[Idah Meacham Strobridge, Subduing a Little Savage, from The Land of Purple Shadows (1909)]

 

SUBDUING A LITTLE SAVAGE.

          STRANGEST of all gifts ever bestowed upon any member of my family was the little seven-year-old wild Indian which a friend—an army officer—sent to my mother when I was a child. We were living in an isolated cañon of the West. For more than a year we had seen no white woman; and only a very few squaws belonging to the tribe of friendly Paiutes living about us.

          If you depend upon people for your pleasures, a more lonely existence than such as ours cannot be imagined. But my mother was a woman of infinite resource and entertainment, and she not only made us see a duty in the things to be done, but to find a pleasure in the doing, as well. So our months of self-imposed exile went by, not altogether unhappily for any of us, and for one small girl not at all. Yet the nearest city of any size to the westward was far off in the Sacramento valley, more than three hundred miles away. Neither toward the East were there any cities nearer. Between, lay only scattering little mining camps. Hostile Paiutes were committing depredations all around us, and the killing of the whites became more and more frequent. These Paiutes, together with the still more murderous Shoshones and Bannocks and the offshoots

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of those tribes, caused the settlers to live in hourly dread of the issue of each morrow.

          The Indians that year had been unusually troublesome—one little band of renegade Bannocks to the Northeast, in particular, had especially alarmed the people. A detachment of troops under command of Lieutenant Hosmer from the military post at Dun Glen started out with the avowed intention of exterminating them. They were but a small band, these mongrel Bannocks, at most but two or three score, but they were notoriously desperate, as well as keen and shrewd in their maneuvering. It was therefore deemed best to have the aid of some of the friendly Paiutes in effecting the plan of action as laid out by the soldiers. So Cap Sue, selecting twenty picked men of his tribe, volunteered their services, and one midwinter day we saw them ride out of our cañon to join the soldiers and hunt down the hostiles in cañons far away.

          The story of the many days of trailing them through the snow, and how they had all but given up the quest when Cap Sue pointed out the blue spiral of the enemy's distant campfire, has passed into history. It is not for me to tell it here, or how they fought them to the death, so that when daybreak came there was but one of all the hostile camp that lived. It is only of him—the little enemy, the one small boy of an alien people—I shall have aught to tell now. It was this little fellow—brown of skin, bright of eye; with un-Indian features, and white teeth (such beautiful teeth as he had!) yet withal terrified and trembling—who was sent by the Lieutenant to my mother, when my father was returning, several weeks later, from a trip to Dun Glen.

          It was late in the afternoon of an April day when we saw him drive up the one long street of the deserted mining camp, where the tide of fortune had cast us

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ashore with the rest of the wreckage left there when the hopes of the early silver miners went down. Though we had not been of them, we were, at that time, with them, and had been caught in the maelstrom.

          In those uncertain days, the temporary absence of any member of the family was fraught with grave fears of danger (a messenger coming to us when one of the household was away, would send a chill to the heart until we were assured all was well), and a safe return was the cause of double rejoicing and welcome; but my astonishment at the sight of the quaint-looking little fellow, who had climbed down from the wagon-seat and now stood looking at us in timid bewilderment, took such complete possession of me that I quite forgot to rush into my father's arms with my usual welcome.

          Such a little fellow! What an odd-looking being he was that day, to be sure! When, in answer to my mother's puzzled questioning, I heard father laughingly tell her that it being the seventh of April, he had brought the boy to her for a birthday present, it seemed almost too good to be true that he was to be "truly ours for keeps." I experienced such a succession of emotions as would be difficult for me to describe; but I remember that the first thought was that, at last, I was to have a real playmate like other children. Then succeeded the fear that—as he was such a very dirty little boy—it was doubtful if, after all, my mother would let me play with him. It occurred to me, later, that—as he was wild, really a wild Indian —he might any day go on the war-path and take my scalp; but that was something of minor importance. Children live in the present, only ; and I did not dwell on what might be, after all, only a remote possibility. I was to have a playmate! A real live playmate! Nothing else mattered.

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          Therefore, the principal thing to do was to lend my aid in getting him into the condition of cleanliness necessary to win my mother's approval of an Indian boy as a playfellow; and such a siege as it was to get him into that particular condition—poor, dirty, miserable little wretch that he was! The soldiers, having found him in a state of semi-nudity, felt they had made a distinct advance in dressing him when they put him into a pair of old soldier-trousers cut off far above the knees that their length might conform the better to his short little legs. A very much worn blue blouse, whose sleeves were lopped off far above the elbows, really did duty for all other apparel, and made quite unnecessary and extravagant the wearing of trousers, as it reached easily to the floor, even dragging a little. An old fatigue cap completed the outfit. I smile as I write this, in recollection of the absurd figure he cut ; but there was no smile on my face then—nor on his own, poor little survivor of a wild band!

          He stood looking from one to another with watchful, frightened eyes; and it was not until long afterward, when he had learned our tongue, that I came to know how the small stranger had thought he had been sent to us that we might put him to death. The White Man had killed his father and mother; all his family; all his friends; all his wild clan. How was he to know that we intended him no harm?

          The plate of food put down for him at that first meal he received from our hands, was partaken of at first cautiously—suspiciously; for he believed we wanted to poison him. When hunger asserted itself, he ate ravenously, tearing his food apart with tooth and nail like some wild animal. As I watched my possible playmate, shocked at his ignorance of good table manners, I am afraid he fell many degrees in my estimation. After he had eaten his fill—literally, as the

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Indian does eat—by signs and motions he was directed toward the pile of wood just beyond the back door; there, when he was seated on a big juniper log, he was shorn of the thick and long black hair, which was ornamented with buckskin strings strung with bits of carved bone. Long, long afterward he told me how, when he saw the scissors, and the axe at the woodpile, he thought he was to be killed with these strange kind of knives (as he deemed the scissors to be), or struck down with the sharp blade of the axe. He had never bathed otherwise than in the Indian's "sweat-house," and when a tub of soapsuds was prepared for a cleansing of the small body according to our methods, he saw in us only enemies who would drown him therein. When the dirty, discarded clothing, together with the matted black locks, went into the flames of a bonfire, the little stoic made no sign of what he believed was in store for him—the burning alive of himself, as he had seen his people burn their enemies—even as he had once seen his father burn a white man. In our every movement he saw something significant of torture or death being prepared for him, horrible things that were only being delayed in their execution, but which would surely come in time. Yet he gave no sign.

          After he had been barbered and bathed, and was ready for clean clothing, the question arose—where was the clothing to come from? There were no stores within many hundreds of miles, neither was there a boy anywhere on our side of the mountain. Clothes he must have, of some sort, however, and at once. A search was made among our own rather meagre wardrobes. It was not a time to consider his sex when it came to dressing him, and it would have been a problem to tell whether the comical-looking little Indian was boy or girl, when we had done. How we laughed

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at the figure he cut—laughing the louder the longer we looked! But he stood there—an unsmiling, unemotional, unmoving small savage—with hatred in his heart of which we had no thought. Nor did the hot fires die down for many and many a moon. All this, and more, we did not come to know until years had passed, and he and we were friends.

          The soldiers, when he was leaving the fort, had given to my father a full suit of the soldier-blue such as they, themselves, wore. These, my mother reconstructed (after I had "ripped them up carefully, and picked all the stitches out") on a less generous plan, fitting them nicely to the sturdy, well-built little body. They were reserved for Sunday use, and some state occasion; and when he donned the suit with its shining brass buttons, he felt himself every inch a soldier, and carried himself as one. The children of the friendly Paiutes living near, could get no recognition from him then. It was only when dressed in the suit which was made for every day use, and he no longer represented the great American army (which all Indians—little and big alike—were beginning to respect, as they began to realize its strength) that he descended from his pedestal, and relaxing from military dignity, deigned to notice them. Even then, it was but a haughty recognition he accorded them. He would rather be my slave than their chief, even in childish plays; and this remained so to the end.

          When he came to us he knew no word of English, and by signs only could we, at first, communicate with him; but I have never known anyone to learn a language so rapidly as he—with an intuition that was little short of the miraculous. His intelligence was that of any child of his age among our own people. What he was ignorant of, was by reason of his past environment, not through lack of a fine mental endowment.

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          Each day, after my own lessons were repeated to my mother, I took the teacher's seat and taught Frank. And no preceptor was ever prouder of pupil than I, when the time came that perfect lessons, signed "Frank Bannock," were handed in for my examination, and there was seldom a criticism to make. Would there were more Frank Bannocks in the world!

          Naturally studious, he was equally eager to gain knowledge and apply it to some practical use; seeming to feel it would be unworthy of one to simply acquire knowledge and hoard it—that it was its application to anything worth while which created its value. And the lessons he learned caused him to ask questions beyond my power to answer! He told me how unsatisfactory to him were the Indian theories of light and darkness; one of the first questions he asked us when he could express himself clearly being: "Where dark go when light come?" He wanted to know what were the moon, and the sun, and the stars—what caused seasons, or colors—of what was beyond the mountains; of what was beyond the grave? What was the mystery of life? and why was death here? Whence? whither? why? Indian that he was, and even Indian child that he was, he asked the questions we all come to ask sooner or later. And I—knowing no more than he—tried to teach what little I knew; and before my halting explanations would be made, he would ever grasp the unuttered thought back of the spoken word; and together we would go to my mother to straighten for us the tangle. When we got beyond our depth in theology, she would give us leave to take down what we would from the book shelves, the books that had many engravings, and among the pictures we got away from problems too big for us. "Shakespeare," "Byron's Poems," "Godey's Lady's Book-1850"! I can remember now, these many decades later, how he

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loved the picture of Mazeppa bound to the back of the wild stallion, in the red morocco volume of Byron! I wish that the children of today were as careful in handling books, as was this little wild Indian of the far-away, little-known mountains.

          And of those mountains where he was born—where he was one of a savage tribe—where no white man might go, and live to return, he would tell me stories of his people and their ways, that was the strangest entertainment a small girl-child ever listened to! He and I used to go up the steep side of the cañon, above our house, where we could watch the sun go down on the mountains that hid his one-time home, and there he would relate to me the things that were in that wild life of his, far away across the river and the purple range of mountains, and a still farther range to the northwest. No tale of Grimm's could hold such complete fascination for a child as did the terrible recountings of massacres along the old emigrant road, and the burning of wagons by the way; of the scalps his kinsfolk brought home from battles where the soldiers had been driven back; of raids upon small settlements, and killing of white men that they might bring back horses, and cattle—for "jerky." Strange tales for a child to hear; still stranger for another to tell! I knew they were true; but they never seemed real. He was my playmate, and shared all my games; how could I connect him with the things I heard from his lips? No, the tales were possessed of a horrible fascination, and when he would tell such things to me (which was not often—he would rather play—to live in the present—to be one of us) the interest I felt was not born of conviction. They were to me as the fairy-stories of genii and dragon; never of what was bout me—everywhere —through those years of my childhood. Could I have felt the truth, I would have better understood what lay

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back of the calm, expressionless little face the day he was brought to our home—when he expected to receive as his portion what his people had meted out to the invading whites.

          The wonder is that he ever freed himself from the terror he had of us when he came. It was weeks before he was reassured; months before he began to evince any confidence in us. But with the years came affection—an affection which we returned in like measure. What a marvel it was; the opening of the doorway of that savage mind! The opening of the doorway of his lonely little heart! I understand you now, Frank, as I did not then. Dear little playmate of the dead and gone years!

          When he was not telling me wonderful tales, he would show me no less wonderful things. I learned how to catch rabbits with a noose on the end of a green willow sapling set in the ground—to be sprung by the rabbit as he loped down the rabbit-trails. I learned, as the Indian children learn, to twist cords out of vegetable fiber. He showed me how to make bone and wooden fish-hooks; and how to set them in a row along the twisted fish-line. Then I learned a way of making a spring out of my left thumb and two forefingers so that a small pebble could be sent spinning out of sight.

          (The other evening, when some of us had climbed to the top of the highest point in Los Angeles to watch a crimson and purple sunset, I picked up some pebbles, and with the others began sending them as far as I could down into the shadow-filled cañons. Suddenly there came back to me the recollection of my childhood days up on the lonely mountain, and I forgot those who were with me. It was little Frank who was beside me as I placed the pebble against the lower joint of my left fore-finger, and with my right finger and other thumb sent the bit of stone far and away, out of sight.

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I had not forgotten the trick learned from the wild little Bannock years and years ago.)

          He taught me in those dim years how to string a bow; and how to tip an arrow with flint sharpened against the ball of the thumb with another stone; and how to turn the feather right, on the shaft of the arrow.

          I learned more of the signs of the big out-of-doors while he and I played together those years there, than throughout all the rest of my life. Woodcraft and stonecraft were pleasant studying, and every day brought some new knowledge. It has served me good turns in the time since, more than once.

          Most wonderful of all, he could rub a greasewood stick so fast between his palms that the point of it placed in a hollow of a bit of dry wood, with a pinch of dry (very, very dry) dust, would presently blaze into a little flame and ignite the dry shredded bark put there to catch the spark. It was marvellous! And what was more marvellous still was the fact that he never failed to make it burn; while I never succeeded in all the time I was with him, no matter how hard I tried. I did precisely as he showed me. It would smoke—oh! so encouragingly—but to blaze, and burn, it refused absolutely and always. It was just the same with the "gorkies" (the Indian's wild onion) that he taught me to find. Whenever I dug down for them the root and stem would separate an inch or two from the surface of the ground, and then the succulent little bulb would be lost. Not so with Frank. He never failed to get them out without severing the slender little root. Then, with the splendid generosity which was so marked a characteristic of his nature, he would pour his whole store of "gorkies" into my lap, while he would dig others for himself—or, if the day was late, go without. It was his will always to give me the best of his spoils of the cañon, whether it was of ber-

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ries, or flowers, nests with speckled eggs, or bits of bright and pretty rock, where every cliff held a "ledge." What halcyon days those were!

          Looking back to that time, it now seems to me that he was frequently less playmate than slave. Slave to my imperious whims; but it was a self-imposed bondage. I fancy at times I must have made of him a veritable little beast of burden. All the tasks I disliked to perform he would willingly undertake, in the household duties which my mother had assigned to each of us impartially. In my childish games and plays he submitted to my dictatorial management with a willingness of which I always took full advantage. I ordered; he obeyed. Whether it was to drag me about all day on a sled, or to haul many hundreds of heavy rocks to build a stone wall around my playhouse (and which—not finding to my liking—I had him tear down, and take away), or to dam the creek to fish for minnows, it was always the same—I was the ruler, he the slave.

          How unselfish he was! I have a memory of the day when, in gathering great branches of sweetbrier along the creek's edge, as I slashed at the thorny shoots with a sharp knife brought from the house, my eyes on the pink blossoms, I did not see the little brown hand reaching out to help me, and the blade struck the end of his finger—taking away the tip and a portion of the fingernail. Frightened at what I had done, the knife fell into the stream, and I burst into tears. When my mother came—attracted by my frantic wails of grief —she found Frank trying to dry my tears and comforting me by saying: "Don't cry—please don't cry! It don't matter; it—it don't hurt me a bit. Don't cry any more. I'm sorry!" He was; was sorry for me—and with no thought for himself. He had no thought

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of his own pain while he beheld my remorse. Unselfish little Frank!

          How his gaze followed mother as she moved about the room where he lay sick—so very, very sick—with typhoid fever! She had nursed him through weary weeks of an illness that wasted his small body to but little more than a skeleton; but he lived, and her nursing it was that saved him. This he knew without the telling; and in those days after the delirium had passed he would watch her with the look of devotion one sometimes sees in the eyes of a faithful dog.

          So, it came to pass that we were unprepared for the change in him that time wrought. In justice to him I must say that he did not alter until there were changed conditions in the country. The first transcontinental railway came through the valley at the foot of the mountain, and it brought white people in great numbers; and these he came to know—the bad with the good. And somehow the bad influenced him most. The inherent traits of a savage race had not been so easily eradicated, after all. Idleness and slovenly ways took the place of the former ways of neatness and industry. The eager desire for knowledge gave place to sullen indifference. He had been gentle and courteous when alone with us; now—led by those who set an unfortunate example—he was cruel and insolent. The glib lie took the place of absolute truth; and where there had been honesty of purpose and action, now was deceit and artifice. He would go away; and returning, beg forgiveness, and that he might begin again with us as before. But it was not to be. By-and-by he went, and did not come home again—ever. He disappeared as completely as though he had gone out of the world; and all our inquiries of white people and Indians alike, through the years which followed, never

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brought us any knowledge of him. Finally we gave him up for dead; and—as we do of the dead—we forgave him much that he had done.

          Almost thirty years afterward—after he had gone out of our home and our lives—on a blue-and-gold day during one Summer that I spent in the arid country long after I had gone away to live where white people were, I was riding with an Indian woman along the ridge between two cañons, where we could look down into one and see the fallen walls of buildings which had been, for a time, my childhood's home. For a long time I sat on my horse, looking down at the silent and broken adobes, as memories came trooping back.

          Then I said: "Come!" and we rode down into the deserted and dead mining camp of the forgotten years. We loosened the cinchas, and took off the bridles that the horses might rest, too; and on a moss-bank where wild violets grew we sat down in the golden sunlight, under that wonderful sapphire sky. The creek—that was fed all the year by the melting snows up—up—up at the peaks above—sang, and laughed, and danced its way to the dry sands of the valley. And birds that builded here sang too. Yet, somehow, I heard only minor notes in all the song!

          Back, and back went memory to those days when, a child, I played through the sun or the snow with my little Indian playfellow.

          The Indian by me was as silent as the gray adobes; for they are a people who respect your silence when you would be still. So she, too, was silent as I; and, like me, perhaps, was living in days now dead. Once again I was a small girl in gingham apron and stout shoes, building stone forts at the creek-edge, from which we rode forth to kill off whole tribes of hostile Indians. Then (but this as a concession to him and his race, and for which I expected him to be properly

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grateful) we would be the wild Indians, and the porphyry walls of the cañon would resound to our war cries, as we fell upon an emigrant train going to California. (What a little savage I was!) Then, when the lure of the chase was upon us, we would shoot the antelope, and deer, and mountain-sheep which our imagination created out of the white sage on the hillside, and drag our game to the campoodie of our family. (And I remembered how I had used a hair-ribbon for this purpose, and vainly tried to restore its ruined lustre afterward, lest it invoke maternal reprimand!)

          Right there it was, in the rocks, that I lost my first penknife, and never found it. Such a beautiful knife it was—pearl-handled, and with four blades that would cut anything! Mr. Clark from the river had given it to me, saying I must not lose it; and then—I lost it, and neither Frank nor I could ever find it. Strange, how long one remembers!

          And there is the place where he and I buried my kitten—under the wild rose, where the brookmint grows still. Or, he buried it; and I stayed home and mourned and mourned, and would not be comforted. Why does one remember such foolish things for three times ten years?

          So the afternoon wore on, and in dreams and memories I lived again where I had lived in the days of gingham aprons and stout shoes. The stream and the bird sang on, while I thought of my childhood's strange setting, and the strange playmate of those years.

          By and by I came back to the present, and to the Paiute woman beside me I told the story of the little boy of an alien tribe—of his baby days as I had heard of them from him; of his boyhood days as I had known them to be. Of his youth—his manhood, I knew nothing; he had come, and been of us, and gone. That was all I knew. When I had done, I said:

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          "I think Frank is dead."

          In Indian-way she sat still—looking down at the broad levels of the valley below us. After we had seen the shadows lengthen, and lie against the walls of the cañon back of the adobes, she rose, and put the bridle on her horse, and tightened the cincha for the ride forward into the warm glow of the dying sunlight. When I, too, had re-set my saddle, and mounted, we came away from the old ruined mining camp and its haunting shadows of the past. Out on the mesa, loping slowly down, I was thinking of other things when the Indian woman spoke.

          "I know that Frank. He no dead."

          "Not dead! You know him?"

          She was of another tribe ; I could not credit it, for no Paiute had ever told us aught of him.

          "Maybe some other Frank; are you sure?"

          She nodded. "He live close up by that place call 'm Austin. Plenty times I see him. Every time he ask 'bout all you. He work plenty for white people. He good man. Everybody like 'm. He never git married. He never go back to Bannock country. He stay here all time—'bout one hun'ed miles up there. He never forget 'bout you family; he heap like 'm all you."

          So he was living, and lived near that part of the country in which we had been much through the long years ; and yet never a sign had he made that we might know of him! Yet he had not forgotten us, else he never would have asked of us whenever he met those Paiutes whom he knew. She said he "liked us—heap liked us." And she would not have said it, had it not been true. But he had never once in all the thirty years given one sign!

          It is the way of the Indian.