LVIA.D. 1840A TALE OF VENGEANCE
Inthe days of the grandfathers, say ninety years ago, the Americans had spread their settlements to the Mississippi, and that river was their frontier. The great plains and deserts beyond, all speckled now with farms and glittering with cities, belonged to the red Indian tribes, who hunted the buffalo, farmed their tobacco, played their games, worshiped the Almighty Spirit, and stole one another’s horses, without paying any heed to the white men. For the whites were only a little tribe among them, a wandering tribe of trappers and traders who came from the Rising Sun Land in search of beaver skins. The beaver skins were wanted for top hats in the Land of the Rising Sun.
These white men had strange and potent magic, being masters of fire, and brought from their own land the fire-water and the firearms which made them welcome among the tribes. Sometimes a white man entered the tribes and became an Indian, winning his rank as warrior, marrying, setting up his lodge, and even rising to the grade of chief. Of such was Jim Beckwourth, part white, part negro, a great warrior, captain of the Dog Soldier regiment in theCrow nation. His lodge was full of robes; his wives, by whom he allied himself to the leading families, were always well fed, well dressed, and well behaved. When he came home with his Dog Soldiers he always returned in triumph, with bands of stolen horses, scalps in plenty.
Long afterward, when he was an old man, Jim told his adventures to a writer, who made them into a book, and in this volume he tells the story of Pine Leaf, an Indian girl. She was little more than a child, when, in an attack of the Cheyennes upon the village, her twin brother was killed. Then, in a passion of rage and grief, she cut off one of her fingers as a sacrifice to the Great Spirit, and took oath that she would avenge her brother’s death, never giving herself in marriage until she had taken a hundred trophies in battle. The warriors laughed when she asked leave to join them on the war-path, but Jim let her come with the Dog Soldiers.
Rapidly she learned the trade of war, able as most of the men with bow, spear and gun, running like an antelope, riding gloriously; and yet withal a woman, modest and gentle except in battle, famed for lithe grace and unusual beauty.
“Please marry me,” said Jim, as she rode beside him.
“Yes, when the pine leaves turn yellow.”
Jim thought this over, and complained that pine leaves do not turn yellow.
“Please!” he said.
“Yes,” answered Pine Leaf, “when you see a red-headed Indian.”
Jim, who had wives enough already as became his position, sulked for this heroine.
She would not marry him, and yet once when a powerful Blackfoot had nigh felled Jim with his battle-ax, Pine Leaf speared the man and saved her chief. In that engagement she killed four warriors, fighting at Jim’s side. A bullet cut through his crown of eagle plumes. “These Blackfeet shoot close,” said Pine Leaf, “but never fear; the Great Spirit will not let them harm us.”
In the next fight, a Blackfoot’s lance pierced Jim’s legging, and then transfixed his horse, pinning him to the animal in its death agony. Pine Leaf hauled out the lance and released him. “I sprang upon the horse,” says Jim, “of a young warrior who was wounded. The heroine then joined me, and we dashed into the conflict. Her horse was immediately after killed, and I discovered her in a hand-to-hand encounter with a dismounted Blackfoot, her lance in one hand and her battle-ax in the other. Three or four springs of my steed brought me upon her antagonist, and striking him with the breast of my horse when at full speed, I knocked him to the earth senseless, and before he could recover, she pinned him to the earth and scalped him. When I had overturned the warrior, Pine Leaf called to me, ‘Ride on, I have him safe now.’”
She was soon at his side chasing the flying enemy, who left ninety-one killed in the field.
In the next raid, Pine Leaf took two prisoners, and offered Jim one of them to wife. But Jim had wives enough of the usual kind, whereas now this girl’spresence at his side in battle gave him increased strength and courage, while daily his love for her flamed higher.
At times the girl was sulky because she was denied the rank of warrior, shut out from the war-path secret, the hidden matters known only to fighting men. This secret was that the warriors shared all knowledge in common as to the frailties of women who erred, but Pine Leaf was barred out.
There is no space here for a tithe of her battles, while that great vengeance for her brother piled up the tale of scalps. In one victorious action, charging at Jim’s side, she was struck by a bullet which broke her left arm. With the wounded arm nursed in her bosom she grew desperate, and three warriors fell to her ax before she fainted from loss of blood.
Before she was well recovered from this wound, she was afield again, despite Jim’s pleading and in defiance of his orders, and in an invasion of the Cheyenne country, was shot through the body.
“Well,” she said afterward, as she lay at the point of death, “I’m sorry that I did not listen to my chief, but I gained two trophies.” The very rescue of her had cost the lives of four warriors.
While she lay through many months of pain, tended by Jim’s head wife, her bosom friend, and by Black Panther, Jim’s little son, the chief was away fighting the great campaigns, which made him famous through all the Indian tribes. Medicine Calf was his title now, and his rank, head chief, for he was one of two sovereigns of equal standing, who reigned over the two tribes of the Crow nation.
While Pine Leaf sat in the lodge, her heart wascrying, but at last she was able to ride again to war. So came a disastrous expedition, in which Medicine Calf and Pine Leaf, with fifty Crow warriors and an American gentleman named Hunter, their guest, were caught in a pit on a hillside, hemmed round by several hundred Blackfeet. They had to cut their way through the enemy’s force, and when Hunter fell, the chief stayed behind to die with him. Half the Crows were slain, and still the Blackfeet pressed hardly upon them. Medicine Calf was at the rear when Pine Leaf joined him. “Why do you wait to be killed?” she asked. “If you wish to die, let us return together. I will die with you.”
They escaped, most of them wounded who survived, and almost dying of cold and hunger before they came to the distant village of their tribe.
Jim’s next adventure was a horse-stealing raid into Canada, when he was absent fourteen months, and the Crows mourned Medicine Calf for dead. On his triumphant return, mounted on a piebald charger the chief had presented to her, Pine Leaf rode with him once more in his campaigns. During one of these raids, being afoot, she pursued and caught a young Blackfoot warrior, then made him her prisoner. He became her slave, her brother by tribal law, and rose to eminence as her private warrior.
Jim had founded a trading post for the white men, and the United States paid him four hundred pounds a year for keeping his people from slaughtering pioneers. So growing rich, he tired of Indian warfare, and left his tribe for a long journey. As a white man he came to the house of his own sisters in the city of Saint Louis, but they seemedstrangers now, and his heart began to cry for the wild life. Then news came that his Crows were slaying white men, and in haste he rode to the rescue, to find his warriors besieging Fort Cass. He came among them, their head chief, Medicine Calf, black with fury at their misdeeds, so that the council sat bewildered, wondering how to sue for his forgiveness. Into that council came Pine Leaf. “Warriors,” she cried, “I make sacrifice for my people!” She told them of her brother’s death and of her great vengeance, now completed in that she had slain a hundred men to be his servants in the other world. So she laid down her arms. “I have hurled my last lance; I am a warrior no more. To-day Medicine Calf has returned. He has returned angry at the follies of his people, and they fear that he will again leave them. They believe that he loves me, and that my devotion to him will attach him to the nation. I, therefore, bestow myself upon him; perhaps he will be contented with me and will leave us no more. Warriors, farewell!”
So Jim Beckwourth, who was Medicine Calf, head chief of the Crow nation, was wedded to Pine Leaf, their great heroine.
Alas for Jim’s morals, they did not live happily ever after, for the scalawag deserted all his wives, titles and honors, to become a mean trader, selling that fire-water which sapped the manhood of the warrior tribes, and left them naked in the bitter days to come. Pine Leaf and her kindred are gone away into the shadows, and over their wide lands spread green fields, now glittering cities of the great republic.
THE END