slain to increase the general alarm; but as yet the _warwhoop_ had
not been raised.
Perceiving a savage near him, who was placing his hands to his mouth
and puffing out his cheeks, previous to raising that dreadful signal
for a general onslaught, MacGillivray, unable longer to restrain the
fury which boiled within him, drew the Highland _tack_ (_i.e._ steel
pistol) from his belt and shot him dead.
"Rash man," exclaimed Munro, "we are lost!"
"Fix your bayonets, my lads, and bear back this naked rabble!" said
MacGillivray, drawing his sword. "Remember, colonel, you are a
kinsman of the House of Foulis; in an hour like this belie not your
name!"
A thousand throats now uttered the horrible whoop of the Iroquois,
and from a myriad echoes the vast forest encircling the shores of the
Horican replied.
It was the death-knell of the _Yengees_; and now ensued that
frightful episode of the war known in American history as the
Massacre of Fort William Henry.
"In the name of God and the King, keep together, 60th--shoulder to
shoulder, Royal Americans!" cried Munro; but his soldiers, crushed
and impeded by the pressure, strove in vain to free their muskets and
bear back the human tide that closed upon them. In the confusion
poor old Munro lost his child, and with him all his soldierly
coolness and self-possession. He became a prey to grief and
distraction.
"Lochmoy! Lochmoy! stand by MacGillivray!" were the shouts of the
Black Watch, as they flung aside their muskets, knapsacks, and
cantines, and, unsheathing their dirks and claymores, closed
hand-to-hand with the Iroquois, and hewed them down like children on
every side.
"Dhia! o Dhia! my wife!" was the first thought of MacGillivray; and
when last he saw Mary she was standing erect on the tumbril, the
horses of which had been shot, wringing her hands in an attitude of
despair, as the brown tide of the Iroquois swept round her like a
living sea; and the last she saw of her husband was his form towering
above all others, when combating bravely and making frantic efforts,
with Alaster MacGregor, Ewen Chisholm, Bane the piper, and other
Celtic swordsmen, to reach her; but by a horde of savages they were
driven into the forest, and she saw them no more.
The French guard offered but a feeble resistance, and fled; then
ensued a thousand episodes replete with horror! On all hands the
unfortunate survivors of the siege were hewn down, slashed, stabbed,
tomahawked, and scalped. Shrieks, groans, screams, prayers, and wild
entreaties for mercy, with the occasional explosions of musketry,
rang through the forest; but above all other sounds, on earth or in
the sky of heaven, rose the appalling whoop of the unglutted Iroquois.
One of Mary's companions--the widow--was literally hewn to pieces in
a moment, while her children were whirled round by the feet, and had
their brains dashed out against the trees; her other friend, the wife
of Captain Dacres, a fair-haired and pretty young Englishwoman, was
torn from her side. The glittering hatchet of one Indian cleft her
head to the nose, while another caught her body as it was falling,
and by a single sweep of his knife shred off her scalp, and waved the
silken curls as a trophy above his head. Mary was to be their next
victim; but ere they could drag her down she flung herself at the
feet of Ossong, and, clasping his moccassined legs, said in his own
language--
"I will pray the Great Spirit that he pardon you my death; but do not
torture me; do not make me suffer--I am a weak woman, and about to
become a mother."
Ossong grinned hideously, and grasping her by the hair raised his
scalping-knife; but at that moment his hand was grasped from behind.
He turned furiously, and was confronted by Orono.
"Spare her!" said the latter, in his guttural tones.
"For what? My ears are not as the ears of an ass, therefore I hear
not follies; nor of a fox, therefore I hear no lies!" responded the
fierce savage; "spare her for what?"
"The wigwam of Orono."
Ossong laughed scornfully, and turned away in search of other
victims, which he found but too readily.
Mary clung to her preserver. She gave a wild and haggard glance over
that forest scene, in the recesses of which the shrieks of the
destroyer and destroyed were already dying away--over that wilderness
of red-coated dead, of mothers and their children, gashed, hewn and
dismembered, scalped and mutilated--over the debris of scattered
muskets, torn standards, and broken drums, rifled baggage, open
knapsacks, hats, and powdered wigs--everywhere blood, death, and
disorder! Then the light seemed to go out of her eyes; she became
senseless, and remembered no more.
Saved by the French, Colonels Munro and Young with three hundred
fugitives reached Albany; and General Webb, when all was over, sent
out five hundred men from Fort Edward to glean up survivors and bury
the dead. Our soldiers perished in the forest in scores under every
species of torture, wounds, thirst and fatigue; many were flayed and
roasted alive by the Iroquois; others were stripped nude, scalped,
and made a mark for bullets or tomahawks till death relieved them of
their misery.
"Thus," says Smollett, "ended (with the fall of Fort William Henry)
the third campaign in America, where, with an evident superiority
over the enemy, an army of twenty thousand regular troops, a great
number of provincial forces, ana a prodigious naval power--not less
than twenty ships of the line--we abandoned our allies, exposed our
people, suffered them to be cruelly massacred in sight of our troops,
and relinquished a large and valuable tract of country, to the
eternal disgrace and reproach of the British name!"
Three of the Black Watch alone escaped this massacre--viz., Ewen
Chisholm, with Alaster MacGregor--whose adventures were somewhat
remarkable--and another, of whom hereafter.
Duncan MacGregor, a soldier from Glengyle, and as some averred a son
of the venerable _Glhun Dhu_, who was captain of Doune Castle under
Prince Charles, fell mortally wounded by a bullet from the rifle of
an Indian in the woods. On finding himself dying, he begged his
clansman Alaster to convey his little all--a few pounds of back pay
and prize-money--to his aged and widowed mother. Faithful to the
trust reposed in him by his expiring friend, this poor fellow bore
the money about with him, untouched, throughout the most arduous
struggles of the American campaign, during a long captivity in
France, and amid the urgent necessities of nearly ten years of
privation, until he reached Glengyle, and then he handed to the
mother of his comrade the money, still wrapped in the moccassin of a
Pawnee, whom he had slain at Fort William Henry.
Ewen Chisholm, one of the eight faithful men of the Coire-gaoth in
Glenmorriston, survived the war in America, but was slain when the
Black Watch was at Guadaloupe, in 1759; and his death is thus
recorded in the _Edinburgh Chronicle_ for that year, which contains a
letter from Ensign Grant--known as Alaster the One-handed--detailing
the circumstance:--
"When the troops were to embark, the outposts were called in. This
soldier (Chisholm) had been placed as a single sentinel by his
captain. When summoned to come off, he refused, unless his captain
who had appointed him his post would personally give him orders. He
was told that his captain and most of the troops were embarked, and
that unless he came off he would be taken prisoner; he still refused,
and said he would keep his station. When the troops were all on
board the ships, they saw a party of forty or fifty men coming
towards him; he retired a little, and setting his back to a tree,
fired his gun at them, then, throwing it aside, he drew his sword,
rushed amongst them, and after making considerable havoc was cut to
pieces."
Such was the end of Ewen Chisholm; but to resume:--
The noon of the next day--the 11th August--was passed before Mary
became fully alive to the desolate nature of her position--to all
that she had lost and suffered--and to the circumstance that in her
delirium she had become the mother of a little daughter.
She was lying on a bed of soft furs of various kinds, within a hut
formed by branches and matting tied to poles, and covered with broad
pieces of bark. Upon these poles hung various Indian weapons, at the
sight of which she closed her swimming eyes as the memory of her
husband and the horrors of yesterday rushed upon her. An old Indian
woman, hideous as a tawny skin full of wrinkles and streaked with
paint could make her, sat near, squatted on the ground like a Burmese
idol; but this ancient squaw was nursing the new-born infant
tenderly, and with care placed it in the bosom of Mary, who wept and
moaned with sorrow and joy as she pressed it in her arms, and the new
emotions of a mother woke within her; but again the light seemed to
pass from her eyes, and a faintness came over her. Then starting,
she sought to shake it off that she might look upon her child, and
strive to trace the features of Roderick in her face; but the
weakness she suffered was too great--she sank back upon the bed of
furs, and lay still, and to all appearance asleep, though tears were
oozing fast from her long black lashes.
Close by, behind a matting, crouched an Indian warrior. This person
was Orono concealing himself, for the honest creature felt
instinctively, that at such a critical time his presence or his
aspect might very naturally excite the terror of the desolate
patient. Two terrible questions were ever on the tongue and in the
heart of the latter.
"Was Roderick safe?"
If so, how were she and her babe to join him?
At last she remembered Orono, who had preserved her, and on the third
day, though weak, and though she knew it not--dying--she inquired of
the squaw where he was.
"Here," replied the watchful Indian, stepping forward, while his eyes
beamed with pleasure, on finding that he was not forgotten.
"My husband, Orono--know you aught of my husband?"
The Indian shook his head.
"When did you last see him?" she asked, imploringly.
"Fighting against a hundred braves in the forest, where the pawaws of
the French have put up two trees, _thus_," said he, crossing his
fingers to indicate a cross made by the Jesuits near the Horican.
"Alas! my mother taught me that the way of the cross was the way to
heaven. Oh, my husband!--and that at the foot of that cross I should
give up my whole heart. God, who bringeth good out of evil, will
order all things for the best; but can this be, if my husband, my
friend, my protector, the father of my babe, be slain? May he not
have been preserved for himself and this little one? Oh, yes--God is
kind. His will is adorable," continued the poor girl, kissing her
babe in a wild rapture of resignation and despair.
She recalled with sorrow and horror the many whom she had seen so
barbarously destroyed, and others whom she believed to have perished;
the brave soldiers, the kind old colonel, and the poor little boy,
his son, to whom she had been almost a mother, during the terrors of
the recent siege. Their voices lingered in her ear; their faces
hovered before her.
Orono visited the place where he had last seen the "white chief," as
he not inaptly named MacGillivray; but could discover no trace of
him. Many of the dead had already been interred by the soldiers of
Montcalm, who now possessed the shattered remains of Fort William
Henry; others had been devoured by wild animals. No body answering
the description of Roderick had been, found or seen among the slain
by the Iroquois. He was known to have a gold bracelet of Mary's,
rivetted round his sword arm; but that might have been cut off, or
buried with him, undiscovered.
Mary felt a great repugnance for the old squaw; yet the poor Indian
was kind and attentive in her own barbarous fashion; and the patient,
while her heart was swollen almost to bursting, conversed with her,
in the hope of obtaining surer protection for her little one, and
discovering some traces of its father.
"What would it avail you, were he found?" asked the squaw.
"Why?"
"The Red warriors would immediately take his scalp, for the oracles
of the pawaws have driven them mad. After three days of conjuration,
they have told us--"
"They--are the pawaws a tribe of the Iroquois?"
"They are our wise men--our oracles."
"And they told--what?"
"That the devils would not hinder the pale faces from being masters
of our country. We have fought bravely; but the brandy, the gold and
silver of the Yengees are more powerful than the prophesies of the
lying pawaws or the knives of our warriors."
"Every Red man in the land has dug up the war-hatchet," said a
strange guttural voice; "the print of the white moccassins will soon
be effaced on the prairies and in the woods--their graves alone will
remain--their scalps and their bones."
The old squaw started nimbly forward, and poor Mary pressed her
little naked babe closer to her breast, on seeing the towering form
of Ossong, streaked with his ghastly war paint, appear between her
and the door of the wretched wigwam in which she lay so helplessly at
his mercy.
"What seek _you_ in the dwelling of Orono?" demanded the Indian woman
with some asperity.
"Neither the squaw nor the papoose of the white man," replied Ossong,
scornfully.
"It is well. You are in your native land, and can find the bones of
your fathers; but here the poor squaw of the white chief is a
stranger."
"And Orono will protect her," added the other savage, who bore that
name, stepping proudly forward.
"The pawaws say our fathers come from the rising sun, and that we
must go towards the place of its setting---that _there_ is the future
home of the Red man," said Ossong, as a savage glare lit up his eyes
and he played with his scalping-knife; "shall even one pale face be
permitted to live, if such things are said? Go--Orono has become a
woman!"
With this taunt, the most bitter that can be made to an Indian,
Ossong waved his hand, and strode away with a sombre air of fury and
disdain.
As he left the hut, a glittering ornament which hung at his neck
caught the eye of Mary. She uttered a faint cry, for she was weak
and feeble, and while clutching her babe in one arm, strove to raise
her attenuated form with the other. She endeavoured to call back
Ossong; but her voice failed, and she sank despairingly on her bed of
skins. Among the gewgaws which covered the broad breast of Ossong,
to her horror, she had discovered the gilt regimental gorget of her
husband, which she knew too well, by its silver thistle, as there had
been no other officer of Highlanders but be in Fort William Henry.
The eyes of Orono gleamed brightly; he, too, had detected the cause
of her agitation, and he said,
"It is an ornament of the pale chief, worn by Ossong."
"It was my husband's! Oh, Orono, ask him--for pity, ask him, where,
when, how he obtained possession of it."
"Ossong is fierce as a Pequot," said the Iroquois, sadly.
"Ask him, lest I die!" exclaimed Mary, passionately.
"Ossong in a strong and fierce warrior," replied the savage, gently;
"I will steal it for you, if I can. Ossong is cruel. Listen; he
found a pale face on the shore of the Horican; he was wounded and
feeble, so Ossong stripped and bound him to a gum-tree, where he
roasted him with sedge-grass, and, before death, forced him to eat
his own ears, which were cut off by a scalping-knife."
"Oh, my husband!" exclaimed Mary, in despair; "and a fiend such as
this has had his hands on you!"
"I fear me," said Orono, shaking his head, "that he you weep for has
gone to where the sun hides itself at night."
"What mean you, Orono?"
"Away beyond the great prairies of the buffaloes--to the place of
sleep--the wigwam of grass, where the Indian sleeps sounder than even
the fire-water of the white man can make him."
"Alas! you mean the grave?"
The Iroquois nodded his head, and relapsed into silence, while with a
low moan at a suggestion which seemed to fulfil her own fears, and
seemed only too probable, Mary fell back and became, to all
appearance, insensible.
Several days passed, during which she hovered between time and
eternity; but nothing, even in civilized life, could surpass the
watchful kindness and attention of the poor but grateful savage on
whose mercy she found herself thrown. _How_ Ossong became possessed
of the regimental gorget--whether he had found it in the wood, or
torn it from her husband's neck when dead, Orono could never
discover, as his tawny compatriot was animated in no measured degree
by the worst attributes of the American Indian--craft, timidity,
fickleness, ferocity, revenge, and quickness of apprehension. Hence
there were no means of wresting the important--perhaps
dreadful--secret from him. He was soon after shot in a skirmish by
the soldiers of Fort Edward, and the story of the gilded badge
perished with him.
"Oh, never to see my dear, dear husband again--never, in this dreary
world! It is a terrible blow--a dreadful and soul-crushing
conviction!" Mary continued to exclaim, "God has required many
sacrifices of me; but that Roderick should never see the wee pet-lamb
I have brought into this vale of woe is the bitterest thought of all;
and to what a fate shall I leave it! My heart is like a stone--my
brain a chaos."
"Remain and be the squaw of Orono; he is good and gentle, and will
love the lonely pale face, and will teach her to hoe rice," said the
enterprising proprietor of the wigwam, who also possessed a valuable
property in wampum and scalp-locks.
"Remain here! a month, yea, a week of this will kill me, Orono.
Remain here, and so far away from my country--from the deep glens
where the heather blooms so sweetly! I cannot stay, Orono,"
continued the poor girl, wildly. "I have been taught to love my
native land by the voices of my father, who fell in battle, of my
mother, who died of sorrow, and of my brave husband, who perished in
this hated wilderness!"
"Orono understands," said the Indian, quietly; "he, too, loves the
hunting-grounds of the Iroquois; but he will protect the poor pale
face and her child."
Seeing her weep bitterly, after a pause, during which he regarded her
attentively--
"Orono," said he, "is but a poor Indian warrior and knows not the God
of the pale faces; but may he speak."
"Say on."
"Turn to the Great Spirit of the Iroquois, who dwells far away beyond
the lakes and the prairies; be resigned to his will. The lightning
is not swifter than his wrath; the hunting-grounds are not greater
than his goodness. This Great Spirit knows every leaf in the
woods--every ripple on the waters; and doubtless he has removed the
white chief from evils more terrible than yonder battle by the
Horican; for sudden death is good."
"How think you so?"
"I know not; but the pawaws say so."
Here was a subject for one who could reflect; but the heart of Mary
seemed to have died within her.
"Oh yes," continued the Indian, patting her white shoulder gently
with his strong brown hand, and pointing south; "he is gone to the
abode of the Great Spirit, to the happy hunting-grounds, where the
souls of all brave warriors go, and where they seem to live again."
"Oh that I were with him."
"Orono has no squaw now; but the Oneida girl who slept on his breast
is there."
"Orono," said the widow, touched by his tone, and gathering hope from
his protection, "is a good warrior."
"He is a brave one!" replied the Iroquois, proudly.
"It is better to be good than brave; and you _are_ good."
"Orono is grateful to the squaw of the white chief, and has given his
promise to protect her; so the strongest and tallest braves of the
Iroquois must respect that promise. My brothers say, Let the pale
face die----"
"She will not trouble you long," said Mary, weeping over her child,
for which she had neither proper nurture nor little garments, nor
even the rites of baptism.
"Are we to perish, they cry, that pale faces may gather, and dig, and
sow, on the sacred banks of the Horican? Are they sent here to
inherit the home of the Indian, the hunting-ground of his fathers,
and the great solemn barrows where their bones lie by the Oswego and
the Mississippi, as if the Great Spirit loved them better than his
children the Iroquois."
From this day fever of mind and body--an illness for which she had
neither nurse, physician, nor comforts around her--prostrated the
faculties of the poor widow, for such she deemed herself. As each
link in the chain of life is broken by death, we are united more
closely to those which remain; but to poor Mary all seemed a hopeless
blank. The _last link_ was a child, whose feeble life and doubtful
future filled her with dismay.
Now that Roderick was gone, her heart seemed to follow him. She
clung with fonder affection to the world that was to come, and where
she was to meet him; but her babe, could she selfishly forsake it?
Her heart was sorely lacerated. Eternity seemed close--terribly
_close_ to her; and her husband being there, instituted to her a more
endearing tie between this world and that mysterious "bourne from
whence no traveller returns." She had no terror of this journey, for
he whom she loved with all the strength of her soul had gone before
and awaited her there. At times she fancied that he chid her delay;
she felt drawn towards that spirit-world by a chord of affection
which made her now yearn for it, as before she had wept and yearned
for her Highland home.
But her babe--so innocent and so deserted--could she die and leave it
among the Iroquois?
How did Roderick die--where? Peacefully or in torture? Was he
buried, or lying still unentombed?
These dreadful questions and thoughts were ever before her in the
intervals of waking from her fits of delirium, which often lasted for
hours; and her snatches of sleep were filled by horrible dreams.
In these intervals a new hope dawned in her heart. Her husband might
have escaped and gained Fort Edward or the army of Montcalm, and she
might yet reach him with her child if protected by Orono. This idea
gave a new and exciting impulse to her already overwrought frame; but
it came, alas! too late, for, a few days after the birth of her
little one, she too surely felt herself dying--dying there with none
to hear her story, or to whom she could bequeath her helpless babe--a
thought sufficient alone to kill her. With the last effort of her
strength she took from her now matted hair the Celtic marriage brooch
(the old palladium of her husband's family) which she had kept there
concealed since the day of their departure from Fort William Henry,
and fixing it to a fragment of her own dress, which she had wrapped
round the infant, pointed to it, that Orono might deem it an amulet
or talisman--"a great medicine"--and expired!
* * * *
It was about the time of sunset, and before interring the body in a
deep grave which he had scooped at the foot of a gum-tree, and lined
with soft furs, Orono sat silent and watching in his wigwam. Near
the dead mother her unconscious child slept peacefully. The poor
Indian was perhaps praying, and feeling thankful in his heart that he
had discharged a debt of gratitude, and would yet do more by
conveying the little orphan to the nearest white settlement, and
there leaving her to her fate.
The evening was beautiful, like those which preceded the siege and
the massacre. A mellow sunset was deepening on the hills that
overlook the waters of Lake George, and the setting beams played with
a wavering radiance on the green foliage that was tossed like verdant
plumage by the evening wind, and on the ripples that ran before it
over the bosom of that lovely lake. All was still within the Indian
hut where the dead woman lay, with her long black lashes resting on
the pallid cheek from which they never more would rise: and with her
pure, pale profile, sharply defined against the coarse grass matting
that screened her wretched couch. Crouching on one side was the old
squaw, appalled by the marble hue of the strange corpse; on the other
sat Orono, divested of his plume and all his ornaments in token of
grief, with his deep glittering eyes fixed on the rocky bluffs which
seemed to start forward from the copse-covered slopes, and were then
tinted with a deep purple by the sinking sun.