Woman on the American Frontier: A Valuable and Authentic History of the Heroism, Adventures, Privations, Captivities, Trials, and Noble Lives and Deaths of the "Pioneer Mothers of the Republic"Fowler, William Worthington
History
Woman on the American Frontier: A Valuable and Authentic History of the Heroism, Adventures, Privations, Captivities, Trials, and Noble Lives and Deaths of the "Pioneer Mothers of the Republic"
Fowler, William Worthington
Frontier and pioneer life -- United States; Women -- United States -- Biography
Not content with what she had done, like a patriot as she was, she
immediately returned, begged for the release of the children of others,
again was rewarded with success, and brought two or three more away; again
returned, and again succeeded, till she had rescued the whole fifteen of
her neighbors' children who had been thus snatched away from their
distracted parents. On her last visit to the camp of the enemy, the Indians
were so struck with her conduct that one of them declared that so brave a
squaw deserved to be carried across the river, and offered to take her on
his back and carry her over. She, in the same spirit, accepted the offer,
mounted the back of the gallant savage, was carried to the opposite bank,
where she collected her rescued troop of children, and hastened away to
restore them to their overjoyed parents.
During the memorable Wyoming massacre, Mrs. Mary Gould, wife of James
Gould, with the other women remaining in the village of Wyoming, sought
safety in the fort. In the haste and confusion attending this act, she left
her boy, about four years old, behind. Obeying the instincts of a mother,
and turning a deaf ear to the admonitions of friends, she started off on a
perilous search for the missing one. It was dark; she was alone; and the
foe was lurking around; but the agonies of death could not exceed her
agonies of suspense; so she hastened on. She traversed the fields which,
but a few hours before,
"Were trampled by the hurrying crowd,"
where--
"----fiery hearts and armed hands,
Encountered in the battle cloud,"
and where unarmed hands were now resting on cold and motionless hearts.
After a search of between one and two hours, she found her child on the
bank of the river, sporting with a little band of playmates. Clasping her
treasure in her arms, she hurried back and reached the fort in safety.
During the struggles of the Revolution, the privations sustained, and the
efforts made, by women, were neither few nor of short duration. Many of
them are delineated in the present volume. Yet innumerable instances of
faithful toil, and patient endurance, must have been covered with oblivion.
In how many a lone home, from which the father was long sundered by a
soldier's destiny, did the mother labor to perform to their little ones
both his duties and her own, having no witness of the extent of her heavy
burdens and sleepless anxieties, save the Hearer of prayer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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