So many miles they had walked together, so many obstacles they had overcome to find themselves at this point. She had tried to keep herself from loving this man, but in the end, her love for him had been the one thing she could not overcome. They were meant to be together, and no one or nothing but death itself would ever be able to tear them apart.
She knew this to be true because Skypilot had promised her, and he was one man who did not lie.
The service the Jesuit read was not in her language, nor Skypilot’s, nor even in the bit of French she knew. It was a language, as far as she could tell, unique to the priest and that mattered little. She knew she was pledging her heart to Skypilot and he was pledging his life to her, and that was all that mattered.
As the priest pronounced them husband and wife, Moon Song felt a profound feeling of security wash over her. It was done. She was married to a man named Skypilot who, appropriately enough, had helped her navigate the sky, giving her a glimpse of a hope bigger and better than anything she had imagined—a God who was no trickster like Nanabozho but who had come to earth and conquered death solely because of his love for her and the rest of humanity.
She was, at this moment, the happiest woman on the face of the earth. The oil painting that Isabella left behind, propped upon the mantel to dry, was an astonishing portrait of a woman who had seldom seen an image of herself. She was truly beautiful, and Skypilot . . . oh the love that was in his face for her and in hers for him.
Isabella laughed when she exclaimed over that fact. “Ah,” Isabella had said, “I saw that look in his eyes from the beginning, even when you were wet and bedraggled and half frozen.”
A few days after the wedding, Moon Song realized that she was seeing less and less of her father. He seemed to be always in need of something from Marquette. Skypilot informed her that from what he could tell, Ben Webster had become quite smitten with Isabella’s house full of children, her easel, and her easy smile.
Moon Song decided that she could live with that. Even if it meant having Isabella as a stepmother someday. Her father deserved a second chance at life. He had certainly given up enough of his own to create a second chance for her.
Epilogue
Three years after Moon Song and Skypilot’s marriage, the government workers found the small tribal village on top of the mountain and insisted they were to take a quota of the Chippewa children to the boarding school for Indians in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.
Standing Bear was not yet of school age, but still, for a moment, Moon Song again felt the fear of having her child taken away from her. That was, until her husband informed them that the children of the village were already under his tutelage along with three other teachers.
He introduced himself as an instructor of English and theology. He introduced his mother-in-law, the now famous Isabella Webster, as artist-in-residence who was teaching the children the fundamentals of drawing and painting. He introduced Fallen Arrow as a teacher of natural biology, herbalism, and native culture.
Moon Song’s father, Benjamin Webster, Skypilot quietly introduced as an excellent mathematics instructor as well as a trained attorney-at-law who would, if necessary, take the matter all the way to the Supreme Court if they laid one finger on the children of their village. Then he informed them that they were on private property but were welcome to tour the excellent school facilities whenever they wished.
The government workers took note of the sturdy buildings, warmly dressed, well-fed children, and hawk-like eyes of the attorney, and they never came back.
Theirs was a prosperous tribe, but they kept their prosperity a closely guarded secret.
Moon Song’s father, although a foolish young man at one time, had turned out to be rather excellent at judging land and minerals. Something he neglected to tell his father.
After the government workers left, she and little Standing Bear each took a flat tin pan with a curved lip and walked a mile from their village until they came to a small stream.
Standing Bear dug several handfuls of the black sand and placed it into his pan. Then he swirled the water around and around. This was a favorite form of play to him, and to her while the older children were at school.
“Am I doing it right, Mother?” he asked.
“Tip it a little more, son,” she said. “Let just a bit of the soil wash away each time.”
“I found one!” He triumphantly held up a small, rough pebble that shone in the sunlight.
“Yes, you did.” She put the tiny pebble into a small pouch that she kept tied to her waist. Then she went back to washing the black sand out of her own pan. It was pleasant work when the weather was fine. Frequently she brought a small picnic and they stayed all day.
No. Her father was no fool. He had chosen his land wisely and very, very quietly. He had not purchased land near the mountains of copper that marched up the western side of the Keweenaw Peninsula. Nor had he chosen land near the mines of Iron Mountain.
Instead, he’d chosen the relatively unnoticed land of the Huron Mountains.
“Mother,” Standing Bear said, “I found another pretty yellow rock for your collection.”
“Very pretty, little one.” She took the small, shiny nugget from his hand. It was not big enough to be worth a lot, but then, they didn’t need a lot. Her people had always lived simply.
Soon, there would be enough for her father to make another quiet, discreet trip on a train, carrying her pouch with him, and monies would be deposited into a private account, and then he would come home and they would go back to living the way they had chosen to live.
They had all learned a great deal. The best lesson of all was that gold, real gold, true gold, was found only within the hearts of those who loved.
Author’s Note
Many years ago, the mother of a friend showed me an old photo of her great-great-grandmother who was full-blooded Cherokee. I was fascinated and wanted to know more, but she knew little about her. I gathered that there had been some shame in having a native mother and grandmother and that in her later years, the native woman had been kept hidden.
Her name was Moon Song.
That name has haunted me for years. Such a beautiful, hopeful name to give a baby girl.
When a Native American was needed as a minor character in my first book of the Michigan historical series, The Measure of Katie Calloway, I asked for permission from the family to use Moon Song’s name. Little did I know that her story would eventually take over an entire book.
I had one idea in mind for her story, but my Moon Song character had another. Moon Song had some things to tell me, and I listened. The more I researched, the more the book changed from the simple, sweet love story I had planned of Moon Song and Skypilot traveling north together to her home. Things cried out to be included that I had not known when I began her story.
The forced boarding schools were a dark time in our country’s history and ended, to my shock, within my own lifetime. “Kill the Indian, Save the Child” was a famous rallying call.
The scene of Moon Song’s father hiring men to hold her mother back as he boarded the ship with their child happened in real life. White fathers did wrest their children away from native mothers. “Country marriages” between white men and native women were common and had little to no legal weight. One real-life heroine I discovered in my research was a white “legal” wife who insisted on supporting her husband’s native “country wife” and his children long after his death. I enjoyed redeeming Isabella by giving her that choice.
Other heroes in my eyes were those many white men who honored their “country marriages” and stayed the course, living out their lives where their native wives would be accepted and happy.
Reading about the slow dissolution in the 1700s and 1800s of the Native Americans’ ability to support themselves because of their increasing dependence on foreign goods, and their eventual dependence on government subsidies, was extremely disturbing and forced me to draw a parallel with our society�
��s similar modern-day dependence.
One bright spot in my research was my discovery of a Jesuit priest named Father Baraga, otherwise known as the “Snowshoe Priest,” who traveled hundreds of miles each winter throughout the Upper Peninsula. He was a welcome guest in every wigwam, longhouse, or cabin. He was revered by Native Americans and whites alike and died the year my story begins. Father Slovic is a thinly disguised representation of the man I imagined Father Baraga to be.
Although I personally entered the depths of an 1800s-era Keweenaw copper mine, I did not, in the end, have the heart to force Skypilot to work down there, although that had been my initial intent. I thought his time would be better spent trying to take control of an unruly, divided classroom of American, Cornish, and Irish children.
Steamships did blow up, catch fire, collide with one another, and sink at an alarming rate on the Great Lakes. Skypilot, Moon Song, and Isabella’s plight at Painted Rocks Lakeshore is based on a story I heard while sailing along that coast, of a man and woman being the only survivors in that area after a similar accident.
Also, even though there have never been any truly productive gold mines in Michigan (the Ropers Mine did produce for a short while, and there are rumors of others opening in the future), I was surprised to learn that there have been at least two purported discoveries of gold mines in the Huron Mountains that have been lost and never again found. I like to think that Moon Song and her little boy had a wonderful life playing in the streams of the Huron Mountains, panning for gold, quietly surface-mining one of those lost discoveries.
Serena B. Miller is the author of The Measure of Katie Calloway and A Promise to Love, as well as numerous articles for periodicals such as Woman’s World, Guideposts, Reader’s Digest, Focus on the Family, Christian Woman, and more. She lives on a farm in southern Ohio.
Website: www.bakerpublishinggroup.com/revell/newsletters-signup
Twitter: RevellBooks
Facebook: Revell
Under a Blackberry Moon Page 28