XX.
A DAUGHTER OF THE CHEROKEES.
Mary Greenwater was not the ugly, coarse-featured woman that many squaws are. She possessed many of the fine features of her white sisters. She had been well educated at the Carlisle Indian school, and had traveled much. While, with other Cherokee Indians, she drew her annuities from the government, yet she was known to be the wealthiest woman of the tribe. She was lavish in the expenditure of money. Her home in the Cherokee hills was elaborately furnished with the richest of carpets and furniture; even a grand piano adorned her parlor. But with all its costly appointments, the house was a wilderness of disorder. Like other of her race, she despised anything akin to neatness. Her dresses were gaudy in color and extravagant in style. Pearl necklaces, diamond 176 brooches and rings were worn on all occasions. She owned fine carriages and many spirited horses. As a horsewoman, she was an expert and as a pistol shot she was accounted the best in the Cherokee nation. Her servants were the half-breed Indian Negroes to whom her word was as absolute a law as any Caliph ever possessed over a tribe. She was accustomed to command, and if disobeyed she enforced her orders at the point of the revolver she always carried.
The source of Mary Greenwater’s wealth was a mystery. Those of her tribe gave themselves no concern about it, but the matter was a subject of much comment among the few white men in the territory. Mercer, a young man of adventurous spirit, hearing of her fabulous wealth, sought her hand in marriage. After the wedding, he used all his arts to wring from her the secret of her riches. Once when she started on one of her lone journeys to the hills of the Grand River, he attempted to follow and that was the last ever seen or heard of 177 him. That the woman possessed the secret of a vast amount of lost treasure was evident, as she spent many Spanish gold coins of ancient date as months rolled on, and this induced Grim, a farm hand, to marry her. She elevated him from a menial position, to overseer of her ranch. She gave him money, which he recklessly spent at the faro tables at the Garrison. When she refused to further indulge him in his reckless expenditures, he, like Mercer, attempted to follow her on her journey to the Grand River hills one night. He was missed by his companions who went in numbers to search for him, taking an Indian guide. They were led in an opposite direction from the way he went and his fate remained a mystery, until many months later his body was found in the Grand River, with a bullet in the brain.
Two years after the death of Grim, Carson and a negro were hunting in the Grand River country and were encamped one night in the hills. While seated beside their campfire, they heard a cry of distress. 178 Upon going to the spot, they found a lone Indian woman pinioned beneath her pony, which had stepped into a wolf hole and broke its leg. The woman was badly injured and they carried her to their campfire and made her comfortable. The next day they constructed a rude litter and carried her twenty miles to a place where she could receive medical attention.
The woman was Mary Greenwater, and this was, perhaps, the first act of kindness she had ever received.
A certain escapade at the close of Carson’s college days had caused him to migrate to the West, where, like many others, he became a soldier of fortune, drifting whither the strongest tide wind blew. When Mary Greenwater recovered she sought him, and in her gratitude made him the overseer of her ranch at a princely salary.
In course of time they were married by the ancient Indian ceremony of the Fastest Horse. When the days of feasting were over, and Mary Greenwater’s relatives 179 had returned to their cabins richer by a number of ponies, Mary told Carson a wondrous story of how, many summers ago, when her grandfather was a boy, a Spanish caravan came from Santa Fe and was besieged in the Grand river hills for many days, and of how, finding that they would eventually be starved to death if they remained, the travelers had hidden their possessions among the lime rocks and undertaken to cut their way through the Indian hordes to a place of safety. Her grandfather had found the hiding place of the treasure and had kept it a profound secret from all except herself, to whom he told it only when he began to sing his death song.