The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of CanadaParkman, Francis
History
The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada
Parkman, Francis
Pontiac's Conspiracy, 1763-1765
should betray her, she turned and killed him at a blow. Among the
prisoners was the wife of Glendenning, a woman of a most masculine spirit,
who, far from being overpowered by what she had seen, was excited to the
extremity of rage, charged her captors with treachery, cowardice, and
ingratitude, and assailed them with a tempest of abuse. Neither the
tomahawk, which they brandished over her head, nor the scalp of her
murdered husband, with which they struck her in the face, could silence
the undaunted virago. When the party began their retreat, bearing with
them a great quantity of plunder packed on the horses they had stolen,
Glendenning’s wife, with her infant child, was placed among a long train
of captives guarded before and behind by the Indians. As they defiled
along a narrow path which led through a gap in the mountains, she handed
the child to the woman behind her, and, leaving it to its fate,[331]
slipped into the bushes and escaped. Being well acquainted with the woods,
she succeeded, before nightfall, in reaching the spot where the ruins of
her dwelling had not yet ceased to burn. Here she sought out the body of
her husband, and covered it with fence-rails, to protect it from the
wolves. When her task was complete, and when night closed around her, the
bold spirit which had hitherto borne her up suddenly gave way. The
recollection of the horrors she had witnessed, the presence of the dead,
the darkness, the solitude, and the gloom of the surrounding forest,
wrought upon her till her terror rose to ecstasy; and she remained until
daybreak, crouched among the bushes, haunted by the threatening apparition
of an armed man, who, to her heated imagination, seemed constantly
approaching to murder her.[332]
Some time after the butchery at Glendenning’s house, an outrage was
perpetrated, unmatched, in its fiend-like atrocity, through all the annals
of the war. In a solitary place, deep within the settled limits of
Pennsylvania, stood a small school-house, one of those rude structures of
logs which, to this day, may be seen in some of the remote northern
districts of New England. A man chancing to pass by was struck by the
unwonted silence; and, pushing open the door, he looked in. In the centre
lay the master, scalped and lifeless, with a Bible clasped in his hand;
while around the room were strewn the bodies of his pupils, nine in
number, miserably mangled, though one of them still retained a spark of
life. It was afterwards known that the deed was committed by three or four
warriors from a village near the Ohio; and it is but just to observe that,
when they returned home, their conduct was disapproved by some of the
tribe.[333]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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