They were pleased with the Mormons. They would have been pleased with any whites who would not cheat them, nor sell them whiskey, nor whip them for their poor gipsey habits, nor bear themselves indecently toward their women, many of whom among the Pottawatamies, especially those of nearly unmixed French descent, are singularly comely, and some of them educated. But all Indians have something like a sentiment of reverence for the insane, and admire those who sacrifice, without apparent motive, their worldly welfare to the triumph of an idea. They understand the meaning of what they call a great vow, and think it the duty of the right-minded to lighten the votary's penance under it. To this feeling they united the sympathy of fellow-sufferers for those who could talk to them of their own Illinois, and tell the story how from it they also had been ruthlessly expelled.
Their hospitality was sincere, almost delicate. Fanny Le Clerc, the spoiled child of the great brave, Pied Riche, interpreter of the Nation, would have the pale face Miss Devine learn duets with her to the guitar; and the daughter of substantial Joseph La Framboise, the interpreter of the United States,—she died of the fever that summer,—welcomed all the nicest young Mormon Kitties and Lizzies, and Jennies and Susans, to a coffee feast at her father's house, which was probably the best cabin in the river village. They made the Mormons at home, there and elsewhere. Upon all their lands they formally gave them leave to tarry just so long as should suit their own good pleasure.
The affair, of course, furnished material for a solemn council. Under the auspices of an officer of the United States, their chiefs were summoned, in the form befitting great occasions, to meet in the dirty yard of one Mr. P. A. Sarpy's log trading house, at their village. They came in grand toilet, moving in their fantastic attire with so much aplomb and genteel measure, that the stranger found it difficult not to believe them high born gentlemen, attending a costumed ball. Their aristocratically thin legs, of which they displayed fully the usual Indian proportion, aided this illusion. There is something too at all times very Mock-Indian in the theatrical French millinery tie of the Pottawatamie turban; while it is next to impossible for a sober white man, at first sight, to believe that the red, green, black, blue and yellow cosmetics, with which he sees such grave personages so variously dotted, diapered, cancelled and arabesqued, are worn by them in any mood but one of the deepest and most desperate quizzing. From the time of their first squat upon the ground, to the final breaking up of the council circle, they sustained their characters with equal self-possession and address.
I will not take it upon myself to describe their order of ceremonies; indeed, I ought not, since I have never been able to view the habits and customs of our aborigines in any other light than that of a reluctant and sorrowful subject of jest. Besides, in this instance, the displays of pow wow and eloquence were both probably moderated, by the conduct of the entire transaction on temperance principles. I therefore content myself with observing, generally, that the proceedings were such as every way became the grandeur of the parties interested, and the magnitude of the interests involved. When the Red Men had indulged to satiety in tobacco smoke from their peace pipes, and in what they love still better, their peculiar metaphoric rhodomontade, which, beginning with the celestial bodies, and coursing downwards over the grandest sublunary objects, always managed to alight at last on their Grand Father Polk, and the tenderness for him of his affectionate colored children; all the solemn funny fellows present who played the part of Chiefs, signed formal articles of convention with their unpronounceable names.
The renowned chief, Pied Riche—he was surnamed Le Clerc on account of his remarkable scholarship,—then rose, and said:
"My Mormon Brethren,
"The Pottawatamie came sad and tired into this unhealthy Missouri Bottom, not many years back, when he was taken from his beautiful country beyond the Mississippi, which had abundant game and timber and clear water everywhere. Now you are driven away, the same, from your lodges and lands there, and the graves of your people. So we have both suffered. We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us both. You are now free to cut and use all the wood you may wish. You can make all your improvements, and live on any part of our actual land not occupied by us. Because one suffers, and does not deserve it, is no reason he shall suffer always: I say. We may live to see all right yet. However, if we do not, our children will.—Bon Jour."
And thus ended the pageant. I give this speech as a morsel of real Indian. It was recited to me after the Treaty by the Pottawatamie orator in French, which language he spoke with elegance. Bon Jour is the French, Indian and English Hail and Farewell of the Pottawatamies.
The other entertainers of the Mormons at this time, the Omahas, or Mahaws, are one of the minor tribes of the Grand Prairie. Their Great Father, the United States, has found it inconvenient to protect so remote a dependency against the overpowering league of the Dahcotahs or Sioux, and has judged it dangerous at the same time to allow them to protect themselves by entering into a confederation with others. Under the pressure of this paternal embarrassment and restraint, it has therefore happened most naturally, that this tribe, once a powerful and valued ally of ours, has been reduced to a band of little more than a hundred families; and these, a few years more, will entirely extinguish. When I was among them, they were so ill-fed, that their protruding high cheek bones gave them the air of a tribe of consumptives. The buffalo had left them, and no good ranges lay within several hundred miles reach. Hardly any other game found cover on their land. What little there was, they were short of ammunition to kill. Their annuity from the United States was trifling. They made next to nothing at thieving. They had planted some corn in their awkward Indian fashion, but through fear of ambush dared not venture out to harvest it. A chief resource for them, the winter previous, had been the spoliation of their neighbors, the Prairie Field Mice.
These interesting little people, more industrious and thrifty than the Mahaws, garner up in the neat little cellars of their underground homes, the small seeds or beans of the wood pea vine, which are black and hard, but quite nutritious. Gathering them one by one, a single Mouse will thus collect as much as half a pint, which before the cold weather sets in, he piles away in a dry and frost proof excavation, cleverly thatched and covered in. The Omaha animal, who, like enough, may have idled during all the season the Mouse was amassing his toilsome treasure, finds this subterranean granary to give out a certain peculiar cavernous vibration when briskly tapped upon above the ground. He wanders about, therefore, striking with a wand in hopeful spots: and as soon as he hears the hollow sound he knows, unearths the little retired capitalist along with his winter's hope. Mouse wakes up from his nap to starve, and Mahaw swallows several relishing mouthfuls.