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III

MARRYING AND GIVING IN MARRIAGE

THE destinies of the Ranger and Robinson families had been linked together by the double ties of affinity and consanguinity in the first third of the nineteenth century. Their broad and fertile lands, to which they held the original title-deeds direct from the government, bore the signature and seal of Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States; and their children and children's children, though scattered now in the farthest West, from Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands to the Philippine Archipelago, treasure to this day among their most valued heirlooms the historic parchments. For these were signed by Old Hickory when the original West was bounded on its outermost verge by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and when the new West, though discovered in the infancy of the century by Lewis and Clark (aided by Sacajawea, their one woman ally and pathfinder), was to the average American citizen an unknown country, quite as obscure to his understanding as was the Dark Continent of Africa in the days antedating Sir Samuel Baker, Oom Paul, and Cecil Rhodes.

The elder Rangers, who claimed Knickerbocker blood, and the Robinsons, who boasted of Scotch ancestry, though living in adjoining counties in Kentucky in their earlier years, had never met until, as if by accident, — if accident it might be called through which there seems to have been an original, interwoven design,—the fates of the two families became interlinked through their settlement upon adjoining lands, situated some fifty miles south of old Fort Dearborn, in the days when Chicago was a mosquito-beleaguered swamp, and Portland, Oregon, an unbroken forest of pointed f