3.  Like pain of fire runs down my body my love to you, my dear! 
        Like pain runs down my body my love to you, my dear. 
        Just as sickness is my love to you, my dear. 
        Just as a boil pains me my love to you, my dear. 
        Just as a fire burns me my love to you, my dear. 
        I am thinking of what you said to me
        I am thinking of the love you bear me. 
        I am afraid of your love, my dear. 
        O pain!  O pain! 
        Oh, where is my true love going, my dear? 
        Oh, they say she will be taken away far from here.  She will
          leave me, my true love, my dear. 
        My body feels numb on account of what I have said, my true
          love, my dear. 
        Good-by, my true love, my dear.[250]

MORE LOVE-STORIES

Apart from “free translations” and embellishments, the great difficulty with poems like these, taken down at the present day, is that one never knows, though they may be told by a pure Indian, how far they may have been influenced by the half-breeds or the missionaries who have been with these Indians, in some cases for many generations.  The same is true of not a few of the stories attributed to Indians.

Powers had heard among other “Indian” tales one of a lover’s leap, and another of a Mono maiden who loved an Awani brave and was imprisoned by her cruel father in a cave until she perished.  “But,” says Powers (368), “neither Choko nor any other Indian could give me any information touching them, and Choko dismissed them all with the contemptuous remark, ‘White man too much lie.’” I have shown in this chapter how large is the number of white men who “too much lie” in attributing to Indians stories, thoughts, and feelings, which no Indian ever dreamt of.[251]

The genuine traditional literature of the Indians consists, as Powers remarks (408), almost entirely of petty fables about animals, and there is an almost total lack of human legends.  Some there are, and a few of them are quite pretty.  Powers relates one (299) which may well be Indian, the only suspicious feature being the reference to a “beautiful” cloud (for Indians know only the utility, not the charm, of nature).

“One day, as the sun was setting, Kiunaddissi’s daughter went out and saw a beautiful red cloud, the most lovely cloud ever seen, resting like a bar along the horizon, stretching southward.  She cried out to her father, ’O father, come and see this beautiful [bright?] cloud!’ He did so....  Next day the daughter took a basket and went out into the plain to gather clover to eat.  While picking the clover she found a very pretty arrow, trimmed with yellow-hammer’s feathers.  After gazing at it awhile in wonder she turned to look at her basket, and there beside it stood a man who was called Yang-wi’-a-kan-ueh (Red Cloud) who was none other than the cloud she had seen