The Grange advance. [volume] (Red Wing, Minn.) 1873-1877, 1876-05-03
A Romance of the Black Hills.

Our party left the North Platte river
on the 10Th inst, four in number.
There were MeSsrs. Dear and BOsler,
myself and a beautiful Indian girl of
the Sioux tribe. About the latter
there is bit of romance not down on
any page or chronicle, but worthy the
painting by pen more eloquent than
mine. She took passage at the Platte
and rode with us distance of so miles
to the NiObrara or Running Water, q
stream that might be called the poem
Of the prairie as appropriately as are
the snowflakes termed the poem of the
air, by Mr.. Longfellow. The girl was
time, attract immediate affection be
she on the plains or in the fashionable
draWing-room. Long black hair she
had, dressed ingeniously, and large
brown eyes with crystalline clear
ness. The soft olive complexion be-
tokened the half blood in her
veins, and a voice of more than ordi-
nary sweetness reminded me that it
had caught, perhaps, the murmur of
the May winds in the greenness of the
pines.
| She was modest on first acquaintance
| and [ knew it to be the result not of the
native instinct but rather that of edu-
cation. She and became gradually
more sOciable as the wheels of the
stage whirled away the sandy miles,
and before the shutdown darkened the
prairies, knew chapter or so in her
! history, just as 1 put it on this page.
Seventeen years ago, she was born
on the South Platte, in Sioux lodge.
Her father was a white man of fine
culture, but of long experience on the
border. Just as he had left college
and crossed the threshold of young
manhood, an evil day befell him down
in his Alabama home, and leaving to Il
remorseful memory and a green grave
the pallid, dead face of a beautiful
girl whom he had ruined, he fled to
the mountains, praying perhaps that
they might fall on him and crush out
of existence the everlasting memory
Of a deed not even a dying day may
atone for. The years went by black
winged and his face caught the shad-
ow OF every one of them, until his
speech knew little else but curses and
his dreams nothing but a pallid fore
head hidden under the sod of the south.
In Sioux lodge a certain day, he
took to himself one of the handsomest
full-blooded women in all the tribe,
and, after the honey moon and the
passing of many other moons, there
was born to them, one morning down
on the grassy bank of the Platte,
brown-eyed little being that had the
speech of it's mother and the delicate
features of it's once handsome father.
The summers and winters went by
with the blossoms of flowers and the
fakes of snow, until the girl grew to
the age of IA, with all the wild beauty
of the west around her. 1t had deeply
impregnated her life, and yet there
was a subtle refinement in her charac-
ter, that i'll accorded with the people
in whose lodges she had been nursed
and reared.
Down by the Platte one morning in
June, three years ago, there was the
flowing of two tides, one of the river,
the other of ''the affairs of men,
Naked and cold with his face buried in
the water and his hands clinching the
weeds and the sand, lay a suicide
John Morey, of Alabama. Two In
dian children had found him while they
were playing along the shore, and
fastened to give the alarm. When
the widowed mother and the daughter
and their kins-people gathered at the
spot, mile from the lodges. there
was a wailing and weeping that
mingled strangely and weirdly with
the ripple of the river over it's sands
and bubbles. They lifted the dead
man up from the water and there was
, hu11pt thrOuGh his hrain
A short way off lay his clothing, and
among other papers found in the side
pocket of his blue flannel shirt, was a
letter addressed to his daughter. 1t
was written in a rugged, tremulous
hand, but the punctuation and the Or
typography indicated the early culture
not neglected to teach to his daughter.
After the burial and the passing of the
first great grief she read it carefully,
and therein discovered traces of the
early career of her father, which al
most overweight her being.
The grief of heart and the burst of
tears came back again, and the seat
of reason was almost shaken. But,
strangest Of all, and after the explana-
ton of the cause of his suicide, the IA
Their wrote to his daughter that she
should go back to his parents, aged but
wealthy as they were, in Alabama, and
should there continue, in a certain
seminary, the incomplete rudiments of
an education he had given her from
time to time.
Her mother, wholly unable to read,
was made acquainted with the mes
sages and the requests of the suicides