THE PITIFUL REMNANT
It was perhaps as well that Tonty was compelled to turn back, for he
could have done little good even if he had been able to press on and
reach the Bay of St. Louis. When he was at the Cenis or Nabedache
village pleading for guides, the Spaniards had already marched from
Mexico to attack the French fort and its little garrison, and were
encamped on the hill where La Salle had left Barbier in charge of the
survivors. But others had preceded them, and they found the buildings in
ruins. Scattered here and there were boxes and bits of supplies; doors
were unhinged, barrels broken open, and in the near-by meadow were dead
bodies of Frenchmen.
On May 1, into the camp of the Spaniards walked two men. Painted and
savage and dressed in buffalo hides, these two strangers were
L’Archevêque and Grollet, the servant of Duhaut, and Ruter’s half-savage
companion. They had come to give themselves up to the Spaniards rather
than endure longer their wretched existence among the Indians.
Three months before, so they told the Spanish officer, the meager
garrison under Barbier, just recovering from a siege of smallpox, was
set upon by howling Karankawan Indians who massacred the inhabitants and
pillaged the fort. Gabriel Barbier and Father Membré both were killed
outright. Barbier’s wife with a three-months-old babe at her breast was
saved for a time by the Indian women; but the warriors, returning and
finding her still alive, murdered her also, and, seizing the baby by the
feet, beat its brains out against a tree.
Thus the colony had paid for the offense of Moranget and his men when
they had first landed on the red men’s shores and robbed the native camp
of canoes and blankets. After the massacre, L’Archevêque and Grollet
claimed that they had come to the fort and buried fourteen of the dead.
Many years later there came to the ears of Tonty a remarkable tale of
some who had escaped the killing at the fort on the Bay. Among those who
had remained with Barbier was the widow Talon, whose husband had been
lost on one of La Salle’s first expeditions to hunt the river. One of
her daughters had died of sickness at the fort. Her oldest boy Pierre
had been taken by La Salle to the village of the Cenis to learn their
language. Though she did not know it on the day of the massacre, Pierre
had for a year and a half been running wild like the Indians themselves,
in the Cenis country. A chief of the Cenis had taken him, together with
young Meusnier, under his own protection.
But the widow still kept four of the children with her in the fort. Then
came that awful day when the Indians fell upon them. Before the eyes of
her children the widow was killed. But the Indian women took compassion
upon the four little ones, carried them off on their backs, and adopted
them into their own families. The oldest was a young girl named Mary
Magdalene Talon, and her younger brothers were Jean Baptiste, Robert,
and Lucien—one of whom, now a boy of four, had been born on the way over
from France. With these four the squaws had rescued a young boy called
Eustache Bréman.
In the lodges of Indians the five children were brought up by their
foster mothers with as much care as the dusky children of the tribe. For
many years the girl and her young brothers lived as the Indians lived.
They ate meat as their red brothers did—raw, sun-baked, or half-cooked.
The boys learned to run and to ride and to draw the bow; and like the
Indians themselves they learned to run to the nearest stream each
morning at break of day and plunge naked into the water, whatever the
season might be.
One day the Karankawas took sharp thorns and pricked holes through the
skin of the arms and faces and other parts of the bodies of these French
children. Then, having burned in the fire a walnut branch, they crushed
the charcoal into powder, mixed it with a little water, and forced it
into the holes in their fair skin. It was very painful at first, but the
pain soon passed away and then each adopted child appeared tattooed with
marks that no washing could take out.
Jean Baptiste and young Bréman were soon old enough to be off with the
braves. Perhaps the only habit of life which they could not learn was
the eating of human flesh. Once the warriors fell upon a tribe of the
Tonkawans and killed many, and for three days Jean Baptiste went without
food because his foster people gave him nothing to eat save the flesh of
the men they had slain.
Meanwhile among the Cenis or Nabedaches, Hiens and his party had been
having strange experiences—fighting in the savage wars and living in the
round thatched huts of the Indians. But it was not in the nature of
things for this band of survivors to live peaceably among themselves.
Ruter, the half-savage deserter who had talked one night with Joutel by
the Cenis lodge-fire, quarreled with Hiens (so came the tale to Tonty)
and killed the old buccaneer. As for Ruter, never more was he heard
from. His companion, Grollet, and the miserable L’Archevêque, tiring of
their life among the Indians, had already given themselves up to the
Spaniards.
There remained, under the protection of the Cenis chief, Pierre Talon
and his comrade Meusnier. One day an Indian friend came to them with
warning on his lips: the Spaniards, cruel enemies of their countrymen,
were marching into the Indian country looking for these refugee white
men. In fear they fled from town to town; but their flight was in vain,
for it was not long before they had fallen into the hands of the Spanish
horsemen. Their captors marched them back to the village of the Cenis,
hoping to find more whites there. They were disappointed, but during
their brief stop they became so impressed with the Indians that they
left three Spanish Franciscan friars and built them a chapel in the
village. Two of the Spanish officers spoke the French language as well
as their own; Talon and Meusnier had become familiar with the tongue of
the Cenis; and so by means of a four-sided conversation the friars
learned from the Indians a few words of their language before their men
took the captives away to the southwest.
Pierre was greatly astonished at all this. These men seemed to be
Christians even if they were Spanish, and instead of cruelty they had
bestowed upon him only kindness. If the Spaniards were like this, he
would have them capture also his sister and younger brothers. And so he
told the Spaniards that he had three brothers and a sister living with
the Karankawas, down near the Bay of St. Louis.
On the way back to Mexico the Spanish troops with swords and guns and
horses rode into the village where the Talon children were. Jean
Baptiste Talon and Eustache Bréman they did not find; but Mary Magdalene
and Robert and Lucien were there. The officers agreed to give the
Indians who had fostered them a horse for each child. But when they came
to the girl Mary, who was older and larger, the Indians protested; for
they thought that they ought to get two horses for her. The dispute grew
hot and both sides sprang to arms. The Spanish guns spoke, two or three
Indians fell dead and the others fled terrified. The subdued Indians
finally gave up the girl for one horse, and the Spaniards rode out of
the village, after giving the Indians some tobacco to ease the hearts of
those whose dead lay upon the ground.
The foster mothers mourned over their lost children, especially the
younger ones, for in the years of their stay with the tribe they had
found warm places in Indian hearts. Jean Baptiste and young Bréman
remained for another year with their Indian people. Then there came
another Spanish troop and carried them off. Again the Indians wept and
urged young Talon to escape as soon as possible and come back to them
and bring with him as many Spanish horses as he could. He promised, but
they never saw him again. Thus the Talons came to Mexico.
Pierre and Jean Talon, after many years with the Spaniards, came at last
to their own country of France. Long before them the Abbé, Joutel, and
their three companions had also come home to the land of the lilies.
In the wild reaches of the Great Valley there remained little trace of
the last expedition of La Salle to found a colony at the foot of what
Joutel had come to call the fatal river. Up and down the broad highway
that ran through the valley from north to south, red men pushed their
wooden dugouts or bark canoes. With moccasined feet they trailed the
deer through the woods and followed the track of the shaggy beasts of
the plains. And at break of day beside the enemy’s camp they sent up the
cry of war quite as they and their fathers had done for many hundred
years. From one end of the valley to the other the white men had
traveled; and yet, as the track of a canoe dies out of the water or the
shadow of a flying bird passes over the plain and is gone, so now it
seemed that the trail of the white men’s passing had vanished out of the
valley and that the dream that had led to their coming had been lost
with the dreamer beneath the waving grass of the Southern plains.
Yet down by the Gulf a Quinipissa chief guarded year by year a precious
letter, waiting, and not in vain, to give it to a white man who should
come into the mouth of the river from the sea. And, far in the north, on
a high rock beside the river Illinois, the Man with the Iron Hand, known
and loved and feared by all the tribes, kept alive year after year the
vision of his chief. His days were to be long in the valley he loved and
his services many to his king and his Indian friends; and the time was
yet to come when he would see the flag of France waving over a colony of
Frenchmen at the mouth of the river which had run like a silver thread
through a quarter of a century of dreams and deeds.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Man with the Iron Hand, by John Carl Parish