 | THE PRAIRIE. The prairie |  |
1. THE PRAIRIE.
1. CHAPTER I.
“My visor is Philemon's roof; within the house
is Jove.”
Shakspeare.
The trapper, who had meditated no violence,
dropped his rifle again, and laughing at the success
of his experiment, with great seeming self-complacency,
he drew the astounded gaze of the naturalist
from the person of the savage to himself, by saying—
“The imps will lie for hours, like sleeping alligators,
brooding their deviltries in dreams and other
craftiness, until such time as they see some real danger
is at hand, and then they look to themselves the
same as other mortals. But this is a scouter in his
war-paint! There should be more of his tribe at
no great distance. Let us draw the truth out of him;
for an unlucky war-party may prove more dangerous
to us than a visit from the whole family of the squatter.”
“It is truly a desperate and a dangerous species!”
said the Doctor, relieving his amazement by a breath
that seemed to exhaust his lungs of air; “a violent
race, and one that it is difficult to define or class
within the usual boundaries of definitions. Speak
to him, therefore; but let thy words be strong in
amity.”
The old man cast a keen eye on every side of
him, to ascertain the important particular whether
the stranger was supported by any associates, and
then making the usual signs of peace, by exhibiting
the mean time, the Indian had betrayed no evidence
of uneasiness. He suffered the trapper to draw nigh,
maintaining by his own mien and attitude a striking
air of dignity and fearlessness. Perhaps the wary
warrior also knew that, owing to the difference in
their weapons, he should be placed more on an
equality, by being brought nearer to the strangers.
As a description of this individual may furnish
some idea of the personal appearance of a whole
race, it may be well to detain the narrative, in order
to present it to the reader, in our hasty and imperfect
manner. Would the truant eyes of Alston or Leslie
turn, but for a time, from their gaze at the models of
antiquity, to contemplate this wronged and humbled
people, little would be left for such inferior artists as
ourselves to delineate.
The Indian in question was in every particular a
warrior of fine stature and admirable proportions.
As he cast aside his mask, composed of such party-coloured
leaves, as he had hurriedly collected, his
countenance appeared in all the gravity, the dignity,
and, it may be added, in the terror of his profession.
The outlines of his lineaments were strikingly noble
and nearly approaching to Roman, though the
secondary features of his face were slightly marked
with the well-known traces of his Asiatic origin.
The peculiar tint of the skin, which in itself is so
well designed to aid the effect of a martial expression,
had received an additional aspect of wild ferocity
from the colours of the war-paint. But, as though
he disdained the usual artifices of his people, he
bore none of those strange and horrid devices, with
which the children of the forest are accustomed, like
the more civilized heroes of the mustache, to back
their reputation for courage, contenting himself with
a broad and deep shadowing of black, that served as
a sufficient and an admirable foil to the brighter
as usual shaved to the crown, where a large and gallant
scalp-lock seemed fearlessly to challenge the
grasp of his enemies. The ornaments that were ordinarily
pendant from the cartilages of his ears had
been removed, on account of his present pursuit.
His body, notwithstanding the lateness of the season,
was nearly naked, and the portion which was clad
bore a vestment no warmer than a light robe of
the finest dressed deer-skin, beautifully stained with
the rude design of some daring exploit, and which
was carelessly worn, as if more in pride than from
any unmanly regard to comfort. His leggings were
of bright scarlet cloth, the only evidence about his
person that he had held communion with the traders
of the Pale-faces. But as if to furnish some offset
to this solitary submission to a womanish vanity, they
were fearfully fringed, from the gartered knee to the
bottom of the moccasin, with the hair of human
scalps. He leaned lightly with one hand on a short
hickory bow, while the other rather touched than
sought support from the long, delicate handle of an
ashen lance. A quiver made of the cougar skin,
from which the tail of the animal depended, as a
characteristic ornament, was slung at his back, and a
shield of hides, quaintly emblazoned with another of
his warlike deeds, was suspended from his neck by a
thong of sinews.
As the trapper approached, this warrior maintained
his calm upright attitude, discovering neither an
eagerness to ascertain the character of those who advanced
upon him, nor the smallest wish to avoid a
scrutiny in his own person. An eye, that was darker
and more shining than that of the stag, was incessantly
glancing, however, from one to another of the
stranger party, seemingly never knowing rest for an
instant.
“Is my brother far from his village?” demanded
the paint, and those other little signs by which a
practised eye knows the tribe of the warrior he encounters
in the American deserts, with the same readiness,
and by the same sort of mysterious observation,
as that by which the seaman knows the distant
sail.
“It is farther to the towns of the Big-knives,” was
the laconic reply.
“Why is a Pawnee-Loup so far from the fork of
his own river, without a horse to journey on, and in
a spot so empty as this?”
“Can the women and children of a Pale-face live
without the meat of the bison? There was hunger
in my lodge.”
“My brother is very young to be already the master
of a lodge,” returned the trapper, looking steadily
into the unmoved countenance of the youthful
warrior; “but I dare say he is brave, and that many
a chief has offered him his daughters for wives. But
he has been mistaken,” pointing to the arrow, which
was dangling from the hand that held the bow, “in
bringing a loose and barbed arrow-head to kill the
buffaloe. Do the Pawness wish the wounds they
give their game to rankle?”
“It is good to be ready for the Sioux. Though
not in sight, a bush may hide him.”
“The man is a living proof of the truth of his
words,” muttered the trapper in English, “and a
close-jointed and gallant looking lad he is; but far
too young for a chief of any importance. It is wise,
however, to speak him fair, for a single arm thrown
into either party, if we come to blows with the squatter
and his brood, may turn the day.—You see my
children are weary,” he continued in the dialect of
the prairies, pointing, as he spoke, to the rest of the
party, who, by this time, were also approaching.
this spot?”
“The runners, from the people on the Big-river,
tell us that your nation have traded with the Tawney-faces
who live beyond the salt-lake, and that
the prairies are now the hunting grounds of the Big-knives!”
“It is true, as I hear, also, from the hunters and
trappers on La Platte. Though it is with the Frenchers,
and not with the men who claim to own the
Mexicos, that my people have bargained.”
“And warriors are going up the Long-river, to see
that they have not been cheated in what they have
bought?”
“Ay, that is partly true, too, I fear; and it will
not be long before an accursed band of choppers
and loggers will be following on their heels, to humble
the wilderness which lies so broad and rich on
the western banks of the Mississippi, and then the
land will be a peopled desert, from the shores of the
main sea to the foot of the Rocky Mountains; fill'd
with all the abominations and craft of man, and
stript of the comforts and loveliness it received from
the hands of the Lord!”
“And where were the chiefs of the Pawnee-Loups,
when this bargain was made?” suddenly demanded
the youthful warrior, a look of startling fierceness
gleaming, at the same instant, athwart his dark visage.
“Is a nation to be sold like the skin of a beaver?”
“Right enough—right enough, and where were
truth and honesty, also? But might is right, according
to the fashions of the 'arth; and what the strong
choose to do, the weak must call justice. If the
law of the Wahcondah was as much hearkened to,
Pawnee, as the laws of the Long-knives, your right
to the prairies would be as good as that of the greatest
chief in the settlements to the house which covers
his head.”
“The skin of the traveller is white,” said the
young native, laying a finger impressively on the
hard and wrinkled hand of the trapper. “Does his
heart say one thing and his tongue another?”
“The Wahcondah of a white man has ears and he
shuts them to a lie. Look at my head; it is like a
frosted pine, and must soon be laid in the ground.
Why then should I wish to meet the Great Spirit,
face to face, while his countenance is dark upon me.”
The Pawnee gracefully threw his shield over one
shoulder, and placing a hand on his chest, he bent
his head, in deference to the gray locks exhibited by
the trapper; after which his eye became more steady,
and his countenance less fierce. Still he maintained
every appearance of a distrust and watchfulness
that were rather tempered and subdued, than
forgotten. When this equivocal species of amity
was established between the warrior of the prairies
and the experienced old trapper, the latter proceeded
to give his directions to Paul, concerning the arrangements
of the contemplated halt. While Inez
and Ellen were dismounting, and Middleton and the
bee-hunter were attending to their comforts, the discourse
was continued, sometimes in the language of
the natives, but often as Paul and the Doctor mingled
their opinions with the two principal speakers,
in the English tongue. There was a keen and subtle
trial of skill between the Pawnee and the trapper, in
which each endeavoured to discover the objects of
the other, without betraying his interest in the investigation.
As might be expected, when the struggle
was between adversaries so equal, the result of the
encounter answered the expectations of neither.
The latter had put all the interrogatories his ingenuity
and practice could suggest, concerning the state
of the tribe of the Loups, their crops, their store of
provisions for the ensuing winter, and their relations
with their different warlike neighbours, without extorting
the cause of his finding a solitary warrior so
far from his people. On the other hand, while the
questions of the Indian were far more dignified and
delicate, they were equally ingenious. He commented
on the state of the trade in peltries, spoke of the
good or ill success of many white hunters, whom he
had either encountered or heard named, and even
alluded to the steady march, which the nation of his
great father, as he cautiously termed the government
of the States, was making towards the hunting-grounds
of his tribe. It was apparent, however, by the singular
mixture of interest, contempt, and indignation,
that were occasionally gleaming through the reserved
manners of this warrior, that he knew the strange
people who were thus trespassing on his native rights
much more by report than by any actual intercourse.
This personal ignorance of the whites was as much
betrayed by the manner in which he regarded the
females, as by any of the brief but energetic expressions
which occasionally escaped him.
While speaking to the trapper he suffered his
wandering glances to stray towards the intellectual
and nearly infantile beauty of Inez, as one might be
supposed to gaze upon the loveliness of an ethereal
being. It was very evident that he now saw, for the
first time, one of those females, of whom the fathers
of his tribe so often spoke, and who were considered
of such rare excellence as to equal all that savage
ingenuity could imagine in the way of loveliness.
His observation of Ellen was less marked, but notwithstanding
the warlike and chastened expression
of his eye, there was much of the homage, which
man is made to pay to woman, even in the more cursory
look he sometimes turned on her maturer and
perhaps more animated beauty. This admiration,
however, was so tempered by his habits, and so
to elude every eye but that of the trapper, who was
too well skilled in Indian customs, and was too well
instructed in the importance of rightly conceiving
the character of the stranger, to let the smallest trait
or the most trifling of his movements escape him. In
the mean time the unconscious Ellen herself moved
about the feeble and less resolute Inez with her accustomed
assiduity and tenderness, exhibiting in her
frank features those changing emotions of joy and regret
which occasionally beset her, as her active mind
dwelt on the decided step she had just taken, with
the contending doubts and hopes, and possibly with
some of the mental vacillation that was natural to
her situation and sex.
Not so Paul; conceiving himself to have obtained
the two things dearest to his heart, the possession of
Ellen and a triumph over the sons of Ishmael, he
now enacted his part, in the business of the moment,
with as much coolness as though he was already
leading his willing bride, from solemnizing their nuptials
before a border magistrate, to the security of
his own dwelling. He had hovered around the moving
family, during the tedious period of their weary
march, concealing himself by day, and seeking interviews
with his betrothed as opportunities offered, in
the manner already described, until fortune and his
own intrepidity had united to render him successful
at the very moment when he was beginning to despair,
and he now cared neither for distance, nor violence,
nor hardships. To his sanguine fancy and determined
resolution all the rest was easily to be
achieved. Such were his feelings, and such in truth
they seemed to be. With his cap cast on one side
and whistling a low air, he thrashed among the bushes,
in order to make a place suitable for the females
to repose on, while, from time to time, he cast an
Ellen, as she tripped past him in the pursuit of her
own share of the duty.
“And so the Wolf-tribe of the Pawnees have
buried the hatchet with their neighbours the Konzas,”
said the trapper, pursuing a discourse which
he had scarcely permitted to flag, though it had been
occasionally interrupted by the different directions
with which he occasionally saw fit to interrupt it.
(The reader will remember that, while he spoke to
the native warrior in his own tongue, he necessarily
addressed his white companions in English.) “The
Loups and the light-fac'd Red-skins are again friends.
Doctor, that is a tribe of which I'll engage you've
often read, and of which many a round lie has been
whispered in the ears of the ignorant people, who
live in the settlements. There was a story of a nation
of Welshers, that liv'd hereaway in the prairies,
and how they came into the land afore the uneasy
minded man, who first let in the Christians to rob the
heathens of their inheritance, had ever dreamt that
the sun set on a country as big as that it rose from.
And how they knew the white ways, and spoke with
white tongues, and a thousand other follies and idle
conceits.”
“Have I not heard of them!” exclaimed the naturalist,
dropping a piece of jerked bison's meat, which
he was rather roughly discussing at the moment. “I
should be greatly ignorant not to have often dwelt
with delight on so beautiful a theory, and one which
so triumphantly establishes two positions, which I
have often maintained are unanswerable, even without
such living testimony in their favour—viz. that
this continent can claim a more remote affinity with
civilization than the time of Columbus, and that colour
is the fruit of climate and condition, and not a
regulation of nature. Propound the latter question
to this Indian gentleman, venerable hunter; he is of
make us masters of the two sides of the disputed
point.”
“Do you think a Pawnee is a reader of books
and a believer of printed lies, like the idlers in the
towns?” retorted the old man, laughing. “But it may
be as well to humour the likings of the man, which
after all it is quite possible are neither more nor less
than his natural gift, and therefore to be followed, although
they may be pitied. What does my brother
think? all whom he sees here have pale skins, but
the Pawnee warriors are red; does he believe that
man changes with the season, and that the son is not
like his father?”
The young warrior regarded his interrogator for a
moment with a steady and scornful eye, and then
raising his finger upward, with a proud gesture, he
answered with dignity—
“The Wahcondah pours the rain from his clouds;
when he speaks, he shakes the hills; and the fire,
which scorches the trees, is the anger of his eye;
but he fashioned his children with care and thought.
What he has thus made, never alters!”
“Ay, 'tis in the reason of natur' that it should be
so, Doctor,” continued the trapper, when he had interpreted
this answer to the disappointed naturalist.
“The Pawnees are a wise and a great people, and
I'll engage they abound in many a wholesome and
honest tradition. The hunters and trappers, that I
sometimes see, speak of a great warrior of your
race!”
“My tribe are not women. A brave is no stranger
in my village.”
“Ay; but he, they speak of most, is a chief far
beyond the renown of common warriors, and one
that might have done credit to that once mighty but
now fallen people, the Delawares of the hills.”
“Such a warrior should have a name?”
“They call him Hard-Heart, from the stoutness
of his resolution; and well is he named, if all I have
heard of his deeds be true.”
The stranger cast a glance, which seemed to read
the guileless soul of the old man, as he demanded—
“Has the Pale-face seen the partisan of my people?”
“Never. It is not with me now, as it used to be
some forty years ago, when warfare and bloodshed
were my calling and my gifts!”
A loud shout from the reckless Paul interrupted
his speech, and at the next moment the bee-hunter
appeared, leading an Indian war-horse from the side
of the thicket opposite to the one occupied by the
party.
“Here is a beast for a Red-skin to straddle!” he
cried as he made the animal go through some of its
wild paces. “There's not a brigadier in all Kentucky
that can call himself master of so sleek and
well-jointed a nag! A Spanish saddle too, like a
grandee of the Mexicos! and look at the mane and
tail, braided and platted down with little silver balls,
as if it were Ellen herself getting her shining hair
ready for a dance or a husking frolic! Isn't this a
real trotter, old trapper, to eat out of the manger of
a savage?”
“Softly, lad, softly. The Loups are famous for
their horses, and it is often that you see a warrior on
the prairies far better mounted than a congress-man
in the settlements. But this, indeed, is a beast that
none but a powerful chief should ride. The saddle,
as you rightly think, has been sit upon in its day by
a great Spanish captain, who has lost it and his life
together, in some of the battles which this people
often fight against the southern provinces. I warrant
me, I warrant me, the youngster is the son of a great
chief; may be of the mighty Hard-Heart himself!”
During this rude interruption to the discourse, the
displeasure; but when he thought his beast had been
the subject of sufficient comment, he very coolly,
and with the air of one accustomed to have his will
respected, relieved Paul of the bridle, and throwing
the reins on the neck of the animal, he sprang upon
his back, with the activity of a professor of the
equestrian art. Nothing could be finer or firmer than
the seat of the savage. The highly wrought and cumbrous
saddle was evidently more for show than use.
Indeed it impeded rather than aided the action of
limbs, which disdained to seek assistance or admit of
restraint from such womanish inventions as stirrups.
The horse, which immediately began to prance, was,
like its rider, wild and untutored in all his motions,
but while there was so little of art, there was all the
freedom and grace of nature in the movements of
both. The animal was probably indebted to the
blood of Araby for its excellence, through a long
pedigree, that embraced the steed of Mexico, the
Spanish barb and the Moorish charger. The rider,
in obtaining his steed from the provinces of Central-America
had also obtained that spirit and grace in
controlling him, which unite to form the most intrepid
and perhaps the most skilful horseman in the
world.
Notwithstanding this sudden occupation of his animal,
the Pawnee discovered no hasty wish to depart.
More at his ease, and possibly more independent,
now he found himself secure of the means of retreat,
he rode back and forth, eying the different individuals
of the party with far greater freedom than
before. But at each extremity of his ride, just as
the sagacious trapper expected to see him profit by
his advantage and fly, he would turn his horse and
pass over the same ground, sometimes with the
rapidity of the flying deer, and at others more slowly
and with greater dignity of mien and attitude. Anxious
on his future movements, the old man determined
to invite him to a renewal of their conference.
He therefore made a gesture expressive at the same
time of his wish to resume the interrupted discourse
and of his own pacific intentions. The quick eye
of the stranger was not slow to note the action, but
it was not until a sufficient time had passed to allow
him to debate the prudence of the measure in his
own mind, that he seemed willing to trust himself
again so near a party that was so much superior to
himself in physical power, and consequently one
that was able at any instant to command his life or
control his personal liberty. When he did approach
nigh enough to converse with facility, it was with a
singular mixture of haughtiness and of distrust.
“It is far to the village of the Loups,” he said,
stretching his arm in a direction contrary to that, in
which the trapper well knew, that the tribe dwelt,
“and the road is crooked. What has the Big-knife
to say?”
“Ay, crooked enough!” muttered the old man in
English, if you are to set out on your journey by
that path, but not half so winding as the cunning of
an Indian's mind. Say, my brother; do the chiefs
of the Pawnees love to see strange faces in their
lodges?”
The young warrior bent his body gracefully,
though but slightly over his saddle-bow, as he replied
with grave dignity—
“When have my people forgotten to give food to
the stranger?”
“If I lead my daughters to the doors of the
Loups, will the women take them by the hand; and
will the warriors smoke with my young men?”
“The country of the Pale-faces is behind them.
Why do they journey so far towards the setting sun?
Have they lost the path, or are these the women of
river `with the troubled waters?”'
“Neither. They, who wade the Missouri, are the
warriors of my great father, who has sent them on
his message, but we are peace-runners. The white
men and the red are neighbours, and they wish to be
friends.—Do not the Omahaws visit the Loups, when
the tomahawk is buried in the path between the two
nations?”
“The Omahaws are welcome.”
“And the Yanktons and the burnt-wood Tetons,
who live in the elbow of the river `with muddy
water,' do they not come into the lodges of the
Loups and smoke?”
“The Tetons are liars,” exclaimed the other.
“They dare not shut their eyes in the night. No;
they sleep in the sun. See,” he added pointing with
fierce triumph to the frightful ornaments of his leggings,
“their scalps are so plenty, that the Pawnees
tread on them! Go; let a Sioux live in banks of
snow; the plains and buffaloes are for men!”
“Ah! the secret is out,” said the trapper to
Middleton, who was an attentive, because a deeply
interested observer of what was passing. “This
good looking young Indian is scouting on the track
of the Siouxes—you may see it by his arrow-heads,
and his paint; ay, and by his eye, too; for a Red-skin
lets his natur' follow the business he is on, be it
for peace or be it for war,—quiet, Hector, quiet.
Have you never scented a Pawnee afore, pup—keep
down, dog—keep down—my brother is right. The
Siouxes are thieves. Men of all colours and nations
say it of them, and say it truly. But the people from
the rising sun are not Siouxes, and they wish to visit
the lodges of the Loups.”
“The head of my brother is white,” returned the
Pawnee, throwing one of those glances at the trapper,
which were so remarkably expressive of distrust,
towards the eastern horizon, “and his eyes
have looked on many things—can he tell me the
name of what he sees yonder—is it a buffaloe?”
“It looks more like a cloud, peeping above the
skirt of the plain with the sunshine lighting its edges.
It is the smoke of the heavens.”
“It is a hill of the earth, and on its top are the
lodges of the Pale-faces! Let the women of my
brother wash their feet among the people of their
own colour.”
“The eyes of a Pawnee are good, if he can see
a white-skin so far.”
The Indian turned slowly towards the speaker,
and after a pause of a moment he sternly demanded—
“Can my brother hunt?”
“Alas! I claim to be no better than a miserable
trapper.”
“When the plain is covered with the buffaloes,
can he see them?”
“No doubt, no doubt—it is far easier to see than
to take a scampering bull.”
“And when the birds are flying from the cold, and
the clouds are black with their feathers, can he see
them too?”
“Ay, ay, it is not hard to find a duck or a goose
when millions are darkening the heavens.”
“When the snow falls, and covers the lodges of
the Long-knives, can the stranger see flakes in the
air?”
“My eyes are none of the best, now,” returned
the old man a little resentfully, “but the time has
been when I had a name for my sight!”
“The Red-skins find the Big-knives as easily as the
strangers see the buffaloe, or the travelling birds, or
the falling snow. Your warriors think the Master of
Life has made the whole earth white. They are
that they see. Go! a Pawnee is not blind, that he
need look long for your people!”
The warrior suddenly paused, and bent his face
aside, like one who listened with all his faculties absorbed
in the act. Then turning the head of his
horse, he rode to the nearest angle of the thicket,
and looked intently across the bleak prairie, in a
direction opposite to the side on which the party
stood. Returning slowly from this unaccountable,
and to his observers, startling procedure, he riveted
his eyes on Inez and paced back and forth several
times, with the air of one who maintained a warm
struggle on some difficult point, in the secret recesses
of his own thoughts. He had drawn the reins of
his impatient steed, and was seemingly about to
speak, when his head again sunk on his chest and he
resumed his former attitude of attention. Galloping
like a deer, to the place of his former observations,
he rode for a moment swiftly, in short and rapid circles,
as if still uncertain of his course, and then darted
away, like a bird that had been fluttering around
its nest before it takes a distant flight. After scouring
the plain for a minute, he was lost to the eye behind
a swell of the land.
The hounds, who had also manifested great uneasiness
for some time, followed him for a little distance,
and then terminated their chase by seating themselves
on the ground and raising their usual low,
whining, and alarming howls.
| THE PRAIRIE. The prairie | |