Mr. Wilkinson died July 18, 1912. He is survived by his wife, Mrs. Lucy Wilkinson, a son, Wm. W. Wilkinson, and two daughters, Mrs. J. Fred Smith and Mrs. Herman Shields. Mrs. George B. Dyball, another daughter, died May 13, 1914.
NIKUMI
By Mrs. Harriet S. MacMurphy
He glanced from the letter in his hand to the Indian woman sitting in the door of the skin tipi, and the papoose on the ground beside her, then down the river, his eyes moving on, like the waters, and seeing some vision of his brain, far distant. After a time his gaze came back and rested upon the woman and her babe again.
"If I could take the child," he murmured.
The squaw watched him furtively while she drew the deer sinew through the pieces of skin from which she was fashioning a moccasin. She understood, although spoken in English, the words he was scarce conscious of uttering, and, startled out of her Indian instinct of assumed inattention, looked at him with wide-opened eyes, trying to fathom a matter hardly comprehended but of great moment to her.
"Take the child"—where, and for what? Was he going to leave and sail down the great river to the St. Louis whence came all traders and the soldiers on the boats? Going away again as he had come to her many seasons ago? "Take the child," her child and his? Her mouth closed firmly, her eyes darkened and narrowed, as she stooped suddenly and lifted the child to her lap; and the Indian mother's cunning and watchfulness were aroused and pitted against the white father's love of his child.
Fort Atkinson was the most western post of the line established by President Monroe in 1819, after the Louisiana Purchase, to maintain the authority of the United States against Indian turbulence and British aggression, and had been in existence about four years before our story opens.
Here had been stationed the Sixth U. S. Infantry, who had wearily tramped for two months the banks of the Missouri river and dragged their boats after them, a distance of nearly a thousand miles of river travel to reach this post in the wilderness. Not a white man then occupied what is now the state of Iowa, except Julien Dubuque and a score or so of French traders. Not a road was to be found nor a vehicle to traverse it. But one or two boats other than keel boats and barges had ever overcome the swift current of the great Missouri thus far.