ROMANCE OF THE BORDER.
The romance of border-life is inseparably associated with woman, being her
natural attendant during her wanderings through the wilderness. A
distinguished American orator has suggested that a series of novels might
be written founded upon the true stories of the border-women of our
country. Such a contribution to our literature has thus far been made only
to a limited extent. The reason for this deficiency will be obvious on a
moment's reflection. The _true stories_ of the pioneer wives and
mothers are often as interesting as any work of fiction, and need no
embellishment from the imagination of a writer, because they are crowded
with incidents and situations as thrilling as those which form the staple
out of which novels are fabricated; love and adventure, hair-breadth
escapes, heart-rending tragedies on the frontier, are thus woven into a
narrative of absorbing and permanent interest, _permanent_ because it
is part of the history and biography of America. Some of the truest of
these stories are those which are most deeply fraught with tenderness and
romance. What is more calculated to move the mind and heart of man for
example than a story of two lovers environed by some deadly danger, or of
separation and reunion, or a love faithful unto death?
Many years ago a young pioneer traveling across the plains met a lady to
whom he became attached, and after a short courtship they were united in
marriage. A trip over the plains in those days was not one to be chosen for
a honey-moon excursion but the pair bore their labors and privations
cheerfully; perils and hardships only seemed to draw them closer together,
and they were looking forward to a home on the Pacific slope where in
plenty and repose they would be indemnified for the pains and fatigues of
the journey. But their life's romance was destined, alas! to a sudden and
mournful end. While crossing one of the rapid mountain streams their boat
filled with water, and though the young man struggled manfully to gain the
shore with his bride, the rush of the torrent bore them down and they sank
to rise no more. An hour later their bodies were found locked together in a
last embrace. The rough mountaineers had not the heart to unclasp that
embrace but buried them by the side of the river in one grave.
The Indian was of course an important factor in the composition of these
border romances. He was generally the villain in the plot of the story, and
too often a successful villain whose wiles or open attacks were the means
of separating two lovers. These tales have often a tragical catastrophe,
but sometimes the _denouement_ is a happy one, thanks to the courage
and constancy of the heroine or hero.
[Footnote: Potters Life of Daniel Boone] Among the adventurers whom Daniel
Boone the famous hunter and Indian fighter of Kentucky, describes as having
re-inforced his little colony was a young gentleman named Smith, who had
been a major in the militia of Virginia, and possessed a full share of the
gallantry and noble spirit of his native State. In the absence of Boone he
was chosen, on account of his military rank and talent, to command the rude
citadel which contained all the wealth of this patriarchal band, their
wives, their children, and their herds. It held also an object particularly
dear to this young soldier--a lady, the daughter of one of the settlers, to
whom he had pledged his affections. It came to pass upon a certain day when
a siege was just over, tranquillity restored, and the employment of
husbandry resumed, that this young lady, with a lady companion, strolled
out, as young ladies in love are very apt to do, along the bank of the
Kentucky River.
Having rambled about for some time they espied a canoe lying by the shore,
and in a frolic stepped into it, with the determination of visiting a
neighbor on the opposite bank. It seems that they were not so well skilled
in navigation as the Lady of the Lake who paddled her own canoe very
dexterously; for instead of gliding to the point of destination they were
whirled about by the stream, and at length thrown on a sandbar from which
they were obliged to wade to the shore. Full of the mirth excited by their
wild adventure they hastily arranged their dresses and were proceeding to
climb the bank, when three Indians rushed from a neighboring covert, seized
the fair wanderers, and forced them away. Their savage captors evincing no
sympathy for their distress, nor allowing them time for rest or reflection,
hurried them along during the whole day by rugged and thorny paths. Their
shoes were worn off by the rocks, their clothes torn, and their feet and
limbs lacerated and stained with blood. To heighten their misery one of the
savages began to make love to Miss ------, (the intended of Major S.) and
while goading her along with a pointed stick, promised in recompense for
her sufferings to make her his squaw. This at once roused all the energies
of her mind and called its powers into action. In the hope that her friends
would soon pursue them she broke the twigs as she passed along and delayed
the party as much as possible by tardy and blundering steps. The day and
the night passed, and another day of agony had nearly rolled over the heads
of these afflicted girls, when their conductors halted to cook a hasty
repast of buffalo meat.
The ladies meanwhile were soon missed from the garrison. The natural
courage and sagacity of Smith now heightened by love, gave him the wings of
the wind and the fierceness of the tiger. The light traces of feminine feet
led him to the place of embarkation; the canoe was traced to the opposite
shore; the deep prints of the moccasin in the sand told the rest of the
story.
The agonized Smith, accompanied by a few of his best woodsmen, pursued the
spoil-encumbered foe. The track once discovered they kept it with that
unerring sagacity so peculiar to our hunters. The bended grass, the
disentangled briars, and the compressed shrubs afforded the only, but to
them the certain indication of the route of the enemy. When they had
sufficiently ascertained the general course of the retreat of the Indians,
Smith quitted the trace, assuring his companions that they would fall in
with them at the pass of a certain stream-head for which he now struck a
direct course, thus gaining on the foe who had taken the most difficult
paths.
Having arrived at the stream, they traced its course until they discovered
the water newly thrown upon the rocks. Smith, leaving his party, now crept
forward upon his hands and knees, until he discovered one of the savages
seated by a fire, and with a deliberate aim shot him through the heart. The
women rushed towards their deliverer, and recognizing Smith, clung to him
in the transport of newly awakened joy and gratitude; while a second Indian
sprang towards him with his tomahawk. Smith, disengaging himself from the
ladies, aimed a blow at his antagonist with his rifle, which the savage
avoided by springing aside, but at the same moment the latter received a
mortal wound from another hand. The other and only remaining Indian fell in
attempting to escape. Smith with his interesting charge returned in triumph
to the fort where his gallantry no doubt was repaid by the sweetest of
all rewards.
The May flower, or trailing arbutus, has been aptly styled our national
flower. It lifts its sweet face in the desolate and rugged hillside, and
flourishes in the chilly air and earth of early spring. So amid the rude
scenes of frontier-life, love and romance peep out, and courtship is
conducted in log cabins and even in more untoward places.
A tradition of the early settlement of Auburn, New York, relates that while
Captain Hardenberg, the stout young miller, was busy with his sacks of
grain in his little log-mill, he was unexpectedly assaulted and overwhelmed
with the arrows not of the savages but of love. The sweet eyes as well as
the blooming health and courage of the daughter of Roeliffe Brinkerhoff who
had been sent by her father to the mill, made young Hardenberg capitulate,
and during the hour while she was waiting for the grist he managed
thoroughly to assure her of the state of his affections; the courtship thus
well begun resulted soon after in a wedding.
The imagination of the poet garnering the anecdotes and early traditions of
the frontier around which lingers an aroma of love, has clothed them with
new life, adorned them with bright colors, endowed them with fresh and
vernal perfume and then woven them into a wreath with the magic art of
poesy. From out of a group of stern features on Plymouth rock, graven with
the deep lines of austere and almost cruel duty, the sweet face of Rose
Standish looks winningly at us. The rugged captain of the Pilgrim band
wooes Priscilla Mullins, through his friend John Alden, and finds too late
that love does not prove fortunate when made by proxy; and Evangeline,
maid, wife and widow comes back to us in beauty and sorrow from the far
Acadian border. These romances of our eastern country have been fortunate
in having a poet to make them immortal. But the West is equally fruitful in
incidents which furnish material, and only lack the poet or novelist to
work them up into enduring form.
The western country seems naturally fitted in many ways for love and
romance. In that region the mind is uncramped and unfettered by the
excessive schooling and over-training which prevails in the older
settlements of the East. The heart heats more freely and warmly when its
current is unchecked by conventionalities. Life is more intense in the
West. The transitions of life are more frequent and startling. Both men and
things are continually changing. In such a society impulse governs largely:
the cooler and more selfish faculties of man's nature are less dominant.
When we add to these conditions, the changes, hardships, and enforced
separations of the frontier as frequent concomitants, we have exactly a
state of society which is fruitful in romantic incidents--brides torn from
their husband's embrace and hurried away; but restored as suddenly and
strangely; two faithful lovers parted forever or re-united miraculously;
and thrilling scenes in love's melodrama acted and re-acted on different
stages but always with startling effect.
The effects of the romantic incidents in the lives of our pioneer women are
also heightened by the extraordinary freshness and ever-changing scenery of
the wilderness. Nature there spreads out like a mighty canvas: the forest,
the mountains, and the prairies show clear and distinct through the crystal
air so that peak and tree and even the tall blades of grass are outlined
with a microscopic nearness. Over this vivid surface bison are browsing,
and antelopes gambolling; plumed warriors flit by on their ponies, as the
pioneer-men and women with wagons, oxen and horses are moving westward.
This is the scene where love springs spontaneously out of the close
companionship which danger enforces.
The story of the Chase family is an illustration of the adage that truth is
often stranger than fiction, and might readily furnish the groundwork upon
which the genius of some future Cooper could construct an American romance
of thrilling interest.
The stage whereon this drama of real life was acted lay in that rich, broad
expanse between the Arkansas and the South Platte Rivers. The time, 1847.
The principal actors were the Chase family, consisting of old Mr. Chase,
his wife, sons, and grandsons, Mary, his daughter, La Bonte and Kilbuck two
famous hunters and mountaineers, Antoine a guide and Arapahoe Indians.
The scene opens with a view of three white-tilted Conestoga wagons or
"prairie schooners," each drawn by four pair of oxen rumbling along through
a plain enameled with the verdure and many tinted flowers of spring. The
day is drawing to its close, and the rays of the sinking sun throw a mellow
light over a waving sea of vernal herbage. The wagons are driven by the
sons of Mr. Chase and contain the women and the household goods of the
family. Behind the great swaying "schooners" walk the men with shouldered
rifles, and a troup of mounted men have just galloped up to bid adieu to
the departing emigrants. From out this group, the mild face of Mary Chase
beams with a parting smile in response to rough but kindly farewells of
these her old friends and neighbors. The last words of warning and
God-speed are spoken by the mounted men, who gallop away and leave them
making their first stage on a journey which will carry them northward and
westward more than two thousand miles from their old home in Missouri.
And now the sun has set, and still in the twilight the train moves on,
stopping as the darkness falls, at a rich bottom, where the loose cattle,
starting some hours before them, have been driven and corralled. The oxen
are unyoked, the wagons drawn up, so as to form the sides of a small
square. A huge fire is kindled, the women descend and prepare the evening
meal, boiling great kettles of coffee, and baking corn-cakes in the embers.
The whole company stretch themselves around the fire, and having finished
their repast, address themselves to sweet sleep, such as tired voyagers
over the plains can so well enjoy. The men of the party are soon soundly
slumbering; but the women, depressed with the thoughts that they are
leaving their home and loved friends and neighbors, perhaps forever, their
hearts filled with forebodings of danger and misfortune, cast only wakeful
eyes upon the darkened plain or up to the inscrutable stars that are
shining with marvelous brightness in the azure firmament. Far into the
night they wake and watch, silently weeping until nature is exhausted, and
a sleep, troubled with sad dreams, visits them.
With the first light of morning the camp is astir, and as the sun rises,
the wagons are again rolling along across the upland prairies, to strike
the trail leading to the south fork of the Platte. Slowly and hardly,
fifteen miles each day, they toil on over the heavy soil. At night, while
in camp, the hours are beguiled by Antoine, their Canadian guide, who tells
stories of wild life and perilous adventures among the hunters and trappers
who make the prairies and mountains their home. His descriptions of Indian
fights and slaughters, and of the sufferings and privations endured by the
hunters in their arduous life, fix the attention of the women of the party,
and especially of Mary Chase, who listens with greater interest because she
remembers that such was the life led by one very dear to her--one long
supposed to be dead, and of whom, since his departure, fifteen years
before, she has heard not a syllable. Her imagination now pictures him
anew, as the most daring of these adventurous hunters, and conjures up his
figure charging through the midst of yelling savages, or as stretched on
the ground, perishing of wounds, or of cold and famine.
Among the characters that figure in Antoine's stories is a hunter named La
Bonte, made conspicuous by his deeds of hardihood and daring. At the first
mention of his name Mary's face is suffused with blushes; not that she for
a moment dreamed that it could be her long lost La Bonte, for she knows
that the name is a common one, but because from associations which still
linger in her memory, it recalled a sad era in her former life, to which
she could not revert without a strange mingling of pleasure and pain. She
remembers the manly form of La Bonte as she first saw him, and the love
which sprang up between them; and then the parting, with the hope of speedy
reunion. She remembers how two years passed without tidings of her lover,
when, one bitter day, she met a mountaineer, just returned from the far
West to settle in his native State; and, inquiring tremblingly after La
Bonte, he told how he had met his death from the Blackfeet Indians in the
wild gorges of the Yellowstone country.
Now, on hearing once more that name, a spring of sweet and bitter
recollections is opened and a vague hope is raised in her breast that the
lover of her youth is still alive. She questions the Canadian, "Who was
this La Bonte who you say was such a brave mountaineer?" Antoine replies,
"He was a fine fellow--strong as a buffalo-bull, a dead shot, cared not a
rush for the Indians, left a girl that he loved in Missouri, said the girl
did not love him, and so he followed the trail to the mountains. He hasn't
gone under yet; be sure of that," says the good natured guide, observing
the emotion which Mary showed, and suspecting that she took a more than
ordinary interest in the young hunter.
As the guide ceased to speak, Mary turns away and bursts into a flood of
tears. The mention of the name of one whom she had long believed dead, and
the recital of his praiseworthy qualities, awake the strongest feelings
which she had cherished towards one whose loss she still bewails.
The scene now changes to the camp of a party of hunters almost within
rifle-shot of the spot where the Chase family are sitting around their
evening fire. There are three in this party: one is Kilbuck, so known on
the plains, another is a stranger who has chanced to join them, the third
is a hunter named _La Bonte_.
The conversation turning on the party encamped near them, the stranger
remarks that their name is Chase. La Bonte looks up a moment from the lock
of his rifle, which he is cleaning, but either does not hear, or, hearing,
does not heed, for he resumes his work. "Traveling alone to the Platte
valley," continues the stranger, "they'll lose their hair, sure." "I hope
not," rejoins Kilbuck, "for there's a girl among them worth more than
that." "Where does she come from, stranger," inquires La Bonte. "Down below
Missouri, from Tennessee, I hear." "And what's her name?" The colloquy is
interrupted by the entrance into the camp of an Arapahoe Indian. The
hunters address him in his own language. They learn from him that a
war-party of his people was out on the Platte-trail to intercept the
traders on their return from the North Fork. He cautions them against
crossing the divide, as the braves, he says, are "a heap mad, and take
white scalp." The Indian, rewarded for his information with a feast of
buffalo-meat, leaves the camp and starts for the mountains. The hunters
pursue their journey the next day, traveling leisurely along, and stopping
where good grass and abundant game is found, until, one morning, they
suddenly strike a wheel-track, which left the creek-bank and pursued a
course at right angles to it in the direction of the divide. Kilbuck
pronounces it but a few hours old, and that of three wagons drawn by oxen.
"These are the wagons of old Chase," says the strange hunter: "they're
going right into the Rapahoe trap," cries Kilbuck. "I knew the name of
Chase years ago," says La Bonte in a low tone, "and I should hate the worst
kind to have mischief happen to any one that bore it. This trail is fresh
as paint, and it goes against me to let these simple critters help the
Rapahoes to their own hair. This child feels like helping them out of the
scrape. What do you say, old hos?" "I think with you, my boy," replies
Kilbuck, "and go in for following the wagon-trail and telling the poor
critters that there's danger ahead of them." "What's your talk, stranger?"
"I'm with you," answered the latter; and both follow quickly after La
Bonte, who gallops away on the trail.
Returning now to the Chase family, we see again the three white-topped
wagons rumbling slowly over the rolling prairie and towards the upland
ridge of the divide which rose before them, studded with dwarf pines and
cedar thickets. They are evidently traveling with caution, for the quick
eye of Antoine, the guide, has discovered recent Indian signs upon the
trail, and with the keenness of a mountaineer he at once sees that it is
that of a war-party, for there were no horses with them and after one or
two of the moccasin tracks there was the mark of a rope which trailed upon
the ground. This was enough to show him that the Indians were provided with
the usual lassoes of skin with which to secure the horses stolen on the
expedition. The men of the party accordingly are all mounted and thoroughly
armed, the wagons are moving in a line abreast, and a sharp lookout is kept
on all sides. The women and children are all consigned to the interior of
the wagons and the former also hold guns in readiness to take part in the
defense should an attack be made. As they move slowly on their course no
Indians make their presence visible and the party are evidently losing
their fears if not their caution.
As the shadows are lengthening they reach Black Horse Creek, and corrall
their wagons, kindle a fire, and are preparing for the night, when three or
four Indians suddenly show themselves on the bluff and making friendly
signals approach the camp. Most of the men are away attending to the cattle
or collecting fuel, and only old Chase and a grandson fourteen years of age
are in the camp. The Indians are hospitably received and regaled with a
smoke, after which they gratify their curiosity by examining the articles
lying around, and among others which takes their fancy the pot boiling over
the fire, with which one of them is about very coolly to walk off, when old
Chase, snatching it from the Indian's hands, knocks him down. One of his
companions instantly begins to draw the buckskin cover from his gun and is
about to take summary vengeance for the insult offered to his companion,
when Mary Chase, courageously advancing, places her left hand on the gun
which he is in the act of uncovering and with the other points a pistol at
his breast.
Whether daunted by this bold act of the girl, or admiring her devotion to
her father, the Indian, drawing back with a deep grunt, replaces the cover
on his piece and motioning to the other Indians to be peaceable, shakes
hands with old Chase, who all this time looks him steadily in the face.
The other whites soon return, the supper is ready, and all hands sit down
to the repast. The Indians then gather their buffalo-robes about them and
quickly withdraw. In spite of their quiet demeanor, Antoine says they mean
mischief. Every precaution is therefore taken against surprise; the mules
and horses are hobbled, the oxen only being allowed to run at large; a
guard is set around the camp; the fire is extinguished lest the savages
should aim by its light at any of the party; and all slept with rifles and
pistols ready at their side.
The night, however, passes quietly away, and nothing disturbs the
tranquility of the camp except the mournful cry of the prairie wolf chasing
the antelope. The sun has now risen; they are yoking the cattle to the
wagons and driving in the mules and horses, when a band of Indians show
themselves on the bluff and descending it approach the camp with an air of
confidence. They are huge braves, hideously streaked with war-paint, and
hide the malignant gleams that shoot from their snaky eyes with assumed
smiles and expressions of good nature.
Old Chase, ignorant of Indian treachery and in spite of the warnings of
Antoine, offering no obstruction to their approach, has allowed them to
enter the camp. What madness! They have divested themselves of their
buffalo-robes, and appear naked to the breech-clout and armed with bows and
arrows, tomahawks, and scalping knives. Six or seven only come in at first,
but others quickly follow, dropping in by twos and threes until a score or
more are collected around the wagons.
Their demeanor, at first friendly, changes to insolence and then to
fierceness. They demand powder and shot, and when they are refused begin to
brandish their tomahawks. A tall chief, motioning to the band to keep back,
now accosts Mr. Chase, and through Antoine as an interpreter, informs him
that unless the demands of his braves are complied with he will not be
responsible for the consequences; that they are out on the war-trail and
their eyes red with blood so that they cannot distinguish between white
man's and Utah's scalps; that the party and all their women and wagons are
in the power of the Indian braves; and therefore that the white chief's
best plan will be to make what terms he can; that all they require is that
they shall give up their guns and ammunition on the prairie and all their
mules and horses, retaining only the medicine-buffaloes (the oxen) to draw
their wagons. By this time the oxen have been yoked to the teams and the
teamsters stand whip in hand ready for the order to start. Old Chase
trembles with rage at the insolent demand. "Not a grain of powder to save
my life," he yells; "put out boys!" As he turns to mount his horse which
stands ready saddled, the Indians leap upon the wagons and others rush
against the men who make a brave fight in their defence. Mary, who sees her
father struck to the ground, springs with a shrill cry to his assistance at
the moment when a savage, crimson with paint and looking like a red demon,
bestrides his prostrate body, brandishing a glittering knife in the air
preparatory to plunging it into the old man's heart. All is wild confusion.
The whites are struggling heroically against overpowering numbers. A single
volley of rifles is heard and three Indians bite the dust. A moment later
and the brave defenders are disarmed amid the shrieks of the women and the
children and the triumphant whoops of the savages.
Mary, flying to her father's rescue, has been overtaken by a huge Indian,
who throws his lasso over her shoulders and drags her to the earth, then
drawing his scalping-knife he is about to tear the gory trophy from her
head. The girl, rising upon her knees, struggles towards the spot where her
father lies, now bathed in blood. The Indian jerks the lariat violently and
drags her on her face, and with a wild yell rushes to complete the bloody
work.
At that instant a yell as fierce as his own is echoed from the bluff, and
looking up he sees La Bonte charging down the declivity, his long hair and
the fringes of his garments waving in the breeze, his trusty rifle
supported in his right arm, and hard after him Kilbuck and the stranger
galloping with loud shouts to the scene of action. As La Bonte races madly
down the side of the bluff, he catches sight of the girl as the ferocious
savage is dragging her over the ground. A cry of horror and vengeance
escapes his lips, as driving his spurs to the rowels into his steed he
bounds like an arrow to the rescue. Another instant and he is upon his foe;
pushing the muzzle of his rifle against the broad chest of the Indian he
pulled the trigger, literally blowing out the savage's heart. Cropping his
rifle, he wheels his trained horse and drawing a pistol from his belt he
charges the enemy among whom Kilbuck and the stranger are dealing
death-blows. The Indians, panic-stricken by the suddenness of the attack,
turn and flee, leaving several of their number dead upon the field.
Mary, with her arms bound to her body by the lasso, and with her eyes
closed to receive the fatal stroke, hears the defiant shout of La Bonte,
and glancing up between her half-opened eyelids, sees the wild figure of
the mountaineer as he sends the bullet to the heart of her foe. When the
Indians flee, La Bonte, the first to run to her aid, cuts the skin-rope,
raises her from the ground, looks long and intently in her face, and sees
his never-to-be-forgotten Mary Chase. "What! can it be you, Mary?" he
exclaims, gazing at the trembling maiden, who hardly believes her eyes as
she returns his gaze and recognizes in her deliverer her former lover. She
only sobs and clings closer to him in speechless gratitude and love.
Turning from these lovers reunited so miraculously, we see stretched on the
battle-field the two grandsons of Mr. Chase, fine lads of fourteen or
fifteen, who after fighting like men fall dead pierced with arrows and
lances. Old Chase and his sons are slightly wounded, and Antoine shot
through the neck and half scalped. The dead boys are laid tenderly beneath
the prairie-sod, the wounds of the others are dressed, and the following
morning the party continue their journey to the Platte. The three hunters
guide and guard them on their way, Mary riding on horseback by the side of
her lover.
For many days they pursued their journey, but with feelings far different
from those with which they had made its earlier stages. Old Mr. Chase
marches on doggedly and in silence; his resolution to seek a new home on
the banks of the Columbia has been shaken more by the loss of his
grandsons, than by the fatigues and privations incident to the march. The
unbidden tears often steal down the cheeks of the women, who cast many a
longing look behind them towards the southeastern horizon, far beyond whose
purple rim lay their old home. The South Fork of the Platte has been
passed, Laramie reached, and for a fortnight the lofty summits of the
mountains which overhang the "pass" to California have been in sight; but
when they strike the broad trail which would conduct them to their promised
land in the valley of the Columbia, the party pause, gaze for a moment
steadfastly at the mountain-summits, and then as if by a common impulse,
the heads of the horses and oxen are faced to the east, and men, women, and
children toss their hats and bonnets in the air, hurrahing lustily for home
as the huge wagons roll down along the banks of the river Platte. The
closing scene in this romantic melodrama was the marriage of Mary and La
Bonte, in Tennessee, four months after the rescue of the Chase family from
the Indians.
The following "romance of the forest" we believe has never before been
published. The substance of it was communicated to the writer by a
gentleman who received it from his grandfather, one of the early settlers
of Michigan.
In the year 1762 the Great Pontiac, the Indian Napoleon of the Northwest,
had his headquarters in a small secluded island at the opening of Lake St.
Clair. Here he organized, with wonderful ability and secrecy, a
wide-reaching conspiracy, having for its object the destruction of every
English garrison and settlement in Michigan. His envoys, with blood-stained
hatchets, had been despatched to the various Indian tribes of the region,
and wherever these emblems of butchery had been accepted the savage hordes
were gathering, and around their bale-fires in the midnight pantomimes of
murder were concentrating their excitable natures into a burning focus
which would light their path to carnage and rapine.
While these lurid clouds, charged with death and destruction, were
gathering, unseen, about the heads of the adventurous pioneers, who had
penetrated that beautiful region, a family of eastern settlers, named
Rouse, arrived in the territory, and, disregarding the admonitions of the
officers in the fort at Detroit, pushed on twenty miles farther west and
planted themselves in the heart of one of those magnificent oak-openings
which the Almighty seems to have designed as parks and pleasure-grounds for
the sons and daughters of the forest.
Miss Anna Rouse, the only daughter of the family, had been betrothed before
her departure from New York State to a young man named James Philbrick, who
had afterward gone to fight the French and Indians. It was understood that
upon his return he was to follow the Rouse family to Michigan, where, upon
his arrival, the marriage was to take place.
In a few months young Philbrick reached the appointed place, and in the
following week married Miss Rouse in the presence of a numerous assemblage
of soldiers and settlers, who had come from the military posts and the
nearest plantations to join in the festivities.
All was gladness and hilarity; the hospitality was bounteous, the company
joyous, the bridegroom brave and manly, and the bride lovely as a wild
rose. When the banquet was ready the guests trooped into the room where it
was spread, and even the sentinels who had been posted beside the muskets
in the door-yard, seeing no signs of prowling savages, had entered the
house and were enjoying the feast. Scarcely had they abandoned their post
when an ear-piercing war-whoop silenced in a moment the joyous sound of the
revelers. The soldiers rushed to the door only to be shot down. A few
succeeded in recovering their arms, and made a desperate fight. Meanwhile
the savages battered down the doors, and leaped in at the windows. The
bridegroom was shot, and left for dead, as he was assisting to conceal his
bride, and a gigantic warrior, seizing the latter, bore her away into the
darkness. After a short but terrific struggle, the savages were driven out
of the house, but the defenders were so crippled by their losses and by the
want of arms which the enemy had carried away, that it was judged best not
to attempt to pursue the Indians, who had disappeared as suddenly as they
came.
When the body of the bridegroom was lifted up it was discovered that his
heart still beat, though but faintly. Restoratives were administered, and
he slowly came back to life, and to the sad consciousness that all that
could make life happy to him was gone for ever.
The family soon after abandoned their new home and moved to Detroit, owing
to the danger of fresh attacks from Pontiac and his confederates. Years
rolled away; young Philbrick, as soon as he recovered from his wounds, took
part in the stirring scenes of the war, and strove to forget, in turmoil
and excitement, the loss of his fair young bride. But in vain. Her
remembrance in the fray nerved his arm to strike, and steadied his eye to
launch the bullet at the heart of the hated foes who had bereft him of his
dearest treasure; and in the stillness of the night his imagination
pictured her, the cruel victim of her barbarous captors.
Peace came in 1763, and he then learned that she had been carried to
Canada. He hastened down the St. Lawrence and passed from settlement to
settlement, but could gain no tidings of her. After two years, spent in
unavailing search, he came back a sad and almost broken-hearted man.
Her image, as she appeared when last he saw her, all radiant in youth and
beauty, haunted his waking hours, and in his dreams she was with him as a
visible presence. Months, years rolled away; he gave her up as dead, but he
did not forget his long-lost bride.
One summer's day, while sitting in his cabin in Michigan, in one of those
beautiful natural parks, where he had chosen his abode, he heard a light
step, and, looking up, saw his bride standing before him, beautiful still,
but with a chastened beauty which told of years of separation and grief.
Her story was a long one. When she was borne away from the marriage feast
by her savage captor, she was seen by an old squaw, the wife of a famous
chief who had just lost her own daughter, and being attracted by the beauty
of Miss Rouse, she protected her from violence, and finally adopted her.
Twice she escaped, but was recaptured. The old squaw afterwards took her a
thousand miles into the wilderness, and watched her with the ferocious
tenderness that the tigress shows for her young. At length, after nearly
six years, her Indian mother died. She succeeded then in making her escape,
traveled four hundred miles on foot, reached the St. Lawrence, and after
passing through great perils and hardships, arrived at Detroit. There she
soon found friends, who relieved her wants and conveyed her to her husband,
whom she had remembered with fondness and loved with constancy during all
the weary years of her captivity.