1911: snappy “Civilization’s Way” doggerel

A generation into the post-frontier era, the big city paper has a positively jazzy Jargon-tinged poem with a uniquely Pacific NW flavor.

Ishi was quite the media sensation at the time (image credit: Springfield Weekly Republican)

Hang on a sec: it almost goes without saying, but not quite, that this 120-year-old selection is going to be racist-y. So I’ve warned you.

At the same time, this poem partakes of a trend we’ve seen in others at “the turn of the century”, lamenting the White folks’ invention of modern warfare, with its wholesale mechanized slaughter.

This gets kind of slangy — see if you’re picking up what this scribe’s dropping!

CIVILIZATION’S WAY
By Dean Collins [1887-1969]

Lend your ears, and I will sing you
     just a simple little thing you
Will find, perhaps, is worthy of some
     slight appreciation,
As an interesting contrast of the cus-
     toms that have gone past,
Against the customs now in vogue
     in modern civ’lization.

In a distant spot, secluded where no
     prying eye intruded,
Brooding o’er his bow and scalping
     knife the solemn Ishi sat,
And the uncontaminated man primeval
     meditated
Upon the good old days gone by, and
     other junk like that.

There were frowns upon his forehead,
     and he spake in jargon torrid,
Hurling hot anathema against the
     simple bow and knife,
persistently belittled the good
     blade with which he’d whittled
At the scalps of many chieftains in
     his carefree early life.

“Cultus blade and cultus bow stick! On
     the square, you make me so sick
To think how long I used you in my
     killing recreation,
Ere I got the white man’s weapon and
     became entirely hep on
The ways of wholesale slaughter in
     the haunts of civ’lization.

“When a red man undefiled then,
     through the glades I stalked the
     wildmen
Very often sev’ral week before I
     met them in a fight,
And with joy I used to squeak then, if
     I averaged one a week when
I knew naught .of the fancy stunt
     of paleface dynamite.

“Had I had the dope I know now, I’d
     have made a hyas show-how
Of the modern comprehensive way
     that paleface chieftain helps;
I’d sneak up when they were sleepy,
     dynamite their deerskin tepee —
Bing! Boong! And then I’d gather
     up hyas close string of scalps.

“Oh cultus bow and arrow! You sure
     stack up like a pair o’
Cheap deuces in a fancy deck where
     straights and flushes be.
Ishi all the class you are for is a sign
     at a cigar store
When you stack your string of scalps
     against the pale-face chieftain’s.
     See!”

— from the Portland (OR) Morning Oregonian of December 6, 1911, page 12, column 7

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?