WHILE merciless masters have driven the red man from the dune country, indelible impressions of his race remain. His nomenclature is on the maps, and the lakes, rivers, and streams carry names that were precious to his people. His mythology still envelops the region with a halo of romance and fable.
The dust of his forefathers has mingled with the hills, and time has obliterated nearly every material trace of him, except those among the imperishable stones. The débris of the little quarries is still visible on small promontories, and in the depressions along the ridges, where the pines have held the soil against the action of the wind and rain. Here we find innumerable chips and fragments of broken stones, left by the workers, who fashioned the implements of war and peace on these sequestered spots.{280}
Occasionally an imperfect or unfinished arrow or spear-head appears among the refuse, which the patient artificer discarded. Many perfect specimens are found, but these are seldom discovered near the sites of the rude workshops. They are uncovered by the shifting sands in the “blow outs,” where the winds eddy on the sides of hills that may have held their secrets for centuries, and turned up out of the fertile soil in the back country, by the plowshares of a race that carried the bitter cup of affliction to the aborigine.
The little flakes of flint may be scattered over a space forty or fifty feet across, and many thousands of perfect points may have gone forth from it, as messages of death to the hearts of enemies, or to pierce the quivering flesh of the innocent.
The refined ingenuity of man has ever been applied to things that kill. The art of annihilation has attracted some of the dominant intellects of mankind, and the extinction of life has been the industry of millions since human history began.
The feathered shaft of the savage, and the steel{281} shell of the white man, go upon the same errand, and they both leave the same dark stain upon the green earth. The children of men, in all ages, have been taught that war is the only path to glory.
Under His quiet skies the living things must die, because they live. The Great Riddle awaits solution beyond the confines of our philosophy, and in the midst of our speculative wanderings, we become dust. Theology is as helpless before a burial mound in the wilderness, as beside the gilded tomb of a prince of the church.
The spiritual needs of the primitive savage were administered by his tribal gods, and the spirits of his mythology. In his child-like faith he believed the favor of a Great Spirit to be in the sunshine, and that omnipotent wrath was thundered in the storms. His good manitous presided over his fortunes in life, and gently led him into fabled hunting grounds beyond the grave.
He was a fatalist, and not being civilized, his theology was imperfect.
Civilization approached him with a Bible in one hand and a bottle in the other, and the decay of his race began. The finger of fate had touched{282} him, and the last heart-broken remnants of once happy and powerful tribes were tied and led away by benign and Christian soldiers. They carried crushed spirits and shattered lives to an alien soil, which an all-wise conqueror had selected for them, leaving their burned homes, and the bones of those they loved, in the land of their birth.
The moralist finds abundant food for reflection in the sufferings of the weak, at the hands of the strong, and the triumph of might over helplessness, but the Indian interfered with enlightened selfishness and he perished.
The record of the expatriation and the practical extinction of the Pottawatomies, who lived in this region, is written upon dark pages of our history, but perhaps they had no rights as living creatures that an enlightened government was bound to respect.
When the fog rolls in from the distant waters, and steals through the pines, wraith-like forms of a forgotten race seem to haunt the scenes of by-gone years. We may imagine the march of phantom throngs through the trees, to meet silent battalions beyond the hills. The sands seem to{283} yield to the folds of a gray mantle that is laid upon them, and retreat into obscurity.
When the night shadows come into the dune country, the spell of mystery and poetry comes with them. The sorcery of the dark places leads us into a land of dreams and unreality.
Out on the tremulous surface of the lake, we may fancy the lifting of silvery paddles in the path of the moon’s reflections, and the furtive movement across the bar of light, of mystic shapes in phantom canoes.
Mingled with the lispings of the little waves, we may hear ghostly prows touch the sand, and see spectral figures file into the hills. The faint echoes of strokes upon flint come out of the shadows.
The spirits of an ancient race have gone to their quarries, for arrowheads and spears, for the unseen battles with evil gods.
Voices in the night wind recall them, and they go out into the purple mists, that come upon the face of the wate............