THE COUNCIL OF THE SACHEMS.
Although the chiefs had guessed from Stronghand's gestures what was
going on between him and the American bandit, not one of them made the
slightest allusion to Kidd's departure, or even seemed to notice it.
The Canadian trapper, named Whistler, alone went up to the hunter, and
pressing his hand, said, with a coarse laugh--
"By heavens! Comrade, you did not miss your game, but brought it down
at the first shot. Receive my sincere congratulations for having freed
us of that skunk, who is neither fish nor flesh, and whose roguish face
did not at all please me."
"It would please you much less, my good fellow, if you knew him," the
hunter replied, with a smile.
"I beg you to believe that I have no desire to form a closer
acquaintance with that pícaro; only too many like him may be met on the
prairies."
The chiefs had resumed their seats, and the council which had been
momentarily interrupted, was re-opened by Thunderbolt. The Indians,
though people think proper to regard them as savages, could give
lessons in urbanity and good breeding to the members of parliamentary
assemblies in old Europe. Among them a speaker is never interrupted
by those coarse and inopportune noises for which some M.P.'s seem to
possess a privilege. Each speaks in his turn. The speakers, who are
listened to with a religious silence, have the liberty of expressing
their ideas without fearing personalities, which are frequently
offensive. When the debate is closed, the speaker--that is to say, the
oldest chief, or the one of the highest position either through bravery
or wisdom--sums up the discussion in a few words, takes the opinion of
the other chiefs, who vote by nodding their heads, and the minority
always accepts, without complaint or recrimination of any sort, the
resolution of the majority.
Before going further, we will explain, in a few words, the cause of
the dissatisfaction which had induced the Indians to revolt once
again against the whites. At the period of the Spanish conquests,
the Indians, in spite of the obstinate assertions to the contrary,
were happy, or at any rate were, through the intelligent care of
the Government, placed in a situation which insured their existence
under very satisfactory conditions. It is indubitable that if Spain
had retained her colonies for fifty or sixty years longer, she would
have gradually succeeded in converting the aborigines of her vast
territories, attaching them to the cultivation of the soil, and making
them give up a nomadic existence, and adopt the far preferable life in
villages.
All Spanish America, both North and South, was covered with missions;
that is to say, agricultural colonies, established on a large scale;
where monks, in every way respectable, through their complete
abnegation of the enjoyments of the world, and their inexhaustible
charity, taught the Indians not only the paternal precepts of the
Gospel, and their duty to their neighbour, but preaching by example,
they became weavers, labourers, cobblers, and blacksmiths, in order to
make their docile apprentices more easily understand the way to set to
work. These missions contained, at the time of the War of Independence,
several hundred thousand Indians, who had given up their nomadic life
of hunting, and patiently assumed the yoke of civilization. This
magnificent result, obtained by courage and perseverance, and which
would have speedily resulted in the solution of a problem declared
to be insoluble--the emancipation of the red race, and its aptitude
to assume the sedentary condition of a town life, was unhappily not
carried further.
When the Mexicans had proclaimed their independence, their first care
was to destroy all that the Spaniards had raised, and utterly overthrow
the internal governmental system established by them. Naturally, the
missions were not exempted from this general overthrow; they were
perhaps more kindly treated than the institutions created by the old
oppressors. The philosophic spirit of the eighteenth century, when
it forced its way into Mexico, was naturally misunderstood and ill
appreciated by men who were plunged into the grossest ignorance, and
who believed that they displayed the independence and nobility of
their character by deadly hatred of the clergy, and abolishing their
prerogatives at one stroke. It is true that, by an inevitable reaction,
the Mexicans, whose revolution was almost entirely effected by priests,
and who, at the outset, displayed themselves as such daring skeptics,
ere long fell again, through their superstition, beneath the power of
the same clergy, and became more devoted slaves to them than ever.
Unfortunately, the death blow had been dealt to the missions or
agricultural colonies, although the Government recognized its mistake,
and sought by all means to palliate it. They never recovered, only
languished, and eventually the majority of them fell into ruin, and
were utterly abandoned by the Indians, who returned to that desert life
from which they had been drawn with such difficulty. Nothing is so
heart-rending as the sight now offered by these missions, which were
once so rich, so full of life, and so flourishing; only a few Indians
can be seen, wandering about like ghosts in the deserted cloisters, led
by an old, white-haired monk, whom they would not leave, and who had
vowed to die among his children.
The Mexican Government did not stop here. Returning to the old errors
of the conquistadors, it grew accustomed to regard the Indians as
slaves; imposing on them exorbitant tariffs for articles of primary
necessity, which it sold to them through special agents, bowing them
to any Draconian law, and carrying their injustice so far as to deny
them intellect, and brand them with the name of _Gente sin razón_, or
people without reason. The consequences of such a system can be easily
comprehended. The Indians, who, at the outset, contented themselves
with passively withdrawing, and seeking in the desert the liberty that
was refused them, on finding themselves so unjustly treated, and urged
to desperation by such insults, thought about avenging themselves, and
requiting evil for evil.
Then recommenced those periodical invasions of the Indian borders which
the Spaniards had repressed with such difficulty and such bloodshed.
Murder and pillage were organized on a grand scale, and with such
success, that the Comanches and Apaches, to vex the whites, gave the
ironical name of the "Mexican moon" to the month they selected to
commit their periodical depredations. The subjected Indians--that is to
say, those who, in spite of the constant vexations to which they were
victims, remained attached to their villages--revolted several times,
and on each occasion the Mexican government succeeded in making them
return to their duty by promises and concessions, which were violated
and forgotten so soon as the Redskins had laid down their arms. The
war, consequently, became generalized and permanent in the Border
states of the confederation.
But with the exception of a few invasions more serious than others,
the Indians had almost entirely confined themselves to keeping the
whites on the alert, when the great insurrection of 1827 broke out,
which all but succeeded in depriving Mexico of her richest provinces.
This insurrection was the more terrible, because on this occasion
the Indians, guided by experienced chiefs, possessing firearms, and
carrying out tactics entirely different from those they had hitherto
employed, waged a serious war, and insisted on retaining the provinces
they had seized. The Redskins elected an emperor and established
a government; they displayed a settled intention of definitively
regaining their independence and reconstituting their nationality.
The Mexicans, justly terrified by these manifestations, made the
greatest sacrifices in order to quell this formidable revolt, and
succeeded, though rather owing to the treachery and disunion they
managed to sow among the chiefs than by the power of their arms. But
this uprising had caused them to reflect, and they saw that it was high
time to come to an arrangement with these men, whom they had hitherto
been accustomed to regard as irrational beings. Peace was concluded on
conditions very advantageous to the Indians and their forces; and the
Mexicans, owing to the fright they had endured, were compelled to keep
their promises, or, to speak more correctly, pretended to do so.
For several years the Indians, satisfied with this apparent
amelioration in the relations between them and the whites, remained
peacefully in their villages, and the Mexicans had only to defend
their borders against the attacks of the wild or unsubjected Indians.
This was a task, we are bound to confess, in which they were not very
successful; for the Indians eventually passed the limits the Spaniards
had imposed on them, permanently established themselves on the ruins
of the old Creole villages, and by degrees, and gaining ground each
year, they reduced the territory of the Mexican Government in an
extraordinary way.
Still, when the remembrance of the great Indian insurrection seemed
to have died out, and the Indios Mansos had apparently accepted the
sovereignty of Mexico, the annoyances recommenced. Though at first
slight, they gradually became more and more frequent, owing to the
apathetic resignation of the Indians, and the patience with which they
uncomplainingly endured the unjust aggressions of which they were made
the systematic victims. The concessions granted under the pressure of
fear were brutally withdrawn, and matters returned to the same state as
before the insurrection. The Indians continued to suffer, apparently
resigned to endure all the insults it might please their oppressors to
make them undergo: but this calm concealed a terrific storm, and the
Mexicans would shortly be aroused by a thunderclap.
The Redskins behaved, under the circumstances, with rare prudence
and circumspection, in order not to alarm the persons they wished to
surprise. They would certainly have succeeded in deceiving the Mexicans
as to their plans, had it not been for the treachery of the agents of
the Mexican Government, continually kept in their villages to watch
them, among whom was Kidd, whom Stronghand had so suddenly unmasked and
contemptuously turned out. Still these agents, in spite of their lively
desire to make themselves of importance by magnifying facts, had only
been able to give very vague details about the conspiracy the Indians
were secretly forming. They knew that an emperor had been elected, and
that he was a white man, but they did not know who he was or his name.
They also knew that the Confederation of the Papazos had placed itself
at the head of the movement, and intended to deal the first blow, but
no one was aware when or how hostilities would commence.
This information, however, incomplete though it was, appeared to the
Mexicans, on whose minds at once rushed the sanguinary memories of the
last revolution, sufficiently serious for them to place themselves in
a position to resist the first attack of the Redskins, which is always
so terrible, and to place their frontiers in such a state as would
prevent a surprise--a thing they had never yet succeeded in effecting.
The Mexican Government, warned of what was going on by the commandants
of the States of Sonora and Sinaloa, the two most menaced of the
Confederation, and recognising the gravity of the case, resolved to
send troops from the capital to reinforce the border garrisons. This
plan, unfortunately, could not be carried out, and was the cause of
fresh and very dangerous complications.
It is only in the old Spanish colonies, which are in the deepest state
of neglect and disorganization, that such acts are possible. The troops
told off to proceed to Sonora, so soon as they learned that they were
intended to oppose the Indians, peremptorily refused to march, alleging
as the reason, that they were not at all desirous of fighting savages
who did not respect the law of nations, and had no scruples about
scalping their prisoners. The President of the republic, strong in his
right and the danger the country ran, tried to insist and force them to
set out. Then a thing that might be easily foreseen occurred: not only
did the troops obstinately remain in revolt, but set the seal on it by
making a pronunciamiento in favour of the general chosen to command the
expedition, and who, we may do him the justice of saying, had been the
first to declare against the departure of the troops from the capital.
This pronunciamiento was the spark that fired the powder train. In a
few days the whole of Mexico was a prey to the horrors of civil war;
so that the governors of the two States, being reduced to their own
forces, and not knowing whether they would retain their posts under
the new president, were more embarrassed than ever, did not dare
take any initiative, and contented themselves with throwing up such
intrenchments as they could, though they had quite enough to do in
keeping their troops to their duty, and keeping them from deserting.
Such was the state of things at the moment we have now reached. This
information, upon which we have purposely laid a stress, in order
to make the reader understand certain facts which, without this
precaution, would seem to belong rather to the regions of fancy than to
that of history, as they are so strange and incredible, was reported
by Stronghand to the council of the sachems, and listened to in a
religious silence.
"Now," he added, in conclusion, "I believe that the moment has arrived
to strike the grand blow for which we have so long been preparing. Our
enemies hesitate; they are demoralized; their soldiers tremble; and I
am convinced they will not withstand the attack of our and the great
Beaver's warriors. This is what I wished to say to the council. Still
it was not advisable that such important news should reach the ears of
our enemies. The sachems will judge whether I have acted well, or if my
zeal carried me too far in dismissing from the council a paleface who,
I am convinced, is a traitor sold to the Mexicans. I have spoken."
A flattering murmur greeted the concluding remarks of the young man,
who sat down, blushing.
"It appears to me," Whistler then said, "that the debate need not be
a long one. As war is decided on, the council of the Confederation
has only to seek allies among the other Indian nations, in order to
augment the number of our warriors, if that be possible. As regards the
operations, and the period when the Mexican territory is to be invaded,
that will devolve on the military committee, who pledge themselves to
the profoundest secrecy about their discussions, until the hour for
action arrives. I have spoken."
Thunderbolt rose.
"Chiefs and sachems of the Confederation of the Papazos," he said in
his sympathetic and sonorous voice, "and you, warriors, our allies, the
moment for dissolving your council has at length arrived. Henceforth
the committee of the five chiefs will alone sit. Each of you will
return to his tribe, arm his warriors, and order the scalp dance to
be performed round the war post; but the eighth sun must see you here
again at the head of your warriors, in order that all may be ready to
act when the invasion is decided on. I have spoken. Have I said well,
powerful men?"
The chiefs rose in silence, resumed their weapons, and immediately left
the village, starting in different directions at a gallop. Thunderbolt
and Stronghand were left alone.
"My son," the old man then said, "have you nothing to tell me?"
"Yes, father," the young man respectfully answered; "I have very
serious news for you."