The Daughter of the Chieftain : the Story of an Indian Girl, Ellis [great book club books .TXT] 📗
- Author: Ellis
Book online «The Daughter of the Chieftain : the Story of an Indian Girl, Ellis [great book club books .TXT] 📗». Author Ellis
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE. OMAS, ALICE, AND LINNA
CHAPTER TWO. DANGER IN THE AIR
CHAPTER THREE. JULY THIRD, 1778
CHAPTER FOUR. THE EASTERN SHORE
CHAPTER FIVE. IN THE WOODS
CHAPTER SIX. PUSHING EASTWARD
CHAPTER SEVEN. JABEZ ZITNER
CHAPTER EIGHT. LINNA'S WOODCRAFT
CHAPTER NINE. IN A CIRCLE
CHAPTER TEN. NEAR THE END
CHAPTER ELEVEN. ALL IN VAIN
CHAPTER TWELVE. CONCLUSION
I don't suppose there is any use in trying to find out when the game of "Jack Stones" was first played. No one can tell. It certainly is a good many hundred years old.
All boys and girls know how to play it. There is the little rubber ball, which you toss in the air, catch up one of the odd iron prongs, without touching another, and while the ball is aloft; then you do the same with another, and again with another, until none is left. After that you seize a couple at a time, until all have been used; then three, and four, and so on, with other variations, to the end of the game.
Doubtless your fathers and mothers, if they watch you during the progress of the play, will think it easy and simple. If they do, persuade them to try it. You will soon laugh at their failure.
Now, when we older folks were young like you, we did not have the regular, scraggly bits of iron and dainty rubber ball. We played with pieces of stones. I suspect more deftness was needed in handling them than in using the new fashioned pieces. Certainly, in trials than I can remember, I never played the game through without a break; but then I was never half so handy as you are at such things: that, no doubt, accounts for it.
Well, a good many years ago, before any of your fathers or mothers were born, a little girl named Alice Ripley sat near her home playing "Jack Stones." It was the first of July, 1778, and although her house was made of logs, had no carpets or stove, but a big fireplace, where all the food was made ready for eating, yet no sweeter or happier girl can be found today, if you spend weeks in searching for her. Nor can you come upon a more lovely spot in which to build a home, for it was the famed Wyoming Valley, in Western Pennsylvania.
Now, since some of my young friends may not be acquainted with this place, you will allow me to tell you that the Wyoming Valley lies between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains, and that the beautiful Susquehanna River runs through it.
The valley runs northeast and southwest, and is twenty-one miles long, with an average breadth of three miles. The bottom lands—that is, those in the lowest portion—are sometimes overflowed when there is an unusual quantity of water in the river. In some places the plains are level, and in others, rolling. The soil is very fertile.
Two mountain ranges hem in the valley. The one on the east has an average height of a thousand feet, and the other two hundred feet less. The eastern range is steep, mostly barren, and abounds with caverns, clefts, ravines, and forests. The western is not nearly so wild, and is mostly cultivated.
The meaning of the Indian word for Wyoming is "Large Plains," which, like most of the Indian names, fits very well indeed.
The first white man who visited Wyoming was a good Moravian missionary, Count Zinzendorf—in 1742. He toiled among the Delaware Indians who lived there, and those of his faith who followed him 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,
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