The Indian is an absolute believer in the virtue of the outdoor life, not as an occasional thing, but as his regular, set, uniform habit. He lives out of doors; not only does his body remain in the open, but his mind, his soul, are ever also there. Except in the very cold weather his house is free to every breeze that blows. He laughs at “drafts.” “Catching cold” is a something of which he knows absolutely nothing. When he learns of white people shutting themselves up in houses into which the fresh, pure, free air of the plains and deserts, often laden with the healthful odors of the pines, firs, balsams of the forest, cannot come, he shakes his head at the folly, and feels as one would if he saw a man slamming his door in the face of his best friend. Virtually he sleeps out of doors, eats out of doors, works out of doors. When the women make their baskets and pottery, it is always out of doors, and their best beadwork is always done in the open. The men make their bows and arrows, dress their buckskin, make their moccasins and buckskin clothes, and perform nearly all their ceremonials out of doors.

Our greatest scientific fighters against tuberculosis are emulating the Indian in the fact that even in the winter of the East they advocate that their patients sleep out of doors. Pure air, and abundance of it, is their cry.

“Taking cold” comes, not from breathing “night air,” but generally from inflammation of the mucous membranes caused by impure air,—the air of a heated room from which all the pure air has been exhausted by being breathed again and again into the lungs of its deluded occupants, each exhalation sending with it a fresh amount of poison to vitiate the little good that remains.

Men often go to gymnasiums in the city to get exercise. The air is vitiated by the presence of others, and as respiration is increased by the exercise, impure air is taken into the lungs, and the prime object of the exercise is defeated. For it is not so much to develop muscles as it is to stimulate the general action of the whole body that gymnastics should be indulged in. Vigorous exercise demands deep breathing; if the air breathed is pure, the blood thereby becomes more oxygenated or vivified. As this vitalized blood circulates, it carries its life-giving new strength and energy to every part of the body, so that the whole man feels the increased vigor. But let the air be impure, death instead of life is given to the blood. Hence, where possible, all vigorous exercise should be taken out of doors in the pure air and sunlight, and if this is not possible, every door, window, and avenue through which outside air can be brought inside should be placed wide open, and kept open during the whole time of the exercises. If spectators come, and on their account windows and doors are closed, a positive injury is being done to the exercisers. Far better turn out the spectators than shut out God’s pure air.

What a pitiable thing it is that our civilization can do no better for us than to make us slaves to indoor life, so that we have to go and take artificial exercise in order to preserve our health. Think of the vigor and strength, the robustness and power, the joy and the health, that are the possession of men and women of outdoor life. Let any one who wishes to know what this means read John Muir’s Mountains of California. In it he tells of his years of experiences climbing the terribly difficult peaks of the Sierras, the exploring of glaciers, the sleeping out at night during snow-storms in the depth of winter without either an overcoat or a single blanket. One of the most thrilling of experiences is told as simply as the narrative of a child. He was out during a terrific wind-storm. Says he: “When the storm began to sound I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions Nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath a roof.”

Think of a city-bred man, a society man, deliberately walking out into a storm to enjoy it.

“It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift. Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills.... I heard trees falling for hours at the rate of one every two or three minutes; some uprooted, partly on account of the loose, water-soaked condition of the ground; others broken straight across, where some weakness caused by fire had determined the spot. The gestures of the various trees made a delightful study. Young sugar-pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and singing and shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond.

“I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion, across many a glen from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,—spruce and fir and pine and leafless oak,—and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way,—singing its own song and making its own peculiar gestures,—manifesting a richness of variety to be found in no other forest I have yet seen.

“Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of the topmost needles. But under the circumstances the choice of a tree was a serious matter. One whose instep was not very strong seemed in danger of being blown down, or of being struck by others in case they should fall; another was branchless to a considerable height above the ground, and at the same time too large to be grasped with arms and legs in climbing; while others were not favorably situated for clear views. After cautiously casting about, I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglas spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though comparatively young, they were about 100 feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.

“In its wildest sweeps my treetop described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having seen others of the same species still more severely tried—bent almost to the ground, indeed, in heavy snows—without breaking a fiber. I was therefore safe, and free to take the wind into my pulses and enjoy the excited forest from my superb outlook....

“I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.”

What an experience, and what a joy to feel one’s self able to enjoy it! I know what it is. Years before I had read this, I had had a similar experience when driving over the high Sierras from the borders of Oregon, Nevada, and California down into southern California. Imagine the ordinary business man, or clerk, or banker, or preacher, or lawyer, or doctor, daring to climb so high a tree, and especially during such a storm. Yet such a day so spent is worth more than a year of any ordinary man’s life.

Edward Robeson Taylor, the poet-mayor of San Francisco, once expressed his keen appreciation of what Nature gives to the man who loves her enough to test her. And he has made the test many a time, in the Sierras, in the forests, in the deserts, in the Grand Canyon, as well as on the Bay of San Francisco. He wrote:

Then, too, there are marvelous healing powers in God’s great out-of-doors. The vis medicatrix NaturÆ is no fiction of the imagination. If sick people knew enough, were wise enough, to go out into the open and discard all civilized modes of life, climbing mountains, sleeping on pine boughs, swimming in the streams, working in the soil, dabbling in the hot or cold springs, eating the ripe fruits and nuts, and bathing the whole body daily in bright sunshine, they would be brought to a health and vigor they had never before known.

I have often wondered why thoughtful white people have not observed that insanity is practically unknown amongst the Indians. Why? Our own great Emerson once wrote a clear answer.

“It was,” said he, “the practice of the Orientals, especially of the Persians, to let insane persons wander at their own will out of the towns, into the desert, and, if they liked, to associate with wild animals. In their belief, wild beasts, especially gazelles, collect around an insane person, and live with him on a friendly footing. The patient found something curative in that intercourse, by which he was quieted and sometimes restored. But there are more insane persons than are called so, or are under treatment in hospitals. The crowd in the cities, at the hotels, theaters, card-tables, the speculators who rush for investment at ten per cent, twenty per cent, cent per cent, are all more or less mad—these point the moral, and persuade us to seek in the fields the health of the mind.”

But not only does healing come to the mind in Nature: the diseased soul there finds medicine and health.

The well-beloved Robert Louis Stevenson was well aware of this out-of-door joy. Among many other fine things on the subject he once wrote the following which fully expresses my idea:

“To wash in one of God’s rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in such a cleansing.”

One of our great artists and writers, whose life went out a few years ago in sad eclipse, wrote with a clarity of vision that his awful experiences had taught him: “I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the land for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy, that he might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young shoots; and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service to men. ... I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.”

How literally true to fact is this assurance of purification out in the great elemental forces and places of Nature, and how the Indian daily demonstrates it. Thousands can testify to it. Here one becomes soothed. The grinning faces of hate do not pursue him here. Nature is passionless to the hunted man. She is willing to be wooed and won, and then opens up her rich treasures to the guiltiest and vilest of men, until they regain the right angle of vision, then the desire for purification, then repentance, then assurance of forgiveness, and finally their self-respect. Then they are able to return (if necessity compels) to civilization and bear any punishment that may be awarded, for in the rugged arms of Nature they have absorbed strength and power,—strength of will and power of soul to dare and do that which the highest within them compels.

Who that has read the De Profundis of that erratic and brilliant genius, Oscar Wilde, has not felt the sad pathos and yet intense truth of his concluding words? They are Indian-like in their direct truth and native strength.

“All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times I have been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt. She will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”

This is one of the great wonders of the out-of-door life that the weary and sinful of the white race would do well to learn.

But not only does health of mind and soul return to the sinful in God’s great out-of-doors: the most vigorous and pure, healthy and perfect, minds and souls are expanded and strengthened with such contact. Buddha, Mahomet, Moses, David, Elijah, Christ, were all lovers of out-of-doors. Washington, Lincoln, and Garfield were all out-of-door men. One learns in the solitude and primitive frankness of the free life of the out doors to do his own thinking, untrammeled by convention or prejudice. He sees things as they are. His soul is unclothed, and there can no longer be any deception or pretense. So he becomes an individual; not a mere rote thinker of other’s thoughts, and not a mere parrot of other men’s ideas. Edwin Markham could never have written The Man with the Hoe had he lived only in the city. He would never have seen deeply enough, and he would never have dared brave the conventional prejudices of the civilized (?) world as he did in his poem, had he been city-bred. But because he thought nakedly before God and his own soul he was compelled to see the monstrousness of making a man—a son of God, created in His image—a mere clod of clay. The idea that this poem is a reflection upon labor is utter nonsense. It is merely a protest, strong, vigorous, forceful as a thunder-storm, against compelling some men to labor so hard that they have neither time nor opportunity for mental and spiritual occupation, and have thus even lost the desire for or hope of gaining it. Labor is ennobling, but man is made for more than mere physical labor. The unequal distribution of affairs in this life causes some men to have no physical labor, to their vast disadvantage, while others have nothing but physical labor, equally to their disadvantage. The finding of a just equilibrium between these two extremes, and then aiding the men of both extremes to see the need of each helping the other, or of taking some of the burden of the other, would result in the immediate benefiting of the race to an incalculable extent, both in body, mind, and soul. And it is this for which I plead, earnestly calling upon my fellows to so adjust their own lives that they will strike the happy mean, thus living (not merely talking about) the dignity of labor as well as the joy of mental and spiritual occupation.

Another important thing must not be overlooked. As a result of this out-of-door life the Indian is an early riser and an early retirer to bed. The civilized habit of turning night into day, living in the glare of gas and electric light, is, on the face of it, artificial, unnatural, and unhealthful. It is indefensible from every standpoint. There is not one word of good can be said of it. The day is made for work, the night for rest and sleep. The use of artificial light to the extent we indulge it in civilization is gradually rendering normal eyesight a rarity. Children are born with myoptic and other eye-diseased tendencies. Sometimes it seems as if more people, of all ages, wear glasses than use their natural eyesight, and this is but one of many sad consequences accruing in part from our reversal of the natural use of the day and night times.

Many men, literary and others, wait until the quiet of evening to do their work. They often stimulate themselves with coffee, and even stronger beverages, and then work until the “wee sma’ hours,” by artificial light, after they have already done a fair day’s work. We used to hear a great many words of commendation of the youths in school and college who “burned the midnight oil.” If I had my way I would “use the leather strap” upon all these burners-up of their physical and mental forces at the time God intended they should be abed and asleep. The time for mental work is in the early morning after a hearty, healthy, good night’s sleep. The body is strengthened, the mind refreshed, and thought flows easily and readily, because all weariness has disappeared under the influence of “tired nature’s sweet restorer.” Mental work done at such time is not only a pleasure, but is well done, properly done, because the conditions are right for its doing.

Nor is this all. There is a mental and spiritual pleasure given to the early riser that the late sleeper knows nothing of. One of the most beautiful baskets in my historic collection of Indian baskets is one made by a Coahuila woman who depicted thereon the white light of the morning shining through the dark silhouettes of the sharp points of the giant cactus. Her Æsthetic enjoyment was thus made the inspiration of a real work of art.

How much white people lose by not seeing and knowing the beauty of the early morning hours,—the hours just preceding dawn, and during the first outburst of the sun! A friend and I stood out the other morning before sunrise, looking at the exquisite delicate lights over the mountain peaks, and she gave expression to the above thought, and only a few days before I had said it to a friend as we had wended our way from El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon out to O’Neill Point to see the sunrise. Elisha Safford eloquently speaks as follows of this:

BEAUTY OF THE MORNING

All children, and especially city children, need out-of-door life. Men and women need it too, sadly, but if the elders cannot have it, owing to our perverted social conditions, our law-givers should see to it that the children do better. It is a well-known fact that cities would soon die out if their vast populations were not constantly being replenished by the sons and daughters of the country. So instead of letting our city children grow up to imperfect manhood, let us find some way to get them out of doors and out into the country more and more. Exercise in the open, where pure air penetrates to the full depths of the lungs, personal contact with the soil, and physical work upon it, as well as personal contact with the trees and flowers and all growing things, the animals of the farm and field, the rocks and mountains, the hills and valleys, the waterfalls and streams, the deserts and canyons; all these are to be desired. Who does not wish to sing with Edwin Markham:

Of course this out-in-the-country life for city children can only be gained if their parents and our educators and politicians combine to provide it. And in some way it ought to be done. What a joy it would be to many a city boy to be allowed to go and do some work in the country during certain times in the year! Those who have seen the city children who are taken yearly into the country by Fresh Air Funds, or out by vessel into the Bay of New York or Boston Harbor, by philanthropic people, know what delight, joy, and health they receive from the outing. These things all point to the great, the dire, the awful need there is for some way of giving to our city children and men and women more out-door life.

Just after the San Francisco earthquake, Dr. J. H. Kellogg, editor of Good Health, wrote in his forceful way of some lessons the people might learn from that disaster. Here is one of them bearing upon this very question:

“Three hundred thousand people have found out that they can live out of doors, and that out of doors is a safer place than indoors.

“People who have all their lives slept on beds of down, protected by thick walls of brick or stone, barricaded against the dangerous (?) air of night, have found that it is possible to spend a night upon an unsheltered hillside without risk to life, and it is more than likely that, as in the case of the Charleston earthquake, not a few modern troglodytes, who scarcely ever saw the light of day before, have been actually benefited by being forced out into the fresh air and the sunshine.

“The great tent colonies, improvised by the military authorities with such promptness under the efficient management of the able General Funston, may become the permanent homes for some of the thousands who are now for the first time in their lives tasting the sweets of an out-of-door life. Man is an out-of-door creature, meant to live amid umbrageous freshness, his skin bathed clean by morning dews or evening showers, browned and disinfected by the sun, fed by tropic fruits, and cheered by tropic birds and flowers. It is only through long generations of living under artificial conditions that civilized man has become accustomed to the unhealthful and disease-producing influences of the modern house to such a degree that they can be even in a small measure tolerated. But this immunity is only apparent. An atmosphere that will kill a Hottentot or a baboon in six months will also kill a bank president or a trust magnate—sometime. And if these tent-dwellers get such a taste of the substantial advantages of the out-of-door life that they refuse to return to the old unwholesome conditions of anti-earthquake days, they will profit substantially by their experience, terrible though it has been. It takes earthquakes and cyclones and tidal waves to jostle us out of the unnatural and degenerative ruts into which conventionality is always driving us.

“What advantages has the man in the brown-stone front over the man in the tent? Only these: A pale face instead of the brown skin which is natural to his species; a coated tongue, no appetite, and no digestion, instead of the keen zest for food and splendid digestive vigor of the tent-dweller; an aching head and confused mind and depressed spirits, instead of the vim and snap and energy, mental and physical, and the freedom from pain and pessimism of out-of-door dwellers; early consumption or apoplexy or paresis or cancer of the stomach or arteriosclerosis,—the dry rot of the body which stealthily weakens the props and crumbles the foundations of the citadel of life.”

Why is it that in our cities in summer, and in Florida and the South generally, and in the West, we do not follow the French custom of eating out of doors?

American visitors to Paris in the summer time have always been impressed by the prevalent custom there of dining out of doors. The sidewalks in front of cafÉs and restaurants are always so occupied with chairs and tables that pedestrians often have to step into the street to get by. This has long been the summer custom in Paris, but with the arrival of cold weather tables and chairs disappeared every year, and the diners returned to the close nicotine-laden air of the stuffy little dining-rooms inside. But last year, according to the London correspondent of the Outlook, an enterprising Frenchman, finding his patrons much attached to his open-air dining-room, and being short of room inside, undertook to make his guests comfortable out of doors by means of a large brazier placed upon the sidewalk. Others followed his example, and in a short time the streets were lined with braziers from the Madeline to the Bastile, much to the satisfaction of the cab-drivers and newsboys. One ingenious proprietor made his table-legs hollow, filled with hot water, and thus utilized them as foot-warmers. And so one may now enjoy a fashionable Parisian cafÉ au plein air any day in the year.

Everybody is always hungry at a picnic, not simply because of the unusual exercise, but as the result of the tonic appetite-stimulating influence of the out-of-doors. The same plan may be introduced into any private home by utilizing a back porch, or, when this is lacking, a tent-cloth awning may be provided at the expense of a few dollars.

The old Spanish patio, or inner court, provided the seclusion that many desire, with the possibility of a larger out-of-door life. Mr. Gustav Stickley, the far-seeing editor of The Craftsman, which so effectually pleads for a simpler and more democratic life for the people, has planned a number of Craftsman houses in which these open porches for eating, and sleeping as well, are introduced. This is a great step in the right direction, and is strongly to be commended.

But the outdoor life is larger than houses and porches. One must get away from all houses to really feel and know the joy of the great out-of-doors. Every teacher and orator should know the birds and trees, the flowers and grasses, the rocks and stars, the clouds and odors, at first hand. He should not depend upon books at all for any of this knowledge, save as guides to obtain it. Instead of reading books he should read Nature. See how powerful is the simple oratory of the Indian, whose figures and similes and illustrations and metaphors are of those things in Nature with which he is perfectly familiar.

Another effect upon the mind and soul as the result of this outdoor life is remarkable to those who have never given it a thought. One of our poets once said, “The undevout astronomer is mad.” And every Indian will tell you that the undevout Indian is either mad or “getting civilized.” One of our California historians once wrote something to the effect that the California Indian had no religion, no mythology, no reverence, no belief in anything outside of and beyond himself. Jeremiah Curtin, a careful and close student of the California Indian for many years, in his wonderfully interesting book, “Creation Myths of Primitive America,” shows the utter fallacy of this idea. He says: “Primitive man in America stood at every step face to face with divinity as he knew or understood it. He could never escape from the presence of those powers which had constituted the first world, and which composed all that there was in the present one. ... The most important question of all in Indian life was communication with divinity, intercourse with the spirits of divine personages.” Indeed, the Indian sees the divine power in everything. His God speaks in the storm, the howling wind, the tornado, the hurricane, the roaring rapids and dashing cataracts of the rivers, the never-ending rise and fall of the ocean, the towering mountains and the tiny hills, the trees, the bees, the buds and blossoms. It is God in the flower that makes it grow and gives it its odor; that makes the tree from the acorn; that makes the sun to shine; that sends the rain and dew and the gentle zephyrs. The thunder is His voice, and everything in Nature is an expression of His thought.

This belief compels the Indian to a close study of Nature. Hence the keenness of his powers of observation. He knows every plant, and when and where it best grows. He knows the track of every bird, insect, reptile, and animal. He knows all the signs of the weather. He is a past-master in woodcraft, and knows more of the habits of plants and animal life than all of our trained naturalists put together. He is a poet, too, withal, and an orator, using the knowledge he has of nature in his thought and speech. No writer that ever lived knew the real Indian so well as Fenimore Cooper, and we all know the dignified and poetical speech of his Indian characters. I know scores and hundreds of dusky-skinned Henry D. Thoreaus and John Burroughses, John Muirs and Elizabeth Grinnells and Olive Thorne Millers. Indeed, to get an Indian once started upon his lore of plant, tree, insect, bird, or animal, is to open up a flood-gate which will deluge any but the one who knows what to expect.