The Frontiersmen

by Charles Egbert Craddock

"N'petalogalgun!" (I am sent as a messenger) he declared urgently. "Give me a belt."

He turned his flaming eyes directly upon Atta-Kulla-Kulla, himself in the prime of life now, in 1745, who it seemed must act definitely under this coercion. He must either refuse to testify to the truth, which he knew, or involve his people, the Cherokees, in a quarrel which did not concern them, of which a century was tired, between the Lenni Lenape and the Mengwe.

So long ago it had begun! The Mengwe, hard pressed by other nations and long at war with the Lenape, besought peace of this foe, and that they would use their influence with the others. Usually women, prompted always by the losing side, protested against the further effusion of blood and went with intercessions from one faction to the other. This, in view of the number and devious interests of the warring forces, was then impracticable, and therefore the Mengwe besought the Lenape to act as mediator for the occasion. Only so noted a race of warriors could afford this magnanimity, the Mengwe argued. It might impair the prestige of a less high-couraged and powerful tribe. And with these specious wiles the cat was duly belled.

But alas for the Lenape! Magnanimity is the most dangerous of all the virtues—to its possessor! Presently the Mengwe claimed to have conquered the Lenape in battle, and cited the well-known fact that they had inaugurated peace proposals. As the Mengwe confederation grew more powerful they assumed all the arrogance of a protectorate. They sold the lands of their dependents. They resented all action of the Lenape on their own account. If the Lenape went to war on some quarrel of their making, they had the Mengwe to reckon with as well as the enemy. As the years rolled by in scores, this fiction gradually assumed all the binding force of fact, till now it was felt that only by the avowal of the truth by some powerful tribe, both ancient and contemporary, such as the Cherokee,—who, although allied neither linguistically nor consanguineously, by some abstruse figment of Indian etiquette affected an affiliation to the Lenape and called them "grandfather,"—could their rightful independence be recognized, reëstablished, and maintained. Therefore, "Give me a belt!" cried Tscholens pertinaciously, offering in exchange the official belt of the Delawares, or, as they were called, Lenni Lenape.

Nothing less would content him. He hardened himself as flint against all suave beguilements tending to effect a diversion of interest. He would not see the horse-race. He would not "roll the bullet." He would not witness the game of chungke, expressly played in honor of his visit. He even refused to join in the dance, although young and nimble. But it chanced that the three circles were awhirl on the sandy spaces contiguous to the "beloved square" when the first break in the cohesion of his pertinacity occurred. The red sunset was widely aflare; the dizzy rout of the shadows of the dancers, all gregarious and intricately involved in the three circles, kept the moving figures company. These successive circles, one within another, followed each a different direction in their revolutions to the music of the primitive flute, fashioned of the bone of a deer (the tibia), and the stertorous sonorities of the earthen drums; and as the fantastically attired figures whirled around and around, their dull gray shadows whisked to and fro on the golden brown sand, all in the red sunset glow.

Tscholens, quitting the council-house, glanced but indifferently at them and then away at the lengthening perspective of the azure mountains of the Great Smoky range. The harbingers of the twilight were advancing in a soft blue haze over the purple and garnet tinted slopes near at hand, their forests all leafless now, although the autumn had lingered long, and the burnished golden days of the Indian summer were loath to go. Lights were springing up here and there in the town as the glow of the hearths of the dwellings, where supper was cooking, flickered out to meet on the threshold the rays of the departing sun, which seemed to pause there for a farewell glance in at the open door. In the centre of the "beloved square" the fire which always burned here was slowly smouldering. It flung a red reflection on the front of the building devoted to the conferences of the aged councilors, painted a peaceful white and facing the setting sun. At this moment was emerging from it a figure which Tscholens had not before seen.

A man so old he was that even the Indian's back was bent. His face was of weird effect, for amid its many wrinkles were streaks of parti-colored paint such as he had worn more than three quarters of a century earlier, when his fleet foot and the old war-trace were familiar. In common with all the Cherokees, his head was polled and bare save for a tuft, always spared to afford a grasp for any hand bold enough and strong enough to take the scalp; but this lock, although still dense and full, was of a snowy whiteness, contrasting sharply with the red paint and belying the warlike aspect of the red-feathered crest that trembled and shivered with the infirmities of his step. A heavy robe of fur reached almost to his feet, and a mantle, curiously wrought of the iridescent feathers of the neck and breast of the wild turkey, bespoke his consequence and added to the singularity of his aspect; for Indians seldom attained such age in those wild days, the warriors being usually cut off in their prime. It is to be doubted if Tscholens had ever seen so old a man, for this was Tsiskwa of Citico, reputed then to be one hundred and ten years of age.

The step of the young grandfather, sauntering along, came to an abrupt halt. He stood staring, exclaiming to the Cherokee warrior Savanukah, "Pennau wullih! Auween won gintsch pat?" (Look yonder! Who is that who has just come?)

It was an eagle-like majesty which looked forth from the eyes of Tsiskwa of Citico, as he seated himself on the long cane-wrought divan, just within the entrance of the cabin on the eastern side of the "beloved square." Time can work but little change in such a spirit. An eagle, however old, is always an eagle.

The sage lifted one august claw and majestically waved it at the young Delaware illau (war-captain) standing before him, while Savanukah turned away to join the dancers. "Lenni Lenape?—I remember—I remember very well when you came from the West!"