Page:Weird Tales Volume 2 Number 2 (1923-09).djvu/41

40 brother Christians the nature of his trials and tribulations.

He went in great pomp and state, arrayed in a quantity of war bonnets, beads and blankets, riding a milk-white horse with a silver mane and tail. And he returned, with his war bonnets, beads and blankets; and his milk-white horse, yet without his pomp and state. He also returned a heathen, and with a new opinion about white men.

Thereafter it transpired that, as the Western emigrant trains crept weary and slow-footed, down the Bitterroot Range into the Snake River Basin, en route to the Willamette Valley, Pohontihac and his confreres dropped casually down the river in canoes, and slew the wayfarers, without favor and apparently without fear.

This un-Christian procedure continued over a period of two or three decades, yet the expedient was without avail; the white man continued to arrive. And, as a somewhat ironic corollary, the red man continued to depart. From a large and powerful tribe, inhabiting a two-thirds of what later was to be the state of Idaho, the Kennisaus shrank to half their former size, and dropped to the lower basins of the Snake and Salmon Rivers.

It was immediately after they had occupied this, the latest of their retreats, that the O. S. L. learned that it required the lower Snake River Basin in the carrying out of its railroad plans. So the now highly indignant Kennisaus shrank again, and further reduced themselves. This time it was the valley of the Salmon. Whereupon, certain prophets of Destiny inaugurated the would-be towns of Whitebird, Leland and Lewiston, and impudent steamboat pilots began to blow loud-mouthed whistles along the banks of the Salmon. So the Kennisaus—such as now were left of them—folded their tents like the Arabs, and silently stole away up the Clearwater basin, where they sat down grimly to await the end.

Old Chief Pohontihac had long since died as the result of a broken heart—died, still a heathen. And they had buried him a heathen, amid much evidence of splendor, upon the shore of the upper Clearwater, near a point later known as Deadman's Hill, among the tombs of his contemporaries. He was left in this final resting place, together with his various war accoutrements and an abundance of food and blankets; and, because the milk-white horse refused to die, they killed it and buried it with him, so that he would not be required to walk to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

Thus at the time of this writing the Kennisaus were an all but extinct race: they had passed with the buffalo—or the buffalo had passed with them, whichever way you choose to put it. There were those who maintained that the tribe had been wholly exterminated, and others who disagreed with this contention. It was remembered that the government, not requiring the Clearwater Valley for any other purpose, had given it to the Kennisaus as a Reservation, though at a period so remote that the Department may have forgotten all about the incident.

There also had been a report that a biological expedition, out in search of the missing link, in about the year 1913, had unofficially mentioned running across signs of extinct villages along the upper Clearwater, and numerous Indian burying grounds somewhat resembling, in their general characteristics, those of the White Plains Apaches.

Moreover, the S. P. & S. surveying crew, who had run the line to the upper Clearwater coal deposits, a couple of summers before, remembered having seen, upon one or two occasions, the smoke from remote camp fires, and the occasional flash of a red and blue blanket against the background of forest freen.

Beyond these meager facts, however, the subject was shrouded in mystery—a sort of halo of dead, or half-dead, memories. All that was known for sure I was that the Kennisaus had made their final stand in the upper Clearwater Basin; and that now, under the urge of immediate necessity, the S. P. & S. was about to construct a railroad up the said basin—this in defiance of the laws of gravity, the ghosts of vanished tribes, the forms of those, if any, that yet remained, and all other obstacles and impediments, both seen and unseen. Because, as above suggested, the coal deposits at the head of the Clearwater, had begun to attract attention.

E PITCHED our construction camp at the foot of Deadman's Hill, where the Little Chewelah enters the Clearwater, some forty miles up from its confluence with the Salmon.

Perkins, the S. P. & S. superintendent, had transferred us in a body from that unfinished stub-line running unto Burns, Oregon. The immediate job before us consisted of a roadbed, beginning at Deadman's Hill and continuing twenty miles up the left bank of the Clearwater, across the Wild Rose Prairie. The survey was already in; it was for us to follow this survey, lay the grade, run the cuts, make the fills, (there were no tunnels) and prepare the ballast ready for the ties and rails.

Our outfit comprised some three hundred construction hands, six or seven orange-peel steam shovels, for the cuts and grades, a half-hundred horse teams for the plows and scrapers, sleeping tents, repair shops, cookhouses—an ordinary railroad construction outfit. Perkins had simply handed us the job and told us to do it, so there was nothing to be said on the subject—except that it was a man-sized job, considering the time at our disposal; for we had arrived on the ground not until early in August, and we were expected to finish before the winter set in, though no one of course knew when that would be.

Weatherford, therefore, had sent Courtney up ahead of time, to establish the camp and get things in working order; we followed a couple of weeks later—Weatherford, Charley Eaglefeather and myself.

You, of course, have heard of Charley Eaglefeather. He is (or was) what they called an "educated Indian."

Not only was Charley Eaglefeather an educated Indian, but he was an educated Kennisau Indian—to state the case as it should be stated. Moreover, he had royal blood. He was the descendant of old Chief Pohontihac, grandson of Witchipa, and direct heir to the Kennisau throne, if there had been any throne left.

That is how they came to educate him, at least so they say. In any event, the Indian agent snapped him up from in front of his father's tepee, one fine morning while he was yet a beady-eyed child, shooting his toy arrows at imaginary foes, and packed him off for a five-year siege at Carlisle.

Here, a wealthy Boston spinster, touring the country in search of information—meanwhile intent upon the proverbial Indian uplift—espied him, expressed an abrupt prejudice in favor of his snappy black eyes and, descending upon him, fed him consecutively, and at her own expense, to Harvard University, the Ann Arbor Law School, and the Boston Polytechnic.

He came forth from these trials and tribulations about the most highly educated Indian one ever saw: educated—if I must tell the whole truth—in devious ways far beyond the mere sciences and the classics. For his accomplishments included—in addition to fancy waistcoats, ice-cream sodas and red ties—the fine arts of football, baseball and tennis.

Those of you who are not too young will remember in particular the