The Man with the Iron Hand

by John Carl Parish

There remained, under the protection of the Cenis chief, Pierre Talon and his comrade Meusnier. One day an Indian friend came to them with warning on his lips: the Spaniards, cruel enemies of their countrymen, were marching into the Indian country looking for these refugee white men. In fear they fled from town to town; but their flight was in vain, for it was not long before they had fallen into the hands of the Spanish horsemen. Their captors marched them back to the village of the Cenis, hoping to find more whites there. They were disappointed, but during their brief stop they became so impressed with the Indians that they left three Spanish Franciscan friars and built them a chapel in the village. Two of the Spanish officers spoke the French language as well as their own; Talon and Meusnier had become familiar with the tongue of the Cenis; and so by means of a four-sided conversation the friars learned from the Indians a few words of their language before their men took the captives away to the southwest.

Pierre was greatly astonished at all this. These men seemed to be Christians even if they were Spanish, and instead of cruelty they had bestowed upon him only kindness. If the Spaniards were like this, he would have them capture also his sister and younger brothers. And so he told the Spaniards that he had three brothers and a sister living with the Karankawas, down near the Bay of St. Louis.

On the way back to Mexico the Spanish troops with swords and guns and horses rode into the village where the Talon children were. Jean Baptiste Talon and Eustache Bréman they did not find; but Mary Magdalene and Robert and Lucien were there. The officers agreed to give the Indians who had fostered them a horse for each child. But when they came to the girl Mary, who was older and larger, the Indians protested; for they thought that they ought to get two horses for her. The dispute grew hot and both sides sprang to arms. The Spanish guns spoke, two or three Indians fell dead and the others fled terrified. The subdued Indians finally gave up the girl for one horse, and the Spaniards rode out of the village, after giving the Indians some tobacco to ease the hearts of those whose dead lay upon the ground.

The foster mothers mourned over their lost children, especially the younger ones, for in the years of their stay with the tribe they had found warm places in Indian hearts. Jean Baptiste and young Bréman remained for another year with their Indian people. Then there came another Spanish troop and carried them off. Again the Indians wept and urged young Talon to escape as soon as possible and come back to them and bring with him as many Spanish horses as he could. He promised, but they never saw him again. Thus the Talons came to Mexico.

Pierre and Jean Talon, after many years with the Spaniards, came at last to their own country of France. Long before them the Abbé, Joutel, and their three companions had also come home to the land of the lilies.

In the wild reaches of the Great Valley there remained little trace of the last expedition of La Salle to found a colony at the foot of what Joutel had come to call the fatal river. Up and down the broad highway that ran through the valley from north to south, red men pushed their wooden dugouts or bark canoes. With moccasined feet they trailed the deer through the woods and followed the track of the shaggy beasts of the plains. And at break of day beside the enemy’s camp they sent up the cry of war quite as they and their fathers had done for many hundred years. From one end of the valley to the other the white men had traveled; and yet, as the track of a canoe dies out of the water or the shadow of a flying bird passes over the plain and is gone, so now it seemed that the trail of the white men’s passing had vanished out of the valley and that the dream that had led to their coming had been lost with the dreamer beneath the waving grass of the Southern plains.

Yet down by the Gulf a Quinipissa chief guarded year by year a precious letter, waiting, and not in vain, to give it to a white man who should come into the mouth of the river from the sea. And, far in the north, on a high rock beside the river Illinois, the Man with the Iron Hand, known and loved and feared by all the tribes, kept alive year after year the vision of his chief. His days were to be long in the valley he loved and his services many to his king and his Indian friends; and the time was yet to come when he would see the flag of France waving over a colony of Frenchmen at the mouth of the river which had run like a silver thread through a quarter of a century of dreams and deeds.

THE END

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS