CHAPTER II.
THE WHITE CHIEF.
1800.
The hero of our sketch, Philemon Wright, was a man forty years of age. In appearance he was of a strong, broad build, and stood six feet in his stockings. A wealth of flaxen hair was brushed straight back from a high and noble brow. His face was profoundly meditative. Thick eyebrows shaded the eyes, which were wonderfully quick, observant and penetrating. His features indicated goodness and energy, strength of will and determination. His muscles were the envy of all who felt them.
Like all superior men, Philemon Wright nourished long his projects, but decision once made he set himself to realize them with ardor, obstacles only serving to intensify his energy, for he employed all the resources of his spirit and inflexible will to triumph over them. He was a worthy descendant of the men of Kent who followed Harold to victory through difficulties which to others would have been insurmountable.
His father, Thomas Wright, having sold his estates in Kent, settled in Woburn, twenty miles from Boston, in 1760, where Philemon, the fifth and youngest son, was born shortly afterwards. While a mere lad of fifteen he saw active service in the Revolutionary War, in the vicinity of Boston and New York, taking up arms as a British subject against the short-sighted rulers of the Motherland in the vain hope of wresting from them the rights which the revolutionists considered were their due.
Philemon married, at twenty-two, a Miss Wyman, of Irish descent, whose grand-nephews, Rufus and Joseph Choate, have since played so conspicuous a place in the drama of American history, and had seven promising children, who were known familiarly as Phil, Bearie, Chrissy, Abbie, Christie, Mary and Rug.
Philemon Wright was a man of indomitable courage, enterprise, industry and perseverance, and had acquired considerable property in the neighborhood of Boston. Finding a better market in Canada for farm produce, he went every fall to Montreal, and in 1796 determined to go on a tour of exploration on the Grand River, or the Utawas, as the Ottawa was then called.
A few settlements then existed for the first forty-five miles, up to the Long Sault Rapids, but beyond this point the seventy-five or eighty miles was a complete wilderness. He found that this part of the country was entirely unknown to the inhabitants of Montreal, excepting, of course, to the employees of the two great fur-trading companies, though its immense resources of fine timber were, he said, "sufficient to furnish supplies for any foreign market, even to load one thousand vessels."
Prominent members of the fur companies in Montreal drew his attention to their printed report, which stated that there was not five hundred acres of arable land on the extensive banks of the whole river.