“I answered promptly that I had brought gold, knowledge and a true heart into the wilderness; that all I asked was a corner in her lodge, and permission to rest among her people; to learn their ways and be one of them till death called me away.
“‘It is well,’ she answered. ‘This letter says that you have fled from many tears, and brought wisdom and gold from over the big waters. Come, I have a robe embroidered with my own hand, and plumage from flame-colored birds, with which my women shall crown you before my son comes from the war-council of the Six Nations. My eyes are getting dim, and I can no longer string the wampum or work garlands on the robes my women have prepared for my needle. You shall be eyes to me; when my voice grows weak you shall talk sweet words to the warriors, and they will obey me still. When I am dead, struck down with the white frost of age, then you shall be queen in my place; I will teach the chiefs to obey you. Have I spoken well?’
“She waited for no answer, but led me into the lodge, brought forth a robe of embroidered skins such as clothed her own stately person, and clothed me in it with her own hands. If she used any other ceremony of adoption, I did not understand it, nor indeed how much this act portended. Queen Esther was a shrewd woman, ambitious for herself and her tribe. She knew well the value of the gold which I had deposited with Sir William Johnson, and how rich a harvest my coming might secure to them.
“Queen Esther kept her promise. Her influence placed me at once in a position of power. She never asked my name, but gave me that which she had cast aside on renouncing her own race—Catharine Montour.
“I was among the children of nature, in the broad, deep forests of a new world. I had broken every tie which had bound me to my kind, and was free. For the first time in my life I felt the force of liberty and the wild, sublime pleasures of an unshackled spirit. Every new thought which awoke my heart in that deep wilderness was full of sublimity and wild poetic strength. There was something of stern, inborn greatness in the savages who had adopted me—something picturesque in their raiment, and majestic in their wild, untaught eloquence, that aroused the new and stern properties of my nature till my very being seemed changed.
“The wish to be loved and cherished forsook me forever. New energies started to life, and I almost scorned myself that I had ever bowed to the weakness of affection. What was dominion over one heart compared to the knowledge that the wild, fierce spirits of a thousand savage beings were quelled by the sound of my footsteps?—not with a physical and cowardly fear, but with an awe which was of the spirit—a superstitious dread, which was to them a religion. Without any effort of my own, I became a being of fear and wonder to the whole savage nation. They looked upon me as a spirit from the great hunting-ground, sent to them by Manitou, endowed with beauty and supernatural powers, which demanded all their rude worship, and fixed me among them as a deity.
“I encouraged this belief, for a thirst for rule and ascendency was strong upon me. I became a despot and yet a benefactress in the exercise of my power, and the distribution of my wealth. Did one of those strong, savage creatures dare to offend me, I had but to lift my finger, and he was stripped of his ornaments and scourged forth from his nation, a disgraced and abandoned alien, without home, or people, or friends. On the other hand, did they wish for trinkets, or beads, or powder for the rifles which I had presented to them, they had to bend low to their ‘White Prophetess’ as she passed; to weave her lodge with flowers, and line it with rich furs; to bring her a singing-bird, or to carry her litter through the rough passes of the mountains, and a piece of smooth bark, covered with signs which they knew nothing of, was sent to Sir William Johnson, and lo, their wants were supplied.
“This was power, such as my changed heart panted for. I grew stern, selfish and despotic, among these rude savages, but never cruel. Your people wrong me there; no drop of blood has ever been shed by me or through my instrumentality; but my gold has brought many poor victims from the stake, who falsely believe that my vindictive power had sent them there; my entreaties have saved many a village from the flames, and many hearths from desolation, where my name is spoken as a word of fear.
“The eldest son of Queen Esther was a noble. He came of his father’s race, with something of refinement, which his mother never could entirely cast aside, blended with it. From her early recollections Queen Esther had given him fragments of a rude poetical education, and this, with the domestic refinement of her lodge, had lifted him unconsciously above the other chiefs of his tribe.
“He not only possessed that bravery which won the admiration of his people, and was essential to their respect, but in his character were combined all the elements of a warrior and a statesman. Independent of this superior knowledge, his mind was naturally too majestic and penetrating to yield me the homage which was so readily rendered by the more ignorant of his tribe.