January 8, 1845: “Menominee Dirge.”, by William H. C. Hosmer, published in the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel.
Gentlemen—the enclosed dirge was written a few years since in the wilds of Wisconsin, and suggested by the burial of an Indian girl of the Menominee Tribe. I walked in the procession, and it astonished me to observe with what regularity they tuned their tread to the wild notes of their funeral song.
The concluding line of each stanza of the enclosed embodied words I caught from the singers; and I am indebted to Mr. Solomon Juneau, of Milwaukie, for a translation of them. Why are they not as musical as the famous Greek termination of Byron’s “Maid of Athens?”
I have just emerged from a stormy political sea, and am searching now for purer waters.— Wishing you health and happiness, I subscribe myself, Truly yours, W. H. C. Hosmer.
We bear the dead—we bear the dead,
In robes of the otter habited,
From the quiet depths of the greenwood shade
To her lowly couch on the hill-top made,
There, there the sun, when dies the day,
In vain the winds lift her tresses black—
Flings mournfully his parting ray;—
“Ke-ton-ee-mi-coo wa-was-te-nac!”
When plows tear up the forest floor,
And hunters follow the deer no more;
When the red man’s council-hearth is cold,
His glory like “a tale that’s told,”
Spare, white man, spare one oak to wave
Its bough above the maiden’s grave,
And the dead will send a blessing back—
“Ke-ton-ee-mi-coo wa-was-te-nac!”
The flower of our forest maids is gone,
And a night of woe is coming on;
Soon will the homes of our people be
Far from the bright Menominee;
But yearly, to your burial place,
Some mourning band of our luckless race,
To smooth the turf, will wander back—
“Ke-ton-ee-mi-coo wa-was-te-nac!”
The soul of our peerless one took flight,
While moaned the wind of yesternight;
She heard a voice from the chime of souls,
Sweet as the lay of orioles,
Say—“Come to that bright and blissful land
Where death waves not his skeleton hand,
Where the sky with storm is never black”—
“Ke-ton-ee-mi-coo wa-was-te-nac!”