During my convalescence, my tent, or I should say, the lawn before it,
became a kind of general divan, where the warrior and elders of the
tribe would assemble, to smoke and relate the strange stories of days
gone by. Some of them appeared to me particularly beautiful; I shall,
therefore, narrate them to the reader. One old chief began as
follows:--
"I will tell ye of the Shkote-nah Pishkuan, or the boat of fire, when I
saw it for the first time. Since that, the grass has withered fifteen
times in the prairies, and I have grown weak and old. Then I was a
warrior, and many scalps have I taken on the eastern shores of the
Sabine. Then, also, the Pale-faces, living in the prairies were good;
we fought them because we were enemies, but they never stole anything
from us, nor we from them.
"Well, at that time, we were once in the spring hunting the buffalo.
The Caddoes, who are now a small tribe of starved dogs, were then a
large powerful nation, extending from the Cross Timbers to the waters of
the great stream, in the East, but they were gamblers and drunkards;
they would sell all their furs for the `Shoba-wapo' (fire-water), and
return to their villages to poison their squaws, and make brutes of
their children. Soon they got nothing more to sell; and as they could
not now do without the `Shoba-wapo,' they began to steal. They would
steal the horses and oxen of the Pale-faces, and say `The Comanches did
it.' When they killed trappers or travellers, they would go to the fort
of the Yankees and say to them, `Go to the wigwams of the Comanches, and
you will see the scalps of your friends hanging upon long poles.' But
we did not care, for we knew it was not true.
"A long time passed away, when the evil spirit of the Caddoes whispered
to them to come to the villages of the Comanches while they were hunting
and to take away with them all that they could. They did so, entering
the war-path as foxes and owls, during night. When they arrived, they
found nothing but squaws, old women, and little children. Yet these
fought well, and many of the Caddoes were killed before they abandoned
their lodges. They soon found us out in the hunting-ground; and our
great chief ordered me to start with five hundred warriors, and never
return until the Caddoes should have no home, and wander like deer and
starved wolves in the open prairie.
"I followed the track. First, I burnt their great villages in the Cross
Timbers, and then pursued them in the swamps and cane-breaks of the
East, where they concealed themselves among the long lizards of the
water (the alligators). We, however, came up with them again, and they
crossed the Sabine, to take shelter among the Yankees, where they had
another village, which was their largest and their richest. We
followed; and on the very shores of their river, although a thousand
miles from our own country, and where the waters are dyed with the red
clay of the soil, we encamped round their wigwams and prepared to
conquer.
"It was at the gloomy season, when it rains night and day; the river was
high, the earth damp, and our young braves shivering, even under their
blankets. It was evening, when, far to the south, above one of the
windings of the stream, I saw a thick black smoke rising as a tall pine
among the clouds, and I watched it closely. It came towards us; and as
the sky darkened and night came on, sparks of fire showed the progress
of the strange sight. Soon noises were heard, like those of the
mountains when the evil spirits are shaking them; the sounds were awful,
solemn, and regular, like the throbs of a warrior's heart; and now and
then a sharp, shrill scream would rend the air and awake other terrible
voices in the forest.
"It came, and deer, bears, panthers were passing among us madly flying
before the dreaded unknown. It came, it flew, nearer and nearer, till
we saw it plainly with its two big mouths, spitting fire like the
burning mountains of the West. It rained very hard, and yet we saw all.
It was like a long fish, shaped like a canoe, and its sides had many
eyes, full of bright light as the stars above.
"I saw no one with the monster; he was alone, breaking the waters and
splashing them with his arms, his legs, or his fins. On the top, and it
was very high, there was a square lodge: Once I thought I could see a
man in it, but it was a fancy; or perhaps the soul of the thing,
watching from its hiding place for a prey which it might seize upon;
happily it was dark, very dark, and being in a hollow along the banks,
we could not be perceived; and the dreadful thing passed.
"The Caddoes uttered a loud scream of fear and agony; their hearts were
melted. We said nothing, for we were Comanches and warriors; and yet I
felt strange, and was fixed to where I stood. A man is but a man, and
even a Red-skin cannot struggle with a spirit. The scream of the
Caddoes, however, frightened the monster; its flanks opened and
discharged some tremendous Anim Tekis (thunders) on the village. I
heard the crashing of the logs, the splitting of the hides covering the
lodges, and when the smoke was all gone, it left a smell of powder; the
monster was far, far off, and there was no trace of it left, except the
moans of the wounded and the lamentation of the squaws among the
Caddoes.
"I and my young men soon recovered our senses; we entered the village,
burnt every thing, and killed the warriors. They would not fight; but
as they were thieves, we destroyed them. We returned to our own
villages, every one of us with many scalps, and since that time the
Caddoes have never been a nation; they wander from north to south, and
from east to west: they have huts made with the bark of trees, or they
take shelter in the burrows of the prairie dogs, with the owls and the
snakes; but they have no lodges, no wigwams, no villages. Thus may it
be with all the foes of our great nation."
This is an historical fact. The steamboat "Beaver" made its first
exploration upon the Red River, some eighty miles above the French
settlement of Nachitochy, just at the very time that the Comanches were
attacking the last Caddoe village upon the banks of the Red. River.
These poor savages yelled with terror when the strange mass passed thus
before them, and, either from wanton cruelty or from fear of an attack,
the boat fired four guns, loaded with grape-shot, upon the village, from
which they were not a hundred yards distant.
The following is a narrative of events which happened in the time of
Mosh Kohta (buffalo), a great chief, hundreds of years ago, when the
unfortunate "La Salle" was shipwrecked upon the coast of Texas, while
endeavouring to discover the mouth of the Mississippi. Such records are
very numerous among the great prairie tribes; they bear sometimes the
Ossianic type, and are related every evening during the month of
February, when the "Divines" and the elders of the nation teach to the
young men the traditions of former days.
"It was in the time of a chief, a great chief, strong, cunning, and
wise, a chief of many bold deeds. His name was Mosh Kohta.
"It is a long while! No Pale-faces dwelt in the land of plenty (the
translation of the Indian word `Texas'); our grandfathers had just
received it from the Great Spirit, and they had come from the setting of
the sun across the big mountains to take possession. We were a great
nation, we are so now, we have always been so, and we will ever be. At
that time, also, our tribe spread all along the western shores of the
great stream Mississippi, for no Pale-face had yet settled upon it. We
were a great people, ruled by a mighty chief; the earth, the trees, the
rivers, and the air know his name. Is there a place in the mountains or
the prairies where the name of Mosh Kohta has not been pronounced and
praised?
"At that time a strange warlike people of the Pale-faces broke their big
canoes along our coasts of the South, and they landed on the shore, well
armed with big guns and long rifles, but they had nothing to eat. These
were the `Maha-mate-kosh-ehoj' (the French); their chief was a good man,
a warrior, and a great traveller; he had started from the northern
territories of the Algonquins, to go across the salt water in far
distant lands, and bring back with him many good things which the
Red-skins wanted:--warm blankets to sleep upon, flints to strike a fire,
axes to cut the trees, and knives to skin the bear and the buffalo. He
was a good man and loved the Indians, for they also were good, and good
people will always love each other.
"He met with Mosh Kohta; our warriors would not fight the strangers, for
they were hungry and their voices were soft; they were also too few to
be feared, though their courage seemed great under misfortune, and they
would sing and laugh while they suffered. We gave them food, we helped
them to take from the waters the planks of their big canoe, and to build
the first wigwam in which the Pale-faces ever dwelt in Texas. Two moons
they remained hunting the buffalo with our young men, till at last their
chief and his bravest warriors started in some small canoes of ours, to
see if they could not enter the great stream, by following the coast
towards the sunrise. He was gone four moons, and when he returned, he
had lost half of his men, by sickness, hunger, and fatigue; yet Mosh
Kohta bade him not despair; the great chief promised the Pale-faces to
conduct them in the spring to the great stream, and for several more
moons we lived all together, as braves and brothers should. Then, for
the first time also, the Comanches got some of their rifles, and others
knives. Was it good--was it bad? Who knows? Yet the lance and arrows
killed as many buffaloes as lead and black dust (powder), and the squaws
could take off the skin of a deer or a beaver without knives. How they
did it, no one knows now; but they did it, though they had not yet seen
the keen and sharp knives of the Pale-faces.
"However, it was not long time before many of the strangers tired of
remaining so far from their wigwams their chief every morning would look
for hours towards the rising of the sun, as if the eyes of his soul
could see through the immensity of the prairies; he became gloomy as a
man of dark deeds (a Medecin), and one day, with half of his men, he
began a long inland trail across prairies, swamps, and rivers, so much
did he dread to die far from his lodge. Yet he did die: not of
sickness, not of hunger, but under the knife of another Pale-face; and
he was the first one from strange countries whose bones blanched without
burial in the waste. Often the evening breeze whispers his name along
the swells of the southern plains, for he was a brave man, and no doubt
he is now smoking with his great Manitou.
"Well, he started. At that time the buffalo and the deer were
plentiful, and the men went on their trail gaily till they reached the
river of many forks (Trinity River), for they knew that every day
brought them nearer and nearer to the forts of their people, though it
was yet a long way--very long. The Pale-face chief had a son with him;
a noble youth, fair to look upon, active and strong: the Comanches loved
him. Mosh Kohta had advised him to distrust two of his own warriors;
but he was young and generous, incapable of wrong or cowardice; he would
not suspect it in others, especially among men of his own colour and
nation, who had shared his toils, his dangers, his sorrows, and his
joys.
"Now these two warriors our great chief had spoken of were men and very
greedy; they were ambitious too, and believed that, by killing their
chief and his son, they would themselves command the hand. One evening,
while they were all eating the meal of friendship, groans were heard--a
murder had been committed. The other warriors sprang up; they saw their
chief dead, and the two warriors coming towards them; their revenge was
quick--quick as that of the panther: the two base warriors were killed.
"Then there was a great fight among the Pale-face band, in which many
were slain; but the young man and some other braves escaped from their
enemies, and, after two moons, reached the Arkansas, where they found
their friends and some Makota Conayas (priests--black-gowns). The
remainder of the band who left us, and who murdered their chief, our
ancestors destroyed like reptiles, for they were venomous and bad. The
other half of the Pale-faces, who had remained behind in their wood
wigwams, followed our tribe to our great villages, became Comanches, and
took squaws. Their children and grandchildren have formed a good and
brave nation; they are paler than the Comanches, but their heart is all
the same; and often in the hunting-grounds they join our hunters,
partake of the same meals, and agree like brothers. These are the
nation of the Wakoes, not far in the south, upon the trail of the Cross
Timbers. But who knows not the Wakoes?--even children can go to their
hospitable lodges."
This episode is historical. In the early months of 1684, four vessels
left La Rochelle, in France, for the colonisation of the Mississippi,
bearing two hundred and eighty persons. The expedition was commanded by
La Salle, who brought with him his nephew, Moranget. After a delay at
Santo Domingo, which lasted two years, the expedition, missing the mouth
of the Mississippi, entered the Bay of Matagorda, where they were
shipwrecked. "There," says Bancroft in his History of America, "under
the suns of June, with timber felled in an inland grove, and dragged for
a league over the prairie grass, the colonists prepared to build a
shelter, La Salle being the architect, and himself making the beams, and
tenons, and mortises."
This is the settlement which made Texas a part of Louisiana, La Salle
proposed to seek the Mississippi in the canoes of the Indians, who had
shewed themselves friendly, and, after an absence of about four months,
and the loss of thirty men, he returned in rags, having failed to find
"the fatal river." The eloquent American historian gives him a noble
character:--"On the return of La Salle," says he, "he learned that a
mutiny had broken out among his men, and they had destroyed a part of
the colony's provisions. Heaven and man seemed his enemies, and, with
the giant energy of an indomitable will, having lost his hopes of
fortune, his hopes of fame, with his colony diminished to about one
hundred, among whom discontent had given birth to plans of crime--with
no European nearer than the river Pamuco, and no French nearer than the
northern shores of the Mississippi, he resolved to travel on foot to his
countrymen in the North, and renew his attempts at colonisation."
It appears that La Salle left sixty men behind him, and on the 20th of
March, 1686, after a buffalo-hunt, he was murdered by Duhaut and
L'Archeveque, two adventurers, who had embarked their capital in the
enterprise. They had long shewn a spirit of mutiny, and the malignity
of disappointed avarice so maddened them that that they murdered their
unfortunate commander.
I will borrow a page of Bancroft, who is more explicit than the Comanche
chroniclers.
"Leaving sixty men at Fort St. Louis, in January, 1687, La Salle, with
the other portion of his men, departed for Canada. Lading their baggage
on the wild horses from the Cenis, which found their pasture everywhere
in the prairies, in shoes made of green buffalo hides; for want of other
paths, following the track of the buffalo, and using skins as the only
shelter against rain, winning favour with the savages by the confiding
courage of their leader--they ascended the streams towards the first
ridges of highlands, walking through beautiful plains and groves, among
deer and buffaloes,--now fording the clear rivulets, now building a
bridge by felling a giant tree across a stream, till they had passed the
basin of the Colorado, and in the upland country had reached a branch of
the Trinity River.
"In the little company of wanderers there were two men, Duhaut and
L'Archeveque, who had embarked their capital in the enterprise. Of
these, Duhaut had long shewn a spirit of mutiny; the base malignity of
disappointed avarice, maddened by sufferings and impatient of control,
awakened the fiercest passions of ungovernable hatred. Inviting
Moranget to take charge of the fruits of a buffalo hunt, they quarrelled
with him and murdered him.
"Wondering at the delay of his nephew's return, La Salle, on the 20th of
March, went to seek him. At the brink of the river, he observed eagles
hovering, as if over carrion, and he fired an alarm-gun. Warned by the
sound, Duhaut and L'Archeveque crossed the river: the former skulked in
the prairie grass; of the latter, La Salle asked, `Where is my nephew?'
At the moment of the answer, Duhaut fired; and, without uttering a word,
La Salle fell dead. `You are down now, grand bashaw! You are down
now:' shouted one of the conspirators, as they despoiled his remains,
which were left on the prairie, naked and without burial, to be devoured
by wild beasts.
"Such was the end of this daring adventurer. For force of will and vast
conceptions; for various knowledge, and quick adaptation of his genius
to untried circumstances; for a sublime magnanimity, that resigned
itself to the will of Heaven, and yet triumphed over affliction by
energy of purpose and unfaltering hope,--he had no superior among his
countrymen. He had won the affection of the Governor of Canada, the
esteem of Colbert, the confidence of Seignelay, the favour of Louis XIV.
After beginning the colonisation of Upper Canada, he perfected the
discovery of the Mississippi from the Falls of St. Anthony to its mouth;
and he will be remembered through all times as the father of
colonisation in the great central valley of the West."
Jontel, with the brother and son of La Salle, and others, but seven in
all, obtained a guide from the Indians for the Arkansas, and, fording
torrents, crossing ravines, making a ferry over rivers with rafts or
boats of buffalo hides, without meeting the cheering custom of the
calumet, till they reached the country above the Red River, and leaving
an esteemed companion in a wilderness grave, on the 24th of July, came
upon a branch of the Mississippi. There they beheld on an island a
large cross: never did Christians gaze on that emblem with more
deep-felt emotion. Near it stood a log hut, tenanted by two Frenchmen.
A missionary, of the name of Tonti, had descended that river, and, full
of grief at not finding La Salle, had established a post near the
Arkansas.
As the reader may perceive, there is not much difference between our
printed records, and the traditions of the Comanches.