The Man with the Iron Hand

by John Carl Parish

“I beg thee to have pity on me and on my nation. It is thou who knowest the Spirit who made us all. It is thou who speakest to Him and hearest his word. Beg Him to give me life and health and to come and dwell with us that we may know Him.”

Then the chief gave the priest a pipe like that which the two old men had carried. It was carved, and decked with the plumage of birds, and its stem was as long as a tall brave’s arm. It was a token of peace which the white men would often need in the countries they were about to explore. With this present the Peoria spoke of the love he bore for the great chief of the French.

With another present he warned the white men of the dangers ahead of them; and he begged them not to go farther. Tribes fierce and deadly lived toward the south, and other dangers more mysterious and awful lurked along the waters of the river. But the gentle-faced priest replied that he had no fear of death, saying that he counted no happiness greater than to die teaching of his God.

Amazed were all the Indians who sat in the chiefs lodge and heard this answer. To scalp a foe in honor of one’s manitou and to the glory of his nation seemed the height of joy and triumph; but they could not understand the courage of one who would willingly be scalped or tortured in honor of his God. So they made no reply and the council closed.

Meanwhile among the lodges Indian women and girls had busied themselves in preparing a feast for the strangers. Papooses were hung up out of the way on trees or leaned against the lodge walls while their mothers brought corn and meat, stirred the fires, and killed a dog for the distinguished guests. A woman whose nose had been cut off as a punishment for unfaithfulness to her husband came out of a near-by lodge. Young girls, whose daily duty it was to care for the rows of corn and beans in the fields, now helped to bring into the lodge the food which the women had made ready.

The first course at this Peoria feast was sagamite, a dish made from the meal of Indian corn and seasoned with fat. It was served on a great wooden platter. An Indian, acting as master of ceremonies, took a spoon made from the bone of a buffalo, filled it with sagamite, and presented it several times to the mouths of the strangers as one would feed children. Then they brought, fresh from the fires which the Indian women had tended, a dish containing three fish. The same Indian took the fish, removed the bones, blew upon some pieces to cool them, and fed them to the guests. The third course, which was served only upon rare and highly important occasions, consisted of the meat of a dog freshly killed. To the great surprise of the Indians the white men did not eat of this dish, and so it was taken away. The fourth course was buffalo meat, the choicest morsels of which were given to the priest and his companion.

After this elaborate feast, the Peorias took their visitors through the whole village, and the open-mouthed and open-hearted Indians brought them gifts of their own make—belts and bracelets made from the hair of buffalo or bear and dyed red, yellow, and gray. At length when night came upon the Peoria lodges, Marquette and Joliet were made comfortable on beds of buffalo robes in the lodge of the chief.

In the afternoon of the next day the strangers departed from the Indian lodges on the Iowa River and followed the pathway back to the bank of the Mississippi; and with them, courteous to the last, went the chief and full six hundred members of the tribe. When they came out upon the river bank, the Indians gazed in wonder at the five white men who had been left by their leaders to guard two small canoes—small, indeed, in comparison with the great boats of the Peorias which, hollowed out of three-foot logs, were half a hundred feet long.

The sun was about halfway down the sky when the strangers embarked. The Peorias, gathered on the bank, looked on curiously as the two white men and the Indian boy joined their companions in the birch-bark canoes, pushed out from the shore, swung into the current, and paddled off downstream. Then they faced the dropping sun and walked back to the village. As they thought of the savage tribes to the south and the awful dangers of the river, they doubted greatly if the gallant strangers would again come to their village and pay them the visit which the black-robed priest had promised.

They did see these same voyagers again, but not in the village by the side of the Iowa River; for during that very summer the Peoria tribe moved. One day the Indian women stripped the lodge-poles, packed up the camp implements, loaded themselves with supplies of food and robes, and together with the men of the village started on a journey eastward which led them far beyond the Mississippi. On the banks of the Illinois River, not far from the lake that still bears their name, the Peoria women set up new lodges and kindled the fires that were to burn day and night in the new home. Farther up the same river another tribe of the Illinois Nation—the Kaskaskias—were living in a village on the north bank.