Voyages from Montreal, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans ] voyages from Montreal, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans.

BYRON    George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), was both popular and notorious in Kidd’s day. His poems (Kidd refers only to Childe Harold [see Preface, 10], but other works such as the Hebrew Melodies [1815], Manfred [1817] and Don Juan [1819-1824] also lie behind The Huron Chief) were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic and exercised a considerable influence on Colonial Canadian poetry. As intimated in the Introduction pp. xiii, Byron’s work and life were also subjected to moral censure both before and after his death (of fever, as he was going to join the fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman empire).

Helicon    The mountain in Greece that is regarded as the home of the muses. Kidd’s reference to “banks” indicates that he may have been thinking of Hippocrene and Aganippe, the sacred springs that rose on Helicon.

baccalia Latin: a kind of laurel abounding in berries. A crown of laurel is traditionally bestowed on poets as a sign of distinction. (C.R.S.)

Pliny . . . Vesuvius    Pliny the Elder (A.D. c. 23-79) was a Roman naturalist who died of asphixiation near Vesuvius, the volcano in southern Italy where he had gone to investigate the eruption that buried Pompeii and other towns.

the Canadas    The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the old province of Quebec into Lower Canada (corresponding roughly to present-day Quebec) and Upper Canada (corresponding roughly to present-day Ontario).

In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimages (1812-1818) and Lalla Rookh (1817) the protagonists are both travellers—Childe Harold in Europe and Lalla Rookh in the near East. But while Byron’s hero travels extensively by boat (see, for example, I, xiiff.), Moore’s heroine travels by land and only dreams, in “The Fire Worshippers”, that “she was sailing on [the] Eastern Ocean, where the sea-gypsies . . . enjoy a perpetual summer in wandering from isle to isle . . .” Kidd seems to be using “magnificent Gondolas” in a general sense to mean ornate and exotic vessels.

dramatic poem    Byron’s Manfred is subtitled “A Dramatic Poem”, as is “Camala” in The Poems of Ossian.

MOHICANS, . . . NARAGANSETTS . . . DELAWARES     These three tribes, all of the Algonquian linguistic stock, were among the original inhabitants of the Northeastern United States. By Kidd’s day they were either nearly or totally extinct: the Mohegans, who had numbered over two thousand in the middle of the seventeenth century, had practically disappeared by the early nineteenth century; the Narragansetts, who had numbered some five thousand in 1674, had dwindled to eighty in 1832; and the Delawares, who were also once a powerful tribe, had suffered a similar fate—indeed, one remnant of them, the survivors of a group that had been converted to Christianity by Moravian missionaries, fled to Ontario after their settlement at Gnadenhutten was brutally attacked by white American “freemen” in 1782. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is the most famous literary treatment of the fate that befell the Indians who were driven by the demands of white settlement from “their homes and hunting-grounds. . . .”

will scarcely leave a memorial    Cf. Tudor, Letters pp. 279-280; “the unfortunate race [The Indians] . . . is mouldering away, and at no remote period will have no existence but in history. . . . So many tribes and nations have disappeared, leaving no other than . . . miserable vestiges, so that they and their language have become extinct. . . .” Klinck (p. 502) argues that the Letters of William Tudor (1779-1817), the Massachusetts businessman, legislator and man of letters who founded and first edited (1815-1817) the North American Review, lie centrally in “. . . the background of the Mountain-Skenandow symbolism” in The Huron Chief, and it is certainly true that Tudor’s Letter XII “On the Past, Present, and Future State of the Indians” (pp. 279-305) embodies attitudes similar to those in Kidd’s Preface and poem. It is doubtful, however, that Kidd would have agreed with Tudor’s claim that “The policy of the federal government [of the United States] has been, from the beginning, influenced by humane views towards the natives. . .” (p. 295).

the once mighty rulers of the vast American regions    Cf. Tudor, Letters, p. 280: “. . . the original possessors of this magnificent country. . . .”

Many of the Indian Tribes have emigrated into Canada . . . Following the American Revolution, numbers of Mohawks and Cayugas (tribes that remained strongly loyal to Britain), as well as smaller groups from other tribes, settled in Ontario near Brantford and the Bay of Quinte (C.R.S.); see also the note to 1. 26, above.

Polyphemus    The cyclops, or one-eyed giant, in Homer’s Odyssey who lived on an island (usually identified with Sicily) and near a mountain (Mount Aetna). He imprisoned Ulysses and his companions in his cave and devoured some of them. The rest blinded him when he was in a drunken torpor and made their escape. For the identification of Polyphemus with Archdeacon George Jehoshaphat Mountain (the “dangerous Mountain” of Preface, 40-44), the superintendent of Kidd’s divinity studies, see the Introduction, pp. xi and xiii. See also the Introduction, pp. xxxii and xxxvii for a discussion of the fate of the “lines addressed to the Rev. Polyphemus” (Preface, 43), lines which do not in fact appear amongst the “miscellaneous poems”in The Huron Chief volume.

cloud-capped brows of a dangerous Mountain . . . poetic feeling    See Longmore, “Lord Byron”, Tales, p. 292: “LORD BYRON was essentially a Poet in every meaning of the word. In the journal of his life, we find him during the days of his boyhood wandering along the hills of Scotia, indulging his dawning intellect in all the feelings which her cloud-capt mountains, and romantic glens could draw forth.” Longmore’s essay on Byron also appeared in the Canadian Magazine in July, 1824.

Tales and Traditions of the Indians    As mentioned in the Introduction, p. xii, this volume was never published; however, an excerpt “From the unpublished manuscripts of ADAM KIDD, ESQ., Author of the Huron Chief” entitled “RED JACKET. The Celebrated Indian Chief” did appear in the Kingston Chronicle for March 26, 1831, as well as in other Canadian newspapers.

local descriptions . . .    Kidd’s catalogue of the “majestic scenery” of “the Canadas” reveals the influence of the nearly-ubiquitous aesthetic of the sublime in its approving emphasis on the wilder, larger and more irregular features of the country.

There is no evidence that The Huron Chief was translated into any Indian languages. As discussed in the earlier note to the title of the poem, “SAWENNOWANE” is probably Kidd’s transcription of the Huron name of Nicholas Vincent Tsaouenhohi (or Tsawenhoni or Isawanhonhi), who was the head Chief of the Hurons at Jeune Lorette from 1811 to his death in 1844.

Huron’s banks    The banks of Lake Huron, bounded on the north and east by present day Ontario and on the west by Michigan. Compare Kidd’s opening lines with Moore, “To the Honourable W.R. Spencer from Buffalo, Upon Lake Erie” (in Poems Relating to America), 117: “. . . as wand’ring upon Erie’s shore. . . .”

Eden’s daughters    In this phrase and the ensuing lines, Kidd not only indicates an awareness of the etymological roots of Eden in the Hebrew word for pleasure or delight but also mixes Biblical terminology with a conception of history deriving from the Greek myth of an original “golden race”. See H.N. Fairchild’s The Noble Savage: a Study in Romantic Naturalism (1928) for the concept of the Golden Age as a component and concomitant of the notion of the Noble Savage which is so central to Kidd’s poem. (C.R.S.)

great Spirit    In an essay “On the Religion of the Indian Tribes of North America” in Buchanan’s Sketches, S.F. Jarvis observes that North American Indians “. . . acknowledge one Supreme Being, whom they denominate the Great Spirit, or the Master of Life. . . . All agree that . . . the Great Spirit . . . is the master, creator, and governor of the world” (p. 227). See also Buchanan, Sketches, pp. 19, 20, 38, 62 and 68 for references to the Great Spirit.

Cf. The Appendix on “The Five Nations” in Buchanan’s Sketches, pp. 335-336 where the third edition (1755) of The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada (first published in 1727) by Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776) is quoted as follows: “‘The Five Nations consist of so many tribes or nations joined together, without any superiority of the one over the other. . . . They are known by the names of Mohawks, Oneydoes, Onondagas, Cayugas and Sennekas. Each of these nations is again divided into three tribes or families, who distinguish themselves by three different anns or ensigns; the Tortoise, the Bear, and the Wolf; and the Sachems, or old men of these families put their ensign or marks of their family to every public paper when they sign it. . . . The Five Nations think themselves superior to the rest of mankind, and call themselves Ongue-honwe; that is, men surpassing all others.” The “five confederated nations” (who became the Six Nations in the early eighteenth century through the addition of the Tuscarora) are also known as the Iroquois Confederacy or the Iroquois League. A scholar and political leader in New York in the first half of the eighteenth century, Cadwallader Colden was one of the earliest students of the Five Nations.

Council-fire    The fire around which the Indians assembled for consultation and deliberation. Cf. Buchanan, Sketches, p. 23 (Buchanan is quoting the Rev. Heckewelder; see note to 1. 65n., below): “. . . where the council fire was yet burning bright, [the white men] put it out, and extinguished it with our own blood. . . .” Buchanan gives the act of extinguishing the council fire a figurative sense in a note to this passage: “Putting the fire out: Murdering them or their people, where they assemble for pacific purposes, where treaties are held, &c.”

fairy    Enchanted; illusory. Cf. Moore, “The Fire-Worshippers”, Lalla Rookh, III, 104-106: “Like those who . . . discover / In the lone deep some fairy shore, / Where mortal never trod before. . . .”

roe    A poeticism: Kidd is referring, not to the smaller European and Asian roe deer, but to the North American white-tailed deer. See also his references at l. 467 to the “musk-roe” and 1. 594 to the “bounding roe”. (C.R.S.)

Sumach    A plant native to North America, the sumach turns a brilliant red in the fall but is, of course, green in the spring and summer. Cf. Moore, “Ballad Stanzas” (in Poems Relating to America), 13: “By the shade of yon sumach, whose red berry dips. . . .”

MORANKA    No information about an Indian of this name has yet come to light. It is possible that the name is an invention of Kidd’s—an adaptation, perhaps, of “MOKANNA”, the “Prophet-Chief’ of “dazzling brow” in the opening of Lalla Rookh, 7ff.

the Spirit    See the note to 1. 21 of the poem.

gush of the fountain    Cf. Moore, “Ballad Stanzas” (in Poems Relating to America), 14: ’In the gush of the fountain, how sweet to recline. . .”

John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder (1743-1823) was a Moravian missionary who worked to bring his Church’s particular strain of practical, subjective, democratic and fundamentally Scriptural Christianity to the Delawares and Mohegans. His attachment to these tribes, and his antagonism to their traditional enemies, the Iroquois, can be strongly felt in his Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania (1819) and A Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren Among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians (1820). Although Kidd may, as Klinck suggests (p. 501), have taken this note and other materials directly from Heckewelder, there is a greater likelihood that his quotations from the Moravian missionary were gleaned from Buchanan, who is “. . . copious in [his] extracts from the Rev. Author’s pages” (p. xn.) in his Sketches . . .; indeed, Buchanan begins his chapter on “Indian Relations of the Conduct of the Europeans towards Them” with the following quotation from Heckewelder’s Account . . . (p. 76): “Long and dismal, says the reverend author whose work I have so often alluded to, are the complaints which the Indians make of European ingratitude and injustice. They love to repeat them, and always do it with the eloquence of nature, aided by an energetic and comprehensive language, which our polished idioms cannot imitate. Often I have listened to these descriptions of their hard sufferings, until I felt ashamed of being a white man (p. 18).

Our wigwams are plundered, our homes are no more    Cf. Moore, “The Fire-Worshippers”, Lalla rookh, III, 54: “Her throne had fall’n—her pride was crush’d— / Her sons were willing slaves, nor blush’d, / In their own land,—no more their own. . . .”

shivered    Broken or split in small fragments. Cf. Byron, Don Juan, I, xxxvi: “. . . all his household gods lay shiver’d around him. . . .”

pyre    A heap of inflammable materials, usually for the purpose of burning a dead body.

Cf. Moore, “To the Lady Charlotte Rawdon, From the Banks of the St. Lawrence” (in Poems Relating to America), 69f.: “. . . oft my flight I take / Over Huron’s lucid lake . . . the light canoe, / . . . reflected . . . / Looks as if it hung in air.”

Æolus    In Homer’s Odyssey Aeolus is a friend of the gods who gives Ulysses a leather bag containing the winds that would have impeded his voyage. On account of this, Aeolus came to be regarded by the Greeks and Romans as the god of the winds. He was supposed to have kept the winds in a cave on the Aeolian Islands.

to obtrude    To thrust (one’s self) prominently forward without solicitation: to intrude.

The bliss of tears—oft felt like joy    This is a commonplace paradox of the literature of sensibility, and one which Kidd reiterates in various formulations later in the poem, for example in 11. 311, 1101-1106 and 1203-1204. (C.R.S.)

A hoary Chief    Skenandow; see the notes to the title and 11. 142n. and 190n. If Kidd’s Skenandow can be identified at least in part with the Oneida chief of the same name who died in 1816 at the age of a hundred and twenty, then he can be seen as “hoary” in two senses: his hair is presumably grey or white (the literal meaning of “hoary”) and he is from a remote period in the past (the figurative meaning of the term). That Skenandow’s speech sounds like a whisper of an “angel” (1. 136) may suggest that the narrator is encountering the spirit of the dead chief, or just an old man.

Chieftain . . . mountain    See the Introduction, p. xvii for a discussion of the mountain/Mountain opposition in The Huron Chief.

Klinck (p. 500) cites the Utica Patriot for March 19, 1816, as quoted by William W. Campbell, The Border Warfare of New York, During the Revolution; or The Annals of Tryon County. (1849), pp. 265-267, as the source for the speech given in this note. But it is more likely that Kidd found the speech in Buchanan, Sketches, p. 178: “A distinguished Oneida Chief named Skenandou, having yielded to the teaching of his minister, (the Rev. Mr. [Samuel] Kirkland,) and lived a reformed man for fifty years, said, in his 120th year, just before he died [on March 11, 1816; Klinck, p. 500], ’I am an aged hemlock. The winds of one hundred years have whistled through my branches. I am dead at the top.’”

Sire—I’m not the indian’s foe— Cf. Campbell, Gertrude of Wyoming, I, xv: “Christian! I am the foeman of thy foe Whereas Kidd’s line is spoken by the narrator to the Huron Chief, Campbell’s is spoken by an enemy of the Hurons to a white settler—a fact that points to the very different conception of the Huron in The Huron Chief and Gertrude of Wyoming; see also the note to l. 1413, below.

mutual converse    Milton frequently employs the word “mutual” in describing Adam and Eve before the fall; see for example, Paradise Lost, IV, 727-728 (“. . . our mutual help / And mutual love ) and, by way of contrast, IX, 1187 (“. . . in mutual accusation . . .”). At the close of “To Thomas Hume, Esq., M.D., From the city of Washington” (in Poems Relating to America), 87f. Moore sings the praises of “converse” with a friend. (C.R.S.)

Candour    Openness, frankness, kindliness; freedom from prejudice or malice. Cf. l. 1381 below.

SKENANDOW    Klinck (p. 500) conjectures the existence of an actual Huron or Wyandot chief called Skenandow who was “. . . a descendant of the Huron refugees from Iroquois persecution who stayed in the West instead of finding shelter at Lorette, near Quebec city.” While it is just possible that such a chief existed and that Kidd met him, see the notes to 11. 134 and 142n. above for evidence pointing to the likelihood that Kidd intended the reader to associate his Huron chief with Skenandoa (c. 1696-1816), the “distinguished Oneida Chief” who could well be said to have been “. . . known afar, / When first the white man felt the rage, / Of Indians, in defensive war” (190-192).

plaintive    Mournful; expressive of sorrow.

The maid, revered    Ta-poo-ka; see the note to l. 238, below.

Zephyr    In Greek mythology, Zephyrus or Zephyr was the personification of the west wind.

freedom    Frankness, openness.

SIOUX    The presence of a Sioux warrior in Southwestern Ontario seems anomalous. The Sioux were located west of the Mississippi River, in the Western plains regions of Canada and the United States. Kidd may have been misled by the appearance of the Sioux in a list containing several eastern Indian tribes in Buchanan, Sketches, p. 156 or he may have read in George Proctor’s (or George Longmore’s) Lucubrations of Humphrey Ravelin, Esq. (1823; see the note to l. 1317n., below) that the “Sieues” lived “. . . on the shores of Lake Huron “ (p. 350). A third possibility is that Kidd was misled by the fact that a common Huron family name at Lorette was (and is) Sioui; indeed, Tehariolina, La Nation Huronne, p. 79, reproduces an 1825 lithograph of three Chiefs from Jeune Lorette, one of whom is Elie Sioui (another is Nicholas Vincent Tsaouenhohi). It is notable that his metre here and elsewhere in the poem (ll. 949, 1107, 1398 and 1446) apportions two syllables to the word Sioux, as do the alternative spellings of “Sieues” or “Sieu”. It should also be noted that the Huron family name Sioui carries three syllables.

TA-POO-KA    The story of the love of the Sioux warrior Alkwanwaugh (see note to 1. 667, below)for the maiden Ta-poo-ka is very likely based on an anecdote drawn from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Narrative Journal of Travels . . . from Detroit through the Great Chain of American Lakes to the Sources of the Mississippi River (1821), p. 330 and entitled “Constancy of an Indian Girl” in Buchanan’s Sketches, pp. 179-180: “In passing thro’ Lake Pepin our interpreter pointed out to us a high precipice . . . from which an Indian girl, of the Sioux nation, had, many years ago, precipitated herself in a fit of disappointed love. She had given her heart, it appears, to a young chief of her own tribe, who was very much attached to her, but the alliance was opposed by her parents, who wished her to marry an old chief [Kidd’s “aged Chief” (285)], renowned for his wisdom and influence in the nation. As the union was insisted upon, and no other way appearing to avoid it, she determined to sacrifice her life in preference to a violation of her former vow; and while the preparations for the marriage feast were going forward, she left her father’s cabin [”She from her father’s cabin stole . . .”, l. 290], without exciting suspicion, and before she could be overtaken threw herself from an awful precipice, and was instantly dashed to a thousand pieces. Such an instance of sentiment is rarely to be met with among barbarians, and should redeem the name of this noble-minded girl from oblivion. It was Oo-la-i-ta.” (It may also be observed that such an instance of sentiment is probably the product of acculturation and, in any case, would be more likely to apply to a patrilineal Sioux than to a matrilineal Iroquoian group; Huron parents could suggest but would not insist upon a marriage.)

     The fact that Kidd’s maiden is called Ta-poo-ka and, in a later note (821n.) described as a touchstone for “. . . everything that was beautiful.—She was the idol of the Nation—every young heart worshipped her”, may provide grounds for associating her with the “beautiful Tatoka” who has “many lovers” but “place[s] her affections upon a youth” called Karkapaha (of whom her father initially disapproves because he has performed “no valiant deeds in war”) in “The Mountain of Little Spirits”, a cognate of the tale in Schoolcraft that Kidd could have encountered in James Athearn Jones, Tales of an Indian Camp (1829), which was reprinted in Traditions of the North American Indians (1830), II, 207-222. As its title suggests, “The Mountain of Little Spirits” also contains a supernatural element, as do “The Maiden’s Rock” (II, 131-140) and “The Lake of the White Canoe” (III, 1-31), two other cognate legends in Tales of an Indian Camp which may be behind the Ta-poo-ka story in The Huron Chief. “The Maid’s Rock” is essentially the same tale as Schoolcraft’s “Constancy of an Indian Girl”, but its heroine is named “Winona” and she sings a “Dirge” in loosened verse before plunging to her death from a precipice beside Lake Pepin. “The Lake of the White Canoe” is largely given over to a “rhythmical tale of the chief of the Roanokes” (III, 9) concerning two star-crossed lovers named “‘Pequida . . . / The fairest of the fair” and “Annawan, the Brave” (III, 12) who enter the spint world and haunt the lake from which the tale derives its name. In his Introduction to the second edition of his work, Traditions of the North American Indians, I, xxv, Jones notes that the tradition behind “The Lake of the White Canoe” furnished Thomas Moore with the subject of the ballad entitled “The Lake of the dismal Swamp” in Odes and Epistles (1806).

     It is worth noting that in Charles Sangster’s The Angel Guest and Other Poems, ed. Frank Tierney (1977), pp. 57-59 there is a poem enttled “Tapooka” which contains a probable echo of The Huron Chief 262-264 (“. . . Great Chiefs assembled from afar, / Who, having to MANITTO prayed, / Salute the beauteous bridal-star”): “Great Chiefs from the wilds afar / . . . have prayed to Manitou freely / And saluted the Bridal Star” (p. 58). Both Kidd (l. 946) and Sangster refer to Ta-poo-ka as “the loved”. It is also worth noting that Sangster’s poem, which ends with “The maid and her brave Sioux lover / Returned from the Spirit-Isle” in a “white canoe” (p. 59), appears in both Edward Hartley Dewart’s Selections from Canadian Poets (1864), pp. 243-246 and William Douw Lighthall’s Songs of Great Dominion (1889) pp. 45-48 as “Taapookaa—A Huron Legend.” As Charles R. Steele notes, the legend of the white canoe is also treated in the title poems of Alan Sullivan’s The White Canoe and Other Verse (1891) and James D. Edgar’s The White Stone Canoe. A Legend of the Ottawas (1885).

jubilee    An occasion for joyful celebration or general rejoicing.

to MANITTO prayed    Kidd’s note on the Manitto repeats almost verbatim a passage quoted in Buchanan’s Sketches, p. 231 from the History of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Indians in North America (1794), p. 39 by George Henry Loskiel (1740-1814), another Moravian missionary. The passage continues: “When they perform a solemn sacrifice, a manitto, or a head as large as life, is put upon a pole in the middle of the house. But they understand by the word manitto, every being to which an offering is made, especially all good spirits. . . . The manittoes are also considered as tutelar spirits.” Buchanan, Sketches, p. 233 also quotes the description of the household god from the Voyages from Montreal Through the Continent of North America (1801), pp. c-ci by Alexander Mackenzie (1764-1820), the Scottish-born fur-trader and explorer of the Canadian North and West, that constitutes the second part of Kidd’s note.

bridal star    Probably Venus, commonly known as the evening or morning star and traditionally associated with love and marriage (see for example, Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, 5 19-520: “. . . bid haste the Ev’ning Star . . . to light the bridal Lamp”).

verdant    Green.

fire-flies    See the note to l. 911, below.

cabin    While Indians are often imagined as living in wigwams, the Hurons lived in rectangular long-houses and, by the nineteenth century, had begun to inhabit single family dwellings that could well have been described as cabins. (C.R.S.)

festive pleasures, unconfined    Cf. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, III, xii: “On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; / No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet. . . .”

spirit-bride    See the note to 1. 238f. above.

throbs    Violent pulsations of the heart.

Europe’s pomp . . . groves of pine    Cf. Moore, “To the Lady Charlotte Rawdon, From the Banks of the St. Lawrence” (in Poems Relating to America), 37-39: “. . . there are miracles, which man, / Cag’d in the bounds of Europe’s pigmy span, / Can scarcely dream of. . . .”

poor GOLDSMITH    Oliver Goldsmith (c. 1730-1774), the Irish-born author whose poem The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society (1764) contains the lines: “. . . press the bashful stranger to his food / And learn the luxury of doing good” (21-22).

These lines present a conventional Rousseauistic (and Romantic) conception of the corrupting effect of artifice and civilization on the natural man and the natural world. (C.R.S.)

Noble . . . Charter-school    Under the auspices of the Charter Society (founded in 1733), schools were established in Ireland to provide Protestant education for the Catholic poor. Either Kidd is confused in thinking that Charter Schools were establishments for the children of the aristocratic and wealthy or he means the passage as an indictment of the members of the Charter Society—those who belong to the “Charter-school” of thought. It is also possible that Kidd had in mind here those chartered companies (such as the Hudson’s Bay Company) and their constituent members which were given monopolies for trade or colonization in areas of North America and elsewhere, and which exercised wide powers over the inhabitants of those areas. Still another—and perhaps most likely—possibility is that Kidd was thinking of the Schools of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning that were established by Royal Charter in 1801 by Bishop Jacob Mountain. The Royal Grammar Schools in Quebec and Montreal were among those supervised by the Royal Institution, as were the so-called National Schools—schools founded under the auspices of the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. One of the trustees of the Royal Institution was Charles James Stewart, a son of the Earl of Galloway (and thus a “noble”), who was Bishop of Quebec from 1826 to 1837.

past    Passed.

mutual converse    See the note to l. 181, above.

Kidd’s note is taken from Buchanan’s account in Sketches, pp. 26-32 of a visit in 1819 to “the house of Miss Brandt” and her brother (the descendants of Joseph Brant [1747-1807] the famous Mohawk chief) in Upper Canada. After the observations that Kidd quotes almost verbatim, Buchanan continues: “. . . as the Indian never makes a show of civility, but when prompted by a genuine feeling, so he thinks others are actuated by similar candour. I really feel ashamed when I consider how severe a rebuke this carries with it to us who boast of civilization, but who are so much carried away by the general insincerity of expression pervading all ranks, that few indeed are to be found who speak just what they wish or know. This duplicity is the effect of what is termed a high state of refinement” (pp. 30-31).

spicy clime    Sweet-scented place, aromatic region, with a possible allusion to the “spicy Forest” and “spicy Shrub” of Eden in Milton, Paradise Lost V, 298 and VIII, 517.

glass of time    An hour-glass for the measurement of time; a clock.

Hail, hail to the Chieftain    Cf. Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake, II, xix, i: “Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!”

darkles    Shows itself darkly, possibly with anger or scorn. Cf. Byron, Don Juan, VI, ci: “. . . . her proud brow’s blue veins [began] to swell and darkle.”

This quotation from Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Nations of Canada (see the note to 1. 22n., above) appears in Buchanan, Sketches, p. 346n.

downy    hilly (a down is a grassy hill), and also, perhaps, feathery soft (down being, of course, the soft underplumage of a bird).

Ulysses . . . Calypso    Kidd here conflates two characters and episodes from Homer’s Odyssey: on the island of Aeaea, the enchantress Circe makes Ulysses half forget his “native home” on Ithaca; on the island of Ogygia, the enchantress Calypso, despite his resistance to her blandishments, detains him for seven years. (C.R.S.)

polished    Polite, refined, cultured.

Horn    As the note to l. 1275 makes clear, a rattle: “. . . the Chief who conducted the ceremony, [held] in his hand a horn filled with small pebbles . . .” See the note to l. 1275, below.

KEMANA    No reference has yet been discovered to an Indian woman of this name.

Kidd condenses the fourth stanza of Horace, Odes, II, xii (11. 13-16):

me dulcis dominae Musa Licymniae
cantus, me voluit dicere lucidum
fulgentes oculos et bene mutuis
fidum pectus amoribus. . . .

C.E. Bennett in Horace: the Odes and Epodes, p. 135 translates this stanza as follows: “Me the Muse has bidden to celebrate the sweet singing of Mistress Licymnia, her brightly flashing eyes, and her heart right faithful in mutual love. . . .” One of the finest Roman poets, Horace (65-8 B.C.) dedicated the first three books of his Odes to “. . . his friend Maecenas”, “the confidential advisor to Octavian, and a generous patron of literature” (ibid., p. viii). Licymnia is Horace’s pseudonym for Terentia, the wife of Maecenas.

my woes seem quite forgot    Cf. “The Fire-Worshippers”, Lalla Rookh, III, 313-315: “If aught could make this soul forget / The bond to which its seal is set, / ’Twould be those eyes. . . .”

SLIEVEGALLIN    Klinck (pp. 495-496) calls attention to the reference to Slievegallion (a mountain with an altitude of 1,735 feet) in “The Hibernian Solitary”, a poem which appears towards the end of The Huron Chief and Other Poems:

When . . . I strayed, reckless of earth-born caves,
O’er the proud summit of Slievegallin fair—
Mountain renowned in song—by me adored

I cast my eye tow’rds that loved Cot below—
Home of my childhood—seat of blissful hours:
But now that home’s no more, nor inmates dear,
Nor blissful hours—for gone’s my every joy!
                           (pp. 209-210)

Klinck comments of Kidd’s “childhood”: “He had lived, we learn from his notes (pp. 200 and 211), ‘in the romantic townland [or village] of Tullinagee’, in the parish of Desertlyn, near Moneymore, in the southern part of the county of Deny [Londonderry, in what is now Northern Ireland]. . . . In this setting his poetic feeling had first been stirred.” Kidd used the name Slievegallin as a nom de plume for some letters printed in the Montreal press in 1829 (see Appendix C), and for various poems published in the Quebec Mercury (October 25, November 22, December 27, 1822, January 10, 1823, August 23, 1825), in the Canadian Courant (May 21, August 6 and August 10, 1825) and in the Canadian Spectator (September 10, 1825). “The Bard of Slievegallin. A Fragment,” signed A.K., appeared in the Canadian Spectator for July 2, 1825. See also the Canadian Freeman for September 9, 1828 and the Quebec Mercury for July 7, 1831 for explicit links between Kidd and Slievegallin.

mantled braes    Covered slopes. Cf. “The Hibernian Solitary”, The Huron Chief, and Other Poems, p. 209 where Kidd describes the slopes of Slievegallin as “daisied banks”.

For discussions of this stanza, see Klinck, pp. 496-498 and Introduction, pp. xiii-xiv.

I hate all whining cant    Cf. Moore, “To the Lord Viscount Forbes, From the City of Washington” (in Poems Relating to America), 129: “. . . how I hate thy cant!” Moore also anticipates Kidd by rhyming “cant” with “rant” in the ensuing line.

By hill, by dale, by grot, or fountain    Cf. Longmore, Tecumthé, in Tales, p. 138: “And all around, hill, valley, bower, and grot. . . .”

poising     Probably weighing or balancing one thing against another; equivocation (?).

Muse . . . MNEMOSYNE    In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the personification of memory and the mother of the Muses, the goddesses of literature and the arts and, by extension, the sources of inspiration for writers and artists. A Titaness (rather than a “Persian Nymph”), Mnemosyne brought forth the Muses, not to Jupiter (a Roman god), but to Zeus.

jetty    Black, dark. See also the note to l. 1555, below.

soul . . . shining through    The idea of the eyes as windows of the soul goes back at least to the middle of the fourteenth century. (C.R.S.)

Kidd is quoting verbatim from Mackenzie’s description of “the Knisteneaux [Cree] women” of the Canadian Northwest in his Voyages, p. xcv.

harp    As l. 563 indicates, Kidd—who obviously considered himself part of the Irish bardic tradition—employs harp here in its traditional (and resonantly Irish) association with poetry. See also Introduction, p. xxxix, n. 4.

moulder    Decay, rot.

unfurled    Unrolled, unfolded.

perchance    Possibly, maybe.

oak . . . decay    See the note to l. 142n..

in my boy-hood’s cheerful hour, I ye loved to stray    Cf. Longmore, Tecumthté, in Tales, p. 88: “Recalling pastimes, when I lov’d to stray / In youth’s diversion. . . .”

In his “Examples of the Knisteneaux and Algonquin Tongues”, Voyages, p. cviii Mackenzie gives the Algonquin word for squirrel as “Otchi ta mou”.

Cf. Moore, “The Fire-Worshippers”, Lalla Rookh, III, 279-280 (“. . . from childhood’s hour, / I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay . . .”) for this and the two preceding stanzas.

See Henry Home, Lord Kaimes (1696-1782), Sketches of the History of Man (1778; rpt. 1968), 150: “Upon the whole, it is computed by able writers, that the present inhabitants of America amount not to a twentieth part of those who existed when that continent was discovered by Columbus. This decay is ascribed to the intemperate use of spirits, and to the small-pox, both of them introduced by the Europeans.” See also Bartholomew de Las Casas (1474-1566), The Spanish Colonie (1552; trans. 1583; rpt. 1966), seg. A2^v-r: “ . . in y space of y said 40 yeeres . . . the Spaniards doen to death . . . more than twelve Millions of soules, men, women, and children. And I verilie do believe ... that there are dead more than fifteen Millions of soules”; seg. A[3]^r: “They made certayne Gibbets . . . every one enough for thirteane, in honour of our Saviour and his twelve Apostles . . .”; A4^v: “. . . they taught their houndes, fierce dogs, to tear them in pieces . . .”; and B4^v for the story of the Cuban Indian (which Kidd translates into dialogue form) who decided “. . . that hee would not go to heaven, but that hee would go to hell, to the ende, not to come in the place where such people [Spaniardes] should be . . .” Another translation (by J[ohn] P[hillips]) of the work of de Las Casas (a Dominican friar known as the “Apostle of the Indians”) appeared in 1656 as The Tears of the Indians . . .; it contains graphic illustrations of the cruelties perpetrated by the Spanish on the Indians. The Corsini mentioned at the end of Kidd’s note is probably Filipo Corsini, who published an Italian translation of a history of Mexico during the colonial period by Antonio de Sulis y Rivadeneyra (1610-1686): Istoria della conquista del Mexico . . . (1783).

prescribe    Decide; ordain.

Sire    A respectful title used in addressing a king or other sovereign prince, here an Indian chief.

vesper-bell    The bell that summons worshippers to evening service (vespers). Cf. Byron, Don Juan, III, cii-cviii for a (facetious) paean to twilight complete with “vesper bell” that may have influenced this portion of The Huron Chief.

first repenting . . .    In this stanza Kidd appears to be conflating events that occur in the last three books of Milton’s Paradise Lost where, after the fall, Adam confides to Eve his thoughts and plans, receives through the Archangel Michael a vision of the future and feels to an extent “. . . the balm of sweet relief, / When rescued from his load of grief.” Cf. Moore, “To the Lady Charlotte Rawdon, From the Banks of the St. Lawrence” (in Poems Relating to America), 34-36: “. . . where the first sinful pair / For consolation might have weeping trod, / When banish’d from the garden of their God.” Kidd’s vision here, as elsewhere in The Huron Chief, is post-Edenic. (C.R.S.)

The opening clause of this note (“They generally make feasts and sacrifices . . . ”) summarizes the opening sentences of a paragraph in Mackenzie’s Voyages, pp. xcix-c. Most of the remainder of the paragraph is quoted verbatim by Kidd. Buchanan, Sketches, p. 245 quotes the same passage from Voyages, but includes Mackenzie’s reference (significantly omitted by Kidd) to sacrifices by the Knisteneaux Indians of “dogs, [preferably] . . . very fat . . . milk-white . . .” ones.

Nature’s God    In this phrase and the surrounding passage, Kidd (perhaps with an eye on some common deistic assumptions) asserts a traditional, Humanistic link between Creator and Creation, a link which makes possible the methodology of ascent and revelation described in ll. 644-648. Cf. Pope, An Essay on Man, IV, 327-340:

See! the sole bliss Heav’n could on thee bestow;
Which who but feels can taste, but thinks can know:
Yet poor with fortune, and with learning blind,
The bad must miss; the good, untaught, will find;
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
But looks thro’ Nature, up to Nature’s God;
Pursues that Chain which links th’ immense design,
Joins heav’n and earth, and mortal and divine;
Sees, that no being any bliss can know,
But touches some above, and some below;
Learns, from this union of the rising Whole,
The first, last purpose of the human soul;
And knows where Faith, Law, Morals, all began,
All end, in LOVE of GOD, and LOVE of MAN.

Tribe    See the note to the title of The Huron Chief, above.

snow-bird    Any one of a number of species of small birds seen mainly during the winter.

In the margin above and to the right of this line Job Deacon has written: “perverted taste to be first attracted by a Squaw!”

ALKWANWAUGH    No Sioux warrior of this name has come to light, but see The Huron Chief, 1107-1114 for Kidd’s assertion that he was related through his mother to the famous Huron warrior Atsistari (see following note). It is possible that Alkwanwaugh is Kidd’s transcription of Ahihathenha (Stanislas Kostka), one of the Chiefs at Jeune Lorette in the 1820’s (See Tehariolina, La Nation Huronne, pp. 79 and 161).

Kidd is confusing Eustache Atsistari (c. 1602-1642), frequently spelled Ahatsistari; see Dictionary of Canadian Biography, I) and Shastaretsi (16?- 1685). The former was indeed a “distinguished [Huron] warrior”: in 1641, the year before his torture and death at the hands of the Iroquois, he led a band of fifty Huron which claimed to have scattered a force of 300 Iroquois and captured some of them” (Trigger, Children, II, 659). Shastaretsi, who “flourished in 1676,” was the head Chief (capitaine) of the Hurons at Sillery and Notre-Dame de Foy; he died in 1685 after “. . . the remnant of the Nation” (The Huron Chief, 670) had settled at Ancienne Lorette in 1673-1697. According to Tehariolina, La Nation Huronne, p. 81, the “head Chief of the Hurons during the war of 1759” (presumably the French-English conflict that led to the fall of Quebec in that year) was Thomas Martin Thodatoouan, a name difficult to reconcile with Kidd’s Tsa-a-ra-lih-to, which sounds a little more like Tsaouenhohi, the name assigned, in fact to Thomas Martin in the brief oral history of the Hurons that was transcribed “. . . en 1825 par Vincent Sasennio [et] conservé par l’abbé P. Vincent” (see Lindsay, Notre-Dame de la Jeune-Lorette, p. 265). (Could Kidd’s source(s) have been the same as Sasennio’s, or, indeed, Sasennio’s transcription itself?) Of Kidd’s Oui-a-ra-lih-to nothing can at present be said with certainty; perhaps he was one or other of Gaspard Picard Ondiaralete or Petit Etienne Ondiarelate, both of whom were Huron Chiefs at Lorette in the eighteen twenties (see Tehanolina, pp. 76 and 141); the age of neither of these men is known, however, and there is no evidence to suggest that either one of them was “the oldest Chief of the village of Lorette.” The matter is further complicated when attention is turned to the question of which of the Huron Chiefs at Lorette served with the British General John Burgoyne (1722-1792) during the American War of Independence in 1775-1777. Burgoyne, it may be recalled, led a poorly-equipped and out-numbered force to defeat at Saratoga on October 17, 1777. Letter XXIII in Adam Hodgson, Letters from North America, Written During a Tour in the United States and Canada (1824), I, 376-384 contains an “. . . extract from the journal of one of [his] fellow travellers [on a “Steam-boat, on the St. Lawrence” in August, 1820], who left [him] at Montreal to visit Quebec; and on his return, found on board the steam-boat one of the Indian chiefs, belonging to the village of Loretto [sic].” Part of this extract sheds a murky light on the matter at hand: “‘We have on board one of the Indian chiefs, who walked in the procession at Loretto, and his daughter, a genteel young woman. He speaks the English language. He said he knew General Washington, and had dined with him twice; and that the General had made him a present of a very good horse. . . . The story of the horse was thus explained: Vincent [the name of the Huron chief] commanded a body of Indians, at the capture of Burgoyne, and was made a prisoner with that General. The horse had been taken by him from the Americans; and hence he called him not his own, but Washington’s. This information I obtained from others on board.’” The excerpt goes on to characterize the chief as an anti-Catholic (and a tippler) who claimed to have been “educated at Hampshire”—a claim that identifies him with Louis Vincent Saouatanan, who studied at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (see Tehariolina, p. 159). Although Lindsay, pp. 275-278 records that Hurons from Lorette fought for the French against the British at the Battles of the Plains of Abraham (1759) and Saint Foy (1760), he makes no mention of Burgoyne ’s Saratoga Campaign. “Vu la privation de documents,” he says sadly, “l’histoire miitaire de Lorette est fort difficile à tracer” (p. 275). Nonetheless, see Robert S. Allen, “The British Indian Department and the Frontier in North America, 1755-1830,” Canadian Historic Sites, Occasional Papers in Archaelogy and History, No. 14 (Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs, 1775) for a knowledgeable and valuable survey of British-Indian relations during the period covered by The Huron Chief, and LeMoine, Picturesque Quebec, p. 464, for the observation that “In 1776, Lorette sent its contingent of painted and plumed warriors to fight General Burgoyne’s inglorious campaigns.”

This very date of life    Presumably 1829-1830, when The Huron Chief was written and published, though see Introduction, pp. xx-xxi for a discussion of the handling of time in the poem.

LOGAN    John Logan (c. 1725-1780), who was half Cayuga and half white, was a leader of the Iroquois tribes living along the Ohio and Scioto rivers in the mid-to-late eighteenth century. In 1774 a group of white settlers massacred a large number of Indians, including several of Logan’s relatives (though not, by some accounts, his “. . . wives and children all.. .” as stated in 1. 729). Although the Cayuga chief had to that point been an “advocate of peace” (710) and “‘the white man’s friend’” (716), he was, in Kidd’s words (736n.), “. . . so deeply enraged at this unprovoked cruelty, that he determined to seek revenge, . . .” by attacking nearby white settlements. These attacks (in which many whites were killed) helped to precipitate what is called Lord Dunmore’s War—the Indian Campaign led by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore (1732-1809) against the Indians. A force under the command of Andrew Lewis defeated the Indians at Point Pleasant at the mouth of the (Great) Kanawha river (see 736n.), and Dunmore negotiated a peace with the Indians in the Scioto valley. Refusing to participate in the peace negotiations, Logan delivered a speech (not directly to Lord Dunmore but through an interpreter, John Gibson) which subsequently became both famous and controversial—famous as an example of Indian oratory (it was praised on this count by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia [1787; rpt. 1800], VI), and controversial for its attribution of the murder of Logan’s family to Colonel Michael Cresap (see the note to 1. 736n. below). Logan is reputed to have served with the British during the American Revolution and to have died a drunkard.

the Mingo’s story    The story of Logan who, though of mixed white-Indian blood (see preceding note), was a leader of the Mingo, a tribe often known as the “Iroquois of the Ohio” to distinguish them from the Iroquois of New York.

Lord Dunmore    See the note to 1. 685. The Earl of Dunmore was the Governor of Virginia from 1771 to 1775, and a vigorous defender of the Western frontier of Britian’s American colomes.

Although it makes no explicit reference to Colonel Cresap (see the notes to ll. 685 and 736n.), Logan’s speech in The Huron Chief is essentially a stanzaic rendition of the version of the speech recorded in Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1800), VI: “. . . [Logan] sent by a messenger the following speech to be delivered to Lord Dunmore: ’I appeal to any white man to say, if ever he entered Logan’s cabin hungry, and he gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked, and he clothed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites, that my countrymen pointed as they passed, and said, ‘Logan is the friend of the white men.’ I had even thought to have lived with you, but for the injuries of one man. Col. Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called upon me for revenge. I have sought it: I have killed many: I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbour a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan?—Not one.’” Jefferson remarks of this speech that it challenges “the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent. . . .” Jefferson’s rendition of Logan’s speech, and his account(s) of the events leading up to it (see the note to l. 736n. below), were widely quoted, as, for example in Campbell, Gertrude of Wyoming, III, xvii n..

Job Deacon (presumably) has placed a cross in the margin beside this line.

destructive war    Pope, Essay on Man, 184: “Destructive War See also Longmore, Tecumthé, in Tales, p. 127: “Destructive War!”

Perfidy    Treachery; the violation of friendship, allegiance or faith.

This speech appears with slight variation (Kidd’s opening sentence elaborates the “in their words” of the original to “in the words of the white men”) in Buchanan, Sketches, pp. 24-25, where it is attributed to “. . . a great chief of the Delaware nation . . .”

Colonel Michael Cresap (1742-1745): the Maryland frontiersman and Indian fighter who was made solely responsible by Jefferson in the 1787 (and earlier) editions of Notes on the State of Virginia, VI for the massacre of Logan’s family: “Cresap and his party concealed themselves on the bank of the river, and the moment the canoe [of women and children, with only one man] reached the shore. . . killed every person in it. This happened to be the family of Logan, who had long been distinguished as a friend of the whites.” In An Appendix Relative to the Murder of Logan’s Family in the 1800 edition of the Notes, Jefferson, after surveying the evidence surrounding the murders, revised his account of the incident so as to deflect full responsibility from Cresap: “Captain Michael Cresap, and a certain Daniel Greathouse, leading . . . parties, surprized, at different times, travelling and hunting parties of the Indians, having their women and children with them, and murdered many. Among these were unfortunately the family of Logan, a chief celebrated in peace and war, and long distinguished as the friend of the whites.” That Kidd was familiar with the 1800 (or a later) edition of Jefferson’s Notes is indicated by the mention in his note of “a hunting party” (the original version makes no mention of “hunting parties”); however, his failure to mention Greathouse suggests that he was unconvinced by the partial exoneration of Cresap and, perhaps, familiar with Jefferson’s earlier account of the incident, either in the edition of 1787 or, more likely, in the edition of 1800, where it co-exists with the revised version in the “Appendix”. In any event, Kidd’s description at the end of his note of Logan’s decision to seek revenge and of the constituent forces in the ensuing battle is taken almost verbatim from Jefferson, Notes, VI.

life’s party coloured glass    An obscure phrase, but presumably the eye or eyeball which is party- (or parti-) coloured—that is, partly of one colour and partly of another (variegated).

Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron is the largest freshwater island in the world. Its name refers to the spirits or Manitous (see the note to 263 and n., above) that were believed to dwell on the islands in the archipelago of which Manitoulin Island is a part. Kidd’s note is based on Henry, Travels and Adventures, p. 36n.: “The name Manitoualin, implies the residence of Manitoes, or genii, a distinction very commonly attributed to the islands, and sometimes to the shores, of Lake Huron and Superior. . . .”

Eastern bowers . . . Hinda    Kidd is referring to the heroine of “The Fire-Worshippers,” the tragic third tale in Moore’s Lalla Rookh. Hinda is an eastern princess (and the inhabitant of a “bower” [see Lalla Rookh, IV, 144, 197 etc.]) who falls in love with a Fire-Worshipper, an implacable enemy of her Moslem father. Since both lovers perish, Kidd’s allusion to their story presages disaster for the lovers in The Huron Chief (C.R.S.)

Saint Clair The Saint Clair river connects Lake Huron at its southern tip with Lake Saint Clair, which in turn flows into Lake Erie through the Detroit river.

bark    Barque: a sailing vessel of any kind.

Beside and below this stanza, Job Deacon has written: “It was thine own foolish wayward inclination and not “a Mountain Demon”, that has blighted thy prospects. Justice to the illustrious dead, whom thy heartless calumny cannot reach, requires this much to be said. The living is able, if inclined, to justify his own conduct; but I apprehend is too conscious of his integrity, and too exalted in mind, to condescend to notice your base scurrility contained in this inharmonious doggerel.” By the “illustrious dead” Deacon presumably means Jacob Mountain (1749-1825), the first Anglican Bishop of Quebec, and by “The living” presumably George Jehoshaphat Mountain (1789-1863), the son of Jacob Mountain and himself the third Anglican Bishop of Quebec.

dome    A poeticism: tent, wigwam.

COOSEA    No Indian woman of this name, either historical or mythological, has yet come to light.

TA-POO-KA    See the note to 238f., above.

Job Deacon has written beside this stanza: “a Swan appears beautiful on water but I know not how graceful its air or carriage is on land.”

KEKAPOO    No historical or mythological Indian of this name has to date been discovered. Kidd appears to have given to an individual a version of the name of the Kikapoo or Kickapoo tribe, which opposed the Americans in the American Revolution and, as followers of Tecumseh, in the War of 1812. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the Kickapoo were forced to leave Illinois (where they had earlier moved from Wisconsin) and to migrate first to Missouri and then to Kansas. Many Kickapoo have also lived for a long time in Mexico. A legend entitled “The Caverns of the Kickapoo” appears in Jones, Traditions, II, 201-205.

Spirit    See the note to l. 21, above.

The pair have passed through Lake Saint Clair and are moving down the Detroit river towards Lake Erie.

Tehariolina, La Nation Huronne, p. 132 (and see also Tsaouenhohi’s 1829 map, pp. 138-139) confirms that Ladaouanna (Kidd’s “LADAUANNA”) was the Huron word for the St. Lawrence. In his comparison of the “. . . impatient waters of the ST. LAWRENCE [to] . . . the white foaming horses of Ossian . . .” Kidd seems to be conflating Ossian (who has waves with “white heads”, “backs of foam” and so on, but no “white foaming horses”) and Moore (whose “O’Donohue’s Mistress” [in Irish Melodies] contains waves that are “white horses”). The “impudent BUCHANAN” to whom Kidd refers later is none other than James Buchanan (1772-1851), the author of the Sketches upon which The Huron Chief makes considerable levies. In 1830 (and at the time of the publication of his Sketches in 1824), Buchanan was the British Consul in New York, a post that he held until 1843, when he retired to Niagara Falls, Canada (where he is buried in Lundy’s Lane Cemetery). According to A.W. Patrick Buchanan, K.C., The Buchanan Book: The Life of Alexander Buchanan. Q.C., of Montreal, Followed by an Account of the Family of Buchanan (1911), p. 231, James Buchanan “. . . was a warm advocate of Free Trade, and in favour of opening the River St. Lawrence to all nations.” His specific plan, which Kidd obviously considered despicable, was set out in pamphlets published in 1822 and 1841. In the interests of “. . . upholding . . . the power of the [British] crown and interests of the empire on [the North American] . . .” continent it called for, amongst other things, the routing of American wheat destined for Britain through Canada (“Wheat . . . imported . . . at any point west of Kingston . . . to be admitted into England as Canada-wheat”) and the redefinition of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence as waters under the control, not of the “young colony” of Canada, but of the empire (“Let this noble river, and those inland seas, be regarded as the navigable waters of the empire, and not as private river”). “Afford the citizens of [the United States] all the advantages the proposed measures assuredly yield them”, he argued, “and they must become a changed people before they will sacrifice them” (Proposed Measure for Admission of Grain from All Countries into Great Britain Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Wellington [1841], pp. 7 and 13). Kidd’s supplementary note refers to the boundary commissions that were established under the treaty of Ghent at the close of the War of 1812 to settle disputes over the border between the United States and British North America. It is worth noting that on the same page of the March 12, 1830 issue of The Brockville Gazette and General Advertiser as Kidd’s letter to William Buell (see Introduction, pp. xxxii-xxxiii), Buchanan defends himself of misrepresenting Canada’s interests “. . . in relation to the West India Trade, and free navigation of the St. Lawrence. . . .”

Job Deacon has underlined “velvet shore” in this line and written beside it “This is an odd term”.

Kidd quotes verbatim from Henry, Travels and Adventures, p. 296.

potent    Powerful.

nigher    Nearer.

Job Deacon has placed an “x” after “enchanting power” and written: “there must be something understood here to make up the sense—and I think it to be, were here after ‘enchanting power’.”

Syren    Siren: in classical mythology, a fabulous creature, female or part female, who has the power to send men to their destruction. In the Odyssey, xi, Ulysses recounts the story of how he and his men successfully resisted the lure of the Sirens.

For one, whom all but one forgot    Cf. Byron Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, I, v: “. . . he . . . / Had sigh’d to many though he loved but one / And that loved one, alas! could ne’er be his.”

Cf. Mackenzie, Voyages, p. 39: “Their canoes. . . . are made of the bark of the birch-tree and fir-wood, but of so light a construction, that the man whom one of these light vessels bears on the water, can, in return, carry it over land without any difficulty. It is very seldom that more than one person embarks in them, nor are they capable of receiving more than two.” See also Henry, Travels and Adventures, p. 14: “To each canoe there are eight men. . . . every man is privileged to put on board [a bag weighing forty pounds].”

fire-flies    See Moore, “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” 6: “. . . her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see” and Jones, “The Lake of the White Canoe,” Tales, III, 26: “A solitary, twinkling light— / It seems a fire-fly lamp. . . .”

azure    Sky-blue.

In Voyages, p. cix, Mackenzie gives “Athick” as the Knisteneaux word for frog. Cf. The description of tree frogs in Loskiel, History, p. 89: “Their colour so exactly resembles that of the tree, to which they attach themselves, that they are hardly to be distinguished from it. In some places they assemble in such numbers in summer, that the ears of the passengers are almost stunned with their croaking.” The Moira River enters Lake Ontario at Belleville, between Toronto and Kingston. Camelion: chameleon.

bull-toad    Bull-frog.

Job Deacon has placed an “x” between “slow advanced” and written in the margin: “x should be slowly and ‘advanced’ should be moved to preserve the measure.”

Beside this stanza, Job Deacon has written: “This is certainly finely conceived and well expressed.”

luxury    Intense enjoyment.

evening star    See the note to l. 264, above.

pine-knots    An American usage: pine-wood used as a fuel.

Cf. Mackenzie, Voyages, p. 37: “They always keep a large quantity of the fibres of willow bark, which they work into thread on their thighs. Their nets are from three to forty fathoms in length. . . . They likewise make lines of the sinews of the rein-deer, and manufacture their hooks from wood, horn, or bone.” A note on the same page describes Watape (Kidd’s WATTAP): “Watape is the name given to the divided roots of the spruce-fir. . . . different parts of the bark canoes are . . . sewed together with this kind of filament.” See also Henry, Travels and Adventures, p. 14: “The small roots of the spruce-tree afford the wattap, with which the bark [of the canoes] is sewed. . .

down    Hair. The skins are presumably from young animals.

seraph    An angel of the highest order.

Chippewas    The Chippewa or Ojibwa Indians belong to the Algonquian linguistic stock. At one time, in the middle of the eighteenth century, they inhabited and controlled the area from Southern Ontario to the Turtle Mountains. They fought for the British in the War of 1812, and in Kidd’s day were living peacefully in Ontario and Manitoba, as well as in the United States. The Mississaugas were a branch of the Ojibwa.

Henry, Travels and Adventures, p. 198: “The Chipeways of Chagouemig are a handsome well-made people; and much more cleanly, as well as much more regular in the government of their families, than the Chipeways of Lake Huron. The women have agreeable features, and take great pains in dressing their hair, which consists in neatly dividing it on the forehead and top of the head, and in plaiting and turning it up behind.”

See Buchanan, Sketches, pp. 335-336 (the Appendix on “The Five Nations” from Colden’s History . . .) for a description of the central role of “. . . the Sachems, or old men [civil chiefs] . . . in all [the] public affairs.. .” of each Indian Nation. See also the note, above, to the title of The Huron Chief.

some future poet’s page    Charles R. Steele suggests that Kidd may have been thinking here of his own projected Tales and Traditions of the Indians (Preface, 50). See also the note to 1. 1656, below.

wonted    Customary, usual.

native    Innate or natural, as opposed to artificial or affected.

See the note to l. 264, above.

MILTON’S bower    Eden, as described in Paradise Lost, IV, V, VIII and IX which treat in whole or in part of Paradise before the fall. See especially Paradise Lost, IV, 690 and VIII, 510 for the “blissful” nuptial bower of Adam and Eve, and IV, 309-311 for the pre-lapsarian love-making of the couple. Milton twice refers to the river Euphrates in Paradise Lost (I, 420, XII, 114), but he does not name it explicitly in IV, 220-240, the passage describing the “River large” and the “four main streams” in Eden. The Euphrates is one of the largest rivers in the near East.

caraboo    Caribou.

Alpine hill    Alp: one of the range of mountains in France and Switzerland.

lily    A possible reference to the “lilies of the field” in Matthew 6.28 which neither “toil” nor “spin” but possess a natural beauty and grace.

“feathered tribe” is a periphrasis deriving from James Thomson, “Winter”, The Seasons, 793 (“feather’d Game”) and similar phrases. Kidd’s description of the humming-bird in that note and stanza may owe a debt to Loskiel, History, p. 94.

bliss    Kidd’s use of “bliss” here and elsewhere (for example, ll. 33, 214,1218, and 1625) recalls Milton’s use of the word in his descriptions of Heaven and, especially, Eden in Paradise Lost—for example in IV, 508 and 728, VIII, 522 and IX, 411. Bliss is also one of Moore’s favourite words.

western star    A poetic term locating the Indian’s “path of independence” in Canada’s west—indeed, in what would become Canada West (Ontario).

Kidd’s note is taken virtually verbatim either from Buchanan, Sketches, p. 22 (where it is part of a quotation from Heckewelder) or, less likely, directly from Heckewelder. Buchanan notes the “Council house here means, ‘Connexion District’”—that is, an Indian community or assembly (see the note to l. 24, above).

OU-KA-KEE    No Indian chief of this name has to date been discovered. Interestingly enough, Mackenzie, Voyages, p. cix gives “O ma ka ki” as the Algonquin word for frog.

frowning    Gloomy, threatening.

fount    Fountain.

ALKWANWAUGH . . . ATSISTARI. . . .    See the notes to II. 667 and 673 and n., above.

chase    Hunting-ground; unenclosed, park-like terrain (see also l. 1133).

Kidd may have had a particular Indian victory in mind, but which one is not clear.

spousal love    Pope, Odyssey, XVIII, 334: “’Till Hymen lights the torch of spousal love”—that is, matrimonial love.

dimpling    Rippling.

pliant    Readily yielding; easily influenced.

sail . . . canoe    Henry, Travels and Adventures, p. 14: “The canoes are worked . . . occasionally, with a sail.”

Although the opening line of Kidd’s quotation of Horace, Odes, IV, 45-48 contains a slight variation on the standard text (it usually reads “Tum meae, siquid . . .”), the remainder of the quotation is substantially accurate. Bennet translates the lines as follows: “Then, if I have aught deserving to be heard, the best powers of my voice shall swell the acclaim, and happy at Caesar’s coming home, I’ll sing: ‘O glorious day, with honour to be mentioned!’” Iulus was the son of Mark Antony.

The original Skenandow was a life-long friend to the American colonists, either assisting them against the British or remaining neutral during their conflicts with the Iroquois. See the notes to ll. 134, 142n. and 190 above for further discussions of Skenandow as an historical figure and as a fictional character in Kidd’s poem.

darkling    Darkening.

No printed source has yet been discovered for this note; it may conceivably be Kidd’s own.

cloys    Gratifies to excess.

type    Symbol; prefigurement.

Cf. Henry Travels and Adventures, p. 300: “Many travellers have described the marriages of the Indians. . . .” The lengthy quotation in the middle of this note occurs, with no substantial differences, in the chapter entitled “Attempts Recently Made to Lead the Indian Tribes to Admit Teachers of Christianity among Them; with Observations thereon, and Hints to Missionaries”, p. 103. The “Indian heroes” listed by Kidd at the end of his note all figure in Buchanan Sketches, particularly in the sections entitled “Feelings and Views of the Indians at the Present Hour, with Some Specimens of their Recent Oratory” (pp. 37-64) and “Remonstraces of the Indians to the Government of the United States in 1790” (pp. 118-145). Pontiac (c. 1720-1769) was the Ottawa chief who inspired the siege of Detroit in 1763 as part of a widespread campaign against the British in 1763-1765; Corn Planter (c. 1732-1836) was a Seneca chief (and half-breed) who supported the British against the rebels in the American War of Independence and later favoured friendship with the whites (at least until 1820 when he apparently had a change of heart); Logan (c. 1725-1780) was an Iroquois leader (for further details of his life, see the notes to ll. 685, 692 and 697-752, above); Atsistari (c. 1602-1642) was a distinguished Huron warrior (see the note to l. 673 and n., above); Skenandow (c. 1704-1816) was an Oneida chief and a friend of the whites (see the notes to ll. 1227-1232, above); Red Jacket (c. 1758-1830) was a Seneca chief who moved from urging hostility towards the whites to attempting to forge lasting peace with them ( he visited George Washington in 1792 and supported the Americans in the War of 1812); Tecumseh (c. 1768-1813) was, of course, the Shawnee chief whose life-long resistance to the Americans led to his death while fighting for the British at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 (see also the note to l. 1317n., below). Omaha is not an individual but a tribe which, in the face of pressure from American colonists, migrated ever westwards from the Ohio valley in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The identity of “TSA-WA-WAN-HI” is uncertain, but Kidd is probably referring to one or another (or all) of three Huron chiefs: Ignace Tsawenhohi (Tsaouenhohi) (?-1693), who was head Chief at Ancienne Lorette and Jeune Lorette from 1685 to 1693; Paul Picard Tsawenhohi (?- 1747), who was head chief at Jeune Lorette between 1693 and 1747; and José Vincent Tsawenhohi (?-1811), who was head chief of the Hurons between 1776 and the succession in 1811 of Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi (Tsaouenhohi), the Huron chief who appears to have inspired Kidd’s poem (see Introduction and the note to the title of The Huron Chief, above).

foul disorder    Milton, Paradise Lost, VI, 387-388: “. . . deformed rout / Enter’d, and foul disorder. . . .”   This allusion to the “. . . impious War in Heav’n . . .” (I, 43), serves, like the ensuing lines, to place the Sectarianism of competing missionaries (“Creeds-men”) on the side of Satan in a vicious and violent travesty of the true Christian way (“Religion’s pathway”) practiced by God’s natural servants, the Indians. See also the letter reproduced in Appendix C. (C.R.S.)

The first paragraph of this note is taken from Tudor’s Letters, p. 294n. Kidd quotes Tudor quite accurately, though he does change the punctuation of the original, and he does omit two sentences, the first an illustration of the lack of sympathy among the whites for the Indian (“Shortly afterwards he went to some of the inhabitants and said to them, When white man’s child die—Indian man he sorry—he help bury him—when my child die—no one speak to me—I make his grave alone—I can no live here”) and the second Tudor’s concluding observation (“What energy and depth of feeling does this specimen of Indian character exhibit!”). Kidd’s views on the fondness of Indians for “their children and relatives” doubtless owes debts to Buchanan’s chapter on their “Attachment to, and Education of, their Children” in Sketches, pp. 65-73 and to Mackenzie’s account of their affection for, and care of, the elderly in Voyages, p. cxxviii: “The Chipewayans have been accused of abandoning their aged and infirm people to perish, and of not burying their dead; but these are melancholy necessities, which proceed from their wandering way of life. They are by no means universal, for it is within my knowledge, that a man, rendered helpless by the palsy, was carried about for many years, with the greatest tenderness and attention, till he died a natural death.” In the Advertisement to the fifth number of the Irish Melodies, Moore does allude in passing to “. . . those Indians, who put their relatives to death, when they become feeble . . .” (Irish Melodies and Other Poems, with a Melologue upon National Music to which are appended the Original Advertisements to the Melodies, and the Prefatory Letter on Music [1825], p. 216). Kidd’s comments on the ill treatment of the Indians in Georgia probably refers to the attempt in 1828 by the government of that state to appropriate the lands of the Cherokee. In 1829, the newly-elected American President, Andrew Jackson (see the note to l. 1589n., below) informed the Cherokees that they had either to acquiesce to the Georgia government or leave the state. The Indians appealed to the United States Supreme Court and, in 1832, won exemption from Georgia law.

Juvenal, the Roman author whose name is synonymous with fierce satire, flourished in A.D. 98-128. G.G. Ramsay translates the passage quoted by Kidd from Juvenal’s Satire, XIII, 26-27 as follows: “For honest men are scarce; hardly so numerous as the gates of Thebes, or the mouths of the enriching Nile.”

An extensive search has failed to identify conclusively Kidd’s Captain W[illia]ms. A number of British naval officers were given land in the Bay of Quinte area near Kingston on Lake Ontario, and several Williams appear in documents of the area and period.

scarlet-bird    The cardinal or a scarlet tanager. (C.R.S.)

fabled harp    The Aeolian harp, which produces music when the wind passes through its strings. (C.R.S.)

Persian’s soul    Moore’s Lalla Rookh is set in “Persian lands” (I, 2) and contains several instances of the mystical devotion described by Kidd in the ensuing lines.

See Heckewelder, Account, pp. 208-210 and Loskiel, History, p. 104 for accounts of Indian dances that parallel Kidd’s note. See also Tehariolina, La Nation Huronne, pp. 341-382 for a detailed account of Huron music and dancing. Tehariolina, p. 358 quotes Ernest Gagnon in Lindsay’s, Notre-Dame de Ia Jeune-Lorette, p. 258 to the effect that all the secular music of the Hurons was accompanied by two instruments—the “Chichigouane,” a rattle consisting of an ox’s horn partly filled with pebbles or small bones (Kidd’s “horn filled with small pebbles”) and the tambourine, described by Kidd as being “. . . made of dressed deer-skins, fixed on a round hoop. . . .” In Greek mythology, Pan is the god of herds and shepherds who originated in Arcadia. He is credited with inventing the shepherd’s flute from the reed into which the nymph Syrinx was changed to escape his amorous advances.

But hush! . . . It is an enemy!—to arms    Cf. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, III, xxi-xxii: “But hush! hark a deep sound strikes like a rising knell! . . . Arm! Arm! it is—it is—the cannon’s opening roar!” and Moore, “The Fire-Worshippers”, Lalla Rookh, III, 116: “But, hark!—that war-whoop on the deck. . . .”

doubtful seemed the day    Cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, VI, 423: “. . . Who have sustain’d one day in doubtful fight. . . .”

empurpled    Made purple; reddened.

The literature on Tecumseh, the famous Shawnee chief who was born in 1768 in Old Piqua, Ohio and killed on October 5, 1813 at Moraviantown on the Thames River near what is now London, Ontario, is very extensive, and can be approached through Carl F. Klinck’s Tecumseh: Fact and Fiction in Early Records (1961; rpt. 1978), a collection of documents with commentaries and a bibliography. Benjamin Drake’s Life of Tecumseh (1841) may also be usefully consulted, as may the descriptions of Tecumseh (not collected by Klinck) in Buchanan, Sketches, 60f. and Heckewelder, Account, 295f. Kidd’s description of Tecumseh, who was widely known as “the Napoleon of the West” (see James Hall, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West [1835], I, 98), probably draws on various sources: however, it contains several distinctive features, including the erroneous implication that the Chief was present at the Battle of Tippecanoe “on the banks of the Wabash” in 1811, the assertion that he was “appointed head Chief” of the Hurons and the anecdote concerning his son, which point towards a specific source for much of his note: the account of Tecumseh’s last years in the essay entitled “Indian Warfare” in the Lucubrations of Humphrey Ravelin, Esq. (1823), pp. 338-359. (In “George Longmore: A New Literary Ancestor”, Dalhousie Review, 59 [Summer, 1979], 281-282, Mary Lu MacDonald has argued that George Proctor may be one of Longmore’s pseudonyms.) Reprinted with some omissions (notably the controversial story that the “. . . skin was flayed from [the Chief’s] lifeless corpse, and made into razor strops . . .” [p. 358] by the Americans), as “The Argument” to Longmore’s Tecumthé, a Poetical Tale (December, 1824 in The Canadian Review and Literary and Historical Journal and 1826 in Tales of Chivalry and Romance), Proctor’s (or Longmore’s own) “slight account” of “Tecumthé” (p. 337) is echoed by Kidd both verbally and factually; for example, Proctor notes that the Indians “denominated the Americans ‘Long Knives’”, gives the figure of “near three thousand” as the number of “Indian fighting-men” who assembled at Detroit in the spring of 1813” and guesses the age of Tecumseh’s son at “about fourteen or fifteen. . . .” To Proctor, probably by way of Longmore’s Tales of Chivalry and Romance, Kidd adds details of the Battle of the Thames (where, by nearly all accounts, thirty-three Indians were killed), and a negative assessment of General Henry Proctor (17?-1822), the British Commander on the western front and at Moraviantown, who was court-martialled for his behavior at the baffle, and suspended from the army for six months without pay.

the other shore    Presumably the southern, and American, shore of Lake Erie.

pond’rous    Ponderous: heavy; large.

Etna    Volcano on the island of Sicily. Cf. Campbell, Gertrude of Wyoming, I, viii: “. . . Etna’s fires . . .” and III, xx: “. . . fire o’erhung / The bandit groups in one Vesuvian glare. . . .”

feathered dart    Poeticism: arrow. See Longmore, Tecumthé, in Tales, p. 122: “To hurl the well-directed dart / Against each foeman’s panting heart.”

sable    Dark; black.

The idea of having the Indian’s take three Christian prisoners may have been suggested to Kidd by two passages in Buchanan, Sketches: “Three American prisoners were one day brought in by fourteen warriors . . .” (p. 173) and (an Indian Sachem is speaking) “We have now observed the Governor’s orders in bringing the three other Christian prisoners . . .” (p. 343). As suggested in the Introduction, p. xxxviii, Kidd’s “Christian foe-men, three” constitute an unholy trinity.

Ramsay translates this quotation from Juvenal, Satire, I, 147-148 as follows: “To these ways of ours Posterity will have nothing to add. . . .”

Kidd’s note is a slight reworking of W.E. Cormack’s statement at the formation of the Boeothick Institution on October 2, 1827, as reported in the Royal Gazette on November 13, 1827 (and subsequently in various Canadian newspapers). For the full text of Cormack’s statement, see James P. Howley, The Beothucks or Red Indians: The Aboriginal Inhabitants of Newfoundland (1915; rpt. 1976), pp. 182-183. The account of the slaughter of the Beothuk that Kidd accredits was based in Micmac tradition and has been treated with scepticism by modern scholars, including Howley; see Frederick W. Rowe, Extinction: the Beothuks of Newfoundland (1977), pp. 102-103. And see Howley, 169-232 and Rowe, pp. 61-80 for accounts of the discovery and death in St. John’s on June 6, 1829 of Shanawdithit (Nancy), the last of the Beothuks. Preconcerted: Arranged beforehand.

lost    Morally or spiritually ruined; damned. Kidd’s note quotes Mackenzie, Voyages, p. xcvii.

candid    Honest. Cf. l. 183.

hapless pair    Milton, Paradise Lost, X, 342-343: “. . . the hapless Pair [Adam and Eve] / Sat in thir sad discourse and various plaint. . . .”

paley    Paly (poeticism): pale.

fiend    A demon; the devil; a person with devilish qualities. Milton describes Satan as “the fiend” throughout Paradise Lost. And see particularly IX, 75 where Satan is “. . . involv’d in rising Mist. . . .” (C.R.S.)

even    Evening.

For a discussion of the significance of various images in this stanza, see Introduction, pp. xxviii-xxix.

fearless eagle    As suggested in the Introduction, an image with possible American associations. But see also Campbell, Gertrude of Wyoming, I, xxii. for the eagle as an Indian emblem of “a bold, noble, and liberal mind.”

blasted pine    Cf. Byron, Manfred, I, ii, 65: “. . . like these blasted pines . . .”, and Campbell, Gertrude of Wyoming, I, xv: “The hollow peace-tree fell beneath [the Huron’s (!)] tomahawk.”

tendrels    Tendrils.

screech-owl’s boding song    See “The Alarm of the Great Sentinal” in Jones, Traditions, I, 61-71 for the legend of “. . . an old white owl, who had for his lodge a hollow oak in which he dwelt with his family.” On account of the legend that this white owl once wamed their ancestors of impending danger, “. . . the hunters of the Delawares never harm this wise and good bird.” “Hollow oaks” and a “stunted pine” appear in “The Lake of the White Canoe” in Traditions, III, 11 and 15.

Cf. Buchanan, Sketches, p. 244: “ . . .[various precious items] are seen along difficult or dangerous roads, on rocks, and on the shores of rapids, as so many offerings made to the presiding spirit of the place”; Mackenzie, Voyages, p. c (quoted by Buchanan, p. 245) for the sacrifice of dogs “. . . on the bank of a river or lake . . .”; and Moore, “Song of the Evil Spirit of the Woods,” 44n. for two quotations referring to Indian sacrifices by “falls” and a “Cascade.” The quotation from Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 18), Metamorphoses, I, 574-576 is translated by Frank Justus Miller (1916; rpt. 1956) as follows: “Here, seated in a cave of overhanging rock, he was giving laws to his waters, and to his water-nymphs.”

Bytown is of course present-day Ottawa See the note to l. 494, above for some details of Kidd’s boyhood in Ireland.

fairy    Enchanted, in reference to the waterfall being the “bower” of a “Water-God” or, as Buchanan explains (Sketches, p. 244), a deity who is related but inferior to the Great Spirit.

unsullied    Untarnished; pure.

pinioned    Tied, bound.

Council-fire See the note to l. 24, above.

shade    Spirit.

annoy    Disturb.

Kidd’s note paraphrases and conflates comments made in Mackenzie, Voyages, pp. xcv-xcvii.

Miller translates the words of Hercules (Alcides), the Greek hero of enormous strength and great compassion, in Ovid, Metamorphoses, IX, 203-204 as follows: “And there are those who can believe that there are gods!”

asunder    Apart; into fragments.

Kidd’s note is an adaptation (with the addition of a pointed reference to “white Christians”) of a passage from Heckewelder, quoted in Buchanan, Sketches, pp. 20-21.

obsequies    Funeral rites.

Embosomed    Enclosed, enveloped.

The final sentence of this note appears to be Kidd’s own, but the preceding description of the bow and arrow is taken from Mackenzie, Voyages, p. 206 (a description of the Indians of the Peace river area of what is now Alberta!)

SACHEMS    See the note to l. 1021n. above.

William James, A Full and Correct Account of the Military Occurrences of the Late War between Great Britain and the United States of America (1818), I, 188-189 offers the following account of the treatment of General James Winchester (1752-1826) by Round-head (?-1812) after the battle of Frenchtown or Raisin River: “Stripped of his shirt and trousers, and suffering exceedingly from the cold, the American general [Winchester] was found by Colonel Proctor [see the note to 1. 1317n., above], near to one of the Indian fires, in the possession of the Wyandot chief Round-head. The Indian had decked himself out in the general’s great and uniform coats, waistcoat, and hat; and was so pleased with his new dress, that the British commanding officer had great difficulty in persuading him to make restitution.” In his Index (II, n.p.) James refers to this as Round-head’s “Safe delivery of his prisoner to Colonel Proctor.”

Cf. Henry, Travels and Adventures, p. 33: “On the following day, we reached an island [in Lake Huron], called La Cloche, because there is here a rock, standing on a plain, which, being struck, rings like a bell.”

Kidd may be alluding to a particular Indian legend here, but neither a specific source for the passage nor a specific referent for the “great mountain” has yet been discovered.

Cf. Robert McAfee, History of the Late War in the Western County (1816), p. 272: “The Miamies and the Wyandots were on the side of humanity and opposed the wishes of the others. The dispute between them had become serious when Colonel Elliot and Tecumseh came down from the batteries to the scene of camage. As soon as Tecumseh beheld it, he flourished his sword and in a loud voice ordered them ‘For shame do desist. It is a disgrace to kill a defenoeless prisoner.’ His orders were obeyed, to the great joy of the prisoners, who had by this time lost all hopes of being preserved. In this simple act, Tecumseh displayed more humanity, magnanimity, and civilization, than Procter with all his British associates in command, displayed through the whole war on the northwestern frontiers.”

In Annal, IX, vi, 5 (308) the early Roman poet Quintus Ennius (239-169 B.C.) describes the distinguished orator Cethegus (see also Horaoe, Epistles, II, ii, 117) as “the essence of persuasion” (see The Annals of Q. Ennius, ed. Otto Skutsch [1985], pp. 96 and pp. 480-486). Skutsch would amend “suadae medulla” to “Suadaique medulla”, but Kidd’s phrase has been allowed to stand here since it has precedents in the quotations of the phrase that are found in Cicero (“Suadai”, with “Suadae” as a conjectured correction) and Quintilian (“Suadae medullam”) (see Skutsch, pp. 480-481 and 485-486).

jet    Jet is a species of coal which, when polished, becomes extremely black and shiny.

Kidd’s note is taken without significant variation either from Colden, History, p. 3n. or, more likely, from Buchanan, Sketches, p. 336n..

The tree of peace    Cf. Colden, History, p. 51n. and Buchanan, Sketches, p. 346n.: “The Five Nations always express peace by the metaphor of a tree” (in Colden the initial letters of “Peace”, “Metaphor” and “Tree” are capitalized).

Kidd is quoting from “The Speech of Corn Plant, Half Town, and Big Tree, Chiefs of the Seneca Nation” in 1791 to the American President George Washington (1732-1799) as recorded in Buchanan, Sketches, p. 139. See also Buchanan, Sketches, p. 345ff. and Colden, History, p. 57 for references to the figure of the chain of friendship.

Cf. Buchanan, Sketches, pp. 344 (and n.)-347: “. . . his Lordship [the then Governor General of Virgima, Lord Howard of Effingham] having brought two hatchets, proposed to have them buried in token of peace [note: ‘All Indians make use of a hatchet or axe as an emblem of war’]. . . . Then the Indians desired that the hole might be dug to bury the axes. . . . The Mohawks said there was no need of burying any on their account, for the . . . chain had never been broken by them.” Character: report of the qualities and habits of a person or persons.

Cf. Mackenzie, Voyages, p. xcii: “. . . their hair [is] black, which is common to all the natives of North America. It is cut in various forms, according to the fancy of the several tribes, and by some is left in a long, lank, flow of nature”; and p. cxx: “They cut their hair in various forms, or leave it in a long, natural flow, according as their caprice or fancy suggests. The women always wear it in great length, and some of them are very attentive to its arrangement.” “Carolan” probably refers to Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738), the itinerant Irish harper and poet who was known as Carolan. And there may well be a semi-private joke operating in the reference to “a modem Carolan,” since one of Kidd’s fellow poets in The Irish Shield (see September-December, 1829) styled himself “Carolan” (see also Introduction, p. xxxix n. 7.) During Rome’s republican period, ordinary citizens wore a white outer garment called the toga virilis—literally, the garment of manhood (it was first put on at puberty).

See the note to l. 1565n., above for details of the speech to Washington by Corn Planter and other Seneca Chiefs that Kidd is quoting here, almost certainly from Buchanan, Sketches, pp. 135-136.

M. Leduc is the “seignior” at Les Cédres in Henry, Travels and Adventures, pp. 9-10; Kidd slightly alters the wording but not the substance of Henry’s account (p. 10) of a conversation with Leduc. Kidd’s note opens with a quotation, not from Leduc, but from Titus 1.15.

Wattap    See the note to l. 977n., above.

General Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) was President of the United States from 1829 to 1837. In the War of 1812 he distinguished himself by winning victories over both the British and the Creek Indians. In peace he used his status as a war hero to champion the causes of the lower and middle classes and to attack the bastions of wealth and monopoly, becoming in many people’s minds (including, apparently, Kidd’s) the incamation of the American democratic spirit. Probably using as his source The Irish Vindicator for December 22, 1829 (see Introduction, p. xxxii), Kidd conflates and quite accurately quotes passages from Jackson’s First Annual Message of December 8, 1829. There is irony either in Kidd’s praise of Jackson or, at Kidd’s expense, in the fact that Jackson advocated the removal of the Indians to west of the Mississippi. On May 28, 1830 Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, and in February, 1832 he supported Georgia in its defiance of an American Supreme Court decision in favour of the Cherokee (see the note to 1. 1256n., above). Both Thomas Moore (see the note to the Dedication of The Huron Chief) and Basil Hall (1788-1844, the author of, amongst other things, the three volume Travels in North America [1829]) were non-Americans—Moore was Irish, Hall was British—whose negative assessments of various aspects of American life (in the Preface and various pieces in Poems Relating to America and Travels, for example) earned them a certain amount of opprobrium in the United States. America’s “. . . ship-building transaction, to redeem unfortunate Greece is a reference to the commitment, made but not honoured, by the United States to supply the Greek nationalists with ships during their struggle for independence (1821-1829) from the Ottoman Empire. Re opitulandum non verbis: “One must give assistance with action not words” (proverbial).

Cf. Buchanan on the eloquence and language of the Indians in Sketches, pp. 51-52: “The style is primitive; the short sentences teem with power; a serene majesty is spread over the entire composition; and the pathos searches and melts the very soul.”

ranger    A rover, wanderer or rake and, especially in the United States, an armed man. Rangers from Virginia, Kentucky and elsewhere fought against both the Indians and the British in the War of 1812 and earlier—hence, very likely (and pace Butler’s Rangers), Kidd’s perjorative use of the term. In this and following lines, Kidd probably intended an allusion to the activities of Satan who resolves to elude the Angels guarding paradise by wrapping himself “. . . in mist / Of midnight vapor (Paradise Lost, IX, 158-159) and who is not only associated with midnight (see also IX, 58), but also, of course, the author of the “. . . impious War in Heav’n . . .” (I, 43).

John Macdonell (1768-1850) was a Scottish-born fur-trader who went to Britain’s American colonies in 1773 and came to Canada after the American Revolution. He became a partner in the Northwest Company in 1796 and was put in charge of the Upper Red River development in 1799 and the Athabasca River department in 1809. He retired in 1812, and settled at Point Fortune on the Ottawa river, where he ran a store and a boat service and remained for the rest of his life. vestibulum:  vestibule.

walking elements    Clouds. Walking is here used in the now obsolete sense of moving or shifting (not necessarily through the use of legs) from place to place.

In “Lines Written on Leaving Philadelphia” (in Poems Relating to America), Moore recalls the “. . . endearments he met, / As he stray’d by the wave of the Schuylldll . . .” (3 1-32) river, which flows through Pennsylvania and enters the Delaware river at Philadelphia. Moore also remembers spending “. . . hours / Where Schuylkill winds his way through banks of flowers . . .” in “To the Honourable W.R. Spencer . . .”, 99-100. (C.R.S.)

pulseless    Lifeless.

airy    Immaterial.

Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus:    “I also feel aggrieved, whenever good Homer ‘nods’” (Horace, Ars Poetica, 359). Cornelius Peter Van Ness (1782-1852), was a Vermont-born American lawyer, legislator, supreme-court justice and State Governor (Vermont: 1823-1825) who held at least two positions that brought him into contact with Canada: he was a customs officer in Vermont during the War of 1812 and, at the close of the war, he was one of the commissioners charged with establishing the boundary between the United States and British North America. Shortly after the inauguration of Jackson in 1829, Van Ness was appointed “minister to the Court of Spain”, a position that he held for about two years. Cf. Moore, ’To the Honourable W.K. Spencer From Buffalo, Upon Lake Erie” (in Poems Relating to America), 62n. for sentiments that are somewhat similar to those expressed in Kidd’s note. (C.R.S.)

dart    Arrow.

. . . future bards . . .    Cf. the penultimate paragraph of “Conlath and Cuthona”, the penultimate poem in The Poems of Ossian: “The chief of Mora dies. The vision grows dim on my mind. I behold the chiefs no more! But, O ye bards of future times, remember the fall of Conlath with tears. He fell before his day.” See also Tudor, Letters, p. 292: “The history of these people [the Indians], long after they shall have become extinct, will be interesting to our posterity, and furnish subjects for poetry and romance.”