USA > Pennsylvania > Mifflin County > History of Mifflin County : its physical peculiarities, soil, climate, &c. ; including an early sketch of the state of Pennsylvania Volume I > Part 5
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HISTORY OF MIFFLIN COUNTY.
had discovered. But it may be said, that an exclusive right of this kind would be unfavorable to the settlement of a country, and therefore could have no place among the sovereigns and states of Europe. The Swedes and Dutch seem to have paid no regard to the claim of Britain founded on the first discovery of Sebastian Cabot, who coasted North America for the Dutch, took possession of New York, and the Swedes of Pennsylvania. No state or in- dividual ought to have regarded it for no expense, enterprise or labor of a Nation, or of any individual congenial a right which in its operation would defeat the end in view by the Creator."
Mrs. Grey the Captive.'
Juniata county was separated from Mifflin by an act of the Leg- islature of March 2, 1831, and comprised that portion of Mifflin that lay southeast of Black Log and Shade Mountain.
Southwest of the Juniata River is the beautiful and fertile valley of Tuscarora composed of undulating hills of slate and limestone, and on the northeast of the Juniata are smaller valleys of similar formation. The first settlements in Tuscarora Valley were made by the Scotch-Irish in 1749. At that day the State lands border- ing on the mountains, watered by clear copious springs, were more esteemed than the limestone lands where the waters sunk beneath the surface, and expensive wells were required. The adventurous pioneers, therefore, extended their researches over the mountains and discovered the rich and well-watered valleys along the Juniata. The Tuscarora Valley then being a part of Mifflin county, the following incident is appropriate in this work :
Robert Hagg, Samuel Bigham, James Gray and John Gray were the first four white men who settled in Tuscarora Valley, in the year 1749. They cleared some land, built a fort-afterwards called Bigham's Fort. Sometime in 1756 John Gray and another person went to Carlisle with pack-horses, to purchase salt. As Gray was returning on the declivity of the mountain, a bear crossed his path and frightened his horse, which threw him off. He was de- tained some hours by his accident, and when he arrived at the Fort he found.it had just been burned, and every person in it either killed or taken prisoners by the Indians. His wife and only daughter, three years old, were gone. John Gray joined Colonel Armstrong's expedition against Kittanning in the autumn of the same year, in hopes of hearing from his family. The hardships of the campaign prostrated his health, and he returned to Bucks
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county, his original home, only to die. He left a will, giving to his wife one-half of his farm, and to his daughter the other half, if they returned from captivity. If his daughter should not re- turn, or was not alive, he gave the other half to his sister, who had a claim of thirteen pounds sterling against him, which she was to release. In the meantime George Woods, Mrs. Gray and her child, with the others, were taken across the mountains to Kittanning, then an Indian village, and afterwards delivered to the French commander at Fort Duquesne. Woods was given to an Indian, named Hutson, and Mrs. Gray and her child were taken charge of by others, and carried into Canada. About a year after the burn- ing of the fort, Mrs. Gray concealed herself among some deer- skins in the wagon of a white trader, and was brought off, leaving her daughter in captivity. She returned home, proved her hus- band's will, and took possession of her half of the property. She afterwards married a Mr. Enoch Williams, by whom, however, she had no issue. Seven years after her escape, in 1764, a treaty was made with the Indians, by the conditions of which a number of captive children were surrendered and brought to Philadelphia to be recognized and elaimed by their friends.
Mrs. Gray attended, but no child appeared that she recognized as her dear little Jane. Still there was one about the same age that no one claimed. Some one conversant with the conditions of John Gray's will, slyly whispered to her to claim this child for the pur- pose of holding the other half of the property. She did so, and brought up the child as her own, carefully retaining the secret as well as a women could. Time wore away, and the girl grew up gross and ugly in person, awkward in manners, and, as events proved, loose in her morals. With all these attainments she managed to captivate a Mr. Gillespie, who married her. A Scotch-Irish clergy- man of the Seceder persuasion, by the name of McKee, became very intimate with Gillespie, and either purchased the property in question from him, or had so far won his good graces that he be- queathed it to him. The clergyman made over the property to one of his nephews of the same name. The clergyman had also a brother McKee, who, with his wife, was also a resident of Tuscarora Valley. His wife, "old Mrs. McKee," was a prominent witness in the subse- quent trials. After a lapse of years, the children of James Gray, heirs of John Gray's sister, got hold of some information leading them to doubt the identity of the returned captive, and law-suits on this state of things were commenced about 1789. There were
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multiform and complicated phases to the ease assumed, over the legal contest of over fifty years, that would now throw light upon the early history of the valley. The Williamses, Grays and Mckees, all claimed an interest by inheritance, to say nothing of the Beales, the Norrises and others, who had bought into the property.
Old Mrs. MeKee, the principal witness on the trial, who spoke with a rieh Irish brogne, on one occasion beeame quite gar -- rulous and entered largely into the history of the valley, to the great amusement of the court. Among other things, she described the spurious girl as "a big, blaek, ugly, Dutch lump, and not to be compared to the beautiful Jenny Gray." The case was tried in the old Lewistown court house, and her historieal developments so much interested one .of Lewistown's old jurymen, that himself, being an old settler, forgot the restraints of a jurymen and sent for- the old lady to come to his room at the hotel and enter more at large into the days of " Auld Lang Syne."
The old man was a little deaf, and the old lady's loud voice could be heard through the house.
One of the counsel, whose side of the ease wore rather a dis- couraging aspeet, overheard the old lady, and the next morning exposed the poor juryman, amidst mueh laughter by the court, bar and andience, and the case was ordered for trial before another jury. The following is the deposition of George Woods, written by him at Bedford in 1789, but never sworn to, and it was with. muel effort that the counsel were enabled to introduce these facts. as part of the testimony. The case was finally deeided in 1833 or '34 against the identity of the adopted child, and the property vested accordingly :
" Personally appeared, &c., &c., George Woods, and saith that. about the 12th or 13th of June, 1756, he was taken by the Indians in the settlement of Tusearora, in the county of Mifflin, and that. the wife of John Gray and his daughter Jane and others were taken. at the same time, and that they were all carried to Kittanning, a town on the Allegheny River, and there divided amongst the In- dians, and sometime in the month of July, then next, the said Indians delivered me and Jane Gray to a certain Indian named John Hut- son, and said Indian took me and the said Jane Gray to Pittsburgh, then in possession of the French. After some days the Indian Hutson delivered me to the French Governor, M. Duquesne, from which time I heard nothing of Jane Gray until the winter after Stump killed the Indians up the Susquehanna, at which time I found out the
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said Indian, John Hutson, who informed me that little Jane Gray was then a fine big girl, and lived near Sir William Johnsons, which in- formation I gave to Hannah Gray, mother of Jane Gray. At the same time, Hannah Gray showed me a girl she had taken out of the prisoners released by Col. Boquet for her own child. I then in- formed said Hannah that the child she had taken was not her own child, and said Hannah requested me not to mention that before the girl she had taken, for that if she never got her own she wished never to let the one she had know anything of her not being her own child. Some time the same year Col. George Croghan came to my house, I informed him the account I got of John Hutson. Mr. Croghan informed that the Indian's information was true, and that he got the said Jane Gray from said Indian, and had put her into a good family to be brought up, all of which I informed said Hannah; and-this-summer-was-a-three-years the said John Hutson and his son came to my house in Bedford, and stayed some time. I inquired about little Jenny, as he called the child he had got with me, and he informed me that Jenny was now a fine woman, had a fine house and five children, and lived near Sir William John- ston's place to the northward. I am clear that the girl Mrs. Hannah Gray showed me she had taken for the daughter of John Gray was not the danghter of her and John Gray ; and further saith not."
Dated, June, 1789, never sworn to, used in 1815 and 1817 in the court of Mifflin county, at Lewistown.
The Capture of Frances Slocum.
The case cited below has a most feeling interest to the author, by reason of over forty years' acquaintance with a part of the family mentioned therein and their prominent position in our country's more recent history, as the reader will discover at the close of this article. At a little distance from the present court house at Wil- kesbarre, lived the family of Jonathan Slocum. The men were one day away in the fields, and in an instant the house was surrounded by the Indians. There were in it, a mother, a daughter, about nine years old, a son, aged thirteen, another daughter, aged five, and a son, aged two-and-a-half years.
A young man, named Kingsley, and a boy were present grinding a knife. The first thing the Indians done was to shoot down the young man, and scalp him with the knife he had in his hand.
The nine-year old sister took the two-and-a-half-year old boy and run out of the back door and got into the fort. The Indians
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HISTORY OF MIFFLIN COUNTY.
chased her just enough to see her fright and to have a hearty laugh as she ran into the fort, and clung to and lifted her chubby little brother. Then they took the Kingsley boy, and young Slocum, aged thirteen, and little Frances, aged five, and prepared to depart, but finding young Slocum lame, at the earnest entreaties of his mother, they set him down and left him. Their captives were young Kingsley and the little girl. The mother's heart swelled unutter- ably, and for years she could not describe the scene without tears. She saw an Indian throw her child over his shoulder, and as her hair fell over her face, with one hand she brushed it aside, while tears fell from her distended eyes, and stretching out her other hand towards her mother she called for aid. The Indian turned into the woods, and this was the last that was seen of little Frances. This image was probably carried by the mother to her latest days.
About a month after this they came again, and murdered the aged grandfather, and shot a ball in the leg of the lame boy. This he carried with him in his leg six years, and to his grave. The last child was born a few months after these tragedies. What were the conversations, the conjectures, the hopes and fears respecting little Frances' fate, I will not attempt to describe. As the boy grew to manhood they were ever anxious to know the fate of their fair-haired little sister. They wrote letters, sent inquiries and made journeys over the west and the Canadas. Four of these journeys were made in vain. A silence as deep as night in the forest through which they wandered, hung over her fate for sixty years.
The reader will now pass over fifty-eight years, and suppose him- self in the wilderness of Indiana, on the bank of the Mississinewa, about fifty miles south of Fort Wayne. A very respectable Indian agent of the United States, Hon. George W. Ewing, of Pern, Indiana, was traveling there, and weary and belated, with a tired horse, he stops at an Indian wigwam for the night. He can speak the Indian language. The family are rich Indians, and have horses and skins in abundance. In the course of the evening he notices the hair of the woman is light, and her skin under her dress is also white. This led to a conversation. She told him she was a white child, but had been carried away when a very small girl. She could only remember her name was Slocum, and that she lived in a little house on the banks of the Susquehanna, and how many there were in her father's family, and their ages. But the name of the town she could not remember. On reaching his home 4
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the agent mentioned this story to his mother. She urged him to write and print the account. He done so, and sent it to Lancaster requesting its publication. By some unaccountable blunder it lay in the office two years, and was never published. Finally it saw light, and fell into the hands of Mr. Slocum, who was the little two- and-a-half year old boy when the girl was taken. In a few days he was off to see his sister, taking his older sister with him, the one who aided him in escape, and writing to a brother in Ohio, who was born after the captivity, to go with him. The two brothers and sister, in 1838, sought little Frances, just sixty years after her captivity. The writer hereof met the Ohio brother on his return, and from him learned the details of their meeting.
They reached the Indian country, the home of the Miami In- dians, nine miles from the nearest white settlement, they find the little wigwam. "I shall know my sister," said the one who sought ffer, " because she lost the nail of her first finger. Your brother hammered it off in the blacksmith shop when she was four years old." They got into the cabin and found an Indian woman having the appearance of seventy-five. She was painted and jew- eled, and dressed like an Indian in all respects. Nothing but her hair and her covered skin would indicate her origin. They got an interpreter and began to converse. She tells them where she was born, her name, &c., with the order of her father's family. "How come your nail gone?" inquired her sister. "My brother pounded it off when I was a little child in the shop." In a word they were satisfied this was Frances their long-lost sister. They asked her what her christian name was. She could not remember. Was it Frances ? She smiled and said "yes." It was the first time she had heard it pronounced for sixty years. Here then they were met, two brothers and two sisters. They were all satisfied they were brothers and sisters, but what a contrast !
The brothers were walking the cabin unable to speak, the oldest sister was weeping, but the Indian sister sat motionless and pas- sionless as indifferent as a spectator. There was no throbbing, no fine chords in her bosom to be touched. When the Mr. Slocum of Ohio, was giving me this history on his return, he shed copious tears. I finally said to him, "But could she not speak English?" "Not a word." "Did she know her age?" "She had no idea of it." "Was she entirely ignorant ?" "She did not know when Sunday comes."
But what a picture for the painter would the inside of that cabin have afforded.
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Here were the children of civilization, respectable, intelligent, temperate and wealthy, able to overcome mountains to recover their sister. On the other hand there was the child of the forest, not able to tell the day of the week, whose views and feelings were confined to the inside of that eabin. Her experiences are told in a word. She lived with the Delawares who carried her off till she was grown and then married a Delaware.
He either died or ran away, and she then married a Miami In- dian, a chief. She had two daughters, both of whom were married and who live in all the glory of an Indian eabin, deerskin clothes, and cowhide head dresses. No one of the family ean speak a word of English. They had an abundance of fine horses, and when the Indian sister wanted to aecompany her relatives, she whipped out, bridled her horse, mounted him astride and was off.
At night she eould throw a blanket around her, lie down on the floor and be asleep at once. The brothers and sister asked her to return with them and bring her children with her.
They, with their wealth, would transplant her baek on the banks of the Snsquehanna, or in northern Ohio, and make her a happy home, if money would do so.
This she declined, she had always lived with the Indians, and they had ever been kind to her, and she had promised her late husband, on his death bed,that she would never leave his people; and here they left her and hers, with the wild and darkened heathen, though springing from a pions race. The brothers made her annual visits there- after, and took her presents, and the author has often conversed with the brother in Ohio on his return from these visits.
He has often said to me that his Indian sister was more happy among her people than she ever could be, in her advanced age, to change her location to a residence among the whites, where, ignorant of their language and their habits, she would be a stranger.
With the Indian was her home. Here were all her attachments, her interests, and her lifelong memories centred, and he, after fur- ther thought, said he would not advise the change. The Indians gave them a most cordial reception. They held meetings, and adopted their queen's brothers as members of their tribe ; the de- tails of the ceremonies thereof was given the writer by Mr. Stocum, at Bellevue, Ohio, in 1844 or 1845. His heart yearned with an in- describable sensation for the poor helpless one, torn from the arms of her mother, and nnheard of for sixty years.
Mysterious Providenee ! How wonderful the tie which can thus
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HISTORY OF MIFFLIN COUNTY.
bind the human family together with a chain so strong. Other interests in our country's history are connected with the Slocum family. The other sister married a Mr. MePherson, and settled in northern Ohio, at an early day, near where Clyde now is. The aged mother came west also, and lived with her son, near Bellevue. A son of this sister married to MePherson, was made a cadet at West Point Military Academy. The writer made his acquaintance when we were both boys, when he made his home visits during his vacations. He made most brilliant progress, and was promoted to a brigadier-generalship, and assigned duty in Oregon and Cali- fornia.
On the breaking out of the war of the Rebellion, he was called east, and placed in an important command, and was waylaid in am- bush and shot dead, in the south. General Grant sent his body, under an escort of the regular army, north to be buried, and his remains rest in an old orchard, near the cabin wherein he was born, near Clyde, Sandusky county, Ohio, eight miles east of Fremont. Here rests General McPherson, a nephew of this Indian queen, and over his remains the people of his native county of Sandusky have erected a splendid monument, which was dedicated some years ago with unusual ceremonies, and an attendence of many thousands of people from many states. There is in the possession of the author, copies of the correspondence between old Mrs. Slocum, Gen- eral McPherson's grand-mother, and General Grant, on the occasion of her thanking him, as commander-in-chief of the army, for send- ing the escort he did, with the remains of her grand-son, from the far south to the family burying ground in the old orchard, near the cabin where he first saw the light of heaven.
Primitive Travelers.
Of the first white men who came within the limits of Mifflin county we know as little as we do of the Indian himself in his primitive condition. They were traders whose avocation led them to make journeys from the east to the Ohio River. That persons did engage in those trading operations and make those journeys before the earliest record we have of them, is evidenced by many circumstances. In a letter written by George Croghan, who resided on the Susquehanna River, about five miles west of Harris' Ferry, which is now Harrisburg, he mentions a trader who had just arrived from the Ohio, and gives other intelligence from which it may be inferred that the making of such trips was not then an nnknown
.
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thing, Croghan himself is mentioned as a trader as early as June, 1747.
He was well acquainted with the Indian country, and the best roads to Ohio, and was selected to convey an expedition thither. These early traders did not belong to that class of persons who re- duce to writing the events of their daily lives. It does not often appear that anything transpired with them which they deemed worthy of remembrance. They did not penetrate this new country at the date of 1740 to 1755 and '60, in the spirit of explorers seek- ing discoveries of value to the world and a benefit to themselves.
Even a passage of hundreds of miles through an unbroken forest made no impression on their nnappreciative senses intent upon traffic, they transported their goods on horseback from one end of the province to the other, with a view of a profitable trading with the Indians, whose verdancy and inexperience in transactions of this class at that early day, before they learned the ways of the white man, rendered them an easy prey to captivity and avarice. The ronte taken by these "Commercial Travelers" in that olden time was about the same traversed by the commercial traveler of the present day, viz : from the east up through the Long Narrows, then an Indian war path, now traversed by turnpike, canal and rail- road, and proceeding westward crossed the Allegheny Mountains at or near Kittanning Point.
It was this trail that gave the valley of the Juniata and these adjacent valleys their early importance, and it was the great high- way between the east and the west as it is to-day.
The traders, the agents of the government, and the pioneers all followed it as they proceeded westward. In 1754, to later, when there was a pressing necessity for military operations against the French on the Ohio, and the ways and means of moving troops and con- veying supplies were under consideration, there was no other road to Ohio, than this path, which Governor Morris described as "only a horseway through the woods and over mountains not passable with any carriage." It was improved when, in 1755, arrangements were made to enable Braddock and his army to march against Fort Duquesne. In 1756 and 1758 the rivalry which for years had existed between the English and the French to secure the friendship and alliance of the Indians, was becoming more intense. It continued to increase until its ultimate and inevitable result was reached, viz : a war in which a conspicnous part was played by Mifflin county. An agent was sent by the English Gov-
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HISTORY OF MIFFLIN COUNTY.
ernment with presents for the Indians, and to remind them of the liberality of the government in providing for their necessities on former occasions. This agent was also to ascertain their num- ber, disposition, strength and influence, also to obtain from them any intelligence possible as to the designs and operations of the French. The English were in constant dread of incurring the enmity of the Indians, and yet it could be avoided only by fre- quent and expensive presents, amounting virtually to the pur- chase of that unreliable friendship. They accepted these bribes without any hesitancy, being proud to receive them, and regarded them as concessions to their own importance. One of the persons composing this mission to the Indians, was George Croghan, a man of excitable temperament and varied fortunes. He was an Irish- man by birth, and came to Pennsylvania in 1742. Assuming the occupation of a trader, and learning the languages of the Shawnees and Delawares, and perhaps other nations, he manifested a willing- ness to perform services for, and make himself useful to the gov- ernment besides his other duties. In 1749 he was licensed as an Indian trader, but he had probably been previously employed in that vocation without a license, or under a former one. Another of these agents in the employment of the British Government, was Andrew Montour. He is spoken of in the record of those primi- tive times as " knowing, faithful and prudent," and was finally highly rewarded for bringing information concerning the Indians in the north-west. There were also white men in charge of trains of pack-horses, but of them we can get only incidental information. It is also highly probably that Indians also belonged to these trains. The journey was not new to them. There was the well-worn path over which the dusky warriors had for centuries, perhaps, traversed to and fro before the encroachments of civilization were began. We censure the Indian and call him an unfeeling savage, and a heathen to capture and carry away over these mountain routes poor innocent childhood ; away from parents and friends and Christian civilization, as was the case in many instances besides those related in another part of this work. We hear no comparison to the work done by the high-toned modern civilization, that system of chris- tian civilization pervading our own country for a century past, our schools and our churches, our missionaries to heathen lands to bring them up to our standard, that glows in all its effulgence and meridian splendor of this nineteenth century ; and this system of christian civilization can handcuff the mother and the father and
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