The Vanishing Race: The Last Great Indian Council

One refreshing thought is now flung at them: their days of journeying have brought them within sight of water – water without which there is no life. That long green fringe winding under the brow of the distant hills means tree growth. The Indian loves the brotherhood of trees. Trees grow in that desolate landscape only on the borders of streams. Toward the water and welcome shade they hasten. Tired beast and tired man lave in the lifegiving flood. The horses wade in it as though the snows had melted and run thither to caress and refresh them. Oh, the exhilaration of water! On the margin of the far banks the camp is made for the night. There is witchery in a Western night. Myriads upon myriads of low-hung stars, brilliant, large and lustrous, bend to warm the soul and light the trail. Under these night lamps, amid the speech of leaves and the rush of the river, they bivouac for their last night, bending under the weight of thoughts too deep for tears. In the haze of a broken sleep they wrought out again the sorrows of their troubled record. When the morning broke through the dull gray of the eastern sky rim, he would be a heartless surgeon of emotions who attempted to probe the pathos of their thoughts, and a dull and vulgar rhetorician who should attempt to parse the fathomless sorrow of their speech.

In the hush of the new morning they mounted, and set forth upon their journey over the Great Divide. All Nature seemed conscious of the burden weighing to the earth every Indian thought, and trailing in the dust every hope of the race. The birds remembered not to sing – the prairie dogs ceased their almost continual and rasping chatter. The very horses seemed to loiter and fear the weary miles of their final day of travel. The hills, the sky, the very light of the noonday sun gathered to themselves a new atmosphere and spread it like a mantle over this travelling host. Tired feet now press the highest dome of the hills. It had been a westward climb. Full in their faces, as though to canonize the moment, the god of day had wrought cloud and sky into a miracle of sunset, transmuting by living fire the brown grasses into burnished gold – the fading sage into a silver glow, and the gleam of the distant river into the red of wine. The scene transfixed them. Gladiators of other days became helpless children. During the solemn suspense of this tragic moment, waiting in confused and wondering silence, their faces lighted with the ominous sunset sheen, one great chief uttered speech for all: “Brothers, the West, the West! We alone have the key to the West, and we must bravely unlock the portals; we can buy no lamp that will banish the night. We have always kept our time by the sun. When we pass through the gates of this dying day, we shall pass into a sunless land, and for us there shall be no more time, a forever-land of annihilating darkness.”

For one wistful moment they looked and waited, then the hill upbore them no longer. They filed down the narrow, barren ridge, lined on either hand by sullen and impassable gulfs. Their eagle feathers fluttered from war-bonnet and coup stick, encarnadined by the sun's red rays. Steeper and more rugged became the path until they were confronted by the sharp edge of the bluff. There was danger in the untrodden descent. It was a pathway of struggle.

Once in the valley

They said farewell forever.Thus departed the Great Chieftains,In the purple mists of evening.

The Indian composes music for every emotion of his soul. He has a song for the Great Mystery; for the animals of the chase; for the maiden he woos; for the rippling river. His prayers are breathed in song. His whole life is an expression in music. These songs are treasured down through the ages, and old age teaches youth the import of the melody so that nothing is lost, nothing forgotten. Haydn wrote his “Creation,” Beethoven his “Symphonies,” Mendelssohn his “Songs Without Words,” Handel gave the world his “Dead March in Saul,” Mozart was commissioned by Count Walsegg to pour his great soul into a requiem; during its composition he felt that he was writing the dead march of his soul. For generations it has been sung in the little church at St. Mark's, where the great composer lies in an unknown grave. Had the Indian the combined soul of these masters in music, could he cull from symphony and oratorio and requiem and dirge the master notes that have thrilled and inspired the ages, he then would falter at the edge of his task in an attempt to register the burden of his lament, and utter for the generations of men the requiem wrought out during these moments of passion – a passion of sorrow so sad that the voice of it must ride through the width of the sky, and conquer the thunder of the fiercest tempest. The orchestral grandeur of the world's great composers is the child of genius. They reached the far heights of inspiration in a few isolated instances and for the delight of men. The Indian composing his own requiem must encompass the eternal pathos of a whole race of mankind riding forth beyond the challenge of death. It is well that the Indian does not compose this death march, for the sorrow of it would hush all lullabies, and banish the laughter of children.

Napoleon said to his soldiers, drawn up in battle line on the plains of Egypt, in sight of the solemn Sphinx and the eternal pyramids: “Forty centuries look down upon your actions to-day!” Four hundred and a score years ago Columbus looked first upon the red man. These solemn centuries look down upon this day; look down upon the sheathed sword, the broken coup stick, the shattered battle-axe, the deserted wigwams, the last red men mobilized on the plains of death. Ninety millions, with suffused eyes, watch this vanishing remnant of a race, whose regnant majesty inspires at the very moment it succumbs to the iconoclasm of civilization. It is the imposing triumph of solitary grandeur sweeping beyond the reach of militant crimes, their muffled footfalls reaching beyond the margin of an echo.