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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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