USA > Pennsylvania > Jefferson County > Brookville > A pioneer history of Jefferson county, Pennsylvania and my first recollections of Brookville, Pennsylvania, 1840-1843, when my feet were bare and my cheeks were brown > Part 3
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The twine or cords were manufactured by the squaws, who gathered stalks of this hemp, separating them into filaments, and then taking a num- ber of filaments in one hand, rolled them rapidly upon their bare thighs until twisted, locking, from time to time, the ends with fresh fibres. The cord thus made was finished by dressing with a mixture of grease and wax, and drawn over a smooth groove in a stone.
Their hominy-mills can be seen yet about a mile north of Samuel Temple's barn, in Warsaw township.
All the stone implements of our Indians except arrows were ground and polished. How this was done the reader must imagine. Indians had their mechanics and their workshops or " spots" where implements were made. You must remember that the Indian had no iron or steel tools, only bone, stone, and wood to work with. The flint arrows were made from a stone of uniform density. Large chips were flaked or broken from the rock. These chips were again deftly chipped with bone chisels into arrows, and made straight by pressure. A lever was used on the rock to separate chips,-a bone tied to a heavy stick.
From Jones's " Antiquities of the Southern Indians" the writer has gleaned most of the following facts. They had a limited variety of cop- per implements, which were of rare occurrence, and which were too soft to be of use in working so hard a material as flint or quartzite. Hence it is believed that they fashioned their spear- and arrow-heads with other im- plements than those of iron or steel. They must have acquired, by their observation and numerous experiments, a thorough and practical knowl- edge of cleavage,-that is, " the tendency to split in certain directions, which is characteristic of most of the crystallizable minerals." Captain
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PIONEER HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, PENNA.
John Smith, speaking of the Virginia Indians in his sixth voyage, says, " His arrow-head he quickly maketh with a little bone, which he weareth at his bracelet, of a splint of a stone or glasse, in the form of a heart, and these they glue to the ends of the arrows. With the sinews of the deer and the tops of deers' horns boiled to a jelly they make a glue which will not dissolve in cold water." Schoolcraft says, " The skill displayed in this art, as it is exhibited by the tribes of the entire continent, has excited admiration. The material employed is generally some form of horn stone, sometimes passing into flint. No specimens have, however, been observed where the substance is gun-flint. The horn-stone is less hard than common quartz, and can be readily broken by contact with the latter." Catlin, in his " Last Ramble among the Indians," says, " Every tribe has its factory in which these arrow-heads are made, and in these only certain adepts are able or allowed to make them for the use of the tribe. Erratic bowlders of flint are collected and sometimes brought an immense distance, and broken with a sort of sledge-hammer made of a rounded pebble of horn-stone set in a twisted withe, holding the stone and forming a handle. The flint, at the indiscriminate blows of the sledge, is broken into a hundred pieces, and such flakes selected as from the angles of their fracture and thickness will answer as the basis of an arrow-head. The master-workman, seated on the ground, lays one of these flakes on the palm of his hand, holding it firmly down with two or more fingers of the same hand, and with his right hand, between the thumb and two forefingers, places his chisel or punch on the point that is to be broken off, and a co-operator-a striker-in front of him, with a mallet of very hard wood, strikes the chisel or punch on the upper end, flaking the flint off on the under side below each projecting point that is struck. The flint is then turned and chipped in the same manner from the opposite side, and that is chipped until required shape and dimensions are obtained, all the fractures being made on the palm of the hand. In selecting the flake for the arrow-head a nice judgment must be used or the attempt will fail. A flake with two opposite parallel, or nearly par- allel, planes of cleavage is found, and of the thickness required for the centre of the arrow-point. The first chipping reaches nearly to the cen- tre of these planes, but without quite breaking it away, and each clip- ping is shorter and shorter, until the shape and edge of the arrow-head is formed. The yielding elasticity of the palm of the hand enables the chip to come off without breaking the body of the flint, which would be the case if they were broken on a hard substance. These people have no metallic instruments to work with, and the punch which they use, I was told, was a piece of bone, but on examining it, I found it to be of sub- stance much harder, made of the tooth-incisor-of the sperm whale, which cetaceans are often stranded on the coast of the Pacific."
" A considerable number of Indians must have returned and settled
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PIONEER HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, PENNA.
along the Red Bank as late as 1815-16. James White, of 'Mexico,' informed the writer that three hundred of them, about that time, settled along this stream below Brookville, partly in Armstrong County. Re- specting their return to this section, Dr. M. A. Ward wrote to Eben Smith Kelly at Kittanning, from Pittsburg, January 18, 1817,-
" ' I am not at all surprised that the sober, industrious, religious in- habitants of Red Bank should be highly incensed at their late accession of emigrants, not only because by them they will probably be deprived of many fat bucks and delicious turkeys, to which, according to the strict interpretation of all our game laws, they have as good a right, if they have the fortune to find and the address to shoot them, as any " dirty, nasty" Indians whatever, but because the presence and examples of such neighbors must have a very depraving influence upon the morals. Their insinuating influence will be apt to divert the minds of the farmers from the sober pursuits of agriculture and inspire a propensity for the barbarous pleasures of the chase. . . . But what is worse than all, I have heard that they love whiskey to such an inordinate degree as to get sometimes beastly drunk, and even beat their wives and behave unseemly before their families, which certainly must have a most demoralizing tendency on the minds of the rising generation.'"-History of Armstrong County.
· The Delaware Indians styled themselves " Lenni Lenape," the original or unchanged people. The eastern division of their people was divided into three tribes,-the Unamies, or Turtles of the sea-shore ; the Una- chlactgos, or Turkeys of the woods ; and the Minsi-monceys, or Wolves of the mountains. A few of the Muncy villages of this latter division were scattered as far west as the valley of the Allegheny.
From Penn's arrival in 1682 the Delawares were subject to the Iro- quois, or the confederacy of the Six Nations, who were the most warlike savages in America. The Iroquois were usually known among the English people as the Five Nations. The nations were divided and known as the Mohawks, the fire-striking people, having been the first to procure fire arms. The Senecas, mountaineers, occupied Western New York and Northwestern Pennsylvania. They were found in great num- bers in the Allegheny and its tributaries. Their great chiefs were Corn- planter and Guyasutha. This tribe was the most numerous, powerful, and warlike of the Iroquois nation, and comprised our Jefferson County Indians.
" But these were Indians pure and uncorrupted. Before many a log fire, at night, old settlers have often recited how clear, distinct, and im- mutable were their laws and customs ; that when fully understood a white man could transact the most important business with as much safety as he can to-day in any commercial centre.
" In this day and age of progress we pride ourselves upon our rail- roads and telegraph as means of rapid communication, and yet, while it was well known to the early settlers that news and light freight would
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PIONEER HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, PENNA.
travel with incomprehensible speed from tribe to tribe, people of the present day fail to understand the complete system by which it was done.
" In many places through the western counties you will find traces of pits, which the early settlers will tell you were dug by white men looking for silver, which, as well as copper, was common among the Indians, and was supposed by first comers to be found in the vicinity ; but experience soon proved the copper came, perhaps, from Lake Superior, by this Indian express, as we might term it, and the silver, just as possible, from the far West. Our railroads wind along the valleys, almost regardless of length or circuit, if a gradual rise can only be obtained. To travellers on wheels straight distances between points are much less formidable than is generally supposed. We find traces of the example of the Indian in the first white men. The first settlers of 1799 and 1805 took their bags of grain on their backs, walked fifty miles to the mill in Indiana or Arm- strong County, and brought home their flour the same way."
" The following is taken from the ' Early Days of Punxsutawney and Western Pennsylvania,' contributed a few years ago to the Punxsutawney Plaindealer by the late John K. Coxson, Esq., who had made considerable research into Indian history, and was an enthusiast on the subject. Ac- cording to Mr. Coxson, ' More than eighteen hundred years ago the Iroquois held a lodge in Punxsutawney (this town still bears its Indian name, which was their sobriquet for " gnat town"), to which point they could ascend with their canoes, and go still higher up the Mahoning to within a few hours' travel of the summit of the Allegheny Mountains. There were various Indian trails traversing the forests, one of which entered Punxsutawney near where Judge Mitchell now resides.
" ' These trails were the thoroughfares or roadways of the Indians, over which they journeyed when on the chase or the " war-path," just as the people of the present age travel over their graded roads. "An erroneous impression obtains among many at the present day that the Indian, in travelling the interminable forests which once covered our towns and fields, roamed at random, like a modern afternoon hunter, by no fixed paths, or that he was guided in his long journeyings solely by the sun and stars, or by the course of the streams and mountains ; and true it is that these untutored sons of the woods were considerable astronomers and geographers, and relied much upon these unerring guide-marks of nature. Even in the most starless nights they could determine their course by feel- ing the bark of the oak-trees, which is always smoothest on the south side and roughest on the north. But still they had their trails, or paths, as distinctly marked as are our county and State roads, and often better located. The white traders adopted them, and often stole their names, to be in turn surrendered to the leader of some .Anglo Saxon army, and, finally, obliterated by some costly highway of travel and commerce.
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PIONEER HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, PENNA.
They are now almost wholly effaced or forgotten. Hundreds travel along, or plough over them, unconscious that they are in the footsteps of the red men."* It has not taken long to obliterate all these Indian land- marks from our land ; little more than a century ago the Indians roamed over all this western country, and now scarce a vestige of their presence remains. Much has been written and said about their deeds of butchery and cruelty. True, they were cruel, and in many instances fiendish, in their inhuman practices, but they did not meet the first settlers in this spirit. Honest, hospitable, religious in their belief, reverencing their Manitou, or Great Spirit, and willing to do anything to please their white brother,-this is how they met their first white visitors ; but when they had seen nearly all their vast domain appropriated by the invaders, when wicked white men had introduced into their midst the " wicked fire- water," which is to-day the cause of many an act of fiendishness perpe- trated by those who are not untutored savages, then the Indian rebelled, all the savage in his breast was aroused, and he became pitiless and cruel in the extreme.
"""' It is true that our broad domains were purchased and secured by treaty, but the odds were always on the side of the whites. The " Colo- nial Records" give an account of the treaty of 1686, by which a deed for " walking purchase was executed, by which the Indians sold as far as a man could walk in a day. But when the walk was to be made the most active white man was obtained, who ran from daylight until dark, as fast as he was able, without stopping to eat or drink. This much dissatisfied the Indians, who expected to walk leisurely, resting at noon to eat and shoot game, and one old chief expressed his dissatisfaction as follows : ' Lun, lun, lun ; no lay down to drink ; no stop to shoot squirrel, but lun, lun, lun all day ; me no keep up ; lun, lun for land.' That deed, it is said, does not now exist, but was confirmed in 1737."
" ' When the white man came the Indians were a temperate people, and their chiefs tried hard to prohibit the sale of intoxicating drinks among their tribes ; and when one Sylvester Garland, in 1701, intro- duced rum among them and induced them to drink, at a council held in Philadelphia, Shemekenwhol, chief of the Shawnese, complained to Governor William Penn, and at a council held on the 13th of October, 1701, this man was held in the sum of one hundred pounds never to deal rum to the Indians again ; and the bond and sentence was approved by Judge Shippen, of Philadelphia. At the chief's suggestion the council en - acted a law prohibiting the trade in rum with the Indians. Still later the ruling chiefs of the Six Nations opposed the use of rum, and Red Jacket, in a speech at Buffalo, wished that whiskey would never be less than "a dollar a quart." He answered the missionary's remarks on drunkenness
* Judge Veech.
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PIONEER HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, PENNA.
thus : " Go to the white man with that." A council, held on the Allegheny River, deplored the murder of the Wigden family in Butler County by a Seneca Indian while under the influence of whiskey, approved the sentence of our law, and again passed their prohibitory resolutions, and implored the white man not to give rum to the Indian.'
" Mr. Coxson claims that the council of the Delawares, Muncys, Shawnese, Nanticokes, Tuscorawas, and Mingos, to protest against the sale of their domain by the Six Nations, at Albany, in 1754, was held at Punxsutawney, and cites Joncaire's ' Notes on Indian Warfare,' ' Life of Bezant,' etc. 'It is said they ascended the tributary of La Belle Riviere to the mountain village on the way to Chinklacamoose (Clearfield) to attend the council.'* At that council, though Sheklemas, the Christian king of the Delawares, and other Christian chiefs, tried hard to prevent the war, they were overruled, and the tribes decided to go to war with their French allies against the colony. 'Travellers, as early as 1731, reported to the council of the colony of a town sixty miles from the Susquehanna.' 1
""' After the failure of the expedition against Fort Duquesne, the white captives were taken to Kittanning, Logtown, and Pukeesheno (Punxsutawney). The sachem, Pukeesheno (for whom the town was called), was the father of Tecumseh and his twin brother, the Prophet, and was a Shawnese. We make this digression to add another proof that Punxsutawney was named after a Shawnese chief as early as 1750.' ±
"' I went with Captain Brady on an Indian hunt up the Allegheny River. We found a good many signs of the savages, and I believe we were so much like the savages (when Brady went on a scouting expedition he always dressed in Indian costume) that they could hardly have known us from a band of Shawnese. But they had an introduction to us near the mouth of Red Bank. General Brodhead was on the route behind Captain Brady, who discovered the Indians on a march. He lay con- cealed among the rocks until the painted chiefs and their braves had got fairly into the narrow pass, when Brady and his men opened a destructive fire. The sylvan warriors retuned the volley with terrific yells that shook the caverns and mountains from base to crest. The fight was short but sanguine. The Indians left the pass and retired, and soon were lost sight of in the deepness of the forest. We returned with three children re- captured, whose parents had been killed at Greensburg. We immediately set out on a path that led us to the mountains, to a lodge the savages had near the head-waters of Mahoning and Red Bank.
""' We crossed the Mahoning about forty miles from Kittanning, and entered a town, which we found deserted. It seemed to be a hamlet, built by the Shawnese. From there we went over high and rugged hills,
* Joncaire.
+ Bezant.
¿ History of Western Pennsylvania, p. 302.
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PIONEER HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY, PENNA.
through laurel thickets, darkened by tall pine and hemlock groves, for one whole day, and lay quietly down on the bank of a considerable stream (Sandy Lick). About midnight Brady was aroused by the sound of a rifle not far down the creek. We arose and stole quietly along about half a mile, when we heard the voices of Indians but a short distance below us ; there another creek unites its waters with the one upon whose banks we had rested. We ascertained that two Indians had killed a deer at a lick, They were trying to strike a light to dress their game. When the flame of pine-knots blazed brightly and revealed the visages of the savages, Brady appeared to be greatly excited, and perhaps the caution that he always took when on a war-path was at that time disregarded. Revenge swallowed and absorbed every faculty of his soul. He recog- nized the Indian who was foremost, when they chased him, a few months before, so closely that he was forced to leap across a chasm of stone on the slippery rock twenty-three feet ; between the jaws of granite there roared a deep torrent twenty feet deep. When Brady saw Conemah he sprang forward and planted his tomahawk in his head. The other Indian, who had his knife in his hand, sprang at Brady. The long, bright steel glistened in his uplifted hand, when the flash of Farley's rifle was the death-light of the brave, who sank to the sands. . . . Brady scalped the Indians in a moment, and drew the deer into the thicket to finish dress- ing it, but had not completed his undertaking when he heard a noise in the branches of the neighboring trees. He sprang forward, quenched the flame, and in breathless silence listened for the least sound, but noth- ing was heard save the rustling of the leaves, stirred by the wind. One of the scouts softly crept along the banks of the creek to catch the faintest sound that echoes on the water, when he found a canoe down upon the beach. The scout communicated this to Brady, who resolved to embark on this craft, if it was large enough to carry the company. It was found to be of sufficient size. We all embarked and took the deer along. We had not gone forty rods down the stream when the savages gave a war-whoop, and about a mile off they were answered with a hun- dred voices. We heard them in pursuit as we went dashing down the frightful and unknown stream. We gained on them. We heard their voices far behind us, until the faint echoes of the hundreds of warriors were lost ; but, unexpectedly, we found ourselves passing full fifty canoes drawn up on the beach. Brady landed a short distance below. There was no time to lose. If the pursuers arrived they might overtake the scouts. It was yet night. He took four of his men along, and with great caution unmoored the canoes and sent them adrift. The scouts below secured them, and succeeded in arriving at Brodhead's quarters with the scalps of two Indians and their whole fleet, which disabled them much from carrying on their bloody expeditions.'
" In the legend of Noshaken, the white captive of the Delawares, in
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1753, who was kept at a village supposed to have been Punxsutawney, occurs the following : 'The scouts were on the track of the Indians, the time of burning of the captives was extended, and the whole band pre- pared to depart for Fort Venango with the prisoners. . . . They con- tinued on for twenty miles, and encamped by a beautiful spring, where the sand boiled up from the bottom near where two creeks unite. Here they passed the night, and the next morning again headed for Fort Venango. "' This spring is believed to have been the " sand spring" at Brook- ville. Thus both the earlier histories and traditions would lead us to believe that Jefferson County was once the scene of Indian occupation. The early settlers found many vestiges of them, and even at this late day " Indian relics" in the shape of stone tomahawks, flint arrows, darts, etc., are frequently found.
"' But it was long after these scenes, when Joseph Barnett, the first white settler, came into the wilds of what is now Jefferson County. Then nearly all the Indians had gone, some toward the setting sun, others toward Canada. Of all the tribes that once composed the great Indian confederations, only a few Muncies and Senecas of Cornplanter's tribe remained. These Indians, for a number of years after the white men came, extended their hunting excursions into these forests. They were always peaceable and friendly. The first settlers found their small patches of corn, one of which was planted where the fair-grounds are now located, and another in the flat at Port Barnett. Indian corn, or maize, as it was sometimes called, is undoubtedly an American cereal, being first discovered on this continent in 1600, though it is now grown in all civilized lands.' " *- Kate Scott's History of Jefferson County.
CHAPTER III.
THE WILDERNESS IN 1755-THE SAVAGE INDIAN-MARIE LE ROY AND BARBARA LEININGER, THE FIRST WHITE PIONEERS TO TREAD THIS WILDERNESS-THE CHINKLACAMOOSE PATH-PUNXSUTAWNEY AND KIT- TANNING-REV. HECKEWELDER, REV. ZEISBERGER, REV. ETTWEIN, AND ROTHE.
FROM what I can learn, the first white pioneers to tread the soil of Jefferson County, as it now is, were Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger. They were Swiss people, and lived with their parents about fifteen miles from where the city of Sunbury now is, in Northumberland County, then
* Drs. Sturtevant, Pickering, and other eminent botanists and antiquarians, believed that maize (or Indian corn) is mentioned by the old Icelandic writers, who are thought to have visited the coast of castern North America as early as 1006.
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Lancaster or Berks County. These girls were Indian prisoners, and were being taken to Kittanning, as it is called now, by and over the " Chink- lacamoose path" or " Indian trail." This " trail" passed through Punx- sutawney, and here the Indians with these captive girls rested five days.
I quote from the " Narrative of Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leinin- ger" as follows :
" Early in the morning of the 16th of October, 1755, while Le Roy's hired man went out to fetch the cows, he heard the Indians shooting six times. Soon after eight of them came to the house and killed Marie Le Roy's father with tomahawks. Her brother defended himself des- perately for a time, but was at last overpowered. The Indians did not kill him, but took him prisoner, together with Marie Le Roy and a little girl, who was staying with the family. Thereupon they plundered the homestead and set it on fire. Into this fire they laid the body of the murdered father, feet foremost, until it was half consumed. The upper half was left lying on the ground, with the two tomahawks with which they had killed him sticking in his head. Then they kindled another fire, not far from the house. While sitting around it, a neighbor of Le Roy, named Bastian, happened to pass by on horseback. He was imme- diately shot down and scalped.
" Two of the Indians now went to the house of Barbara Leininger, where they found her father, her brother, and her sister Regina. Her mother had gone to the mill. They demanded rum ; but there was none in the house. Then they called for tobacco, which was given them. Having filled and smoked a pipe, they said, ' We are Allegheny Indians, and your enemies. You must all die !' Thereupon they shot her father, tomahawked her brother, who was twenty years of age, took Barbara and her sister Regina prisoners, and conveyed them into the forest for about a mile. There they were soon joined by the other Indians, with Marie Le Roy and the little girl.
" Not long after several of the Indians led the prisoners to the top of a high hill, near the two plantations. Toward evening the rest of the savages returned with six fresh and bloody scalps, which they threw at the feet of the poor captives, saying that they had a good hunt that day.
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