STRANGE STORIES OF THE
GREAT VALLEY
STRANGE STORIES OF
THE GREAT VALLEY
I
LONG, LONG AGO
A Mound-Builder's Treasure-trove
"O—YI—O! O—yi—o!" sang fifteen-year-old Obadiah Holman—called Doby for short—as he tried to skip a flat stone across the big river. "O—yi—o! O—yi—o!"
Dark clouds were tumbling up from the southwest, but March sunshine still dimpled and danced and sparkled with the current.
"It is pretty water. That's what the Indian name means, O—yi—o, beautiful. A river beautiful," and he hopped about joyously, kicking out another hatchet-shaped stone or two on the stream's edge of one of the choice town lots of the O—hi—o river-port of Marietta in the new farthest northwest State of Ohio, beyond whose small beginnings of civilization lay the wilderness of the great Northwest Territory in this year of 1816.
A flatboat made of green-oak planks, which held a family's household goods and farming tools, was anchored 'longshore in a bayou that promised safety from the coming storm.