"We thank thee for taking so much pains to come and visit us. Never has the earth seemed so lovely nor the sun so bright as to-day. Never has the Great River been so calm nor so free from rocks. Your magic canoes have removed all obstacles as they came. Never has our tobacco tasted so fine nor our corn looked so thriving. Come and dwell with us that we may know your Manitou!"
To honor the guests a busy preparation for a grand feast was going forward in the center of the town. There was to be smoking of the peace pipes. Most splendid of all, a dance of the calumet was soon to begin.
Warriors strutted in the front rows of the crowd. Squaws slipped to the back. Men and women singers gathered under a tree. Little red cubs of babies scuttled in and out. Dogs got under everybody's feet. The sun was going down and firelight and twilight mingled with the shadows.
On a mat of woven rushes lay the all-powerful calumet. It was a pipe with a red-stone bowl for tobacco and a long hollow stem of two feet or more. Feathers of the white eagle decorated it. Red feathers would have meant a calumet of war—and destruction to the guests!
This calumet was to be given as the greatest of all compliments to the bead-bringing visitors. It was a passport, a letter of credit, and a talisman to any group of strange Indians.
When the music for the dance began all the Indians sang the same air, but they sang in octaves. The soprano of the women and boys, the barytone of some men, the bass of others, produced a chorus full and rich. Drums, many high, a few low in tone, supplied the place of harmonized chords which Indian composers cannot manage. To this accompaniment, weird and incomplete, but agreeable to Anthony's ear, the dancers stepped in perfect time and graceful swaying as they kept to the long-drawn-out, bewildering, and sweetly monotonous round upon round.
As the shining copper-red bodies of the dancers gyrated, their shadows leaped and fell. When the firelight flickered, the eyes of the watching hundreds squatting in the background glowed green like fox-fire.
In the pauses of the music speeches were made and more presents given, first by the sachems and then by the Frenchmen.
The French had so strong a passion for courtesy as to carry their good manners even into the wigwams of savages. In return the natives were glad to honor such guests with barbaric splendor. Perhaps of all the strange things that have happened on the Great River none is stranger than the fact that white men of a later day should have forgotten the politeness with which the clever Illinois nations first received their race and should have rudely and greedily turned such powerful allies into revengeful foes.