Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/70

 and still others that he was the son of a white man and an Indian woman. It is known only that he came out of the wilderness somewhere on the borders of Canada. It is likely that he had Indian blood and that it was the blood of the Five Nations. But there is little chance that the truth will ever be known, for the Spraggites ceased to exist half a century ago. The sect died when it no longer had a God and those remaining alive who saw him in life never knew anything of his origin.

The first existing record of his physical appearance is to be found in the works of Miss Amelia Bossert, a lady of a highly emotional nature who became the poetess and historian of the Spraggite sect as well as the mother of three children by the Prophet. After she had passed middle age and was no longer attractive she quarrelled with the sect and was publicly expelled from the colony. But her impressions had been written as a girl and having been already printed and distributed she found it impossible to collect and destroy them. She was seventeen at the time when Cyrus Spragg first entered her life. She saw him on the morning he entered Valencia, Illinois, driving a wagon-train laden with food and household furniture sent West into the frontier country by an enterprising Philadelphia merchant. She must even then have been a woman of an hysterical nature easily susceptible to a faith which rested upon outbursts of wild religious ecstasy. There was a great deal in her account that was significant.

She wrote: "He was a handsomely made man of about six feet two inches with a remarkable high