“Indian’s big Chief, long time ago! White man kill ’im!”
She knew the perfidy of Osceola’s capture under the white flag of truce as well as any American student.
This untutored and innocent child of the forest became a most interesting personal study. Friendly and courteous, there yet shone out from her wonderful eyes an unapproachableness that made a gulf between the white woman and the red woman.
Stem-o-la-kee wore many strands of glittering beads, which to the Seminole woman mean everything—usefulness, caste and the wealth of her husband or father. She never appears without this insignia of her position, and in the particular instance of this Glade visitor, when the doctor whom she had come to consult ordered the removal of the necklace on account of its great weight, medical authority and savage superstition clashed. Stem-o-la-kee reluctantly obeyed the doctor’s order, in part, by removing a few strands. She had not brought all her beads, nor her beaten silver ornaments, with her, which are used for full dress and ceremonial occasions, and seemed to feel an embarrassment over this, explaining: “Plenty beads means good squaw. My home Okee-cho-bee, me got a plenty; sick too much,” meaning she had come on an errand for health and not for a social visit. To these suntanned women of the Everglades, the beads play an important part all through life.
When the little pappoose is a year old, she is given her first string, with its “first year bead.” This bead is always larger and of different color.
A string of beads is allowed for each year until she marries. At her marriage, her mother gives her many new strands, and, if she is a chief’s daughter, she receives many gifts of beads at her wedding. The beads play such an important part in the career of a Seminole woman that they are always given as a reward for any prowess and a mother is allowed two strings for each child born. In full dress many of the squaws wear from twenty to thirty pounds of glass beads, varying in size and color—the colors blending in perfect harmony.
When the squaw reaches middle life, she begins to take off her beads, one string at a time, as so many moons go by, until but one string is left.
She is now an old woman, too old to work, and the single strand she wears is made up of the “life beads” and buried with her.
During Stem-o-la-kee’s stay, though tired and weak from illness, and with a constant knocking at the door by wee tots, as well as older visitors, who came to “shake hands with the Indian woman,” the young squaw showed nothing but grace and good feeling to the visitors. On all such occasions she would, in a twinkling, don her new and gayly colored dress, add the discarded ropes of beads, give a twist to her raven hair, and would appear at the parlor door, shy, but with eyes shining and with a pleasing smile, stand ready to give the usual gracious hand grasp and then as quickly and noiselessly glide away, like a timid deer, to the improvised couch which had been made for her.