The Lure Of The Mississippi Part 21

"The missionaries," he admitted, "are our friends and I believe they tell us the truth. They do not want our land and they do not cheat us as some of the traders do. They say our beliefs in spook lakes and bad medicine are superst.i.tion, but it is hard to forget our beliefs, because our fathers have taught them to us for many generations.

"My father once took me along on a buffalo hunt far west and he showed me a spook lake. The hunters camped on the sh.o.r.e of the lake, but none of them would have been brave enough to paddle a canoe on its waters.

Some of them would not even gather the dead wood on its sh.o.r.e, but my father told us boys to gather the wood and we did. Our women used the wood to smoke and dry the buffalo meat, and we boys watched for the bad spirits to fly out of the wood.

"I did not see the spirits, but some of the boys told me that they heard the spirits whistle and howl and rise with the smoke after the sun had gone down, and they said that Katinka, the medicine man, saw them, too."

"Where is that spook lake?" the boys asked, also forgetting to paddle.

"That spook lake," Tatanka continued, "lies far west on the plains, which the white men call Dakotah. No trees grow on the plains, but trees and bushes grow on the lake sh.o.r.e and many dead trees and stumps grow in the water. Our people call it the Lake of the Stumps. The water was so bitter that we could not drink it, but our horses drank it."

Bill and Tim dipped a handful of the brown water from Reelfoot Lake.

"It isn't bitter," both exclaimed at once. "This isn't a spook lake."

"Did your horses die, after they drank out of Stump Lake?"

"No, they liked the water."

"Then it wasn't a haunted lake," both of them argued.

"But why did the trees die?" Tatanka objected.

"May be the outlet became choked and the trees were drowned," Barker explained. "You know that white trappers always catch plenty of mink and muskrats and find good fish in the lakes which the Indians say are haunted."

Tatanka began to paddle again, but looked as if he were not convinced but had given up arguing against all three of his friends.

The scene spread out before them looked indeed weird and almost forbidding. A dead forest of tall straight cypress spires arose like tree specters from the dark waters of the lake. The gray trunks had long ago been stripped of bark and branches; a few bald eagles and fish-hawks sailed in spirals over the dead pointed poles and uttered a shrill, piercing cry at the intruders of their solitude.

"It is a forest of ghost trees," Tatanka murmured. "We should not stay here."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "It is a forest of ghost trees," Tatanka murmured.]

"Ghost trees nothing," the old trapper exploded impatiently. "Those trees were drowned forty years ago. The bark and branches have rotted away. It is a wonder the trees are still standing.

"Tatanka, you're a hopeless old heathen. If you don't quit scaring the boys with your spook lakes and ghost trees, I'm going to send you home on a gunboat, and I'll hire a coal-black negro to help us paddle the canoe. Here, fill your red calumet pipe and don't be afraid of harmless dead trees."

A row of turtles plunged into the water from a log, a pair of ducks arose out of some rushes and a large fish jumped out of the water and fell back with a loud splash. Then the channel wound about amongst white water-lilies and patches of the large, beautiful wild lotus or w.a.n.kapin lilies.

Tatanka had lit his pipe and looked about him in silence.

"There," Barker encouraged him. "Doesn't that look like a Minnesota lake? Ducks and turtles and fish and acres of water-lilies. Just like the marshes on your wonderful Minnesota, only the lotus doesn't grow there."

"Yes it does," Tatanka claimed. "My mother and I gathered the big seeds on a lake below the mouth of the Minnesota and in a few other places where w.a.n.kapin grows in our country."

"Well, at last you are convinced that we are not on a bewitched lake.

But now it is high time we look for a camping-place.

"Bill, steer straight for sh.o.r.e. We'll make a good soft bed in that cane-brake."

There are two kinds of cane growing in the South, the small and the large. The small cane, in which the travelers were camping now, grows about a dozen feet high and forms vast thickets on waste lands as far north as Kentucky. These cane-brakes were the home of deer and bear and other wild animals, but large areas have now been made into cotton-fields.

The big cane grows only on wet lands near the rivers from the White River southward. It reaches a height of thirty feet. At the age of about thirty or forty years, the big cane flowers and produces an abundance of rich nouris.h.i.+ng grains for stock and game. After flowering, the old canes die and new plants spring up from the seed. The young shoots are known as mutton cane, because deer and bear and stock grow fat on them.

"This cane," said Tatanka, after they had eaten their supper, "is like the pipe-stem reeds of the Sioux Country. The Indian boys called them spear-gra.s.s, and we threw the reeds at each other when we played war."

The campers remained a week on Reelfoot Lake, and they still found much evidence of the great earthquake half a century before.

The great cracks in the earth, formed at that time, could still be seen in many places. Some of the fissures were filled with sand, which had come up from below; in others, young trees had grown up, while many of the old trees, still alive, were leaning over the partly filled fissures.

It was a strange lake indeed on which the travelers found themselves.

Most of the lake, about ten miles long and two miles wide, was covered with water-lilies, lotus, and many other kinds of water plants. Along the margin and on half a dozen low islands grew the sombre cypress, its odd, fantastic, knee-like roots projecting above the water. On the higher lands also, many trees not growing on the upper river had appeared. Sycamores, or b.u.t.tonwood, mulberry, gum-trees, and catalpas.

The campers met an old man, who had lived near Reelfoot all his life and who told many stories of the great earthquake.

"I was born the year of the earthquake," the old man related, "and my father told me many stories about it.

"The first shock came a little after midnight on December 16th. My father and two other men were on the river at the time. They were going to New Madrid and were going to start very early, so they could return the same day. Their boat was tied near a very big sycamore. All at once they heard a great thundering underground. The big tree began to sway like the tow-head willows in the storm. Then the whole bank broke loose and crashed into the river. First the water in the river seemed to rise like a big wall, the next moment it rushed down stream with a roaring current.

"My father was thrown out of the boat and would have drowned if he had not gotten hold of the branches of the big sycamore. How he did it, he did not remember. He yelled for help, and after a long time the men came back with the boat and took him off.

"They were all so scared they couldn't talk; they thought the world was coming to an end.

"They hurried to the highest land they could find to spend the night, but none of them expected to see the sun rise. Again and again the earth rolled and shook as if it were a blanket. Big trees crashed and snapped like bean-poles, and whole acres of forest crashed into the river. The air smelled of burning sulphur, or some such gases as come out of a sulphur spring.

"Father and the two men crept into a thicket of small brush because they were afraid to stay in the big timber, and father always claimed that in a few minutes it grew as dark as if they had been sitting in a cellar at night.

"Every little while, a dozen times or more, they felt the earth shaking and heard the deep rambling underground and the roaring and rus.h.i.+ng of the river.

"When daylight came they hurried home and when they found that father's family had not been injured they decided to go on to New Madrid, thinking that they might be of some help to sufferers or to s.h.i.+pwrecked boatmen.

"They hardly recognized the river. It was full of landslides, trees, and all kinds of debris, and one good-sized island and its tow-head had entirely disappeared. They found the town of New Madrid in ruins. The land had sunk ten feet or more. About thirty boats in the harbor had been wrecked or carried down stream.. One large barge loaded with five hundred barrels of flour was split from stern to bow and left high and dry on the bank.

"The people had all fled and were camping on high land away from the river."

The old man paused as if for breath.

"Did the people ever go back?" asked Tim.

"No, they didn't. The fact is they couldn't. The river washed the whole town away. The present town is built a little farther up the river.

"The whole country, my father said, was changed by the earthquake. Many good farms sank and many others were covered with sand. Where the lake is now, Bayou de Chien and Reelfoot Creek used to run through a dense forest of cypress trees. You can follow their channels in your bark boat, because there are no stumps or dead trees in the old channels.

"Some of our neighbors were so frightened that they moved away. Father was also going to leave. He was going into Arkansas, but mother would not move. She said she had traveled in an ox-wagon from Pennsylvania to Indiana and from Indiana to Tennessee and that was enough. If the end of the world was coming, Arkansas wouldn't last any longer than Tennessee."

Thus ran the story of the old farmer of Reelfoot Lake. He spoke in a quaint Southern dialect, in which Bill and Tim were quite at home, but which compelled Barker to pay very close attention, while Tatanka lost most of the tale.

The story of the old pioneer has been corroborated by the testimony of many reliable men.

At the time of this great catastrophe, Captain Nicholas Roosevelt was taking the pioneer steamer _New Orleans_ from Pittsburgh to New Orleans.