I had gone
into Minnesota to track down and correlate one of the ghost stories that still
lingered on with the population along the Mississippi, from its upper most
wooded parts down and around the bend and mound area of Pigs Eye, as it was
referred to in the 1820s and thereafter, and cliffs of St. Paul, and
Minneapolis. Mark Twain, had once
visited St. Paul, and called it quite the hidden secret.
I was searching for its lost lore, I could now vouch for that, for it
had a strong and old Indian validation of lost legends. I now prefer to them,
in particular one, as open-air ghost stories, or tales, told by old white folks
back in the early 1960s, of those earlier years of the 1880s, which sounded flat.
Indian mythology should be told by Native Americans, all woven around those
vast, lonely looking mounds, resting quietly along the rim of the cliffs. When
told by the Indians I could hear the hooves and the feet and the thud and the
blows, the muffled cries of warriors. The Chippewa, or Ojibwa, the Cayuga, the
old people.
I met an old fur seller in the late 1960s, he was in his 90s, and he
lived up on York Street, on the East Side of St. Paul, and held these ghost
tales in frightened veneration, and talked little of them, but he liked my
beer, and so one evening he told me a story; a tale-teller he wasn’t, but his
Indian friend was, and neither one was never too clear, and it sounded more on
the order of phenomena, and as the white old fella said, “The older the tale,
the bigger the spirit,” and we all three laughed.
Now it is the year 2016, all of this is old stuff from my youth, I’m now
sixty-eight, but the tale remains deep inside my head, and I’m no ethnologist,
but I have traveled some, and legends always have a strain of truth to them,
and if this one then has just that, it is enough for a true legend of long
buried races.
. . .
“It is an old, old tale,” said the old Indian, and his fur trading
partner nodded his head in agreement, “so old it is wholly new to the outside
world of looking into. It is a thrill to
it for me, because it comes in fact out of the remote history of my family, Red
Wing Reservation, although it is wound up with an old snake myth. It is centered on a huge mound, that looks
more like a product of nature now, or a small hill, yet it is as it is, a
mound, burial place by a prehistoric tribe.
And it is haunted, I have gone by it many times, it is along the
Mississippi on the cliffs, the figures which are buried in it are seven, from
the reservation I have mentioned.
“Each night one of the several warriors buried in this mound leaves till
dawn, as a squaw takes his place until he returns, and guides him back to his
resting habitation. The apparition, each
one is headless. The reason being, the squaw taking his place is because all
seven fount over her and beheaded each other, and through sheer remorse, she
gave her life up to this task by and by, the spirit of her victims roam the
land, feeling their way back to her.
“It was one evening she sustained a mortal wound by a giant black snake
that fell upon her from a tree she had been resting against, awaiting for her
warrior’s return. Thus the phenomena being this late headless Indian was unable
to return to his burial site, unable to find her or the entrance. As the open proof of her death lay next to a
tree by the mound, bitten by the snake, and she was buried a distance away from
the mound, though alone and in a lonelier landscape.
This ghost, blind without a head, and unable to hear, had only touch,
and needed to feel her touch, now an alone and restless figure, feared and
shunned, returns to this very area, near the site and cliffs, several times in
its long, very long history, digging into many different mounds, unable to find
his resting place, his comrades, and never has he found its entrance only the
squaw knew. And then this lone spirit, unable to find his sentinel steps out of
sight for another generation, leaving his comrades free to rest once more in
peace.
No: 5119/3-25-2016
