An incident in this same massacre of Wyoming is illustrative of a somewhat curious fact with regard to Indian life, the adaptability of their captives to the life of the woods. There was captured by the Indians a little girl named Frances Slocum, about five years old. For long all trace of her was lost; but in 1835, more than fifty years after the massacre, an old woman known as Maconaqua, living in a Miami village in Indiana, was by accident identified as the lost Frances Slocum. To all appearance she was an Indian; and she was really so in costume, habits, and even in manner of thought. When the events of her childhood were recalled to her memory, she herself was able to give evidence which rendered her identification unquestionably complete. But when pressed to return to civilization and her relatives, she absolutely declined. "I cannot go," she said; "I have always lived with the Indians; I am used to them; I wish to live and die with them. My husband and my boys are buried here, and I cannot leave them. I have a house and land, two daughters, a son-in-law, and grandchildren. I was a sapling when they took me. It is all gone past. I should not be happy with my white relatives. I am glad to see them; but I cannot go." So she was left with her red brothers by adoption; but when, some ten years later, the Miami Indians were moved West; a bill was introduced into Congress by a Mr. Bidlack, securing to Maconaqua and her heirs a tract of land a mile square, embracing the home in which she had so long lived. But she pined after her red kindred, and in 1847 died from sheer weariness of the new conditions of her existence, and was buried near the confluence of the Wabash and the Missisinewa Rivers. This incident is here related not merely for the sake of the pathos which it holds, but for the purpose of noting a curious contrast between the sons of the wilderness and the children of civilization. The case of Frances Slocum is typical; many a captive has been led away by the red men, and has afterward become so completely Indianized that he or she would stubbornly refuse to return to the life of the white race, and, if forced to do so, would pine and die for lack of the breath of the forests and plains. Yet never has there been known an instance where a red man became reconciled to life among the whites; always, when not forcibly detained captive, they fled back to the free life which had been theirs, even if they had known it but as children; if kept in captivity, they broke their chains by death. So that when we vaunt our civilization we must remember that it has no charms for those who have known the life of the woods, and thus we learn some at least of the reasons why we have failed to produce from the Indian a finished product of the civilization of our day.