A river flows through green prairies into a vast blue lake. There are
log houses along the banks, and near the lake a more pretentious
structure, also built of logs. Quaint as an old Dutch mill, with its
overhanging second story, this fort of rude type answers its purpose
well, for only Indians are likely to assail it, and Indians bring no
artillery.
A summer morning comes, an August morning in the year 1812. There is
war, and there have been disgraces and defeats and wavering counsels. To
the soldiers in the fort has been given the advice of a weakling in
peril, and it has had unhappy weight. About the fort are gathering a
host of Indians, dark Pottowatomies, treacherous and sullen. Yet the
fort is to be abandoned. The scanty garrison will venture forth with its
women and its children.
To the south, along the lake, are reaches of yellow sand and a mile or
more away are trees and scanty shrubbery. From the fort file slowly out
the soldiers with their baggage-wagons, in which the weaker are
bestowed. Among the young is a boy of eight--a waif, the orphan of a
hunter. Forest-bred, he is alert and in some things older than his
years. He is old enough to have a sense of danger. From his covert in
the wagon he watches all intently.
The few musicians play a funeral march, and the procession moves
apprehensively, though it moves steadily, for there are brave men in the
ranks, men who will not flinch, though they rage at the evil folly to
which they have been driven. They do not doubt the issue, though they
face it. They have not long to wait. The bushes which fringe the rising
ground do not conceal the shifting enemy. The marching column huddles.
There are sharp commands and the reports of muskets. The Indians are
attacking. The massacre has begun!
Hampered, unsheltered, outnumbered by a vengeful host, the whites must
die. The men die fighting, as men in such straits should. The Indians
are close upon the women and children in the wagon. Into one of them,
that which contains the hunter's child, leaps a savage, in whose beady
eyes are all cruelty and ferocity. His tomahawk sinks into the brain of
the nearest helpless one, and at the same instant, swift as an otter
gliding into water, the boy is out and darting away among the bushes.
Oddly enough he is unnoticed--a remnant of the soldiers are dying
hardly--and he escapes to where the bushes are more dense. About a
cottonwood tree in the distance appears greater covert. Around the tree
has been part of the struggle, but the ghastly tide has passed, and
there are only dead men there. The boy is in mortal terror, but his
instinct does not fail him. There is a heap of brush, the top of some
tree felled by a storm, and beneath the mass he writhes and wriggles and
is lost from view.
There is a rush of returning footsteps; there is a clamor of many Indian
voices about the brush-heap, but the boy is undiscovered. The savages
are not seeking him. They count all the whites as slain or captured, and
are now but intent on plunder. Night falls. The child slips from his
hiding place, and runs to the southward. Suddenly a dark figure rises in
his path, and the grasp of a strong hand is upon his shoulder. He
struggles frantically, but only for a moment. His own language is
spoken. It is in the voice of a friendly Miami fleeing, like the boy,
from the Pottowatomies. The Indian takes the boy by the hand, and
hurries him to the westward, to the Mississippi.
It is the year 1835. One of a band of trappers venturing up the Missouri
is a slender, quiet man, the deadliest shot in the party. Good trapper
he is, but the fame he has earned among adventurers of his class is not
from fur-getting. He is a lonely man, but a creature of action. He never
seeks to avoid the Indian trails. Cautious and crafty he is, certainly,
but he follows closely the westward drift of the red men, and when
opportunity comes he spares not at all. He is a hunter of Indians,
vengeance personified. He is the boy who hid beneath the brush-heap; the
memory of that awful day and night is ever with him, and he seeks
blindly to make the equation just. To his single arm have fallen more
savages than fell whites on the day of the massacre by the lake. Still
he moves westward.
It is the year 1893 now. An old man occupies a farm in the remote
Northwest. He has lost none of his faculties, nor nearly all his
strength, though he is eighty-nine years of age. The long battle with
the dangers of the wilds is done. The old man listens to the talk of
those about him, of how a great nation is inviting all the nations of
the world to take part in a monster jubilee, because of the
quadri-centennial of a continent's discovery. He hears them tell of a
place where this mighty demonstration will be made, and a torrent of
memory sweeps him backward over eighty years. He thinks of one awful day
and night. An irresistible longing to look again upon the regions he has
not seen for more than three-quarters of a century, a wild desire to
revisit the junction of the river and the great blue lake, and to wander
where the sandreaches and the cottonwood tree were, possesses him. And,
resolute as ever, he acts upon the impulse which now becomes a plan.
An old man, as strangely placed as some old gray elk among a herd of
buffalo, is hurried along the swarming, roaring thoroughfares of a
great city. He has found the river and the lake, but nothing else save
pandemonium. He is seeking now the place where the cottonwood tree
stood, though he scarcely hopes to find it. He asks what his course
shall be, and is answered kindly. He finds his way to a broad
thoroughfare bearing the blue lake's name, and is told to seek
Eighteenth Street, and there walk toward the water. He does as he is
directed, and--marvelous to him, now--he finds the Tree.
There it stands, the cottonwood of the massacre, with blunt white limbs
outstretched and dead, as dead as those who were slaughtered at its base
and whose very bones have long been dust. The old man walks about it as
in a dream. He finds the spot where was the brush-heap beneath which he
passed shuddering hours so long ago, and he stands there upon a modern
pavement. The marble piles of rich men loom above him on each side.
Where were the sand ridges cast up by the lake, rush by the burdened
railroad trains. He cannot comprehend it--but there is more to come.
The old man has sought the oak-dotted prairie miles to the south.
Surely, something, somewhere must be unchanged! He has attained the spot
where the trees were densest. He is in a swirl of hosts. He looks upon
vast, splendid structures, such as the world has never seen before.
Through shining thoroughfares are surging the people of all nations.
And here was where the Miami Indian found the boy!
An old man is sitting again in his cabin in the far Northwest. He is
wondering, wondering if it has been but a dream, his old-age journey.
How could it be real? Surely there was once the fort where the river
joined the lake, and there were the yellow sand-ridges, and the low,
green prairie and the wilderness. He had seen them. They were there,
familiar to the pioneers, the features of a landscape where was the
outpost in the wilderness of the race which conquers. He knew there
could be no mistake about it, that what he remembered was something
real, for the river was in its ancient channel; though dark its waters,
the lake was blue and vast as of old, and the tree with its stark
branches was still the Tree. Those who had lived with him in his old age
in the far Northwest had seemed never to doubt in him the retained
possession of all his faculties, and he knew that he could not be
mistaken as to the things that were. He had lived with them. How could
such changes have come within the span of a single lifetime? Yet he had
seen the new! How could it be? And the old man could not tell.