Chapter 16

"Now these Potawatami," said the Dog Chief, "had had guns a long time, and better guns than ours. But being boys we did not know enough to turn back. About midday we came to level country around the headwaters of the creek, and there were four Potawatami skinning buffaloes. They had bunched up their horses and tied them to a tree while they cut up the kill. Red Morning said for us to run off the horses, and that would be almost as good as a scalp-taking. We left our ponies in the ravine and wriggled through the long grass. We had cut the horses loose and were running them, before the Potawatami discovered it. One of them called his own horse and it broke out of the bunch and ran toward him. In a moment he was on his back, so we three each jumped on a horse and began to whip them to a gallop. The Potawatami made for the Suh-tai, and rode even with him. I think he saw it was only a boy, and neither of them had a gun. But suddenly as their horses came neck and neck Suh-tai gave a leap and landed on the Potawatami's horse behind the rider. It was a trick of his with which he used to scare us. He would leap on and off before you had time to think. As he clapped his legs to the horse's back he stuck his knife into the Potawatami. The man threw up his arms and Suh-tai tumbled him off the horse in an instant.

"This I saw because Red Morning's horse had been shot under him, and I had stopped to take him up. By this time another man had caught a horse and I had got my lance again which I had left leaning against a tree. I faced him with it as he came on at a dead run, and for a moment I thought it had gone clean through him, but really it had passed between his arm and his body and he had twisted it out of my hand.

"Our horses were going too fast to stop, but Red Morning, from behind me, struck at the head of the man's horse as it passed with his knife-edged club, and we heard the man shout as he went down. I managed to get my horse about in time to see Suh-tai, who had caught up with us, trying to snatch the Potawatami's scalp, but his knife turned on one of the silver plates through which his scalp-lock was pulled, and all the Suh-tai got was a lock of the hair. In his excitement he thought it was the scalp and went shaking it and shouting like a wild man.

"The Potawatami pulled himself free of his fallen horse as I came up, and it did me good to see the blood flowing from under his arm where my lance had scraped him. I rode straight at him, meaning to ride him down, but the horse swerved a little and got a long wiping stroke from the Potawatami's knife, from which, in a minute more, he began to stagger. By this time the other men had got their guns and begun shooting. Suh-tai's bow had been shot in two, and Red Morning had a graze that laid his cheek open. So we got on our own ponies and rode away.

"We saw other men riding into the open, but they had all been chasing buffaloes, and our ponies were fresh. It was not long before we left the shooting behind. Once we thought we heard it break out again in a different direction, but we were full of our own affairs, and anxious to get back to the camp and brag about them. As we crossed the creek Suh-tai made a line and said the words that made it Medicine. We felt perfectly safe.

"It was our first fight, and each of us had counted coup. Suh-tai was not sure but he had killed his man. Not for worlds would he have wiped the blood from his knife until he had shown it to the camp. Two of us had wounds, for my man had struck at me as he passed, though I had been too excited to notice it at the time ... '_Eyah!_' said the Dog Chief,--'a man's first scar ...!' We were very happy, and Red Morning taught us his song as we rode home beside the Republican River.

"As we neared our own camp we were checked in our rejoicing; we heard the wails of the women, and then we saw the warriors sitting around with their heads in their blankets--as many as were left of them. My father was gone, he was one of the first who was killed by the Potawatami."

The Dog Chief was silent a long time, puffing gently on his pipe, and the Officer of the Yellow Rope began to sing to himself a strange, stirring song.

Looking at him attentively Oliver saw an old faint scar running across his face from nose to ear.

"Is your name Red Morning?" Oliver wished to know.

The man nodded, but he did not smile; they were all of them smoking silently with their eyes upon the ground. Oliver understood that there was more and turned back to the Dog Chief.

"Weren't they pleased with what you had done?" he asked.

"They were pleased when they had time to notice us," he said, "but they didn't know--they didn't know that we had broken the Medicine of the Arrows. It didn't occur to us to say anything about the time we had left the camp, and nobody asked us. A young warrior, Big Head he was called, had also gone out toward the enemy before the Mystery was over. They laid it all to him.

"And at that time we didn't know ourselves, not till long afterward. You see, we thought we had got away from the Potawatami because our ponies were fresh and theirs had been running buffaloes. Rut the truth was they had followed us until they heard the noise of the shooting where Our Folks attacked the Kitkahhahki. It was the first they knew of the attack and they went to the help of their friends. Until they came Our Folks had all the advantage. But the Potawatami shoot to kill. They carry sticks on which to rest the guns, and their horses are trained to stand still. Our men charged them as they came, but the Potawatami came forward by tens to shoot, and loaded while other tens took their places ... and the Medicine of the Arrows had been broken. The men of the Potawatami took the hearts of our slain to make strong Medicine for their bullets and when the Cheyennes saw what they were doing they ran away.

"But if we three had not broken the Medicine, the Potawatami would never have been in that battle.

"Thus it is," said the Dog Soldier, putting his pipe in his belt and gathering his robes about him, "that wars are lost and won, not only in battle, but in the minds and the hearts of the people, and by the keeping of those things that are sacred to the people, rather than by seeking those things that are pleasing to one's self. Do you understand this, my son?"

"I think so," said Oliver, remembering what he had heard at school. He felt the hand of the Dog Chief on his shoulder, but when he looked up it was only the Museum attendant come to tell him it was closing time.

THE END

APPENDIX

GLOSSARY OF INDIAN AND SPANISH NAMES

THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL

The appendix is that part of a book in which you find the really important things, put there to keep them from interfering with the story. Without an appendix you might not discover that all of the important things in this book really _are_ true.

All the main traveled roads in the United States began as animal or Indian trails. There is no map that shows these roads as they originally were, but the changes are not so many as you might think. Railways have tunneled under passes where the buffalo went over, hills have been cut away and swamps filled in, but the general direction and in many places the actual grades covered by the great continental highways remain the same.

THE BUFFALO COUNTRY

_Licks_ are places where deer and buffaloes went to lick the salt they needed out of the ground. They were once salt springs or lakes long dried up.

_Wallows_ were mudholes where the buffaloes covered themselves with mud as a protection from mosquitoes and flies. They would lie down and work themselves into the muddy water up to their eyes. Crossing the Great Plains, you can still see round green places that were wallows in the days of the buffalo.

The Pawnees are a roving tribe, in the region of the Platte and Kansas Rivers. If they were just setting out on their journey when the children heard them they would sing:--

"Dark against the sky, yonder distant line Runs before us. Trees we see, long the line of trees Bending, swaying in the wind.

"Bright with flashing light, yonder distant line Runs before us. Swiftly runs, swift the river runs, Winding, flowing through the land."

But if they happened to be crossing the river at the time they would be singing to _Kawas_, their eagle god, to help them. They had a song for coming up on the other side, and one for the mesas, with long, flat-sounding lines, and a climbing song for the mountains.

You will find all these songs and some others in a book by Miss Fletcher in the public library.

TRAIL TALK

You will find the story of the Coyote and the Burning Mountain in my book _The Basket Woman_.

The Tenasas were the Tennessee Mountains. Little River is on the map.

Flint Ridge is a great outcrop of flint stone in Ohio, near the town of Zanesville. Sky-Blue-Water is Lake Superior.

Cahokia is the great mound near St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the river.

When the Lenni-Lenape speaks of a Telling of his Fathers about the mastodon or the mammoth, he was probably thinking of the story that is pictured on the Lenape stone, which seems to me to be the one told by Arrumpa. Several Indian tribes had stories of a large extinct animal which they called the Big Moose, or the Big Elk, because moose and elk were the largest animals they knew.

ARRUMPA'S STORY

I am not quite certain of the places mentioned in this story, because the country has so greatly changed, but it must have been in Florida or Georgia, probably about where the Savannah River is now. It is in that part of the country we have the proof that man was here in America at the same time as the mammoth.

Shell mounds occur all along the coast. No doubt the first permanent trails led to them from the hunting-grounds. Every year the tribe went down to gather sea-food, and left great piles of shells many feet deep, sometimes covering several acres. It is from these mounds that we discover the most that we know about early man in the United States.

There are three different opinions as to where the first men in America came from. First, that they came from some place in the North that is now covered with Arctic ice; second, that they came from Europe and Africa by way of some islands that are now sunk beneath the Atlantic Ocean; third, that they came from Asia across Behring Strait and the Aleutian Islands.

The third theory seems the most reasonable. But also it is very likely that some people did come from the lost islands in the Atlantic, and left traces in South America and the West Indies. It may be that Dorcas Jane and Oliver will yet meet somebody in the Museum country who can tell them about it.

The Great Cold that Arrumpa speaks about must have been the Ice Age, that geologists tell us once covered the continent of North America, almost down to the Ohio River. It came and went slowly, and probably so changed the climate that the elephants, tigers, camels, and other animals that used to be found in the United States could no longer live in it.

THE COYOTE'S STORY

_Tamal-Pyweack_--Wall-of-Shining-Rocks--is an Indian name for the Rocky Mountains. _Backbone-of-the-World_ is another.

The Country of the Dry Washes is between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas, toward the south. A dry wash is the bed of a river that runs only in the rainy season. As such rivers usually run very swiftly, they make great ragged gashes across a country.

There are several places in the Rockies called _Wind Trap_. The Crooked Horn might have been Pike's Peak, as you can see by the pictures. The white men had to rediscover this trail for themselves, for the Indians seemed to have forgotten it, but the railroad that passes through the Rockies, near Pike's Peak, follows the old trail of the Bighorn.

It is very likely that the Indian in America had the dog for his friend as soon as he had fire, if not before it. Most of the Indian stories of the origin of fire make the coyote the first discoverer and bringer of fire to man. The words that Howkawanda said before he killed the Bighorn were probably the same that every Indian hunter uses when he goes hunting big game: "O brother, we are about to kill you, we hope that you will understand and forgive us." Unless they say something like that the spirit of the animal killed might do them some mischief.

THE CORN WOMAN'S STORY

Indian corn, _mahiz_, or maize, is supposed to have come originally from Central America. But the strange thing about it is that no specimen of the wild plant from which it might have developed has ever been found. This would indicate that the development must have taken place a very long time ago, and the parent corn may have belonged to the age of the mastodon and other extinct creatures.

Different tribes probably brought it into the United States at different times. Some of it came up the Atlantic Coast, across the West Indies. The fragments of legend from which I made the story of the Corn Woman were found among the Indians that were living in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee at the time the white men came.

Chihuahua is a province and city in Old Mexico, the trail that leads to it one of the oldest lines of tribal migration on the continent.

To be given to the Sun meant to have your heart cut out on a sacrificial stone, usually on the top of a hill, or other high place. The Aztecs were an ancient Mexican people who practiced this kind of sacrifice as a part of their religion. If it was from them the Corn Woman obtained the seed, it must have been before they moved south to Mexico City, where the Spaniards found them in the sixteenth century.

A _teocali_ was an Aztec temple.

MOKE-ICHA'S STORY

A _tipi_ is the sort of tent used by the Plains Indians, made of tanned skins. It is sometimes called a _lodge_, and the poles on which the skins are hung are usually cut from the tree which for this reason is called the lodge-pole pine. It is important to remember things like this. By knowing the type of house used, you can tell more about the kind of life lived by that tribe than by any other one thing. When the poles were banked up with earth the house was called an _earth lodge_. If thatched with brush and grass, a _wickiup_. In the eastern United States, where huts were covered with bark, they were generally called _wigwams_. In the desert, if the house was built of sticks and earth or brush, it was called a _hogan_, and if of earth made into rude bricks, a _pueblo_.

The Queres Indians live all along the Rio Grande in pueblos, since there is no need of their living now in the cliffs. You can read about them at Ty-uonyi in "The Delight-Makers."

A _kiva_ is the underground chamber of the house, or if not underground, at least without doors, entered from the top by means of a ladder.

_Shipapu_, the place from which the Queres and other pueblo Indians came, means, in the Queres language, "Black Lake of Tears," and according to the Zuni, "Place of Encompassing Mist," neither of which sounds like a pleasant place to live. Nevertheless, all the Queres expect to go there when they die. It is the Underworld from which the Twin Brothers led them when the mud of the earliest world was scarcely dried, and they seem to have gone wandering about until they found Ty-uonyi, where they settled.

The stone puma, which Moke-icha thought was carved in her honor, can still be seen on the mesa back from the river, south of Tyuonyi. But the Navajo need not have made fun of the Cliff-Dwellers for praying to a puma, since the Navajos of to-day still say their prayers to the bear. The Navajos are a wandering tribe, and pretend to despise all people who live in fixed dwellings.

The "ghosts of prayer plumes," which Moke-icha saw in the sky, is the Milky Way. The Queres pray by the use of small feathered sticks planted in the ground or in crevices of the rocks in high and lonely places. As the best feathers for this purpose are white, and as everything is thought of by Indians as having a spirit, it was easy for them to think of that wonderful drift of stars across the sky as the spirits of prayers, traveling to Those Above. If ever you should think of making a prayer plume for yourself, do not on any account use the feathers of owl or crow, as these are black prayers and might get you accused of witchcraft.

The _Uakanyi_, to which Tse-tse wished to belong, were the Shamans of War; they had all the secrets of strategy and spells to protect a man from his enemies. There were also Shamans of hunting, of medicine and priestcraft.

It was while the Queres were on their way from Shipapu that the Delight-Makers were sent to keep the people cheerful. The white mud with which they daubed themselves is a symbol of light, and the corn leaves tied in their hair signify fruitfulness, for the corn needs cheering up also. There must be something in it, for you notice that clowns, whose business it is to make people laugh, always daub themselves with white.

THE MOUND-BUILDER'S STORY

The Mound-Builders lived in the Mississippi Valley about a thousand years ago. They built chiefly north of the Ohio River, until they were driven out by the Lenni-Lenape about five hundred years before the English and French began to settle that country. They went south and are probably the same people we know as Creeks and Cherokees.

_Tallegewi_ is the only name for the Mound-Builders that has come down to us, though some people insist that it ought to be _Allegewi_, and the singular instead of being _Tallega_ should be _Allega_.

The _Lenni-Lenape_ are the tribes we know as Delawares. The name means "Real People."

The _Mingwe_ or _Mingoes_ are the tribes that the French called Iroquois, and the English, Five Nations. They called themselves "People of the Long House." _Mingwe_ was the name by which they were known to other tribes, and means "stealthy," "treacherous." All Indian tribes have several names.

The _Onondaga_ were one of the five nations of the Iroquois. They lived in western New York.

_Shinaki_ was somewhere in the great forest of Canada. _Namaesippu_ means "Fish River," and must have been that part of the St. Lawrence between Lakes Erie and Huron.

The _Peace Mark_ was only one of the significant ways in which Indians painted their faces. The marks always meant as much to other Indians as the device on a knight's shield meant in the Middle Ages.

_Scioto_ means "long legs," in reference to the river's many branches.

_Wabashiki_ means "gleaming white," on account of the white limestone along its upper course. _Maumee_ and _Miami_ are forms of the same word, the name of the tribe that once lived along those waters.

_Kaskaskia_ is also the name of a tribe and means, "They scrape them off," or something of that kind, referring to the manner in which they get rid of their enemies, the Peorias.

The Indian word from which we take _Sandusky_ means "cold springs," or "good water, here," or "water pools," according to the person who uses it.

You will find all these places on the map.

"_G'we_!" or "_Gowe_!" as it is sometimes written, was the war cry of the Lenape and the Mingwe on their joint wars. At least that was the way it sounded to the people who heard it. Along the eastern front of these nations it was softened to "_Zowie_!" and in that form you can hear the people of eastern New York and Vermont still using it as slang.

THE ONONDAGA'S STORY

The _Red Score_ of the Lenni-Lenape was a picture writing made in red chalk on birch bark, telling how the tribe came down out of Shinaki and drove out the Tallegewi in a hundred years' war. Several imperfect copies of it are still in existence and one nearly perfect interpretation made for the English colonists. It was in the nature of short-hand memoranda of the most interesting items of their tribal history, but unless Oliver and Dorcas Jane meet somebody in the Museum country who knew the Tellings that went with the Red Score, it is unlikely we shall ever know just what did happen.

Any early map of the Ohio Valley, or any good automobile map of the country south and east of the Great Lakes, will give the _Muskingham-Mahoning Trail_, which was much used by the first white settlers in that country. The same is true of the old Iroquois Trade Trail, as it is still a well-traveled country road through the heart of New York State. _Muskingham_ means "Elk's Eye," and referred to the clear brown color of the water. _Mahoning_ means "Salt Lick," or, more literally, "There a Lick."

_Mohican-ittuck_, the old name for the Hudson River, means the river of the Mohicans, whose hunting-grounds were along its upper reaches.

_Niagara_ probably means something in connection with the river at that point, the narrows, or the neck. According to the old spelling it should have been pronounced Nee-ae-gaer'-ae, but it isn't.

_Adirondack_ means "Bark-Eaters," a local name for the tribe that once lived there and in seasons of scarcity ate the inner bark of the birch tree.

_Algonquian_ is a name for one of the great tribal groups, several members of which occupied the New England country at the beginning of our history. The name probably means "Place of the Fish-Spearing," in reference to the prow of the canoe, which was occupied by the man with the fish spear. The Eastern Algonquians were all canoers.

_Wabaniki_ means "Eastlanders," people living toward the East.

The American Indians, like all other people in the world, believed in supernatural beings of many sorts, spirits of woods and rocks, Underwater People and an Underworld. They had stories of ghosts and flying heads and giants. Most of the tribes believed in animals that, when they were alone, laid off their animal skins and thought and behaved as men. Some of them thought of the moon and stars as other worlds like ours, inhabited by people like us who occasionally came to earth and took away with them mortals whom they loved. In the various tribal legends can be found the elements of almost every sort of European fairy tale.

_Shaman_ is not an Indian word at all, but has been generally adopted as a term of respect to indicate men or women who became wise in the things of the spirit. Sometimes a knowledge of healing herbs was included in the Shaman's education, and often he gave advice on personal matters. But the chief business of the Shaman was to keep man reconciled with the spirit world, to persuade it to be on his side, or to prevent the spirits from doing him harm. A Shaman was not a priest, nor was he elected to office, and in some tribes he did not even go to war, but stayed at home to protect the women and children. Any one could be a Shaman who thought himself equal to it and could persuade people to believe in him.

_Taryenya-wagon_ was the Great Spirit of the Five Nations, who was also called "Holder of the Heavens."

Indian children always belong to the mother's side of the house. The only way in which the Shaman's son could be born an Onondaga was for the mother to be adopted into the tribe before the son was born. Adoptions were very common, orphans, prisoners of war, and even white people being made members of the tribe in this way.

THE SNOWY EGRET'S STORY

The Great Admiral was, of course, Christopher Columbus. You will find all about him and the other Spanish gentlemen in the school history.

Something special deserves to be said about Panfilo de Narvaez, since it was he who set the Spanish exploration of the territory of the United States in motion. He landed on the west coast of Florida in 1548, and after penetrating only a little way into the interior was driven out by the Indians. But he left Juan Ortiz, one of his men, a prisoner among them, who was afterward discovered by Soto and became his interpreter and guide.