Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New

"So I say, fellow-citizens, that we must guard against the influences of the public schools as a nation, for the people, of the people, and by the people. Education is often a blessing in disguise, but we should not pry into things that the finite mind has no business with. How much was Galileo ahead in the long run for going out of his sphere? He was boycotted from morning till night and died poor. Look at Demosthenes. Look at Diogenes. They pried into science, and both of them was poor providers and have since died. Of course their names are frequently used in debating schools, and some claim that this is big pay for what they went through; but I say give me a high-stepping horse, the bright smile of dear ones who are not related to me in any way, the approval of the admiring throng, a large woolly dog that will do as I tell him, a modest little home and unlimited credit at the store, and I do not care how much B. will have to use off from the diameter of a given grindstone, for which he paid an undivided one-fifteenth.

"I know that this is regarded as a queer doctrine by what is called our more Advanced Thinkers but I say let every man who pants for fame select his own style of pant and go ahead. I bid him a most hearty godspeed and hope he will do well.

"But what makes me mad is for a man to come to me and dictate what I shall pant for. This is called intolerance by people who can afford to use words of that size. Intolerance is a thing that makes me tired. Whether it's religious, political or social intolerance, I dislike it very much. People that think I will enjoy voting for a yaller dog that had been picked out for me, or that I will be tickled to death to indorse the religious dogmas of an effete monicky with my eyes shot, don't know me. I say, let every man rely solely on his own thinker, and damned be he who first cries hold, enough! I am not a profane man, but I quote from a poem in using the above quotation.

"But again. In closing, let me say that we owe it to our common country to be peaceable citizens and pay our taxes without murmuring. The time to get in our fine work is on the valuation, and it is too late to kick after that. Let us cultivate a spirit of lofty patriotism, but believe nothing just to oblige others. I used to be a great believer in anything that was submitted for my approval. That was what kept me back. Now, if a man like Jay Gould says he is not feeling so well as he did, I make him show me his tongue.

"We are here to-day to celebrate the birthday of American freedom, as I understand it, and I am here to say that whatever may be said against our refinement and our pork, our style of freedom is sought for everywhere. It is a freedom that will stand any climate and I hear it very highly spoken of wherever I go.

"I am here to state that, as boy and man, I have been a constant user of American freedom for over fifty years, and I can truly say that I feel no desire to turn back; also that there will be a grand, free-for-all scuffle for a greased pig on the vacant lot south of the church at seven o'clock, after which fireworks will be served to those who desire to remain."

And thus did the Fourth of July pass with all its glories in Whalen's Grove in the year of our independence the 110th.

ENCOURAGING GREEN JOKES

I want to encourage green jokes, that have never trotted in harness before, and, besides, I must insist on using my scanty fund of laugh on jokes of the nineteenth century. I have got to draw the line somewhere.

CHESTNUT-BURR III – BILL NYE FINDS COLOROW FULL OF ODD TRAITS

The recent ruction on the part of William H. Colorow, Duke of Rawhide Buttes and heir presumptive to the throne of Yellow Jacket Park, brings the Indian once more to our notice and teaches us that eternal vigilance is the price of government land on the frontier.

Sig. Colorow is of Indian parentage and his lineage, such as it is, is very long. His ancestors run back as far as the earliest dawn of the Christian era. They claimed the land extending in a southerly direction from the North Pole, and seemed to ignore the fact that it had been sold for taxes. The Indian has always been in favor of representation without taxation, and Colorow has believed in a community of grub, allowing the white man to retain a controlling interest in common, wet-browed toil. He has always been willing to divide his bread with the pale face. He has offered, time and again, to give the white man the bread that was sweetened with honest sweat, while he took his plain. He says that to prefer bread that tastes of perspiration shows a depraved taste.

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

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.