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Show THE SAVAGES' DRINK Savages' Knowledge of Artificial Stimulants Stimu-lants Hard Drinkers Rotten Berries Ber-ries Supplied Savages of the Arabian Desert Distilled From Cactus by the Wild Indians of Arizona Testimony of Early Missionaries Savages of Haiti Drank Chica in 1512 The Ar-rowak Ar-rowak and Carib Tribes Made Intoxicants Intoxi-cants From Manioc and Were Drunkards Drunk-ards How the Macouchi Distilled an Abominable Fermented Liquor Dynamite Dyna-mite Converted Into an Opiatic Intoxicant. Intox-icant. (Special Cor. Intermountain Catholic.) (Copyrighted.) In our issue of November W. replying to a query of a correspondent who took exceptions t- statements of Oswald Crawford, we said: "Whisky is not the only intoxicant beverage. Alcohol is extracted from herbs as well as from vegetables and cereals. Wood alcohol is obtained by the destructive distillation of wood. There can be no question of the savage instinct in securing intoxicants. (2) As to the 'mistake or misquotation,' misquota-tion,' that could not be possible, as Mr. Crawford stands in the first rank as antiquarian, historian, author and scientist. We have mailed the letter to our distinguished correspondent, who will no doubt verify his statements. Ed." The last mail from Loretto, Lower California, brought the information so earnestly sought. "We give here the whole correspondence: "To the Editor of the Intermountain Catholic Sir: In one of Mr. Crawford's letters from Lower Low-er California I read that a member of Otondo's expedition and colony, writing of Lower California, Califor-nia, says: 'We found the land inhabited by brutish, naked people, sodomitic, drunken and besotted.' 1 Now pardon mo if I ask how was it possible for these savages to be drunkards? Where could they get their whisky to make them drunk? Has not ilr. Crawford made a mistake or a misquotation? Respectfully, CHARLES K. BALL. "Salt Lake City, Nov. 12, 1907. 104 Lenaco avenue." Is there in man, civilized or uncivilized, a craving crav-ing at times for stimulants, or is the indulgence in any kind of intoxicants pimply an acquired habit? The average well-to-do man whose table is liberally supplied with luxuries, such as strong tea, coffee, . or chocolate, with highly seasoned foods or condiments condi-ments like pepper, tabasco, seasoned pickles and Worchestershire sauce, has all the stimulants his body 'demands, and if he be a "total abstainer," cannot understand his neighbor's hankering after fermented liquors. A few week3 ago the Chicago Tribune gave space to an address of Dr. Cyrusi Wall, delivered before a class of medical students. The doctor is an occasional contributor to medical med-ical literature, is prominent in his profession and is ranked as an authority on diseases of the nerves. While dwelling on the probable value of alcohol in emergent conditions of the human system, the doctor doc-tor seized the opportunity to remind his young men that the desire for fermented and brewed liquor3 was an acquired habit. Without any particular display of extraordinary knowledge he might have said the same of patent medicines, mineral waters, of tea and, in fact, of a thousand and one things consumed by civilized man. As if to intercept any objection to his statement, the doctor added that savage man, or man, in what he termed a state of nature, knew nothing of artificial stimulation. I am not then surprised that any one or many of your readers should express a doubt toudhing the probability of savages like the "Digger Indians" extracting alcohol from plants and fruits, or before be-fore the coming of the European, kuowing anything any-thing at all of alcohol or drunkenness. Well, let us see how much Dr. Wall has studied the subject. SAVAGES HARD DRINKERS. Herodotus, in his second book, makes mention of a savage tribe, whose hunting grounds were along the Western rim of the Arabian desert, that distilled dis-tilled from the juice of the rothem berry a highly intoxicating beverage. Those of the readers of The Intermountain Catholic who have visited the Academy of San Carlos, Mexico City, will call to j mind that remarkable painting of Juaros, repre- ! senting the Toltec maiden, long before the con- quest, revealing to the Aztec chief the secret of ex- I tracting the intoxicating drink pulque from the I Continued on Page o. j ''"'" ' 1 i j f- ' J ' ! - -nii.ii.ir -r n r ml. r Try- - '-, .. -i -. ni ,i. .,, j, ...... ... , , . ., ..... ,. j,.. ., ,.im- '"' ' j THE SAVAGES DRINK. I , (Continued from Page 1.) A',,r t maguey cactus. The Spanish historian j 'fd rxpiorrr Onate states that in his time, lo98, I 'he doov. irjjioS of Arizona and Xorthern Mexico "la .n,m the fruit of the pitahaya a giant cac- ;; ia very exhilarating drink. This extraordinary f !rnr Pro,-.-;. in places, to the height of forty feet, j N "ii1' of ihe most wonderful plants of the 1 vcPi;,;,,, kingdom. Early in May it throws out H !':' ; u!u!i of cream-like idossoms, and in August I !,:,! - Miiit as large as hens' eggs. Like the ilo- I i ;;!m of the Xubian desert, whose fronds are j ;'-rvoir?. of water, the pitahaya is the friend of 'frt travrlrr. In a land condemned to ster- .v and drought, where the air in summer is that j 11 t.uc-o nven, and where a blazing 6Uti sucks j ln';-iiir from the human body, the pitahaya, like a "v c -Hninel towers aloft and invites the perish-n;r perish-n;r 1rar,'ler to approach and slake his thirst. But ''"urn to Dr. Wall and your correspondent. In J.til Father Juan Meutuig was the resident '"Wior.ary to the Yaquis, and dwelt at Guasavas, H'-ra. Xorthern Mexico. He wrote the "Rudo I -rayo that is: a rough sketch and descriptive I 'uiit of the country and tribes north of the I ui river. anl wet of the Sierra Madre moun- ;j and that part of the present territory of j j ri-r,na which is west and south of the Gila river. t ' ' Av? rcsd'- 4The sauco grows luxuri- J'y in Sonr.ra and ihe high regions of the Pimas. j )f n,iian prepare a beverage of such quality "'. ff iV" V- Eugenia Mercier, a Favorite Niece of Aunt Busy's. from its small fruit that those who get drunk on it take three or four days to sober up." Again on page 1 75, he writes: "The wine or drink with which they become intoxicated, is made of maize, the maguey called mezcal, Indian fig, and other things; but as I have already observed, the worst of all is that made of the berry of the sauco, because be-cause its effects last for several days." In 1573 Diego de Landa, member of the noble family of the Calderon, was appointed bis-hop of Merida, Yucatan, where he died in 1579. Before his election he had been for many years a missionary mission-ary among the Quiche tribes and had mastered the Maya alphabet and language. In the evening of his life he wrote "Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan," Yuca-tan," or as we would say, Xarative history of Yucatan. Yu-catan. On page 123 of his work, this is what we read: "Their wine is made of honey and water (i. c., Head) to which is added a powder produced from the roots of a tree grown and cultivated for its bark. This strengthens the drink. On it they become stupid as fools, and the women are often hard set to bring home their drunken husbands from a neighbor's house." On page 101, the writer says, "they get shamefully drunk when they meet together to celebrate some event." Traveling further south, we find in the "Vocab-ulaire "Vocab-ulaire de L'Ancienne Langue de Haiti," appended to the history of the Indians of Haiti written in 1512 by a Franciscan friar, Eomain Pane, that the Indian word for a fermented but very intoxicating drink .was Cliicha, the same word used by the Indians In-dians and Lados of Honduras today for whisky or rum. Tane was a missionary to the Indians of San Domingo and Haiti and when Fernando Columbus Co-lumbus wrote the life of his father Christopher, the discoverer of America, he incorporated Pane's dictionary of the Haitian language with his book. Sailing further toward the equator, we meet in Surinam, the Arrowak and Carib tribes of whom Schomburgk the botanist and explorer of Surinam writes in his "Travels in Guiana" (179S) : "From the Manioc they make a fermented liquor and never nev-er fail to get drunk after every brewing." In 1816, the English naturalist Charles Water-ton Water-ton ascended the Demerara river and visited the Carib and Macouchi tribes living in the great forests for-ests of inland British Guiana. In his "Wanderings in South America" he writes of the Macouchi: "Before each hut, there is the trunk of a largo tree hollowed out like a trough. In this from their cassava, they make an abominable, ill-tasted sour kind of fermented liquor, called piwarri. They are very fond of it and drink it till they become stupidly stup-idly drunk." "When I ascended the Essequibo river, and in 1902, passed a week with this tribe, I personally verified Warburton's statement, and on some future occasion may describe the process of extracting from the cassava the intoxicating drink piwarri. MESCAL AXD DYXAMITE. The Canadian tribes and those east of the Missouri Mis-souri were confirmed smokers, and if they had no knowledge of intoxicants it was solely owing to the absence of the material out of which their southern south-ern kinsmen manufactured their exhilarating drinks. I thought I had heard of and sampled ail known intoxicants from meerapicon to tequila, but every day I am learning that the ingenuity of man, in straightened circumstances, defies limitations. limita-tions. I am becoming convinced that only by tkv decaptation of entire communities may prohibition become effective. When 1 was in Xorthern Mexico, a few years ago, I passed a day or two at the mines of Gaudclupe y Calvo, the guest of a prominent Mexican mine owner. We were sitting on his verandah, ve-randah, one pleasant evening after supper, when two peon miners met on the path that led from the mine to the shacks of the men. When these two exchanged salutations and passed on, one of them suddenly turned and said aloud to the other: "Come over to my Xacal and have a 'dyna' with me." I turned to my host and asked an explanation, "That," he said, "was an invitation to have a drink of a new kind of a liquor they call cbima. These two men are blasters, and unfortunately, like many more of our men, get drunk on dynamite. It is a hbit that is rapidly spreading through the min-ii min-ii g camps and threatens to impair the efficiency of the men and lower the output. Xo one knows who first discovered that dynamite, when taken wit! mescal produces the combined effects of opium ani alcohol. Whoever he was the fiends should buih a monument to him in Hades. ' The chirua man is very dainty and particula in introducing the high explosive to his stomach lie knows that the stuff is manufactured for tin purpose of smashing things, and that he must ex crcise care in preparing the charge iuteuded ti operate upon himself. From a stick of dynamite hi cuts off a small piece, the size of a pea. This pet he dissolves in a wine glass full of mescal or te quih, watching the incorporation of the explosive with the liquor with keen and pleasurable expectancy. expec-tancy. When dissolution is effected, he quaffs th-: draught, seeks a cool retreat, rolls himself in hi: blanket and lays him down to pleasant rest. 'Tie sleeps for an hour or two. and in his dreams has traveled with the opium eater, the hashheesh fiend, with fairies and hobgoblins. The amount of dynr-mite consumed by the men in an ordinary camp is so great that already the quantity required for our regular work is becoming seriously affected. The vice is increasing among the miners of tlv: Sierras and threatens to invade the saloons of the mi-v'ng towns." 1' is very probable that the people who first landed and settled on the South American continent conti-nent brought with them from Asia assuming they came from Asia the knowledge of extracting r.lcohol from fruits and plants. Their descend-ents, descend-ents, as they became brutalized by feuds and wars and the evil results and dire conditions following intcrnicine conflicts, lost their early civilization, its arts and acquired knowledge, but retained the secret of producing intoxicating drinks. Among all the southern tribes, not families remember I know of no exception savage man was and is' given to drunkness. Lorctto, L. C. |