The White Canoe

The White Canoe; or, The Spirit of the Lake (1886), by the author of The Silent Hunter, is a serialized frontier romance. The narrative opens with Isaonie (the Silent Stream), a young Comanche chief of high standing, asleep in his wigwam with his wife Eleah and their twelve-month-old son Neosho. Eleah is of Mexican noble descent—a descendant of Montezuma—captured during a raid and married to Isaonie when he saved her from scheduled execution by torture after his tribe's war losses. Despite her captivity, their union deepened into genuine affection; her superior education earned her influence over her warrior husband. The story begins when Isaonie returns from hunting troubled and melancholy. Eleah, alarmed at his distress and his avoidance of their usual evening intimacies with their son, eventually coaxes from him that his deceased father calls him to the spirit world. He begins recounting the legend of the White Canoe, a tale involving a young warrior's journey to the land of souls, but the text breaks off incomplete.