The combustible train was laid,—only a spark was needed, only a move of hostility, to fire the country. Will Black Hawk apply that spark?
"We cannot go," said the Pottawattamies. "The sale of our lands was made by a few young men without our consent."
Five hundred Indians determined to hold all the northern part of Illinois for ever.
Sacs, Foxes, Pottawattamies, sent daily letters and complaints. "Our Father! our Father! our Father!"—it was a plea and a prayer, and trouble, trouble, trouble. Black Partridge's letters make one weep. "Some of my people will be dead before Spring."
Meanwhile agents were ahead surveying lands in that magic West. The Indians were becoming as interested in migration as the whites had been; the same causes were pushing them on.
Clark was busily making contracts for saw-mills and corn-mills on the Platte and Kansas, arranging for means of transportation, for provisions for use on the way and after they settled, for oxen and carts and stock,—when one day four strange Indians, worn and bewildered, arrived at St. Louis, out of that West. Some kind hand guided them to the Indian office.
That tunic, that bandeau of fox skins,—Clark recalled it as the tribal dress of a nation beyond the Rocky Mountains. With an expression of exquisite joy, old Tunnachemootoolt, for it was he, the Black Eagle, recognised the Red Head of a quarter of a century before. Clark could scarcely believe that those Indians had travelled on foot nearly two thousand miles to see him at St. Louis.
As but yesterday came back the memory of Camp Chopunnish among the Nez Percés of Oregon. Over Tunnachemootoolt's camp the American flag was flying when they arrived from the Walla Walla.
It did not take long to discover their story. Some winters before an American trapper (in Oregon tradition reputed to have been Jedediah Smith), watched the Nez Percés dance around the sun-pole on the present site of Walla Walla.
"It is not good," said the trapper, "such worship is not acceptable to the Great Spirit. You should get the white man's Book of Heaven."