Chapter XI: Part 11

“Around about it were encamped thousands of Blackfeet waiting to trade for the goods the flotilla had brought up and to obtain on credit ammunition, fukes (trade guns), traps and tobacco. As yet the company had no Blackfoot interpreter. The factor perceiving that Monroe was a youth of more than ordinary intelligence at once detailed him to live and travel with the Piegans (a Blackfoot tribe) and learn their language, also to see that they returned to Mountain Fort with their furs the succeeding summer. Word had been received that, following the course of Lewis and Clarke, American traders were yearly pushing farther and farther westward and had even reached the mouth of the Yellowstone. The company feared their competition. Monroe was to do his best to prevent it.

“‘At last,’ Monroe told me, ‘the day came for our departure, and I set out with the chiefs and medicine men at the head of the long procession. There were eight hundred lodges of the Piegans there, about eight thousand souls. They owned thousands of horses. Oh, but it was a grand sight to see that long column of riders and pack animals, and loose horses trooping over the plains. We traveled on southward all the long day, and about an hour or two before sundown we came to the rim of a valley through which flowed a cotton wood-bordered stream. We dismounted at the top of the hill, and spread our robes intending to sit there until the procession passed by into the bottom and put up the lodges. A medicine man produced a large stone pipe, filled it and attempted to light it with flint and steel and a bit of punk (rotten wood), but somehow he could get no spark. I motioned him to hand it to me, and drawing my sunglass from my pocket, I got the proper focus and set the tobacco afire, drawing several mouthfuls of smoke through the long stem.

“‘As one man all those round about sprang to their feet and rushed toward me, shouting and gesticulating as if they had gone crazy. I also jumped up, terribly frightened, for I thought they were going to do me harm, perhaps kill me. The pipe was wrenched out of my grasp by the chief himself, who eagerly began to smoke and pray. He had drawn but a whiff or two when another seized it, and from him it was taken by still another. Others turned and harangued the passing column; men and women sprang from their horses and joined the group, mothers pressing close and rubbing their babes against me, praying earnestly meanwhile. I recognized a word that I had already learned--Natos--Sun--and suddenly the meaning of the commotion became clear; they thought that I was Great Medicine; that I had called upon the Sun himself to light the pipe, and that he had done so. The mere act of holding up my hand above the pipe was a supplication to their God. They had perhaps not noticed the glass, or if they had, had thought it some secret charm or amulet. At all events I had suddenly become a great personage, and from then on the utmost consideration and kindness was accorded to me.

“‘When I entered Lone Walker’s lodge that evening--he was the chief, and my host--I was greeted by deep growls from either side of the doorway, and was horrified to see two nearly grown grizzly bears acting as if about to spring upon me. I stopped and stood quite still, but I believe that my hair was rising; I know that my flesh felt to be shrinking. I was not kept in suspense. Lone Walker spoke to his pets, and they immediately lay down, noses between their paws, and I passed on to the place pointed out to me, the first couch at the chief’s left hand. It was some time before I became accustomed to the bears, but we finally came to a sort of understanding with one another. They ceased growling at me as I passed in and out of the lodge, but would never allow me to touch them, bristling up and preparing to fight if I attempted to do so. In the following spring they disappeared one night and were never seen again.’

“Think how the youth, Rising Wolf, must have felt as he journeyed southward over the vast plains, and under the shadow of the giant mountains which lie between the Saskatchewan and the Missouri, for he knew that he was the first of his race to behold them.” We were born a little too late!

“Monroe often referred to that first trip with the Piegans as the happiest time of his life.”

In the moon of falling leaves they came to Pile of Rocks River, and after three months went on to winter on Yellow River. Next summer they wandered down the Musselshell, crossed the Big River and thence westward by way of the Little Rockies and the Bear Paw Mountains to the Marias. Even paradise has its geography.

“Rifle and pistol were now useless as the last rounds of powder and ball had been fired. But what mattered that? Had they not their bows and great sheaves of arrows? In the spring they had planted on the banks of the Judith a large patch of their own tobacco which they would harvest in due time.

“One by one young Rising Wolf’s garments were worn out and cast aside. The women of the lodge tanned deerskins and bighorn (sheep) and from them Lone Walker himself cut and sewed shirts and leggings, which he wore in their place. It was not permitted for women to make men’s clothing. So ere long he was dressed in full Indian costume, even to the belt and breech-clout, and his hair grew so that it fell in rippling waves down over his shoulders.” A warrior never cut his hair, so white men living with Indians followed their fashion, else they were not admitted to rank as warriors. “He began to think of braiding it. Ap-ah’-ki, the shy young daughter of the chief, made his footwear--thin parfleche (arrow-proof)--soled moccasins (skin-shoes) for summer, beautifully embroidered with colored porcupine quills; thick, soft warm ones of buffalo robe for winter.

“‘I could not help but notice her,’ he said, ‘on the first night I stayed in her father’s lodge.... I learned the language easily, quickly, yet I never spoke to her nor she to me, for, as you know, the Blackfeet think it unseemly for youths and maidens to do so.

“‘One evening a man came into the lodge and began to praise a certain youth with whom I had often hunted; spoke of his bravery, his kindness, his wealth, and ended by saying that the young fellow presented to Lone Walker thirty horses, and wished, with Ap-ah’-ki, to set up a lodge of his own. I glanced at the girl and caught her looking at me; such a look! expressing at once fear, despair and something else which I dared not believe I interpreted aright. The chief spoke: “Tell your friend,” he said, “that all you have spoken of him is true; I know that he is a real man, a good, kind, brave, generous young man, yet for all that I can not give him my daughter.”

“‘Again I looked at Ap-ah’-ki and she at me. Now she was smiling and there was happiness in her eyes. But if she smiled I could not. I had heard him refuse thirty head of horses. What hope had I then, who did not even own the horse I rode? I, who received for my services only twenty pounds a year, from which must be deducted the various articles I bought. Surely the girl was not for me. I suffered.

“‘It was a little later, perhaps a couple of weeks, that I met her in the trail, bringing home a bundle of fire-wood. We stopped and looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then I spoke her name. Crash went the fuel on the ground, and we embraced and kissed regardless of those who might be looking.

“‘So, forgetting the bundle of wood, we went hand in hand and stood before Lone Walker, where he sat smoking his long pipe, out on the shady side of the lodge.

“‘The chief smiled. “Why, think you, did I refuse the thirty horses?” he asked, and before I could answer: “Because I wanted you for my son-in-law, wanted a white man because he is more cunning, much wiser than the Indian, and I need a counselor. We have not been blind, neither I nor my women. There is nothing more to say except this: be good to her.”

“‘That very day they set up a small lodge for us, and stored it with robes and parfleches of dried meat and berries, gave us one of their two brass kettles, tanned skins, pack saddles, ropes, all that a lodge should contain. And, not least, Lone Walker told me to choose thirty horses from his large herd. In the evening we took possession of our house and were happy.’

“Monroe remained in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company a number of years, raising a large family of boys and girls, most of whom are alive to-day. The oldest, John, is about seventy-five years of age, but still young enough to go to the Rockies near his home every autumn, and kill a few bighorn and elk, and trap a few beavers. The old man never revisited his home; never saw his parents after they parted with him at the Montreal docks. He intended to return to them for a brief visit some time, but kept deferring it, and then came letters two years old to say that they were both dead. Came also a letter from an attorney, saying that they had bequeathed him a considerable property, that he must go to Montreal and sign certain papers in order to take possession of it. At the time the factor of Mountain Fort was going to England on leave; to him, in his simple trustfulness Monroe gave a power of attorney in the matter. The factor never returned, and by virtue of the papers he had signed the frontiersman lost his inheritance. But that was a matter of little moment to him then. Had he not a lodge and family, good horses and a vast domain actually teeming with game wherein to wander? What more could one possibly want?

“Leaving the Hudson’s Bay Company, Monroe sometimes worked for the American Fur Company, but mostly as a free trapper, wandered from the Saskatchewan to the Yellowstone and from the Rockies to Lake Winnipeg. The headwaters of the South Saskatchewan were one of his favorite hunting grounds. Thither in the early fifties he guided the noted Jesuit Father, De Smet, and at the foot of the beautiful lakes just south of Chief Mountain they erected a huge wooden cross and named the two bodies of water Saint Mary’s Lakes.” Here the Canada and United States boundary climbs the Rocky Mountains.

“One winter after his sons John and François had married they were camping there for the season, the three lodges of the family, when one night a large war party of Assiniboins attacked them. The daughters Lizzie, Amelia and Mary had been taught to shoot, and together they made a brave resistance, driving the Indians away just before daylight, with the loss of five of their number, Lizzie killing one of them as he was about to let down the bars of the horse corral.

“Besides other furs, beaver, fisher, marten and wolverine, they killed more than three hundred wolves that winter by a device so unique, yet simple, that it is well worth recording. By the banks of the outlet of the lakes they built a long pen twelve by sixteen feet at the base, and sloping sharply inward and upward to a height of seven feet. The top of the pyramid was an opening about two feet six inches wide by eight feet in length. Whole deer, quarters of buffalo, any kind of meat handy was thrown into the pen, and the wolves, scenting the flesh and blood, seeing it plainly through the four to six inch spaces between the logs would eventually climb to the top and jump down through the opening. But they could not jump out, and there morning would find them uneasily pacing around and around in utter bewilderment.

“You will remember that the old man was a Catholic, yet I know that he had much faith in the Blackfoot religion, and believed in the efficiency of the medicine-man’s prayers and mysteries. He used often to speak of the terrible power possessed by a man named Old Sun. ‘There was one,’ he would say, ‘who surely talked with the gods, and was given some of their mysterious power. Sometimes of a dark night he would invite a few of us to his lodge, when all was calm and still. After all were seated his wives would bank the fire with ashes so that it was as dark within as without, and he would begin to pray. First to the Sun-chief, then to the wind maker, the thunder and the lightning. As he prayed, entreating them to come and do his will, first the lodge ears would begin to quiver with the first breath of a coming breeze, which gradually grew stronger and stronger till the lodge bent to the blasts, and the lodge poles strained and creaked. Then thunder began to boom, faint and far away, and lightning dimly to blaze, and they came nearer and nearer until they seemed to be just overhead; the crashes deafened us, the flashes blinded us, and all were terror-stricken. Then this wonderful man would pray them to go, and the wind would die down, and the thunder and lightning go on rumbling and flashing into the far distance until we heard and saw them no more.’”

LIII

A. D. 1819

SIMON BOLIVAR

Once at the stilted court of Spain young Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias, had the condescension to play at tennis with a mere colonial; and the bounder won.

Long afterward, when Don Ferdinand was king, the colonial challenged him to another ball game, one played with cannon-balls. This time the stake was the Spanish American empire, but Ferdinand played Bolivar, and again the bounder won.

“Now tell me,” a lady said once, “what animal reminds one most of the Señor Bolivar?”

And Bolivar thought he heard some one say “monkey,” whereat he flew into an awful passion, until the offender claimed that the word was “sparrow.” He stood five feet six inches, with a bird-like quickness, and a puckered face with an odd tang of monkey. Rich, lavish, gaudy, talking mock heroics, vain as a peacock, always on the strut unless he was on the run, there is no more pathetically funny figure in history than tragical Bolivar; who heard liberty, as he thought, knocking at the door of South America, and opened--to let in chaos.

“I don’t know,” drawled a Spaniard of that time, “to what class of beasts these South Americans belong.”

They were dogs, these Spanish colonials, treated as dogs, behaving as dogs. When they wanted a university Spain said they were only provided by Providence to labor in the mines. If they had opinions the Inquisition cured them of their errors. They were not allowed to hold any office or learn the arts of war and government. Spain sent officials to ease them of their surplus cash, and keep them out of mischief. Thanks to Spain they were no more fit for public affairs than a lot of Bengali baboos.

They were loyal as beaten dogs until Napoleon stole the Spanish crown for brother Joseph, and French armies promenaded all over Spain closely pursued by the British. There was no Spain left to love, but the colonials were not Napoleon’s dogs. Napoleon’s envoys to Venezuela were nearly torn to pieces before they escaped to sea, where a little British frigate came and gobbled them up. The sea belonged to the British, and so the colonials sent ambassadors, Bolivar and another gentleman, to King George. Please would he help them to gain their liberty? George had just chased Napoleon out of Spain, and said he would do his best with his allies, the Spaniards.

In London Bolivar unearthed a countryman who loved liberty and had fought for Napoleon, a real professional soldier. General Miranda was able and willing to lead the armies of freedom, until he actually saw the Venezuelan troops. Then he shied hard. He really must draw the line somewhere. Yes, he would take command of the rabble on one condition, that he got rid of Bolivar. To get away from Bolivar he would go anywhere and do anything. So he led his rabble and found them stout fighters, and drove the Spaniards out of the central provinces.

The politicians were sitting down to draft the first of many comic-opera constitutions when an awful sound, louder than any thunder, swept out of the eastern Andes, the earth rolled like a sea in a storm, and the five cities of the new republic crashed down in heaps of ruin. The barracks buried the garrisons, the marching troops were totally destroyed, the politicians were killed, and in all one hundred twenty thousand people perished. The only thing left standing in one church was a pillar bearing the arms of Spain; the only districts not wrecked were those still loyal to the Spanish government. The clergy pointed the moral, the ruined people repented their rebellion, and the Spanish forces took heart and closed in from every side upon the lost republic. Simon Bolivar generously surrendered General Miranda in chains to the victorious Spaniards.

So far one sees only, as poor Miranda did, that this man was a sickening cad. But he was something more. He stuck to the cause for which he had given his life, joined the rebels in what is now Colombia, was given a small garrison command and ordered to stay in his fort. In defiance of orders, he swept the Spaniards out of the Magdalena Valley, raised a large force, liberated the country, then marched into Venezuela, defeated the Spanish forces in a score of brilliant actions, and was proclaimed liberator with absolute power in both Colombia and Venezuela. One begins to marvel at this heroic leader until the cad looms out. “Spaniards and Canary islanders!” he wrote, “reckon on death even if you are neutral, unless you will work actively for the liberty of America. Americans! count on life even if you are culpable.”

Bolivar’s pet hobbies were three in number: Resigning his job as liberator; writing proclamations; committing massacres. “I order you,” he wrote to the governor of La Guayra, “to shoot all the prisoners in those dungeons, and _in the hospital_, without any exception whatever.”

So the prisoners of war were set to work building a funeral pyre. When this was ready eight hundred of them were brought up in batches, butchered with axes, bayonets and knives, and their bodies thrown on the flames. Meanwhile Bolivar, in his office, refreshed himself by writing a proclamation to denounce the atrocities of the Spaniards.

Southward of the Orinoco River there are vast level prairies called Llanos, a cattle country, handled by wild horsemen known as the Llaneros. In Bolivar’s time their leader called himself Boves, and he had as second in command Morales. Boves said that Morales was “atrocious.” Morales said that “Boves was a man of merit, but too blood-thirsty.” The Spaniards called their command “The Infernal Division.” At first they fought for the Revolution, afterward for Spain, but they were really quite impartial and spared neither age nor sex. This was the “Spanish” army which swept away the second Venezuelan republic, slaughtering the whole population save some few poor starving camps of fugitives. Then Boves reported to the Spanish general, “I have recovered the arms, ammunition, and the honor of the Spanish flag, which your excellency lost at Carabobo.”

From this time onward the situation was rather like a dog fight, with the republican dog somewhere underneath in the middle. At times Bolivar ran like a rabbit, at times he was granted a triumph, but whenever he had time to come up and breathe he fired off volleys of proclamations. In sixteen years a painstaking Colombian counted six hundred ninety-six battles, which makes an average of one every ninth day, not to mention massacres; but for all his puny body and feeble health Bolivar was always to be found in the very thick of the scrimmage.

Europe had entered on the peace of Waterloo, but the ghouls who stripped the dead after Napoleon’s battles had uniforms to sell which went to clothe the fantastic mobs, republican and royalist, who drenched all Spanish America with blood. There were soldiers, too, whose trade of war was at an end in Europe, who gladly listened to Bolivar’s agents, who offered gorgeous uniforms and promised splendid wages--never paid--and who came to join in the war for “liberty.” Three hundred Germans and nearly six thousand British veterans joined Bolivar’s colors to fight for the freedom of America, and nearly all of them perished in battle or by disease. Bolivar was never without British officers, preferred British troops to all others, and in his later years really earned the loyal love they gave him, while they taught the liberator how to behave like a white man.

It was in 1819 that Bolivar led a force of two thousand five hundred men across a flooded prairie. For a week they were up to their knees, at times to their necks in water under a tropic deluge of rain, swimming a dozen rivers beset by alligators. The climate and starvation bore very heavily upon the British troops. Beyond the flood they climbed the eastern Andes and crossed the Paramo at a height of thirteen thousand feet, swept by an icy wind in blinding fog--hard going for Venezuelans.

An Irishman, Colonel Rook, commanded the British contingent. “All,” he reported, “was quite well with his corps, which had had quite a pleasant march” through the awful gorges and over the freezing Paramo. A Venezuelan officer remarked here that one-fourth of the men had perished.

“It was true,” said Rook, “but it really was a very good thing, for the men who had dropped out were all the wastrels and weaklings of the force.”

Great was the astonishment of the royalists when Bolivar dropped on them out of the clouds, and in the battle of Boyacá they were put to rout. Next day Colonel Rook had his arm cut off by the surgeons, chaffing them about the beautiful limb he was losing. He died of the operation, but the British legion went on from victory to victory, melting away like snow until at the end negroes and Indians filled its illustrious companies. Colombia, Venezuela and Equador, Peru and Bolivia were freed from the Spanish yoke and, in the main, released by Bolivar’s tireless, unfailing and undaunted courage. But they could not stand his braggart proclamations, would not have him or any man for master, began a series of squabbles and revolutions that have lasted ever since, and proved themselves unfit for the freedom Bolivar gave. He knew at the end that he had given his life for a myth. On the eighth December, 1830, he dictated his final proclamation and on the tenth received the last rites of the church, being still his old braggart self. “Colombians! my last wishes are for the welfare of the fatherland. If my death contributes to the cessation of party strife, and to the consolidation of the Union, I shall descend in peace to the grave.” On the seventeenth his troubled spirit passed.

LIV

A. D. 1812

THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE

When Lieutenant Lord Thomas Cochrane commanded the brig of war _Speedy_, he used to carry about a whole broadside of her cannon-balls in his pocket. He had fifty-four men when he laid his toy boat alongside a Spanish frigate with thirty-two heavy guns and three hundred nineteen men, but the Spaniard could not fire down into his decks, whereas he blasted her with his treble-shotted pop-guns. Leaving only the doctor on board he boarded that Spaniard, got more than he bargained for, and would have been wiped out, but that a detachment of his sailors dressed to resemble black demons, charged down from the forecastle head. The Spaniards were so shocked that they surrendered.

For thirteen months the _Speedy_ romped about, capturing in all fifty ships, one hundred and twenty-two guns, five hundred prisoners. Then she gave chase to three French battle-ships by mistake, and met with a dreadful end.

In 1809, Cochrane, being a bit of a chemist, and a first-rate mechanic, was allowed to make fireworks hulks loaded with explosives--with which he attacked a French fleet in the anchorage at Aix. The fleet got into a panic and destroyed itself.

And all his battles read like fairy tales, for this long-legged, red-haired Scot, rivaled Lord Nelson himself in genius and daring. At war he was the hero and idol of the fleet, but in peace a demon, restless, fractious, fiendish in humor, deadly in rage, playing schoolboy jokes on the admiralty and the parliament. He could not be happy without making swarms of powerful enemies, and those enemies waited their chance.

In February, 1814, a French officer landed at Dover with tidings that the Emperor Napoleon had been slain by Cossacks. The messenger’s progress became a triumphal procession, and amid public rejoicings he entered London to deliver his papers at the admiralty. Bells pealed, cannon thundered, the stock exchange went mad with the rise of prices, while the messenger--a Mr. Berenger--sneaked to the lodgings of an acquaintance, Lord Cochrane, and borrowed civilian clothes.

His news was false, his despatch a forgery, he had been hired by Cochrane’s uncle, a stock-exchange speculator, to contrive the whole blackguardly hoax. Cochrane knew nothing of the plot, but for the mere lending of that suit of clothes, he was sentenced to the pillory, a year’s imprisonment, and a fine of a thousand pounds. He was struck from the rolls of the navy, expelled from the house of commons, his banner as a Knight of the Bath torn down and thrown from the doors of Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster. In the end he was driven to disgraceful exile and hopeless ruin.

Four years later Cochrane, commanding the Chilian navy, sailed from Valparaiso to fight the Spanish fleet. Running away from his mother, a son of his--Tom Cochrane, junior--aged five, contrived to sail with the admiral, and in his first engagement, was spattered with the blood and brains of a marine.

“I’m not hurt, papa,” said the imp, “the shot didn’t touch me. Jack says that the ball is not made that will hurt mama’s boy.” Jack proved to be right, but it was in that engagement that Cochrane earned his Spanish title, “The Devil.” Three times he attempted to take Callao from the Spaniards, then in disgusted failure dispersed his useless squadron, and went off with his flag ship to Valdivia. For lack of officers, he kept the deck himself until he dropped. When he went below for a nap, the lieutenant left a middy in command, but the middy went to sleep and the ship was cast away.

Cochrane got her afloat; then, with all his gunpowder wet, went off with his sinking wreck to attack Valdivia. The place was a Spanish stronghold with fifteen forts and one hundred and fifteen guns. Cochrane, preferring to depend on cold steel, left the muskets behind, wrecked his boats in the surf, let his men swim, led them straight at the Spaniards, stormed the batteries, and seized the city. So he found some nice new ships, and an arsenal to equip them, for his next attack on Callao.

He had a fancy for the frigate, _Esmeralda_, which lay in Callao--thought she would suit him for a cruiser. She happened to be protected by a Spanish fleet, and batteries mounting three hundred guns, but Cochrane did not mind. El Diablo first eased the minds of the Spaniards by sending away two out of his three small vessels, but kept the bulk of their men, and all their boats, a detail not observed by the weary enemy. His boarding party, two hundred and forty strong, stole into the anchorage at midnight, and sorely surprised the _Esmeralda_. Cochrane, first on board, was felled with the butt end of a musket, and thrown back into his boat grievously hurt, in addition to which he had a bullet through his thigh before he took possession of the frigate. The fleet and batteries had opened fire, but El Diablo noticed that two neutral ships protected themselves with a display of lanterns arranged as a signal, “Please don’t hit me.” “That’s good enough for me,” said Cochrane and copied those lights which protected the neutrals. When the bewildered Spaniards saw his lanterns also, they promptly attacked the neutrals. So Cochrane stole away with his prize.

Although the great sailor delivered Chili and Peru from the Spaniards, the patriots ungratefully despoiled him of all his pay and rewards. Cochrane has been described as “a destroying angel with a limited income and a turn for politics.” Anyway he was misunderstood, and left Chili disgusted, to attend to the liberation of Brazil from the Portuguese. But if the Chilians were thieves, the Brazilians proved to be both thieves and cowards. Reporting to the Brazilian government that all their cartridges, fuses, guns, powder, spars and sails, were alike rotten, and all their men an encumbrance, he dismantled a squadron to find equipment for a single ship, the _Pedro Primeiro_. This he manned with British and Yankee adventurers. He had two other small but fairly effective ships when he commenced to threaten Bahia. There lay thirteen Portuguese war-ships, mounting four hundred and eighteen guns, seventy merchant ships, and a garrison of several thousand men. El Diablo’s blockade reduced the whole to starvation, the threat of his fireworks sent them into convulsions, and their leaders resolved on flight to Portugal. So the troops were embarked, the rich people took ship with their treasure, and the squadron escorted them to sea, where Cochrane grinned in the offing. For fifteen days he hung in the rear of that fleet, cutting off ships as they straggled. He had not a man to spare for charge of his prizes, but when he caught a ship he staved her water casks, disabled her rigging so that she could only run before the wind back to Bahia, and threw every weapon overboard. He captured seventy odd ships, half the troops, all the treasure, fought and out-maneuvered the war fleet so that he could not be caught, and only let thirteen wretched vessels escape to Lisbon. Such a deed of war has never been matched in the world’s annals, and Cochrane followed it by forcing the whole of Northern Brazil to an abject surrender.

Like the patriots of Chili and Peru, the Brazilians gratefully rewarded their liberator by cheating him out of his pay; so next he turned to deliver Greece from the Turks. Very soon he found that even the Brazilians were perfect gentlemen compared with the Greek patriots, and the heart-sick man went home.

England was sorry for the way she had treated her hero, gave back his naval rank and made him admiral with command-in-chief of a British fleet at sea, restored his banner as a Knight of the Bath in Henry VII’s chapel, granted a pension, and at the end, found him a resting-place in the Abbey. On his father’s death, he succeeded to the earldom of Dundonald, and down to 1860, when the old man went to his rest, his life was devoted to untiring service. He was among the first inventors to apply coal gas to light English streets and homes; he designed the boilers long in use by the English navy; made a bitumen concrete for paving; and offered plans for the reduction of Sebastopol which would have averted all the horrors of the siege. Yet even to his eightieth year he was apt to shock and terrify all official persons, and when he was buried in the nave of the Abbey, Lord Brougham pronounced his strange obituary. “What,” he exclaimed at the grave side, “no cabinet minister, no officer of state to grace this great man’s funeral!” Perhaps they were still scared of the poor old hero.

LV

A.D. 1823

THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS

Far back in the long ago time New Zealand was a crowded happy land. Big Maori fortress villages crowned the hilltops, broad farms covered the hillsides; the chiefs kept a good table, cooking was excellent, and especially when prisoners were in season, the people feasted between sleeps, or, should provisions fail, sacked the next parish for a supply of meat. So many parishes were sacked and eaten, that in the course of time the chiefs led their tribes to quite a distance before they could find a nice fat edible village, but still the individual citizen felt crowded after meals, and all was well.

Then came the Pakehas, the white men, trading, with muskets for sale, and the tribe that failed to get a trader to deal with was very soon wiped out. A musket cost a ton of flax, and to pile up enough to buy one a whole tribe must leave its hill fortress to camp in unwholesome flax swamps. The people worked themselves thin to buy guns, powder and iron tools for farming, but they cherished their Pakeha as a priceless treasure in special charge of the chief, and if a white man was eaten, it was clear proof that he was entirely useless alive, or a quite detestable character. The good Pakehas became Maori warriors, a little particular as to their meat being really pig, but otherwise well mannered and popular.

Now of these Pakeha Maoris, one has left a book. He omitted his name from the book of _Old New Zealand_, and never mentioned dates, but tradition says he was Mr. F. C. Maning, and that he lived as a Maori and trader for forty years, from 1823 to 1863 when the work was published.

In the days when Mr. Maning reached the North Island a trader was valued at twenty times his weight in muskets, equivalent say, to the sum total of the British National Debt. Runaway sailors however, were quite cheap. “Two men of this description were hospitably entertained one night by a chief, a very particular friend of mine, who, to pay himself for his trouble and outlay, ate one of them next morning.”

Maning came ashore on the back of a warrior by the name of Melons, who capsized in an ebb tide running like a sluice, at which the white man, displeased, held the native’s head under water by way of punishment. When they got ashore Melons wanted to get even, so challenged the Pakeha to a wrestling match. Both were in the pink of condition, the Maori, twenty-five years of age, and a heavy-weight, the other a boy full of animal spirits and tough as leather. After the battle Melons sat up rather dazed, offered his hand, and venting his entire stock of English, said “How do you do?”

But then came a powerful chief, by name Relation-eater. “Pretty work this,” he began, “_good_ work. I won’t stand this not at all! not at all! not at all!” (The last sentence took three jumps, a step and a turn round, to keep correct time.) “Who killed the Pakeha? It was Melons. You are a nice man, killing _my_ Pakeha ... we shall be called the ‘Pakeha killkillers’; I shall be sick with shame; the Pakeha will run away; what if you had killed him dead, or broken his bones”.... (Here poor Melones burst out crying like an infant). “Where is the hat? Where the shoes? The Pakeha is robbed! he is murdered!” Here a wild howl from Melons.

The local trader took Mr. Maning to live with him, but it was known to the tribes that the newcomer really and truly belonged to Relation-eater. Not long had he been settled when there occurred a meeting between his tribe and another, a game of bluff, when the warriors of both sides danced the splendid Haka, most blood-curdling, hair-lifting of all ceremonials. Afterward old Relation-eater singled out the horrible savage who had begun the war-dance, and these two tender-hearted individuals for a full half-hour, seated on the ground hanging on each other’s necks, gave vent to a chorus of skilfully modulated howling. “So there was peace,” and during the ceremonies Maning came upon a circle of what seemed to be Maori chiefs, until drawing near he found that their nodding heads had nobody underneath. Raw heads had been stuck on slender rods, with cross sticks to carry the robes, “Looking at the ’eds, sir?” asked an English sailor. “’Eds was _werry_ scarce--they had to tattoo a slave a bit ago, and the villain ran away, tattooin’ and all!”

“What!”

“Bolted before he was fit to kill,” said the sailor, mournful to think how dishonest people could be.

Once the head chief, having need to punish a rebellious vassal, sent Relation-eater, who plundered and burned the offending village. The vassal decamped with his tribe.

“Well, about three months after this, about daylight I was aroused by a great uproar.... Out I ran at once and perceived that M--’s premises were being sacked by the rebellious vassal who ... was taking this means of revenging himself for the rough handling he had received from our chief. Men were rushing in mad haste through the smashed windows and doors, loaded with everything they could lay hands upon.... A large canoe was floating near to the house, and was being rapidly filled with plunder. I saw a fat old Maori woman who was washerwoman, being dragged along the ground by a huge fellow who was trying to tear from her grasp one of my shirts, to which she clung with perfect desperation. I perceived at a glance that the faithful old creature would probably save a sleeve.

“An old man-of-war’s man defending _his_ washing, called out, ‘Hit out, sir! ... our mob will be here in five minutes!’

“The odds were terrible, but ... I at once floored a native who was rushing by me.... I then perceived that he was one of our own people ... so to balance things I knocked down another! and then felt myself seized round the waist from behind.

“The old sailor was down now but fighting three men at once, while his striped shirt and canvas trousers still hung proudly on the fence.

“Then came our mob to the rescue and the assailants fled.

“Some time after this a little incident worth noting happened at my friend M--’s place. Our chief had for some time back a sort of dispute with another magnate.... The question was at last brought to a fair hearing at my friend’s house. The arguments on both sides were very forcible; so much so that in the course of the arbitration our chief and thirty of his principal witnesses were shot dead in a heap before my friend’s door, and sixty others badly wounded, and my friend’s house and store blown up and burnt to ashes.

“My friend was, however, consoled by hundreds of friends who came in large parties to condole with him, and who, as was quite correct in such cases, shot and ate all his stock, sheep, pigs, ducks, geese, fowls, etc., all in high compliment to himself; he felt proud.... He did not, however, survive these honors long.”

Mr. Maning took this poor gentleman’s place as trader, and earnestly studied native etiquette, on which his comments are always deliciously funny. Two young Australians were his guests when there arrived one day a Maori desperado who wanted blankets; and “to explain his views more clearly knocked both my friends down, threatened to kill them both with his tomahawk, then rushed into the bedroom, dragged out all the bedclothes, and burnt them on the kitchen fire.”

A few weeks later, Mr. Maning being alone, and reading a year-old Sydney paper, the desperado called. “‘Friend,’ said I; ‘my advice to you is to be off.’

“He made no answer but a scowl of defiance. ‘I am thinking, friend, that this is my house,’ said I, and springing upon him I placed my foot to his shoulder, and gave him a shove which would have sent most people heels over head.... But quick as lightning ... he bounded from the ground, flung his mat away over his head, and struck a furious blow at my head with his tomahawk. I caught the tomahawk in full descent; the edge grazed my hand; but my arm, stiffened like a bar of iron, arrested the blow. He made one furious, but ineffectual attempt to wrest the tomahawk from my grasp; and then we seized one another round the middle, and struggled like maniacs in the endeavor to dash each other against the boarded floor; I holding on for dear life to the tomahawk ... fastened to his wrist by a strong thong of leather.... At last he got a lock round my leg; and had it not been for the table on which we both fell, and which in smashing to pieces, broke our fall, I might have been disabled.... We now rolled over and over on the floor like two mad bulldogs; he trying to bite, and I trying to stun him by dashing his bullet head against the floor. Up again! another furious struggle in course of which both our heads and half our bodies were dashed through the two glass windows, and every single article of furniture was reduced to atoms. Down again, rolling like made, and dancing about among the rubbish--wreck of the house. Such a battle it was that I can hardly describe it.

“By this time we were both covered with blood from various wounds.... My friend was trying to kill me, and I was only trying to disarm and tie him up ... as there were no witnesses. If I killed him, I might have serious difficulties with his tribe.

“Up again; another terrific tussle for the tomahawk; down again with a crash; and so this life and death battle went on ... for a full hour ... we had another desperate wrestling match. I lifted my friend high in my arms, and dashed him, panting, furious, foaming at the mouth--but beaten--against the ground. His God has deserted him.

“He spoke for the first time, ‘Enough! I am beaten; let me rise.’

“I, incautiously, let go his left arm. Quick as lightning he snatched at a large carving fork ... which was lying among the debris; his fingers touched the handle and it rolled away out of his reach; my life was saved. He then struck me with all his remaining fire on the side of the head, causing the blood to flow out of my mouth. One more short struggle and he was conquered.

“But now I had at last got angry ... I must kill my man, or sooner or later he would kill me.... I told him to get up and die standing. I clutched the tomahawk for the _coup de grace_. At this instant a thundering sound of feet ... a whole tribe coming ... my friends!... He was dragged by the heels, stamped on, kicked, and thrown half dead, into his canoe.

“All the time we had been fighting, a little slave imp of a boy belonging to my antagonist had been loading the canoe with my goods and chattels.... These were now brought back.”

In the sequel this desperado committed two more murders “and also killed in fair fight, with his own hand the first man in a native battle ... which I witnessed.... At last having attempted to murder another native, he was shot through the heart ... so there died.”

Mr. Maning was never again molested, and making full allowance for their foibles, speaks with a very tender love for that race of warriors.

LVI

A.D. 1840

A TALE OF VENGEANCE

In the days of the grandfathers, say ninety years ago, the Americans had spread their settlements to the Mississippi, and that river was their frontier. The great plains and deserts beyond, all speckled now with farms and glittering with cities, belonged to the red Indian tribes, who hunted the buffalo, farmed their tobacco, played their games, worshiped the Almighty Spirit, and stole one another’s horses, without paying any heed to the white men. For the whites were only a little tribe among them, a wandering tribe of trappers and traders who came from the Rising Sun Land in search of beaver skins. The beaver skins were wanted for top hats in the Land of the Rising Sun.

These white men had strange and potent magic, being masters of fire, and brought from their own land the fire-water and the firearms which made them welcome among the tribes. Sometimes a white man entered the tribes and became an Indian, winning his rank as warrior, marrying, setting up his lodge, and even rising to the grade of chief. Of such was Jim Beckwourth, part white, part negro, a great warrior, captain of the Dog Soldier regiment in the Crow nation. His lodge was full of robes; his wives, by whom he allied himself to the leading families, were always well fed, well dressed, and well behaved. When he came home with his Dog Soldiers he always returned in triumph, with bands of stolen horses, scalps in plenty.

Long afterward, when he was an old man, Jim told his adventures to a writer, who made them into a book, and in this volume he tells the story of Pine Leaf, an Indian girl. She was little more than a child, when, in an attack of the Cheyennes upon the village, her twin brother was killed. Then, in a passion of rage and grief, she cut off one of her fingers as a sacrifice to the Great Spirit, and took oath that she would avenge her brother’s death, never giving herself in marriage until she had taken a hundred trophies in battle. The warriors laughed when she asked leave to join them on the war-path, but Jim let her come with the Dog Soldiers.

Rapidly she learned the trade of war, able as most of the men with bow, spear and gun, running like an antelope, riding gloriously; and yet withal a woman, modest and gentle except in battle, famed for lithe grace and unusual beauty.

“Please marry me,” said Jim, as she rode beside him.

“Yes, when the pine leaves turn yellow.”

Jim thought this over, and complained that pine leaves do not turn yellow.

“Please!” he said.

“Yes,” answered Pine Leaf, “when you see a red-headed Indian.”

Jim, who had wives enough already as became his position, sulked for this heroine.

She would not marry him, and yet once when a powerful Blackfoot had nigh felled Jim with his battle-ax, Pine Leaf speared the man and saved her chief. In that engagement she killed four warriors, fighting at Jim’s side. A bullet cut through his crown of eagle plumes. “These Blackfeet shoot close,” said Pine Leaf, “but never fear; the Great Spirit will not let them harm us.”

In the next fight, a Blackfoot’s lance pierced Jim’s legging, and then transfixed his horse, pinning him to the animal in its death agony. Pine Leaf hauled out the lance and released him. “I sprang upon the horse,” says Jim, “of a young warrior who was wounded. The heroine then joined me, and we dashed into the conflict. Her horse was immediately after killed, and I discovered her in a hand-to-hand encounter with a dismounted Blackfoot, her lance in one hand and her battle-ax in the other. Three or four springs of my steed brought me upon her antagonist, and striking him with the breast of my horse when at full speed, I knocked him to the earth senseless, and before he could recover, she pinned him to the earth and scalped him. When I had overturned the warrior, Pine Leaf called to me, ‘Ride on, I have him safe now.’”

She was soon at his side chasing the flying enemy, who left ninety-one killed in the field.

In the next raid, Pine Leaf took two prisoners, and offered Jim one of them to wife. But Jim had wives enough of the usual kind, whereas now this girl’s presence at his side in battle gave him increased strength and courage, while daily his love for her flamed higher.

At times the girl was sulky because she was denied the rank of warrior, shut out from the war-path secret, the hidden matters known only to fighting men. This secret was that the warriors shared all knowledge in common as to the frailties of women who erred, but Pine Leaf was barred out.

There is no space here for a tithe of her battles, while that great vengeance for her brother piled up the tale of scalps. In one victorious action, charging at Jim’s side, she was struck by a bullet which broke her left arm. With the wounded arm nursed in her bosom she grew desperate, and three warriors fell to her ax before she fainted from loss of blood.

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.