Here they were greeted by a flight of arrows, launched so hastily that no one was hit. The ambush consisted of a dozen redskins, who, in obedience to the signalling, had hastened round the head of the chasm, easily arriving in time to cut off the more slowly moving party. Fortunately, only two of them had firearms; and the majority, seeing at once what chance they would stand against mounted men who were desperate and well armed, fled like chamois down the slopes. Three of the party were, however, speedily stopped by revolver-bullets from the horsemen, and so rendered an easy capture.
Then the truth, or something like it, came out. The 288 Chinamen were gold-thieves who had escaped from the mines and had fallen into the hands of the Chippewyans, who cared nothing for their stolen gold but a good deal for the labour which they would have been able to extort from them. Lord had neither time nor inclination to sift the matter. Finding that the Celestials were not so badly injured but that they could ride back to prison, he had them bound on to baggage-mules, made the three wounded Indians mount behind three of his men, and so conveyed all the prisoners in triumph to the coast, where he handed them over to a military picket for a journey to Vancouver jail.
CHAPTER XXIII
TWO DAYS IN A MOHAWK VILLAGE
A very voluminous writer, and an explorer of no small repute in Germany—Johann Georg Kohl—has drawn up, from personal experience, as exhaustive an account of the Mohawk section of the Iroquois Indians as Surgeon Bigsby gave of the Huron and Cherokee branches of that once powerful family. Herr Kohl spent the years 1859-60 in travelling about the north-eastern portion of the United States and Southern Canada, and thus was able to gather some interesting and valuable information concerning the tribe, which the writers of story-books seem to have maligned very much. He shows us the Mohawks of Quebec as hard-working farmers, respectable traders in fur, bold hunters, and pious Christians; and he reminds us that there is nothing extraordinary in all this if we take into account a century and a half of French influence at its best, together with the splendid labours of the Jesuit missionary heroes.
From Lake Champlain, Herr Kohl travelled across the boundary in a Canadian farmer’s waggon, which eventually set him down at an Indian village that 290 stood on the verge of an immense pine-forest. To be “dumped” down suddenly in a place where there is not a single white person would be disconcerting enough to any but a man of inquiring and adventurous disposition; but Kohl, on learning from his companion that here was a purely native population, eagerly jumped out of the cart with his gun and his luggage and bade the farmer drive on. Of course, he was stared at; but so he would have been in an English or German village; with this difference: that these Mohawk women and children possessed a native politeness and readiness to oblige that few English and fewer Germans can muster up. Kohl spoke encouragingly to the starers; was there an inn in the place? he asked in French. No; there was not. Where could he get a night’s lodging then? Anywhere in the village; perhaps the gentleman would like to see the chief’s house, as being the largest and most fitting for his reception. A neat little old woman called a youth who was repairing a timber-trolley.
“Go, my son; carry the gentleman’s paquet and show him the chief’s house.”
The idlers drew back, and though they continued to stare, made no attempt to follow the stranger. He began to ask questions. Where were all the men? The men were at work, a few in the fields, but most of them in the forest—hunting, wood-lumbering, or clearing the traps set for foxes, squirrels, etc.; many of them would be home by sundown.