It was long remembered in the Cherokee nation. Their grandfather came to the Overhill towns on the banks of the Tennessee River in a most imperious frame of mind.
"Give me a belt!" he cried in irrelevant response to every gracious overture of hospitality. For although presents were heaped upon him, the official belt of the Cherokee nation was not among them, and he cast them all aside as mere baubles.
Even the clever subterfuges of that master of statecraft, the half-king, Atta-Kulla-Kulla, might not avail. "N\'tschutti!" (Dear friend) he said once in eager propitiation; "Gooch ili lehelecheu?" (Does your father yet live?) He spoke in a gentle voice and slowly, the Delaware language being unaccustomed to his lips. "Tell the great sakimau I well remember him!" And he laid a string of beads on the arm of the quivering Lenape, for their grandfather was of that nationality.
But what flout of Fate was this? Not the coveted string of wampum, the official token, its significance not to be argued away, or overlooked, or mistaken—but instead a necklace of pearls, the fine freshwater gems of the region, so often mentioned by the elder writers and since held to be mythical or exaggeration of the polish of mere shell beads till the recent discoveries have placed once more the yield of the Unio margaritiferus of the rivers of Tennessee on metropolitan markets.
A personal gift—of the rarest, it is true—but a mere trifle in the estimation of Tscholens, in comparison with that national recognition which he craved and which a tribe of warriors awaited.
The irate grandfather flung the glossy trinket from him down among the ashes of the fire, which glowed in the centre of the floor of the great council-house of the town of Citico, one of the dome-shaped buildings, plastered as usual within and without with richly tinted red clay. The flicker from the coals revealed the rows of posts that like a colonnade upheld the roof; the cane-wrought divan encircling the apartment between these columns and the windowless walls; the astonished faces and feather-crested heads of the conclave of Cherokee chiefs from half a dozen towns as they clustered around the fire and stared at Tscholens.
The grave emotion in his face dignified its expression despite its savagery. Paradoxically the grandfather was young, slender, and, rated by any other standard than that of the Cherokees, an unusually tall people, would have been considered of fine height. His muscular arms were bare except for his heavy silver bracelets; a tuft of feathers quivered high on his head; his leggings were of deerskin, embroidered with parti-colored quills of the porcupine, and his shirt was of fine sable fur. His voice was sonorously insistent.
"N\'petalogalgun!" (I am sent as a messenger) he declared urgently. "Give me a belt."
He turned his flaming eyes directly upon Atta-Kulla-Kulla, himself in the prime of life now, in 1745, who it seemed must act definitely under this coercion. He must either refuse to testify to the truth, which he knew, or involve his people, the Cherokees, in a quarrel which did not concern them, of which a century was tired, between the Lenni Lenape and the Mengwe.
So long ago it had begun! The Mengwe, hard pressed by other nations and long at war with the Lenape, besought peace of this foe, and that they would use their influence with the others. Usually women, prompted always by the losing side, protested against the further effusion of blood and went with intercessions from one faction to the other. This, in view of the number and devious interests of the warring forces, was then impracticable, and therefore the Mengwe besought the Lenape to act as mediator for the occasion. Only so noted a race of warriors could afford this magnanimity, the Mengwe argued. It might impair the prestige of a less high-couraged and powerful tribe. And with these specious wiles the cat was duly belled.
But alas for the Lenape! Magnanimity is the most dangerous of all the virtues—to its possessor! Presently the Mengwe claimed to have conquered the Lenape in battle, and cited the well-known fact that they had inaugurated peace proposals. As the Mengwe confederation grew more powerful they assumed all the arrogance of a protectorate. They sold the lands of their dependents. They resented all action of the Lenape on their own account. If the Lenape went to war on some quarrel of their making, they had the Mengwe to reckon with as well as the enemy. As the years rolled by in scores, this fiction gradually assumed all the binding force of fact, till now it was felt that only by the avowal of the truth by some powerful tribe, both ancient and contemporary, such as the Cherokee,—who, although allied neither linguistically nor consanguineously, by some abstruse figment of Indian etiquette affected an affiliation to the Lenape and called them "grandfather,"—could their rightful independence be recognized, re?stablished, and maintained. Therefore, "Give me a belt!" cried Tscholens pertinaciously, offering in exchange the official belt of the Delawares, or, as they were called, Lenni Lenape.
Nothing less would content him. He hardened himself as flint against all suave beguilements tending to effect a diversion of interest. He would not see the horse-race. He would not "roll the bullet." He would not witness the game of chungke, expressly played in honor of his visit. He even refused to join in the dance, although young and nimble. But it chanced that the three circles were awhirl on the sandy spaces contiguous to the "beloved square" when the first break in the cohesion of his pertinacity occurred. The red sunset was widely aflare; the dizzy rout of the shadows of the dancers, all gregarious and intricately involved in the three circles, kept the moving figures company. These successive circles, one within another, followed each a different direction in their revolutions to the music of the primitive flute, fashioned of the bone of a deer (the tibia), and the stertorous sonorities of the earthen drums; and as the fantastically attired figures whirled around and around, their dull gray shadows whisked to and fro on the golden brown sand, all in the red sunset glow.
Tscholens, quitting the council-house, glanced but indifferently at them and then away at the lengthening perspective of the azure mountains of the Great Smoky range. The harbingers of the twilight were advancing in a soft blue haze over the purple and garnet tinted slopes near at hand, their forests all leafless now, although the autumn had lingered long, and the burnished golden days of the Indian summer were loath to go. Lights were springing up here and there in the town as the glow of the hearths of the dwellings, where supper was cooking, flickered out to meet on the threshold the rays of the departing sun, which seemed to pause there for a farewell glance in at the open door. In the centre of the "beloved square" the fire which always burned here was slowly smouldering. It flung a red reflection on the front of the building devoted to the conferences of the aged councilors, painted a peaceful white and facing the setting sun. At this moment was emerging from it a figure which Tscholens had not before seen.
A man so old he was that even the Indian\'s back was bent. His face was of weird effect, for amid its many wrinkles were streaks of parti-colored paint such as he had worn more than three quarters of a century earlier, when his fleet foot and the old war-trace were familiar. In common with all the Cherokees, his head was polled and bare save for a tuft, always spared to afford a grasp for any hand bold enough and strong enough to take the scalp; but this lock, although still dense and full, was of a snowy whiteness, contrasting sharply with the red paint and belying the warlike aspect of the red-feathered crest that trembled and shivered with the infirmities of his step. A heavy robe of fur reached almost to his feet, and a mantle, curiously wrought of the iridescent feathers of the neck and breast of the wild turkey, bespoke his consequence and added to the singularity of his aspect; for Indians seldom attained such age in those wild days, the warriors being usually cut off in their prime. It is to be doubted if Tscholens had ever seen so old a man, for this was Tsiskwa of Citico, reputed then to be one hundred and ten years of age.
The step of the young grandfather, sauntering along, came to an abrupt halt. He stood staring, exclaiming to the Cherokee warrior Savanukah, "Pennau wullih! Auween won gintsch pat?" (Look yonder! Who is that who has just come?)
It was an eagle-like majesty which looked forth from the eyes of Tsiskwa of Citico, as he seated himself on the long cane-wrought divan, just within the entrance of the cabin on the eastern side of the "beloved square." Time can work but little change in such a spirit. An eagle, however old, is always an eagle.
The sage lifted one august claw and majestically waved it at the young Delaware illau (war-captain) standing before him, while Savanukah turned away to join the dancers. "Lenni Lenape?—I remember—I remember very well when you came from the West!"
Tscholens was not stricken with astonishment, although that migration is held by investigators of pre-Columbian myths[11] to have occurred before the ninth century! It was formerly a general trait among the Indians to use the, first person singular in speaking of the tribe, and to avoid, even in its name, the plural termination. Tsiskwa went on with the tone of reminiscence rather than legendary lore, and with an air of bated rancor, as of one whose corroding grievance still works at the heart, to describe how the Lenni Lenape crossed the Mississippi and fell upon the widespread settlements of the Alligewi (or Tallegwi) Indians—considered identical with the Cherokee (Tsullakee)—and warred with them many years in folly, in futility, in hopeless defeat.
He lifted his eyes and gazed at the sun. A curve of pride steadied his old lips. His face was as resolute, as victorious, in looking backward as ever it had been in vaunting forecast. His was the temperament that always saw in prophecy or retrospect what he would wish to see. And that sun, now going down, had lighted him all his life along a path of conscious triumph.
And then, he continued, the Lenni Lenape, after years of futile war, combined with the Mengwe,[12] and before their united force the Cherokee retired into the impregnable stronghold of their mountains, their beautiful country, the pride of the world!
He waved his hand toward the landscape—lying out there in the lustre of its exquisite coloring, in the clarified air and the enhancing sunset; in the ideality of the contour of its majestic lofty mountains; in the splendor of its silver rivers, its phenomenally lush forests, its rich soil—pitying the rest of the world who must needs dwell elsewhere.
"And here," he went on, "the European found me two centuries ago."
He proceeded to narrate the advent of De Soto and his followers into the country of the Cherokees, embellishing his account with unrecorded particulars of their stay, especially in their digging for gold and silver, in which enterprise he himself seemed to have actively participated—only some two centuries previous!
Tscholens, listening, looked about absently at the "beloved square," which was vacant, with its open piazza-like building on each of the four sides. Two or three men were talking in the "war cabin," painted a vivid red. On the western side of the square the roof of the "holy cabin" showed dark against a lustrous reach of the shimmering river; despite the shadows within the broad entrance, the "sacred white seat" and the red clay transverse wall that partitioned off the sanctum sanctorum were plainly visible, but all was empty, deserted—the cheera-taghe had departed for the night.
As Tsiskwa paused to cough, the Delaware, suddenly taking heart of grace, observed that it had always been the boast of the Lenni Lenape that they were the first tribe to welcome the European, the Dutch, to the land that they now called New York.
Whereupon Tsiskwa retorted in a tempest of racking coughs that, whoever welcomed the Europeans here or there, it was no credit that the Lenape should be so forward to appropriate it! The white people were not the friends of the red man. They wanted the whole country. Finally they would have it.
"Mattapewiwak nik, schwannakwak!" (The white people are a deceiving lot!) said Tscholens, seeking some common ground on which they could meet with a mutual sentiment.
And at once Tsiskwa was all animation and as aggressive as at twenty. Well, indeed, might the Lenape say that! They were forever an easy prey—not only of the astute Europeans, but of the simple Indian as well. For a hundred years they had been the dupe of the Mengwe! As the mind of Tsiskwa dwelt on the various subtleties of the diplomatic attitude of the Mengwe toward the Lenape, its craft so appealed to him that his lips curved with relish; a smile irradiated his blurred eyes and intensified his wrinkles; his cough, shaking the folds of his outer fur garments above his wasted chest, mingled with his gay chuckle of merriment, as young as a boy\'s, while he cried, "Iroquois! Iroquois!"—the characteristic exclamation of the Mengwe confederation, whence they take their modern and popular name, and signifying, "I have spoken! I have spoken!"
At the familiar and detested sound the Lenape suddenly smote his breast with his braceleted arms, and a strong cry involuntarily broke from him—so poignant, so bitter, so shrill, that it sounded high above the bleating flute, the guttural drone of the drum, the vibratory throb of the dancing feet, and brought the pastime to a sudden close. In another moment the "beloved square" was filled with crowds of the Cherokees and their huddling shadows, all a medley in the last red suffusions of the sinking sun. To the tumult of eager, anxious, polite questions, Tscholens faltered to Savanukah, who had hastily returned:—
"N\'schauwihilla! N\'dagotschi! Lowanneunk undchen!" (I am fainting! I am cold! The wind comes from the north!)
He looked ill enough, but Savanukah\'s sharp eyes scanned suspiciously the aged countenance of Tsiskwa of Citico. Tsiskwa was, however, the image of venerable and respected innocence. His aged lips mumbled one upon the other silently. He hardly seemed to take note of the tumult. When the afflicted "grandfather" was being led away from the scene, Savanukah loitered to ask, with well-couched phrase and the show of deep reverence, what had been the tenor of the discourse, and it was with a galvanic jerk that the old man appeared to gather his faculties together.
"Of what did he talk?" Tsiskwa fixed august eyes upon Savanukah as he repeated the query. "Am I to remember of what young men talk?—the mad young men?—mad, mad—all quite mad!"
For not to Savanukah, surely, would he confess; and although because of this reticence that discerning party believed that Tsiskwa had wittingly wounded their emotional "grandfather" in his tenderest pride till he roared like a bull, Savanukah afterward had cause to repudiate this opinion in a conviction which was less to the credit of the acumen of Tsiskwa than a full confession of his breach of etiquette in tormenting his young "grandfather" might have been. At the time Savanukah felt a certain, malicious pride in the old man\'s keenness and poise and capacity, and he said apart to the inquisitive bystanders that, as might have been expected, the big bird, Tsiskwa-yah, had pounced upon the little bird, Tscholen-tit—for the name of each signifies a bird in their respective languages, and the suffixes imply great and small. And mightily pleased was Savanukah with his own wit.
That night came a sudden change. A keen frost was falling soon after the sun went down, for the wind was laid, and such a chill glittering white moon came gliding out of the mists about the dark Great Smoky domes that it seemed the winter incarnate. All adown the desert aisles of the leafless woods the light lay with a flocculent glister like snow, so enhanced was its whiteness in the rare air and the blackness of the forest shadows—spare, clearly drawn, all filar and fine like the intricacies of a delicate line engraving. Something that the daylight might have shown, blue and blurred, was about the mountains; it followed the progress of that wintry moon westward. Presently, drawn up from across the ranges, it proved to be a purple cloud, and despite the broad section of the heavens still clear and the glittering whorls of the constellations, that cloud held snow.
As the loitering southern winter had been long in abeyance, many of the Cherokees of Citico Town were still in their airy summer residences, but in one of the conical "winter houses," stove-like, air-tight, windowless, plastered within and without with the impervious red clay of the region, after the fashion of the great rotunda, Tscholens, in view of his sudden seizure and complaint of the gentle breeze of the south as freighted with the chill of the north, was consigned to rest. Half a dozen Cherokee braves were detailed to accompany him,............