T sounds a bit melodramatic, in these days of “Carlisle” education for the Indian, and with “Lo” himself on the lecture platform, to tell of a band of one time hostile red men having a white chief—once a captive—who so learned to love his captivity that when freedom was to be had for the taking, he refused it, and still lives among them, voluntarily. Contentedly—happily? Who knows? He says so; and with no proof to the contrary we must needs believe him.
Once in every three years he leaves his home among the mountains of eastern Oregon, and goes for a week to San Francisco by the sea. Once in every three years he may be seen there on the streets, in the parks, at the theaters, on the beach, at the Cliff or the Heights, as strangers are seen daily, and with nothing about him to mark him in any wise different from a thousand others. You might pass him dozens of times without particularly observing him, save that he is always accompanied by a woman so evidently of a different world than that which he has known, that your attention is at once arrested, and your curiosity is whetted to know the story—for story there is, you are sure. And what a story! One does not have to go to fiction for tales of the marvelous; and these two—he, roughened, bearded and browned, clothed as the average American laborer taking a holiday; she, with the bearing of a gentlewoman, and dressed as they do who have found the treasure-trove that lies at the end of the rainbow—these two have a tragic story, all their own, that few know. It is this:
Back in those far days when the Pacific Railroad was undreamed of—before we had so much as ever guessed there might in reality be a stage line between the Missouri and the Sacramento—one noon the wheels of an emigrant wagon were moving down a wide Nevada valley, where the sage gray of the short greasewood was the only thing remotely green; moving so slowly that they seemed not to move at all. It was a family from one of the States of our Middle West, going to California. The man walked beside the slow-moving wagon. Sometimes some of the children walked, too. The woman rode and held in her arms a wee boy whose own arms fought and sturdy legs struggled often to walk with the others—a blue-eyed boy, bonny and beautiful.
Days and days of unblinking sunshine; and always the awful stillness of the plains. There had been weeks of it; and this day when they came down the broad wash that was the drain from the bordering mountain range, a thick heat lay on the land, making welcome the promised noon rest where the greasewood grew tall. All down the length of the now dry wash the brush was more than shoulder high—annually wetted as it was by the full spring creek.
When the greasewood grows so high it may easily hide a foe.
The wagon bumped and ground its wheels over the stones of the road here in the wash toward the row of tall greasewood, a dozen yards away. Over there they would halt for a noon rest. Over there they would eat their noon meal—drink from their scanty water supply—and then resume the dreary journey.
This day was just such an one as all their other desert days had been; the place seemed to them not different in any way from the other miles of endless monotony. As they neared the high brush, one of the children—a fair-haired girl of eight—picking up a bright pebble from the road, held it up that her father might see. The other children walking beside the wagon picked up pebbles, too—pebbles red, and purple, and green, that had come down the bed of the creek when the flood came. In the wagon the woman sat holding the blue-eyed boy in her arms.
Then——
There was a swift, singing sound in the air, and one of the oxen staggered—bellowed—fell!
The sound of an arrow boring the air isn’t quite like anything else one may ever hear; and the man knew—before he heard the big steer’s roar of pain—that the thing he had feared (but had at last come to believe he had no cause to fear, when weeks passed and it had not happened) had finally come to them.
Dashing out from the greasewood cover, the Indians—half naked and wholly devilish—made quick work of their victims. They did not dally in what they had to do. Back on the plains another wagon—two, three, four, a train!—was coming; they did not dare to stay to meet such numbers. They struck only when sure of their strength. Now they were two to one—nay, ten men to one man! And he, that man, went down with a wife’s shrieks and the screaming of children’s voices in his ears.
It was the old story of early times and emigrants on the plains. You have heard it time and again.
After the arrow, the knife; and bloody corpses left by a burning wagon. Things done to turn sick with horror the next lone wayfarers who should reach this gruesome spot. Human flesh and bone for the vultures of the air and the wolves of the desert to feed upon, till—taken from their preying talon and tooth—they might be laid in the shallow graves hollowed by the roadside.
Yet one was spared. The wee bonny laddie wrested from the clinging arms of a dying mother, was held apart to witness a butchery that strained the childish eyes with terror. He lived, but never was he to forget the awful scene of that hour in the desert. And when the brutal work was over, savage arms bore him away to their homes on the heights of near mountains gashed by many a cañon.
There, for years upon years—growing from babyhood to boyhood—from boyhood to youth—he lived among them; and so became as one of their tribe. They were a small tribe—these—of renegade Bannocks; shifting their camps further and further into the North, and away from the White Man’s approach as civilization began to force them back. Northward; and at last into Oregon.
The sturdy little frame remained sturdy. Some children there are who persist in thriving under the most adverse conditions. And he was one of these. Yet, it must be admitted, his captors were kind; for the Indian—savage though he may be—deals gently, always, with his children; and this boy had become to them as their own.
The baby words of the White Man’s tongue were soon forgotten, and Indian gutterals took their place. The little feet were moccasined with deerskin, and the round cheeks daubed with paint. The little body was kept warm in a rabbitskin robe. Their food was his food—grass seeds ground into paste, and game; and his friends were themselves. To all intents and purposes he had become an Indian.
When, at length, he reached early manhood he took to himself an Indian bride. Then the tribe made him their chief.
Mines in the mountains had brought an army of prospectors into the once wild country. The mines prospered, and camps—permanent ones—multiplied. The Red Men saw their enemy growing in numbers beyond their strength to battle, so the depredations became fewer and fewer, and finally ceased altogether. “Lo” is something of a philosopher, and he generally accepts defeat with a better grace than his white brother. These knew they were beaten, so they were willing to accept peace; and began to mix, by degrees, with the Whites. They adopted the White Man’s dress—some learned his speech. The blue-eyed chief, too, whose position among them was never quite clear to the miners, again learned the language that seemed as one he had never known.
It was a long time before he came to realize that his chains of captivity had dropped away—rusted apart by time and circumstances—and that he might now, if he so chose, go back to the people of his own blood. He thought of it dully, indifferently, at first—then deeply. The way was open for him! He could go! But he came to know that down in the depths of his heart an affection had grown up for these people who had made him their own, that no other people could lay claim to, ever. That for all the days of his life his lot was here.
The awful events of that long gone day in the desert were too deeply branded into his recollection ever to be forgotten (young child though he was at the time); but the years had dimmed its horrors, and the associations of a lifetime had dulled his sensibilities.
No! he would remain among them. As he had been, he would still be—one of them. He had lost all desire to go. How many years had come and gone since the longing for liberty left him? He could not remember. This was his home—these were his people—he would stay.
And there he is today. There, a dozen years ago, a San Franciscan, drawn by the mines, found him; and during a summer’s companionship, gaining his confidence, learned from his lips his story.
Months later, this thrice strange tale served to entertain half a score of people who met together in his parlors on his return. They gathered around the story teller—close listeners—intent on every syllable; but one there was who went white as she heard. And when she could see him apart and unnoted, she said:
“He is my brother! I saw them take him away. I was hid behind a greasewood bush—I do not know how they overlooked me. I saw it all—everything! Then, those in an emigrant train behind ours, came and took me with them. I was a little child then—only eight; and he—my brother—was younger. I thought they had taken him away and killed him—I never guessed he lived. I know—I am sure this is he. Tell me all you can; for I must go and find him.”
What that meeting was, no one can say. She found him there surrounded by those who were his nearest and dearest—a brown-skinned wife and little bronze bairns—his! She stood face to face with him—she clasped hands with him; yet a lifetime and all the world lay between. Children of the loins of one father—born of the same mother—these two had nothing in common between them—nothing—save the yearning for a something that was always to lie just beyond.
He yielded to her persuasions and went home with her to see the city by the sea of which he had heard much, but knew nothing. It was a visit of but a few days; yet in that time no hour struck for each alike. Try as each would for a feeling of kinship, the other was ever a stranger.
She showed him the sights of the city, but he was more and more bewildered by what he saw. At the beach it was better; he seemed to understand the ocean best, though seeing it for the first time. She sought to awaken in him an interest in the things of her world. And to his credit be it said, he honestly tried to respond in the way she would have him.
But up and away to the Northeast was all he had interest in or heart for; and so at the end of a week he went back. Going, he pledged himself to come to her every third year for a week’s stay; for “blood is thicker than water,” and though they might never strike the same chord, yet, after all, she was his sister.
The years wax and wane. Every third one brings in fulfillment of the promise, the very commonplace-looking brother who is something of a mystery to her metropolitan friends. Time has brought brother and sister a little more closely together, but it will never bridge the chasm. Always there is a restraint, a reserve, which comes from a common knowledge that there are things in his past life he may not tell—yet, which she guesses with an unspoken, unnamed fear.
Once (when the bronze-brown woman was dead), he tried to accept civilized life as a finality. The month had not rounded out to fullness when each saw the futility of the attempt.
Back on the rough Oregon mountains were sons and daughters, “flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone,” brown-skinned though they were; and he turned his back on the White Man and his unfamiliar ways, and set his face toward those whom he knew best and loved.
Somehow, you like and respect the man for going, as you couldn’t had he stayed.
The story reads like fiction, doesn’t it? But the pity of it is that it is true.
