Whenever a lost child could not be found, the Indians were naturally
suspected of stealing it; and this was probably the fate of a little one
whom her mother lifted over the fence into the dooryard of her cabin,
near Galion, and then went back to her work of making sugar in the
woods. When she came home at nightfall, the child was not there, and
no search afterwards availed to find her, though the whole neighborhood
searched the woods for days and nights. It was known only that a party
of Indians had lately camped near, and that they might have taken the
child and brought it up as their own; but the mother never heard of her
again.
Galion is rather famous for lost people, but at least one of them was
found again. This was a little girl of the name of Bashford, who was
sent to bring home the cows. In trying to return she became confused,
and she wisely decided to keep with the cattle. When they lay down for
the night, she sheltered herself against the warm back of a motherly
old cow, and then followed them about in the morning till the neighbors
found her.
She was none the worse for the night’s adventure except for her
fright at the howling of the wolves, and from the pain of her slightly
frost-bitten feet. But the fate of a little boy who wandered from home
in Williams County was of a singular pathos. He was found dead after a
three-days search, when the poor little body, which was half clad, was
still warm. It was supposed that he had undressed each night when he lay
down to sleep, as he was used to do at home, and that the third night he
had been so chilled by the October cold that he could not put on all
his clothes again, and so strayed feebly about till he lay down and died
just before rescue came.
Encounters with wolves and bears were not so common as these animals
were, by any means; but now and then the settlers came in conflict with
them. In Crawford County so lately as 1826, a young man named Enoch
Baker, in coming home from rather a late call on a young lady, fought
a running fight with wolves, which left him only when he reached the
clearing where his father’s cabin stood; then they fell back into the
woods. Daniel Cloe, a boy of the same neighborhood, was attacked by a
pack of eleven wolves one morning before daybreak, but was saved by his
bulldog, which seized the foremost wolf by the throat, and gave the boy
time to climb a tree.
A brother of this boy found his dogs one morning in ferocious clamor
about some animal which they seemed afraid to grapple with. He came up
and found that it was a bear. He had no gun, but he caught up a club,
and when he had contrived to catch the bear by one of his hind legs,
and to throw him over, he beat him about the head with his bludgeon and
killed him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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