A LEGEND OF THE YOSEMITE
THE LOVE OF TIS-SA-ACK AND TU-TOCH-A-NU-LAH
“Ah-wi-yah—the Beautiful,” she was once justly called. And now that the weight of many, many years bore heavily upon her, the warriors of the tribe, recalling the traditions of the past, still called her “The Beautiful.” But who would ever think that the bent and withered old squaw was once the pride of her tribe? The scorching suns of many summers, and the keen, chilling blasts of many cruel winters had indeed made sad havoc in the beauty of Yosemite’s queen.
No one knew how old Ah-wi-yah was—no one knew when she first came to the valley of Yosemite. There was none of all her people who could recall the time when she was not already very, very old and wrinkled. The most venerable sagamore of the tribe remembered that the old squaw was regarded as the only living relic of an age of by-gone majesty, when he was yet scarcely more than a small pappoose, boarded and strapped with thongs to his mother’s back. He recalled that it was she who smiled upon him, and patted his head approvingly on the glorious and never to be forgotten day when his little hands and feeble arms first drew a slender, feathered arrow to its barbed head, and from a child’s bow sent it hurtling on its deadly flight at a startled rabbit that traversed his path. He remembered too, that the venerable Ah-wi-yah, standing erect before her lodge with fiery, flashing eyes, led the wild, fierce shout of triumph when he, grown to the stature of a brave, came home from the warpath with his first scalp. And it was the old squaw who, with her own wrinkled hands, hung the still bleeding trophy on his lodge pole, and foretold that the ghastly, gory emblem of his valor would have many, many children.
Yes, Ah-wi-yah was very, very old—so old that she recalled the time when the fair Po-ho-ho waterfall was but a silvery, gleaming ribbon no larger than a stalk of maize—so old that she remembered the days when the Mission Fathers had not yet come to the Land of the Golden Sunset.
White as the snows of the Sierran winter was the hair of Ah-wi-yah, but her eye—so wondrous dark—was bright and piercing beneath her shaggy, wrinkled brow, and her voice was sweet and flute-like; clear as a wandering echo amid the towering, craggy hills of the smiling beautiful valley wherein her tribe had lived and died for unnumbered ages.
Ah-wi-yah was often the counsellor of the chieftains of the tribe for, squaw though she was, she alone knew the records of the more glorious and war-like past of her fast diminishing kindred. The old squaw lived not in the dull and spiritless present, though her aged tongue was wise and crafty. She lived in the glorious olden days, that wondrous, shadowy past that held for her such memories of long vanished greatness—and who knows what sweet and tender romance?
When I, a curious tourist, wished to study the wonderful traditions of the tribe, the warriors said: “Oh pale face, there is none left to tell thee of our glorious and deathless past but Ah-wi-yah, the Beautiful. In the vast storehouse of her unfailing memory there are many marvellous and beautiful legends. Go to her—the wise old squaw—she will tell them to thee, we doubt not gladly.”
And the white haired squaw with the flute-like voice told me many thrilling, beautiful legends of the days when her tribe was strong and mighty—the days when the Manitou never forgot his chosen people, the children of the lustrous Sun. Of all the legends that Ah-wi-yah told the wondering pale face, there was none so beautiful as the love of Tis-sa-ack and Tu-toch-a-nu-lah. This I will relate just as the wonderful story-teller, who has long since been gathered to her fathers, and whose fragile bones are now mouldering in a dark and gloomy canyon of the towering Sierras, told it me.
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“The memory of man, O Pale Face, goeth not so far back into the distant past as the happy days when the children of the glorious Sun first built their blazing council fires in the beautiful, mountain locked valley of the Yosemite. In that unremembered time the baleful glitter of the white sails of the accursed, marauding pale face had not yet defiled the pure blue waters of the broad Pacific. The Sierras were illumined by the red glare of the watch-fires of a mighty, heroic race of redmen, and the waters laughed and sang in joyful cadence with the dancing of their light canoes.