The prairie winds breathed through the trees. A robin came and sang in the timber.
The four sat thoughtful—the Tunker, the Indian, the pioneer woman, and the merry, sad-faced boy. It was a commonplace scene in the Indiana timber, and that one lonely grave is all that is left to recall such scenes to-day—the grave of the pioneer mother.
CHAPTER X.
THE INDIAN RUNNER.
The young May moon was hanging over the Mississippi on the evening when Jasper came to the village of the Sacs and Foxes. This royal town, the head residence of the two tribes, and the ancient burying-ground of the Indian race, was very beautifully situated at the junction of the Rock River with the Mississippi. The Father of Waters, which is in many places turbid and uninteresting, here becomes a clear and impetuous stream, flowing over beds of rock and gravel, amid high and wooded shores. The rapids—the water-ponies of the Indians—here come leaping down, surging and foaming, and are checked by monumental islands. The land rises from the river in slopes, like terraces, crowned with hills and patriarchal trees. From these hills the sight is glorious. On one hand rolls the mighty river, and on the other stretch vast prairies, flower-carpeted, sun-flooded, a sea of vegetation, the home of the prairie plover and countless nesters of the bright, warm air. It is a park, whose extent is bounded by hundreds of miles.
Water-swept and beautiful lies Rock Island, where on a parapet of rock was built Fort Armstrong in the days of the later Indian troubles.
The royal town and burying-ground was a place of remarkable fertility. The grape-vine tangled the near woods, the wild honeysuckle perfumed the air, and wild plums blossomed white in May and purpled with fruit in summer. If ever an Indian race loved a town, it was this. The Indian mind is poetic. Nature is the book of poetry to his instinct, and here Nature was poetic in all her moods.
The Indians venerated the graves of their ancestors. Here they kept the graves beautiful, and often carried food to them and left it for the dead.