Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 November 1879 — "A Lurid Tale.” [ARTICLE]

"A Lurid Tale.”

There is a very’ tender and touching legend about these falls. I knew there must be. If there had been none I should have made up one—something I hate to do most awfully, because I like all my romances to have a dash of truth in them. There was, on a time within the memory of the oldest inhabitant, trouble among the Indians. The Mohawks, if it was the Mohawks, and the Milicetes, if that is the way you spell it, fell in love with each other, and each begged the other for a lock of his hair to remember him by. And, at the same time, the ardent suitor begged the poor boon of being allowed to cut off the lock himself. Moreover, to show that he meant business, he ground his little thomashawk and honed up his persua-

■ive little scalping-knife, and announced that he was in the hair business, no trouble to show goods, a new crate just opened to-day, orde* from the country promptly attended to. Well, customers came right along from the day the sign was hung out on either side, and both establishments bad all they could do. The supplyseemed to equal the demand, and the demand was steady and constant, with a rising tendency. But after awhile it was evident that the Mohawks had the most and the best men out on the road, and had got the dead wood on the country trade, and vast quantities of Milicete hair was worked up at prices to suit the times. Things run on thia way until at last the Milicete Indians were forced out of the lobbing trade entirely, buying in small lots and manufacturing only home orders, all sales •at thirty days, on a margin of about two and one-half per cent. But the greedy Mohawks put up a few branch stores to‘kill off this stand, and the Milicetes were at last driven to little puttering side-street business, hardly getting enough hair to run the headingmachine. t Meanwhile, the demand in the Mohawk market for Milicete hair continued unabated, and runners for the house were untiring in their efforts to secure the new crops and whatever there was already in the stack or bins. And when they * brought in word one day that the rival firm had skipped out of thfi country, taking all the Milicete hair there was along with them, on their heads, the Mohawks got up, put on their war-paint, piled into their canoes, and started down the river in fierce pursuit. Night closed in alike on the pursued and the pursuers, but it didn’t stop the circus a minute. The Milicetes paddled till their backs ached/ and the Mohawks made the ripples fly right behind them. At length tne roar of the falls sounded in the ears of the flying Milicetes, and they turned to the shore, beached their light barks, and struck for tall timber.

All but one. A woman, as usual, was the last one in the train. A squaw whose aboriginal name I either forgot or never knew—Mary Jane Johnson, maybe —was sculling along at the tail end of the procession. For two or three miles before reaching the falls she had made up her womanly, or squawly, mind that she would save her tribe,-and at the same time avenge them. So she lighted a kerosene lamp, or it may have been a pine knot, and set it in the stem of her canoe. The pursuing Mohawks saw it, thought it was the last act of sullen, hopeless defiance, and they howled till their coms ached, trying to reach it. When the fugitives landed above the falls, Mary Jane Johnson landed, too, but she did not strike for She picked up her kerosene lamp and trotted around the falls on the rocks. From rock to rock she nimbly sprang and lightly scrambled until she reached a point far beyond them, where her flaming signal just lined the pursuing canoes with the “split rock,” just midway in the cataract. On came the Mohawks, their fierce eyes fastened on the flame that danced before them, their fiercer cries drowning the roar of the cataract, until suddenly the angry white foam leaps into their faces from the swirls and eddying rapids that catch their fragile barks, and, before their savage yells of hate can be changed to the notes of their death-song, the mad plunge is taken, and the gorge is so full of drowned Indians that the Coroner’s office is worth $2,500 a year for the next six weeks. It used the Mohawks up completely; they went out of business. The Millicetes also, what was left of them, reformed, went out of politics entirely, and the tribe is now settled in an Indian village down below here a little ways, at the mouth of the Aroostook, where thoy live oh the interest of their taxes. Mary Jane Johnson was highly honored by her tribe. They married her to the chief, and granted her the free privilege of cutting wood and hoeing com, and cooking for her husband and fifteen children all the rest of her life.—Burdette, in Burlington Hawk-Eye.