University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.

The boats, side by side, of Sanutee and Ishiagaska,
crossed the river at a point just below Pocota-ligo. It
was there that Sanutee landed—the other chief continued

his progress to the town. But a few words,
and those of stern resolve, passed between them at
separation; but those words were volumes. They
were the words of revolution and strife, and announced
the preparation of the people not less than of the two
chiefs, for the commencement, with brief delay, of
those terrors which were now the most prominent images
in their minds. The night was fixed among
them for the outbreak, the several commands arranged,
and the intelligence brought by the sailor, informed
them of a contemplated attack of the Spaniards
by sea upon the Carolinian settlements, while at the
same time another body was in progress over land to
coalesce with them in their operations. This latter
force could not be very distant, and it was understood
that when the scouts should return with accounts of
its approach, the signal should be given for the general
massacre.

“They shall die—they shall all perish, and their
scalps shall shrivel around the long pole in the lodge
of the warrior,” exclaimed Ishiagaska, fiercely, to his
brother chief in their own language. The response
of Sanutee was in a different temper, though recognising
the same necessity.

“The Yemassee must be free,” said the elder
chief, solemnly, in his sonorous tones—“the Manneyto
will bring him freedom—he will take the burden from
his shoulders, and set him up against the tree by the
wayside. He will put the bow into his hands—he will
strengthen him for the chase; there shall be no pale-faces
along the path to rob him of venison—to put
blows upon his shoulders. The Yamassee shall be
free.”

“He shall drink blood for strength.—He shall hunt
the track of the English to the sounds of the big waters;
and the war-whoop shall ring death in the ear that
sleeps,” cried Ishiagaska, with a furious exultation.

“Let them go, Ishiagaska, let them go from the
Yemassee—let the warrior have no stop in the chase,
when he would strike the brown deer on the edge of

the swamp. Let them leave the home of the Yemassee,
and take the big canoe over the waters, and the tomahawk
of Sanutee shall be buried—it should drink no
blood from the English.”

“They will not go,” exclaimed the other fiercely—
“there must be blood—the white man will not go.
His teeth are in the trees, and he eats into the earth
for his own.”

“Thou hast said, Ishiagaska—there must be blood—
they will not go. The knife of the Yemassee must
be red. But—not yet—not yet! The moon must
sleep first—the Yemassee is a little child till the moon
sleeps, but then—”

“He is a strong man, with a long arrow, and a tomahawk
like the Manneyto.”

“It is good—the arrow shall fly to the heart, and
the tomahawk shall sink deep into the head. The
Yemassee shall have his lands, and his limbs shall be
free in the hunt.” Thus, almost in a strain of lyric
enthusiasm, for a little while they continued, until, having
briefly arranged for a meeting with other chiefs of
their party for the day ensuing, they separated, and the
night had well set in before Sanutee reappeared in the
cabin of his wife.

He returned gloomy and abstracted—his mind brooding
over schemes of war and violence. He was about
to plunge his nation into all the difficulties and dangers
of a strife with the colony, still in its infancy, but even
in its infancy, powerful to the Indians—with a people
with whom they had, hitherto, always been at
peace and on terms of the most friendly intercourse.
Sanutee felt the difficulties of this former relation
doubly to increase those which necessarily belong to
war. He had, however, well deliberated the matter,
and arrived at a determination, so fraught with peril
not only to himself but to his people, only after a perfect
conviction of its absolute necessity. Yet such a
decision was a severe trial to a spirit framed as his—
a spirit, which, as in the case of Logan, desired peace
rather than war. The misfortune with him, however,

consisted in this—he was a patriot rather than a sage,
and though lacking nothing of that wisdom which may
exist in a mind not yet entirely stripped of all warmth—
all national veneration,—he could not coldly calculate
chances and changes, injurious and possibly fatal to his
people, tamely to predict, without seeking also to divert
them. At the first, misled as were the Indians generally,
he had been friendly to the settlers—he had cordially
welcomed them—yielded the lands of his people
graciously, and when they were assailed by other
tribes, had himself gone forth in their battle even
against the Spaniards of St. Augustine, with whom he
now found it politic to enter into alliance. But his
eyes were now fully opened to his error. It is in the
nature of civilization to own an appetite for dominion
and extended sway, which the world that is known
will always fail to satisfy. It is for her, then, to seek
and to create, and not with the Macedonian barbarian, to
weep for the triumph of the unknown. Conquest and
sway are the great leading principles of her existence,
and the savage must join in her train, or she rides
over him relentlessly in her for-ever-onward progress.
Though slow, perhaps, in her approaches, Sanutee
was sage enough at length to foresee all this, as the inevitable
result of her progressive march. The evidence
rose daily before his eyes in the diminution
of the game—in the frequent insults to his people, unredressed
by their obtrusive neighbours—and in the
daily approach of some new borderer in contact with
the Indian hunters, whose habits were foreign, and
whose capacities were obviously superior to theirs.
The desire for new lands, and the facility with which
the whites, in many cases, taking advantage of the
weaknesses of their chiefs, had been enabled to procure
them, impressed Sanutee strongly with the melancholy
prospect in reserve for the Yemassee. He,
probably, would not live to behold them landless, and
his own children might, to the last, have range enough
for the chase; but the nation itself was in the thought
of the unselfish chieftain, upon whom its general voice
had conferred the title of “the well-beloved of Manneyto.”

He threw himself upon the bearskin of his cabin,
and Matiwan stood beside him. She was not young—
she was not beautiful, but her face was softly brown,
and her eye was dark, while her long black hair came
down her back with a flow of girlish luxuriance. Her
face was that of a girl, plump, and though sorrow had
made free with it, the original expression must have
been one of extreme liveliness. Even now, when she
laughed, and the beautiful white teeth glittered through
her almost purple lips, she wore all the expression
of a child. The chief loved her as a child rather than
as a wife, and she rather adored than loved the chief.
At this moment, however, as she stood before him,
robed loosely in her long white garment, and with an
apron of the soft skin of the spotted fawn, he had neither
words nor looks for Matiwan. She brought him
a gourd filled with a simple beer common to their people,
and extracted from the pleasanter roots of the forest,
with the nature of which, all Indians, in their rude
pharmacy, are familiar. Unconsciously he drank off
the beverage, and without speaking returned the gourd
to the woman. She addressed him inquiringly at last,

“The chief, Sanutee, has sent an arrow from his
bow, yet brings he no venison from the woods?”

The red of his cheek grew darker, as the speech
reminded him of his loss, not only of dog, but deer;
and though the sailor had proffered him the meat,
which his pride had compelled him to reject, he could
not but feel that he had been defrauded of the spoils
which had been in reality his own, while sustaining
a severe loss beside: querulously, therefore, was the
manner of his reply:—

“Has Matiwan been into the tree-top to-day, for
the voice of the bird which is painted, that she must
sing with a foolish noise in the ear of Sanutee?”

The woman was rebuked into silence for the
moment, but with a knowledge of his mood, she sunk
back directly behind him, upon a corner of the bear

skin, and after a few prefatory notes, as if singing
for her own exercise and amusement, she carolled
forth in an exquisite ballad voice, one of those little
fancies of the Indians, which may be found among nearly
all the tribes from Carolina to Mexico.—It recorded
the achievements of that Puck of the American forests,
the mocking-bird; and detailed the manner in which
he procured his imitative powers. The strain, playfully
simple in the sweet language of the original,
must necessarily lose in the more frigid verse of the
translator.

The song had something of the desired effect,
though still the chief said nothing. He seemed

soothed, however, and as a beautiful pet fawn bounded
friskingly into the lodge, from the enclosure which adjoined
it, and leaped playfully upon him, as, with an
indulged habit, he encouraged its caresses; while,
also encouraged by this show, Matiwan herself drew
nigher, and her arm rested upon his shoulder. The
chief, though still silent and musing, suffered his hand
to glide over the soft skin and shrinking back of the
animal, which, still more encouraged by his caress,
now thrust its head into his bosom, while its face was
even occasionally pressed upon his own. On a sudden,
however, the warrior started, as his hand was
pressed upon a thick cluster of large and various
beads, which had been wound about the neck of the
playful favourite; and, as if there had been contamination
in the touch, thrusting the now affrighted animal
away, he cried out to the shrinking woman, in a voice
of thunder:—

“Matiwan, the white trader has been in the lodge
of Sanutee!”

“No, chief—Sanutee—not Granger—he has not
been in the lodge of the chief.”

“The beads! Matiwan—the beads!” he cried, furiously,
as he tore the cluster from the neck of the fawn,
and dashing them to the ground, trampled them fiercely
under his feet.

“The boy,—Sanutee—the boy, Occonestoga—”

“The dog! came he to the lodge of Sanutee when
Sanutee said no! Matiwan—woman! Thy ears
have forgotten the words of the chief—of Sanutee—
thine eyes have looked upon a dog.”

“'Tis the child of Matiwan—Matiwan has no child
but Occonestoga.” And she threw herself at length,
with her face to the ground, at the foot of her lord.

“Speak, Matiwan—darkens the dog still in the
lodge of Sanutee?”

“Sanutee, no! Occonestoga has gone with the chiefs
of the English, to talk in council with the Yemassee.”

“Ha—thou speakest!—look, Matiwan — where
stood the sun when the chiefs of the pale-faces came?
Speak!”

“The sun stood high over the lodge of Matiwan,
and saw not beneath the tree top.”

“They come for more lands—they would have all;
but they know not that Sanutee lives—they say he
sleeps—that he has no tongue,—that his people have
forgotten his voice! They shall see.” As he spoke,
he pointed to the gaudy beads which lay strewed over
the floor of the cabin, and, with a bitter sarcasm of
glance and speech, thus addressed her:—

“What made thee, a chief of the Yemassees,
Matiwan, to sell the lands of my people to the pale-faces
for their painted glass? They would buy thee,
and the chief, and the nation—all; and with what?
With that which is not worth, save that it is like thine
eye. And thou—didst thou pray to the Manneyto to
send thee from thy people, that thou mightst carry
water for the pale-faces from the spring? Go—thou
hast done wrong, Matiwan.”

“They put the painted glass into the hands of
Matiwan, but they asked not for lands; they gave
it to Matiwan, for she was the wife of Sanutee, the
chief.”

“They lied with a forked tongue. It was to buy
the lands of our people; it was to send us into the
black swamps, where the sun sleeps for ever. But I
will go—where is the dog—the slave of the pale-faces?
where went Occonestoga with the English?”

“To Pocota-ligo—they would see the chiefs of
Yemassee.”

“To buy them with the painted glass, and red cloth,
and strong water. Manneyto be with my people,
for the chiefs are slaves to the English; and they will
give the big forests of my fathers to be cut down by
the accursed axes of the pale-face. But they blind
me not—they buy not Sanutee! The knife must have
blood—the Yemassee must have his home with the
old grave of his father. I will go to Pocota-ligo.”

“Sanutee, chief—'tis Matiwan, the mother of Occonestoga
that speaks; thou wilt see the young chief—
thou wilt look upon the boy at Pocota-ligo. Oh! well-beloved

of the Yemassee—look not to strike.” She
sunk at his feet as she uttered the entreaty, and her
arms clung about his knees.

“I would not see Occonestoga, Matiwan—for he is
thy son. Manneyto befriend thee; but thou hast
been the mother to a dog.”

“Thou wilt not see to strike—”

“I would not see him! but let him not stand in the
path of Sanutee. Look, Matiwan—the knife is in my
hands, and there is death for the dog, and a curse for
the traitor, from the black swamps of Opitchi-Manneyto.”
[2]

He said no more, and she, too, was speechless.
She could only raise her hands and eye, in imploring
expressions to his glance, as, seizing upon his tomahawk,
which he had thrown beside him upon the skin,
he rushed forth from the lodge, and took the path to
Pocota-ligo.