# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/The Doom of Mamelons

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THE DOOM OF MAMELONS
ALONG the lower Saguenay are strange, bare, rounded rocks, the ruined foundations of old mountains long since shaken down by earthquake and ploughed away by glaciers, and heaps of sand, the erosion of other hills. It is from their name that the whole district is known as Mamelons, meaning the place of great mounds. For a century and more it had been prophesied among the Leni Lenape that if any princess of their tribe should wed a white man war and defeat would follow, and the tribe would reach its end at Mamelons. They had come to believe that where the European landed the red race would look its last on the sun. For a thousand years war was waged across these wastes between the Montagnais, or Mountaineers, and the Eskimos of the frozen north-land. The Montagnais were helped by the Nasquapees, a small, fine-featured people, keen of sight and smell, disbelievers in the powers of medicine-men, yet a folk who called up the dead, for they were mediums and translated the messages of spirits. They claimed to have come long before out of the East, Basques, or Iberians. In the last great fight between the red and the yellow men at Mamelons there had been omens: a raven had been on the moon (an eclipse), and the sun had risen red. Scorching heat lay on the sand, so that in the battle many tried to cool themselves by ​drawing the dead upon them, for the sake of their shadows. Knowing it was to be the last of many great battles, the dead hurried to the help of their friends, and for hours cries and tramplings sounded, and strange buffetings were felt from viewless hands. Hundreds of feet below, the Saguenay foamed red, and still the heat increased and the copper sun shone fainter. In the height of battle the earth began to rock, ashes sifted out of the sky, or, gathering moisture from the sultry air, came down as mud. Darkness fell; then, with a hollow roar and crash, a long-pent volcano in the north burst into eruption, and every man who had stood on the heaving earth was flung down into his own or his enemy's blood. In the dawn it was seen that only two on the battle-field were alive, and they the chiefs of either party. Sadly they made the sign of peace, and the Eskimo set his face northward, nor did he and his tribesmen ever return to vex the Laurentian people.
The Leni Lenape chief had a daughter who at a later time gave herself to a white lover at the old chief's home near Cape Eternity. When they left it to go down the Saguenay they were nearly caught in the fire that raged from Lake St. John to Chicoutimi and that spread over one hundred and fifty miles of forest in seven hours, but they plunged into the dark flood, gained their boat, and so in time reached the French priest at Mamelons, the place of doom. The wedding was to be at once. ​They approached the altar gravely, he strong, confident, she pale and oppressed. When she should have spoken the words that would bind her to the husband, as he pressed the ring on her finger, the girl looked strangely into the east. Her pallor intensified. She had forgotten where she stood. For she saw the millions of the old Iberian race marching through time, carrying their kings and queens enthroned and lifting up their gods. And of all the hosts she was the sole survivor in this western world. The land henceforth belonged to the white people. The chapel bell tolled. It tolled the passing of a soul. It told the passing of a race.