Before she was well recovered from this wound, she was afield again, despite Jim’s pleading and in defiance of his orders, and in an invasion of the Cheyenne country, was shot through the body.
“Well,” she said afterward, as she lay at the point of death, “I’m sorry that I did not listen to my chief, but I gained two trophies.” The very rescue of her had cost the lives of four warriors.
While she lay through many months of pain, tended by Jim’s head wife, her bosom friend, and by Black Panther, Jim’s little son, the chief was away fighting the great campaigns, which made him famous through all the Indian tribes. Medicine Calf was his title now, and his rank, head chief, for he was one of two sovereigns of equal standing, who reigned over the two tribes of the Crow nation.
While Pine Leaf sat in the lodge, her heart was crying, but at last she was able to ride again to war. So came a disastrous expedition, in which Medicine Calf and Pine Leaf, with fifty Crow warriors and an American gentleman named Hunter, their guest, were caught in a pit on a hillside, hemmed round by several hundred Blackfeet. They had to cut their way through the enemy’s force, and when Hunter fell, the chief stayed behind to die with him. Half the Crows were slain, and still the Blackfeet pressed hardly upon them. Medicine Calf was at the rear when Pine Leaf joined him. “Why do you wait to be killed?” she asked. “If you wish to die, let us return together. I will die with you.”
They escaped, most of them wounded who survived, and almost dying of cold and hunger before they came to the distant village of their tribe.
Jim’s next adventure was a horse-stealing raid into Canada, when he was absent fourteen months, and the Crows mourned Medicine Calf for dead. On his triumphant return, mounted on a piebald charger the chief had presented to her, Pine Leaf rode with him once more in his campaigns. During one of these raids, being afoot, she pursued and caught a young Blackfoot warrior, then made him her prisoner. He became her slave, her brother by tribal law, and rose to eminence as her private warrior.
Jim had founded a trading post for the white men, and the United States paid him four hundred pounds a year for keeping his people from slaughtering pioneers. So growing rich, he tired of Indian warfare, and left his tribe for a long journey. As a white man he came to the house of his own sisters in the city of Saint Louis, but they seemed strangers now, and his heart began to cry for the wild life. Then news came that his Crows were slaying white men, and in haste he rode to the rescue, to find his warriors besieging Fort Cass. He came among them, their head chief, Medicine Calf, black with fury at their misdeeds, so that the council sat bewildered, wondering how to sue for his forgiveness. Into that council came Pine Leaf. “Warriors,” she cried, “I make sacrifice for my people!” She told them of her brother’s death and of her great vengeance, now completed in that she had slain a hundred men to be his servants in the other world. So she laid down her arms. “I have hurled my last lance; I am a warrior no more. To-day Medicine Calf has returned. He has returned angry at the follies of his people, and they fear that he will again leave them. They believe that he loves me, and that my devotion to him will attach him to the nation. I, therefore, bestow myself upon him; perhaps he will be contented with me and will leave us no more. Warriors, farewell!”
So Jim Beckwourth, who was Medicine Calf, head chief of the Crow nation, was wedded to Pine Leaf, their great heroine.
Alas for Jim’s morals, they did not live happily ever after, for the scalawag deserted all his wives, titles and honors, to become a mean trader, selling that fire-water which sapped the manhood of the warrior tribes, and left them naked in the bitter days to come. Pine Leaf and her kindred are gone away into the shadows, and over their wide lands spread green fields, now glittering cities of the great republic.
THE END