OPPORTUNITY.
"Master of human destinies am I,
Fame, love and fortune on my footsteps wait,
Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate
Deserts and seas remote, and, passing by
Hovel, and mart, and palace, soon or late
I knock unbidden once at every gate!
If sleeping, wake--if feasting, rise before
I turn away. It is the hour of fate
And they who follow me reach every state
Mortals desire, and conquer every foe
Save death; but those who doubt or hesitate,
Condemned to failure, penury and woe,
Seek me in vain and uselessly implore--
I answer not, and I return no more."
--_Ingalls._
_A Fortune Won and Lost._
Hanging in a room of the White House when the magnetic, able and
masterful Roosevelt was President, was this beautiful poem of Senator
Ingalls. A gem of rarest value in word painting; a literary production
beyond criticism; but in sentiment, harmful and discouraging! It is
not true! Opportunity has knocked repeatedly at the door of countless
numbers, and future generations will hear its call again and again.
Only one chance to be given us? No! Life is too fine and means too
much for "the hour of fate" to hang on so slender a thread as a single
opportunity. It comes many times to some; it comes but once to others;
it does not come to all. To Antoine Janis, a French Trapper, it
knocked unbidden at his door but once; he failed to answer, and he
lived to appreciate his great loss, for he had fortune placed within
his grasp and did not realize it. Once, all the beautiful Cache la
Poudre Valley was his; every acre of land from La Porte to the Box
Elder; every lot in Fort Collins; wealth which would run into the
millions. It was the gift of the Indians, and was his as absolutely as
though it had come by Deed of Warranty with all its covenants, clear
and indefeasible. The Government in its Treaties with the Indians
recognized their grants, and had Janis asserted his rights to this
vast property, his claim would undoubtedly have been recognized by the
Government as in many similar cases. He continued his residence in
Larimer County for thirty-four years, going then to the Indians at the
Pine Ridge Agency and remaining there until his death. The close
friendship, early formed between him and the Indians, was never
broken, and they buried him with honors.
I like to imagine that famous meeting at La Porte, when that Valley,
then nameless, changed hands. The Indians as a race were dignified,
serious, and on formal occasions acted with great deliberation. They
were a generous people, and were about to make a present to the White
Brother who had come to dwell among them. Bold Wolf, the Chief, called
his counsellors together. From out the seven hundred tepees they came,
in their brilliant dress of state. They gathered around the camp fire,
seated on their feet, with Antoine Janis as their honored guest. They
smoked the pipe of peace; not a pipe for each, but one for all, that
would draw them closer in lasting friendship. Resting their painted
cheeks on the palms of their hands, they listened with the utmost
respect to those who spoke. The oratory of the Indian is proverbial.
His dignified and serious bearing, his simple words and brief
sentences, his profound earnestness and apt illustrations, made him a
master of eloquence. It was an occasion for thrilling discourse. The
land where they were assembled was theirs. It was the land of their
fathers. It was theirs by right of discovery, by right of occupancy.
Here they had lived their lives; here their children had been born;
here their dead were buried, and here they had worshipped the Great
Spirit to whom their ancestors had bowed. And they were to give away
the best of their heritage; the luxuriant meadows of the richest and
most beautiful valley in their vast domain were to go to the White
Brother forever. Thereafter, every man, woman and child of the tribe
recognized that the country they looked out upon, over which their
ponies grazed, across which the buffalo roamed, even the very ground
upon which their wigwams stood, was the property of Antoine Janis.
_The Call of the Blood._
About the year 1800 some French trappers and hunters were passing out
of Colorado, into New Mexico, in quest of new streams in which to ply
their avocation. The pack ponies which they were driving on ahead
suddenly stopped and centered about an object at which they sniffed
intelligently. The trappers coming forward to investigate looked at
each other in amazement as they gathered around a deserted child lying
on the bosom of the unfeeling earth, hungry and helpless. These
bronzed and bearded men were heavy handed, but not stony hearted; and
they met the responsibility as best they could. Moses had been left in
the bullrushes of a stream for his preservation. This child had been
left in the tangled weeds on the bank of a stream for its destruction.
Moses lived to become the leader of a nation. This child was
saved--but let us see. It was taken by the trappers, named Friday for
the day upon which it was found, as in the tale of Robinson Crusoe, an
Indian youth was named Friday for the day of his discovery. Friday
grew and thrived, was adopted by one of the party, and at the age of
fourteen was taken along to St. Louis, where he was sent to school,
and shared in the joys and griefs of other boys of his age. When he
was twenty-one, the cry that had long been suppressed gave utterance.
He wanted to see his people. Leaving home, he came to Colorado, and to
the tribe of the Arapahoes, who had crossed the path of the trappers
twenty-one years before. It was a new life to which he was admitted.
During his visit a buffalo hunt was organized in his behalf. He
watched the preparations, saw the gathering of the ponies from off the
prairies, the testing of the bows and arrows, the night of feasting
and dancing before the start at earliest dawn. Wending their way over
the plains, they finally spied the herd. At once the dullness of the
hunters gave place to trained alertness; absolute quiet reigned; the
ponies crept forward slowly and softly, step by step, with their
riders clinging to their sides to give the appearance of a band of
grazing horses. At last they were near enough, and then the signal.
Away went the horses and riders in a whirlwind of excitement, the eyes
of the riders blazing, the nostrils of the horses dilating. Away went
the herd, shaking the earth with the thunders of their flight; away
flew the arrows to the twang of the bows, as they sped straight and
true into the heaving sides of the struggling animals. Down went the
buffalo, down on their trembling knees, down on their quivering sides,
as they stretched themselves out for their final death struggle. Down
went the Indians to dance in glee around the prostrate bodies of their
trophies.
And Friday? No one ever hunted as Friday hunted! The thirst of blood
was upon him. He had plunged into the midst of danger, and knew no
pity, no compunction, no fatigue. The instinct of his race that had
been sleeping for years surged to the surface at a bound, never again
to be dormant. That night he threw off the garb that stood for the
civilizing influences of the past, donned the yellow blanket of his
race and adopted the life of his people. That day of daring, and his
education, marked him as a leader, and he became a Chief of the
Arapahoe nation.
Chief Friday had a son. He was called Jacob after that Patriarch, who,
when asked his age by Pharaoh, replied so poetically "the days of the
years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years; few and evil
have the days of the years of my life been, but have not attained unto
the days of the years of the lives of my fathers in the days of their
pilgrimage." There is a superstition among the Indians that if they
have lost a battle, they must sacrifice some member of another tribe
as an offering to the Great Spirit. Jacob had been chosen for the
sacrifice. Hearing of it he fled. Returning two years later when he
supposed there was no further fear of his destruction, he was set upon
and left dead upon the ground. Friday loved Jacob with a very great
love, and so did he love the good of his people. He counseled peace,
and instead of plunging two nations in war, he buried his son with a
breaking heart, hidden by the stoicism of his race.
Chief Friday had a daughter. A winsome lass. Light of foot, with a
singing voice and dancing eyes. She was called "Little Niwot" by her
father, because she used her left hand, and Niwot in the Indian tongue
means "left hand." I asked a doctor once, those wisest of wise men,
why it was that out of fifteen hundred million of the earth's
inhabitants, so few used the left hand prominently, and this was his
reply: "Upebanti manusinistra ob herededitatum."
Niwot's education was not alone like that of the other Indian
children, whose eyes were trained to see the beauty in the sun, the
moon and the stars; whose ears were attuned to catch the voices in the
murmuring brooks, the music in the rustling trees, the melody in the
warbling birds; but she had learned of her father as well, who taught
her from the remembrances of those far-off days in the St. Louis
schools. Little Niwot loved an Indian youth, who was not the choice of
her mother. So she ran away with her dusky mate and became the wife of
the man of her choice. Friday was left alone. Jacob was dead and Niwot
was gone; he grieved for them, and could not be comforted. Niwot
became the name of a Creek near Longmont, and of a near-by station on
the Colorado and Southern Railway. So in station and stream, the
memory of a little Indian maiden is to always be kept green.
And Friday died; died in the happy thought that in the civilizing
processes that had been going on about him, he had always tried to
stay the hand of his people when raised to check the white wave that
was sweeping them to their destruction. Chief Friday was well known to
the early settlers, and from them has come this story, here a little
and there a little, and now woven into print for the first time. The
unhappy ending of his life is like that of Chief Logan, whose
heart-breaking plea has been handed down to us in this great burst of
touching eloquence:
"I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan's cabin
hungry and he gave him not meat; if ever he came naked and he clothed
him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan
remained idle in his camp, an advocate of peace. Such was my love for
the whites that my countrymen pointed as I passed and said, 'Logan is
a friend of the white man.' I had even thought to have lived with you
but for the injuries of one man; Col. Cresap, who, the last Spring, in
cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not
even sparing my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood
in any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought
it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my
country, I rejoice at the beams of peace; but do not harbor a thought
that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn
on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not
one."