United States or Antigua and Barbuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Their country was full of pretended maniacs, who, to propitiate their guardian spirits, or okies, and acquire the mystic virtue which pertained to madness, raved stark naked through the villages, scattering the brands of the lodge-fires, and upsetting everything in their way. The river Niagara was at this time, 1640, well known to the Jesuits, though none of them had visited it.
Five or six fires blazed on the earthen floor, and around them were huddled twice that number of families, sitting, crouching, standing, or flat on the ground; old and young, women and men, children and dogs, mingled pell-mell. The scene would have been a strange one by daylight: it was doubly strange by the flicker and glare of the lodge-fires.
The lodge-fires died down in the camp, but the muffled intone came in a hollow sound from the interior of the tepee until the spirit of silence was made more sure, and sleep came over the bad and good together. Across the gray-greens of the moonlit plains bobbed and flitted the dim form of the seeker of God's help.
I go to my death, but the words I have spoken will live. The hearts of those listening here will treasure them up; they will be told around the lodge-fires and repeated in the war-dance. The words I speak will go out among the tribes, and no man can destroy them. Yes, they go out words, but they will come back arrows and war in the day of vengeance when the tribes shall rise against the oppressor.
All were to go to the mouth of the Maria's "The River That Scolds at the Other" the Indians call this stream, that disturbs the waters of the Missouri with its swifter flood. On through the camp the crier rode, and behind him the lodge-fires glowed in answer to his call.
Sixty chiefs and principal men, with a crowd of younger warriors, formed their council- circle in the fort, those of each village grouped together, and all seated on the ground with a gravity of bearing sufficiently curious to those who had seen the same men in the domestic circle of their lodge-fires.
In nineteen days they reached the town of Cahiague, and, lounging around their smoky lodge-fires, the hunters forgot the hardships of the past. For Champlain there was no rest. A double motive urged him, discovery, and the strengthening of his colony by widening its circle of trade.
Word Of The Day