Boys of the Old Sea Bed: Tales of Nature and Adventure

by Charles Allen McConnell

When Rob and Ed Allen came with their father’s family to live upon the Necedah river there was a band of perhaps an hundred Winnebagoes making their lodge in Big Bend. The chief, following custom, had taken a “white” name, after that of a man who had befriended him, and was known, not as Jim Miner, but as “Miner Jim.” Miner Jim’s wife was the daughter of a Menominee chief, and was called by the whites “Menominee Mary.” Mary was every inch a red princess. Magnificently proportioned, and of nature imperious, her word held at least equal authority in the tribe with the chief. While it was customary among the Indians for a brave, and especially a chief, to have several wives, Menominee Mary reigned the sole spouse in the tepee of the Winnebago chief. Their eldest child was Ka-li-cha-goo-gah, and, according to Indian custom, which traces descent through mother to son, instead of through father to son, the lad was considered a Menominee.

Between this Indian lad of about their own age, and the Allen boys, and their neighbor, Dauphin Thompson, there sprang up a warm friendship. The white boys and the red one were together upon many a hunting trip, and in the berry season gathered their basswood-bark baskets full of fruit side by side. Buckskin moccasins ornamented with elaborate beadwork designs by Menominee Mary, broad, ash-bowed snow shoes for winter hunting, and a soft, lynx-fur robe attested the love the son of the chief bore his white comrades. And in return his delight was great in the gift of a score of steel traps with which he would gather in a harvest of muskrat pelts from the lodges on Iron Creek marsh during the months of deep snow. Living as members of this band were two young people, a boy nearly grown, whose red, stubby hair, and smiling, freckled face was, as Dauphin declared, a “plain map of Ireland.” The other was a girl apparently twelve or thirteen years of age, with wavy, dark brown hair, and eyes as blue as a summer sky. Whether these young folk were able to speak English, the white boys could not tell. They never answered a question put to them in that tongue, and the older Indians seemed adverse to having them associate with the white lads. Uncle Sam Thompson told the boys the story of the Minnesota massacre and gave, as his suspicion, that some of this band of the Big Bend were really refugees from the Sioux who were in that uprising, and that the two evidently white children were really captives taken at that time.

During the year of which I write the boys had been freely received at the Indian camp, and, what few whites had been permitted to behold, had been allowed to attend their stated occasions of worship, the ceremonial dances. The Fish Dance in the spring, the Green Corn Dance in the summer, the Harvest Dance and the Hunting Moon Dance in the autumn, were of strange interest to these town-bred boys.

“I tell you what I’d like to see,” said Ed Allen, as they were going home from one of these, to them, grotesque performances, “I would like to go to a sure-enough scalp dance, or war dance.”

“You can be thankful, young man,” replied Dauphin, “that you are permitted to see what you have seen without having those other dances added. White men who have been spectators have seldom found either of these performances pleasant, if indeed they had any opportunity to tell about them afterward.”

As the winter season approached, there seemed to come a change in the attitude of the Indians toward their visitors. Kalichigoogah was often silent and moody with his friends, and the older Indians, while never rude, offered little welcome to the whites.

There had been a series of more or less disastrous fires here and there in the great forest, and the lumbermen who were busily gaining title to these lands laid the blame upon the Indians. The representation they made to the government at Washington was that the Indians, if not revengefully guilty, were at least carelessly so, as forest fires would be sure to be kindled from their campfires. Moreover, they declared, the Winnebagoes were trespassers in the forest; the government had allotted them a reservation in the Indian Territory, and they called upon the authorities at Washington to see that these Indians were “returned” to the place where they belonged.

To one acquainted with the manner of Indian life, the charge that forest fires were set from the campfires of the red men, would be ridiculous. Such fires might, and doubtless did, start from the campfires of white hunters and timber scouts, but never from a fire built by an Indian. In the first place, the forest was the very life of the Indian. He understood that any harm to the big woods meant harm to himself. A white man would build his fire by a log or dry stump, and pile on plenty of sticks and limbs. He would have a big fire—and go away leaving it burning careless of consequences. On the contrary, the Indian, who for generations had lived in the possible presence of a keen-eyed enemy, was very cautious about letting a smoke rise above the tree tops to call attention to himself. Consequently his fire was small—just a few little sticks, or pieces of bark brought together, and always the fire extinguished, and generally the very ashes concealed, as the hunter or warrior left his camping place.

Friends among the whites had sent word to the Winnebagoes of the purpose of the Great Father at Washington to take them from the land of their fathers and hold them upon the bleak prairies where there was no forest shade, no cool lakes, no sparkling rivers, but fierce winds, and dust clouds, and marauding Comanches.

The red man is called cruel and treacherous, but to the Winnebagoes the white race, at this time, seemed the incarnation of all that is unjust and hateful. It is small wonder that Miner Jim’s band grew moody, and distant in their attitude toward their former friends.