The Shagganappi

The Shagganappi, by E. Pauline
Johnson

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Title: The Shagganappi
Author: E. Pauline Johnson

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The Shagganappi
By E. Pauline Johnson
With Introduction by Ernest Thompson Seton
Dedicated to the Boy Scouts

TEKAHIONWAKE
(PAULINE JOHNSON)
How well I remember my first meeting with Tekahionwake, the Indian
girl! I see her yet as she stood in all ways the ideal type of her race,
lithe and active, with clean-cut aquiline features, olive-red complexion
and long dark hair; but developed by her white-man training so that the
shy Indian girl had given place to the alert, resourceful world-woman,
at home equally in the salons of the rich and learned or in the stern of
the birch canoe, where, with paddle poised, she was in absolute and

fearless control, watching, warring and winning against the grim rocks
that grinned out of the white rapids to tear the frail craft and mangle its
daring rider.
We met at the private view of one of my own pictures. It was a wolf
scene, and Tekahionwake, quickly sensing the painter's sympathy with
the Wolf, claimed him as a Medicine Brother, for she herself was of the
Wolf Clan of the Mohawks. The little silver token she gave me then is
not to be gauged or appraised by any craftsman method known to trade.
From that day, twenty odd years ago, our friendship continued to the
end, and it is the last sad privilege of brotherhood to write this brief
comment on her personality. I do it with a special insight, for I am
charged with a message from Tekahionwake herself. "Never let anyone
call me a white woman," she said. "There are those who think they pay
me a compliment in saying that I am just like a white woman. My aim,
my joy, my pride is to sing the glories of my own people. Ours was the
race that gave the world its measure of heroism, its standard of physical
prowess. Ours was the race that taught the world that avarice veiled by
any name is crime. Ours were the people of the blue air and the green
woods, and ours the faith that taught men to live without greed and to
die without fear. Ours were the fighting men that, man to man--yes, one
to three--could meet and win against the world. But for our few
numbers, our simple faith that others were as true as we to keep their
honor bright and hold as bond inviolable their plighted word, we should
have owned America to-day."
If the spirit of Wetamoo, the beautiful woman Sachem, the Boadicea of
New England, ever came back, it must have been in Tekahionwake the
Mohawk. The fortitude and the eloquence of the Narragansett
Chieftainess were born again in the Iroquois maiden; she typified the
spirit of her people that flung itself against the advancing tide of white
encroachment even as a falcon might fling himself against a horde of
crows whose strength was their numbers and whose numbers were
without end, so all his wondrous effort was made vain.
"The Riders of the Plains," the "Legends of Vancouver," "Flint and
Feather," and the present volume, "Shagganappi," all tell of the spirit

that tells them. Love of the blessed life of blue air without gold-lust is
felt in the line and the interline, with joy in the beauty of beaver stream,
tamarac swamp, shad-bush and drifting cloud, and faith in the creed of
her fathers, that saw the Great Spirit in all things and that reverenced
Him at