The Indians concentrated their minds so closely upon the chase as hardly to have time for any other topic of interest, though I was occasionally questioned upon life in Europe. I took pains, in answering through the mouth of Thayendanegea, to present my own former condition, and that of my fellow-countrymen in Ireland, as far more splendid and prosperous than it was. My father, I told them (may God forgive me!), was a merchant who owned a number of vessels and a great warehouse full of scarlet cloth, looking-glasses, guns, beads, kettles, compasses, and all useful things. He daily took out a great map of the world and told his captains where to send his goods for trading purposes.
The Indians did not dispute the first part of the story, but disbelieved in the map, when Thayendanegea informed them that the design of the whole world could be reduced to little upon a single sheet of paper. However, they are never so indelicate as to give a person the lie: they said, ‘We dare say, brother, that you yourself believe this to be true, but it appears so improbable to us that to assent to it would confuse our minds in respect to other related subjects.’ I had with me, in an oiled silk bag, a map of the River St Lawrence and the Great Lakes. They understood the principle of a map: for in giving directions to a traveller, they would often trace on the ground with a stick the course of a river and indicate the natural features of the surrounding country. I showed them Buffalo Creek, down which we were travelling at the time, and ‘There are the Falls of Niagara,’ I said, ‘and there is Lake Erie, and, if you cross the water at this point, in a matter of ten days or so in a canoe you will reach Detroit, and so upwards to Lake Huron.’ They were fascinated, and exclaimed ‘Wawa!’ in astonishment.
‘Then,’ said I, ‘if you shrink this map to a tenth the size, the directions and shapes remain the same, and there is room on the paper for my home in Ireland, and for the hot lands in the south, and for all the rest of the world.’
They confessed that they had been at fault and begged my pardon; so that the lie about my father, which I told in order to enhance my consequentiality among them – for they have a great scorn of indigent and ill-born persons – passed as Gospel truth.
Terry and I were in perfect health. He had a flux on the third day, but this was soon cured by a medicine that they gave him, decocted from a sort of fungus that grows on the pine. The squaws are the physicians of the tribe and carry medicine bags containing herbal remedies for wounds, snake-bite, and the commoner ailments. So healthy is the blood of these Indians (and I may say that they have the best teeth and sweetest breath of any people I know – by the bye, the cigar-smoking New York Dutch have the worst) that they recover rapidly from the effects of wounds that would be fatal in a European. I inquired closely into the appearance and properties of these herbs, many of which I was able to recognize in their green state when the summer came again, and add to my military pharmacopoeia.
Near Lake Seneca there was a solemn conference of chiefs in a fine grove of butter-nut trees upon a hill, where it was resolved to support the British cause to the utmost. As we approach the Senecan village of Buffalo. Terry was accidentally shot in the leg by a feu de joie of welcome to us. He remained there in Cornplanter’s lodge to recover of his wound, much to my regret. Terry took an Indian girl to wife, which was an inconsiderate action on his part, for these women are remarkably faithful, and he could not hope to keep her with him on his return to the Regiment; the life of a soldier’s wife in a crowded barrack would be death to a girl trained in the freedom of the woods and lakes. However, who am I to judge of Terry? For, on my resuming the journey, I fell into what will be judged by my readers to be still graver error.
Chapter XVII
WE WERE passing through the territory of the Wyandots, who are in general hostile to the Six Nations, being allied with their principal foes, the Algonquins and Ottawas; but in the words of one of our warriors, by name Bear-Whose-Screams-Disturb-Sleep, the war-hatchet was ‘now buried under a few leaves and sticks, and though restless was not showing its edge to the light of the sun’. In other words, we could count upon passing safely through the territory unless we happened to encounter some Indian who had a private blood-feud against a member of our party. One afternoon, as we were gliding through a forest fifty miles to the south of Lake Erie, close to French Creek, Kiss Me told us: ‘I smell a camp-fire. Fish is frying. Let us go to it.’ So marvellously keen was his smell that we followed up the wind for a distance of five miles before we came to the encampment; which we approached, weapons in hand, with extreme caution in order to assure ourselves that the strangers were friendly.
We came upon a scene of great animation; two warriors were strutting about in the circle of the fire. They were making speeches and counter-speeches in a resentful tone, with a great amount of descriptive gesture of a very vivid and graceful variety. Though they were clearly incensed, one with another, the common forms of politeness were not outraged: each waited patiently without interruption, though with a mocking smile upon his lips, for the other to finish his say. They continually referred to a woman, the evident subject of their quarrel, who was seated before the fire, with her back turned to me, at a point equidistant from the two disputants. She was dressed in a soldier’s red jacket and her hair was tied with a coloured handkerchief. She appeared from her posture to be weeping.
I did not understand a word of their language, yet my heart swelled and shrank to the rhythm of their eloquence, and I had a strange sense that it was my fate, not the squaw’s, that was being debated. Suddenly one of the orator’s, who, to judge from the murmurs of the onlookers, appeared to be having the worst of the encounter, rolled his eyes, uttered an exclamation of defiance, and rushed at the woman with upraised tomahawk. It was as if to say in the plainest language: ‘Sir, if I do not win this prize from you, why, you shall not enjoy her, neither.’ The unfortunate creature would infallibly have perished, had not some one at my side uttered the ceremonious word in the Mohawk tongue which signifies ‘I am revenged’, and fired at point-blank range with his firelock. The Indian dropped with a bullet in his breast, his tomahawk flying high into the air and lodging in the branch of a tree; instantly, Strong Soup, who was the murderer, sprang into the circle, struck the dying man with his club (as symbolically claiming the victory) and began scalping him before the eyes of all. The assembly sat dumbfounded, but doubtless a fierce battle would have ensued a moment later had not Thayendanegea, with a shout to our party to hold their hand, darted forward, pipe in hand, and stood smiling in the friendliest manner imaginable at the company.
The pipe to the Indian is as the white flag to civilized people, and universally respected among them. They did not stir from their pacific postures, but listened to him attentively. It seems that these were a delegation of Ottawas passing through Wyandot territory on a visit to our American adversaries at Ticonderoga. The dead man was the very person who had killed Strong Soup’s brother in the previous year and initiated his run of ill luck: his name was Mad Dog, and the murder had been committed in wantonness and in a time of supposed peace. Thayendanegea assured the Ottawas that his own intentions to them were perfectly peaceful; let the nearest of kin to the murdered man charge himself with the continuance of the private feud, but let no new public war be set on foot.
The Indians, who were aware that they were surrounded and at our mercy, were glad to agree to Thayendanegea’s proposal. It so happened that no kinsman of Mad Dog was present in the delegation, and though any person might, if he cared, assume the burden of a feud by a public declaration to that effect, nobody loved the dead man well enough to risk avenging him. We all now came from behind our trees, pipe in hand, to join the gathering as guests. I had the curiosity, as I was passing, to glance at the face of the squaw who had so nearly played the Helen to a savage war of Trojans and Greeks – but started back with so profound a shock of astonishment that I was hardly sensible what I did or said in the succeeding moments. The woman was none other than Kate Harlowe. I caught her up in my arms and pressed her to my bosom with
a thousand expressions of love, joy, anxiety, and amazement; nor did she resist these endearments, but clung close to me and muttered in a broken voice that she was happy at last.
Kate Harlowe had run from her husband at Fort Chippeway, which lay three miles above the Falls of Niagara, in a fit of vexation. If her account was true, as I have no reason to doubt, she had reproached him for infidelity with a half-breed Indian woman, and he had retaliated by calling her a name which, once spoken by a husband to a wife, is never either forgotten or forgiven. He had then named me as her paramour and she, while denying this, declared that she wished, nevertheless, that it had been so: that she had learned from Johnny Maguire the full story of what had happened at Saintfield. He had thought to cheat me into forging the marriage licence for them, she said, but I had already undertaken to do so in pure chivalry of spirit, etc., etc., and she now heartily regretted her infatuation for a cruel, treacherous, good-for-nothing, prating, Papistical, hedge-gentleman. ‘Ah, now!’ she said, ‘between the hedge-gentleman and the gentleman, what a great gulf is fixed – over that no horse can leap or bridge be thrown! Gerry Lamb is a true gentleman and the shame is on you. So good-bye, Hedge-gentleman Harlowe, and be damned to you, body and soul!’
He replied briefly and scornfully that it was a good riddance for him, since Marie Jeanne (the Canadian woman) was worth fifty of her sort of woman; and that the faster she went, the better he would be pleased.
It was her intention to take her life by throwing herself into the river above the Falls aforementioned. We had lately passed by this prodigious cascade and I now shuddered to think of the death to which she had so nearly consigned herself. The pitch which the stupendous volume of water acquired was horrific beyond any previous idea that could be entertained of it. A stupefaction seized me when I beheld an entire furious river, half a mile wide, precipitating itself into so dreadful a chasm. The huge hollow roar of descending waters could be heard at a distance of twenty miles on all sides, and more than forty miles in the current of a favouring wind. From the shock occasioned by it a tremulous motion was communicated to the earth for several rods around, and a constant mist beclouded the horizon, in which rainbows appeared from the shining of the sun. The foliage of the neighbouring pines was besprinkled with the spray, which depended upon the branches in thousands of little icicles. Below this terrible cataract were always to be found the bruised and lacerated bodies of fishes and land animals which had been arrested by the suction of the voracious waves, as also shattered beams and timbers. Yet so strange is the mind of woman that (as Kate assured me), the reason that she did not plunge in and allow herself to be drawn down to death in the Falls was that the water, in which large masses of ice were whirling, appeared to her too cold by far!
As she was hesitating on the bank she was approached by a womanish person who, from Kate’s description, can have been none other than the bardash Sweet Yellow Head – though what his business in those parts could have been, I have no guess – and spoke very sympathetically with her, evidently divining the circumstances in which she was placed. He told her in broken English, mixed with French, that he was often unfortunate too, that unrequited passion and the cruelty of men made him long for suicide; but that he always refrained, in the confidence that his luck would change if he preserved his equanimity. Kate laughed to be sister in distress to so extraordinary a person, who undertook to help her, if she wished. He would use his influence with a friend among the Ottawas, who was crossing the river that day, to take her with him into the State of New York, where she would no doubt find a new lover among the white settlers of the border, where women were scarce, and there initiate a new and happy life. Sweet Yellow Head assured Kate that her virtue would not be assailed against her will. The Indians were never a lecherous people, as are the negroes, and there is no record of a white woman being violated by one of them, though many have lost their lives and scalps.
The man-woman was as good as his word. Kate returned to Fort Chippeway, where she provided herself with money and clothing suitable for a long journey through the wintry forest, and was soon under the protection of this Ottawa delegation, consisting of twenty persons. Two young chiefs of the party fell in love with her, for white women exercise a certain fascination for tawny men, and each had in turn pressed his suit. She had no liking for either of them and was obliged to adopt the character of a coquette, for fear of offending both. At last it was decreed by the leader of the party that since she had not said plainly, as she should have done, that she would have neither, to avoid dissension in the camp she must plainly declare for one, and be his. So began the dispute which ended in the death of the unsuccessful suitor.
It thus remained to settle with the other chief, to whom Kate now by decree belonged; but that was an easy matter. The Indian, being guilefully informed by Thayendanegea that I was her husband and that perfect love existed between herself and me, was content to relinquish his claim. He was highly gratified when I gave him, in quittance of my obligation to him, the map which had excited so much interest among my companions. The spot where we were now standing I marked upon the map with an allegorical scene in lead pencil: Feathered Turtle (for that was his name) shaking hands with, or rather presenting a flipper to, myself. I was represented as a lamb holding a firelock in the Make Ready position. He shook hands very warmly with me, and wished me long life and many sons.
We spent the evening very pleasantly in the company of these Ottawas, and Kate and I slept together that night, with her blanket beneath and my buffalo-skin above, in the character of man and wife. The ecclesiastical forms of marriage seemed so remote from us here in the wilderness that the invidious word ‘adultery’ never sounded in the conscience of either. Harlowe had repudiated her, and she him; she and I were now living Indian-fashion, and in Indian-fashion I had won her by purchase. Our reciprocal desires smothered all consideration of the future, for both of us, having been in the company of savages for so many weeks and obliged to conform exactly to their ways, dwelt like them carelessly in the present. But in order to justify myself formally, I permitted myself to be enrolled as a member of the Mohican nation.
Thayendanegea performed the ceremony in the presence of my fellow warriors. He bade me strip myself naked, and with the bone of a wolf, the knuckle-end of which was cut to tooth-like points, he scratched me from the palm of one hand along the upper part of the fore-arm, across the breast and across the other arm to the palm again. In like manner he scratched me from my heels upward to the shoulders, and from the shoulders again to the feet over the breast, and again up the reverse part of my arms and across the back. The lines drew blood from me along their entire extent, but I knew better than to flinch or cry out. He told me then, ‘I have made you dreadful,’ and desired me roll in the snow; which I did. Then he washed my wounds with a decoction of medicinal herbs and bade me keep apart from my wife for the space of seven days. He also set before me a spruce-partridge roasted in bear’s grease. This food was symbolical of the qualities of a warrior; for the spruce-partridge makes a thunderous noise with its wings when in flight, and when hiding from a foe is remarkably difficult to discover. Thus I was to be endued with fury for the onset of battle; with patient cunning for the ambush; and with the strength and courage of a bear at bay. In conclusion, Thayendanegea presented me with a small stick whittled in the shape of a war-club, as a talisman.
Other white men have been adopted into the tribe as a mark of honour, notably Lord Percy and the American General, Charles Lee; but none, I believe, with the full native ceremony which made me a Mohawk in fact, not merely in name. Thayendanegea then took me in his arms and embraced me tenderly. While my wounds still smarted I allowed myself to suffer another operation, for which I have ever since had every reason to be thankful. Hair on the face is considered very unsightly by the Indians, and they remove it, roots and all, with the help of a small pliable worm made of flattened brass wire. Though I would not, merely to please them, allow them to remove my eyebrows and la
shes, I suffered them to pluck out my beard. The instrument was closely applied in its flat state to my chin, where the hair was already growing luxuriantly, and compressed between finger and thumb; a number of hairs caught in the spirals were then drawn out with a sudden twitch. The operation, though exquisitely painful, was not a lengthy one; and when I consider how much fatigue and pain is caused in a lifetime by the daily operation of shaving, I wonder that more people, soldiers especially, do not summon up resolution and submit patiently to depilation in this manner.
Of the feasts that we attended in our journey the greatest was given to us by the Cayugas, who were the most violent in their desire for a war against the Americans. The festivities were attended by hundreds of persons. In this religious ceremony – it was this rather than a social occasion – each warrior appeared dressed and painted in simulation of the animal sacred to his family: for the tribes are divided into families named the Bears, Buffaloes, Stags, Pigeons, Eagles, Frogs, and so forth. Some therefore were covered with a buffalo’s or a stag’s hide, having the horns extended; others wore dresses of feathers in a variety of grotesque devices; the Frogs’ bodies were entirely naked, but painted with green and yellow. I had been adopted by Thayendanegea into his family, the Wolves, and dressed accordingly with a wolf’s mask and his bushy tail. All our faces were daubed with vermilion and black, since this was a war-dance, laid upon a coating of bear’s grease. In his preparations for the masquerade each warrior was most sedulous to make the ferocity of his face the most ghastly and glaring possible; for this he used a small looking-glass, which enabled him to apply the colours with great nicety, but, frequently growing impatient with the result, he would wipe off the whole picture with a cloth and recommence from his natural skin.
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