Margaret Smiths Journal | Page 9

tell us about loving our
enemies, and doing good to them that do injure us? Let us forgive our
fellow-creatures, for we have all need of God's forgiveness. I used to
feel as mother does," he said, turning to us; "for I went into the war
with a design to spare neither young nor old of the enemy.
"But I thank God that even in that dark season my heart relented at the
sight of the poor starving women and children, chased from place to
place like partridges. Even the Indian fighters, I found, had sorrows of
their own, and grievous wrongs to avenge; and I do believe, if we had
from the first treated them as poor blinded brethren, and striven as hard
to give them light and knowledge, as we have to cheat them in trade,
and to get away their lands, we should have escaped many bloody wars,
and won many precious souls to Christ."
I inquired of him concerning his captivity. He was wounded, he told me,
in a fight with the Sokokis Indians two years before. It was a hot
skirmish in the woods; the English and the Indians now running
forward, and then falling back, firing at each other from behind the
trees. He had shot off all his powder, and, being ready to faint by
reason of a wound in his knee, he was fain to sit down against an oak,
from whence he did behold, with great sorrow and heaviness of heart,
his companions overpowered by the number of their enemies, fleeing
away and leaving him to his fate. The savages soon came to him with
dreadful whoopings, brandishing their hatchets and their
scalping-knives. He thereupon closed his eyes, expecting to be knocked
in the head, and killed outright. But just then a noted chief coming up
in great haste, bade him be of good cheer, for he was his prisoner, and
should not be slain. He proved to be the famous Sagamore Squando,

the chief man of the Sokokis.
"And were you kindly treated by this chief?" asked Rebecca.
"I suffered much in moving with him to the Sebago Lake, owing to my
wound," he replied; "but the chief did all in his power to give me
comfort, and he often shared with me his scant fare, choosing rather to
endure hunger himself, than to see his son, as he called me, in want of
food. And one night, when I did marvel at this kindness on his part, he
told me that I had once done him a great service; asking me if I was not
at Black Point, in a fishing vessel, the summer before? I told him I was.
He then bade me remember the bad sailors who upset the canoe of a
squaw, and wellnigh drowned her little child, and that I had threatened
and beat them for it; and also how I gave the squaw a warm coat to
wrap up the poor wet papoose. It was his squaw and child that I had
befriended; and he told me that be had often tried to speak to me, and
make known his gratitude therefor; and that he came once to the
garrison at Sheepscot, where he saw me; but being fired at,
notwithstanding his signs of peace and friendship, he was obliged to
flee into the woods. He said the child died a few days after its evil
treatment, and the thought of it made his heart bitter; that he had tried
to live peaceably with the white men, but they had driven him into the
war.
"On one occasion," said the sick soldier, "as we lay side by side in his
hut, on the shore of the Sebago Lake, Squando, about midnight, began
to pray to his God very earnestly. And on my querying with him about
it, he said he was greatly in doubt what to do, and had prayed for some
sign of the Great Spirit's will concerning him. He then told me that
some years ago, near the place where we then lay, he left his wigwam
at night, being unable to sleep, by reason of great heaviness and
distemper of mind. It was a full moon, and as he did walk to and fro, he
saw a fair, tall man in a long black dress, standing in the light on the
lake's shore, who spake to him and called him by name.
"'Squando,' he said, and his voice was deep and solemn, like the wind
in the hill pines, 'the God of the white man is the God of the Indian, and
He is angry with his red children. He alone is able to make the corn
grow before the frost, and to lead the fish up the rivers in the spring,