The Man with the Iron Hand

by John Carl Parish

CHAPTER XX

STRANGE RITES

Spring was coming, and the giant of the Great Valley, lying stretched at full length, was beginning to stir uneasily. Too long had he slept with his head in the snow far up in the country of the Sioux. His outspread arms, flung to the mountains on either side, began to move, and to the tips of his fingers, entwined in the hills of the Alleghanies and the rough piles of the Rockies, a new life came. The Mississippi River was waking from its winter sleep.

In the land of the Iroquois, by distant Lake Ontario, the ice in little brooks was melting, and snow-water was running down from their banks to flow through the length of the Ohio Valley into the Great River. Over by the foot of the Lake of the Illinois, where the headwaters of the Kankakee crept out from the country of the timorous Miamis, cakes of ice were starting on a long journey down the widening river into the Illinois, there to run smoothly through a deserted valley, past the mined village of the Kaskaskias, the empty Peoria lodges, and the forsaken fort to find the wide river in the land of the luckless Tamaroas.

Even in the cold Sioux country the tiny sources of the Mississippi were stirring; and the waters grew less chill as they slipped out of the sight of the Sioux hunters and took their way southward past the far-driven tribes of the Illinois—here the Kaskaskias, lower down the Peorias—until they reached the haunts of the Tamaroas and were joined by the waters of the Illinois.

Southward ever the spring water flowed. Here from the Western plains came rushing like a buffalo bull the tawny Missouri, bringing down logs and trees that had passed many and strange peoples on their way from the far unknown West. Out of these Western countries came also the Arkansas to cast its burden into the river farther down.

Now all these waters, gathered in a mighty stream, flowed on past the strange Southern tribes—past the Taensas, watching their sacred fires and guarding their temples in eight villages gathered on a crescent-shaped lake, and past the Natchez and the treacherous Coroas and Quinipissas—till at last, under the warm Southern sun, the river poured itself out of the bottom of the valley into the salt waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Thus in the year 1682 the Great Valley awoke from its quiet winter. Soon in the North the Indian women could stir the eager soil and begin their planting. The Indian braves could toss their snowshoes into a corner of the lodge, throw off their winter garments of buffalo hide, and go out into the sunshine as free and happy and unencumbered as God had made them.

All the valley was a playground for the Indians. Its woods and its streams, its prairies and its hills, its herds of buffalo, its deer and bear and wild fowl were theirs. They could build their lodges and hunt game where they willed. They could trade with the tribes of the North and South and of the river valleys on either side; or they could fight with them if they chose. It was a valley full of the best gifts of the good spirits—this land of the Indians. What if there were up around the rivers of the North and East occasional white men? They were few and they brought wonderful gifts. Surely there was room for all.

Below the villages of the Arkansas tribes, which Marquette and Joliet had reached nine years before, the Indians had seen no white man’s canoe. It is true their old men told a tale, handed down through long years, of a Spaniard who came into the Great Valley from the East with an army that ravaged and plundered and killed. The leader disappeared, and his men drifted down the river to its mouth and left forever the basin of the Mississippi. But many generations had passed since the time of the mysteriously vanishing De Soto and his cruel followers. Between the French far to the northeast and the Spaniards as far to the southwest there lay the length of the river with room in its broad and smiling valley for the homes and hunting-grounds of a hundred tribes.