cliff's the "Pictured Rocks" of PauPuk-Keewis' entombment, with frowning headlands projecting over the water and stretching far away "into the rich heart of the South." Eastward lay the mighty reaches of the Father of Lakes, the "Gitche Gumee" of the Indian romancers. Farther north, and directly before us, rose Grand Island, a wooded, mountainous, pear-shaped mass, showing red sandstone cliffs on the south and west, the perfect corollary of those on the mainland opposite, while between us and the island sparkled a lovely little bay abounding in wooded coves, and slipping an arm around each side of the island, to clasp hands with the larger lake beyond. The sleepy village beneath thrust out long, mouldering docks like antennæ into the bay, while everywhere, except in the town itself, a primeval forest sent down matted roots to drink of the lake. "You want boatmen for the Rocks," said Pastor Nah-be-nay-ask, at length; "perhaps Kish-ke-tuh-way could accommodate you," and he led the way to a little cabin, the only dwelling on the plateau. "There is the old chief now." The latter was descending the hill from the wall of forest in the rear-a striking fig ure, in fringed hunting shirt and breeches of buckskin, with a long heavy rifle on his shoulder, and two deer-hounds following sedately at his heels. Our guide saluted him respectfully, and signaled us to do so also. He was a man verging on to ninety years, tall, with strongly marked Indian features, a famous warrior and hunter in his youth-one who had seen his own powerful tribe dwindle to a mere handful. The clergyman asked in the melodious Ojibway tongue if the old man's son, "Jimmy," was at home, and finding he was away led us down the cliff to the village, kindly saying he would have the Indian call on us there. The village charmed us from a certain Rip-Van-Winkle air pervading it, and also by the marked flavor of the wilderness in its architecture. It had no business save that carried on by the three or four fishermen whose white sails we saw each morning bringing in "the catch" from the pound nets set at the mouth of the bay. Half of its log cabins and clapboarded dwellings were tenantless, and to heighten the impression of forlornness there was a gaunt, half-dismantled iron furnace at the mouth of the deep cañon opening back from the village, its walls bulging, its iron retorts broken and twisted, its furnace-bars cold and rustyquite the image of desolation. Time was when men thought that Munising, and not Marquette, would be the shipping port of the Upper Peninsula. Its harbor was far superior-in fact, the best on the lake-and when the great iron deposits of the Negaunee were discovered shrewd minds at once jumped to the conclusion that Munising only could be the point of shipment. A city site of generous proportions was surveyed, docks constructed, a furnace for reducing the ore built, stores, warehouses, a hotel and dwellings erected-an Eastern company even offered thirty thousand dollars for the one thousand acres contained in Grand Island, intending to cover the water-front with wharves. But, alas, the construction of an artificial harbor at Marquette, forty miles nearer the mines, shattered these dreams, and Munising for a generation past has been hopelessly bankrupt, even in expectations. Many of the village characters pleased us by their originality. One of the most striking was William Cameron, the old American Fur Company's hunter and trapper-the last of his class. There was a natural boulevard around the western arm of the bay that became our favorite evening walk, and here, on a rustic seat beneath a spreading hemlock, Cameron was usually to be found, smoking his pipe after the evening meal, a smudge burning near by to discourage mosquitoes. The old man's eye was bright, his complexion ruddy, his locks just beginning to whiten. We would not have thought him a day over sixty; yet he told us he had passed his ninetieth birthday. A strange and honorable career has been his. The son of a French voyageur by a half-breed woman, he became in youth a hunter and trapper, in that capacity traversing the western wilds from Superior to the Pacific. Later a mail carrier on the long winter route between Saginaw Bay and the "Soo," via Mackinaw Island, each trip involving a journey of more than two hundred miles performed with dogs and sledge, over the icy wastes of Lake Huron to Mackinaw, and thence overland seventy miles to the " "Soo;" and lastly doing honorable service in the Union army throughout the war. Mr. Lewis N. Morgan in his work on the American beaver pays a glowing tribute to his virtues and intelligence. Glancing out over the bay, darkening in the twilight, the old man falls into interesting reminiscence: "Yonder on Munisin' Bay I have seen two hundred torchlights a dancin' of an evenin'-Injuns spearin' fish. Grand Island in those days was a Fur Company fort, where every spring the Injuns cum by hundreds to trade their furs for supplies. The traders and voyageurs cum too and made merry times. Runnin', jumpin', wrastlin', quoit pitchin', lacrosse playin' by day, dancin' at night—a merry an' a jolly cretur was the free trapper before the whites cum an' made him a slave," and he continues with picturesque descriptions of the old voyageurs and traders, and of his adventures in hunting and trapping. The Munising fishermen, too, were an interesting class, in their cheap, cow-hide boots, buckskin trousers and woollen shirts, the latter open in front and exposing the brawny, hairy chest. They were famous hunters, too, the region round about being a great "deer country," whence in the season venison saddles were shipped to Chicago by the car-load. We often saw their Sandusky skiff beating in from the nets as we left the breakfast table of a morning, and fell into the habit with the other village loungers of sauntering down to the fish-house on the mossy wharf to inspect the "catch." The latter was a pretty sight as it lay scattered over the floor-silvery-scaled white fish, the most delicious food-fish in our markets; long, arrowy lake-trout, like the eastern pickerel, and sometimes one, more often half a dozen, huge sturgeon, the king of lake fishes. The latter, as the hero of one of the Hiawathan exploits, we viewed with especial interest. One of the party at least was struck by the dramatic picture Launce presented, poised over the enormous head of the largest sturgeon, and glibly repeating, while the company listened quizzically: "On the white sand of the bottom Lay the monster, Mishe-Nahma, Lay the sturgeon, king of fishes. Through his gills he breathed the water, With his fins he fanned and winnowed, With his tail he swept the sand floor. There he lay in all his armor, In his birch canoe came sailing noon, out of a clear sky, and rages sometimes for three days, kicking up a sea that no small boat can live in. Kish-ke-tuh-way and a comrade, a halfbreed, agreed to face the terrors of the rocks for the sum of three dollars. A brave little Western lady, whom we named Dian, from her interest in the hunters and the chase, pleaded so hard to go that she was permitted, upon solemn pledge to endure with fortitude whatever the gods might send. For a few bright pieces of silver she procured as companion a pretty Indian maid of sixteen, whom we christened "Bright Eyes." from her resemblance to the Ponca beauty. The expedition was then ready to embark, but for two days the skies And how, at last in answer to Hia- were as unpropitious as to the hosts at watha's taunts "From the white sand of the bottom Up he rose with angry gesture, Quivering in each nerve and fibre, Clashing all his plates and armor, Gleaming bright with all his war-paint In his wrath he darted upward, Flashing, leaped into the sunshine; Opened his great jaws and swallowed Both canoe and Hiawatha." Very expressive were the bronzed faces of the hearers as the narrator concluded. Two in the background looked at one another and winked; but they said nothing. The lake fisherman is very taciturn-so much alone with wind, and sea and sky! The chief attraction of Munising, and, indeed, of the lake, is "The Pictured Rocks," and we were glad when at length the old chief's son, Kish-ke-tuhway (Cut Ear) appeared to make arrangements for our journey thither. The Indians regard these rocks with superstitious awe and dread, and seldom visit them unless strongly lured by display of silver. The fishermen, too, avoid them, probably from the dangerous character of the coast in the vicinity. Without doubt the cliff's are an ugly place in time of storm, since in the whole seven miles of overhanging rock there are but two openings where a boat can land in safety. This coast is also liable to a peculiar kind of tempest called a dry norther," which suddenly springs up in the after 66 Aulis, and we killed time agreeably by several excursions to the neighboring points of interest. A supremely fascinating one was to an ancient Ojibway burial ground, first called to our attention by Pastor Nah-be-nay-ask, and which lay near the base of a long sand-spit thrust out into the bay some three miles south of the town. It made a pathetic little picture. Amid barren wastes of sand, guarded by gloomy pines, on a long and prominent hillock of sand thrown up by long-forgotten mound-builders, were some hundred rude graves, many unnoted, but the majority marked by little houses of boards, roofed with birch bark, or by a square fence of palings, like those one sees in the negro buryinggrounds of the South. The graves were further marked by a pole stuck in the earth, from which a little white flag was waving. There were flowers, too on the graves-Johnny jumpers, pinks, sweet Williams, and live forever, blooming in pretty contrast to the arid waste. In some of the houses we discovered little "mococks" (boxes) of birch bark filled with whortleberries and maple sugar. A weird place for the last sleep, it seemed, there under the sighing pines, man's habitations far away, the gloomy forest and legend-haunted cliffs behind, and the wide lake before. The flag, the houses, the mococks of sugar and berries, we learned, were intended to shelter and cheer the departed spirit, which, in Indian belief, returns at intervals to visit the body. Far out on the point of the cape, two fishermen from a village a hundred miles down the coast had made their camp, following the custom of the Indians, who usually spend the summer on the fishing grounds, returning to their villages in winter. They were about going to the cooper's on Grand Island for casks; and tired with our long scramble through the tangled forest, we sailed with them over the bay, and then to Powell's Point opposite, where, in the sandstone cliffs above high-water mark, our guides led us to some remarkable caves. In one, Mr. Powell stabled his stock; another, an elliptical chamber in the solid rock, thirty feet long by twenty wide, approached by a narrow passage, was his root cellar, a third sheltered his wagons and farm implements. At length a day dawned with a westerly wind, and we were told to make ready for the cliffs. A lunch of mammoth proportions was packed in a great basket. Dian gathered her feminine belongings and marshaled Bright Eyes to the boat. The Antiquary appeared with book in hand. Launce unpacked his freshest colors and stretched his canvas. The expedition was so early afloat that the red disc of the sun barely showed above the cold gray cliffs, and the night mists clung to the water "like a face cloth to the dead." The memories of that morning will never fade from the minds of the voyagers; Launce had transferred them all to his sketch-book before the Point of Graves was reached. It was a still sea, with light flurries, and the Indians plied the oars from the start. The half-breed had the bow oar a tall, light-skinned young fellow of twenty, gay, vivacious, talkative, as became his French blood. Kish-ke-tuhway, on the thwart behind, was a pure blood Ojibway, stern and silent as the grave, who spoke scarcely ten words during the voyage. The girls, too, presented as striking a contrast. Dian, a rich blonde with golden hair and cheeks glowing with youth and health, a radiant, joyous, nineteenth century girl. Bright Eyes, a nut-brown maid with raven tresses, shy, more than half afraid of the beautiful stranger and the bearded men in the stern. We rallied the slow smack's men, drowsily spreading sail for the nets, merely drifting, while we rowed lustily PICTURED ROCK REGION. by, and brought a smile to our Indian's face by our bold offer of a tow behind. We passed the sand spit and its lonely graves, then passed the huge portals of Grand Island, and so out into the lake. "Have you heard how Grand Island came to be"? asked the Antiquary, as we glided by. "Let me tell you! Once Hiawatha was waging bitter war with the Manitos of the north, and pressing them back inch by inch. Stung to fury at his power, they tore off the extreme point of Keweenaw and hurled it at him, thinking to bury him. Happily, the Manito of the Pictured Rocks saw the mountain coming, and opened his caverns to the Man-God, so that he escaped, but the mass rebounded and fell yonder, forming the island, as you see." Getting well out into the lake, the whole line of cliff and crag burst upon the voyagers at a glance, calling from them exclamations of wonder and delight. The cliffs of the Pictured Rocks are certainly unique among natural objects. Imagine parallel ranges of sandstone hills from fifty to two hundred feet high, approaching an inland sea at right angles, and at the point of impingement sliced off as cleverly as by some giant's cleaver seven miles of them with valleys between, crags and pinnacles of rock on the headlands, and often a grand sweep of the rock wall around some indenting cove; imagine, again, this wall festooned with trees and bushes suspended from the verge, tinted and frescoed with all cardinal colors, cut at the base into pillars, caves, grottoes, where almost every architectural device is exhibited,-and one may gain some idea of the beauty and novelty of the scene. By and by, Dian broke a long silence of delight. "One must admit their native beauty," said she, "but, after all, is not their chief interest found in their literary association," and she half sung, half spoke to the rhythmic beat of the oar the legend of Pau-Puk-Keewis in "Hiawatha": ".. for Pau-Puk-Keewis, And the Old Man of the Mountain, But the Old Man of the Mountains Then he raised his hands to heaven, There was the resonance, the vibrant quality in her voice of one warmed with The cliffs were no more enthusiasm. masses of bare, ugly rock; they were bathed in the soft halo of poetry and romance. "On these headlands, too, you remember, Hiawatha wailed for Chibiabos drowned in the abysses below,” said Launce, "and yonder, if I mistake not, are Hiawatha's chickens." Thousands of sea-gulls were circling over the Grand Portal some three miles away, and again a clear voice broke in "Then he climbed the rocky headlands Looking o'er the Gitche Gumee, Perched himself upon the summit, Waiting, full of mirth and mischief, The return of Hiawatha. Stretched upon his back he lay there, Far below him flashed the waters, Plashed and washed the dreamy waters. Far above him swam the heavens, Swam the dizzy, dreamy heavens; Round him hovered, fluttered, rustled, Hiawatha's mountain chickens, Flockwise swept and wheeled about him, Almost brushed him with their pinions. And he killed them as he lay there, Slaughtered them by tens and twenties, Threw their bodies down the headland, Threw them on the beach below him, Till at length Kayoshk, the sea gull, |