Slowly and sadly the sorrowing friends start up the hill with the remains of Boddy and Schiere, while the bereaved and heart-broken widows follow the sad funeral pageant.
How can we bear to hear the cry of anguish that parts their lips when the first clod of earth falls, with sepulchral noise, on the coffin lids that cover the faces of their dead forever!
My humane, kind-hearted reader, who has a soul overflowing with kindness that goes out for “Lo! the poor Indian,” look on this scene a moment, and in your mind exchange your happy home for a cabin on the frontier wilds, where you meet these Indian people, and where, from the fulness of a great heart overflowing with “good will to man,” you have uttered only kind words, while you shared your homely fare with them in sympathy for their low estate. Remember how often you have almost ruined your own family that you might in part compensate them for their lost homes; how you have dropped from your hands your own duties as a wife or mother that you might teach these dark, sad-eyed savage women the little art of housewifery. Think how many hours you have labored teaching them the ways of civil life in dress and manners; while your
memory of childhood’s lessons in Christianity reconciled you to the labor and the sacrifice with this comforting assurance, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it also unto me.” Remember all these, and then gaze on the dark emblems of sorrow that envelop Mrs. Boddy, Mrs. Schiere, Mrs. Brotherton, and tell me, have you still Christianity that enables you to say, “Thy will be done,” nor let your lips breathe out a prayer for power to avenge your bursting heart? Will you censure now the brave and manly friends on whose arms these widows lean, while they go back to a home with the sunlight gone? If these friends, in sympathy with the bereaved, do swear to anticipate a tardy justice, do you still have hard words for the pioneers who brave danger and drink deeply from the fountain of bitter grief when in madness they cry for revenge?
It is one thing to sit through a life-time under the persuasive eloquence of ministers who have never walked side by side with such sorrow, and gradually form an ideal or real monitor in the soul, until human nature seems lost in the divine power that prepares humanity for higher life, and until we think we can at all times, when smitten on one cheek, turn the other. It is quite another thing to break old family associations, and, leaving the scenes of childhood behind you, with strong and brave hearts, open the way for emigration; plant way-marks that point to a future of prosperity; sow the seeds of civilization in unbroken wilds, fairly to represent your race before the savage, and live in the exercise of a religious faith that honest dealings and the overshadowing exercise of brotherly love will be a sure guaranty of final reward.
To go out on the bleak plains of Lost river, and by industry and economy transform the sage-brush deserts into fruitful fields, to rear the unpretentious cabins, and open your doors to the thirsty and hungry of every race and color, and then, when you have done all this, to stand in your cabin-door and smile back at the waving fields, and listen to the lowing herds, while you rejoice in your instrumentality in making the great transformation; looking hopefully to a future, when, from neighboring valleys, shall come up sounds of friendly recognition; longing for the hour when you may catch sight of children returning from the country school, and for the advent of the itinerant minister, who will bring with him a charter under which you may work toward a brotherhood, whose ties will bind on earth and reunite in heaven,—when, suddenly, more direful than mountain torrents or heaving earthquake, comes athwart your life a scene like that enacted on Lost river, November 30th, 1872.
That scene, with all its horrors, has been repeated over and over again, and will continue to be until this Government of ours shall come squarely up to the performance of its duty, and shall have clothed worthy men with power to do and make good its promises of fair and impartial justice to each and all those who sit down under the shadow of its flag.
Tell me truly, do you still feel scorn for the frontier people, whose lives are embellished with episodes and tragedies like these that I have here painted in plainest colors, and nothing borrowed from imagination,—no, not even using half the reality in making up the picture?
My words cannot call back the dead, or flood the rude cabins of the stricken and bereaved with sunshine and hope. No. There, on the hill, beside Linkville, the thirteen little mounds lie out in winter’s storm and summer’s sun; and they who prematurely sleep there will wake no more.
There, on the plains, stand the vacant cabins where these once lived. There, walking with the spirits of the departed by their sides, the widows go; while orphans’ faces wear reproach, in saddened smiles, against a Government that failed to deal justly, and who, with light and careless hand, pointed out its ministers of law without thinking once how much of human woe and misery might be avoided by a few well-studied words of command.