Woman on the American Frontier | Page 7

hundred
yards wide and quite deep for fording, and placed them under keepers
who had some other persons, thirty or forty in number, in charge.
Returning from the field Mrs. Hendee discovered the fate of her
children. Her first outburst of grief was heart-rending to behold, but
this was only transient; she ceased her lamentations, and like the
lioness who has been robbed of her litter, she bounded on the trail of
her plunderers. Resolutely dashing into the river, she stemmed the
current, planting her feet firmly on the bottom and pushed across. With
pallid face, flashing eyes, and lips compressed, maternal love
dominating every fear, she strode into the Indian camp, regardless of
the tomahawks menacingly flourished round her head, boldly
demanded the release of her little ones, and persevered in her alternate

upbraidings and supplications, till her request was granted. She then
carried her children back through the river and landed them in safety on
the other bank.
Not content with what she had done, like a patriot as she was, she
immediately returned, begged for the release of the children of others,
again was rewarded with success, and brought two or three more away;
again returned, and again succeeded, till she had rescued the whole
fifteen of her neighbors' children who had been thus snatched away
from their distracted parents. On her last visit to the camp of the enemy,
the Indians were so struck with her conduct that one of them declared
that so brave a squaw deserved to be carried across the river, and
offered to take her on his back and carry her over. She, in the same
spirit, accepted the offer, mounted the back of the gallant savage, was
carried to the opposite bank, where she collected her rescued troop of
children, and hastened away to restore them to their overjoyed parents.
During the memorable Wyoming massacre, Mrs. Mary Gould, wife of
James Gould, with the other women remaining in the village of
Wyoming, sought safety in the fort. In the haste and confusion
attending this act, she left her boy, about four years old, behind.
Obeying the instincts of a mother, and turning a deaf ear to the
admonitions of friends, she started off on a perilous search for the
missing one. It was dark; she was alone; and the foe was lurking around;
but the agonies of death could not exceed her agonies of suspense; so
she hastened on. She traversed the fields which, but a few hours before,
"Were trampled by the hurrying crowd,"
where--
"----fiery hearts and armed hands, Encountered in the battle cloud,"
and where unarmed hands were now resting on cold and motionless
hearts. After a search of between one and two hours, she found her
child on the bank of the river, sporting with a little band of playmates.
Clasping her treasure in her arms, she hurried back and reached the fort
in safety.

During the struggles of the Revolution, the privations sustained, and the
efforts made, by women, were neither few nor of short duration. Many
of them are delineated in the present volume. Yet innumerable
instances of faithful toil, and patient endurance, must have been
covered with oblivion. In how many a lone home, from which the
father was long sundered by a soldier's destiny, did the mother labor to
perform to their little ones both his duties and her own, having no
witness of the extent of her heavy burdens and sleepless anxieties, save
the Hearer of prayer.
A good and hoary-headed man, who had passed the limits of fourscore,
once said to me, "My father was in the army during the whole eight
years of the Revolutionary War, at first as a common soldier,
afterwards as an officer. My mother had the sole charge of us four little
ones. Our house was a poor one, and far from neighbors. I have a keen
remembrance of the terrible cold of some of those winters. The snow
lay so deep and long, that it was difficult to cut or draw fuel from the
woods, or to get our corn to the mill, when we had any. My mother was
the possessor of a coffee-mill. In that she ground wheat, and made
coarse bread, which we ate, and were thankful. It was not always we
could be allowed as much, even of this, as our keen appetites craved.
Many is the time that we have gone to bed, with only a drink of water
for our supper, in which a little molasses had been mingled. We
patiently received it, for we knew our mother did as well for us as she
could; and we hoped to have something better in the morning. She was
never heard to repine; and young as we were, we tried to make