Green Men

 

 

 

 

 

This short story was told by Indians of DesMoines County Iowa around 1880 who's ancestral  home for hundreds of years was near Lake Michigan in what is now the states of Illinois and Wisconsin. 

It came upon the wind one night that white men with green coats had killed a village in the east near river that walks. Under cover of dark many green men surrounded a village at sunrise the green men killed everyone in the village who did not run. Survivors included five children who fled safely to the woods or swam across the river. 

Other members of the village survived because they were gone hunting. They returned from a hunting trip to find their village burned and everyone dead.

Indians in Illinois, fearful that the green men might attack them, sent messengers to tribes in the Ohio Valley and to enemies in Michigan and Indiana to learn what they could, and try to arrange  what amounted to a mutual defense force. 

NOTE: According to Great Grandmother Williamson, the local Indians never learned what tribe was killed, where it was located, or who did it.

Even as a kid I just hated stories that ended that way. The only clues available were included in the story. In the 1600s and 1700s many tribes along the border with Canada from Lake Superior clear up to the state of Maine, collaborated with the French to attack British interests in Colonial America and colonists that lived within fifty miles of the border with Canada.

A few years ago I saw a movie, someone's Raiders (forget the name), but I recall that the raiders wore green buckskins and they were after an Indian tribe they called the Abenaki.

I don't know where that particular tribe lived, but there are apparently several tribes in that group and they lived on both sides of the St. Lawrence River in Canada and America.

Copyright Don Kelly 1997 - 2002