The Daughter of the Chieftain | Page 2

were
the means of the conversion of a great many red men.
The fierce warriors became humble Christians, who set the best
example to wild brethren, and often to the wicked white men.
More than twenty years before the Revolution settlers began making
their way into the Wyoming Valley. You would think their only trouble
would be with the Indians, who always look with anger upon intruders
of that kind, but really their chief difficulty was with white people.
Most of these pioneers came from Connecticut. The successors of
William Penn, who had bought Pennsylvania from his king, and then
again from the Indians, did not fancy having settlers from other
colonies take possession of one of the garden spots of his grant.
I cannot tell you about the quarrels between the settlers from
Connecticut and those that were already living in Pennsylvania. Forty
of the invaders, as they may be called, put up a fort, which was named
on that account Forty Fort. This was in the winter of 1769, and two
hundred more pioneers followed them in the spring. The fort stood on
the western bank of the river.
The Pennsylvanians, however, had prepared for them, and the trouble
began. During the few years following, the New Englanders were three
times driven out of the valley, and the men, women, and children were
obliged to tramp for two hundred miles through the unbroken
wilderness to their old homes. But they rallied and came back again,
and at last were strong enough to hold their ground. About this time the
mutterings of the American Revolution began to be heard, and the
Pennsylvanians and New Englanders forgot their enmity and became
brothers in their struggle for independence.
Among the pioneers from Connecticut who put up their old fashioned
log houses in Wyoming were George Ripley and his wife Ruth. They
were young, frugal, industrious, and worthy people. They had but one
child--a boy named Benjamin; but after awhile Alice was added to the
family, and at the date of which I am telling you she was six years and

her brother thirteen years old.
Mr. Ripley was absent with the continental army under General
Washington, fighting the battles of his country. Benjamin, on this
spring day, was visiting some of his friends further down the valley; so
that when Alice came forth to play "Jack Stones" alone, no one was in
sight, though her next neighbor lived hardly two hundred yards away.
I wish you could have seen her as she looked on that summer afternoon.
She had been helping, so far as she was able, her mother in the house,
until the parent told her to go outdoors and amuse herself. She was
chubby, plump, healthy, with round pink cheeks, yellow hair tied in a
coil at the back of her head, and her big eyes were as blue, and clear,
and bright as they could be.
She wore a brown homespun dress--that is to say, the materials had
been woven by the deft fingers of her mother, with the aid of the old
spinning wheel, which in those days formed a part of every household.
The dark stockings were knitted by the same busy fingers, with the help
of the flashing needles; and the shoes, put together by Peleg Quintin,
the humpbacked shoemaker, were heavy and coarse, and did not fit any
too well.
The few simple articles of underwear were all homemade, clean, and
comfortable, and the same could be said of the clothing of the brother
and of the mother herself.
Alice came running out of the open front door, bounding off the big flat
stone which served as a step with a single leap, and, running to a spot
of green grass a few yards away, where there was not a bit of dirt or a
speck of dust, she sat down and began the game of which I told you at
the opening of this story.
Alice was left handed. So when she took position, she leaned over to
the right, supporting her body with that arm, while with the other hand
she tossed the little jagged pieces of stone aloft, snatching up the others,
and letting the one that was going up and down in the air drop into her
chubby palm.

She had been playing perhaps ten minutes, when she found someone
was watching her.
She did not see him at first, but heard a low, deep "Huh!" partly at one
side and partly behind her.
Instead of glancing around, she finished the turn of the game on which
she was engaged just then. That done, she clasped all the Jack Stones in
her hand, assumed the upright posture, and looked behind her.
"I thought it was you, Omas," she said with a merry