gathering from the neighboring towns, and were congregated in the wide
spaces about the course at Ioco. These fields had earlier been planted
in corn, but the harvest had stripped the plain, and now the trampling
of hundreds of feet erased all vestiges of the growth except for the
yellow-gray tint of the stubble, spreading out on every side to the
brown of the dense fallen leaves on the slopes where the forests began
to climb the mountain sides. Here and there fires were kindled where
some spectator felt the keen chill of the approaching winter, and more
than one meal was in progress,--perhaps such groups had come from far.
Pack-horses were in evidence laden with rich garments of fur, various
peltry, blankets, valuable gear of every sort to be staked on the result
of the game, and soon the men were betting heavily. All the various
tones of the gamut were on the air,--the deep bass guttural laugh of the
braves; the shrill callow yelping of boys; the absent-minded bawl of
spoiled pappooses interested in the stir, but with an ever-recurrent
recollection of the business of vocally disciplining their patient
mothers; the keen treble chatter of women,--all were suddenly resolved
into a strong dominant chord of sound as a tremendous shout arose upon
the appearance of the ball-players of Ioco. Fresh from the river, they
made a glittering show with the tossing feathers of their crested heads,
their faces painted curiously and fantastically in white, the bright
tints of their gaudy though scanty raiment, their bare arms and legs
suppled with unguents and shining in the sun. This note of welcome had
hardly died away and the echo of the encompassing mountains grown
silent, when an agitated murmur of excitement went sibilantly through
the throng.
A cloud of dust was approaching in the distance, heralding a band of
men. A new sound invoked the echoes. The breath was held to hear it. The
throb of a drum--faint--far. And here thunderously beating, hard at
hand, overpowering all lesser sounds, the drums of loco responded. To
the vibrations of these sonorous earthen cylinders, the sticks plied
with a will on the heads of wet deerskins tightly stretched, the
ball-players of Niowee advanced. In a diagonal direction and at a sturdy
trot they came for a space,--a sudden halt ensued, and eighty pairs of
muscular feet smote tumultuously on the ground. Then once more forward
diagonally, at that swinging jaunty pace, and the stamping pause as
before. The sound seemed to shake the ground, the impact of the feet
with the earth was heard despite the turmoil of the drums; the stamping
vibrations were felt in the midst of the stir of the crowds, and now in
the nearer approach the individual faces could be distinguished, wildly
painted; the athletic figures, gaudily clad and barbarically decorated;
the ball-sticks, held aloft in a sort of rhythmic vibration as if
quivering for a chance at the ball; and fourscore wild young voices
howled defiance at loco Town, whose youth in return howled its municipal
pride, failing only with failing breath.
They were all in the course at last. The judges, elderly warriors and
absolutely impartial, chosen from towns which had no interest at stake
in the match, were seated on a little knoll, commanding a view of the
ground, but at a sufficient distance to be in no danger from a maladroit
handling of the ball. This was made of deerskin, stuffed hard with hair,
and sewn up with deer sinews. The ball-sticks, of which each player
owned his pair, were also partly made of deerskin, the two scoops or
ladles being fashioned of a network of thongs on a wooden hoop, each
furnished with a handle of hickory three feet long, worked together with
a thong of deerskin to catch the ball between the rackets,--it being of
course prohibited to catch the ball in the hand.
The drums beat furiously; the word was given; the ball was flung high in
the air in the middle of the course, and the next instant one hundred
and sixty young athletes rushed together with a mighty shock the force
of which seemed to shake the ground. Some fell and were trampled in the
crush; others madly clutched one another, friend or foe, with the
ill-aimed ball-sticks, inflicting a snapping hurt like a bite,--a wound
by no means to be despised. One, an expert, sent the ball with an artful
twirl through the air toward the Ioco goal, and in the midst of a shout
that rent the sky the whole rout of players went frantically flying
after it, whirling with an incredible swiftness and agility when it was
caught midway, and hurled back toward Niowee with a force as if it had
been flung from a catapult. Here and there individual players in the
frenzied chase made wonderful records of leaps in their efforts to catch
the ball, springing into the air with a surprising strength and
elasticity, and a lightness as of creatures absolutely without weight.
A good match they were playing; for more than half an hour neither side
was permitted by the other to score a single point. The ball seemed for
a time as if it were awing forever, and would fall to the ground no
more. The casualties were many; almost always after one of those sudden
rushes together of both factions that had a tremendous momentum as of
galloping squadrons, the ground would show as the moving masses receded
half a dozen figures prone upon the course; one with a broken arm
perhaps; another badly snapped by the inartistically plied ball-sticks
of friend or foe and crawling off with a bloody pate; sometimes another
lying quite still, evidently stunned and to be hastily dragged off the
course by spectators, before another stampede of the ball-players crush
the life out of the unconscious and prostrate wight. Nevertheless only
the normal interest, which however was very great, appertained to the
match until at a crisis a strange thing happened, inexplicable then, and
perhaps never fully understood.
The ball was flying toward the Niowee goal and the whole field was in
full run after it. The blow that had impelled it had been something
tremendous. A shout of triumph was already welling up from the throat of
all Niowee, for to prevent the scoring of a point in its favor it would
seem that there must be a thing afoot whose fleetness could exceed the
speed of a thing awing.
Amoyah, the deftest runner of all the Tennessee River country, was
foremost in the crown of swift athletes; presently he was detached by
degrees from it; now he was definitely in advance; and soon, spurting
tremendously, he had so neared the Niowee goal that the ball just above
must needs pass over it if a spring might not enable him to capture it
at the last moment. As agile as a deer, and as light as a bird, he
leaped into the air, both arms upstretched, holding the rackets aloft
and ready. He was a far-famed player, and even now the Ioco spectators
were shouting, Amoyah needs must win!
A mysterious silence fell suddenly. They all saw what had happened.
There could be no mistake. The rackets parted at the propitious moment
to receive the ball. The netting closed about it. And then, as if it had
met with no impediment whatever, the ball passed through the stanch web
of thongs and over the poles, and falling to the ground counted one for
Niowee.
The spectators from that town in their astonishment forgot to shout. The
onrushing crowd of players, bearing down upon Amoyah, having intended to
force him to drop the ball, which he had seemed predestined to catch, or
to throw it so ill as to deliver it into the power of Niowee still to
secure the point, could not arrest their own momentum, and went over the
startled and dumfounded player in a swift dash, leaving him prone upon
the ground. He was on his feet in an instant, his physical faculties
rallying promptly, but so bewildered and doubtful that he had but one
definite mental process, the resolve to regain for Ioco the point he had
so mysteriously lost. Twice afterward his fine playing focused the
attention of the crowd. Twice their plaudits of his skill rang through
the vibrating air. Then the ball, hardly checked by the web of his
racket, passed through the ball-sticks, and all realized their
bewitchment.
Amoyah heard the gossip afloat concerning the matter before he had well
quitted the course. The Great Bear had torn the net of the ball-sticks
with his claw, one brave was telling another as he passed, because
Amoyah had unveraciously boasted that he had walked by invitation in the
procession of the bears during their annual march with their shadows at
their hidden mysterious town in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Amoyah paused, tired, excited, panting, and critically examined the web.
Surely enough the interlacing thongs had parted in twain in two straight
lines, invisible save on close inspection, as deftly and as evenly
severed as if cut with a keen knife.
It was late in the day. The sun was now on a westering slant. The
parties of spectators were breaking up, some to journey homeward, others
going into the town with friends. The place that the crowd had occupied
had that peculiarly dreary aspect characteristic of a deserted pleasure
ground. Trampled heavily it was, and the charred remnant of a fire
showed black here and there; broken bits of food were scattered in
places where feasting had been; a great gourd that had held some gallons
of water lay shattered on the ground at his feet; a group at a distance
were doubtfully retracing their steps, searching for something they had
lost; at the farthest limits a wolf like a dog, or a dog like a wolf,
was gnawing at a bone, and snarling as he gnawed. It was all frowzy,
jaded, forlorn.
Somehow suddenly he had a sense of freshness, an illumination, as it
were a vision, of the early morning light striking through a network of
bare trees upon the shimmering reaches of a river. And there on the bank
lay his ball-sticks,--quite good and sound then, he would have staked
his life. And now a picture was before him,--being a man of fancy, he
thought in pictures,--a picture of old Cheesto the Rabbit holding the
ball-sticks half hidden in the folds of his great fur robe and wading
out into the ice-cold water to restore them. And old Cheesto, he
reflected, was one of the cheera-taghe of Ioco, and could work a spell
quite as well as the Great Bear, who had gone to bed for the winter two
weeks ago, and had not heard of ball-sticks within the memory of
man,--perhaps not since he was a Cherokee himself, and playing with the
rest on the course at Tennessee Town.
In fact, old Cheesto, in common with many men not Cherokees, cared
little for the public weal when it interfered with private interest. But
he had not realized how much he had jeopardized the success of Ioco Town
in cutting the netting of the ball-sticks. He had imagined the
incompleteness of the racket would merely show Amoyah as incompetent,
render his play futile and ineffective, and discredit him with both
friend and foe. Never, however, had the play of any one man been so
important and conspicuous as his to-day when the bewitched ball-sticks
became the salient feature and the living tradition of the match between
Ioco and Niowee. For despite these points, thus lost by supernatural
agency to Niowee, the bewitchment of the ball-sticks only served to
illustrate the superior skill of the Ioco team, and to embellish their
victory.
Amoyah had nothing but his imagination to support his theory, but it
seemed singularly credible to Altsasti, to whom he rehearsed it, finding
her seated on the ground before the door of her winter house in great
dreariness of spirit, that he should in playing so well have won nothing
and merely jeopardized the game.
"I am afraid of that Great Bear," she declared, eying the ball-sticks
askance as he came up.
Then revealing his theory of the spell that old Cheesto had wrought upon
him in Tus-ka-sah's interest, Amoyah proposed a counter-spell which
would defeat Tus-ka-sah.
"But Cheesto can still send you trouble if you have a wife," she argued.
"Ah, no," the specious Amoyah replied. "Everybody knows that a man's
wife makes him all the trouble that he needs."
To save him from these woes devised by others Altsasti undertook to give
him all the trouble he needed. But he seemed quite cheerful in the
prospect, and as she cooked the supper within doors he sat at the
entrance, much at home, singing, "_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a,
Ha-hoo-jah!_"
Tus-ka-sah upbraided the magician with the result of this victory, by
which he was defeated. And the wise man threw up eyes and hands at his
ingratitude.
"I set the Great Bear after Amoyah for you! I made the Eeon-a acquainted
with his boastful lies, and he bewitched Amoyah's ball-sticks that his
fine play might come to nothing."
Very little to the purpose, the disaffected man of facts reflected,
remembering the impression produced by his rival's display of skill.
Somehow Amoyah seemed beyond the reach of logic. "Why did you not
instead bewitch the woman?" Tus-ka-sah asked.
But this wiliest of the cheera-taghe shook his head.
"If she had been a _mere_ woman," he said. "But a widow is a witch
herself."
"_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!"_ sang Amoyah at the door of
the winter house.
Eeon-a, the Great Bear, made no sign and slept in peace at his town
house in the mountains.
And since then, as always before, under the first icy moon of the winter
the company of bears with their feather-crested shadows take up their
mysterious march seven times around the "beloved square" of their
ancient secluded town in the Great Smoky Mountains, which it is said may
be seen to this day--by all who can find it!
THE VISIT OF THE TURBULENT GRANDFATHER
It was long remembered in the Cherokee nation. Their grandfather came to
the Overhill towns on the banks of the Tennessee River in a most
imperious frame of mind.
"Give me a belt!" he cried in irrelevant response to every gracious
overture of hospitality. For although presents were heaped upon him, the
official belt of the Cherokee nation was not among them, and he cast
them all aside as mere baubles.
Even the clever subterfuges of that master of statecraft, the half-king,
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, might not avail. "_N'tschutti!_" (Dear friend) he said
once in eager propitiation; "_Gooch ili lehelecheu_?" (Does your father
yet live?) He spoke in a gentle voice and slowly, the Delaware language
being unaccustomed to his lips. "Tell the great sakimau I well remember
him!" And he laid a string of beads on the arm of the quivering Lenape,
for their grandfather was of that nationality.
But what flout of Fate was this? Not the coveted string of wampum, the
official token, its significance not to be argued away, or overlooked,
or mistaken--but instead a necklace of pearls, the fine freshwater gems
of the region, so often mentioned by the elder writers and since held to
be mythical or exaggeration of the polish of mere shell beads till the
recent discoveries have placed once more the yield of the _Unio
margaritiferus_ of the rivers of Tennessee on metropolitan markets.
A personal gift--of the rarest, it is true--but a mere trifle in the
estimation of Tscholens, in comparison with that national recognition
which he craved and which a tribe of warriors awaited.
The irate grandfather flung the glossy trinket from him down among the
ashes of the fire, which glowed in the centre of the floor of the great
council-house of the town of Citico, one of the dome-shaped buildings,
plastered as usual within and without with richly tinted red clay. The
flicker from the coals revealed the rows of posts that like a colonnade
upheld the roof; the cane-wrought divan encircling the apartment between
these columns and the windowless walls; the astonished faces and
feather-crested heads of the conclave of Cherokee chiefs from half a
dozen towns as they clustered around the fire and stared at Tscholens.
The grave emotion in his face dignified its expression despite its
savagery. Paradoxically the grandfather was young, slender, and, rated
by any other standard than that of the Cherokees, an unusually tall
people, would have been considered of fine height. His muscular arms
were bare except for his heavy silver bracelets; a tuft of feathers
quivered high on his head; his leggings were of deerskin, embroidered
with parti-colored quills of the porcupine, and his shirt was of fine
sable fur. His voice was sonorously insistent.
"_N'petalogalgun_!" (I am sent as a messenger) he declared urgently.
"Give me a belt."
He turned his flaming eyes directly upon Atta-Kulla-Kulla, himself in
the prime of life now, in 1745, who it seemed must act definitely under
this coercion. He must either refuse to testify to the truth, which he
knew, or involve his people, the Cherokees, in a quarrel which did not
concern them, of which a century was tired, between the Lenni Lenape and
the Mengwe.
So long ago it had begun! The Mengwe, hard pressed by other nations and
long at war with the Lenape, besought peace of this foe, and that they
would use their influence with the others. Usually women, prompted
always by the losing side, protested against the further effusion of
blood and went with intercessions from one faction to the other. This,
in view of the number and devious interests of the warring forces, was
then impracticable, and therefore the Mengwe besought the Lenape to act
as mediator for the occasion. Only so noted a race of warriors could
afford this magnanimity, the Mengwe argued. It might impair the prestige
of a less high-couraged and powerful tribe. And with these specious
wiles the cat was duly belled.
But alas for the Lenape! Magnanimity is the most dangerous of all the
virtues--to its possessor! Presently the Mengwe claimed to have
conquered the Lenape in battle, and cited the well-known fact that they
had inaugurated peace proposals. As the Mengwe confederation grew more
powerful they assumed all the arrogance of a protectorate. They sold the
lands of their dependents. They resented all action of the Lenape on
their own account. If the Lenape went to war on some quarrel of their
making, they had the Mengwe to reckon with as well as the enemy. As the
years rolled by in scores, this fiction gradually assumed all the
binding force of fact, till now it was felt that only by the avowal of
the truth by some powerful tribe, both ancient and contemporary, such as
the Cherokee,--who, although allied neither linguistically nor
consanguineously, by some abstruse figment of Indian etiquette affected
an affiliation to the Lenape and called them "grandfather,"--could their
rightful independence be recognized, reëstablished, and maintained.
Therefore, "Give me a belt!" cried Tscholens pertinaciously, offering in
exchange the official belt of the Delawares, or, as they were called,
Lenni Lenape.
Nothing less would content him. He hardened himself as flint against all
suave beguilements tending to effect a diversion of interest. He would
not see the horse-race. He would not "roll the bullet." He would not
witness the game of chungke, expressly played in honor of his visit. He
even refused to join in the dance, although young and nimble. But it
chanced that the three circles were awhirl on the sandy spaces
contiguous to the "beloved square" when the first break in the cohesion
of his pertinacity occurred. The red sunset was widely aflare; the dizzy
rout of the shadows of the dancers, all gregarious and intricately
involved in the three circles, kept the moving figures company. These
successive circles, one within another, followed each a different
direction in their revolutions to the music of the primitive flute,
fashioned of the bone of a deer (the tibia), and the stertorous
sonorities of the earthen drums; and as the fantastically attired
figures whirled around and around, their dull gray shadows whisked to
and fro on the golden brown sand, all in the red sunset glow.
Tscholens, quitting the council-house, glanced but indifferently at them
and then away at the lengthening perspective of the azure mountains of
the Great Smoky range. The harbingers of the twilight were advancing in
a soft blue haze over the purple and garnet tinted slopes near at hand,
their forests all leafless now, although the autumn had lingered long,
and the burnished golden days of the Indian summer were loath to go.
Lights were springing up here and there in the town as the glow of the
hearths of the dwellings, where supper was cooking, flickered out to
meet on the threshold the rays of the departing sun, which seemed to
pause there for a farewell glance in at the open door. In the centre of
the "beloved square" the fire which always burned here was slowly
smouldering. It flung a red reflection on the front of the building
devoted to the conferences of the aged councilors, painted a peaceful
white and facing the setting sun. At this moment was emerging from it a
figure which Tscholens had not before seen.
A man so old he was that even the Indian's back was bent. His face was
of weird effect, for amid its many wrinkles were streaks of
parti-colored paint such as he had worn more than three quarters of a
century earlier, when his fleet foot and the old war-trace were
familiar. In common with all the Cherokees, his head was polled and bare
save for a tuft, always spared to afford a grasp for any hand bold
enough and strong enough to take the scalp; but this lock, although
still dense and full, was of a snowy whiteness, contrasting sharply with
the red paint and belying the warlike aspect of the red-feathered crest
that trembled and shivered with the infirmities of his step. A heavy
robe of fur reached almost to his feet, and a mantle, curiously wrought
of the iridescent feathers of the neck and breast of the wild turkey,
bespoke his consequence and added to the singularity of his aspect; for
Indians seldom attained such age in those wild days, the warriors being
usually cut off in their prime. It is to be doubted if Tscholens had
ever seen so old a man, for this was Tsiskwa of Citico, reputed then to
be one hundred and ten years of age.
The step of the young grandfather, sauntering along, came to an abrupt
halt. He stood staring, exclaiming to the Cherokee warrior Savanukah,
"_Pennau wullih! Auween won gintsch pat_?" (Look yonder! Who is that who
has just come?)
It was an eagle-like majesty which looked forth from the eyes of Tsiskwa
of Citico, as he seated himself on the long cane-wrought divan, just
within the entrance of the cabin on the eastern side of the "beloved
square." Time can work but little change in such a spirit. An eagle,
however old, is always an eagle.
The sage lifted one august claw and majestically waved it at the young
Delaware _illau_ (war-captain) standing before him, while Savanukah
turned away to join the dancers. "Lenni Lenape?--I remember--I remember
very well when you came from the West!"
Tscholens was not stricken with astonishment, although that migration is
held by investigators of pre-Columbian myths[11] to have occurred before
the ninth century! It was formerly a general trait among the Indians to
use the, first person singular in speaking of the tribe, and to avoid,
even in its name, the plural termination. Tsiskwa went on with the tone
of reminiscence rather than legendary lore, and with an air of bated
rancor, as of one whose corroding grievance still works at the heart, to
describe how the Lenni Lenape crossed the Mississippi and fell upon the
widespread settlements of the Alligewi (or Tallegwi) Indians--considered
identical with the Cherokee (Tsullakee)--and warred with them many years
in folly, in futility, in hopeless defeat.
He lifted his eyes and gazed at the sun. A curve of pride steadied his
old lips. His face was as resolute, as victorious, in looking backward
as ever it had been in vaunting forecast. His was the temperament that
always saw in prophecy or retrospect what he would wish to see. And that
sun, now going down, had lighted him all his life along a path of
conscious triumph.
And then, he continued, the Lenni Lenape, after years of futile war,
combined with the Mengwe,[12] and before their united force the Cherokee
retired into the impregnable stronghold of their mountains, their
beautiful country, the pride of the world!
He waved his hand toward the landscape--lying out there in the lustre of
its exquisite coloring, in the clarified air and the enhancing sunset;
in the ideality of the contour of its majestic lofty mountains; in the
splendor of its silver rivers, its phenomenally lush forests, its rich
soil--pitying the rest of the world who must needs dwell elsewhere.
"And here," he went on, "the European found me two centuries ago."