The Shagganappi Part 1

The s.h.a.gganappi.

by E. Pauline Johnson.

TEKAHIONWAKE

(PAULINE JOHNSON)

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, lithe and active, with clean-cut aquiline features, olive-red complexion and long dark hair; but developed by her white-man training so that the shy Indian girl had given place to the alert, resourceful world-woman, at home equally in the salons of the rich and learned or in the stern of the birch canoe, where, with paddle poised, she was in absolute and fearless control, watching, warring and winning against the grim rocks that grinned out of the white rapids to tear the frail craft and mangle its daring rider.

We met at the private view of one of my own pictures. It was a wolf scene, and Tekahionwake, quickly sensing the painter's sympathy with the Wolf, claimed him as a Medicine Brother, for she herself was of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawks. The little silver token she gave me then is not to be gauged or appraised by any craftsman method known to trade.

From that day, twenty odd years ago, our friends.h.i.+p continued to the end, and it is the last sad privilege of brotherhood to write this brief comment on her personality. I do it with a special insight, for I am charged with a message from Tekahionwake herself. "Never let anyone call me a white woman," she said. "There are those who think they pay me a compliment 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 that gave the world its measure of heroism, its standard of physical prowess.

Ours was the race that taught the world that avarice veiled by any name is 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 die without fear. Ours were the fighting men that, man to man--yes, one to three--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 honor bright and hold as bond inviolable their plighted word, we should have owned America to-day."

If the spirit of Wetamoo, the beautiful woman Sachem, the Boadicea of New England, ever came back, it must have been in Tekahionwake the Mohawk. The fort.i.tude and the eloquence of the Narragansett Chieftainess were born again in the Iroquois maiden; she typified the spirit of her people that flung itself against the advancing tide of white encroachment even as a falcon might fling himself against a horde of crows whose strength was their numbers and whose numbers were without end, so all his wondrous effort was made vain.

"The Riders of the Plains," the "Legends of Vancouver," "Flint and Feather," and the present volume, "s.h.a.gganappi," all tell of the spirit that tells them. Love of the blessed life of blue air without gold-l.u.s.t is felt in the line and the interline, with joy in the beauty of beaver stream, tamarac swamp, shad-bush and drifting cloud, and faith in the creed of her fathers, that saw the Great Spirit in all things and that reverenced Him at all times, and over and above it all the sad note that tells 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 people ever ride the wave's crest unceasingly. The time must come for us to go down, and when it comes may we have the strength to meet our fate with such fort.i.tude and silent dignity as did the Red Man his.

"Oh, why have your people forced on me the name of Pauline Johnson?" she said. "Was not my Indian name good enough? Do you think you help us by bidding us forget our blood? by teaching us to cast off all memory of our high ideals and our glorious past? I am an Indian. My pen and my life I devote to the memory of my own people. Forget that I was Pauline Johnson, but remember always that I was Tekahionwake, the Mohawk that humbly aspired to be the saga singer of her people, the bard of the n.o.blest folk the world has ever seen, the sad historian of her own heroic race."

ERNEST THOMPSON SETON.

The s.h.a.gganappi

When "Fire-Flint" Larocque said good-bye to his parents, up in the Red River Valley, and started forth for his first term in an Eastern college, he knew that the next few years would be a fight to the very teeth. If he could have called himself "Indian" or "White" he would have known where he stood in the great world of Eastern advancement, but he was neither one nor the other--but here he was born to be a thing apart, with no nationality in all the world to claim as a blood heritage. All his young life he had been accustomed to hear his parents and himself referred to as "half-breeds," until one day, when the Governor-General of all Canada paid a visit to the Indian school, and the princ.i.p.al, with an air of pride, presented "Fire-Flint" to His Excellency, with "This is our head pupil, the most diligent boy in the school. He is Trapper Larocque's son."

"Oh? What tribe does he belong to?" asked the Governor, as he clasped the boy's hand genially.

"Oh, Fire-Flint belongs to no tribe; he is a half-breed," explained the princ.i.p.al.

"What an odd term!" said the Governor, with a perplexed wrinkle across his brows; then, "I imagine you mean a half-blood, not breed." His voice was chilly and his eyes a little cold as he looked rather haughtily at the princ.i.p.al. "I do not like the word 'breed' applied to human beings.

It is a term for cattle and not men," he continued. Then, addressing "Fire-Flint," he asked, "Who are your parents, my boy?"

"My father is half French and half Cree; my mother is about three-quarters Cree; her grandfather was French," replied the boy, while his whole loyal young heart reached out towards this great man, who was lifting him out of the depths of obscurity. Then His Excellency's hands rested with a peculiar half fatherly, half brotherly touch on the shoulders of the slim lad before him.

"Then you have blood in your veins that the whole world might envy,"

he said slowly. "The blood of old France and the blood of a great aboriginal race that is the offshoot of no other race in the world. The Indian blood is a thing of itself, unmixed for thousands of years, a blood that is distinct and exclusive. Few white people can claim such a lineage. Boy, try and remember that as you come of Red Indian blood, dashed with that of the first great soldiers, settlers and pioneers in this vast Dominion, that you have one of the proudest places and heritages in the world; you are a Canadian in the greatest sense of that great word. When you go out into the world will you remember that, Fire-Flint?" His Excellency's voice ceased, but his thin, pale, aristocratic fingers still rested on the boy's shoulders, his eyes still shone with that peculiar brotherly light.

"I shall remember, sir," replied Fire-Flint, while his homeless young heart was fast creating for itself the foothold amongst the great nations of the earth. The princ.i.p.al of the school stood awkwardly, hoping that all this attention would not spoil his head pupil; but he never knew that boy in all the five years he had instructed him, as His Excellency, Lord Mortimer, knew him in that five minutes' chat.

"No," said the Governor, again turning to the princ.i.p.al, "I certainly do not like that term 'half-breed.' Most of the people on the continent of America are of mixed nationality--how few are pure English or Scotch or Irish--or indeed of any particular race? Yet the white people of mixed nations are never called half-breeds. Why not? It would be quite reasonable to use the term regarding them." Then, once again addressing Fire-Flint, he asked, "I suppose all the traders use this term in speaking of your parents and of you?"

"Of my parents, yes, sir," replied the boy.

"And you?" questioned His Excellency, kindly.

"They call me the 's.h.a.gganappi,'" replied Fire-Flint.

"I am afraid that is beyond me, my boy," smiled His Excellency. "Won't you tell me what it means?" The boy smiled responsively.

"It is a buckskin, a color; a s.h.a.gganappi cayuse is a buckskin color.

They say I look that way."

"Ah, I understand," replied His Excellency, as his eyes rested on the dark cream brown tint of the boy's face. "Well, it is a good name; buckskin is a thing essential to white people and to Indians alike, from the Red River to the Rockies. And the cayuse--well, the horse is the n.o.blest animal known to man. So try to be worthy of the nickname, my boy. Live to be essential to your people like the buckskin; to be n.o.ble--like the horse. And now good-bye, s.h.a.gganappi, and remember that you are the real Canadian."

Another handclasp and Lord Mortimer was walking away with the princ.i.p.al at his side, who was saying, "Your Excellency, you have greatly encouraged that boy; I think he always felt terribly that he was a half-bree--half-blood. He would have loved to claim either all Cree or all French ancestry."

"He is a fine lad and I like him," returned Lord Mortimer, rather shortly, for he felt a little impatient with the princ.i.p.al, who could so easily have lightened the boy's heart from the very first year he had entered the school, by fostering within him pride of the two great races that blended within his veins into that one mighty nation called Canadian.

But that day proved the beginning of a new life for Fire-Flint; Lord Mortimer had called him s.h.a.gganappi in a half playful way, had said the name meant good and great things. No more did the little half-blood despise his own unusually tinted skin, no more did he hate that dash of grey in his brown eyes that bespoke "white blood," no more did he deplore the lack of proper coloring that would have meant the heritage of pure Indian blood. He was content to fight it out, through all his life to come, as "The s.h.a.gganappi," and when the time came for him to go to the great Eastern college in Ontario he went with his mind made up that no boy living was going to shoulder him into a corner or out-do him in the race for attainment.

"h.e.l.lo, fellows, there is an Indian blown in from the North-West.

Cracker-jack of a looking chap," announced "Cop" Billings to his roommates late one morning, as he burst into the room after his early mile run to find them with yet ten minutes to spare before the "rising bell."

"Shut up, and let a fellow sleep," growled "Sandy," from his bed in the corner.

"Indian?" exclaimed young Locke, sitting bolt upright; "this ain't a Redskin school; he's got to get put out, or I'm a deader."

"You'll be a deader if you try to put him out," sneered Cop Billings; "first place he's got an arm like braided whipcord, and he's got a chin--hanged determined swat-you-in-the-face sort of chin--not a boiled-fish sort of jaw like yours," and he glared at the unfortunate Locke with sneering disapproval.

"Where'd you see him?" ventured little chunky Johnny Miller, getting into his clothes.

"Saw him in the library as I pa.s.sed. The Head called me in and--"

"Stow it! stow it!" they all yelled; then Locke jeered, "The Head is never up at six-thirty--we are not rabbits."

"Just where you get left; the Head was up at five-thirty and went to the station to meet mister Indian."

"Well, I'll be jing-banged," exclaimed Sandy, nearly awake; "what's the meaning of it all?"

"Meaning's just this, my son," replied Cop, getting out of his limited running togs into something more respectable, "that if you chumps guessed all day you'd never strike just how the Indian came to this school. Who do you suppose wrote to the Head recommending him to take the Redskin, and kind of insinuating that the college would do well to treat him properly? None other than His Excellency Lord Mortimer, Governor-General of 'this Canada of ours.' Now, Locke, will you act good and pretty, and take your bread and milk like a nice little tootsy-wootsy and allow the Indian to stay?"

"Whew!" bellowed Locke, "I guess I'm it, fellows."

"Just found it out, eh?" answered Cop; then, as the first bell clanged throughout the building and hustling was in order, he proceeded to explain that as he pa.s.sed the library door on his way to the baths, Professor Warwick called him in and introduced him to the tall, lithe Westerner, who had wonderfully easy manners, a skin like a tan-colored glove, and whose English was more attractive than marred by a strong accent that sounded "Frenchy."

"When he found that I was heading for the baths he asked to come, too,"

rattled Cop; "been on the train over three days and nights coming from Winnipeg; said he felt grimy, so I took him along. Jingo, you should see his clothes--silk socks, silk s.h.i.+rt, top-coat lined with mink, an otter collar--must have cost hundreds. Says I, 'Well, pal, your governor must be well fixed.' Says he, 'My father is a trapper and trades with the Hudson's Bay Company. He trapped all these minks, and my other clothes--oh, we buy those at the H.B.C. in Winnipeg.' Wouldn't that phase you, fellows? But I forgot his clothes when I saw him strip.

Jiminy Christmas! I never saw such a body. I'm in bully training, but I'm a cow compared to 's.h.a.g.'"