Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/633

Rh to pursue the long tramp of three hundred miles to Canada. Among them was the minister, Mr. Williams, and his family. His exhausted wife fell a victim to the hatchet on the second day of the dreary journey. He himself, and fifty-six other captives, were redeemed in 1706 and brought to Boston. Many remained by preference in Canada with the Indians. Among these was his daughter, Eunice Williams. No persuasions or entreaties of her father could induce her to return. She was converted by a priest, married a savage, and passed a long and contented life as the mistress of a wigwam. After the peace, she, with her red husband, visited her friends and father in Deerfield, in full Indian dress, was kindly received, but would not stay.

Another wildly romantic narrative is that of Mary Jemison, known among the Indians as the “White Woman.” Her father, mother, two brothers, a sister, and other relatives were all murdered by the Indians in 1755, on their frontier farm in Pennsylvania, and she alone, at the age of thirteen, was allowed to live as a captive. Within two years she had an opportunity to join the whites. But her Indian mother and sister, by adoption, treated her kindly, and she preferred to stay with them. Through the remainder of her life, protracted to ninety-one years, — living on the Genesee river, and naturalized that she might hold land-property, and thrown into frequent contact with the whites, — she preferred to live like and to be an Indian, surviving two savage husbands (kind to her, but fiends in ferocity) and five children, leaving three more at her death.

Thus not only the natives of the forest, but equally so — and under circumstances which have presented a very striking lesson to observers — white persons of various ages and of both sexes not only reconcile themselves of necessity to barbarous life, but by preference yearn with strong proclivities to enjoy it, feeling it a cross to natural inclinations to accept or to return to civilization. We may not marvel