THE SEMINOLES’ LAST LOOK.
Reading edition
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BY FAYETTE ROBINSON.
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They left their country with great regret, and I do not think they will ever be satisfied elsewhere. The men seemed moody, but occasionally uttered sentences in their own tongue with great feeling. The lamentations of the women Were pitiful to hear. (Extract from a Letter to the Secretary at War, in Relation to the Removal of the Seminoles.)
Moonlight plays on the waters and all silently they glide,
Though swiftly by a mighty ship that swingeth in their tide,
And the gentle winds of summer are bearing from the land
In whispering tones a sad farewell to an exiled band.
The perfume of the jasmine and the magnolia flowers
Mingles with the odors borne from distant orange bowers,
The music of the mock-bird’s song they hear across the deep,
Whose glassy ripples murmuring a cadence with it keep.
They know that at the morning sun the ship will spread its wing
And like a spirit hurry them from every cherished thing,
And therefore gaze they earnestly upon their native shore,
To write upon their memory scenes they will see no more.
They gaze upon the royal palm, around whose coronet,
Mingling with the moon-beams, the sunlight lingers yet,[1]
On the live-oak, with gnarled limbs all hidden by the moss,
Whose tresses in the summer wind like pennons twine and toss.
They gaze upon the silver strand of Holy Spirit’s Bay,[2]
They see the dolphins flinging up showers of starry spray,
They hear the Halcyon’s[3] wailing voice far out upon the sea,
Mournful as if it knew their grief and wailed for sympathy.
Oh! who can tell the agony that filled the bosoms then
Of mothers with their callow babes, the breasts of stalwort men,
As in the deep and mellow tones of the Muscogee tongue
A warrior o’er his nation’s fate a lament thus begun:
Spirits of the red man’s heaven,[4]
All my fathers e’er adored,
Your might is gone, and other powers
Are monarchs of our hills and lakes,
Long ago, when yon old oaks
Were but acorns on the ground,
The Muscogee were mighty men,
And by the distant Southern Sea
Beat the island Carib back.
Far away amid the hills
Where wandered once the Cherokee
They sung their song of victory.
Streamlets born amid the hills
Roll like old San Juan,[5] at last
To lose them in the mighty sea.
And thus it is with nations, too,
Which hurry through their race and die.
The Seminoles[6] met their fate,
Fought as gallant men should fight
Whom God has made the lords of lands
As fair as were our own. ’Twas vain.
Suwannee is desert now,
’Mid the murmur of its waves
Naught but the scaly Albati[7]
Is heard, and o’er Alachawa[8]
Free and fearless bounds the deer;
No fisher’s boat skims o’er the sea
Around the island’s silver shore.
We have lost our fathers’ home,
Silently around their hearths,
More lonely now than are their graves,
Dim shadows stalk, and ask the gods
Whither have their children fled.
Hither will the white man come
To herd his cattle in the glades
Where happy villages once stood,
And strew the ground he rests upon
With mighty trees, which all who breathe
Remember ever to have been
The giant stocks which now they are.
Warriors should brave and bear
Grief a woman trembles at,
But when they leave their native shore
In fetters thus, the sternest hearts
Will melt, and e’en a soldier’s eye
Weep tears of bitter agony.
He ceased, and scarcely had the winds his accents borne away,
Than spoke out a young mother, on whose breast an infant lay;
Her very voice was melody, and she sung her boy to sleep
In tones whose earnest accent moved the listener to weep.
My boy! my boy! thy father
Is gone to the spirit-land,
Where the pale-face cannot come,
To dwell with the kindred band
Of all the stout old chieftains
Who ruled our race of yore,
And hunted ’neath the dark pines
We shall gaze upon no more.
He sat within his wigwam,
And thou wert on his knee,
When first the rattle of the drum
Rolled through our forests free;
But he lies in the hammock
With his face toward the stars,
And wounds all red and gory
In his breast, ’mid older scars.
He did not die a coward,
For oft his rifle rang,
And twice amid the foemen
The loud scalp-song he sang.
And when the death-shot struck him,
’Twas from no ignoble hand,
But came from e’en the bravest
Of all the hostile band.
I knew thou wert a chieftain,
And amid my grief and pain
I strove to train thee up to win
Me vengeance for the slain.
But now our might is broken,
And we must leave his grave
For a land lying far away
Beyond the western wave.
There thou may’st be happy—
A wife as firm and true
As I was to thy father
Thy hunter’s bed may strew;
But I will not see thee
In thy father’s place, my son,
Proudly wearing at thy knee
Trophies thou hast won.
There thou may’st be happy
As here our people were,
For it is a pleasant land,
They call this scarce as fair.
More blesséd than thy father,
Thou may’st see thy children men,
March with them to battle-fields
And lead them home again.
But I feel my heart is breaking,
And in a little time
I shall return where he is
Beneath the shadowy pine;
Yet if you wear the eagle plume
I will see it, though unseen,
And bless the new land in the west
With its plains of living green.
Her woman wail was over, and silently they stood,
Until the deepening shadows hid the forest and the flood,
Then sunk they sadly on the deck, their breasts bereft of hope,
And the vessel bore them onward like an eagle in its scope.