TRAILS THROUGH
WESTERN WOODS

Lake Angus McDonald

TRAILS THROUGH
WESTERN WOODS

By
Helen Fitzgerald Sanders

Illustrations from Photographs
by the Author

NEW YORK & SEATTLE
THE ALICE HARRIMAN COMPANY
1910

Copyright, 1910, by
THE ALICE HARRIMAN COMPANY
Published, July 1, 1910

THE PREMIER PRESS
NEW YORK

DEDICATION

To the West that is passing; to the days
that are no more and to the brave,
free life of the Wilderness that
lives only in the memory of
those who mourn its loss

[PREFACE]

The writing of this book has been primarily a labour of love, undertaken in the hope that through the harmonious mingling of Indian tradition and descriptions of the region—too little known—where the lessening tribes still dwell, there may be a fuller understanding both of the Indians and of the poetical West.

A wealth of folk-lore will pass with the passing of the Flathead Reservation, therefore it is well to stop and listen before the light is quite vanished from the hill-tops, while still the streams sing the songs of old and the trees murmur regretfully of things lost forever and a time that will come no more. We of the workaday world are too prone to believe that our own country is lacking in myth and tradition, in hero-tale and romance; yet here in our midst is a legended region where every landmark is a symbol in the great, natural record book of a folk whose day is done and whose song is but an echo.

It would not be fitting to close these few introductory words without grateful acknowledgment to those who have aided me toward the accomplishment of my purpose. Indeed, every page brings a pleasant recollection of a friendly spirit and a helping hand. Mr. Duncan McDonald, son of Angus, and Mr. Henri Matt, my Indian friends, have told me by word of mouth, many of the myths and chronicles set forth in the following chapters. Mr. Edward Morgan, the faithful and just agent at the Flathead Reservation, has given me priceless information which I could never have obtained save through his kindly interest. He secured for me the legend of the Flint, the last tale told by Charlot and rendered into English by Michel Rivais, the blind interpreter who has served in that capacity for thirty years. Chief Charlot died after this book was finished and he lies in the land of his exile, out of the home of his fathers where he had hoped to rest. From Mr. Morgan also I received the account of Charlot's meeting with Joseph at the LoLo Pass, the facts of which were given him by the little white boy since grown to manhood, Mr. David Whaley, who rode with Charlot and his band to the hostile camp.

The late Charles Aubrey, pioneer and plainsman, furnished me valuable data concerning the buffalo.

Madame Leonie De Mers and her hospitable relatives, the De Mers of Arlee, were instrumental in winning for me the confidence of the Selish people.

Mrs. L. Mabel Hight, the artist, who has caught the spirit of the mountains with her brush, has added to this book by making the peaks live again in their colours.

In conclusion I would express my everlasting gratitude to Mr. Thomas H. Scott, of Lake McDonald, soldier, mountain-lover and woodsman, who, with unfailing courage and patience, has guided me safely over many and difficult trails.

For the benefit of students I must add that the authorities I have followed in my historical references are: Long's (James') "Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1819-20," Maximilian's "Travels in North America," Father De Smet's "Oregon Missions," Major Ronan's "History of the Flathead Indians," Bradbury's "Travels," Father L. B. Palladino's "Indian and White in the Northwest," and the Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology.

Helen Fitzgerald Sanders.

Butte, Montana,
April 5, 1910.

[CONTENTS]

[LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS]

[THE GENTLE SELISH]

[TRAILS THROUGH
WESTERN WOODS]

[CHAPTER I]
THE GENTLE SELISH

I

WHEN Lewis and Clark took their way through the Western wilderness in 1805, they came upon a fair valley, watered by pleasant streams, bounded by snowy mountain crests, and starred, in the Springtime, by a strangely beautiful flower with silvery-rose fringed petals called the Bitter Root, whence the valley took its name. In the mild enclosure of this land lived a gentle folk differing as much from the hostile people around them as the place of their nativity differed from the stern, mountainous country of long winters and lofty altitudes surrounding it. These early adventurers, confusing this tribe with the nations dwelling about the mouth of the Columbia River, spoke of them as the Flatheads. It is one of those curious historical anomalies that the Chinooks who flattened the heads of their children, should never have been designated as Flatheads, while the Selish, among whom the practice was unknown, have borne the undeserved title until their own proper and euphonious name is unused and all but forgotten.

The Selish proper, living in the Bitter Root Valley, were one branch of a group composed of several nations collectively known as the Selish family. These kindred tribes were the Selish, or Flatheads, the Pend d'Oreilles, the Cœur d'Alenes, the Colvilles, the Spokanes and the Pisquouse. The Nez Percés of the Clearwater were also counted as tribal kin through inter-marriage.

Lewis and Clark were received with great kindness and much wonder by the Selish. There was current among them a story of a hunting party that came back after a long absence East of the Rocky Mountains, bearing strange tidings of a pale-faced race whom they had met,—probably the adventurous Sieur de La Vérendrye and his cavaliers who set out from Montreal to find a highway to the Pacific Sea. But it was only a memory with a few, a curious legend to the many, and these men of white skin and blue eyes came to them as a revelation.

The traders who followed in the footsteps of the first trail-blazers found the natives at their pursuits of hunting, roving over the Bitter Root Valley and into the contested region east of the Main Range of the Rocky Mountains, where both they, and their enemies, the Blackfeet, claimed hereditary right to hunt the buffalo. They were at all times friendly to the white men who came among them, and these visitors described them as simple, straight-forward people, the women distinguished for their virtue, and the men for their bravery in the battle and the chase. They were cleanly in their habits and honorable in their dealings with each other. If a man lost his horse, his bow or other valuable, the one who found it delivered it to the Chief, or Great Father, and he caused it to be hung in a place where it might be seen by all. Then when the owner came seeking his goods, the Chief restored it to him. They were also charitable. If a man were hungry no one said him nay and he was welcome even at the board of the head men to share the best of their fare. This spirit of kindliness they extended to all save their foes and the prisoners taken in war whom they tortured after the manner of more hostile tribes. In appearance they were "comparatively very fair and their complexions a shade lighter than the palest new copper after being freshly rubbed." They were well formed, lithe and tall, a characteristic that still prevails with the pure bloods, as does something of the detail of their ancient dress. They preserve the custom of handing down by word of mouth, from generation to generation, their myths, traditions and history. Some of these chronicles celebrate events which are estimated to have happened two hundred years or more ago.

Of the origin of the Selish nothing is known save the legend of their coming out of the mountains; and perhaps we are none the poorer, for no bald historical record of dates and migrations could be as suggestively charming as this story of the people, themselves, colored by their own fancy and reflecting their inner life. Indeed, a nation's history and tradition bear much the same relation to each other as the conventional public existence of a man compared with that intangible part of him which we call imagination, but which is in reality the sum-total of his mental inheritance: the hidden treasure of his spiritual wealth. Let us look then, through the medium of the Indian's poetic imagery, into a past rose-hued with the sunrise of the new day.

Coyote, the hero of this legend, figures in many of the myths of the Selish; but they do not profess to know if he were a great brave bearing that name or if he were the animal itself, living in the legendary age when beasts and birds spoke the tongue of man. Likely he was a dual personality such as the white buffalo of numerous fables, who was at will a beautiful maiden or one among the vast herds of the plains. Possibly there was, indeed, such a mighty warrior in ages gone by about whose glorified memory has gathered the half-chimerical hero-tales which are the first step toward the ancestor-worship of primitive peoples. In all of the myths given here in which his name is mentioned, except that one of Coyote and the Flint, we shall consider him as an Ideal embodying the Indians' highest conception of valor and achievement.

Long, long ago the Jocko was inhabited by a man-eating monster who lured the tribes from the hills into his domain and then sucked their blood. Coyote determined to deliver the people, so he challenged the monster to a mortal combat. The monster accepted the challenge, and Coyote went into the mountains and got the poison spider from the rocks and bade him sting his enemy, but even the venom of the spider could not penetrate the monster's hide.

Coyote took counsel of the Fox, his friend, and prepared himself for the fray. He got a stout leather thong and bound it around his body, then tied it fast to a huge pine tree. The monster appeared with dripping fangs and gaping jaws, approached Coyote, who retreated farther and farther away, until the thong stretched taut and the pine curved like a bow. Suddenly, the tree, strained to its utmost limit, sprang back, felling the monster with a mortal stroke. Coyote was triumphant and the Woodpecker of the forest cut the pine and sharpened its trunk to a point which Coyote drove through the dead monster's breast, impaling it to the earth. Thus, the Jocko was rid of the man-eater, and the Selish, fearing him no more, came down from the hills into the valley where they lived in plenty and content.

The following story of Coyote and the Flint is of exceptional interest because it is from the lips of the dying Charlot—Charlot the unbending, the silent Chieftain. No word of English ever profaned his tongue, so this myth, told in the impressive Selish language, was translated word for word by Michel Rivais, the blind interpreter at the Flathead Agency, who has served faithfully and well for a period of thirty years.

"In the old times the animals had tribes just like the Indians. The Coyote had his tipi. He was hungry and had nothing to eat. He had bark to shoot his arrow with and the arrow did not go through the deer. He was that way a long time when he heard there was Flint coming on the road that gave a piece of flint to the Fox and he could shoot a deer and kill it, but the Coyote did not know that and used the bark. They did not give the Coyote anything. They only gave some to the Fox. Next day the Fox put a piece of meat on the end of a stick and took it to the fire. The Fox had the piece of meat cooking there and the Coyote was looking at the meat and when it was cooked the Coyote jumped and got the piece of meat and took a bite and in it was the flint, and he bit the flint and asked why they did not tell him how to kill a deer with flint.

"'Why didn't you tell me?' the Coyote asked his friend, the Fox. 'When did the Flint go by here?'

"The Fox said three days it went by here.

"The Coyote took his blanket and his things and started after the Flint and kept on his track all day and evening and said, 'Here is where the Flint camped,' and he stayed there all night himself, and next day he travelled to where the Flint camped, and he said, 'Here is where the Flint camped last night,' and he stayed there, and the next day he went farther and found where the Flint camped and he said, 'The Flint started from here this morning.' He followed the track next morning and went not very far, and he saw the Flint going on the road, and he went 'way out that way and went ahead of the Flint and stayed there for the Flint to come. When the Flint met him there the Coyote told him:

"'Come here. Now, I want to have a fight with you to-day.'

"And the Flint said:

"'Come on. We will fight.'

"The Flint went to him and the Coyote took the thing he had in his hand and struck him three or four times and the Flint broke all to pieces and the Coyote had his blanket there and put the pieces in the blanket and after they were through fighting and he had the pieces of flint in his blanket he packed the flint on his back and went to all the tribes and gave them some flint and said:

"'Here is some flint for you to kill deer and things with.'

"And he went to another tribe and did the same thing and to other tribes and did the same until he came to Flint Creek and then from that time they used the flint to put in their arrows and kill deer and elk.

"That is the story of the Flint."

*****

Coyote was the chosen one to whom the Great Spirit revealed the disaster which reduced the Selish from goodly multitudes of warriors to a handful of wretched, plague-stricken invalids. Old women are still fond of relating the story which they received from their mothers and their mothers' mothers even to the third and fourth generation.

Coyote laid down to rest and dreamed that the Voice of the Great Spirit sounded in his ears, saying that unless the daughter of the Chief became his bride a scourge would fall upon the people. When morning broke he sought out the Chief and told him of the words of the Voice, but the Chief, who was a haughty man, would not heed Coyote and coldly denied him the hand of his daughter in marriage.

Coyote returned to his lodge and soon there resounded through the forests the piercing cry of one in distress. Coyote rushed forth and beheld a man covered with sores across the river. This man related to Coyote how he was the last survivor of a war party that had come upon a village once occupied by the enemy whom they sought, but as they approached they saw no smoke arising from the tipis and no sign of life. They came forward very cautiously, but all was silent and deserted. From lodge to lodge they passed, and finally they came upon an old woman, pitted and scabbed, lying alone and dying. With her last breath she told them of a scourge which had fallen upon the village, consuming brave and child alike, until she, of all the lodges, was left to mourn the rest. Then one by one the war party which had ridden so gallantly to conquest and glory, felt an awful heat as of fire run through their veins. Burning and distraught they leaped into the cold waters of a river and died.

Such was the story of the man whom Coyote met in the woods. He alone remained, disfigured, diseased, doomed. So Coyote brought him into the village and quenched his thirst that he might pass more easily to the Happy Hunting Ground. But as the Great Spirit had revealed to Coyote while he slept, the scourge fell upon the people and laid them low, scarcely enough grief-stricken survivors remaining to weep for their lost dead.

*****

Besides this legendary narrative of the visitation of smallpox there are other authenticated instances of the plague wreaking its vengeance upon the Selish and depleting their villages to desolation. In this wise the tribe was thinned again and again and as early as 1813, Mr. Cox of the Northwest Fur Company, told in his "Adventures" that once the Selish were more powerful by far in number than in the day of his coming amongst them.

There was also another cause for the nation's decline quite as destructive as the plague;—the unequal hostility continuing generation after generation, without capitulation or truce, with the Blackfeet. The country of the Selish abounded in game but it was a part of the tribal code of honour to hunt the buffalo in the fields where their ancestors had hunted. All of the deadly animosity between the two peoples, all of the bloodshed of their cruel wars, was for no other purpose than to maintain the right to seek the beloved herds in the favoured fields which they believed their forefathers had won. The jealousy with which this privilege of the chase was guarded and preserved even to the death explains many national peculiarities, forms, indeed, the keynote to their life of freedom on the plains.

It is possible that the Selish would have been annihilated had not the establishment of new trading-posts enabled them to get fire-arms which the Blackfeet had long possessed. This means of defence gave them fresh strength and thereafter the odds against them were not as great.

The annals of the tribe, so full of tragedy and joy, of fact and fancy, of folk-lore and wood-lore, contain many stories of war glory reminiscent of the days of struggle. Even now there stands, near Ravalli in the Jocko, a rock resembling a man, called by the Indians the Stone Sentinel, which touchingly attests the fidelity and bravery of a nameless hero. The story is that one of the runners who had gone in advance of a war-party after the Indian custom, was surprised while keeping watch and killed by the Blackfeet. The body remained erect and was turned to stone, a monument of devotion to duty so strong that not even death could break his everlasting vigil.

Notwithstanding their love of glory on the war-path and hunting-field, they were a peaceable people. The most beautiful of their traditions are based upon religious themes out of which grew a poetical symbolism, half devotional, half fantastic. And even to-day, in spite of their profession of Christianity, there lives in the heart of the Indian the old paganism, not unlike that of the Greeks, which spiritualizes every object of the woods and waters.

They thought that in the Beginning the good Spirit came up out of the East and the Evil Spirit out of the West, and then began the struggle, typified by light and darkness, which has gone on ever since. From this central idea they have drawn the rainbow Spirit-fancy which arches their dream-sky from horizon to horizon. They consider some trees and rocks sacred; again they hold a lake or stream in superstitious dread and shun it as a habitation of the evil one.

Thus, a cave in the neighbouring hills where rattlesnakes sleep in Winter, they avoided in the past, not on account of the common snakes, but because within the damp, dark recesses of that subterranean den, the King of Snakes, a huge, horned reptile dwelt, appearing occasionally in all his venomous, scaled beauty, striking terror wherever he was seen. A clear spring bubbled near the cave but not even the cold purity of the water could tempt the Indians to that accursed vicinity until by some revelation they learned that the King Snake had migrated to other fastnesses. He is still seen, so they say, gliding stealthily amongst deserted wastes, his crest reared evily, and death in his poison tail.

In contrast to this cave of darkness is the spiritual legend of the Sacred Pine. Upon those same gentle hills of the Jocko it grows, lifting its lessening cone of green toward heaven. It has been there past the memory of the great-grand-fathers of the present generation and from time immemorial it has been held sacred by the Selish tribe. High upon its venerable branches hangs the horn of a Bighorn Sheep, fixed there so firmly by an unknown hand, before even the tradition of the Selish had shaped its ghostly form out of the mists of the past, that the blizzard has not been strong enough to wrench it from its place, nor the frost to gnaw it away. No one knows whence the ram's horn came nor what it signifies, but the tree is considered holy and the Indians believe that it possesses supernatural powers. Hence, offerings are made to it of moccasins, beads, weasel skins, and such little treasures of wearing apparel or handiwork as they most esteem, and at certain seasons, beneath the cool, sweet shadow of its generous boughs the devoted worshippers, going back through the little superficialities of recent civilization to the magnetic pole of their own true blood and beliefs, assemble to dance with religious fervor around its base upon the green. The missionary fathers discourage such idolatrous practices; but the poor children of the woods play truant, nevertheless, and wander back through the cycle of the centuries to do honour to the old, sweet object of their devotion in the primitive, pagan way. And surely the Great Spirit who watches over white and red man impartially, can scarcely be jealous of this tribute of love to a tree,—the instinctive, race-old festival of a woodland tribe.

There is another pine near Ravalli revered because it recalls the days of the chase. It stands upon the face of a mountain somewhat apart from its brethren of the forest, and there the Bighorn Sheep used to take refuge when pursued. If driven to bay, the leader, followed by his band, leaped to death from this eminence. It is known as the Pine of the Bighorn Sheep.

Thus, it will be seen there lives among the Selish a symbolism, making objects which they love chapters in the great unwritten book, wherein is celebrated the heroic past. He who has the key to that volume of tribe-lore, may learn lessons of valour and achievement, of patience and sacrifice. And colouring the whole story, making beautiful its least phase, is the sentiment of the people, even as the haze is the poetry of the hills.

II

As heroic or disastrous events are celebrated in verbal chronicles it follows that the home of the Selish is storied ground. Before the pressure of civilization, encroaching in ever-narrowing circles upon the hunting-ground of the Indians, cramping and crowding them within a smaller space, driving them inch by inch to the confinement which is their death, the Selish wandered at will over a stretch of country beautiful alike in the reality of its landscape and in the richness of myth and legend which hang over every peak and transfigure every lake and stream. To know this country and the people it has sheltered through past centuries one must first glean something of that ephemeral story-charm which records in crag, in mist, in singing stream and spreading tree the dreams made almost real by the thousands of souls who have treasured them, and given them, lip to lip, from old to young, since the forests were first green upon the hills.

The land of the Selish extended eastward to that portion of the Main Range of the Rocky Mountains known to them as Sin-yal-min, or the "Mountains of the Surrounded," from the fact that once a hunting party surrounded and killed a herd of elk by a stream upon those heights; another time a war-party surrounded and slew a company of Blackfeet within the woods upon the mountain side. Though this range marked the eastern boundary of their territory, they hunted buffalo, as we have seen, still east of its mighty peaks,—a region made bloody by battles between the Selish and the Blackfeet tribes. Westward, they wandered over the fertile valley of Sin-yal-min, where they, in common with the Pend d'Oreilles, Kootanais and Nez Percés enjoyed its fruits and fields of grain. This valley is bounded to the north by the great Flathead Lake, a body of water vast in its sweep, winding through narrow channels among wooded shores ever unfolding new and unexposed vistas as one traverses it. On a calm summer day, when the sun's rays are softened by gossamer veils of haze, the water, the mountain-peaks and sky are faintly traced in shades of grey and faded rose as in mother-of-pearl. And on such days as this, at rare intervals, a strange phenomenon occurs,—the reflection of a reflection. Looking over the rail of a steamer within the semi-circular curve of the swell at its stern, one may see, first the reflection of the shore line, the mountains and trees appearing upside down, then a second shore line perfectly wrought in the mirroring waters right side up, pine-crest touching pine-crest, peak poised against peak. This lake was the Selish's conception of the greatest of waters, for their wandering never took them to the Atlantic or Pacific Seas, and in such small craft as they used to travel over the forty miles of water among serpentining shores, the distance must have seemed immense. Many islands rise from the lake, the largest of them, Wild Horse Island, is timbered and mountainous, and so big as to appear like an arm of the main land. This Wild Horse Island, where in olden days bands of wild horses were found, possesses a peculiar interest. Upon its steep cliffs are hieroglyphics traced in pigments unknown to-day, telling the forgotten story of a lost race. The same strange figures appear upon the sheer escarpments of the mainland shore. These rock-walls are moss-grown and colored by the lichen, chrome yellow, burnt orange, russet-brown and varying shades of bronze-green like Autumn leaves, and upon them broods a shadow as darkly impenetrable as the mystery which they hold. Still, it is easy to distinguish upon the heroic tablets of stone, crude figures of horses and some incomprehensible marks. These writings have been variously interpreted or guessed at. Some declare them to be ancient war signals of the Selish, others suggest that they were records of hunting parties left behind for the guidance and information of the tribe; but they, themselves, deny all knowledge of them, saying that to them as to us, the pictured rocks are a wonder and a riddle, the silent evidence of foot-falls so remote that not even an echo has come down to us through the centuries.

Such are the valley of Sin-yal-min and the Lake of the Flathead where the Selish hunted. But their real home, the seat of their fathers, was the Bitter Root Valley, where one branch of the tribe, headed by Charlot, the son of Victor, lived until the recent exodus. Therefore, the Bitter Root Valley was particularly dear to the hearts of these Indians. It was there the bond between the kindred tribes, the Nez Percés and the Selish, was broken; there the pioneer Fathers came to build the first Mission and plant the first Cross among these docile children of the wood. It was there they clung together like frightened sheep until they were driven forth to seek new homes in the Valley of the Jocko, which was to be merely a station in their enforced retreat.

Eastward and southward from the Bitter Root, the Jocko and the range of Sin-yal-min in the contested country, is a cañon called the Hell Gate, because within its narrow limits, the Blackfeet wreaked vengeance upon their less warlike foes. Flowing through the cañon is a river, In-mis-sou-let-ka, corrupted into Missoula, which bears one of the most beautiful of the Selish legends.

*****

Coyote was taking his way through a pass in the mountains during the ancient days, when there came to him, out of the closed lip of silence, the echo of a sound. He stopped to listen, in doubt if it were the singing of waters or human voices that he heard, and as he listened the echo grew into a reality and the strains of wondrous, weirdly sweet music greeted his ear. He followed the illusive melody, attracted as by magic, and at last he saw upon the flower-sown green a circle of young women, dancing around and around, hand clasped in hand, forming a chain and singing as they danced. They beckoned to Coyote and called unto him, saying:

"Thou art beautiful, O Warrior! and strong as is the sun. Come dance with us and we will sing to thee."

Coyote, like one who walks in his sleep, obeyed them and joined the enchanted circle. Then he perceived that as they danced and sang they drew him closer and closer to a great river that lashed itself into a blind, white fury of foam upon the rocks. Coyote became afraid like a woman. He noted with dread the water-weed in the maidens' hair and the evil beauty of their eyes. He strove to break away but he was powerless to resist them and he felt himself drawn nearer and nearer the roaring torrent, until at last the waters closed over him in whirlpools and he knew no more.

*****

The Fox, who was wise and crafty, passed along the shore and there he found, among the water-weeds and grasses the lifeless body of Coyote which had been cast up by the waters, even as they had engulfed him. The Fox was grieved for he loved Coyote, so he bent over the corpse and brought it back to life. Coyote opened his eyes and saw his friend, but the chill of the water was in his blood and he was numb. Then above the roar of the river, echoed the magical measure of a weird-sweet song and through a green glade came the dancers who had lured Coyote to his death. He rose at the sound of the bewitching melody and strained forward to listen.

"It was they who led me to the river," he cried.

"Aye, truly. They are the water Sirens and thou must destroy them," replied the Fox.

At those words Coyote's heart became inflamed with ire; he grew strong with purpose and crept forward, noiseless as a snake, unobserved by the water-maidens.

They were dancing like a flock of white butterflies upon a stretch of grass yellowed and seared by the heat of the sun. Swiftly and silently Coyote set fire to the grass, imprisoning them in a ring of flame. They saw the wall of fire leap up around them and their singing was changed to cries. They turned hither and thither and sought to fly to the water but the way was barred by the hot red-gold embrace of the fire.

When the flames had passed, Coyote went to the spot where the Sirens had danced, and there upon the blackened ground he found a heap of great, white shells. He took these, the remains of the water-maidens, and cast them into the river, saying as he did so:

"I call thee In-mis-sou-let-ka and thou shalt forever bear that name!"

Thus it was that the river flowing through the Hell Gate came by the title of In-mis-sou-let-ka, which men render into English by the inadequate words of "The River of Awe."

*****

Through the length and breadth of the country are story-bearing land-marks. There is a rock in the Jocko, small of size but of weight so mighty that no Indian, however strong, can move it; there is a mountain which roars and growls like an angry monster; there is a cliff where a brave of the legendary age of heroes battled hand to hand with a grizzly bear, and a thousand other spots, each hallowed by a memory. So, through peak and lowland, rivers and forests one can find the faery-spell of romance, lending the commonest stone individuality and interest. And the most prosaic pilgrim wandering along haunted streams, cooling in the shadow of storied woods and upon the shores of enchanted lakes, must feel the spell of poesy upon him; must look with altered vision upon the whispering trees, listen with quickened hearing to the articulate murmur of the rivers, knowing for a time at least, the subtle fellowship with the woodland which is in the heart of the Indian.

Such is the legended land of the Selish, a land fit for gentle, poetic folk to dwell in, a land worthy for brave and devoted men to lay down their lives to save.

III

Within the Bitter Root Valley dwelt Charlot, Slem-Hak-Kah, "Little Claw of a Grizzly Bear," son of the great chief Victor, "The Lodge Pole," and therefore by hereditary right Head Chief of the Selish tribe. That valley is perhaps the most favoured land of the region. The snow melts earlier within its mountain-bound heart, the blizzard drives less fiercely over its slopes and the Spring comes there sooner, sprinkling the grass with the rose stars of the Bitter Root. Under the guidance of the missionary fathers the Indians learned to till the soil and the bounty of their toil was sufficient, for the rich earth yielded fine crops of grain and fruit. The Indians who sowed and plowed their small garden-spots, and the kindly fathers who watched over their prosperity, little dreamed that in the free gift of the earth and the mild beauty of the land lay the cause which should wreak the red man's ruin. This land was dear to the hearts of the people. Victor, their brave guardian, had saved it for them at the treaty of the Hell Gate when they were called upon to give up part of their territory to the increasing demands of the whites. Those of the dominant race kept coming into the Bitter Root and they were welcomed by the Indians. Thus, bit by bit the valley was taken up, its fame spread and it became a region so desirable that the government determined to move the Selish tribe out of the land of their fathers.

Charlot was a courageous and honest man, a leader worthy of his trust. It was he who met the Nez Percés as they descended into the Bitter Root, headed by Chief Joseph, hot with the lust for the white man's scalp. There are few more dramatic incidents in western history than Charlot's visit to Chief Joseph on the LoLo trail and the ultimatum which he delivered to the leader of the Nez Percé hosts.

He rode forth accompanied by Joe La Mousse and a small war-party, carrying with him a little white boy. About his arm he had tied a snowy handkerchief in token of the peaceful character of his errand. When the two Chiefs, Charlot and Joseph faced each other, Charlot spoke these words, slowly, defiantly as one who has made a great decision:

"Joseph, I have something to say to you. It will be in a few words.

"You know I am not afraid of you.

"You know I can whip you.

"If you are going through the valley you must not hurt any of the whites. If you do you will have me and my people to fight.

"You may camp at my place to-night but to-morrow you must pass on."

And it was as Charlot decreed. Joseph the brave, intractable warrior who did battle with the army of the United States and kept the cleverest of our generals guessing at his strategies, bent to the iron will of Charlot. The Nez Percés passed peacefully through the valley and never a soul was harmed.

In the long, cruel struggle that followed, when Chief Joseph and his braves struck terror to the settlers, leaving death and ruin in their path, Charlot remained staunch and true. Indeed, the boast of the Selish is that they, as a nation, were never guilty of taking a white man's life.

Meantime, while they lived in peace and plenty, the fates had sealed their doom. There is no use reiterating the long, painful story of the treaty between the Selish and the government, ceding to the latter the land where the tribal ancestors lived and died. Charlot declared he did not sign away the birth-right of his people and he was an honourable man. He and his friends went farther and said that his mark was forged. On the other hand some of those who were witnesses for the United States maintain that the name Charlot was written like that of Arlee and others, with a blank space left for the mark, or signature of each Chief. They further state that Charlot never affixed his mark to the document nor was it forged as he asserted to the end. This is at best mere evasion. One of two things happened: a fraudulent signature was put upon the face of the treaty to deceive the government, or Charlot, as Head Chief, was overridden and ignored. Whatever the means employed the outcome was the same. It was an unhappy day for the Indians. They had no recourse but to submit, so most of them headed by Arlee, the War Chief, struck their tipis, abandoned the toil-won fields where they had laboured so long and so patiently, left the shadow of the Cross where they were baptized, and went forth into the Jocko to begin again the struggle which should never be more than a beginning.

Joe La Mousse

But Charlot the royal-blooded, son of a long line of fighting chiefs, was not to be moved by the master-hand like a pawn in a game of chess. He haughtily refused to leave the Bitter Root Valley, telling his people that those of them who wished to go should follow Arlee, but he with a few of the faithful, would lie down to his repose in the land of his fathers beneath peaks that mingle with the sky. With impassive dignity he and a party of his loyal band went to Washington at the bidding of the Great Father to listen to the justice of the white man's claim. Charlot proudly declined to accept pension and authority bought at the price of his exile. He wished only the "poor privilege" of dwelling in the valley where his fathers had dwelt; of resting at last, where they had lain so long. He wanted neither money nor land,—simply permission to live in the home of his childhood, his manhood and old age. He added that he would never be taken alive to the Jocko Reservation. The Powers saw no merit in the sentiment of the old Chief. He had dared to oppose their will and they determined to break his spirit. He might remain in the Bitter Root the All-Wise decreed, but in remaining he relinquished every right. More crushing to him than poverty and exile was the final blow to his pride. In a sense he was King of his tribe. The title of Great Chief descended from father to son, even as the crowns of empires are handed down. The War Chiefs, on the other hand, were elected to command the warriors for a year and at the end of their service they became simple braves again. The government, ignoring the canons of the Selish, put Charlot aside, and Arlee, the Red Night, last of the War Chiefs, took precedence over him and became Head Chief of his nation. Charlot was stripped of his title, his honours, his privileges of land grant and pension; in other words, he was reduced from Great Chief to pauper.

Thus Charlot, who with his braves had defied his kinsfolk, the Nez Percés, to protect the weak colony of settlers in their Bitter Root home was driven forth by these same strangers within his gates, and he, the bravest and best of his kind, shorn of the dignities his forebears and he, himself, had won;—robbed, cast out, was held up to contumely as an unruly savage and spurned by the people his mercy had spared.

From the Bitter Root, the poor wanderers took their way into the Jocko, a region also fair, where some of their tribe already dwelt, and made for themselves new homes. They accepted the change uncomplainingly and set to work to sow and reap in this adopted land.

Charlot and his band of nearly two hundred lingered in the Bitter Root until 1891, when driven by hunger and suffering they followed their tribesmen into the Jocko. He had said he would never be taken alive to the new reservation, nor was he. Clad in his war dress, mounted on his best horse, surrounded by his young men in full war regalia, he rode into exile, proud, unbending as a triumphant Chief entering dominions won by conquest. No expression of pain crossed his bronze-stern face; no hint of humility or subjection softened the majesty of his mien. He and his braves were met by the Selish who had gone before, with great ostentation and ceremony. Charlot never forgot nor forgave. He had been cast out, betrayed, but not conquered.

The Selish have learned to love the soft, yellow-green of the Jocko hills, the free sweep of its prairies, where sun flowers flow in a sea of gold beneath the rushing tide of the summer wind, and the prettily boisterous little Jocko River laughs and plays over its rocky bed between a veritable jungle of trees and vines and flowers. In these woods bordering the stream, the most luscious wild gooseberries, strawberries and bright scarlet brew berries grow—this last, dear to the Indian, is picked by the squaws and made into a sparkling draught. There the trees are hung with dense tapestries of blossoming vines, thick moss deadens the footstep and birds call shrilly from the twilight of the trees. But the Jocko and Sin-yal-min are beautiful and fertile, and wherever there is beauty and fertility there comes the Master saying:

"This is mine by right of might! Go forth again O Indian! There are lean hills and deserts left for thee!"

And the Indian, grown used to such things, folds his tipi and takes his way into the charity of the lessening wilderness.

Not long ago a strange thing came to pass. One evening the sun set in a passion of red and gold. The tide of light pulsed through the skies, the air throbbed and shimmered with it, and every lake and pool reflected its ruddy splendour until they seemed to be filled with blood. The Indians gazed at the spectacle in silent awe. Groups of them on horseback, dark figures silhouetted against the bright sky, stared curiously at the awful glory of the heavens and earth, whispered in low tones together and were afraid. Was the Great Spirit revealing something to his children? Some there were who thought that the crimson banners in the West foretold a disaster and verily it was true. The end was near. The sun was setting forever upon their freedom. Once more the children of the old time would be driven to another camping ground where they might halt for a little space and rest their weary heads before they take up the march upon their endless retreat.

IV

During the Summer at the time when the sun reached his greatest strength, according to the ancient custom, the Selish gathered together to dance. In this celebration is embodied the spirit of the people, their pride, their hates and loves. But this dance had a peculiar significance. It was, perhaps, the last that the tribe will celebrate. Another year the white man will occupy the land, and the free, roving life and its habits will be gone. It was a scene never to be forgotten. Overhead a sky deeply azure at its zenith which mellowed toward the West into a tide of ruddy gold flowing between the blue heavens and the green earth; far, far away, dim, amethyst mountains dreaming in the haze; and through that rose-gold flood of light, sharply outlined against the intense blue above and the tender green below, silent figures on horseback, gay with blankets, beads and buckskins, rode out of the filmy distance into the splendour of the setting sun, and noiselessly took their places around the musicians on the grass.

There were among them the most distinguished men of the tribe. Joe La Mousse, once a warrior of fame, grown to an honored old age, watched the younger generation with the simple dignity which becomes one of his years and rank. He possessed the richest war dress of all, strung with elks' teeth and resplendent with the feathers of the war-eagle. It was he, who with Charlot, met the Nez Percés and repudiated their bloody campaign; he, whose valiant ancestor, Ignace La Mousse, the Iroquois, helped to make glorious the name of his adopted people. François and Kai-Kai-She, the judge, both honoured patriarchs, and Chief Antoine Moise, Callup-Squal-She, "Crane with a ring around his neck," who followed Charlot to Washington on his mission of protest, moved and mingled in the bright patchwork of groups upon the green. There was none more imbued with the spirit of festivity than old François with white hair falling to his bowed shoulders. These and many more there were whose prime had known happier days. Chief Moise's wife, a handsome squaw, rode in with her lord, and conspicuous among the women was a slim wisp of a girl with an oval face, buckskin-colored complexion, and great, dusky, twilight eyes. A pale gray-green blanket was wrapped about her head and body, hanging to her moccasined feet. She was the wife of Michel Kaiser, the young leader of the braves. But towering above the rest of the assembly, regal to the point of austerity, was a man aged but still erect, as though his strength of pride would never let his shoulders stoop beneath the conquering years. He wore his blanket folded closely around him and fanned himself with an eagle's wing, the emblem of the warrior. One eye was hidden beneath a white film which had shut out its sight forever, but the other, coal-black and piercing, met the stranger gaze for gaze, never flinching, never turning aside. It was Charlot. Though an exile, his head was still unbent, his spirit unbroken.

Sometimes we see in the aged, the placid melancholy which comes with the foreknowledge of death, so in the serenely sad faces of the aged Indians, we recognize that greater melancholy which is born of the foreshadowing of racial death. They cherish, too, a more personal grief in that they shall live to see the passing of the old life. Patiently they submitted to the expulsion from the Bitter Root, but now in the darkness of gathering years once more they must strike their tipis to make room for the invading hosts. The setting sun streamed through the leaves and touched the venerable faces with false youth. Wagon and pony discharged their human loads who sat passively, listening to the admonition of the tom-tom and the chant:

"Come, O! ye people! Come and dance!"

After this preliminary measure had lasted hours, not an Indian professed to know whether the people would be moved to dance or not. A race characteristic is that impulse must quicken them to action. It was strange how the tidings had spread. The tipis and lodges are scattered over many miles, but the Indians kept coming as though called up by magic from their hiding places in the hills.

Beneath a clump of cottonwood trees around the tom-tom, a drum made of deer hide stretched over a hollowed section of green tree, sat the four musicians beating the time of the chant with sticks bound in strips of cloth. Of these players one was blind, another aged, and the remaining two, in holiday attire, with painted lips and cheeks, were braves. One of these, seated a trifle higher than his companions, leaned indolently over the tom-tom plying his sticks with careless grace. He possessed a peculiar magnetism which marked him a leader. Occasionally his whole body thrilled with sudden animation, his voice rose into a strident cry, then he relapsed into the languid posture and the bee-like drone. Of all that gathering he was the one perfect, full-blood specimen of a brave in the height of his prime. The dandy, Victor Vanderberg, was handsomer perhaps, and little Jerome had the beauty of a head of Raphael, but this Michel Kaiser was a type apart. His face and slim, nimble hands were the colour of bronze. His nose curved sharply as a hawk's beak, his mouth was compressed in a hard, cold line over his white teeth, his cheek bones were high and prominent, his brows straight, sable strokes above small, bright-black eyes that gleamed keen as arrow darts. His hair was made into two thick braids wrapped around with brown fur, his arms were decorated with bracelets and from his neck hung string upon string of beads falling to his waist. It was he who with suppressed energy flung back his head as he gave the shrill cry and quickened the beat of the tom-tom until louder and louder, faster and faster swelled the chant:

"Come, O! ye people! Come and dance!"

Then out into the open on the green stepped a girl-child scarcely three years of age, who threw herself into rhythmic motion, swaying her small body to the time of the music and bearing in her quavering treble the burden of the chant. The impressive faces of the spectators melted into smiles. She was the pet of the tribe, the orphan granddaughter of Joe La Mousse and his venerable wife. Loving hands had made for her a war dress which she wore with the grave complaisance of one favoured above her peers. She scorned the sedate dances of the squaws and chose the quicker action of the war dance, and she would not yield her possession of the field without a struggle which showed that the spirit of her fighting fathers still lived in her.

Suddenly a brave painted grotesquely, dressed in splendid colours with a curious contrivance fastened about his waist and standing out behind like a tail, bounded into the ring, his hurrying feet beating to the tintinnabulation of sleigh bells attached to his legs. Michel Kaiser and the young man who sat beside him at the tom-tom gave up their places to others, and after disappearing for a moment came forth freed from encumbering blankets, transformed with paint and ornament. A fourth dancer joined them and the awe-begetting war dance began. The movement was one of restrained force. With bent heads and bodies inclined forward, one arm hanging limp and the other resting easily at the back, they tripped along until a war-whoop like an electric shock, sent them springing into the air with faces turned upward and clenched fists uplifted toward the sky.

It was now that Michel stood revealed in all his physical beauty. In colour and form he was like a perfectly wrought bronze statue. He was tall and slender. His arms and legs, metal-hard, were fleet and strong and his every motion expressed agility and grace. He was clad in the full war-dress of the Selish, somewhat the same as that which his ancestors had worn before the coming of the white man. Upon his head was a bonnet of skunk tails that quivered with the slightest motion of his sinewy body. He wore, besides, a shirt, long, fringed buckskin leggins and beaded moccasins. He was decorated with broad anklets and little bells that tinkled as he moved. Of the four dancers Michel sprang highest, swung in most perfect rhythm, spent in that wild carnival most energy and force. Supple and lean as a panther he curvetted and darted; light as the wind his moccasined feet skimmed over the green, scarcely seeming to crush a spear of grass. As he went through that terrible pantomime practiced by his fathers before they set out to kill or die, the fire flashing in his lynx-eyes, his slim arm poised over his head, his whole willow-lithe body swaying to the impulse of the war-lust, it was easy to fancy how that play might become a reality and he who danced to perpetuate an ancient form might turn relentless demon if the intoxication of the war-path once kindled in his veins.

Abraham Isaac and Michel Kaiser

This war dance explained many things. It was a portrayal of the glorious deeds of the warriors, a recitation of victorious achievement, a picture of battle, of striking the body of the fallen enemy—one of the great tests of valor. The act of striking was considered a far more gallant feat than the taking of a scalp. After a foe was shot and had fallen, a brave seeking distinction, dashed forth from his own band into the open field and under the deadly rain of the enemy's arrows, struck with his hand the body of the dead or wounded warrior. In doing this he not only courted the desperate danger of that present moment, but brought upon his head the relentless vengeance of the family, the followers and the tribe of the fallen foe,—vengeance of a kind that can wait for years without growing cold. By such inspiring examples the young men were stirred to emulation. The dance showed, too, how in the past the storm-clouds of war gathered slowly until, with lightning flash and thunder-blast, the warriors lashed themselves to the white-heat of frenzy at which they mocked death. The whole thing seemed to be a marshalling of the passions, a blood-fire as irresistible and sweeping as those floods of flame which lay the forests low.

The warriors ceased their mad career. The sweat streamed from their brows and down their cheeks as they sat beneath the shade trees in repose. Still the tom-tom beat and the chant continued:

"Come, O! ye people! Come and dance!"

They needed no urging now. What did they care for vespers and sermons when the ghostly voices of warrior-ancestors, of forest dwellers and huntsmen came echoing from the lips of the past? Their spirit was aroused and the festival would last until the passion was quenched and their veins were cooled.

The next dance was started by a squaw. It was called the "choosing dance," from the fact that either a man or a woman chose a partner for the figure. The ceremony of invitation was simple. The one who desired to invite another, grasped the individual's arm and said briefly:

"Dance!"

The couples formed two circles around the tom-tom, one within the other, then slowly the two rings moved 'round and 'round, with a kind of short, springing step, droning the never-varying chant. At the end of the dance the one who had chosen his partner presented him with a gift. In some cases a horse or a cow was bestowed and not infrequently blankets and the most cherished bead-work belts and hat-bands. Custom makes the acceptance of these favours compulsory. Even the alien visitors were asked to take part and the Indians laughed like pleased children to welcome them to the dance. One very old squaw, Mrs. "Nine Pipes," took her blanket from her body and her 'kerchief from her head to give to her white partner, and a brave, having chosen a pale-faced lady for the figure, and being depleted in fortune by his generosity at a former festival, borrowed fifty cents from a richer companion to bestow upon her. It was all done in the best of faith and friendliness, with child-like good will and pleasure in the doing.

When the next number was called, those who had been honoured with invitations and gifts returned the compliment. After this was done, the Master of the Dance, Michel Kaiser, stepped into the center of the circle, saying in the deep gutturals of the Selish tongue, with all the pomp of one who makes a proclamation, something which may be broadly rendered into these English words:

"This brave, Jerome, chose for his partner, Mary, and gave to her a belt of beads, and Mary chose for her partner, Jerome, and gave to him a silken scarf."

Around the circumference of the great ring he moved, crying aloud the names of the braves and maids who had joined together in the dance, and holding up to view the presents they had exchanged.

The next in order was a dance of the chase by the four young men who had performed the war dance. In this the hunter and the beast he pursued were impersonated and the pantomime carried out every detail of the fleeing prey and the crafty huntsmen who relentlessly drove him to earth.

The fourth measure was the scalp dance given by the squaws, a rite anciently practiced by the female members of families whose lords had returned victorious from battle, bearing as trophies the scalps of enemies they had slain. It was considered an indignity and a matter of just reproach to her husband or brother, if a squaw were unable to take part in this dance. The scalps captured in war were first displayed outside the lodges of the warriors whose spoil they were, and after a time, when they began to mortify or "break down," as the Indians say, the triumphant squaws gathered them together, threw them into the dust and stamped on them, heaping upon them every insult and in the weird ceremony of that ghoulish dance, consigning them to eternal darkness, for no brave without his scalp could enter the Happy Hunting Ground. The chant changed in this figure. The voices of the women rose in a piercing falsetto, broken by a rapid utterance of the single syllable "la, la" repeated an incredible length of time. The effect was singularly savage and strange, emphasizing the barbarous joy of the vengeful women. As the war dance was the call to battle, this was the aftermath.

In pleasing contrast to this cruel rite was the marriage dance, celebrated by both belles and braves. The young squaws, in their gayest attire, ornamented with the best samples of their bead work and painted bright vermillion about the lips and cheeks, formed a chain around the tom-tom, singing shrilly. Then a brave with a party of his friends stepped within the circle, bearing in his hand a stick, generally a small branch of pine or other native tree. He approached the object of his love and laid the branch on her shoulder. If she rejected his suit she pushed the branch aside and he, with his followers, retired in humiliation and chagrin. It often happened that more than one youth desired the hand of the same maiden, and the place of the rejected lover was taken immediately by a rival who made his prayer. If the maid looked with favor upon him she inclined her head, laying her cheek upon the branch. This was at once the betrothal and the marriage. At the close of the festivities the lover bore her to his lodge and they were considered man and wife.

*****

The sun set mellow rose behind the hills which swam in seas of deepening blue. Twilight unfolded shadows that climbed from the valleys to the peaks and touched them with deadening gray chill, until the warm glow died in the bosom of the night. Still the tom-tom beat, the chant rose and fell, the dancers wheeled on madly, singing as they danced. The darkness thickened. The stars wrote midnight in the sky. Papooses had fallen asleep and women sat mute and tired with watching. By the flare of a camp fire, running in uneven lights over the hurrying figures, one might see four braves leaping and swaying in the war dance. The night wore on. A heavy silence was upon the hills which echoed back the war cry, the tom-tom's throb and the chant. One, then another, then a third dropped out. Still the quivering, sweat-burnished bronze body of Michel writhed and twisted, bent and sprang. The lines of his face had hardened, the vermillion ran down his cheeks in rivulets, as of blood, and the corners of his mouth were drawn like the curves of a bow. The camp fire glowed low. The gray of the dawn came up out of the East with a little shuddering wind and the faint stars burned out. The tom-tom pulsed slower, the chant was broken. Suddenly a wild cry thrilled through the pallid morn. The figure of Michel darted upward like a rocket in a final brilliant gush of life, then fell senseless upon the ground.

The embers grayed to ashes. The last spark was dead. The dance was done. The mists of morning rolled up from the valleys and unfurled their pale shrouds along the peaks, and the Indians, mere shadow-shapes, like phantoms in a dream, stole silently away and vanished with the night.

[ENCHANTED WATERS]

[CHAPTER II]
ENCHANTED WATERS

I

THERE is a lake in the cloistered fastnesses of Sin-yal-min, named by the Jesuit priests St. Mary's, but called by the Indians the Waters of the Forgiven. It is a small body of water overshadowed by abrupt mountains, fed by a beautiful fall and for some reason, impossible to explain, it is haunted by an atmosphere at once ghostly and sad. So potent is this intangible dread, this fear of something unseen, this melancholy begotten of a cause unknown, that every visitor is conscious of it. Most of all, the Indians, impressionable and fanciful as children, feel the weird spell and cherish a legend of it as nebulous as the mists that flutter in pale wraith-shapes across its enchanted depths.

The story goes that once, long ago, someone was killed upon the lake and the troubled spirit returns to haunt the scene of its mortal passing, but the murderer, smitten with remorse and repenting of his crime was finally forgiven by the Great Spirit, and the lake became known as the Waters of the Forgiven. The shadow of that crime has never lifted and it broods forever over the lake's dark face and upon the mountains that hold it in their cup of stone. There the echo is multiplied. If one calls aloud, a chorus of fantastic, mocking voices takes up the sound and it goes crying through the solitude like lost souls in Purgatory. The Waters of the Forgiven exhale their eternal sigh, their pensive gloom, even when the sun rides high in the blue, but to feel the fullness of its spectral melancholy, one must seek it out in the secrecy of night. Then, as the mellow moon rises over the mountain tops laying the pale fingers of its rays suggestively on rock and tree, touching them with magical illusion and transforming them to goblin shapes, one palpitates with strange fear, is impressed with impending disaster. As the moonlight flows in misty streams, sealing ravine and lake-deep in shadow the more intense for the contrast of white, discriminating light that runs quicksilver-like upon the ripples of the water and the quivering needles of the pine, the silence is broken by dismal howls. It is the lean, gray timber wolves. Their mournful cry is flung back again by the ghostly pack that no eye sees and no foot can track. Mountain lions yell shrilly and are answered by distant ones of their kind and inevitably that other lesser cry comes back again and again as though the phantom chorus could never forget nor leave off the burden of that lament. Out of the pregnant darkness into the spectral moonlight shadowy creatures come to the shore to drink. The deer, the bear, sometimes the mountain lion and the elk stalk forth and quench their thirst. These things are strange enough, savage enough to inspire fear, but it is not they, nor the grisly mountains that create the terror which is a phantasm, the dread which is not of flesh nor earth.

No Indian, however brave, pitches his tipi by this lake nor crosses its waters, for among the tangle of weeds in its black, mysterious bosom, water sirens are believed to dwell. Ever watchful of human prey they gaze upward from their mossy couches and if a boatman venture out in his frail canoe, they rise, entwining their strangling, white arms about him, pressing him with kisses poisonous as the serpent's sting, breathing upon him their blighting, deadly-sweet breath that dulls his senses into the oblivion of eternal sleep.

II

The Jocko or Spotted Lakes are enchanted waters also. They lie high up in the crown of the continent—the main range of the Rocky Mountains. To reach them the traveller needs patience and strength of body and soul, for the trail is long and tortuous, winding along the rim of sickening-steep ravines, across treacherous swamps, amid mighty forests to great altitudes. There are three lakes in this group, one above the other, the last being sometimes called the Clearwater Lake because it is within the borders of that terrible wilderness whose savage fastnesses have claimed their prey of lost wanderers.

The first lake is inexpressibly ghostly. The flanks of the mountains rise sheer and frown down on murky waters, leaving scarcely any shore, and around their margin, gray-white drift-wood lies scattered like unburied bones. It is a spectral spot, unearthly, colourless as a moth, preyed upon by a lamentable sadness which broods unbroken in the solitude. There the fox-fire kindles in the darkness, the owl wheels in his midnight flight and pale shades of mist unwind their shroud-like scarfs. It is a pool of the dead, a region of lost hopes and throttling despair.

From this lake the trail bears upward through dense jungles and morasses, venomously beautiful with huge, brilliantly coloured flowers growing to the height of a man. Their scarlet and yellow disks exhale an overpowering fragrance, insidious, almost narcotic in its strength. Beneath rank stalk and leaf, rearing blossom and entangling vine, creeping things with mortal sting dwell in the dank, sultry-sweet shadow. One is dazzled with the colour and the scent; charmed and repelled; tempted on into treacherous sinkholes by a wild extravagance of beauty too wanton to be good.

At length the second lake unfolds itself from the living screen of tree and wooded steep. A point of land, stained blood-red, juts out into the water and over it tumbles and cascades a foam-whitened fall. This stain of crimson is a thick-spun carpet of Indian Paint Brush interwoven with lush grass. The mountains show traces of orange and green, apparently a mineral wash hinting of undiscovered treasure.

Looking into the depths of the lake one is impressed with its freckled appearance. A blotch of milky white, then one of dull yellow mottles the water and even as one watches, a shadow darkens the surface, concentrating, scattering in kaleidoscopic variety, then disappearing as mysteriously as it came. There is no cloud in the sky, nor overhanging tree, nor passing bird to cause that shade without substance. At first it seems inexplicable and the Indians, finding no natural reason for its being, believe it to be the forms of water sirens gliding to and fro. On this account, here as at the Waters of the Forgiven no Indian dares to come alone and even with human company he fears the sirens' spell. For as the victim sleeps they come, drawing closer and breathing his breath until he dies. If one watches patiently he may see that the dark shadows are made by shoals of fish, gathering and dispersing, and in so doing, accentuating and lessening the sable spots. The lake is as uneven in temperature as it is in colour. It has hot pools and icy shallows, so it is probably fed by springs as well as by the torrent which falls from the peaks. A strong, sulphurous odour taints the air; the water is unpleasant to the taste and the sedgy weeds which grow about the shores are stained. And as the waters recede during the summer heat, along the banks, in uneven streaks a mineral deposit traces their retreat. Towards the end of July or August a curious thing may be seen in this Lake of the Jocko. A current eddies around and around in a gigantic whirlpool, transforming it into a mighty funnel with an underground vent. At a considerable distance below a stream bursts forth from the mountain side with terrific energy of pressure and plunges downward in a foaming torrent. It is the Jocko River,—the gentle, merry-voiced Jocko of the prairie which winds its course among lines of friendly trees and blossoms. Who would guess that it drew its nurture from the Lake of the Jocko, siren-haunted, poison-breathed, which careful Indians avoid as a region of the accursed? Still it is so and the menace of that mysterious lake becomes the blessing of the plains.

*****

Such are the Waters of the Forgiven and the Jocko, secure in their solitude, guarded more potently by their spell of evil than by wall of stone or armed hosts, holding within their deep, dark bosoms the charm of the water sirens whose sad, sweet song quavers in the music of fall and stream, whose pallid, white faces flash lily-like from the depths, whose entangling tresses spread in flowing masses of sedgy green.

And of the strange things which have happened on those shores, of the braves lured to the death-sleep on couches of moss and pillows of lily pad, scarcely an echo shrills down from the white-shrouded peaks to give warning to the adventurers who would seek out the awful beauty of those Enchanted Waters.

[LAKE ANGUS McDONALD]

[CHAPTER III]
LAKE ANGUS McDONALD AND THE MAN FOR WHOM IT WAS NAMED

WITHIN the range of Sin-yal-min, which rises abruptly from the valley of the Flathead to altitudes of perpetual snow, in a ravine sunk deep into the heart of the mountains, is Lake Angus McDonald. Though but a few miles distant the bells of Saint Ignatius Mission gather the children of the soil to prayer, no hand has marred the untamed beauty of this lake and its surrounding mountain steeps where the eagle builds his nest in security and the mountain goat and bighorn sheep play unmolested and unafraid.

The prospect is a magnificent one as the roadway uncoils its irregular, tawny length from rolling hills into the level sea of green where only a year or two ago the buffalo grazed in peace. Beyond, the jagged summits of Sin-yal-min toss their crests against the sky, their own impalpable blue a shade more intense than the summer heavens, their silvered pinnacles one with the drifting cloud. A delicate, shimmering thread like the gossamer tissue of a spider's web spins its length from the ethereal brow of the mountains to the lifted arms of the foothills below. The yellow road runs through the valley, passes the emerald patch around the Mission and thence onward to blue shadows of peaks where gorges flow like purple seas and distant trees are points of azure. The swelling foothills bear one up, the valley melts away far beneath and sweet-breathed woods sigh their balsam on the breeze. The pass becomes more difficult, the growth thickens. Among the trees broad-leafed thimble berry, brew berry and goose berry blossom and bear; wild clematis builds pyramids of green and white over the bushes; syringa bursts into pale-starred flower, and a shrub, feathery, delicate, sends forth long, tender stems which break into an intangible mist of bloom.

Suddenly out of the tangled forests, a sheet of water, smooth and clear, appears, spreading its quicksilver depths among peaks that still bear their burden of the glacial age. And in the polished mirror of those waters is reflected the perfect image of its mountain crown. First, the purplish green of timbered slopes, then the naked, beetling crags and deep crevasse with its heart of ice. A heavy silence broods here, broken only by the wildly lonesome cry of the raven quavering in lessening undulations of tone through the recesses of the crags. Two Indians near the shore flit away among the leaves, timid as deer in their native haunts. Such is Lake Angus McDonald, and yonder, presiding over all, shouldering its perpetual burden of ice, is McDonald's Peak. Strangely beautiful are these living monuments to the name and fame of a man, and one naturally asks who was this Angus McDonald that his memory should endure in the eternal mountains within the crystal cup of this snow-fed lake?

The question is worth the answering. Angus McDonald was a Highland Scotchman, sent out into the western wilderness by the Hudson Bay Company. There must have lurked in his robust blood the mastering love of freedom and adventure which led the scions of the House of McDonald to such strange and varied destinies; which made such characters in the Scottish hills as Rob Roy and clothed the kilted clans with a romantic colour totally wanting in their stolid brethren of the Lowlands. In any event, it is certain that Angus McDonald, once within the magic of the wild, flung aside the ties that bound him to the outer world and became in dress, in manner of life and in heart, an Indian. He took unto himself an Indian wife, begot sons who were Indians in colour and form and like his adopted people, he hunted upon the heights, moved his tipi from valley to mountain as capricious notion prompted, and finally made for himself and his family a home in the valley of Sin-yal-min not far below that lake and peak which do honor to his memory. Physically he was a man of towering stature, standing over six feet in his moccasins; his shoulders were broad and he was very erect. His leonine head was clad with a heavy shock of hair, and his beard, during his later years, snow white, hung to his waist. His complexion was ruddy, his eyes, clear, blue and penetrating. A picturesque figure he must have been, clad in full buckskin leggins and shirt with a blanket wrapped around him. He was known among the Indians and whites through the length and breadth of the country about, and no more strange or striking character quickened the adventure-bearing epoch which we call the Early Days.

As he was free to the point of lightness in his nature, trampling down and discarding every shackle of conventionality, he was likewise bound but nominally by the Christian creed. He believed in reincarnation and his one desire was that in the hereafter, when his soul should be sent to tenant the new body, he might be re-born in the form of a wild, white horse, with proud, arched neck and earth-scorning hoofs, dashing wind-swift over the broad prairies into the sheltering hills.

So it seems fitting that McDonald's Peak and Lake should remain untamed even as their namesake; that the eddying whirlpool of life should pass them by and that in their embrace the native creatures should live and range as of yore. And may it be that within those shadowy gorges, remote from the sight and hearing of man, a wild, white horse goes bounding through the night?

[SOME INDIAN MISSIONS]

[CHAPTER IV]
SOME INDIAN MISSIONS OF THE NORTHWEST

MORE than a century after the Spanish Francescans planted the Cross upon the Pacific shores, the French, Belgian and Italian Jesuits or robes noires, took their way into the Northwestern wilderness in response to a cry from the people who lived within its solitudes. Civilization follows the highways of intercourse with the outer world, so the Western coast had passed through the struggle of its beginnings and entered into a period of prosperity and peace, while that territory with the Rocky Mountains as its general center, was still as primeval as when the galleons of Juan de Fuca sailed into Puget Sound.

The mellowness of old romance, the warmth of Latin colour, hang over the Missions of California. The pilgrim lingers reverently in their cloistered recesses, breathing the scent of orange blossoms, reposing in the shade of palm and pepper trees. With the song of the sea in his ears and its sapphire glint in his eye he re-lives the olden days, weaves for himself out of imagination's threads, a picture as harmonious in its tones of faded rose and gray as an ancient tapestry. How much the architectural beauty of these Missions has brought them within the affectionate regard of the people it is hard to say, but undoubtedly it has had an influence. The graceful lines of arch and pillar, the low, broad sweep of roof and corridor, the delicate, yellowish-white of the adobe outlined against a sky of royal blue, stir the sleeping sense of beauty in our hearts and make us pause to worship at such favoured shrines.

It is for precisely the opposite reason that we are drawn to the Missions of the Northwest. Austere, ascetic in form, they make their appeal because of their unadorned simplicity. They were originally the plainest structures of logs, added to as occasion demanded and always constructed of such homely materials as the surrounding country could yield. Hands unaccustomed to other labours than telling the rosary or making the sign of the Cross, hewed forest trees and wrought in wood the symbol of their teaching. No wonder, then, that the buildings were small and crude, but their lack of grandeur was the best testimony to the sacrifice and noble purpose of which they were the emblems. Overlooked, isolated they stand, passed by and all but unknown. Yet they are monuments of heroic achievement and devotion; brave men risked their lives willingly to lay these foundation stones of the faith; bitter struggles were fought and won in their consecrated shadows and upon them is the glamour of thrilling episode.

During the seventeenth century a little band of French missionaries of the order of St. Ignatius journeyed from their native France to Canadian territory with the purpose of spreading the word of God amongst the savages of that benighted land. One of them, Father Ignace Jogues, became the apostle of the Iroquois and died at their hands, a martyr. Strangely enough, his teachings lived after him and were preserved in a measure, at least, by those who had murdered him because of the message he brought.

Years afterwards, about 1815, a small party of Iroquois took their way from the Mission of Caughnawaga, in the neighbourhood of Sault St. Louis, on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, and proceeded, probably in quest of furs, into the little known and perilous ascents of the Rocky Mountains. This party was headed by one Ignace La Mousse, his given name being by a curious coincidence, the same as that of the martyred disciple of the Gospel. He was a man of lordly stature and puissance indomitable. Upon their wanderings they came to Spetlemen, "the place of the Bitter Root," a mild, fair valley where dwelt a folk kindly in their natures, who called themselves the Selish. These people welcomed the Iroquois, made them at home in their lodges and shared with them the sports of the chase until the visiting Indians were visitors no more and claimed no other land than this.

From the lips of Old Ignace, as he was known, the Selish heard of a mysterious faith symbolized by a Cross, a greater medicine than that of any of the tribes, and of pale-faced, sable-robed priests, who, in the olden time, taught that faith and died happily in the teaching.

The Selish practiced a simple, spontaneous kind of paganism. They believed in a Good and Evil Spirit who were constantly at war. These two powers were symbolized by light and darkness and their heroic battle was pictured in the alternate triumph of day and night. If buffalo came in plenty, if elk and moose were slain and the season's yield were rich, then, according to their notion, the Good Spirit was in the ascendency; but if, on the other hand, Winter rode down from the mountains while their larder was low, if fish would not bite and game could not be caught, the influence of the Evil Spirit prevailed. They believed also, in a future existence, happy or miserable according to the merit or demerit of the soul during its mortal life. The worthy shade passed into eternal Summer time, to a land watered by fair streams and green with meadows; in these streams were countless fishes and in the meadows bands of wild horses and endless herds of the beloved buffalo. There the spirit, united with its family, would ride through all eternity, hunting amongst the ghostly flocks in the Summer sun of happy souls. But those who had violated the tenets of the tribe, who had been liars, cowards or otherwise dishonourable, and those negative offenders who had been lacking in love for their wives, husbands and children, had sealed for themselves a bitter fate. These outcasts went to an arctic region of everlasting snow where false fires were kindled to torment their frozen limbs with the mocking promise of warmth. Phantom streams offered their parched lips drink, but as they hastened to the banks to quench their thirst, the elusive waters were ever farther and farther away. So ever and anon, through the years that never seemed to die, the shades were doomed to hurry onward through the night and cold of Winter that knows no Spring, in misery as dark as the shadow engulfing them. The Lands of Good and Evil were separated by savage woods, inhabited by hungry wolves, lithe wild cats and serpents coiled to strike. The wretched sinner in his prison of ice, might after a period of penance, short or long, according to the measure of his offense, expiate his sins and join his brethren in the Happy Hunting Ground.

Besides this general belief held in common by the tribe, they cherished countless myths such as those of the creation and many lesser fanciful legends which formed a part of their religion.

Although these Indians were sincere in this simple, half-poetical mythology, they listened very willingly, like eager children, to Old Ignace, and from him learned to make the sacred sign and repeat the white man's prayer. After knowing something of their mysticism it is not surprising that the greater mysticism of the Catholic Church should appeal to them; that once having heard the story of a faith much in accord with many of their elementary, pre-conceived ideas, they should pursue it tirelessly until they gained that which they most desired.

Time upon time at the councils, the chiefs discussed a means of getting a Black Robe to come to them. At last, in a mighty assembly, Old Ignace arose and proposed that a delegation be sent to St. Louis to pray that an apostle of the church might come to shed the light of the new faith upon the darkness of the Western Woods. A stir of approval ran through the attentive people, for it was a great and daring thing to think of. But who would go? The journey of about two thousand miles lay over barriers of mountains, rushing torrents, virgin forests where the sun never shone, and worst of all, penetrated the country of their hereditary enemies, the Sioux. In spite of these perils, in the breathless quiet of expectation that had hushed the tribe, four braves came forward and volunteered to undertake the quest.

The knights of the olden days, who went forth sheathed in armour, in goodly cavalcades, to the land of the Saracen in search of the Holy Grail, have gathered about their memory the white light of heroism, but if their daring and that of these four were weighed impartially, the Indians would rise higher in the scale of glory. Alone, afoot, armed only with such weapons as their skill could contrive, they started out in the Spring of 1831, and in spite of the death that lurked around them, reached their journey's end with the Autumn. The tragical aftermath of that heroic adventure followed quickly. The dangers overcome, the goal won, they failed. Not one among them could speak a word of French or English. They sought out General Clark who had penetrated into their lands, but what brought them from across the Rocky Mountains, through the teeth of perdition to St. Louis, not even he could guess. Picture the tragedy of being within reach of the treasure and unable to point it out! Through General Clark the four emissaries were conducted to the Catholic Church. Monseigneur, the Bishop, was absent—he whom they had travelled six moons to see. Very soon thereafter, two of the number fell ill as a result of exposure. In their sickness, doomed to die in a strange land far, far from the pleasant glades of their native valley, they made the sign of the Cross and other feeble gestures which some priests who visited them interpreted rightly to be an appeal for baptism and the last rites of the church. The priests accordingly gave them the consolation they prayed for and placed in the hands of each a little crucifix. So rigidly did they press these symbols to their breasts, that they retained them even in death. Still in their final agonies not one word could they tell of that mission for which they were even then yielding up their lives. They died christened Narcisse and Paul and were buried in a Catholic cemetery in the City of St. Louis.

The two survivors, nameless shadows, flitted back into the wild and were lost forever in the darkness. No tidings of them ever reached the waiting tribe, so they, too, sacrificed themselves to a fruitless cause.

After these things had happened a Canadian, familiar with the Indians, informed the good fathers who these children of the forest were and of their devotion to a Faith, the merest glimmering of which had penetrated to their remote and isolated valley. Then a priest of the Cathedral offered to go with one companion to these zealous Indians when the Spring should make possible the desperate trip.

Meantime, the Selish waited long and anxiously for word from their delegation. Michel Insula, or Red Feather, "Little Chief and Great Warrior," small of stature but mighty of spirit, always distinguished by the red feather he wore, hearing that some missionaries were travelling westward, fought his way through the hostile country and arrived at the Green River Rendezvous where Indians, trappers and some Protestant ministers were assembled. Insula was dissatisfied with the ministers because they had wives, wore no black gowns such as Old Ignace described, and carried no crucifix. The symbolism of the Catholic Church had impressed him deeply and he would have no other faith, so he and his band returned to their people to tell them that the robes noires were not yet come and their brave messengers had perished with their mission unfulfilled.

They were resolute men, these Indians, and never faltering, they determined to send another party upon the same sacred quest. This time Old Ignace, he who had first broached the adventure to the council, arose among the chiefs and warriors and offered to go. He took with him his two young sons. The Summer was already well spent, but he and the lads started out undaunted, and after a terrible period of ceaseless travelling, smitten with cold and hunger, they reached St. Louis, and Ignace more favoured than the preceding delegation, made known the wants of his adopted tribe to the Bishop, who listened to him kindly and promised to send a priest among his people.

Ignace and his sons returned safely to the Bitter Root Valley and brought the glad tidings to the Selish. But eighteen moons waxed and waned and though the watchful eyes of the Indians scanned the East, never a pale-faced father in robes of black came out of the land of the sunrise.

The chiefs took counsel again. A third time they determined to make their appeal. Once more Ignace La Mousse led the way and in his charge were three Selish and one Nez Percé brave. They fell in with a little party of white people near Fort Laramie, and uniting forces for greater safety, took up the march together. They journeyed onward unmolested until they came to Ash Hollow in the land of the warlike Sioux. In that fateful place three hundred of the hostile tribe surrounded them. The Sioux, wishing only the scalps of the Selish and Nez Percé, ordered the white men and Old Ignace who was dressed in the garb of civilization, to stand apart. The whites obeyed, but Ignace La Mousse, scorning favour or mercy at the enemy's hands, joined his adopted tribal brethren and fought with them until they all lay dead upon the plains. So ended the third expedition.

Once more news of the bloody death of their heroes reached the Selish. A fourth and last party volunteered to undertake that which now seemed a hopeless charge. Two Iroquois, Young Ignace La Mousse, so called to distinguish him from the elder of the name, whose memory was held honourable by the tribe, and Pierre Gaucher, "Left Handed Peter," set out, joining a party of the Hudson Bay Fur Company's men and making the trip in canoes. They finished the journey in safety and obtained from Monseigneur, the Bishop, the pledge that in the Spring he would send a missionary to the Valley of the Bitter Root. Young Ignace waited at the mouth of Bear River through the Winter in order to be ready to guide the priest to the Selish with the coming of the Spring. Pierre Gaucher returned hot-footed, in triumph, conveying to the tribe the glad tidings that their prayer had been answered; that the Great Black Robe was sending them a disciple to preach the Holy Word. At last, after eight years of waiting, the Selish were to have granted them their hearts' desire. From out of the East the pale-faced, black robed father would come bearing with him the Cross illuminated by the rising sun, casting the benediction of its shadow upon the people and their land.

When the Selish learned from Pierre Gaucher that the robe noire was in reality travelling towards their country even then, the Great Chief assembled his braves and it was decided that the tribe should march forward to meet and welcome their missionary. Accordingly they started in good season and on their way met groups of Kalispehlms, Nez Percés and Pend d'Oreilles, who joined them, swelling their number to about sixteen hundred souls. The ever increasing cavalcade moved on over pass and valley, peak and ford, clad in rich furs, war-eagle feathers and buckskins bright with beads—a gaily coloured column filing through the woods. Finally, in the Pierre Hole Valley they came upon him who was henceforth to be their teacher and guide, Father de Smet, whose memory is held in reverence by the Indians of the present generation.

There was great rejoicing among the Selish, the Nez Percés, the Pend d'Oreilles and the Kalispehlms. They burst into wild shouts of delight, swarming around the pale priest, shaking his hand and bowing down before him. They conducted him to the lodge of the Great Chief, called the "Big Face," whom Father de Smet has described as one "who had the appearance of a patriarch." The Chief made Father de Smet welcome in these words:

"'This day the Great Spirit has accomplished our wishes and our hearts are swelled with joy. Our desire to be instructed was so great that four times had we deputed our people to the Great Black Robe in St. Louis to obtain priests. Now, Father, speak and we will comply with all that you will tell us. Show us the way we have to take to go to the home of the Great Spirit.'"

Thus spake the Big Face, Chief of all the Selish, and there before the assembled peoples of the kindred tribes, he offered to the priest his hereditary honours as ruler. His renunciation was sincere, but Father de Smet replied that he had come merely to teach, not to govern them.

That night in the deepening shadow, the children of the forest gathered together around their new leader and chanted a song of praise. Strange music swelling from untutored lips and awakening hearts into the wild silence which had echoed only the howl of native beasts and the war cry of battle and death! Yet even in that hymn of thanksgiving there was an undertone of unconscious sadness. It was the beginning of a new epoch. The old, poetical wood-myth and paganism were gone; the free range over mountain and plain in the exhilarating chase would slowly give place to the pursuits of husbandry. And this new, shapeless compound of civilization and religion was bringing with its blessings, a burden of obligation and pain. The Indians did not know, the priest himself could not understand, that he was the channel through which these simple, happy folk should embark upon dangerous, devouring seas.

*****

Lake McDonald from McDonald Creek

Father De Smet was a Belgian and he had spent some time with the Pottowatamies, in Kansas. He understood the Indians well and what was most important, he loved them. He remained among the Selish long enough to be assured of their docile nature and sincerity of purpose, then returned to St. Louis to urge the establishment of a permanent mission and to ask for assistance to carry on his work. Monseigneur, the Bishop, listened favourably to his appeal and consequently, in the Spring of 1841, Father De Smet, reinforced with two Italian priests, three lay brothers and some other man, started for the Rocky Mountains. The Selish had promised to meet the party at a given place at the base of the Wind River Mountains, on the first day of July. The Indians waited until they were driven by hunger to hunt in more likely fields. The Fathers, learning of this, sent a messenger to recall them, and they hastened back to greet their apostle and his followers. And of that little band there were Charles and François, the sons of Old Ignace, the Iroquois, Simon, the oldest of the tribe, and Young Ignace of great fame, who, we are told, journeyed for four long days and nights having neither food nor drink, in his haste to make good his promise to meet the robes noires.

So far was the season advanced that the Selish had started on their buffalo hunt. Therefore, the priests whose supplies were exhausted, with their Indian friends, went on to Fort Hall, procured provisions there, and then proceeded to the Beaverhead River to join the tribe. The priests stayed only a few days among the Indians who were absorbed in the chase, and again took up their journey with the Bitter Root valley as the chosen place of permanent rest. There they had determined to build the Mission, "the house of the Great Spirit," and there the Selish promised to join them after the hunt was over in the Fall. Along the course of the Hell Gate River they took their way and at last came safely within the green refuge of the valley to lay down their burden and build their church. They selected a fair spot near the present site of Stevensville and laboured long to fashion the pioneer home of the Faith which they called The Mission of St. Mary's. The good priests went farther still and re-named the valley, the river watering it and the highest peak, St. Mary's, so anxious were they in their zeal to eradicate every trace of the old, pagan beliefs of their converts, even to the names of the valleys, lakes and hills!

The element of incongruity and pity in this, the zealous fathers did not appreciate. That a jagged, beetling crest, the home of the thunder cloud, the womb whence issues glacier and roaring stream, fit to be Jove's dwelling, should bear the mild title of St. Mary's, did not shock their notions of the eternal fitness of things. Happily, the valley with its rose-starred brocade of flowers, is still the Bitter Root and a re-awakening interest is calling the old names from their long oblivion to take their places once again, vesting peak and stream and grassy vale with a significance of meaning totally wanting in the artificial foreign titles forced on them by those who neither knew nor cared for their tradition and sentiment. And even the ancient gods and spirits are no longer despised as evils antagonistic to the salvation of the soul. Lafcadio Hearn expressed pity for the cast-off Shinto gods whose places were usurped by the deities of the Buddhist creed. Likewise, the best Christian amongst us, if he looks beneath the surface into the heart of things, must be conscious of a vague regret for the quaint, mythical lore which cast its glamour over the wilderness; for the poor, vanished phantoms of the wood and the gods who have fallen from their thrones. Sometimes in the remotest mountain solitudes we dare to acknowledge thoughts we would not harbour elsewhere. Under the pensive appeal of the still forests, the heaven-reaching peaks and stream-songs, we wonder if upon the heights, in deep-bosomed caverns, those sad exiles dwell, casting over the cloistered groves a subtle melancholy, evasive as the shadow of a cloud, fleeting as the sigh of the Summer wind.

But the good fathers of St. Mary's had no such thought for the ancient paganism and its symbols. They were busy planting the Cross, building a chapel, the best that their strength and skill could erect, and other structures necessary for their protection and comfort. It was a labour of love, as much a religious rite as the saying of the Mass, and verily, the ring of the hammers must have seemed in the ears of those devoted men, endless aves and pater nosters. Finally the work was done. A comfortable log cabin, large enough to hold nearly the assembled tribe, stood in the valley, and when the Indians returned from the hunt, they were joyful in this, their reward, for all those brave attempts to bring the Light into the Wilderness.

The Mission completed, Father De Smet travelled to Fort Colville in Washington, a journey of more than three hundred miles, to procure seeds and roots, and on his way he stopped among the Kalispehlms, the Pend d'Oreilles and the Cœur d'Alenes, all of whom welcomed him and listened attentively to the message he brought. He took back to his Selish charges at St. Mary's "a few bushels of oats, wheat and potatoes" which he and his brethren sowed. The Indians, like children, watched with wonder, the planting, sprouting, ripening and reaping of the crop, a thing hitherto unknown to them, though husbandry on a small scale had been practiced at an earlier date by some of the Eastern tribes.

But however truly the Indians loved their new teachers, the robes noires, and however sincerely they accepted the tenets of their faith, they still persisted in buffalo hunts, which twice a year took them into the contested country, and upon these expeditions, fired with excitement, alive with all the heritage of passion inspired by the chase, the war path and the intoxication of glory handed down to them through an ancestry so ancient as to be lost in the dimness of beginnings, they forgot for a time, at least, the life of order, industry and religion they had pledged themselves to lead. Therefore, one of the new priests, Father Point, accompanied them on the hunt, but in the abandon of those days when every sense was strained to find the prey, and every nerve was as tense as the bow-string 'ere it speeds the arrow to its mark, it was impossible to preach to them the gentle word of Christianity, so the Fathers gave up these attempts and remained at the Mission awaiting the return of their straying converts, a situation which was to result sadly for St. Mary's. Meantime the work was growing. The Pend d'Oreilles and Cœur d'Alenes had asked for missionary priests and Father De Smet needed more helpers in the new land.

From St. Mary's, the Mother Mission, Father Point and Brother Huet went forth to minister to the Cœur d'Alenes, where they established the Mission of the Sacred Heart. A third Mission, St. Ignatius, was founded amongst the Kalispehlms on the Pend d'Oreille River. With these two offshoots from the parent stem of St. Mary's, it was necessary for Father De Smet to seek re-inforcement abroad, but before he sailed he started westward three new recruits from St. Louis.

It must have been an inspiring sight when this humble priest, fresh from the western woods, the scent of the pines exhaling from him, the breadth of vast distances in his vision, the simplicity of the Indians' racial childhood reflected in his own nature, stood before his August Holiness, Pope Gregory XVI., in the grandeur of the Vatican at Rome, and there, amidst the pomp and ostentation, the wealth and luxury of the headwaters of that Church which sends its streams to the utmost corners of the earth, pled the cause of the lowly Indian. More imposing still, it must have been, when His Holiness arose from his throne and embraced this apostle from the great, New World. The Pope sought to make the priest a bishop, but Father De Smet chose to remain as he was, and certainly in the eyes of unprejudiced laymen, he gained in simple dignity more than he foreswore in ecclesiastical honors.

This trip of Father De Smet to Europe has a peculiar interest in that it was the means of bringing into the West, besides numbers of pioneer Sisters, and clergy, a man so beloved, so revered that his name—Father Ravalli—is known by Catholic and Protestant, Indian and White alike, through the whole of the Rocky Mountain region. Those who knew the gentle old man loved him not only for his spirituality, but for his human sweetness. He possessed that breadth of sympathy which sheds mercy on good and bad equally, commiserating the fallen, pitying the weak. He was a native of Ferrara, Italy, and at a very early age decided to become a missionary priest. That he might be most useful materially as well as religiously, he fitted himself for his work. He graduated in belles lettres, philosophy, the natural sciences, and became a teacher in these branches of learning, in several cities of Italy. Under a skilled physician of Rome he studied medicine; in a mechanic's shop he learned the use of tools; finally, in a studio, he practiced the rudiments of art which he always loved. So he came to the Indians bringing with him great human kindliness, and the knowledge of crafts and homely pursuits that made their lives more easy and independent. It was he who devised the first crude mill, the means of giving the people flour and bread, he who by a hundred ingenious devices lightened the burden of their toil. But most of all was his practice of medicine a mercy. To stricken infancy or old age he was alike attentive; to dying Christians he bent with ready ear and alleviating touch, or as compassionately eased the last throes of highwaymen, heretic or murderer. Over the bleak, snowy passes of the mountains, heedless of hardship or danger, he hurried in answer to the appeal of the sick, no matter who they were or where they dwelt. And though often those who went before or came after him were robbed, he was never molested. The most desperate of the "road agents" respected him and suffered him to pass in peace on his way. Gently brave, like the good bishop in Les Miserables, his very trustfulness was his safeguard. Perhaps as striking an example of his forethought as we can find is the fact that he trained a squaw to give intelligent care to women in the throes of childbirth. There is no record of the mothers and babes spared thus, but there were many, and even the letter of the monkish law never stayed his helping hand or curbed his humane devotion. The more ascetic brethren who lived in colder spiritual altitudes, looked doubtfully upon Father Ravalli's impartial ministry; the more astute financiers who held the keys to the Church's coffers, frowned upon his unrewarded toil, and there comes a whisper through the years that there were times when he was an object of charity because he never asked reward for the surcease of suffering his patient vigils brought.

He travelled from one to another of the Northwestern missions and even to Santa Clara, California, but he is known best and loved most as the Apostle of the Selish at St. Mary's. Indeed, looking back through the perspective of time at the plain, little Mission crowned as with an aureole, one figure stands out clearly among the pious priests, who, in turn, presided at its altar, and this figure is Father Ravalli.

His grave, marked by a shaft of stone, is within the shadow of the church in the valley of the Bitter Root, and it was fitting he should lie down to rest where he had laboured so long and lovingly. A generation hence, when the hallowed places of the West become shrines about which pilgrims shall gather reverently, this mountain-tomb of the gentle old priest will be visited and written of. Meantime, he sleeps as sweetly for the solitude, and those whose lives he made more beautiful by his presence think of him at peace as they turn their eyes heavenward to the infinite rosary of the stars.

In spite of the progress of the beneficent work and the fresh blood that had infused new strength into the cause, dark days were to cast their shadow upon the little Mission of St. Mary's. No power could restrain the Selish from the chase, and during their absence twice a year, the colony left behind, consisting only of the priest and those too aged or sick to follow the tribe, were menaced by the Blackfeet and Bannock Indians. The old feud was fanned red hot by the Selish killing two Blackfeet warriors who invaded the very boundaries of the Mission with hostile intent. The threats from the Blackfeet became more terrible. They lurked in the thick timber and brush around the stockade which enclosed the Mission, and, finally, while the tribe was absent on a buffalo hunt, a rumour reached the anxious watchers that the hostiles would descend in a great war party upon the defenseless community. And indeed, they were roused by war whoop and savage yell to see swarming around their weak barricade, the dreaded enemy. Father Ravalli was in charge of the Mission at that time and he and his companions prepared themselves for the death which seemed inevitable. But the Blackfeet, probably seeing that only a man stricken with years, two young boys and a few aged women and little children were all of their hated foe who remained at St. Mary's, retreated to the brush. One of the two boys ventured to the gate to make sure the Blackfeet were gone and was shot dead. This tragical incident and the more awful menace it carried with it to those who were left at the mercy of the invading tribes, and another reason we shall now consider, led to the temporary abandonment of St. Mary's.

In those early days, the missions being the only habitations within many hundreds of miles, became the refuge and abiding place during bitter weather, of French-Canadian and mixed breed trappers, who in milder seasons ranged over the mountains and plains in pursuit of furs. These half-savage men were undoubtedly a picturesque part of the old, woodland life and their uncouth figures lent animation and colour to the quiet monotone of the religious communities. In the first quarter of the last century we find mention of French-Canadians employed by the Missouri Fur Company, appearing on New Year's Eve, clad in bison robes, painted like Indians, dancing La Gignolee to the music of tinkling bells fastened to their dress, for gifts of meat and drink. These trappers were, in the day of St. Mary's Mission, a licentious, roistering band with easy morals, consciences long since gone to sleep, who did not hesitate to debauch the Indians, and who feared neither man nor devil. They went to St. Mary's as to other shrines, and under the pretext of practicing their religion, lived on the missionaries' scanty stores and filled the idle hours with illicit pastimes. It is said that they became revengeful because of the coolness of their reception by the priests, and maliciously set about to poison the Selish against the beloved robes noires. However this may be, whether the wayward, capricious children strayed or not, it is certain that they would not sacrifice the buffalo hunt for priest nor promise of salvation, so the Mission was dismantled and leased; its poor effects packed and the Apostles of the Faith started out again to seek refuge in new fields. At Hell's Gate, the inferno of the Blackfeet, they parted; Father Ravalli to wend his way to the Mission of the Sacred Heart among the Cœur d'Alenes; the rest, under the escort and protection of Victor, the Lodge Pole, Great Chief of the Selish and father of Charlot, followed the Coriacan defile to the Jocko River and finally arrived at St. Ignatius, the Mission of the Kalispehlms.

For a time we leave St. Mary's in the sad oblivion of desertion, while those who had tended its altar, poor pilgrims, toiled over diverse trails toward different destinations.

It is not necessary to follow the varying fortunes of the few, small missions in the Northwestern wilderness, included then within the vast territory called Oregon. Each has its pathetic story of privation and danger, which may be found complete and detailed in ecclesiastical histories written by priests of the order.

We shall pass on to the Mission of St. Ignatius, whither the party from St. Mary's sought refuge, which, in the course of time absorbed some of the lesser institutions and became, as we shall see, the religious center of several tribes. The Mission of St. Ignatius was the same founded by Father Point on the banks of the Pend d'Oreille River among the Kalispehlms in the year 1844. The original location proved undesirable, so ten years later the Mission was moved to a site chosen by the advice of Alexander, Chief of the tribe. A wonderful revelation it must have been when the Indian guide, leading the priests through a pass in the mountains, the secret of his people, showed them the vast sea of flowing green—the valley of Sin-yal-min—barred to the East by the range of the same name. There ever-changing shades of violet and lights of gold altered the mien of these mountains whose jagged peaks showed white with snow, from whose deep bosoms burst a water-fall plunging from mighty altitudes into the emerald bowl of the valley. This was veritably a kingdom in itself, and no white man had trodden the thick embroidery of wild flowers and grass. It had been a gathering place for many tribes. Within its luxuriantly fruitful limits, berries and roots grew in plenty and game abounded in the neighbouring hills.

In the very palm of Sin-yal-min the new Mission of St. Ignatius was builded. There could scarcely have been a more ideal spot for church and school, forming the nucleus of an agricultural community. There gathered parties of the upper and lower Kalisphelms, upper Kootenais, Flat Bowes, Pend d'Oreilles and Selish, to pitch their tipis in the shadow of the Mission Cross. Many of these Indians made for themselves little farms where they laboured and lived. Entire families of Selish moved from the Bitter Root valley to be near the robes noires they loved. St. Ignatius possessed an advantage that bound the Indians to it by permanent ties and that was its schools. Four pioneer Sisters travelling into the Rocky Mountain region under the guidance of two priests and two laymen, from their home mission in Montreal, founded at St. Ignatius the first girls' school among the Indians of the territory. Not long thereafter the priests established a similar school for boys, where they taught not only the French and English languages and the rudiments of a simple education, but also such handicrafts as seemed most necessary to the development of industry. In saddle-making particularly, the boys excelled, and wonderful specimens of leather work have gone forth from the Mission shops. Thus, largely through its practical industry St. Ignatius grew into a powerful institution. Building after building was added to the group until a beautiful village sprang up, half hidden among clumps of trees and generous vines. On the outskirts of this community rows of tiny, low, thatch-roofed log cabins were built by the Indians to shelter them when they assembled to celebrate such feasts as Christmas, Good Friday and that of St. Ignatius, their patron Saint.

The fates favoured St. Ignatius. In the year of its removal the Hell's Gate treaty was signed wherein the bounds of the reservation were re-adjusted, making the new mission the center of that rich dominion. The treaty of the Hell Gate, participated in by the Selish, the Pend d'Oreilles and some of the Kootenais, was the same, it may be remembered, wherein Victor, the father of Charlot, insisted upon retaining possession of the Bitter Root Valley "above the LoLo Fork" for himself and his people, unless after a fair survey by the United States, the President should deem it best to move the tribe to the Jocko. This agreement was entered into in 1855. Seventeen years went by. The Indians declare that no survey was ever made during that time nor were they furnished with school teachers, skilled artisans and agriculturalists to instruct them, as had been promised on the part of the government. Summarily the Selish were called upon to sign a second agreement, the Garfield treaty, which deprived them of their ancestral home and drove them forth to share the Jocko Reservation in common with the allied tribes. This was at once an impetus to the fortunes of St. Ignatius and a mortal blow to St. Mary's.

That pioneer shrine, abandoned on account of the depredations of the Blackfeet, remained dark and silent for sixteen years. The Selish mourned the loss of their friends and teachers, the robes noires. In spite of the absence of the church's influence, save such intermittent inspiration as the occasional visit of a priest, the Selish prayed and waited. And surely, poor, impulsive children that they were, if they had been misled by tale-bearing, mixed breed trappers, their digression was dearly expiated. During those sixteen years they remained faithful to the cause which four delegations of their number had braved danger, privation and death to win.

In the meantime the West was changing. The first stern, ascetic days were passing when the best of men's characters was called into active existence to cope with immediate hardship; when every nerve rang true, tuned to the highest bravery and that magnificent indifference to death which makes heroes. The cry of gold ran through the length and breadth of the land and the headlong rush of adventurers, good and bad, from the four corners of the earth, all bent on wealth, changed the spirit of the western world. In that mad stampede, men, spurred by the lust of gain, pushed and crowded each other, and with such competition, who thought of or cared for the Indian? His day was done; the accomplishment of his ruin was merely a matter of years. Moreover, the lower element of the reckless, pillaging crew of gold seekers brought with it the vices of civilization—drink and the game.

Change the ideal which inspires a deed and the deed itself is changed. That first, stern West which taught men not to fear by surrounding them with danger, made heroes of them because they had braved the unknown for some noble purpose, religion, the simple love of Nature or another reason as good; but in these altered conditions where debauching gain was the one object of their quest, though they spurned death as the pathfinders had done, their bravery sank to bravado and dare-deviltry because their purpose was sordid.

With this invasion of the wilderness the whole aspect of the mission work underwent a change. The masked man on horseback stalked the trails; the bizarre glamour of the dance hall flaunted its coarse gaiety in the mushroom camps' thronged streets; the saloon and gaming house brought temptation to the Indian, and generally he fell. It was also true that in more than one instance the precedent of bloodshed was set by brigand whites, sowing the seeds which were later to bear a red harvest of war.

So, when St. Mary's opened her doors in 1869, it was upon a period of transition. If the placid image of Our Lady, looking through half closed eyelids, could have seen and understood the metamorphosis what a shock would have smitten her sainted soul! The painted, war-bent Blackfeet were gone far back into their fastnesses, but here and there, thick and fast, came the white settler, peaceful, cold, inevitable, overwhelming, bringing ruin to the old life and its people—the beginning of the end. And that calm, just Mother of Mankind would have seen the timid shadow-shapes of the Selish melting into the gathering twilight, at once welcoming the stranger to the land and relinquishing it to him, retiring step by step before the great, white inundation. It is useless to prolong the story. The climax had to come, and come it did, swiftly, cruelly, with a dark hint of treachery that we, of the superior race are too willing to excuse and condone. By the Garfield Treaty, which, by a curious anomaly, never very lucidly explained, bears the sign of Charlot, son of Victor, hereditary chief of the Selish, that he, a man in his sane senses swears he never signed, the tribe renounced all claim to the land of their fathers and consented to betake themselves to the Jocko reservation. During the twenty-two years of the existence of St. Mary's as an Indian Mission, after its second opening, the fathers, among them Father Ravalli, watched over and tended their decreasing charge. The numbers of the red hosts dwindled; the falling off of the people through new and unnatural conditions thinned their ranks, but surer still, was the admixture of the white strain, so corrupting in most cases to the unfortunate in whom the two race strains commingle. But in spite of the Garfield Treaty, notwithstanding the exodus of the main body of the Selish, St. Mary's faithful to the end, drew to her little altar the last, failing remnant of the tribe—the splendidly defiant Charlot and his band. At last, in 1891, they accepted the inevitable and rode away to the land of their exile resigning to the conquering race their blood-right to the Bitter Root. This was the death of St. Mary's. It remained standing, a church of the whites, but an Indian mission no more. In looking back through the years, their mercies and their cruelties, it is a sorrowfully sweet thing to remember that Father Ravalli, guardian spirit of the Selish, lay down to rest before the ultimate change, the final expulsion, while the first light of the wilderness from the altar of St. Mary's still shone, however faintly, to show the way.

The sequel of St. Ignatius is, happily, less pathetic in its unfolding. The life that ebbed from St. Mary's flowed amply into the newer Mission's growing strength and to-day it stands, substantial and prosperous in the valley of Sin-yal-min. Though the same tragedy is about to be enacted, the expulsion, less summary, leaving to the individual Indian his garden patch, St. Ignatius remains a beacon to the dusky hosts, poor frightened children who cling to this last hope, promising as it does a happiness born of suffering, an ultimate reward which not even the white man can take away. A handsome new church, frescoed by an Italian brother, does service instead of the old chapel, venerable with age that hides behind the sheltering trees. In front of the modern church stands the great, wooden Cross erected by the early fathers, which the Indians kneel to kiss before they go to Mass. And to the right, covered with wild grass, and that neglect of which such vagrant growths are the emblem, is the old cemetery where so many weary pilgrims who travelled long and painfully over difficult trails, have sought peace past the power of dreams to disturb.

Here, as we have seen, upon feast days the Indians come, the scattered bands gathering from mountain and valley, clad in gala attire. Their ranks are thinning fast. The once populous nation of the Selish is shrunk to between three and four hundred souls, still the little village often holds a thousand Indians all told, from the different neighbouring tribes. And sometimes, bands from far away, distinguished by diversified language, curious basketry and articles of handicraft, come as spectators to the feasts.

Until a few years ago these religious festivals were preceded by solemn rites of expiation. A kind of open air court was held, the chiefs sitting in judgment upon all offenders and acting in the capacity of judges. The whole tribe assembled to watch with impassive gravity the austere spectacle of the accusation, sentence and chastisement of those who had broken the law. All malefactors were either brought before the chiefs, or spurred by conscience, they came forward voluntarily, confessed their guilt and prayed to be expurgated of sin through the sting of the lash. When the accusations and confessions were finished, the multitude dropped upon their knees and prayed. Then those arraigned were examined and such of them as the chiefs decreed guilty, were sentenced and immediately suffered the penalty. A blanket was spread upon the earth and the offender lay on this, his back exposed to the raw-hide lash which marked in welt-raising strokes the degree of his transgression. Even while he smarted, never wincing under this ordeal, the spectators at the bidding of the chiefs, prayed once again for the culprit's reformation and forgiveness. Such was the practice of the Selish handed down from the earliest days. The time and place of the chastisement were regulated in these later years by the Catholic festivals, but public punishment with the lash was a custom of the tribe before the missionaries penetrated the West. The confession, the judgment and the whipping they believed to be a complete expiation; having suffered, the sin-soiled were made clean, and thus purified, they met and mingled with the best of their brethren on equal terms, without further reproach. This was a simple and summary form of justice, suited to the people whom it controlled,—was in fact the natural outgrowth of their moral and ethical code—and it is a pity that the ancient law, together with much besides that was desirable in the pristine life of the Indian, has been stamped out beneath the master's iron heel.

One cannot take leave of the missions of the Northwest without looking back upon Father De Smet, their founder, and the work which he began. Through his devotion missions were established among many different nations, even the unyielding Blackfeet falling under the spell of gentleness. And he who lived most of his life either in the wilderness or labouring elsewhere for what he believed to be the salvation of its benighted children, died at last at St. Louis in 1873, after meditative and reminiscent years spent in recording his travels and his triumphs.

There are some subtle questions crying out of the silence which are not to be pushed back unspoken, even though we can find no answer to their riddle. How far have the missionaries succeeded? If completely, why does the Christian Indian still dance to the Sun? And did those Fathers in their errand of mercy blindly pass to the people they would fain have saved from annihilation the fate they strove to spare them from? Who can say?

The Indians were probably in their racial infancy when the maturer ranks marched in and absorbed, or otherwise destroyed them. It would seem that with them it is a case of arrested development. If left to themselves, through centuries they might have brought forth a civilization diametrically opposite to our own. That they never could nor can assimilate or profit by our social and educational methods has been sufficiently proved. Their race instincts are essentially as foreign to ours as those of the Hindu, and their evolution must have necessarily proceeded along totally different lines. The Indians were decreed to work out their own salvation or die, and the latter thing has come to pass. One might go on painting mental pictures of what would have been the result if the free, forest-born red race had thrived and grown into maturity. Certainly in their decadence, their spirit-broken second childhood, we find the germ of an original moral sense, of tradition and poetry, even of religion, which might have borne rich fruit.

The Oriental is to us an enigma, and we recognize in his makeup psychic qualities but slightly hinted of in ourselves. So in the Indian we must acknowledge a race of distinct and separate values that we can never wholly know or understand. The races are products of countless centuries begotten of habit and environment; we cannot put aside these growth-accumulations builded like the rings of the pine, nor can we take that which the Creator made and re-create it to suit our finite ends. Therefore, instead of helping the Indian we are merely killing him, kindly perhaps, with comforts, colleges and sacraments, but none the less surely striking at his life.

And though they are still amongst us, picturesque figures which we value chiefly as relics of a gaily-coloured past, the Indians are the mystery of our continent. They speak to us, they smile at us, they sit within our churches and use our tongue, but for all that they remain forever strangers. What pagan beliefs vibrating through the chain of unrecorded ancestry, what hates, loves, aspirations and bitter griefs, separate from our comprehension as the poles, thrill out of the darkness of yesterday and die unspoken, unformed, beneath those calm, bronze brows? They are a problem to be studied, never solved; a riddle one with the Sphinx, the Cliff Dwellers and the Aztec ruins. For, after all is said, what do even the good Fathers, with candle, crucifix and creed, know of their primal souls, of the unsounded depths of their hearts?

[THE PEOPLE OF THE LEAVES]

Francois

[CHAPTER V]
THE PEOPLE OF THE LEAVES

AMONG the early Canadian French the Sioux were known as the Gens des Feuilles, or People of the Leaves. This poetical title seems very obscure in its meaning, at first, but it may have originated in a legend of the Creation which is as follows:

In the ultimate Beginning, the Great Spirit made the world. Under his potent, life-giving heat the seeds within the soil burst into bloom and the earth was peopled with trees—trees of many kinds and forms, the regal pine and cedar in evergreen beauty and the other hosts whose leaves bud with the Spring, change with the Autumn and die with the Winter's snow. These trees were all possessed of souls and some of them yearned to be free. The Great Spirit, from his throne in the blue skies, penetrating the slightest shadow of a leaf, divining the least unfolding of a bud with his all-seeing, omnipotently sensitive beams radiating like nerves from his golden heart, perceived the sorrow of the sighing forests and mourned with tears of rain at their discontent. Then he knew that a world of trees, however beautiful, was not complete and he loosed the souls from their prisons of bark and limb and re-created them in the form of Indians, who lived in the shelter of the woods, knit to them by the eternal kinship of primal soul-source—verily the People of the Leaves.

*****

It is not strange that among a nation which adored the sun, the chief ceremony should have been the Sun Dance, at once a propitiatory offering to the Great Spirit and a public test of metal before a young man could become a brave. The custom was an ancient one, as ancient, perhaps, as the legend of the leaves, and in the accounts of the earliest explorers and missionaries we read of this dance to the sun; of the physical heroism which was the fruit of the torture and filled the ranks of soldiery with men Spartan in fine scorn of pain and contempt of death. It is interesting to trace similar practices in races widely separate in origin, habits and beliefs, and it seems curious that this rite of initiation into the honourable host of the braves, however dissimilar in outer form, was not totally unlike in spirit the test of knighthood for the hallowed circle of the Table Round.

The festival of the Sun Dance was celebrated every year in the month of July, when the omnipotent orb reached his greatest strength, is, indeed, still celebrated, but without the torture which was its reason for being. A pole was driven deep and solid in the ground and from the top, somewhat after the manner of a May-pole, long, stout thongs depended. After incantations by the Medicine Men, the youths desiring to distinguish themselves came forward in the presence of the assembled multitude, to receive the torture which should condemn them as squaw men or entitle them to fold their blankets as braves.

With a scalping knife the skin was slit over each breast and raised so a thong from the pole could pass beneath and be fastened to the strip of flesh. When all were bound thus, the dance began to the time of a tom-tom and the chant. Goaded by pride into a kind of frenzy the novices danced faster, more wildly, leaping higher, bending lower, until they tore the cords loose from their bleeding bosoms and were free. If, during the ordeal, one fainted or yielded in any way to the agony, he was disgraced before his tribe, cast out as a white-hearted squaw man until the next year's festival, when he might try to wipe out the stain and enter the band of the brave. If, on the other hand, all the young men bore the torture without flinching, their spirits rising superior to all bodily pain, they were received as warriors and earned the right to wear the medicine bag. Often one of greater puissance than his fellows wished further to distinguish himself by a test extraordinary and submitted to a second torture more heroic than the first. He suffered the skin over his shoulder blades to be slit as his breast had been and through these gashes thongs were drawn and fastened as before, but this time the ends were attached to a sacred bison's skull, kept for the purpose, which the brave dragged over rough, rocky ground and through underbrush, until his strained flesh gave way and freed him of his burden. This feat entitled him to additional honors and he was respected and held worthy by the great men of the tribe.

After the torture, when a youth was declared a brave he retired to the wilderness, there in solitude to await the message of the Great Spirit which would reveal to him his medicine, or charm.

This "making medicine" as it was called, was a rite of most solemn sacredness and secrecy and therefore shrouded in mystery. From the lips of one who, in days past, when the ancient customs were rigidly preserved, followed and watched a newly made brave, the ensuing narrative was gleaned.

After dark the young Indian took his way cautiously far off into silent, unpeopled places where sharp escarpments cut like cameos against the sky. There, poised upon the cliffs, his slim figure silhouetted against the moonlit clouds, he remained rigid as a statue through long hours, waiting for the Voice from Above by whose revelation he should learn wherein his power lay. Then lifting his arms towards the heavens he made strange signs to the watchful stars. So he remained 'till dawn paled from the East, when, having received his message, he went forth to seek the animal which should hereafter be his manitou, or guardian spirit. Sometimes it was the bison, the elk, the beaver, the weasel or other beast of his native wild. Into his bag he put a tooth or claw and some fur of the chosen creature, with herbs which might be propitious. Such was his charm, his medicine-bag, the source of his valour and safety, to be worn sleeping and waking, in peace and in war; to be guarded with his life and to go with him in death back to the Great Spirit by whom it was ordained.

If a warrior lost his medicine-bag in battle, he became an outcast among his people and his disgrace was not to be wiped out until he slew and took from an enemy's body the medicine-bag which replaced his own and thus retrieved his honour.

Of all the quaint ceremonies connected with the old wood-worship and sun-worship, combining the idea of Beginning and End, of pre-existence and after-existence, none are more interesting than the rites attending the burial of the dead. As the Indians sprang from the forest trees, according to the myth of the leaves, lived in the shadow of the pleasant woods, so at last, they were received into the strong, embracing branches that tossed over them in wild gestures when the Great Spirit spoke in anger from the sky; that tempered the Summer's heat into cooling shadow for their repose; that shed their gift of crimson leaves upon the Indians' devoted heads even as they, themselves, must shed the garb of flesh before the blast of death. Or, sometimes, the dead were exalted upon a naked rock, rising above earth's levels toward the sun. Wherever his resting place might be, the dead man sat upright, if a brave, dressed in his full war regalia, surrounded by his most prized possessions and if he owned a horse, it was shot so its shade might bear his spirit on the long, dark, devious way to the Happy Hunting Ground. No mournful ghost who met his death in darkness could ever bask in the celestial light of endless Summer-time; he was doomed to become a phantom living in perpetual night. That is the reason none but forced battles were fought after dark; the bravest of the braves feared the curse of everlasting shadow. They believed, too, that no warrior who lost his scalp could enter the fields of the glorious; hence the taking of an enemy's scalp at once killed and damned him. The suicide was likewise barred from Paradise.

*****

Years ago, when the feuds of the hostile tribes still broke into the red vengeance of the war-path, the Sioux and Cheyennes did battle with the Gros Ventres at Squaw Butte, and by some mischance a medicine man of the Sioux, not engaged in the combat, whose generalship lay in marshalling the manitous to the aid of his people, was killed. A traveller, journeying alone in the mountains, found him high upon a cliff with his blanket and war dress tumbling about his bleaching bones, his medicine-bag and all the emblems of his magic preserved intact. In the bag was a grizzly bear's claw, an elk's tooth, and among other trinkets, a small, smooth brass button of the kind worn by the rivermen trading up and down the Missouri River between the East and the savage West. It would be interesting to trace the migrations and transfiguration of that little button from its existence as an humble article of dress to the dignity of a charm in the medicine-bag of the old magician on that isolated cliff. And the Master of Magic himself; he of prophetic powers and knowledge born of intercourse with the gods; there he sat, an arrow through his skull, his blind, eyeless sockets uplifted to the sun, his necromancy unavailing, his wisdom but a dream! In that remote home which his devoted tribesmen chose for him, no irreverent hand had disturbed his watch, and he is probably still sitting, sitting with blind eyes toward the sun while eagles circle overhead and gray wolves howl to the moon. The years pass on unheeded, the face of the land has changed, is changing, will change, and the rustling, swirling leaves of Autumn fall thick and fast. Mayhap, after all, the old Magic Master, keeping his eternal vigil, may see from beyond the flesh the thinning woods and the dead leaves dropping from the trees; hear their weary rustle—poor ghosts, as they flutter before the wintry wind. And among the lessening trees, also driven by the Northern blast, does he see also, a gaunt and silent troop of phantoms—mere Autumn leaves—whirling away before the Storm?

[THE PASSING BUFFALO]

[CHAPTER VI]
THE PASSING BUFFALO

I

IT was summertime in the mountains—that short, passionate burst of warm life between the long seasons of the snow. The world lay panting in the white light of the sun, over gorge and pine-clad hill floated streamers of haze, and along the ground slanted thin, blue shadows. The sky pulsed in ether waves and the distant peaks, azure also, with traceries of silver, were as dim as the memory of a dream. In this untrodden wilderness the passing years have left no record save in the gradual growth of forest trees, and in its rugged beauty it is the same as a century ago. Therefore time itself seems arrested, and it is scarcely strange to come upon a buffalo skull naked and bleached by sun and rain, and close by, half hidden in the loose rocks, an arrow head of pure, black obsidian.

This, then, was once the scene of a brave chase when wind-swift Indians pursued mad, hurtling herds over mountain slope and plain. These empty fastnesses thrilled to the shock of thousands of beating hoofs, these hills flung back the echo to the brooding silence as the black tide flowed on, pressed by deadly huntsmen armed with barb and bow. And even then, far over the horizon, unseen by hunted and hunters, silent as the shadow of a cloud, inevitable as destiny, came the White Race, moving swifter than either one, driving them unawares toward the great abyss where they should vanish forever into the Happy Hunting Ground, lighted by perpetual Summer and peopled by immortal herds and tribes.

II

In such a remote and deserted place as this, no great effort of the imagination is needed to call up the shades of those who once inhabited it, to react their part in the tragedy of progress. Let us fancy that a riper, richer glow is upon the mountains, that the white light of the sun has deepened into an amber flood which quivers between the arch of lapis-lazuli sky and the warm, balsam-scented earth that sighs forth the life of the woods. Already the trees not of the evergreen kind are hung with bewilderingly gorgeous leaves of scarlet, russet-brown and yellowing green; the haze has grown denser and its ghostly presence insinuates itself among the very needles of the pines. It is Autumn. The gush of life has reached its climax and is ebbing. High on the steepled mountains is a wreath of filmy white that trails low in the ravines. It seems as fragile as a bridal veil, but it is the foreword of Winter which will soon descend with driving blast and piping gale, lancing sleet and enshrouding snow to chill the last red ember-glow of the brilliant autumnal days. It was at this time that the Indian's blood ran hot with longing for the hunt. Lodges were abandoned and only those too weak to stand the hardship of the march were left behind. Chiefs and braves, women and children struck out for the haunts of the buffalo where the fat herds grazed before the impending cold.

These children of the forest sought their prey with the woodcraft handed down from old to young through unnumbered generations. Indeed, it was necessary for them to outwit the game by strategy in the early days before the wealthy and progressive Nez Percé Kayuses, who were first to break the wild horses of the western plains, brought the domesticated pony among them. In passing, it is interesting to know that the term "cayuse" applied to all Indian horses, had its origin with this tribe, since the chief article of trade of the Kayuses was the horse, the horse of Indian commerce became known as a "cayuse." The Selish used the method of the stockade. After the march into the buffalo country, they camped in a spot where they could easily fashion an enclosed park by means of barricades built among the trees. A great council of the chiefs and warriors was held and this august body appointed a company of braves to guard the camp and prevent any person from leaving its boundaries lest in so doing the wily buffalo should become alarmed and quit the neighbouring hills. The council proclaimed anew the ancient laws of the chase, and then began the building of the pen. This was a kind of communal work in which the entire tribe engaged, and as all contributed labor so all should benefit alike from its fruits. There within the mock park, whose pleasant green fringe of trees was in reality a prison wall, would be trapped and killed the food for the sterile winter months, when, but for that bounty, starvation would stalk gaunt among them and lay the strongest warrior as low as a new born babe or the feebly old who totter on the threshold of death. The place chosen for the pen was a level glade and the enclosure was built with a single opening facing a cleft in the surrounding hills. From this opening, an avenue also cunningly fenced and gradually widening towards the hills, was constructed, so that the animals driven thither, could escape neither to the right nor the left, but must needs plunge into the imprisoning park.

Next came the election of the Master of Ceremonies, the Lord of the Pen. He was a man seasoned with experience, mighty with the knowledge of occult things—one of the Wah-Kon, Medicine Men or jugglers, who possessed the power of communicating with the Great Spirit. This high functionary determined the crucial moment when the hunt should begin, and when the buffalo, roused from the inertia of grazing, should be driven into the snare. In the center of the clearing he posted the "medicine-mast," made potent by three charms, "a streamer of scarlet cloth two or three yards long, a piece of tobacco and a buffalo horn," which were supposed to entice the animals to their doom. It was he who, in the early dawn, aroused the sleeping camp with the beating of his drum and the chanting of incantations; who conferred with the great Manitous of the buffalo to divine when the time for the chase had come.

Under the Grand Master were four swift runners who penetrated into the surrounding country to find where the buffalo were browsing and to assist by material observation the promptings of the spirits of the hunt. They were provided by the Grand Master with a Wah-Kon ball of skin stuffed with hair, and when the herds were found in a favourable spot and the wind blew from the direction of the animals to the pen, one of the runners, breathless with haste, bearing in his hand the magic ball, appeared before the Grand Master and proclaimed the joyful news. There was a mighty beating of the Grand Master's drum, and out of the lodges ran the excited people, all bent with concentrated energy upon the approaching sport. Every horseman mounted, and those less fortunate armed themselves and took their positions in two lines extending from the entrance to the enclosure toward the open, separating more widely as the distance from the pen increased, thus forming a V shape with but a narrow gateway where the lines converged.

Then through the silent, human barricade rode the bravest of the braves, astride the fleetest horse and he went unarmed, always against the wind, enveloped in a buffalo skin which hung down over his mount. All was quiet. Only the light Autumn wind flowing through the trees carried the curious, crisp, cropping noise of thousands of iron-strong jaws tearing the lush, green grass. And as the rider came upon the crest of the hill and looked at the panorama of waving verdure peopled by multitudes of bison stretching far away across the meadows and over the rolling ground beyond, it must have been a sight to quicken the pulses and stir the blood. Suddenly there sounded a prolonged and distressing cry—the cry of a buffalo calf which wailed shrilly for a moment, then ceased. It came from the brave alone in the open, shrouded in the buffalo hide.

There was a movement in the herd. Every heavily maned head rose, and quivering nostrils snuffed the running wind. At first the buffalo advanced slowly, as if in doubt; gradually their pace quickened to a trot, a gallop, then lo! the whole vast band came hurtling and lurching in its furious career like the swells of a tempestuous, black sea, breaking into angry waves at every shock. And from those deep throats came a mighty roar, ponderous and resonant as the thunder of the surf.

Still the cry of the calf reverberated and re-echoed, and the single horseman crouching beneath his masquerade, led the herd on and on, eluding their onslaught, luring them forward between the lines of his companions who stood silent, trembling with eagerness for the sport. Then pell-mell the mounted hunters rushed out from cover and the wide extremes of the V shaped line closed in so that the horsemen were behind the herd. This done, the wind blowing toward the corral, took the scent of the Indians to the buffalo. Pandemonium reigned. Men, women and children on foot, leaped out from their hiding places with demoniac yells, brandishing spears, hurling stones and shooting arrows from their bows. The stampeded animals, surrounded save for the one loophole ahead, plunged into the pen. The chase was over and the slaughter began. The tribe would live well that Winter-time!

*****

Among the Omawhaws of the first part of the last century, the hunt was preceded by much preparation and ceremony. Generally by the month of June their stores of jerked buffalo meat were well-nigh exhausted, and the little crops of maize, pumpkins, beans and water-melons, with the yield of the small hunting parties pursuing beaver, otter, elk, deer and other game, were scarcely sufficient to fill the wants of the tribe. So, after the harvesting and trading were done, the chiefs called a council and ordered a feast to be held in the lodge of one of the most distinguished of their number, to which all hunters, warriors and chiefs should be invited. Accordingly the squaws of the chosen host were commanded by him to make ready the choicest maize and the plumpest dog for the ceremonial board. When all was in readiness the host called two or three venerable criers to his lodge. He smoked the calumet with them, then whispered that they should go through the village proclaiming the feast and bidding the guests whom he named. He instructed the criers to "speak in a loud voice and tell them to bring their bowls and spoons." They sallied forth singing among the lodges, calling to the distinguished personages to come to the banquet. After these summons the criers went back to the lodge of the host, quickly followed by the guests who were seated according to their rank. The ceremony of smoking was performed first, then the Head Chief arose, thanked his braves for coming and explained to them the object of the assembly, which was the selection of a hunting ground and the appointment of a time to start. After him the others spoke, each giving his opinion frankly, but always careful to be respectful of the opinions of others.

Neither squaws nor children were suffered to be present. The criers tended the kettle and when the speech-making was done, one dipped out a ladle of soup, held it toward the North, South, East and West, and cast it into the ashes of the fire. He also flung a bit of the best part of the meat into the flame as a sacrifice to Wahconda, the Great Spirit. The guests then received their portions, the excellence of which depended upon their rank. The feast closed as it began, with the smoking of the calumet and at its conclusion the criers went forth again, chanting loud songs in praise of the generosity of the host, enumerating the chiefs and warriors who partook of his bounty, finally proclaiming the decision of the council and announcing the time and place of the hunt. This was an occasion of great rejoicing. The squaws at once began to mend the clothing and the weapons of their lords and pack their goods; and the young braves, gay with paint and bright raiment, beguiled the hours with gaming and dancing in the presence of the chiefs.

When the day of the journey arrived the whole community departed, the chiefs and wealthy warriors on horseback, the poorer folk afoot. Sometimes the quest of the buffalo was prolonged over weary weeks, and a meager diet of Pomme blanche or ground-apple, was insufficient to stay the pangs of hunger that assailed the tribe. The hunters preceded the main body, carefully reconnoitering the country for bison or foes. When at length herds were discovered, the hunters threw up their robes as a signal, the tribe halted and the advance party returned to report. They were received with pomp and dignity by the chiefs and medicine men who sat before the people solemnly smoking and offering articulate thanks to Wahconda. In a low voice the hunters informed the dignitaries of the presence of buffalo. These mighty personages, in turn, questioned the huntsmen as to the numbers and respective distances of the herds, and they replied by illustrating with small sticks the relative positions of the bands.

An old man of high standing then addressed the people, telling them that the coveted game at length was nigh, and that on the morrow they would be rewarded for the long fast and fatigue.

That night a council was held and a corps of stout warriors elected to keep order. These officers painted themselves black, wore the crow and were armed with war-clubs in order that they might enforce the mandates of the council and preserve due decorum among the excited tribe folk.

Early in the morning the hunters on horseback, carrying only bows and arrows and the warriors provided with war-clubs, led by the pipe-bearer who bore the sacred calumet, advanced on foot. Once in view of the splendid, living masses covering the green plains as with a giant sable robe, they halted for the pipe-bearer, the representative of the Magi, to perform the propitiatory rite of smoking. He lighted his calumet of red, baked clay, bowed his head in silence, then held the stem in the direction of the herds. After this he smoked, exhaling the aromatic clouds towards the buffalo, the heavens, the earth and the four points of the compass, called by them the "sunrise, sunset, cold country and warm country," or by the collective term of the "four winds." At the completion of this ceremony the head chief gave the signal and the huntsmen charged upon their prey.

From this point their methods were somewhat the same as those of the Selish, except that instead of building a stockade, they, themselves, enclosed the herd in a living circle, pressing closer and closer upon it until the killing was complete. This surrounding hunt was called Ta-wan-a-sa.

The chase was the grand event, the test of horsemanship, of archery, of fine game-craft and often the opportunity for glory on the war-path as well—for where the buffalo abounded there lurked the hidden enemy, also seeking the coveted herds, and an encounter meant battle to the death. Both ponies and hunters were trained to the ultimate perfection of skill and the favoured buffalo horse served no other purpose than to bear his master in the chase. As the cavalcade descended upon the startled game, the rider caressed his faithful steed, called him "father," "brother," "uncle," conjured him not to fear the angry beasts yet not to be too bold lest he be hurt by goring horns and stamping hoofs, and urged him with honeyed speech to the full fruit of his strength and cunning. And the horse, responding, flew with wingéd stride, unguided by reins to the edge of the compact, fleeing band, never hesitating, never halting until the shoulder of the animal pursued, was exposed to the death-dealing shot. It was just behind the shoulder blade that the huntsman sought to strike. The inclination of his body in one direction or another was sufficient to send the horse speeding after fresh prey.

The hunters, themselves, scorned danger and knew not fear. If they were uncertain how deep the arrow had penetrated they rode close to the infuriated brute to examine the nature of the shot, and if necessary to shoot again. And even though in the grand melée, a single animal was often pierced with many arrows, there were seldom quarrels as to whom the quarry belonged, so nicely could they reckon the value of the different shots and determine which had dealt the most speedy death.

Onward and onward they sped, circling and advancing at once, like a whirlwind on the face of the prairie. At length, the darting riders were seen more and more vividly as they compressed their line about the routed band, until finally, only a heap of carcasses lay where the herd had been. Then the tribe came upon the scene. The squaws cut and packed the meat. If a hunter were unfortunate and killed no game, he helped dissect the buffalo of a lucky rival. On completion of his task he stuck his knife in the portion of the meat he desired and it was given to him as compensation for his labor.

Someone, either by order of the chief or of his own free will, presented his kill to the Medicine for a feast. There was great revelry and joy, dancing and eating of marrow bones, to celebrate the aftermath of the royal sport.

III

Although the meat of the buffalo was the Indians' chief article of food, this was by no means the only bond between the red man and the aboriginal herds of the plains. Besides the almost innumerable utilitarian purposes for which the different parts of the animals were used, there was scarcely a phase of life or a ceremony in which they did not figure. In the dance, a rite of the first importance, in the practice of the Wah-Kon, or medicine, in the legends of the creation and the after-death, the buffalo had his place. Such lore might make a quaint and curious volume, but we shall consider only the more striking uses and traditions of the bison in their relation to the life of the early West.

The buffalo was, in truth, the great political factor among the tribes; nearly all of the bitter warfare between nation and nation was for no other purpose than to maintain or gain the right to hunt in favourable fields. Thus the Judith Basin, the region of the Musselshell and many other haunts of the herds, became also battle fields of bloodshed and death. Not only did the bison cause hostilities among the nations, but they were likewise the reason of internal strife. It is said that the Assiniboines, or Sioux of the Mountains, separated from the main body of the tribe on account of a dispute between the wives of two rival chiefs, each of whom persisted in having for her portion the entire heart of a fine bison slain in the chase. This was the beginning of a feud which split the nation into independent, antagonistic tribes.

The utmost economy was generally observed by the early Indians in the use of the buffalo. Each part of the animal served some particular purpose. The tongue, the hump and the marrow bones of the thighs were considered the greatest delicacies. The animals killed for meat were almost always cows, for the flesh of buffalo bulls could be eaten only during the months of May and June.

Among the Omawhaws of nearly two centuries ago, all the meat save the hump and chosen parts reserved for immediate use, was cut into "large, thin slices" and either dried by the heat of the sun or "jerked over a slow fire on a low scaffold." After being thoroughly cured it was compressed into "quadrangular packages" of a convenient size to carry on a pack saddle. The small intestines were carefully cleaned and turned inside out to preserve the outer coating of fat, then dried and woven into a kind of mat. These mats were packed into parcels of the same shape and size as the meat. Even the muscular coating of the stomach was preserved. The large intestines were stuffed with flesh and used without delay. The vertebrae were pulverized with a stone axe after which the crushed bone was boiled. The very rich grease that arose to the surface was skimmed and preserved in bladders for future use. The stomach and bladder were filled with this and other sorts of fat, or converted into water bottles. All of the cured meat was cached, in French-Canadian phrase, until hunger drove the Indians to draw upon these stores.

The pemmican of song and history was a kind of hash made by toasting buffalo meat, then pulverizing it to a fine consistency with a stone hammer. Mr. James Mooney in the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, describes the process as follows; "In the old times a hole was dug in the ground and a buffalo hide was staked over so as to form a skin dish, into which the meat was thrown to be pounded. The hide was that from the neck of the buffalo, the toughest part of the skin, the same used for shields, and the only part which would stand the wear and tear of the hammers. In the meantime the marrow bones are split up and boiled in water until all the grease and oil comes to the top, when it is skimmed off and poured over the pounded beef. As soon as the mixture cools, it is sewed up into skin bags (not the ordinary painted parfléche cases) and laid away until needed. It was sometimes buried or otherwise cached. Pemmican thus prepared will keep indefinitely. When prepared for immediate use, it is usually sweetened with sugar, mesquite pods, or some wild fruit mixed and beaten up with it in the pounding. It is extremely nourishing, and has a very agreeable taste to one accustomed to it. On the march it was to the prairie Indian what parched corn was to the hunter of the timber tribes, and has been found so valuable as a condensed nutriment that it is extensively used by arctic travellers and explorers. A similar preparation is used upon the pampas of South America and in the desert region of South Africa, while the canned beef of commerce is an adaptation from the Indian idea. The name comes from the Cree language, and indicates something mixed with grease or fat. (Lacombe.)"

Among the Sioux at Pine Ridge and Rosebud, in the ceremony of the Ghost Dance, pemmican was celebrated in the sacred songs. Mr. Mooney gives the translation of one of them:

"Give me my knife,