One Township's Yesterdays Chapter XXXII.
THE RED MAN DEPARTS
" ‘I beheld our nation scattered,...
Saw the remnants of our people
Sweeping westward, wild and woeful,
Like the cloud-rack of a tempest,
Like the withered leaves of Autumn!’"
... Henry W. Long fellow |
GONE WAS THE RED MAN from the land of Maxinkuckee ... gone, never to return. Only a few memories survive today where once he roamed,
glorying in his primitive freedom.
Mrs. REBECCA ROBINSON recalls hearing stories of the Indians, who used to come to the VOREIS home, near Burr Oak, to barter. They were
peaceable and harmless. White children, of the families of early settlers, would play with the Indian children who, on the occasion
of some visit, were brought to the homes of the pioneers.
Mrs. MILLIE BIGLEY, who was a resident of the east side of Lake Maxinkuckee until comparatively recent years, when she died at the
age of about eighty-nine, was among the last few people living in this part of the country who actually recalled seeing the Indians
in the flesh, so to speak. One old-timer, still living near the lake, tells the tale, doubtless a tall one, that in his younger days
he saw the body of a dead Indian, and a Chief at that, propped up against the trunk of a tree. Evidently that was the way the old
Chief had been buried. But he was not a live one, perhaps merely a mummy. He must have been sitting there a long time, for it was
nearly a century ago that the Indians departed forever from the shores of Maxinkuckee. And we can take the old-timer's story or leave
it, just as we choose. At any rate, the Indians are gone.
There was a reputed Indian burial place on Long Point, and some skeletons were dug up, quite a few years ago, near the Outlet. It was
believed that the bones were those of Indians.
The red man has departed these many years from his once bountiful hunting-ground.