Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet Part 13

"Where dost thou wish to go? Dost thou know the love of a brother?

Didst thou ever dream of one? I have said we must be brothers to each other; come to the wigwam."

They returned to the village in silence, and when they arrived before the door of the council lodge, the chief summoned everybody to hear what he had to communicate, and ordered the parents to bring the young girl.

"Flower of the magnolia," said he, taking her by the hand, "wilt thou love me less as a brother than as a husband? speak! Whisper thy thought to me! Didst thou ever dream of another voice than mine, a younger one, breathing of love and despair?"

Then leading the girl to where the young warrior stood--

"Brother," said he, "take thy wife and my sister."

Turning towards the elders, the chief extended his right arm so as to invite general attention.

"I have called you," said he, "that an act of justice may be performed; hear my words:--

"A young antelope loved a lily, standing under the shade of a sycamore, by the side of a cool stream. Daily he came to watch it as it grew whiter and more beautiful; he loved it very much, till one day a large bull came and picked up the lily. Was it good? No! The poor antelope fled towards the mountains, never wishing to return any more under the cool shade of the sycamore. One day he met the bull down, and about to be killed by a big bear. He saved him; he heard only the whisper of his heart; he saved the bull, although the bull had taken away the pretty lily from where it: stood, by the cool stream. It was good, it was well! The bull said to the antelope, 'We shall be brothers, in joy and in sorrow!' and the antelope said, there could be no joy for him since the lily was gone. The bull considered; he thought that a brother ought to make great sacrifices for a brother, and he said to the antelope: 'Behold, there is the lily, take it before it droops away, wear it in thy bosom and be happy.' Chiefs, sages, and warriors! I am the bull; behold! my brother the antelope. I have given unto him the flower of the magnolia; she is the lily, that grew by the side of the stream, and under the sycamore. I have done well, I have done much, yet not enough for a great chief, not enough for a brother, not enough for justice!

Sages, warriors, hear me all; the flower of the magnolia can lie but upon the bosom of a chief. My brother must become a chief, he is a chief, for I divide with him the power I possess: my wealth, my lodge, are his own; my horses, my mules, my furs, and all! A chief has but one life, and it is a great gift than cannot be paid too highly. You have heard my words: I have said!"

This sounds very much like a romance, but it is an Apache story, related of one of their great chiefs, during one of their evening encampments.

An Apache having, in a moment of pa.s.sion accidentally killed one of the tribe, hastened to the chiefs to deliver himself up to justice. On his way he was met by the brother of his victim, upon whom, according to Indian laws, fell the duty of revenge and retaliation; they were friends and shook hands together.

"Yet I must kill thee, friend," said the brother.

"Thou wilt!" answered the murderer; "it is thy duty, but wilt thou not remember the dangers we have pa.s.sed together, and provide and console those I leave behind in my lodge?"

"I will," answered the brother; "thy wife shall be my sister during her widowhood, thy children will never want game, until they can themselves strike the bounding deer."

The two Indians continued their way in silence, till at once the brother of the murdered one stopped.

"We shall soon reach the chiefs," said he, "I to revenge a brother's death, thou to quit for ever thy tribe and thy children. Hast thou a wish? think, whisper!"

The murderer stood irresolute, his glance furtively took the direction of his lodge. The brother continued:--

"Go to thy lodge. I shall wait for thee till the setting of the sun, before the council door. Go! thy tongue is silent; but I know the wish of thy heart. Go!"

Such traits are common in Indian life. Distrust exists not among the children of the wilderness, until generated by the conduct of white men.

These stories and thousand others, all exemplifying the triumph of virtue and honour over baseness and vice, are every day narrated by the elders, in presence of the young men and children. The evening encampment is a great school of morals, where the Red-skin philosopher embodies in his tales the sacred precepts of virtue. A traveller, could he understand what was said, as he viewed the scene, might fancy some of the sages of ancient Greece inculcating to their disciples those precepts of wisdom which have transmitted their name down to us bright and glorious, through more than twenty centuries.

I have stated that the holy men among the Indians, that is to say, the keepers of the sacred lodges, keep the records of the great deeds performed in the tribe; but a tribe will generally boast more of the great virtues of one of its men than of the daring of its bravest warriors. "A virtuous man," they say, "has the ear of the Manitou, he can tell him the sufferings of Indian nature, and ask him to soothe them."

Even the Mexicans, who, of all men, have had most to suffer and suffer daily from the Apaches, [What I here say of the Apaches applies to the whole Shoshone race.] cannot but do them the justice they so well deserve. The road betwixt Chihuahua and Santa Fe is almost entirely deserted, so much are the Apaches dreaded; yet they are not hated by the Mexicans half as much as the Texians or the Americans. The Apaches are constantly at war with the Mexicans, it is true, but never have they committed any of those cowardly atrocities which have disgraced every page of Texian history. With the Apaches there are no murders in cold blood, no abuse of the prisoners; a captive knows that he will either suffer death or be adopted in the tribe; but he has never to fear the slow fire and the excruciating torture so generally employed by the Indians in the United States' territories.

Their generosity is unbounded, and by the treatment I received at their hands the reader may form an idea of that brave people. They will never hurt a stranger coming to them: a green bough in his hand is a token of peace; for him they will spread the best blankets the wigwam can afford, they will studiously attend to his wants, smoke with him the calumet of peace, and when he goes away, whatever he may desire from among the disposable wealth of the tribe, if he asks for it, it is given.

Gabriel was once attacked near Santa Fe, and robbed of his baggage by some honest Yankee traders. He fell in with a party of Apaches, to whom he related the circ.u.mstance. They gave him some blankets and left him with their young men at the hunting-lodges they had erected. The next day they returned with several Yankee captives, all well tied, to prevent any possibility of escape. These were the thieves, and what they had taken of Gabriel was of course restored to him. One of the Indians saying, that the Yankees, having blackened and soiled the country by theft, should receive the punishment of dogs, and as it was beneath an Apache to strike them, cords were given to them, with orders that they should chastise each other for their rascality. The blackguards were obliged to submit, and the dread of being scalped was too strong upon them to allow them to refuse. At first, they did not seem to hurt each other much; but one or two of them, smarting under the lash, returned the blows in good earnest, and then they all got angry and beat each other so unmercifully that, in a few minutes, they were scarcely able to move. Nothing could exceed the ludicrous picture which Gabriel would draw out of this little event.

There is one circ.u.mstance which will form a particular datum in the history of the western wild tribes: I mean the terrible visitation of the small-pox. The Apaches, Comanches, the Shoshones, and Arrapahoes are so clean and so very nice in the arrangement of their domestic comforts, that they suffered very little, or not at all; at least, I do not remember a single case which brought death in these tribes; indeed, as I have before mentioned, the Shoshones vaccinate.

But such was not the case with the Club Indians of the Colorado of the West, with the Crows, the Flat-heads, the Umbiquas, and the Black-feet.

These last suffered a great deal more than any people in the world ever suffered from any plague or pestilence. To be sure, the Mandans had been entirely swept from the surface of the earth; but they were few, while the Black-feet were undoubtedly the most numerous and powerful tribe in the neighbourhood of the mountains. Their war-parties ranged the country from the northern English posts on the Slave Lake down south to the very borders of the Shoshones, and many among them had taken scalps of the Osages, near the Mississippi, and even of the great p.a.w.nees. Between the Red River and the Platte they had once one hundred villages, thousands and thousands of horses. They numbered more than six thousand warriors. Their name had become a by-word of terror on the northern continent, from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, and little children in the eastern states, who knew not the name of the tribes two miles from their dwellings, had learned to dread even the name a Black-foot. Now the tribe has been reduced to comparative insignificancy by this dreadful scourge. They died by thousands; whole towns and villages were destroyed; and even now the trapper, coming from the mountains, will often come across numberless lodges in ruins, and the blanched skeletons of uncounted and unburied Indians. They lost ten thousand individuals in less than three weeks.

Many tribes but little known suffered pretty much in the same ratio.

The Club Indians, I have mentioned, numbering four thousand before the pestilence, are now reduced to thirty or forty individuals; and some Apaches related to me that, happening at that time to travel along the sh.o.r.es of the Colorado, they met the poor fellows dying by hundreds on the very edge of the water, where they had dragged themselves to quench their burning thirst, there not being among them one healthy or strong enough to help and succour the others. The Navahoes, living in the neighbourhood of the Club Indians, have entirely disappeared; and, though late travellers have mentioned them in their works, there is not one of them living now.

Mr Farnham mentions them in his "Tour on the Mountains;" but he must have been mistaken, confounding one tribe with another, or perhaps deceived by the ignorance of the trappers; for that tribe occupied a range of country entirely out of his track, and never travelled by American traders or trappers. Mr Farnham could not have been in their neighbourhood by at least six hundred miles.

The villages formerly occupied by the Navahoes are deserted, though many of their lodges still stand; but they serve only to shelter numerous tribes of dogs, which, having increased wonderfully since there has been no one to kill and eat them, have become the lords of vast districts, where they hunt in packs. So numerous and so fierce have they grown; that the neighbouring tribes feel great unwillingness to extend their range to where they may fall in with these canine hunters.

This disease, which has spread north as far as the Ohakallagans, on the borders of the Pacific Ocean, north of Fort Vancouver, has also extended its ravages to the western declivity of the Arrahuac, down to 30 degrees north lat.i.tude, where fifty nations that had a name are now forgotten, the traveller, perchance, only reminded that they existed when he falls in with heaps of unburied bones.

How the Black-feet caught the infection it is difficult to say as their immediate neighbours in the east escaped; but the sites of their villages were well calculated to render the disease more general and terrible: their settlements being generally built in some recess, deep in the heart of the mountains, or in valleys surrounded by lofty hills, which prevent all circulation of the air; and it is easy to understand that the atmosphere, once becoming impregnated with the effluvia, and having, no issue, must have been deadly.

On the contrary, the Shoshones, the Apaches, and the Arrapahoes, have the generality of their villages built along the sh.o.r.es of deep and broad rivers. Inhabiting a warm clime, cleanness, first a necessity, has become a second nature. The hides and skins are never dried in the immediate vicinity of their lodges, but at a great distance where the effluvia can hurt no one. The interior of their lodges is dry, and always covered with a coat of hard white clay, a good precaution against insects and reptiles, the contrast of colour immediately betraying their presence. Besides which, having always a plentiful supply of food, they are temperate in their habits, and are never guilty of excess; while the Crows, Black-feet, and Clubs, having often to suffer hunger for days, nay, weeks together, will, when they have an opportunity, eat to repletion, and their stomachs being always in a disordered state (the princ.i.p.al and physical cause of their fierceness and ferocity), it is no wonder that they fell victims, with such predispositions to disease.

It will require many generations to recover the number of Indians which perished in that year; and, as I have said, as long as they live, it will form an epoch or era to which they will for centuries refer.

Note 1. There is every prospect of these north-western tribes remaining in their present primitive state, indeed of their gradual improvement, for nothing can induce them to touch spirits. They know that the eastern Indians had been debased and conquered by the use of them, and consider an offer of a dram from an American trader as an indirect attempt upon their life and honour.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

In the last chapter but one, I stated that I and my companions, Gabriel and Roche, had been delivered up to the Mexican agents, and were journeying, under an escort of thirty men, to the Mexican capital, to be hanged as an example to all liberators. This escort was commanded by two most atrocious villains, Joachem Texada and Louis Ortiz. They evidently antic.i.p.ated that they would become great men in the republic, upon the safe delivery of our persons to the Mexican government, and every day took good care to remind us that the gibbet was to be our fate on our arrival.

Our route lay across the central deserts of Senora, until we arrived on the banks of the Rio Grande; and so afraid were they of falling in with a hostile party of Apaches, that they took long turns out of the general track, and through mountainous pa.s.ses, by which we not only suffered greatly from fatigue, but were very often threatened with starvation.

It was sixty-three days before we crossed the Rio Grande at Christobal, and we had still a long journey before us. This delay, occasioned by the timidity of our guards, proved our salvation. We had been but one day on our march in the swamp after leaving Christobal, when the war-whoop pierced our ears, and a moment afterwards our party was surrounded by me hundred Apaches, who saluted us with a shower or arrows.

Our Mexican guards threw themselves down on the ground, and cried for mercy, offering ransom. I answered the war-whoop of the Apaches, representing my companions and myself as their friends, and requesting their help and protection, which were immediately given. We were once more unbound and free.

I hardly need say that this was a most agreeable change in the state of affairs; for I have no doubt that, had we arrived at our destination, we should either have been gibbeted or died (somehow or another) in prison.

But if the change was satisfactory to us, it was not so to Joachem Texada and Louis Ortiz, who changed their notes with their change of condition.

The scoundrels, who had amused themselves with reminding us that all we had to expect was an ignominious death, were now our devoted humble servants, cleaning and brushing their own mules for our use, holding the stirrup, and begging for our interference in their behalf with the Apaches. Such wretches did not deserve our good offices; we therefore said nothing for or against them, leaving the Apaches to act as they pleased. About a week after our liberation, the Apaches halted, as they were about to divide their force into two bands, one of which was to return home with the booty they had captured, while the other proceeded to the borders of Texas.

I have stated that the Shoshones, the Arrapahoes, and Apaches had entered into the confederation, but the Comanches were too far distant for us to have had an opportunity of making the proposal to them. As this union was always uppermost in my mind, I resolved that I would now visit the Comanches, with a view to the furtherance of my object.

The country on the east side of the Rio Grande is one dreary desert, in which no water is to be procured. I believe no Indian has ever done more than skirt its border; indeed, as they a.s.sert that it is inhabited by spirits and demons, it is clear that they cannot have visited it.

To proceed to the Comanches country, it was therefore necessary that we should follow the Rio Grande till we came to the presidio of Rio Grande, belonging to the Mexicans, and from there cross over and take the road to San Antonio de Bejar, the last western city of Texas, and proceed through the Texian country to where the Comanches were located. I therefore decided that we would join the band of Apaches who were proceeding towards Texas.

During this excursion, the Apaches had captured many horses and arms from a trading party which they had surprised near Chihuahua, and, with their accustomed liberality, they furnished us with steeds, saddles, arms, blankets, and clothes; indeed, they were so generous, that we could easily pa.s.s ourselves off as merchants returning from a trading expedition, in case we were to fall in with any Mexicans, and have to undergo an examination.

We took our leave of the generous Apache chiefs, who were returning homewards. Joachem Texada and Louis Ortiz were, with the rest of the escort, led away as captives, and what became of them I cannot say. We travelled with the other band of Indians, until we had pa.s.sed the Presidio del Rio Grande, a strong Mexican fort, and the day afterwards took our farewell of them, having joined a band of smugglers who were on their way to Texas. Ten days afterwards, we entered San Antonio de Bejar, and had nothing more to fear, as we were now clear of the Mexican territory.

San Antonio de Bejar is by far the most agreeable residence in Texas.