MY INDIAN TALE
Dawn found me clad in my buckskins, ready for the start. All my articles
of finery lay again in their snug retreat, and with those nightmares of
beaudom disposed of in a way to give me most comfort, I was once more at
my ease. Of all costumes suitable to action, there is none to equal our
old-time forest ranger's dress of fur cap, buckskin shirt, thigh
leggings, and good elk or buffalo moccasins.
To my surprise, the Spanish woman came aboard while I was toasting my
bacon, with word that her mistress and Don Pedro would follow as soon as
they had risen from the breakfast table. Alisanda had sent her down to
prepare food for me. The announcement of this brought a glow to my face
which I saw did not pass unnoticed by the woman. But she masked all
expression under her hard stolidity, and when I declined her services,
set about arranging her mistress's evening attire and returning it to
its box.
Shortly afterwards Mr. Blennerhasset and his wife made their appearance,
escorting my fellow travellers to the river bank and down to the boat
itself. I hastened to add my adieus to the others, and the tactful
couple, seeing that I was impatient to be under way, cut short what had
threatened to be a protracted parting.
With repeated last calls of farewell and wavings of hat and
handkerchief, we swung out into the current and drifted swiftly away
from our over-hospitable host and hostess. A few minutes carried us
below the cultivated upper portion of the island, and I noticed Don
Pedro eying the wooded remainder with a peculiar intentness. Afterwards
I was told that certain of the huge cypresses shadowed a bayou, in which
at the time we passed there were already being collected boats and
munitions for the flotilla that was to form the nucleus of Colonel
Burr's ill-starred expedition.
[Illustration: "We swung out into the current and drifted swiftly away"]
Of this and the nefarious plans since charged to that great dreamer, I
then had not the remotest suspicion, and soon turned my attention from
the pondering senor.
Scattered up and down the midchannel for three miles or more was a
string of barges, flats, and keelboats, laden with flour, lumber, and
other up-river products, for the market at New Orleans. Like ourselves,
they were coming down from the higher shipping-ports with the Spring
fresh.
At my request, Alisanda kept within the house, until, by a vigorous bit
of sculling, I had sent our craft beyond earshot of the nearest of these
barges. The huge, clumsy craft, which must have been upwards of four
hundred tons burden, was manned by the usual crew of twenty-five or
thirty rowdy, drunken rivermen, whose ribaldry and rude jests were
unfitted for the ears of a gentlewoman.
By adroit steering and an occasional return to my sculling, we were
fortunate enough to keep our distance from these other boats, and for
the greater part of the day I had the pleasure of pointing out to
Alisanda the beauties of the river scenery. Rightful in fact, and most
appropriate in truth, is the interpretation which tells us that "Ohio"
means "the beautiful river."
A day of clear, warm sunshine, marred by only one shower, gave us our
first chance to share the ever-shifting views of headlands and rolling,
wooded hills. Though the forest was as yet only half in leaf, and the
height of the flood covered all other than the highest of the bottoms,
the nature of the scene was an unending wonder to my companions, who in
turn compared it with the sterile mountains of Old Spain and the deserts
of New Spain. They could not liken it to the tamed woodlands of England;
for, notwithstanding a generation of settlement, with the river long
since the main artery of a great commerce, these banks were as yet in
many places unbroken wilderness, the abode of elk and deer and wolf, of
tigerish panther and lumbering bear.
High above us soared eagles and turkey buzzards, spying for carrion and
live prey, each according to his nature, as they had soared and spied in
the late sixties and early seventies, when Gist and Boone and the great
Washington first threaded the untraced wilderness and skimmed downstream
in their bark canoes to the dark and bloody hunting-grounds of the
hostile tribes. Since then what vast changes had come over the land!
What thousands of homesteads hewn out of the gloomy depths of beech and
oak, walnut and maple forest! What scores of settlements and towns,
ranging in size up to Cincinnati, with its three hundred and more
houses, many of brick and stone, its fifteen hundred whites and thousand
slaves, its genteel coaches and chariots, and its educational
institutions!
Yet, aside from the slaughtered buffalo and the backward-driven savage,
how small the change in the forest life! Along the rocky banks the
deadly rattlesnake and copperhead still lay coiled in wait; the deer
came timidly down to the water along old game traces where the panther
still lurked; and flocks of screaming, chattering paroquets still flew
up river from the southwest, their emerald plumage contrasting with the
bright hues of the redbirds and woodpeckers, the orioles and
kingfishers.
The following day, below the mouth of the Scioto River, we had view of
one of the strangest sights of the West,--a flight of passenger pigeons.
The flock passed upstream above the left shore in a dense column and
with a tremendous roaring sound of their millions of wings. Though we
were going in a contrary direction, hours passed before we saw the last
stragglers of their amazing multitude, and this despite the fact that
they are among the swiftest of birds. While making a southward bend of
the stream, we came beneath them, the lowermost flying so near overhead
that I was able to kill a number simply by flinging fagots among them.
As their flesh, though dark, is choice eating, we enjoyed a most savory
pie at the evening meal.
During the night the boat caught me nodding and gave itself into the
grasp of an eddy, which held it fast for two hours or more. My regret
over the delay was short-lived, since at dawn I made the welcome
discovery that it had caused us to part company with the last of the
cargo flotilla. The rivermen were well supplied with skiffs, and as some
of them are not above theft and even outright piracy, I had spent most
of these two nights in vigilant watch, with my rifle and Don Pedro's
pistols charged and primed against a night attack.
Less welcome than the absence of such consorts was the cold rain which
set in before dawn and lasted well along toward noon, with now and then
a slashing drive of sleet. I spent the dreary hours fast asleep in my
bunk, for Don Pedro insisted upon his right to share the hardships of
our voyage.
When I turned out, the sun had burst through, and the leaden clouds were
rolling away to the eastward. My first act was to sweep the Ohio shore
with an anxious glance. The swiftly changing vistas of winding river and
pleasant hills that undulated beneath their cloak of budding green, told
me that we had entered upon the run of the Great Bend. By good fortune,
I was just in time to sight the well-remembered hills of my childhood
home. Another twist of the channel brought us in view of the Little
Miami.
Cap in hand, I stepped to the side of the flat, and stood quiet and
apart, gazing at the rough, white stone that rose clear against the
sky-line on the first crest below the stream's mouth. What memories of
childhood rushed in upon me! what bitterness and grief!
At last the envious river swept us around a masking hill. I turned
slowly about, with all my heaviness plainly written in my look. Less
than three paces behind me stood the senorita, her dark eyes fixed upon
me with a soft pity far different from their usual mockery.
"You grieve!" she murmured.
"It is the grave of my mother."
Don Pedro dropped the handle of the steer-oar and turned to me with a
courtesy that went far deeper than outer form. "Your mother? May the
Virgin bless her!"
Alisanda made the sign of the cross, and her lips moved in quick prayer:
"_Ave Maria purisima_--"
After a little the don ventured a word of consolation: "It is a
beautiful place for a tomb,--serene and grand on its solitary hillcrest.
When my own time comes, may I rest as well!"
Serene!--beautiful! The words roused me from my unmanly weakness.
"You do not know!" I cried. "Her grave was dug among the ashes of our
home. She was murdered by the Shawnees."
"You speak of the Indian savages?" murmured Alisanda. "Is it so long ago
as that?"
"In my boyhood--in ninety-one--the Spring before St. Clair's terrible
defeat. The northern tribes raided the settlements from above Pittsburg
to the lower Kentucky, with a fury before unknown. The ferocious braves
crept by night through the very streets of Cincinnati and under the
walls of Fort Washington. Our home, outlying yonder on the Little Miami,
was one of the first struck. The memory of that morning is burned deep
into my brain. My father had gone into town to barter some skins for
flour, and my mother was part way down the hillside, ploughing for corn.
I had gone up to the cabin to fetch a jug of cider, and was half-way
back, when a score of Shawnees in their black war paint leaped from the
ravine and set upon my mother.
"I ran to help her, but she, striking bravely at the treacherous savages
with the ox-goad, screamed to me to fly for the guns. I turned as she
fell under the stroke of a tomahawk. The murderers leaped after me,
yelling and firing. Rifle balls and arrows whistled about me, some
piercing my shirt. But I gained the cabin unhurt. On the pegs beside the
door lay my father's rifle and his old Queen Anne musket of the
Revolution, which I had that morning charged half to the muzzle with
swanshot in preparation for a bear which had been stealing our porkers.
"Barring the door with one hand, I caught down the musket with the
other, and fired through the nearest loophole. My pursuers were coming
on fairly in a body, and the distance was such that the swanshot
scattered just enough to cover the foremost warriors. One fell dead and
three more were wounded. In a twinkling all others than the one killed
leaped to either side and checked their rush.
"But their chief came bounding up from the rear through their midst,
flourishing his bloody tomahawk and yelling to them to come on. Young as
I was, if given a support for the heavy barrel, I could handle my
father's rifle as well as he himself. The chief fell within twenty paces
of the door, with the hole of the rifle ball between his glaring eyes.
At this, fearful that they had run upon a trap, the red warriors ran
dodging and side-leaping to the nearest brush, while I caught up a knife
and rushed out to scalp the chief--"
"_Por Dios!_" cried Don Pedro. "You ran out!--you took the scalp of the
chief under the eyes of his followers?"
"My mother's scalp hung at his belt. I was mad with fury. I would have
struck the murderer even had the others already turned."
"They did turn?" asked Alisanda, her eyes widening with the horror of
the vision she pictured.
"They turned as I burst from the cabin. I was surrounded--seized
fast--but not before I had torn off the scalp of their chief and shaken
it in their painted faces!" My eyes flamed at the memory of that fierce
vengeance.
"_Madre de Dios!_" breathed the Spaniard--"You stung them to wildest
fury!"
"I sought to make them strike me down. Better death under the tomahawk
than the slow agony of torture at the stake. What greater shame to them
than for a boy of twelve to kill two of their most famous warriors,--to
taunt them with the bloody scalp of their chief?"
"Yet they spared you!" whispered Alisanda, her eyes fixed upon my
flushed face.
"For the torture. When they took me north to the Shawnee towns, I was
made to run the gantlet. Being quick-footed and nimble, I avoided most
of the heavier blows and midway of the line dodged out sideways,
tripping up the old squaw who sought to stop me. Before the rabble could
overtake me, I had set myself in the midst of the chiefs and foremost
warriors of the village, whose dignity had prevented them from joining
in the lesser torture.
"My craft in tripping the squaw and avoiding the greater number of my
tormentors won me the protection of the chiefs, and while they waved off
the boys and squaws, the young warrior Tecumseh, one of the brothers of
the chief I had killed, claimed me for adoption in place of his kinsman.
The other brother, Elskwatawa, promptly seconded Tecumseh. After much
dispute, their claim was allowed, and for three years I lived as a
member of the tribe, always watched against escape, yet treated with
utmost kindness.
"That Fall the leading members of my tribe were present with the braves
of the Miamis, Delawares, Wyandots, Iroquois, and other tribes, who made
a second Braddock's Defeat of their battle with General St. Clair. They
brought back no captives, but such quantities of plunder and such tales
of slaughter that I could hardly credit either my eyes or my ears.
"After this I was taken to the neighborhood of the British fort near the
Maumee Rapids, where the notorious renegade McKee proved that even the
worst of men have their better nature. He sought to ransom me from my
adopted brothers. This was refused, but I was permitted to come and go
freely to the fort. One day, chancing upon a book of physic in the scant
library of the post surgeon, I showed such interest that the portly old
doctor seized upon me as a _protege_.
"Within a year I was forced to return to the Shawnee towns, but with me
I took a Latin grammar and my precious treatise on physic. Again I was
brought to the Maumee, and there placed for safekeeping in the fort
during General Wayne's cautious but steady advance north from Fort
Washington. This meant months more of study under the tuition of my
kindly surgeon; so that upon the day of Wayne's glorious victory at
Fallen Timbers, when he drove the routed warriors of the allied tribes
past the very walls of the fort, I was further advanced in my studies
than many an English schoolboy of seventeen or eighteen, and, I must
confess, fast acquiring British sympathies.
"But the sight of Wayne's victorious cavalry, who rode up defiantly
within pistol-shot of the palisades, roused in me such a feverish desire
to escape that I should have flung myself upon the bayonets of the
sentinels rather than have remained. Fortunately the garrison was so
intent upon the burning of the dwellings and trading establishments
without the fort by our army, that I was able to slip over the stockade
with the aid of a rope, and make off safely in the darkness."
Alisanda sighed her relief of the suspense that had held her tense. "So
you escaped!" she exclaimed.
"To the American camp where I found both my father and my mother's
cousin, Captain Van Rensselaer. The captain had been shot from his
saddle during the battle, but was able to return with us to Cincinnati
when my father's term of service as a mounted volunteer expired. It was
Captain Rensselaer who, upon his return to New York, sent for me to
complete my medical and other studies in Columbia College."
"_Por Dios!_ What a life!" cried Don Pedro. "We also have our Indian
battles. But to live among the ferocious savages--_Santa Maria_! Small
wonder you men of the forest wilderness are men of iron!"
"Many settlers of soft fibre have come over the mountains since the days
of peace. But the men who first hewed their homes in the wilderness had
to be of iron. Such are those who now press on to the new frontiers of
the South, the Lakes, and the Mississippi."
"Among whom is our friend Don Juan," replied Alisanda.
I looked, thinking to see a mocking glance, and instead found myself
gazing down into the fathomless depths of her eyes.