WINONA
A DAKOTA LEGEND

AND OTHER POEMS

BY
CAPTAIN E. L. HUGGINS
2d Cavalry U. S. Army

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK
27 West Twenty-third St.

LONDON
27 King William St., Strand

Knickerbocker Press
1890

Copyright, 1890
BY
ELI L. HUGGINS.

The Knickerbocker Press, New York
Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by
G. P. Putnam’s Sons

CONTENTS.

Transcriber’s Note: Incorrect page numbering in the original has been amended here.

WINONA: A DAKOTA LEGEND

WINONA: A DAKOTA LEGEND.

PROEM.

How changed, fair Minnetonka, is thy face

Since first I saw thee in thy pristine grace.

Electric lights fantastically glow,

Swarming like fire-flies on the shores where long,

Through countless summer nights a vanished throng,

Only the Indian camp-fire flickered low.

The odor of the baleful cigarette

Assails us now, where the mild calumet

Around the circle like a censer swung.

The notes of Strauss intoxicate the air,

And dainty feet in cadence twinkle there,

Where in rude strains the warriors’ deeds were sung,

And where the Indian lover’s plaintive flute

Lured to the trysting-place the dusky maid.

Discreetly hidden in the sylvan shade,

The Anglomaniac comes to press his suit,

And Patrick, too, out for a holiday,

Strolls with his Bridget here en dimanché,

And softly whispers in his charmer’s ear

The same old tale, to lovers ever dear.

The rustling leaves, the waves, the mating bird,

Sing the same songs the Indian maiden heard.

Save a few stately names, the vanished race

Whose dust we daily trample leave no trace

Or monument. None who that race have known

Ere poisoned by the vices of our own,

Deem it ignoble; but the white man’s breath,

To him a besom of consuming death,

Sweeps him like ashes from his natal hearth,

E’en as one day some race of stronger birth

Will sweep our children’s children from the earth.

More noxious than the fabled upas tree,

We blight his virtues first, and then with scorn

Repel the hands extended once to save

Our exiled fathers, fleeing o’er the wave.

Yet in his deepest fall, the warrior, born

Of warrior lineage fetterless and free,

Retains unquenched in his unyielding soul

A secret flame in spite of all control.

He brooks no slavish, ignominious toil,

By scourger driven to till the white man’s soil.

Chained in Plutonian caverns far from day,

His spirit swiftly chafes its bars away;

Or by his own impatient hand released,

With rapture bounds as to a marriage feast.

Wealth, pomp, and power ne’er his soul affect;

Still unabashed he stands, unmoved, erect,

His blanket draped, albeit not too clean,

About him with a Roman consul’s mien,

And in the white light of a throne his eye

Would meet, nor quail, the eye of majesty.

His own war-eagle to the sun that soared,

Gave back with eye undimmed its fiery glare,

And sported with the speaking lightnings where

The Thunder-Birds[1] along the tempest roared;

Or swept the plain, but saw no Indian slave

From the Pacific to Atlantic wave.

Fair Minnetonka, thou art changed, and yet

I know not if ’twere matter for regret.

Thou wast a maid untried, with yielding heart,

With flowing hair, and ample sheltering arms,

And unabashed contours, whose rosy charms

Were all untrammelled by the hand of art,

And eyes of dreamy mystery, wherein

E’en then thy triumphs dimly were foreseen;

A worldly-wise and queenly woman now,

Adorned with spoil of many victories,

And flush of further conquest on thy brow;

Jewels cannot thy native charms enhance,

Nor can thy robes, too tightly laced perchance,

The matchless beauty of thy form disguise.

Through every change, by every tongue confessed,

Peerless amid thy sisters East or West;

Like her of whom the master-singer wrote,

“Age cannot wither her nor custom stale

Her infinite variety.”

Thus float

My wandering thoughts, as on the balcony

I sit alone bathed in the moonlight pale,

And musing thus the scene changed suddenly:

Hotel and cottage vanished; to the shore

The prairie sloped a green unbroken floor.

Eight lustrums back, through rosy summers fled,

Adown a dwindling vista far I sped,

A careless youth; again my hoary head

Bloomed with the sunny wealth of twenty years.

A day came back, a day without compeers,

When with a bright companion long since dead,

In my canoe I flitted o’er the lake,

And our swift paddles scattered pearly tears

Upon the smiling ripples in our wake.

She, my companion, was a little maid

Of somewhat rustic garb, of English speech,

Yet something in her accents quaint and rich,

And the warm tinge upon her cheek, betrayed

The mingling crimson of a darker shade,—

Her kinship to the remnant lingering still,

Whose cone-shaped lodges picturesquely stood,

Dotting the hither base of yonder hill,

Like late leaves clinging, spite of growing chill,

Upon the boughs of a November wood.

Changing our mood, we idly drifted there,

Two happy children in a cradling shell

Poised ’twixt two azure vaults; the mystic spell

Of Indian summer brooded in the air,

Filling with human love and sympathy

E’en things inanimate; the earth and sky

Leaned to each other, and the rocks and trees,

Like brothers, seemed sharing our reveries.

“Tell me some legend of the lake,” I cried,

“For in a spot that breathes on every side

Such air of poesy, whose influence

Subdues with such a charm our every sense,

How many loving hearts have loved and died!

How many souls as lofty and intense

As those whose names throughout the whole world ring,

In the high songs the olden minstrels sing!

Who hears those voices e’en but for a day,

The sound remains a part of him alway:

Penelope the constant; Hero sweet;

Briseis weeping at Achilles’ feet;

Andromeda by wingèd Perseus found—

Bright blossom to the sea-girt rock fast bound;

The Lesbian queen of song, but passion’s slave,

Who quenched her burning torch beneath the wave;

Helen, whose beauty, like a fatal brand,

Lit up the towers of Troy o’er sea and land;

And Juliet, swaying at her window’s height,

What slender lily in the wan moonlight.”

“I do not know,” the little maid replied,

“The names of which you speak, but ere she died

My mother told me many stories old,

Some joyous and some sad, of warriors bold,

And spirits, haunting forest, plain, and stream.

Each had its god, and creatures of strange form,

Half beast, half human; all these figures seem

Mingling away in a fantastic swarm,

Dim as the faces of a last year’s dream,

Or motes that mingle in a slant sunbeam.

The legends vanish too; among them all

This one alone, distinctly I recall.”

The tale she told me then I now rehearse,

Set in a frame of rude, unpolished verse.

PART I.

Winona,[2] first-born daughter, was the name

Of a Dakota girl who, long ago,

Dwelt with her people here unknown to fame.

Sweet word, Winona, how my heart and lips

Cling to that name (my mother’s was the same

Ere her form faded into death’s eclipse),

Cling lovingly, and loth to let it go.

All arts that unto savage life belong

She knew, made moccasins, and dressed the game.

From crippling fashions free, her well-knit frame

At fifteen summers was mature and strong.

She pitched the tipi,[3] dug the tipsin[4] roots,

Gathered wild rice and store of savage fruits.

Fearless and self-reliant, she could go

Across the prairie on a starless night;

She speared the fish while in his wildest flight,

And almost like a warrior drew the bow.

Yet she was not all hardness: the keen glance,

Lighting the darkness of her eyes, perchance

Betrayed no softness, but her voice, that rose

O’er the weird circle of the midnight dance,

Through all the gamut ran of human woes,

Passion, and joy. A woman’s love she had

For ornament; on gala days was clad

In garments of the softest doeskin fine,

With shells about her neck; moccasins neat

Were drawn, like gloves, upon her little feet,

Adorned with scarlet quills of porcupine.

Innocent of the niceties refined

That to the toilet her pale sisters bind,

Yet much the same beneath the outer rind,

She was, though all unskilled in bookish lore,

A sound, sweet woman to the very core.

Winona’s uncle, and step-father too,

Was all the father that she ever knew;

By the Absarakas[5] her own was slain

Before her memory could his face retain.

Two bitter years his widow mourned him dead,

And then his elder brother she had wed.

None loved Winona’s uncle; he was stern

And harsh in manner, cold and taciturn,

And none might see, without a secret fear,

Those thin lips ever curling to a sneer.

And yet he was of note and influence

Among the chieftains; true he rarely lent

More than his presence in the council tent,

And when he rose to speak disdained pretence

Of arts rhetoric, but his few words went

Straight and incisive to the question’s core,

And rarely was his counsel overborne.

The Raven was the fitting name he bore,

And though his winters wellnigh reached threescore,

Few of his tribe excelled him in the chase.

A warrior of renown, but never wore

The dancing eagle plumes, and seemed to scorn

The vanities and follies of his race.

I said the Raven was beloved by none;

But no, among the elders there was one

Who often sought him, and the two would walk

Apart for hours, and converse alone.

The gossips, marvelling much what this might mean,

Whispered that they at midnight had been seen

Far from the village wrapped in secret talk.

They seemed in truth an ill-assorted brace,

But Nature oft in Siamese bond unites,

By some strange tie, the farthest opposites.

Gray Cloud was oily, plausible, and vain,

A conjurer with subtle scheming brain;

Too corpulent and clumsy for the chase,

His lodge was still provided with the best,

And though sometimes but a half welcome guest,

He took his dish and spoon to every feast.[6]

Priestcraft and leechcraft were combined in him,

Two trades occult upon which knaves have thriven,

Almost since man from Paradise was driven;

Padding with pompous phrases worn and old

Their scanty esoteric science dim,

And gravely selling, at their weight in gold,

Placebos colored to their patients’ whim.

Man’s noblest mission here too oft is made,

In heathen as in Christian lands, a trade.

Holy the task to comfort and console

The tortured body and the sin-sick soul,

But pain and sorrow, even prayer and creed,

Are turned too oft to instruments of greed.

The conjurer claimed to bear a mission high:

Mysterious omens of the earth and sky

He knew to read; his medicine could find

In time of need the buffalo, and bind

In sleep the senses of the enemy.

Perhaps not wholly a deliberate cheat,

And yet dissimulation and deceit

Oozed from his form obese at every pore.

Skilled by long practice in the priestly art,

To chill with superstitious fear the heart,

And versed in all the legendary lore,

He knew each herb and root that healing bore;

But lest his flock might grow as wise as he,

Disguised their use with solemn mummery.

When all the village wrapped in slumber lay,

His midnight incantations often fell,

His chant now weirdly rose, now sank away,

As o’er some dying child he cast his spell.

And sometimes through his frame strange tremors ran—

Magnetic waves, swept from the unknown pole

Linking the body to the wavering soul;

And swifter came his breath, as if to fan

The feeble life spark, and his finger tips

Were to the brow of pain like angel lips.

No wonder if in moments such as these

He half believed in his own deities,

And thought his sacred rattle could compel

The swarming powers unseen to serve him well.

The Raven lay one evening in his tent

With his accustomed crony at his side;

Around their heads a graceful aureole

Of smoke curled upward from the scarlet bowl

Of Gray Cloud’s pipe with willow bark supplied.

Winona’s thrifty mother came and went,

Her form with household cares and burdens bent,

Fresh fuel adds, and stirs the boiling pot.

Meanwhile the young Winona, half reclined,

Plies her swift needle, that resource refined

For woman’s leisure, whatsoe’er her lot,

The kingly palace or the savage cot.

The cronies smoked without a sign or word,

Passing the pipe sedately to and fro;

Only a distant wail of hopeless woe,

A mother mourning for her child, was heard,

And Gray Cloud moved, as though the sound had stirred