XIX Four Indian Ambassadors
As the years went by Clark’s plant of the Indian Department extended. In his back row were found the office and Council House, rooms for visiting Indians, an armory for repairs of Indian guns and blacksmiths’ shops for Indian work, extending from Main Street to the river.
Daily he sat in his office reading reports from his agents of Indian occurrences.
Four muskrats or two raccoon skins the Indians paid for a quart of whiskey.
“Whiskey!” Clark stamped his foot. “A drunken Indian is more to be dreaded than a tiger in the jungle! An Indian cannot be found among a thousand who would not, after a first drink, sell his horse, his gun, or his last blanket for another drink, or even commit a murder to gratify his passion for spirits. There should be total prohibition.” And the Government made that the law.
“I hear that you have sent liquor into the Indian country,” he said to the officers of the American Fur Company. “Can you refute the charge?”
And the great Company, with Chouteau and Astor at its head, hastened to explain and extenuate.
There was trouble with Indian agents who insisted on leaving their posts and coming to St. Louis, troubles with Indians who wanted to see the President, enough of them to have kept the President for ever busy with Indian affairs.
The Sacs and the Sioux were fighting again.
“Why not let us fight?” said Black Hawk. “White men fight,—they are fighting now.”
Twice in the month of May, 1830, Sacs and Foxes came down to tell of their war with the Sioux. “We might sell our Illinois lands and move west,” hinted the Sacs and Foxes. Instantly Clark approved and wrote to Washington.
“I shall have to go up there and quiet those tribes,” said Clark. In July, 1830, again he set out for Prairie du Chien. Indian runners went ahead announcing, “The Red Head Chief! the Red Head Chief!”
Seventy-eight Sacs and Foxes crowded into his boats and went up. This time in earnest, Clark began buying lands, giving thousands of dollars in annuities, provisions, clothing, lands, stock, agricultural implements. Many of these Indians came on with him down to St. Louis to get their presents and pay.
There came a wailing from the Indians of Illinois. “The game is gone. Naked and hungry, we need help.”
“Poor, misguided, and unreflecting savages!” exclaimed the Governor. “The selfish policy of the traders would keep them in the hunter’s state. The Government would have them settled and self-supporting.”
Funds ran out, but Clark on his own credit again and again went ahead with his work of humanity, moving families, tribes, nations. Assistance in provisions and stock was constantly called for. The great western migration of tribes from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, was sweeping on, the movement of a race. The Peorias were crossing, the Weas, Piankeshaws, and others forgotten to-day.
“Those miserable bands of Illinois rovers, those wretched nations in want of clothes and blankets!” Clark wrote to Washington, begging the Department for help. Their annuities, a thousand dollars a year for twelve years, had expired.
“Exchange your lands for those in the West,” he urged the Indians. To the Government he recommended an additional annuity to be used in breaking up, fencing, and preparing those lands for cultivation.
Horses were stolen from the settlers by tens and twenties and fifties, and cattle killed. The farmers were exasperated.
“Banditti, robbers, thieves, they must get out! The Indians hunt on our lands, and kill our tame stock. They are a great annoyance.”
For two years Governor Edwards had been asking for help.
“The General Government has been applied to long enough to have freed us from so serious a grievance. If it declines acting with effect, it will soon learn that these Indians will be removed, and that very promptly.”
Clark himself was personally using every exertion to prevail on the Indians to move as the best means of preserving tranquillity, and did all he could without actual coercion. The Indians continued to promise to go, but they still remained.
“More time,” said the Indians. “Another year.”
The combustible train was laid,—only a spark was needed, only a move of hostility, to fire the country. Will Black Hawk apply that spark?
“We cannot go,” said the Pottawattamies. “The sale of our lands was made by a few young men without our consent.”
Five hundred Indians determined to hold all the northern part of Illinois for ever.
Sacs, Foxes, Pottawattamies, sent daily letters and complaints. “Our Father! our Father! our Father!”—it was a plea and a prayer, and trouble, trouble, trouble. Black Partridge’s letters make one weep. “Some of my people will be dead before Spring.”
Meanwhile agents were ahead surveying lands in that magic West. The Indians were becoming as interested in migration as the whites had been; the same causes were pushing them on.
Clark was busily making contracts for saw-mills and corn-mills on the Platte and Kansas, arranging for means of transportation, for provisions for use on the way and after they settled, for oxen and carts and stock,—when one day four strange Indians, worn and bewildered, arrived at St. Louis, out of that West. Some kind hand guided them to the Indian office.
That tunic, that bandeau of fox skins,—Clark recalled it as the tribal dress of a nation beyond the Rocky Mountains. With an expression of exquisite joy, old Tunnachemootoolt, for it was he, the Black Eagle, recognised the Red Head of a quarter of a century before. Clark could scarcely believe that those Indians had travelled on foot nearly two thousand miles to see him at St. Louis.
As but yesterday came back the memory of Camp Chopunnish among the Nez Percés of Oregon. Over Tunnachemootoolt’s camp the American flag was flying when they arrived from the Walla Walla.
It did not take long to discover their story. Some winters before an American trapper (in Oregon tradition reputed to have been Jedediah Smith), watched the Nez Percés dance around the sun-pole on the present site of Walla Walla.
“It is not good,” said the trapper, “such worship is not acceptable to the Great Spirit. You should get the white man’s Book of Heaven.”
Voyageurs and Iroquois trappers from the Jesuit schools of Canada said the same. Then Ellice, a chief’s son, came back from the Red River country whither the Hudson’s Bay Company had sent him to be educated. From several sources at once they learned that the white men had a Book that taught of God.
“If this be true it is certainly high time that we had the Book.” The chiefs called a national council. “If our mode of worship is wrong we must lay it aside. We must know about this. It cannot be put off.”
“If we could only find the trail of Lewis and Clark they would tell us the truth.”
“Yes, Lewis and Clark always pointed upward. They must have been trying to tell us.”
So, benighted, bewildered, the Nez Percés talked around their council fires. Over in the buffalo country Black Eagle’s band met the white traders.
“They come from the land of Lewis and Clark,” said the Eagle. “Let us follow them.”
And so, four chiefs were deputed for that wonderful journey, two old men who had known Lewis and Clark,—Black Eagle and the Man-of-the-Morning, whose mother was a Flathead,—and two young men,—Rabbit-Skin-Leggings of the White Bird band on Salmon River, Black Eagle’s brother’s son, and No-Horns-On-His-Head, a young brave of twenty, who was a doubter of the old beliefs.
“They went out by the Lolo trail into the buffalo country of Montana,” say their descendants still living in Idaho.
One day they reached St. Louis and inquired for the Red Head Chief.
Very well Governor Clark remembered his Nez Percé-Flathead friends. His silver locks were shaken by roars of laughter at their reminders of his youth, the bear hunts, the sale of buttons for camas and for kouse. The hospitality of those chiefs who said, “The horses on these hills are ours, take what you need,” should now be rewarded.
With gratitude and with the winsomeness for which he was noted, he invited them into his own house and to his own table. Mrs. Clark devoted herself to their entertainment.
Black Eagle insisted on an early council. “We have heard of the Book. We have come for the Book.”
“What you have heard is true,” answered Clark, puzzled and sensible of his responsibility. Then in simple language, that they might understand, he related the Bible stories of the Creation, of the commandments, of the advent of Christ and his crucifixion.
“Yes,” answered Clark to their interrogatories, “a teacher shall be sent with the Book.”
Just as change of diet and climate had prostrated Lewis and Clark with sickness among the Nez Percés twenty-five years before, so now the Nez Percés fell sick in St. Louis. The Summer was hotter than any they had known in their cool northland. Dr. Farrar was called. Mrs. Clark herself brought them water and medicine as they lay burning with fever in the Council House. They were very grateful for her attentions,—“the beautiful squaw of the Red Head Chief.”
But neither medicine nor nursing could save the aged Black Eagle.
“The most mournful procession I ever saw,” said a young woman of that day, “was when those three Indians followed their dead companion to the grave.”
His name is recorded at the St. Louis cathedral as “Keepeelele, buried October 31, 1831,” a “ne Percé de la tribu des Choponeek, nation appellée Tête Plate.” “Keepeelele,” the Nez Percés of to-day say “was the old man, the Black Eagle.” Sometimes they called him the “Speaking Eagle,” as the orator on occasions.
Still the other Indians remained ill.
“I have been sent by my nation to examine lands for removal to the West,” said William Walker, chief of the Wyandots.
William Walker was the son of a white man, stolen as a child from Kentucky and brought up by the Indians. His mother was also the descendant of a stolen white girl. Young William, educated at the Upper Sandusky mission, became a chief.
The semi-Christian Wyandots desired to follow their friends to the West. Sitting there in the office, transacting business, Governor Clark spoke of the Flathead Nez Percés.
“I have never seen a Flathead, but have often heard of them,” answered William Walker. Curiosity prompted him to step into the next room. Small in size, delicately formed, and of exact symmetry except the flattened head, they lay there parched with fever.
“Their diet at home consists chiefly of vegetables and fish,” said the Governor. “As a nation they have the fewest vices of any tribe on the continent of America.”
November 10, ten days after the burial of Black Eagle, Colonel Audrain of St. Charles, a member of the Legislature, died also at Governor Clark’s house. His body was conveyed to St. Charles in the first hearse ever seen there. On December 25, Christmas Day, 1831, Mrs. Clark herself died after a brief illness.
There was sickness all over St. Louis. Was it a beginning of that strange new malady that by the next Spring had grown into a devouring plague,—the dreaded Asiatic cholera?
At the bedside of his dead wife, Governor Clark sat, holding her waxen hand, with their little six-year-old son, Jefferson, in his lap. “My child, you have no mother now,” said the father with streaming tears. After the funeral, nothing was recorded in Clark’s letter-books for some days, and when he began again, the handwriting was that of an aged man.
None mourned this sad event more than the tender-hearted Nez Percés, who remained until Spring.
When the new steamer Yellowstone of the American Fur Company, set out for its first great trip up the Missouri, Governor Clark made arrangements to send the chiefs home to their country. A day later, the other old Indian, The-Man-of-the-Morning, died and was buried near St. Charles.
Among other passengers on that steamer were Pierre Chouteau the younger and George Catlin, the Indian artist, who was setting out to visit the Mandans.
“You will find the Mandans a strange people and half white,” said Governor Clark to his friend the artist, as he gave him his passport into the Indian country.
On the way up the river Catlin noticed the two young Nez Percés, and painted their pictures.
As if pursued by a strange fatality, at the mouth of the Yellowstone No-Horns-On-His-Head died,—Rabbit-Skin-Leggings alone was left to carry the word from St. Louis.
Earlier than ever that year the Nez Percés had crossed the snowy trails of the Bitter Root to the buffalo country in the Yellowstone and Judith Basin.
“For are not our messengers coming?”
And there, camped with their horses and their lodges, watching, Rabbit-Skin-Leggings met them and shouted afar off,—“A man shall be sent with the Book.”
Back over the hills and the mountains the message flew,—“A man shall be sent with the Book.”
Every year after that the Nez Percés went over to the east, looking for the man with the Book.
Nearly a year elapsed before William Walker got back from his explorations and wrote a public letter giving an account of the Nez Percés in their search for the Book. His account of meeting them in General Clark’s office, and of the object of their errand, created a tremendous sensation.
Religious committees called upon General Clark, letters were written, and to one and all he said, “That was the sole object of their journey,—to obtain the white man’s Book of Heaven.”
The call rang like a trumpet summons through the churches. The next year, 1834, the Methodists sent Jason Lee and three others to Oregon. Two years later followed Whitman and Spalding and their brides, the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains.
“A famine threatens the Upper Missouri,” was the news brought back by that steamer Yellowstone in 1832. “The buffaloes have disappeared!”
The herds, chased so relentlessly on the Missouri, were struggling through the Bitter Root Mountains, to appear in vast throngs on the plains of Idaho.
Even Europe read and commented on that wonderful first journey of a steamer up the Missouri, as later the world hailed the ascent of the Nile and the Yukon.
It was a great journey. Amazed Indians everywhere had watched the monster, puffing and snorting, with steam and whistles, and a continued roar of cannon for half an hour at every fur fort and every Indian village.
“The thunder canoe!” Redmen fell on the ground and cried to the Great Spirit. Some shot their dogs and horses as sacrifices.
At last, even the Blackfeet were reached. The British tried to woo them back to the Saskatchewan at Fort Edmonton, but eventually they tumbled over one another to trade with the Fire Boat that annually climbed the Missouri staircase.