United States or Jamaica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I-e-tan married many of the finest girls of his own and neighbouring tribes, but never had any children. Latterly one of his wives presented him with a male child, which was born with teeth. I-e-tan pronounced it a special interposition of the Great Spirit, of which this extraordinary sign was proof.
He lived a year or two with the Pawnees, acquiring perfectly their difficult language, and attaining a great influence over them, which he never lost. After several years of such penance, I-e-tan revisited the villages of his nation, and, in 1830, on the death of La Criniere, his elder brother, succeeded him as principal chief.
One of these men had formerly been dangerously stabbed by I-e-tan. Actuated by hatred, calculating the chief's power was on the decline, and depending on the strength of their connections, which were influential, the seducers became tired of living out in hunting-camps and elsewhere, and determined to return to the village and face it out.
I-e-tan was the last chief who could so far resist the ruinous influence of the increasing communication of his tribe with the villanous, the worse than barbarous, whites of the extreme frontier as to keep the young men under a tolerable control, but his death proved a signal for license and disorder.
So soon as he became sensible of this irreparable injury, to which, as an Indian, he was, perhaps, even more sensitive than a white man, I-e-tan burned with a mortal resentment. He retired, telling his brother that he would kill him. He got a rifle, returned, and deliberately shot him through the heart.
Such cases of elopement are not very frequent; but after a much longer absence the parties generally become silently reconciled, if necessary, through the arrangement of friends. I-e-tan said, however, that it was not only a personal insult and injury, but an evidence of defiance of his power, and that he would live or die the chief of the Otoes.
At this instant Dorian being out of the way a volley was fired at I-e-tan, and five balls penetrated his body. Then his nephews, coming too late to his support, took swift vengeance. They fired at his now flying enemies, and, although they were in motion, nearly two hundred yards distant, three of them fell dead.
I-e-tan had the advantage of a fine and commanding figure, so remarkable, indeed, that once at a dinner, on a public occasion, at Jefferson Barracks, his health was drunk, with a complimentary allusion to the lines from Shakespeare: A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man.
His enemies had prepared their friends for resistance, and I-e-tan armed himself for the conflict. He sought and found the young men in the skirts of the village, near some trees where their supporters were concealed. I-e-tan addressed the man whom he had formerly wounded: "Stand aside! I do not wish to kill you; I have perhaps injured you enough." The fellow immediately fled.
I-e-tan then drew a pistol, jumped astride his fallen enemy, and was about to blow out his brains, when the interpreter, Dorian, hoping even then to stop bloodshed, struck up his pistol, which was discharged in the air, and seized him around the body and arms. At this instant the wounded man, writhing in the agony of death, discharged his rifle at random.
Word Of The Day