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Lake McDonald from McDonald Creek
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 messengerto 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 therobes 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, "thehouse 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 themild 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, vanishedphantoms 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, endlessavesandpaternosters. 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 scalehad been practiced at an earlier date by some of the Eastern tribes.
But however truly the Indians loved their new teachers, therobes 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 gentleword 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 sightwhen 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 themeans 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 inbelles 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 therudiments 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 sufferedhim to pass in peace on his way. Gently brave, like the good bishop inLes 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 ofthe 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 heavenwardto 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 wereroused 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, ofFrench-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, dancingLa Gignoleeto 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' scantystores 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 belovedrobes 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 thesad 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 asite 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 therobes noiresthey 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 languagesand 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 ofSt. 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, therobes 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 everynerve 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, lookingthrough 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, hereditarychief 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 theirexile 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 frightenedchildren 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 theSelish 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 multitudedropped 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 mingledwith 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 yearsspent 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 educationalmethods 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?
Francois
Francois
AMONGthe early Canadian French the Sioux were known as theGens 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.
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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 theother 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, havingreceived 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 Beginningand 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 wayto 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.
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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 forhim, 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?
ITwas 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 skullnaked 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.
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 isthe 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 aprison 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 theWah-Kon, Medicine Men or jugglers, who possessed the power of communicating with the Great Spirit. This high functionary determined thecrucial 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 aWah-Konball of skin stuffed with hair, andwhen 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 downover 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 inits 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 fromtheir 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!