Journal of a Cowboy
Jean-Luc meets his first real American cowboy
Jean-Luc Duval had always been fascinated by indigenous cultures of the Americas ever since he had read a history book about them back in France. He had learned that the first European visitors to this country had taken a few Indians back home with them. Most famous among them was Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhattan. She was credited for having saved the life of colonizer James Smith at the Jamestown settlement in Tidewater, Va.
Now that he had learned of the life of Tekakwitha, he was even more enthralled. Duval learned that in the spring of 1674, Tekakwitha met Jacques de Lamberville, a Jesuit priest who was visiting her Mohawk village. Tekakwitha confided to him her desire to become a Christian and so Fr. Lamberville baptized her at the age of 19, on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1676. He renamed her “Kateri” after St. Catherine of Siena. When she died, other Mohawk converts cared for her tombstone and wrote the following epitaph upon it in the Mohawk language: “Ownkeonweke Katsitsiio Teonsitsianekaronn,” which means: “The fairest flower that ever bloomed among red men.” He was beginning to realize the mystical aspect of the plains.
Jean-Luc was fixing a light supper of tender cattails for himself one afternoon, when he felt the earth start moving under his feet. The shaking was accompanied by a rumbling sound that was coming ever closer. His first instinct was that there must be a volcano nearby, causing this earthquake. Lifting his eyes though, he beheld a dark mass of huge animals stampeding in his direction.
He had heard of the American bison but had never seen one before, much less several thousand. Jean-Luc knew that they were the main food source for many of the indigenous tribes ever since prehistoric times. The Indians use to crawl under the animal skins in order to disguise their own scent from the animals during the hunt. They also used to tan skins in order to make their portable tipi homes on the plains. They were used in cooking as Jean-Luc understood it. The Plains Indians would dig a shallow, pan-sized hole into the soil. Then they lined it with animal skin, filled with water, before heating some stones in a fire and dropping them into the water with their food. The stones would heat the water enough to cook the food. Jean-Luc thought he might also try to improve his in a similar manner.
As his meal was cooking, he thought of the Plains Indians, who had taught it to other settlers. He remembered them wearing large, feathered headdresses, very different from the single feathers worn by the Iroquois and Hurons.
Other newcomers that flooded into the Great Southwest were to cause the decline of the bison, which many hunted only for sport. It suddenly occurred to him that if he didn’t want to cook his meal, then salted bison meat might make some real fine jerky — all he had to do was to air dry the salty meat in the hot sun. Just as he was thinking this, he heard another noise. It wasn’t the sound of bison coming, though; they had already moved onward to graze in greener pastures. What Jean-Luc had heard was more like the whinnying of a horse.
When he lifted his eyes to see, Jean-Luc caught sight of a pinto horse and its rider approaching his campsite. It was the first time that he was going to meet an American cowboy.
Jean-Luc watched carefully as the stranger pulled his horse to a halt and then he swung his right leg over the horn of the saddle and over to the left. He slowly loosened the cinch under the saddle and then he pulled it off, and put it on the ground, over his saddle blanket.
The American cowboy took a few moments to inspect his horse’s hooves by lifting them one at a time to make sure that they still had horseshoes on and that there was nothing obstructing them. He took off his sombrero and he moved toward Duval. “Howdy,” he said with a smile.