I
From a casual point of view the Indian Agency at Darlington was dull and commonplace if not actually dispiriting. The sun blazed hot in the roadway which ran between the licensed shops, the office and the issue house. Lean dogs were slinking about. A few bedraggled red women with shawls over their heads stood talking softly together on the trader’s porch. A group of warriors in the shade of the blacksmith shop were discussing some ancient campaign, while now and then a clerk in shirt sleeves, his hands full of papers, moved across the plaza, his step quickened by the sting of the sun.
A little back from the street the school building sat bleakly exposed on the sod, flanked on each side by still more inhospitable dormitories—all humming with unseen life. Across the river—the one grateful, gracious touch of all—the yellowed conical tents of the Cheyennes rose amidst green willows, and far beyond, on the beautiful velvet green of the prairies, their untethered ponies fed.
To the careless observer this village was lonely, repulsive; to the sympathetic mind it was a place of drama, for there the passions, prejudices, ancestral loves and hates of two races met and clashed.
There the man of the polished stone age was trying, piteously, tragically trying, to take on the manner of life of a race ten thousand years in advance of him, and there a few devoted Quakers were attempting to lead the nomads into the ways of the people of the plow.
The Cheyennes, at the time practically military prisoners, had given but a nominal consent to the education of their children, and many individuals openly opposed it. For the most part the pupils in the school wore buckskin shirts and were the wastrels and orphans of the tribe, neglected and stupid. The fine, bold sons of the principal chiefs would not surrender their freedom, and their contempt for those who did was expressed in the cry, “Ahyah! Whiteman, Whiteman!”
It will appear that the problem before the teacher of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe school in those days was not merely to govern the pupils in the schoolroom, but to induce men like Tomacham and Tontonava to send their own brave and handsome sons. With great native wit and shrewdness, Seger, the newly appointed master, said to the agent: “Our point of attack is the child. The red man’s love for his offspring is very deep. We must also convince the mothers. They are the conservative forces.”
The young teacher, Seger, had already won many friends among the chief men by his unfailing helpfulness as well as sympathy with their ways, and not content with the few pupils he had, he went out among the tepees pleading the cause of education with the fathers in the hearing of the mothers.
The old men listened gravely and for the most part courteously—never interrupting, weighing each word as it fell. Some of them admitted the reasonableness of his plea. “We think you are telling us the truth,” they said, “but our hearts will not let us go with you on the road. We love the old things. We do not like these new things. We despise the white man’s clothing—we do not want our sons to go crop-haired like a black man. We have left the warpath—never to go back to it. What is before us we do not know—but we are not yet ready to give our children into your hands.” And the women sitting near applauded and said, “Aye, aye!”
Seger argued: “What will you do? The buffaloes are gone. The elk and deer are going. Your sons cannot live by hunting—they must live as the white man lives—by tilling the earth.”
“All that is strange,” darkly answered Tomacham. “We are as the Great Spirit made us. We cannot change. If the Great One wished us to be white why did He not make us so in the first place?”
Nevertheless, Seger’s words sank deep in the ears of Tomacham and Wahiah, his wife, and one day the chief appeared at the door of the school bringing his son Atokan, a splendid young lad of fourteen—handsome as a picture of Hiawatha, with his fringed leggins, beaded shirt, shining, braided hair and painted cheeks. Behind—a long way back—came the mother.
“You see I have brought my son,” began the chief after Seger’s delighted greeting.
“It is good. He will make a fine man.”
The chief’s face clouded. “I do not bring him to become like these,” and he pointed at a couple of stupid, crop-haired boys who stood gaping at him. “I bring my son to learn to read and write, but he must not be clipped and put into white man’s clothing. He can follow your ways without losing his hair. Our way of dress pleases us better.”
Seger was obstinate. “I will not take him. If he comes he must do as the rest—and he must obey me!”
The old chief stood in silence looking on his son, whose grace and dignity appealed even to the teacher’s unæsthetic mind, and his eyes grew dim with prophetic sadness. The mother drew near, and Tomacham turned and spoke to her and told her what the white man said.
“No, no!” she wailed.
Then Tomacham was resolved: “No, my friend, I cannot do it. Let me have him one more day. I cannot bear to leave him to become a white man to-day. See, there is his mother, waiting, weeping; let him be a small, red brave till to-morrow. I have given my word; I will bring him.”
With some understanding of the chief’s ache in the heart Seger consented, and Tomacham let his young warrior stay home for one more day of the old kind.
What sorrowful ceremonies took place in that well-smoked tepee Seger did not know, but next day the chief came again; he was very sorrowful and very tender, but the boy’s face was sullen, his head drooping.
Slowly the father said: “Friend, I have thought all night of what you have said to me. The mother is singing a sad song in our tepee, but we have decided. We give our boy into your hands; teach him the road.”
And with a quiet word to his son the heroic red man turned and went away to hide his quivering lips. It was as if he had given his son to an alien tribe, never to see him again.
When the mother saw her boy next day she burst into a moan of resentful pain. All his wild, free grace was gone. His scissored hair was grotesque. His clumsy gray coat pinched his shoulders, his trousers were absurdly short, and his boots hard and clumsy. He slunk into the circle of the fire like a whipped dog and would not lift his head even in reply to questions. Tomacham smoked hard to keep back the tears, but his mind was made up, his word given. “We are on the road—we cannot turn back,” he said, though it cut him to the heart to see his eaglet become a barnyard fowl.