THE WESTERN MONTHLY REVIEW. DECEMBER, 1827. [The following tale has come to hand from a friend, who lives in the bush. He seems to suppose us acquainted with the various editors of journals, who have offered premiums for the best written tales to be presented within a given time; and appears desirous, that we should transmit the following, that it may take its chance with the rest. We have not the honor to be acquainted with any one of them; though we are exceedingly gratified to find so many at once able, and disposed to act the part of Mecænasses. This circumstance, and that of the MS. being placed at our disposal, will account for our publishing it; though, we confess, the article is something out of our line. As exercising our critical function, however, we hope we shall not transcend our jurisdictional limits, when we say, that we have seldom read any thing more affecting. Indeed, we had once or twice, in reading it, a vague surmise, that the author was quizzing us. If we ever obtain the two volumes, of which he speaks, we shall, probably, understand his purpose more clearly. Meanwhile, in reference to the author's wish, that it may take its chance, as a prize essay, we can only say, that should it happen, in this form, to fall into the hands of any of the aforesaid gentlemen, they certainly can read it easier in print, than spell it out of the plainest handwriting. We know the writer to be poor, a poet, and an author, encumbered with a family. If these claims do not soften their hearts in his favor, we fear, that even this touching tale will not. If any of them, moved by a wish to encourage modest literary merit in distress, see fit to award thirty, twenty, or even ten dollars, or any am, over or unVOL. I.-No. 8. 1 der, down to five, and will remit the same to us, post paid, we pledge ourselves, that we will in like manner remit it, post paid, to the author.-ED.] In a beautiful square opening, cut out of a beech forest, in that part of the state of Indiana, bordering on lake Michigan, latitude and longitude neither recollected, nor material, is a log house, called by its tenants by the more pastoral name of cottage. In fact, it was named by the young lady, who is the heroine of the following story, Tecumthe-place; and the aforesaid wood, being three hundred miles in length by forty in medial breadth, was in like manner by her denominated Tecumthe park; and the above named lake, Tecumthe-place-water. A sweet lawn, in the proper season covered with a tall and thick growth of gourd seed corn, and spreading an area of forty full acres, extended from the cottage, as a centre, in the form of an exact square. Many thousand rustic seats, we can not call them tripods, for they rested on but one leg, and they were vulgarly called stumps, rose in every direction to the height of two feet, formed for that purpose by a beautiful artificial slope from the circumference to the centre. Hence the shepherds and shepherdesses need never promenade more than ten paces at once, without finding a seat on which to repose, while enjoying the beauties of nature, and talking the flowing heart.Here and there, to the number, perhaps, of an hundred, tall dead trees arose, either as ready planted maypoles, or memorials of the gone by generation of trees, or still bearing the furrow, which marked, that they had been scorched by heaven's lightning. The cottage aforesaid had nothing in its external or internal appearance, to distinguish it from a thousand similar erections all over the country. But a whole history of one, or fifty folios of recollections, according to the fertility of the beholder's imagination, was naturally associated with the place, which it occupied. It was built among the ruins of an Indian village. Here, for countless ages, and unknown generations, had flowed the tide of life. Here Indian chevaliers and dark haired maidens had assembled in grand tournament, to receive, and award the high meed of valor. Here the warrior's bosom had swelled, and the eye of the lady of his love had melted. Here a thousand tales, intended for Love's own ear, had been whispered. Heroes more magnanimous than Eneas, a more valiant and triumphant than Hercules, had struck the post,' and had modestly spared other bards and war riors, the trouble of singing, and publishing their exploits; because, alas! there was in those days neither spelling book, nor grammar, paper, nor press; and they were driven to the painful necessity of blowing their own trumpet. Here the venerable and hoary headed priest had celebrated mystic and solemn rites, as he invoked the Great Spirit, and performed the awful pow-wow, and danced to the deep song, he-aw-aw. Here the almost inspired medicine man, looking benignly on the sick, had prepared his bitter decoctions, made from herbs gathered, while wet with the dews of the night, and cropped under the silent influences of the full moon; and with a disinterestedness and grandeur of spirit, wholly unknown to modern professors of the healing art, had taken the medicine himself, and charged no higher for his nauseous dose, than would have been a fair fee, if the patient had taken it. In one word, all that is tender and exciting in chivalry and love, all that is imposing in achievement, performed, and sung by the same person, all that crowds the brain in remembrance, all that is awful in religion, all that is disinterested in the aforesaid mode of practising medicine, had been acted over, again and again, in this village, for we know not how many generations. Memory could not fail to re-people these romantic shades with the noble forms of legions of warriors, returning from the buffalo hunt, and here received with the acclamations of their wives, sons and dusky loves. Still further to raise the spell of imagination, high thought, and solemn remembrance, hard by was a mound. Our profoundest western antiquarians know not, and are thereby in a head scratching quandary, whether this huge heap of earth was raised for war, or defence, sacrifice, or a vegetable cellar, an observatory, or a manure heap, a caveau for wine,-in fact, it is by no means certain, whether the Indians drank wine, or not; a slaughter house, or a cemetery, a pottery, or a place, where giant children played puddles and pans. A cemetery is as likely to be near the fact, as any other conjecture, because, on digging into it, charcoal and ashes were found at the bottom. Though some will still have it, that it was, after all, an Indian ice house. We leave visions and conjectures to romancers, and stick to the naked and stubborn fact. In digging into this mound, there were found two pieces of rotten wood, vulgarly called punk,-the one weighing three pounds, and the other five; a number of leaves, which some learned naturalists affirm to be those of the bread-fruit tree of Otaheite, while others contend as earnestly, that they are leaves of the pawpaw of Scioto; two big bones, some say of the mastodon, some of the megaloWe for our part barely suggest with great modesty to M. Cuvier, whether they may not be two petrified limbs of a hickory tree. Seventeen clam shells; and a prodigious number of smaller bones, which we are not anatomists enough to determine, whether nyx. |