Part 30 (1/1)

He laid aside his blanket, exposing his stripped body; and with his eagle pluan to dance the war-dance of his tribe and to chant the song of the battles he had fought

At first his utterance was broken and indistinct, his step feeble But as he went on his voice rang clearer and stronger; his step grew quicker and fir, he continued the wild tale of blood, dancing faster and faster, haranguing louder and louder, until he became a flame of barbaric exciteing passion,--the Indian war-frenzy

But it could not last long His breath caleamed like coals of fire; his feet faltered in the dance With a final effort he brandished and flung his to as he did so a last war-cry, which thrilled all who heard it as of old when he led the tree, the handle breaking off short with the violence of the shock; and the chief fell back--dead

Thus passed the soul of the fierce Mollalie For years afterward, the tomahawk remained where it had sunk in the tree, sole monument of Mishlah His bones lay unburied beneath, wasted by wind and rain, till there was left only a narrow strip of red earth, with the grass springing rankly around it, to shohere the body had been And the few survivors of the tribe who lingered in the valley ont to point to the tomahawk imbedded in the tree, and tell the tale of the warrior and how he died

Why dwell longer on scenes so terrible? Besides, there is but little more to tell The faithless alliesatreat plague appalled them, and they retreated The pestilence protected the Willa in Multnomah's place turned back the tide of invasion better than the war-chief hih the hot months of summer the mortality continued The valley ept as with the besom of destruction, and the drama of a people's death was enacted with a thousand variations of horror When spring came, the invaders entered the valley once more They found it deserted, with the exception of a feretched bands, sole survivors of awam poles, where the ashes had been cold for months at the camp-fires; they rode by fisheries where spear and net were rotting beside the canoe upon the beach And the dead--the dead lay everywhere: in the lodges, beside the fisheries, along the trail where they had been stricken dohile trying to escape,--everywhere were the ghastly and repulsive forms

The spirit of the few survivors was broken, and they rel bands from the interior and the coast settled in the valley after the lapse of years; and, enerate race our own pioneers found there at their co These hybrids were, within the memory of the white ated all the Indians upon Wappatto Island and around the mouth of the Willamette in the early part of the present century Later on, the Yakimas were driven back by the whites; so that there have been three conquests of the lower Willamette Valley since the fall of the ancient race,--two Indian conquests before the white

The once enerated into the uncouth Chinook, and the blood of the ancient race flows mixed and debased in the veins of abject and squalid descendants; but the story of the e that once spanned the Coluled with much of fable, overlaid with myth and superstition, it is nevertheless one of the historic legends of the Coluotten

One word more of Cecil Gray, and our tale is done

The Shoshone renegade, who resolved at Cecil's death to become a Christian, found his ith a few followers to the Flat-Heads, and settled a that tribe He told them of what he had learned from Cecil,--of the Way of Peace; and the wise s in their hearts The Shoshone lived and died aeneration the tradition of the white man's God was handed down, till in 1832 four Flat-Heads were sent by the tribe to St Louis, to ask that teachers be given them to tell them about God

Every student of history kno that appeal stirred the heart of the East, and caused the sending out of the first urated have since sprung all the ave his life for the Indians, and died see up and bore a harvest long after his death And to-day, two centuries since his body was laid in the lonely grave on Wappatto Island, thousands of Indians are the better for his having lived No true, noble life can be said to have been lived in vain

Defeated and beaten though it one out froree to lighten the great heartache and bitterness of the world Truth, goodness, and self-sacrifice are never beaten,--no, not by death itself The exas is deathless, and lives after the individual is gone, flowing on forever in the broad life of humanity

I write these last lines on Sauvie's Island--the Wappatto of the Indians,--sitting upon the bank of the river, beneath the gnarled and ancient cottonwood that still marks the spot where the old Columbia trail led up from the water to the interior of the island Stately and beautiful are the far snow-peaks and the sweeping forests The woods are rich in the colors of an Oregon autuathered, the dusky hands that once reaped the harvest long cruht flows the Columbia, river of many names,--the Wauna and Weon of poetry,--always vast and grand, always flowing placidly to the sea

Steamboats of the present; batteaux of the fur traders; shi+ps, Grey's and Vancouver's, of discovery; Indian canoes of the old unknown tio, and yet holds its way past forest and pro

Generation after generation, daring hunter, ardent discoverer, silent Indian,--all the shadowy peoples of the past have sailed its waters as we sail them, have lived perplexed and haunted by one out into the Great Darkness with hearts full of wistful doubt and questioning, as we go; and still the river holds its course, bright, beautiful, inscrutable It stays; _we go_ Is there anything _beyond_ the darkness into which generation follows generation and race follows race? Surely there is an after-life, where light and peace shall come to all who, however defeated, have tried to be true and loyal; where the burden shall be lifted and the heartache shall cease; where all the love and hope that slipped away froiven back forever

_Via crucis, via lucis_