Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet

Chapter Twenty Four

During my convalescence, my tent, or I should say, the lawn before it, became a kind of general divan, where the warrior and elders of the tribe would assemble, to smoke and relate the strange stories of days gone by. Some of them appeared to me particularly beautiful; I shall, therefore, narrate them to the reader. One old chief began as follows:—

“I will tell ye of the Shkote-nah Pishkuan, or the boat of fire, when I saw it for the first time. Since that, the grass has withered fifteen times in the prairies, and I have grown weak and old. Then I was a warrior, and many scalps have I taken on the eastern shores of the Sabine. Then, also, the Pale-faces, living in the prairies were good; we fought them because we were enemies, but they never stole anything from us, nor we from them.

“Well, at that time, we were once in the spring hunting the buffalo. The Caddoes, who are now a small tribe of starved dogs, were then a large powerful nation, extending from the Cross Timbers to the waters of the great stream, in the East, but they were gamblers and drunkards; they would sell all their furs for the ‘Shoba-wapo’ (fire-water), and return to their villages to poison their squaws, and make brutes of their children. Soon they got nothing more to sell; and as they could not now do without the ‘Shoba-wapo,’ they began to steal. They would steal the horses and oxen of the Pale-faces, and say ‘The Comanches did it.’ When they killed trappers or travellers, they would go to the fort of the Yankees and say to them, ‘Go to the wigwams of the Comanches, and you will see the scalps of your friends hanging upon long poles.’ But we did not care, for we knew it was not true.

“A long time passed away, when the evil spirit of the Caddoes whispered to them to come to the villages of the Comanches while they were hunting and to take away with them all that they could. They did so, entering the war-path as foxes and owls, during night. When they arrived, they found nothing but squaws, old women, and little children. Yet these fought well, and many of the Caddoes were killed before they abandoned their lodges. They soon found us out in the hunting-ground; and our great chief ordered me to start with five hundred warriors, and never return until the Caddoes should have no home, and wander like deer and starved wolves in the open prairie.

“I followed the track. First, I burnt their great villages in the Cross Timbers, and then pursued them in the swamps and cane-breaks of the East, where they concealed themselves among the long lizards of the water (the alligators). We, however, came up with them again, and they crossed the Sabine, to take shelter among the Yankees, where they had another village, which was their largest and their richest. We followed; and on the very shores of their river, although a thousand miles from our own country, and where the waters are dyed with the red clay of the soil, we encamped round their wigwams and prepared to conquer.

“It was at the gloomy season, when it rains night and day; the river was high, the earth damp, and our young braves shivering, even under their blankets. It was evening, when, far to the south, above one of the windings of the stream, I saw a thick black smoke rising as a tall pine among the clouds, and I watched it closely. It came towards us; and as the sky darkened and night came on, sparks of fire showed the progress of the strange sight. Soon noises were heard, like those of the mountains when the evil spirits are shaking them; the sounds were awful, solemn, and regular, like the throbs of a warrior’s heart; and now and then a sharp, shrill scream would rend the air and awake other terrible voices in the forest.

“It came, and deer, bears, panthers were passing among us madly flying before the dreaded unknown. It came, it flew, nearer and nearer, till we saw it plainly with its two big mouths, spitting fire like the burning mountains of the West. It rained very hard, and yet we saw all. It was like a long fish, shaped like a canoe, and its sides had many eyes, full of bright light as the stars above.

“I saw no one with the monster; he was alone, breaking the waters and splashing them with his arms, his legs, or his fins. On the top, and it was very high, there was a square lodge: Once I thought I could see a man in it, but it was a fancy; or perhaps the soul of the thing, watching from its hiding place for a prey which it might seize upon; happily it was dark, very dark, and being in a hollow along the banks, we could not be perceived; and the dreadful thing passed.

“The Caddoes uttered a loud scream of fear and agony; their hearts were melted. We said nothing, for we were Comanches and warriors; and yet I felt strange, and was fixed to where I stood. A man is but a man, and even a Red-skin cannot struggle with a spirit. The scream of the Caddoes, however, frightened the monster; its flanks opened and discharged some tremendous Anim Tekis (thunders) on the village. I heard the crashing of the logs, the splitting of the hides covering the lodges, and when the smoke was all gone, it left a smell of powder; the monster was far, far off, and there was no trace of it left, except the moans of the wounded and the lamentation of the squaws among the Caddoes.

“I and my young men soon recovered our senses; we entered the village, burnt every thing, and killed the warriors. They would not fight; but as they were thieves, we destroyed them. We returned to our own villages, every one of us with many scalps, and since that time the Caddoes have never been a nation; they wander from north to south, and from east to west: they have huts made with the bark of trees, or they take shelter in the burrows of the prairie dogs, with the owls and the snakes; but they have no lodges, no wigwams, no villages. Thus may it be with all the foes of our great nation.”

This is an historical fact. The steamboat “Beaver” made its first exploration upon the Red River, some eighty miles above the French settlement of Nachitochy, just at the very time that the Comanches were attacking the last Caddoe village upon the banks of the Red. River. These poor savages yelled with terror when the strange mass passed thus before them, and, either from wanton cruelty or from fear of an attack, the boat fired four guns, loaded with grape-shot, upon the village, from which they were not a hundred yards distant.

The following is a narrative of events which happened in the time of Mosh Kohta (buffalo), a great chief, hundreds of years ago, when the unfortunate “La Salle” was shipwrecked upon the coast of Texas, while endeavouring to discover the mouth of the Mississippi. Such records are very numerous among the great prairie tribes; they bear sometimes the Ossianic type, and are related every evening during the month of February, when the “Divines” and the elders of the nation teach to the young men the traditions of former days.

“It was in the time of a chief, a great chief, strong, cunning, and wise, a chief of many bold deeds. His name was Mosh Kohta.

“It is a long while! No Pale-faces dwelt in the land of plenty (the translation of the Indian word ‘Texas’); our grandfathers had just received it from the Great Spirit, and they had come from the setting of the sun across the big mountains to take possession. We were a great nation, we are so now, we have always been so, and we will ever be. At that time, also, our tribe spread all along the western shores of the great stream Mississippi, for no Pale-face had yet settled upon it. We were a great people, ruled by a mighty chief; the earth, the trees, the rivers, and the air know his name. Is there a place in the mountains or the prairies where the name of Mosh Kohta has not been pronounced and praised?

“At that time a strange warlike people of the Pale-faces broke their big canoes along our coasts of the South, and they landed on the shore, well armed with big guns and long rifles, but they had nothing to eat. These were the ‘Maha-mate-kosh-ehoj’ (the French); their chief was a good man, a warrior, and a great traveller; he had started from the northern territories of the Algonquins, to go across the salt water in far distant lands, and bring back with him many good things which the Red-skins wanted:– warm blankets to sleep upon, flints to strike a fire, axes to cut the trees, and knives to skin the bear and the buffalo. He was a good man and loved the Indians, for they also were good, and good people will always love each other.

“He met with Mosh Kohta; our warriors would not fight the strangers, for they were hungry and their voices were soft; they were also too few to be feared, though their courage seemed great under misfortune, and they would sing and laugh while they suffered. We gave them food, we helped them to take from the waters the planks of their big canoe, and to build the first wigwam in which the Pale-faces ever dwelt in Texas. Two moons they remained hunting the buffalo with our young men, till at last their chief and his bravest warriors started in some small canoes of ours, to see if they could not enter the great stream, by following the coast towards the sunrise. He was gone four moons, and when he returned, he had lost half of his men, by sickness, hunger, and fatigue; yet Mosh Kohta bade him not despair; the great chief promised the Pale-faces to conduct them in the spring to the great stream, and for several more moons we lived all together, as braves and brothers should. Then, for the first time also, the Comanches got some of their rifles, and others knives. Was it good—was it bad? Who knows? Yet the lance and arrows killed as many buffaloes as lead and black dust (powder), and the squaws could take off the skin of a deer or a beaver without knives. How they did it, no one knows now; but they did it, though they had not yet seen the keen and sharp knives of the Pale-faces.

“However, it was not long time before many of the strangers tired of remaining so far from their wigwams their chief every morning would look for hours towards the rising of the sun, as if the eyes of his soul could see through the immensity of the prairies; he became gloomy as a man of dark deeds (a Medecin), and one day, with half of his men, he began a long inland trail across prairies, swamps, and rivers, so much did he dread to die far from his lodge. Yet he did die: not of sickness, not of hunger, but under the knife of another Pale-face; and he was the first one from strange countries whose bones blanched without burial in the waste. Often the evening breeze whispers his name along the swells of the southern plains, for he was a brave man, and no doubt he is now smoking with his great Manitou.

“Well, he started. At that time the buffalo and the deer were plentiful, and the men went on their trail gaily till they reached the river of many forks (Trinity River), for they knew that every day brought them nearer and nearer to the forts of their people, though it was yet a long way—very long. The Pale-face chief had a son with him; a noble youth, fair to look upon, active and strong: the Comanches loved him. Mosh Kohta had advised him to distrust two of his own warriors; but he was young and generous, incapable of wrong or cowardice; he would not suspect it in others, especially among men of his own colour and nation, who had shared his toils, his dangers, his sorrows, and his joys.

“Now these two warriors our great chief had spoken of were men and very greedy; they were ambitious too, and believed that, by killing their chief and his son, they would themselves command the hand. One evening, while they were all eating the meal of friendship, groans were heard—a murder had been committed. The other warriors sprang up; they saw their chief dead, and the two warriors coming towards them; their revenge was quick—quick as that of the panther: the two base warriors were killed.

“Then there was a great fight among the Pale-face band, in which many were slain; but the young man and some other braves escaped from their enemies, and, after two moons, reached the Arkansas, where they found their friends and some Makota Conayas (priests—black-gowns). The remainder of the band who left us, and who murdered their chief, our ancestors destroyed like reptiles, for they were venomous and bad. The other half of the Pale-faces, who had remained behind in their wood wigwams, followed our tribe to our great villages, became Comanches, and took squaws. Their children and grandchildren have formed a good and brave nation; they are paler than the Comanches, but their heart is all the same; and often in the hunting-grounds they join our hunters, partake of the same meals, and agree like brothers. These are the nation of the Wakoes, not far in the south, upon the trail of the Cross Timbers. But who knows not the Wakoes?—even children can go to their hospitable lodges.”

This episode is historical. In the early months of 1684, four vessels left La Rochelle, in France, for the colonisation of the Mississippi, bearing two hundred and eighty persons. The expedition was commanded by La Salle, who brought with him his nephew, Moranget. After a delay at Santo Domingo, which lasted two years, the expedition, missing the mouth of the Mississippi, entered the Bay of Matagorda, where they were shipwrecked. “There,” says Bancroft in his History of America, “under the suns of June, with timber felled in an inland grove, and dragged for a league over the prairie grass, the colonists prepared to build a shelter, La Salle being the architect, and himself making the beams, and tenons, and mortises.”

This is the settlement which made Texas a part of Louisiana, La Salle proposed to seek the Mississippi in the canoes of the Indians, who had shewed themselves friendly, and, after an absence of about four months, and the loss of thirty men, he returned in rags, having failed to find “the fatal river.” The eloquent American historian gives him a noble character:– “On the return of La Salle,” says he, “he learned that a mutiny had broken out among his men, and they had destroyed a part of the colony’s provisions. Heaven and man seemed his enemies, and, with the giant energy of an indomitable will, having lost his hopes of fortune, his hopes of fame, with his colony diminished to about one hundred, among whom discontent had given birth to plans of crime—with no European nearer than the river Pamuco, and no French nearer than the northern shores of the Mississippi, he resolved to travel on foot to his countrymen in the North, and renew his attempts at colonisation.”

It appears that La Salle left sixty men behind him, and on the 20th of March, 1686, after a buffalo-hunt, he was murdered by Duhaut and L’Archevêque, two adventurers, who had embarked their capital in the enterprise. They had long shewn a spirit of mutiny, and the malignity of disappointed avarice so maddened them that that they murdered their unfortunate commander.

I will borrow a page of Bancroft, who is more explicit than the Comanche chroniclers.

“Leaving sixty men at Fort St. Louis, in January, 1687, La Salle, with the other portion of his men, departed for Canada. Lading their baggage on the wild horses from the Cenis, which found their pasture everywhere in the prairies, in shoes made of green buffalo hides; for want of other paths, following the track of the buffalo, and using skins as the only shelter against rain, winning favour with the savages by the confiding courage of their leader—they ascended the streams towards the first ridges of highlands, walking through beautiful plains and groves, among deer and buffaloes,—now fording the clear rivulets, now building a bridge by felling a giant tree across a stream, till they had passed the basin of the Colorado, and in the upland country had reached a branch of the Trinity River.

“In the little company of wanderers there were two men, Duhaut and L’Archevêque, who had embarked their capital in the enterprise. Of these, Duhaut had long shewn a spirit of mutiny; the base malignity of disappointed avarice, maddened by sufferings and impatient of control, awakened the fiercest passions of ungovernable hatred. Inviting Moranget to take charge of the fruits of a buffalo hunt, they quarrelled with him and murdered him.

“Wondering at the delay of his nephew’s return, La Salle, on the 20th of March, went to seek him. At the brink of the river, he observed eagles hovering, as if over carrion, and he fired an alarm-gun. Warned by the sound, Duhaut and L’Archevêque crossed the river: the former skulked in the prairie grass; of the latter, La Salle asked, ‘Where is my nephew?’ At the moment of the answer, Duhaut fired; and, without uttering a word, La Salle fell dead. ‘You are down now, grand bashaw! You are down now:’ shouted one of the conspirators, as they despoiled his remains, which were left on the prairie, naked and without burial, to be devoured by wild beasts.

“Such was the end of this daring adventurer. For force of will and vast conceptions; for various knowledge, and quick adaptation of his genius to untried circumstances; for a sublime magnanimity, that resigned itself to the will of Heaven, and yet triumphed over affliction by energy of purpose and unfaltering hope,—he had no superior among his countrymen. He had won the affection of the Governor of Canada, the esteem of Colbert, the confidence of Seignelay, the favour of Louis XIV. After beginning the colonisation of Upper Canada, he perfected the discovery of the Mississippi from the Falls of St. Anthony to its mouth; and he will be remembered through all times as the father of colonisation in the great central valley of the West.”

Jontel, with the brother and son of La Salle, and others, but seven in all, obtained a guide from the Indians for the Arkansas, and, fording torrents, crossing ravines, making a ferry over rivers with rafts or boats of buffalo hides, without meeting the cheering custom of the calumet, till they reached the country above the Red River, and leaving an esteemed companion in a wilderness grave, on the 24th of July, came upon a branch of the Mississippi. There they beheld on an island a large cross: never did Christians gaze on that emblem with more deep-felt emotion. Near it stood a log hut, tenanted by two Frenchmen. A missionary, of the name of Tonti, had descended that river, and, full of grief at not finding La Salle, had established a post near the Arkansas.

As the reader may perceive, there is not much difference between our printed records, and the traditions of the Comanches.

Chapter Twenty Five

It was during my convalescence that the fate of the Texian expedition to Santa Fé was decided; and as the real facts have been studiously concealed, and my intelligence, gained from the Indians, who were disinterested parties, was afterwards fully corroborated by an Irish gentleman who had been persuaded to join it, I may as well relate them here. Assuming the character of friendly traders, with some hundred dollars’ worth of goods, as a blind to their real intentions, which were to surprise the Mexicans during the neutrality which had been agreed upon, about five hundred men were collected at Austin, for the expedition.

Although the report was everywhere circulated that this was to be a trading experiment, the expedition, when it quitted Austin, certainly wore a very different appearance. The men had been supplied with uniforms; generals, and colonels, and majors were dashing about in every direction, and they quitted the capital of Texas with drums beating and colours flying. Deceived by the Texians, a few respectable Europeans were induced to join this expedition, either for scientific research or the desire to visit a new and unexplored country, under such protection, little imagining that they had associated themselves with a large band of robbers, for no other name can be given to these lawless plunderers. But if the force made a tolerable appearance on its quitting the capital, a few hours’ march put an end to all discipline and restraint.