A BUFFALO HUNT
Into a tree that stood beside the Falls of St. Anthony, a devout Sioux
climbed, weeping and lamenting bitterly as he fastened to the branches a
fine beaver skin. On the inside the skin had been carefully dressed and
painted white, and it was decorated with the quills of porcupine. And
while he offered this sacrifice to the spirit of the Falls, he cried out
in a loud voice:—
“Thou who art a spirit, grant that our nation may pass here quietly
without accident, may kill buffalo in abundance, conquer our enemies and
bring in slaves, some of whom we will put to death before thee. The
Foxes have killed our kindred. Grant that we may avenge them.”
Unk-ta-he, the god who dwelt under the Falls of St. Anthony, must have
heard his prayer, for all that he asked was granted. Many buffalo fell
to the lot of the hunters, and later in the season they attacked the
nation of Foxes and great was their victory. They brought their captives
home to offer to the spirit that had given them such glorious success.
On this early July day Hennepin and the timid Picard, looking up as they
made the portage around the Falls, saw the Sioux presenting his
ornamented robe and heard him offer up his prayer. Then they pushed
their canoe into the water and took up their journey upon the stream
that shot out so swiftly from the foot of the Falls. The Sioux climbed
down out of the tree and joined his friends on their hunt along the
river and out over the plains.
The crafty Aquipaguetin was with them, and as the days went by he kept
thinking of the story Hennepin had told him of other white men sent out
by La Salle with merchandise and arms to the mouth of the Wisconsin. Why
should he not meet these men himself and receive their first lavish
presents? Finally he could no longer restrain himself, and taking with
him about ten men he paddled down the river after Hennepin and the
Picard. The two white men had had many adventures. In their hunting they
had not been fortunate, and many times they had come near to starvation.
Once they had passed two days without food, when they came upon some
buffalo crossing the river. The Picard managed to shoot one of the cows
in the head. The animal being too heavy to haul ashore, they cut it into
pieces in the water. Then they feasted so heartily that for several days
they were too sick to resume the journey.
Hennepin and the Picard were yet some distance above the Wisconsin when
Aquipaguetin overtook them. He did not stop long, but dipped paddle once
more and soon reached the mouth of the river where Marquette, seven
years before, had first seen the Mississippi. There he halted and looked
about for signs of white men. No camp was beside the river, nor did any
smoke rise as far as his eye could reach. Having searched in vain he at
length turned northward with great wrath to seek out his foster son.
The Picard had gone off to hunt and the friar was alone under a shelter
they had set up to protect them from the sun. Glancing up he saw his
foster father coming toward him, club in hand. In terror of his life, he
reached for a pair of the Picard’s pistols and a knife. Perhaps the
friar, armed with these unholy weapons, daunted the chief, for he
contented himself with showering upon his adopted son maledictions for
camping on the wrong side of the river and thus exposing himself rashly
to the enemy. Then he pushed on to rejoin his fellow-Sioux.
The party of hunters had now turned south, and in a few days they came
upon Hennepin and the Picard, who joined them on the trail of big game.
Many leagues down the Mississippi they hunted for buffalo, and
altogether they captured a hundred and twenty of the shaggy beasts.
While on the chase it was their practice to post old men on high points
of the cliffs and neighboring hills to keep watch for enemies. One day
Hennepin was busy with a sharp knife trying to cut a long thorn out of
an Indian’s foot when an alarm was given in the camp. Two hundred bowmen
sprang to their arms and ran in the direction of the alarm. Not to be
left out of the fighting, the Indian with the wounded foot jumped up
likewise and ran off as fast as any of them. The women started a
mournful song, which they kept up until the men returned to say that it
was not an enemy, but a herd of nearly a hundred stags.
A few days later the men from their high posts announced that there were
two warriors in the distance. Again the young braves ran out only to
find two Sioux women who had come to tell the chiefs that a party of
Sioux, hunting near the end of Lake Superior, had found five other white
men who were coming south to learn more about the three whites with
Ouasicoudé’s band.
Returning from their hunt some days later, they met these five new white
men. Their leader was the Sieur Du Luth, a famous hunter and explorer
who had come into the upper end of the Mississippi Valley by way of Lake
Superior, and with him were four French _coureurs de bois_. Du Luth was
a cousin of Henry de Tonty, and with great eagerness did he hear from
Ako and his friends the story of the band of whites who had settled at
the Peoria village and of the fort they had built beside the Illinois
River.
There were eight white men now in the band that journeyed northward
toward the Sioux towns about the Lake. The Indians soon made up their
minds that Du Luth was a man of power among the whites—more so, perhaps,
than Ako, the leader of the first three visitors who had come into their
country. But neither Ako nor Du Luth seemed to hold the gray-robed friar
in the high esteem to which he thought himself entitled.
When they had arrived at the villages the Sioux gave a great feast to
the palefaces, who had come into their country from the south and from
the north, and for more than a month red men and white lived together in
peace, each learning from the other. September drew near to a close, and
as winter approached the white men grew anxious to return to their own
kind. They secured the consent of Ouasicoudé, who with his own hand
traced for them a map of the route they would need to take.
With this chart they embarked in two canoes upon the Rum River, and a
few days later they had reached the Mississippi and were carrying their
light craft around the Falls of St. Anthony. Here two of Du Luth’s men,
much to their leader’s wrath, stole robes which were hanging in the
trees as sacrifices to the spirit of the water. They stopped at the
mouth of the Wisconsin to smoke the meat of some buffalo they had
killed. While they were camped at this point, three Sioux came to tell
them of something which had happened since they had left the northern
villages. A party of Sioux, led by one of the chiefs, had plotted to
follow after the eight white men and kill and plunder them. But
Ouasicoudé, the Pierced Pine, the ever friendly chief, was so enraged
that he went to the lodge of the chief of the conspirators and in the
presence of his friends tomahawked him.
Thankful for their deliverance, the whites paddled their canoes up the
Wisconsin River, crossed the portage to the Fox River, and followed that
stream to Green Bay and its settlements of French priests and traders.
Meantime back in the country they had left, the Sioux were waging fierce
war with the Illinois and other nations of the South. Paessa, a
Kaskaskia chief who had left the village of his people, in spite of
Tonty’s remonstrances, before the coming of the Iroquois, had led a
party of Illinois braves into the fastnesses of the Upper Mississippi
against their long-time foes.
In the valley of the Illinois and in the valleys of the rivers which
flowed together to make the current of the mighty Mississippi, no white
man was now to be found. When the first snows came, the tribes of the
Upper Mississippi found themselves with a few guns and knives and bits
of bright cloth and the memory of the white man’s ways. But instead of
the pale-faced Frenchmen, who came bearing presents and asking for
peace, they now had with them, skulking through their valleys, the
faithless Iroquois, with hands red with the blood of conquered nations
and hearts seared with the flames with which they burned their captives.