Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New
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Colorow has for years been a terror to the people of northwestern Colorado, eastern Utah and southern Wyoming. Every spring it used to be his custom to stroll into North Park and prospect for prospectors. Once he came to call on me. He had been there longer than I had and so, of course, it was nothing more than etiquette that he should call on me.
He seemed to enjoy his call very much. I could not think of anything to say, though generally I am of a bright and happy disposition. After I had asked him how his mother was, I could not think of anything else to interest him. Finally I thought of Capt. John Smith and how he amused a hostile band by showing them his compass and new suspenders. I had no compass, but I had a new watch which I carried in a buckskin watch-pocket, and I thought I would show him the sweep-second and fly-back and let him see the wheels go round.
When Colorow is captured, if the United States of America has no use for that watch, I would be glad to have it returned to me at No. 32, Park Row, New York.
Colorow is a man of few words. I will never forget what he said to me when he went away. He held up two fingers and said in a voice that did not seem to waver:
"Meboe so, two sleeps more, you get out."
I sometimes think that when a man says very little we are more apt to take an interest in what he says. It was so in his case. I got to thinking over his remark after he had gone and I decided to accept of his generous offer.
He had given me two sleeps; but I do not require much sleep anyway, and when I got to thinking about Colorow and his restless manner while he was my ghost I could not sleep so well as I had formerly, and so I have been doing the most of my sleeping since that in a more thickly settled country. I remember I was so restless that last night that I walked feverishly about. I walked feverishly about twenty-five miles, I judge, in a northerly direction.
I left a small but growing mine there at that time in charge of the Utes, and I hope they used it judiciously.
The Ute nation is divided into two sections – viz., the Southern Utes, who have been pretty generally friendly, and the Northern or White River Utes, who break out into fits of emotional insanity whenever their ponies got their bellies full of grass.
My policy – one which, I regret to say, has never been adopted by the government – is to hire a sufficient number of armed herders to take the entire grand remnant sale of Indian tribes out on the plains and watch them all summer, rounding them up and counting them every morning and evening to see that they are all there. Through the day they might be kept busy pulling up the "pizen-weed" which grows all over the grazing grounds of the West, and thus they would get plenty of fresh air and at the same time do good in a modest way. But this scheme for "Utelizing" the Utes is a hundred years ahead of the age, and so I do not expect that it will meet with the indorsement of a sluggish administration.
There are, however, two sides to the Indian question, viz., a right and a wrong side. That is why the Indian question wears so well.
One of the great wrongs incident to the matter is the great delay in officially reaching the War Department in such a way as to attract the eye of the speaker. By the time a courier can get in to a telegraph station and wire the governor of a state, who notifies the Adjutant-General to write a dictated letter with his trenchent typewriter, apprising the commander of the department, who is at Coney Island or Carlsbad, with no typewriter nearer than fifteen miles, who wires the governor to make active inquiries about the matter, and by the time the governor has sent a committee, who go to within fifty miles of the scene of hostilities, and return at the end of six weeks to report that they do not know whether there has been an outbreak or not, and then when a ranchman is really killed, and reputable eye-witnesses, who were personally acquainted with deceased, and will swear that they have no interest in the result of the outbreak, come in and make a written and grammatical request for troops, and the War Department gets thoroughly rested, the Indians have gone home, washed the gore off their hands, and resumed their quiet humdrum life. Like trying to treat a man in Liverpool for softening of the brain by applying the mind cure per cable from New York, the remedy is too remote from the disease.
Indians are quick and impulsive in the matter of homicide. They are slow to grapple with anything of a humorous nature, and all the humorous lecturers who have been on the Ute lecture course have lost money, but in the holocaust line, or general arson, torture and massacre business, they act with astonishing rapidity. As a race, they regard this entire land as their own, just as the mosquitoes claim New Jersey, simply because they were there first.
The Indians see that the property is improving, and so they feel more and more wealthy and arrogant. They claim that they will never give up their rights unless they get hard up, and even then it will not count. They always have a mental reservation in these matters, which they prefer to the reservation provided by the government.
Indians naturally dislike to see these lands in the possession of wealthy men whose sons earn a precarious livelihood by playing lawn tennis.
Colorow once made a short speech to his troops, which was taken down at the time by a gentleman who was present and who was collecting material for a new third reader for our common schools.
Colorow claimed that it was incorrect, and the notes were found afterward on the stenographer's body. It is about as ticklish business to report an Indian speech as it is to poultice a boil on the person of the Ameer of Cabul.
In closing Colorow said: "Warriors, our sun is set. We are most of us out on third base, and we have no influence with the umpire.
"Once I could stand on the high ground and one shout would fill the forest with warriors. Now the wailing wind catches up my cry and bears it away like the echo of our former greatness, and I hear a low voice murmur, 'Rats.'
"Whisky and refinement have filled our land with sorrow. The white man crossed the dark waters in his large canoe and filled the forest with churches and railroad accidents.
"The Indian loves not to make money and own aldermen for which he has no use. He loves his wives and his children and intrusts them with the responsibility of doing all his work. The white man comes to us with honeyed words and says if we will divide our lands with him he will give us a present; and when we give him a county and a half he gives us a red collar-button and a blue book, in which he has written in his strange and silent language, 'When this you see, remember me.' Our warriors are weak and have the hearts of women. They care not for the war-path or the chase. Most of them want to go on the stage. Once my warriors went with me at a moment's warning to clean out the foe. They slept in the swamps with the rattlesnakes at night and fought like wolves in the daytime. Now my warriors will not go on the warpath without a valise, and some of them want to carry their dinner.
"Some day, like the fall of a mighty oak in the forest, Colorow will fall to the earth and he will rise no more. You will be scattered to the four winds of heaven, and you will go no more to battle. Some of you will starve to death, while others will go to New York and wear a long linen duster, with the price of cut-rate tickets down the back. Some of you will die with snakes in your moccasins, and others will go to Jerusalem to help rob the Dead wood coach.
"Warriors, I thank you for your kind attention and appreciation. The regular outbreak will begin to-morrow evening at early candle-light. The massacre will open with a song and dance."
Colorow dresses plainly in a coat of paint and a gun.
AWKWARDNESS OF CARRYING WHISKY ABOUT
Whisky is more bulky and annoying to carry about, in the coat-tail pocket than a plug of tobacco; but there have been cases where it was successfully done. I was shown yesterday a little corner that would hold six or eight bushels. It was in the wash-room of a hotel, and was about half full. So were the men who came there, for before night the entire place was filled with empty whisky bottles of every size, shape and smell.
THE RIGHT SORT OF BOY
I am always sorry to see a youth get irritated and pack up his clothes in the heat of debate, and leave the home nest. His future is a little doubtful, and it is hard to prognosticate whether he will fracture limestone for the streets of a great city, or become President of the United States; but there is a beautiful and luminous life ahead of him in comparison with that of the boy who obstinately refuses to leave the home nest. The boy who cannot summon the moral courage some day to uncoil the tendrils of his heart from the clustering idols of the household, to grapple with outrageous fortune, ought to be taken by the ear and led away out into the great untried realm of space.
CHESTNUT-BURR IV – BILL NYE PAYS A BRIEF VISIT TO A PROFESSIONAL STAR READER
How His Past Was Raked Up and His Future Predicted – Interesting Information for One Dollar – He is Warned to Beware of Certain Bad Men – A Delicate Point of Etiquette – Are Astrologists Deteriorating?
Ring the bell and the door will open," is the remark made by a small label over a bell handle in Third avenue, near Eighteenth street, where Mme. La Foy reads the past, present and future at so much per read. Love, marriage, divorce, business, speculation and sickness are there handled with the utmost impunity by "Mme. La Foy, the famous scientific astrologist," who has monkeyed with the planets for twenty years, and if she wanted any information has "read it in the stars." I rang the bell the other day to see if the door would open. It did so after considerable delay, and a pimply boy in knee pants showed me upstairs into the waiting room. After a while I was removed to the consultation room, where Mme. La Foy, seated behind a small oilcloth-covered table, rakes up old personalities and pries into the future at cut rates.
Skirmishing about among the planets for twenty years involves a great deal of fatigue and exposure, to say nothing of the night work, and so Mme. La Foy has the air of one who has put in a very busy life. She is as familiar with planets, though, as you or I might be with our own family, and calls them by their first names. She would know Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Adonis or any of the other fixed stars the darkest night that ever blew.
"Mme. La Foy De Graw," said I, bowing with the easy grace of a gentleman of the old school, "would you mind peering into the future for me about a half dollar's worth, not necessarily for publication, et cetera."
"Certainly not. What would you like to know?"
"Why, I want to know all I can for the money,"
I said, in a bantering tone. "Of course I do not wish to know what I already know. It is what I do not know now that I desire to know. Tell me what I do not know, Madam. I will detain you but a moment."
She gave me back my large, round half dollar and told me that she was already weary. She asked me to excuse her. She was willing to unveil the future to me in her poor, weak way, but she could not guarantee to let a large flood of light into the darkened basement of a benighted mind for half a dollar.
"You can tell me what year and on what day of what month you were born," said Mme. La Foy, "and I will outline your life to you. I generally require a lock of the hair, but in your case we will dispense with it."
I told her when I was born and the circumstances, as well as I could recall them.
"This brings you under Venus, Mercury and Mars. These three planets were in conjunction at the time of your birth. You were born when the sign was wrong, and you have had more or less trouble ever since. Had you been born when the sign was in the head or the heart, instead of the feet, you would not have spread out over the ground so much.
"Your health is very good, as is the health of those generally who are born under the same auspices that you were. People who are born under the reign of the crab are apt to be cancerous. You, however, have great lung power and wonderful gastric possibilities. Yet, at times, you would be very easily upset. A strong cyclone that would unroof a courthouse or tip over a through train would also upset you, in spite of your broad firm feet, if the wind got behind one of your ears.
"You will be married early and you will be very happy, though your wife will not enjoy herself very much. Your wife will be much happier during her second marriage.
"You will prosper better in business matters without forming any partnerships. Do not go into partnership with a small, dark man, who has neuralgia and a fine yacht. He has abundant means, but he will go through you like an electric shock.
"Tuesdays and Saturdays will be your most fortunate days on which to borrow money of men with light hair. Mondays and Thursdays will be your best days for approaching dark men.
"Look out for a low-sot man accompanied by an office cat, both of whom are engaged in the newspaper business. He is crafty and bald-headed on his father's side. He prints the only paper that contains the full text of his speeches at testimonials and dinners given to other people. Do not loan him money on any account.
"You would succeed well as a musician or an inventor, but you would not do well as a poet. You have all the keen sensibility and strong passion of a poet, but you haven't the hair. Do not try poesy.
"In the future I see you very prosperous You are on the lecture platform speaking. Large crowds of people are jostling each other at the box-office and trying to get their money back.
"Then I see you riding behind a flexible horse that must have cost a large sum of money. You are smoking a cigar that has never been in use before. Then Venus bisects the orbit of Mars, and I see you going home with your head tied up in the lap-robe, you and your spirited horse in the same ambulance."
"But do you see anything for me in the future, Mme. La Foy?" I asked, taking my feet off the table, the better to watch her features; "anything that would seem to indicate political preferment, a reward for past services to my country, as it were?"
"No, not clearly. But wait a moment. Your horoscope begins to get a little more intelligent. I see you at the door of the Senate Chamber. You are counting over your money and looking sadly at a schedule of prices. Then you turn sorrowfully away, and decide to buy a seat in the House instead. Many years after I see you in the Senate. You are there day after day attending to your duties. You are there early, before any one else, and I see you pacing back and forth, up and down the aisles, sweeping out the Senate Chamber and dusting off the seats and rejuvenating the cuspidors."
"Does this horoscope which you are using this season give you any idea as to whether money matters will be scarce with me next week or otherwise, and if so, what I had better do about it?"
"Towards the last of the week you will experience considerable monetary prostration; but just as you have become despondent, at the very tail end of the week, the horizon will clear up and a slight, dark gentleman, with wide trousers, who is a total stranger to you, will loan you quite a sum of money, with the understanding that it is to be repaid on Monday."
"Then you would not advise me to go to Coney Island until the week after next?"
"Certainly not."
"Would it be etiquette in dancing a quadrille to swing a young person of the opposite sex twice round at a select party when you are but slightly acquainted, but feel quite confident that her partner is unarmed?"
"Yes."
"Does your horoscope tell a person what to do with raspberry jelly that will not jell?"
"No, not at the present prices."
"So you predict an early marriage, with threatening weather and strong prevailing easterly winds along the Gulf States?"
"Yes, sir."
"And is there no way that this early marriage may be evaded?"
"No, not unless you put it off till later in life."
"Thank you," I said, rising and looking out the window over a broad sweep of undulating alley and wind-swept roofing; "and now, how much are you out on this?"
"Sir!"
"What's the damage?"
"Oh, one dollar."
"But don't you advertise to read the past, present and future for fifty cents?"
"Well, that is where a person has had other information before in his life and has some knowledge to begin with; but where I fill up a vacant mind entirely, and store it with facts of all kinds, and stock it up so that it can do business for itself, I charge a dollar. I cannot thoroughly relit and refurnish a mental tenement from the ground up for fifty cents."
I do not think we have as good "Astrologists" now as we used to have. Astrologists cannot crawl under the tent and pry into the future as they could three or four thousand years ago.
INGRATITUDE OF THE HUMAN HEART
When I was a child I was different from other boys in many respects. I was always looking about to see what good I could do. I am that way yet. If my little brother wanted to go in swimming contrary to orders, I was not strong enough to prevent him, but I would go in with him and save him from a watery grave. I went in the water thousands of times that way, and as a result he is alive to-day. But he is ungrateful. He hardly ever mentions it now, but he remembers the Gordian knots that I tied in his shirts. He speaks of them frequently.
CHESTNUT-BURR V – CONCERNING THE FRENCH MASTERPIECES AT THE ACADEMY OF DESIGN
A Connoisseur with Original Ideas Who Grasps at Once the Spirit of the Canvas and discovers Various Latent Beauties Unknown Even to the Artist Himself – Diana Surprised, and Attired in an Atmosphere that Defies Fashion's Edict.
Taking The World artist with me in order to know fully what I was talking about, I visited the Academy of Design a day or two ago for the purpose of witnessing some of the pictures from Paris which are now on exhibition there. Many of these pictures are large and beautiful, while others are small and ornery. At the head of the stairs is a smallish picture, with a good, heavy frame and greenish foreground. It is not on the catalogue, so I will try to describe it briefly. About half way between the foreground and middle distance there is a cream-colored perspective, while above this there is a rag-carpet sky, with lumps on it.
"And is there no way of removing these large lumps of paint, so as to give the picture an even appearance?" I asked Mr. McDougall.
"Oh, no; they don't want to do that," he said; "that is the impasto method of putting on the colors, which brings out the salient features of the painting."
So this imposture method, it seems, is really gaining ground, and this picture, with the soldier-overcoat sky and green chenille grass and gargetty distance, would no doubt be worth in Paris thirteen or fourteen dollars.
No. 84 is a picture by Charles Durand, entitled "A Country Woman in Champagne." I was bitterly disappointed in this picture, for though the woman seems to be in good spirits the artist has utterly failed to grapple fully with his subject, and without the catalogue in his hand I would defy the most brilliant connoisseur to say definitely whether or not she is under the influence of liquor.
We next walk around to No. 168, a picture by Camille Pissaro.
M. Pissaro has ten pictures in the Academy, but this one is the best. It is made by the squirt system of painting, graining and kalsomining, which is now becoming so a la mode and rouge et noir. The artist tells me that the colors are carefully arranged in a tin pail and applied to the canvas by means of a squirt gun or Rembrandt stomach pump. This gives the painting a beautiful yet dappled appearance, which could not be obtained with a brush.
This picture is worth three dollars of any man's money for the frame is worth two dollars, and there is at least a dollar's worth of paint on the picture that is just as good as ever. The artist has handled the feet in a masterly manner, bringing them out so that they hang over the frame like a thing of life. If I could paint feet as M. Pissaro does I would not spend my life striping buggies in a close room among coarse men with putty on their pantaloons, but I would burst forth from my humble surroundings, and I would attract the attention of the whole great world of art with my massive and heroic feet. Then from this I would gradually get so that I could make pictures that would resemble people. There is no reason why M. Pissaro should not do well in that way, for he has painted No. 171, "A woman at a Well," in which the most unkempt and uncultivated peasant can at once distinguish which is the woman and which is the well. He is also the author of "Spring," a squirt study with a blue rash, which has broken out where the sky ought to be.
No. 136 is the "Execution of Maximilian," by Edouard Manet, a foreign artist. The scene is laid at the base of an old Mexican slaughter-house. In the foreground may be seen the rear of the Mexican army with its wealth of tournure and cute little gored panties. All Mexican troops have their trousers gored at the hips. Sometimes they also have them gored at the bull-fights which take place there. In the contiguous distance Maximilian maybe seen, wearing the hat which has evidently infuriated the Mexican populace. The artist says that Maximilian objects to being shot, but I pretend not to hear him, and he repeats the remark, so I have to say "Very good, very good," and then we pass on to No. 60, which is entitled "Dreams," by Prévis de Chavannes.
In this picture a weary man, who has worn himself out sleeping in haystacks and trying to solve the labor problem, so that the great curse of industry may be wiped out and the wealthy man made to pay the taxes while the poor man assists in sharing the burden of dividends, is lying on the ground with a pleasant smile on his face. He is asleep, with his mouth slightly ajar, showing how his teeth are fastened in their places. He is smiling in his slumber, and there is hay in his whiskers. Three decalcomanie angels are seen fastened to the sky in the form of a tableau. One is scattering cookies in his pathway, while the second has a laurel wreath which is offered at a great reduction, as the owner is about to leave the city for the summer. These are the new style of wingless angels recently introduced into art and now becoming very popular.
M. Chavannes is also the mechanic who constructed a picture numbered 61 and called the "Poor Fisherman." The history of this little picture is full of pathos. The scene is laid in Newark Bay, N. J. A poor fisherman and his children go out to spend the day, taking their lunch with them.
"O papa, let us take two or three cucumbers with our lunch," says one of the children, in glee.
"Very well, my child," exclaims the father, with ill-concealed delight, "Go down to the market and get one for each of us."
The artist has chosen to make his study of the fisherman a short time after lunch. The father is engaged in regretting something which it is now too late to recall. Cholera infantum has overtaken the younger child and the other is gathering lobelia for her father. The picture is wonderful in its conception ana execution. One can see that he is a poor fisherman, for he has not caught any fish, and the great agony he feels is depicted in his face and the altitude of his hair. The picture might have been called a battle piece or a French interior, with equal propriety.
Manet has several bright and cheery bits of color, among them No. 147, "Spring at Giverny," which might be called Fourth of July in a Roman candle factory without misleading the thoughtful art-student.
No. 150, "Meadows at Giverny," by the same man, is a study in connecting the foreground and background of an oil painting by means of purple hay and dark-blue bunches of boneset in such a way as to deceive the eye.
I have always bitterly regretted that while I was abroad I did not go to Giverny and see the purple hay and navy-blue tansy and water cress which grow there in such great abundance. How often we go hurrying through a country, seeing the old and well-worn features shown us by the professional guides and tourists, forgetting or overlooking more important matters, like a scene in France, No. 142, entitled "Women Bathing." I presume I was within three-quarters of a mile of this view and yet came home without knowing anything about it.