Evelyn Raymond - The Sun Maid - A Story of Fort Dearborn

In some measure, the story of the Sun Maid is an allegory.

Both the heroine and the city of her love grew from insignificant beginnings; the one into a type of broadest womanhood, the other into a grandeur which has made it unique among the cities of the world.

Discouragements, sorrows, and seeming ruin but developed in each the same high attributes of courage, indomitable will power, and far-reaching sympathy. The story of the youth of either would be a tale unfinished; and those who have followed, with any degree of interest, the fortunes of either during any period will keep that interest to the end.

There are things which never age. Such was the heart of the Maid who remained glad as a girl to the end of her century, and such the marvellous Chicago with a century rounded glory which is still the glory of a youth whose future magnificence no man can estimate.

E. R., Baltimore, January, 1900.

With gloom in his heart, Black Partridge strode homeward along the beach path.

The glory of a brilliant August sunset crimsoned the tops of the sandhills on the west and the waters of the broad lake on the east; but if the preoccupied Indian observed this at all, it was to see in it an omen of impending tragedy. Red was the color of blood, and he foresaw that blood must flow, and freely.

“They are all fools. All. They know that Black Partridge cannot lie, yet they believe not his words. The white man lies, and works his own destruction. His doom be on his head!”

As his thought took this line the chief’s brow grew still more stern, and an expression of contempt curled the corners of his wide, thin lips. A savage though he was, at that moment he felt himself immeasurably superior to the pale-faces whom he had known; and in the consciousness of his integrity he held his tall form even more erect, while he turned his face toward the sky in gratitude to that Great Spirit who had made him what he was.

Then again he remembered the past, and again his feather-adorned head drooped beneath its burden of regret, while his brown fingers clasped and unclasped themselves about a glittering medal which decorated his necklace, and was the most cherished of his few possessions.

“I have worn it for long, and it has rested lightly upon my heart; but now it becomes a knife that pierces. Therefore I must return it whence it came.”

Yet something like a sigh escaped him, and his hands fell down straight at his sides. Also, his narrow eyes gazed forward upon the horizon, absently, as if their inward visions were much clearer than anything external. In this manner he went onward for a little distance, till his moccasined foot struck sharply against something lying in his path, and so roused him from his reverie.

“Ugh! Ugh! So. When the squaw dies the papoose must suffer.”

The soft obstruction was a little child, curled into a rounded heap, and fast asleep upon this primitive public highway. The touch of the red man’s foot had partially wakened the sleeper, and when he bent and laid his hand upon her shoulder, she sprang up lightly, at once beginning to laugh and chatter with a gayety that infected even the stolid Indian.

“Ugh! The Little-One-Who-Laughs. Why are you here alone, so far from the Fort, Kitty Briscoe?”

“I runned away. Bunny rabbit runned away. I did catch him two times. I did find some posies, all yellow and round and – posies runned away, too. Ain’t that funny? Kitty go seek them.”

Her laughter trilled out, bird clear, and a mischievous twinkle lighted her big blue eyes.

“I runned away. Bunny rabbit runned to catch me. I runned to catch bunny. I caught the posies. Yellow posies gone – I go find them, too.”

As if it were the best joke in the world, the little creature still laughed over her own conceit of so many runnings till, in whirling about, she discovered the remnants of the flowers she had lost upon the heat-hardened path behind her. Indeed, when she had dropped down to sleep, overcome by sudden weariness, it had been with the cool leaves and blossoms for a couch. Now the love of all green and growing things was an inborn passion with this child, and her face sobered to a keen distress as she gazed upon her ruined treasures. But almost at once the cloud passed, and she laughed again.

“Poor posies, tired posies, sleepy, too. Kitty sorry. Put them in the water trough and wake them up. Then they hold their eyes open, just like Kitty’s.”

“Ugh! Where the papoose sleeps the blossoms wither,” remarked Black Partridge, regarding the bruised and faded plants with more attention. They were wild orchids, and he knew that the child must have wandered far afield to obtain them. At that time of year such blooms were extremely rare, and only to be found in the moist shadows of some tree-bordered stream quite remote from this sandy beach.

“Oh, dear! Something aches my feet. I will go home to my little bed. Pick up the posies, Feather-man, and take poor Kitty.”

With entire confidence that the Indian would do as she wished, the small maid clasped his buckskin-covered knee and leaned her dimpled cheek against it. It proved a comfortable support, and with a babyish yawn she promptly fell asleep again.

Had she been a child of his own village, even of his own wigwam, Black Partridge would have shaken her roughly aside, feeling his dignity affronted by her familiarity; but in her case he could not do this and on this night least of all.

The little estray was the orphan of Fort Dearborn; whose soldier father had met a soldier’s common fate, and whose mother had quickly followed him with her broken heart. Then the babe of a few weeks became the charge of the kind women at the Fort, and the pet of the garrison in general.

But now far graver matters than the pranks of a mischievous child filled the minds of all her friends. The peaceful, monotonous life of the past few years was over, and the order had gone forth that the post should be evacuated. Preparations had already begun for the long and hazardous journey which confronted that isolated band of white people, and the mothers of a score of other restless young folk had been too busy and anxious to notice when this child slipped away to wander on the prairie.

For a brief time the weary baby slumbered against the red man’s knee, while he considered the course he would best pursue; whether to return her at once to the family of the commandant, or to carry her southward to the Pottawatomie lodge whither he was bound. Then, his decision made, he lifted the child to his breast and resumed his homeward way.

But the bright head pillowed so near his eyes seemed to dazzle him, and its floating golden locks to catch and hold, in a peculiar fashion, the rays of the sunset. From this, with his race instinct of poetic imagery, which finds in nature a type for everything, he caught a quaint suggestion.

“She is like the sun himself. She is all warmth and brightness. She is his child, now that her pale-faced parents sleep the long sleep, and none other claims her. None? Yes, one. I, Black Partridge, the Man-Who-Lies-Not. In my village, Muck-otey-pokee, lives my sister, the daughter of a chief, her whose one son died of the fever on that same dark night when the arrow of a Sioux warrior killed a brave, his sire. In her closed tepee there will again be light. The Sun Maid shall make it. So shall she escape the fate of the doomed pale-faces, and so shall the daughter of my house again be glad.”

Thus, bearing her new name, and all unconsciously, the little Sun Maid was carried southward and still southward till the twilight fell and her new guardian reached the Pottawatomie village, on the Illinois prairie, where he dwelt.