Page:Women of Ohio; a record of their achievements in the history of the state (Vol. I).djvu/29

Rh just before the attack was made. Ann fought right with the men and the attack was repulsed. Later she came, with a son, to the settlement of Gallipolis, Ohio and lived there, with, it is pleasant to be able to say, the esteem of the community, despite her antic ways, until her death in 1825.

Ann had survived her second husband also. She lived in a cabin alone but on friendly terms with her neighbors. She liked to tell of her adventures. Mad Ann liked liquor and, it seems, also chewed tobacco. But she did wear skirts, for all her leather coat and woodman’s boots. Trousers, on women of that day and age, were, it seems, unthinkable, even for “Mad Ann.”

LOUISA ST. CLAIR, daughter of General St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory, accompanied her father and her two sisters from West- moreland County, Penn, to Marietta in 1790. This meant leaving a fine plantation, plenty of balls and parties, for a frontier garrison and the rough life of the wilderness. But it suited Louisa. She could ride like a centaur, range the woods, fearless of Indians, kill a squirrel at the top of a tree, walk mile on mile of the roughest trails in any weather— and dance all night when stress and strain of circumstances relaxed sufficiently to permit such diversion.

Louisa was beautiful in face and figure and doubtless the reigning toast among her father’s officers. Nor was toast an empty term. It was the day of hard drinking as well as of hard fighting— and hard praying. Seeds that sprouted, later, into the historic Women’s Crusade were being planted plenti- fully at this time. But Louisa St. Clair adapted herself, like a sensible and intelligent as well as charming young woman, to her surroundings as she found them and when the time came for her to go back to a more sophisticated society, she is said to have left Ohio with keen regret, despite her natural chagrin at criticism of her father’s defeat in his famous battle with the Indians at Ft. Jefferson, on the Wabash, in 1791.

REBECCA ROUSE, — mother of Bathsheba, the first Ohio school teacher — came all the way from New Bedford, Mass., with her husband and her eight children, in a covered wagon. They crossed the mountains on foot.

The children stuck in the mud, literally, time after time, yet it was im- possible for the team to drag any heavier burden up the gorge-like mountain tracks. They finally reached Ft. Pitt —now Pittsburgh, Penn., then a town of 500 human beings —and embarked on the unwieldy, roofless boat on which they were to voyage down the Ohio to the mouth of the Muskingum.

The men had to go ashore in the evening and were detained all night. At midnight the women discovered that the ill-calked hull was half full of water. Mrs. Rouse, however, managed to get her family and herself ashore, obtained shelter for the rest of the night. When the men returned, the voyage was begun. Dreadful storms drove them to the Kentucky shore. Then it turned cold. It was December when the eight week’s journey of Rebecca Rouse, with her husband and eight children ended temporarily at Marietta