The spiritual needs of the primitive savage were administered by his tribal gods, and the spirits of his mythology. In his child-like faith he believed the favor of a Great Spirit to be in the sunshine, and that omnipotent wrath was thundered in the storms. His good manitous presided over his fortunes in life, and gently led him into fabled hunting grounds beyond the grave.
He was a fatalist, and not being civilized, his theology was imperfect.
Civilization approached him with a Bible in one hand and a bottle in the other, and the decay of his race began. The finger of fate had touched him, and the last heart-broken remnants of once happy and powerful tribes were tied and led away by benign and Christian soldiers. They carried crushed spirits and shattered lives to an alien soil, which an all-wise conqueror had selected for them, leaving their burned homes, and the bones of those they loved, in the land of their birth.
The moralist finds abundant food for reflection in the sufferings of the weak, at the hands of the strong, and the triumph of might over helplessness, but the Indian interfered with enlightened selfishness and he perished.
The record of the expatriation and the practical extinction of the Pottawatomies, who lived in this region, is written upon dark pages of our history, but perhaps they had no rights as living creatures that an enlightened government was bound to respect.
When the fog rolls in from the distant waters, and steals through the pines, wraith-like forms of a forgotten race seem to haunt the scenes of by-gone years. We may imagine the march of phantom throngs through the trees, to meet silent battalions beyond the hills. The sands seem to yield to the folds of a gray mantle that is laid upon them, and retreat into obscurity.
When the night shadows come into the dune country, the spell of mystery and poetry comes with them. The sorcery of the dark places leads us into a land of dreams and unreality.
Out on the tremulous surface of the lake, we may fancy the lifting of silvery paddles in the path of the moon’s reflections, and the furtive movement across the bar of light, of mystic shapes in phantom canoes.
Mingled with the lispings of the little waves, we may hear ghostly prows touch the sand, and see spectral figures file into the hills. The faint echoes of strokes upon flint come out of the shadows.