Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 17.djvu/367



REMINISCENCES OF MARTHA E. GILLIAM COLLINS 359

children thro' the back window and told him to run to the woods where the men were getting out timbers for a cabin and give the alarm. After quite a spell of hacking the Indians finally cut thro' the door and crowded into the cabin. My mother and her aunt had crawled under the four-poster bed and before the Indians could pull them out the men came on the run. The Indians heard them coming and ran away, all but the one mother's aunt had wounded. Just as he was going out of the door the men shot him and he laid down and died on the door step.

"Nowadays a man most generally has only one job, like being a lawyer, or a preacher, or a politician, or a farmer, but when my father was a young man the men folks had to what- ever came to hand. When my father was in his 'teens he was a man grown and a good shot and was good at tracking game, so he naturally took up tracking runaway slaves. They used to send for him all 'round the country, for a heap of slaves used to take to the swamps. He made good money at the business. He was so good at tracking them and bringing them back to their owners that when he ran for sheriff the people said, 'He is so successful catching runaway niggers, he will be good at catching criminals,' so he was voted in as sheriff.

"When the Black Hawk war came on father enlisted and served thro' it, and when the Seminole war broke out in Florida where he was born they made him a captain and he fought thro' that war. When he had finished fighting he went back to the frontier in Missouri, for everything west of Missouri in those days was Indian country. He was a great man to make friends and so they elected him to the legislature in Missouri. He got interested in religion and was ordained a preacher. He was one of the Old Testament style of preachers. He wasn't very strong on turning the other cheek. If a man hit him on one cheek he would think he was struck by an earth- quake or a cyclone before he got time to hit father on the other cheek. Father believed the Bible, particularly where it