Now in my eighties, every once in a while on a sunny day I’ll drive back on an old dirt road east of the lake to stop and gaze out in a field, at a couple of large scraggy white pines with a small grassy lump under them. Both the trees and the lump have seen better days.
Long ago before he died my dad took me back into the woods to show me this rundown abandoned one room hovel with no windows, a low sod roof and a dirt floor. There was a small rusty stovepipe out the back earthen wall with what was left of an old weathered door drooping off one hinge that swung in the wind. It looked like critters had been living in it for some time.
He told me that one day as a little kid he was walking back in the south woods and met the last living member of Chief Shavehead’s Potawatomi tribe. He didn’t have a last name. They just called him Ole Injun Joe. Ancient, indigent and bent over with a widow’s hump, he spoke slow broken English and didn’t smell too good.
There he lived alone with his old bony cow and a few hungry chickens that had about outlived their time and place. Without a friend or family he was just a worthless smelly, begging pain in the neck who was no longer welcome anywhere. The white settlers who had moved in and bought out the land got tired of this wandering, old nuisance hanging around. So one late autumn day, with a loaded shotgun, they invited him out to live anywhere on the planet except around them on the sandy sunny shores of Shavehead Lake. Cold and alone he was weak as water and the winter was coming on.
My dad, as a little kid at the time, never really understood what Ole Injun Joe meant when he quietly said, “Little boy, don’t be the last of your tribe to die.” Long gone, and forgotten he lays buried somewhere in an unmarked grave along with his time and his tribe.
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