Produced by Andrew Sly
By E. Pauline Johnson
With Introduction by Ernest Thompson Seton
Dedicated to the Boy Scouts
How well I remember my first meeting with Tekahionwake, the Indian girl!I see her yet as she stood in all ways the ideal type of her race, litheand active, with clean-cut aquiline features, olive-red complexion andlong dark hair; but developed by her white-man training so that the shyIndian girl had given place to the alert, resourceful world-woman, athome equally in the salons of the rich and learned or in the stern ofthe birch canoe, where, with paddle poised, she was in absolute andfearless control, watching, warring and winning against the grim rocksthat grinned out of the white rapids to tear the frail craft and mangleits daring rider.
We met at the private view of one of my own pictures. It was a wolfscene, and Tekahionwake, quickly sensing the painter's sympathy with theWolf, claimed him as a Medicine Brother, for she herself was of the WolfClan of the Mohawks. The little silver token she gave me then is not tobe gauged or appraised by any craftsman method known to trade.
From that day, twenty odd years ago, our friendship continued to theend, and it is the last sad privilege of brotherhood to write this briefcomment on her personality. I do it with a special insight, for I amcharged with a message from Tekahionwake herself. "Never let anyone callme a white woman," she said. "There are those who think they pay me acompliment in saying that I am just like a white woman. My aim, my joy,my pride is to sing the glories of my own people. Ours was the race thatgave the world its measure of heroism, its standard of physical prowess.Ours was the race that taught the world that avarice veiled by any nameis crime. Ours were the people of the blue air and the green woods,and ours the faith that taught men to live without greed and to diewithout fear. Ours were the fighting men that, man to man—yes, one tothree—could meet and win against the world. But for our few numbers,our simple faith that others were as true as we to keep their honorbright and hold as bond inviolable their plighted word, we should haveowned America to-day."
If the spirit of Wetamoo, the beautiful woman Sachem, the Boadicea ofNew England, ever came back, it must have been in Tekahionwake theMohawk. The fortitude and the eloquence of the Narragansett Chieftainesswere born again in the Iroquois maiden; she typified the spirit ofher people that flung itself against the advancing tide of whiteencroachment even as a falcon might fling himself against a horde ofcrows whose strength was their numbers and whose numbers were withoutend, so all his wondrous effort was made vain.
"The Riders of the Plains," the "Legends of Vancouver," "Flint andFeather," and the present volume, "Shagganappi," all tell of the spiritthat tells them. Love of the blessed life of blue air without gold-lustis felt in the line and the interline, with joy in the beauty of beaverstream, tamarac swamp, shad-bush and drifting cloud, and faith in thecreed of her fathers, that saw the Great Spirit in all things and thatreverenced Him at all times, and over and above it all the sad note thattells of a proud race, conscious that it has been crushed by numbers,that its day is over and its heritage gone forever.
Oh, reader of the alien race, keep this in mind: remember that no peopleever ride the wave's crest unceasingly. The time must come for us to godown, and when it