McClinton extricated the tomahawk from her neck, bound up the wound with his own neckerchief and carried her to her parent’s home, near the Falling Springs. He remained until the wound healed, when he married her. Later the pair migrated west of the Alleghenies.
Madelon McClinton was very dark, with an oval face and aquiline features, possibly having had a strain of Pennsylvania Jewish blood to account for her brunette type of beauty. She always wore a red scarf wrapped about her neck, being proud and sensitive of the ugly long white scar left by the Indian’s weapon.
This ancestress, so Grandmother McClinton thought, was responsible for Anna’s affinity for the rather prosaic Dutchman Wellendorf. Although the girl was open in her preference for Oscar, she did not make a decision as to matrimony for some time. When Wellendorf was absent, she was nicer to McMeans than anyone else. However, if Oscar appeared on the scene, she had eyes and ears for no other.
On one occasion[occasion] when the two young men started down the river on their rafts, proudly standing at the steering oars in the rear, for the Allegheny pilots rode at the back of the rafts, whereas those on the Susquehanna were always at the front. Anna was at the water’s edge, under a huge buttonwood tree–or, as Wellendorf called it in the breezy vernacular of the Pennsylvania[Pennsylvania] Dutch, a “wasserpitcher”–and waved a red kerchief impartially at both.
McMean’s raft on this trip was of “pig iron”, that is unpeeled hemlock logs, as heavy as lead, and became submerged when he had only gotten as far as the mouth of French Creek. He had to run ashore to try and devise ways and means to save it from sinking altogether, while Wellendorf floated along serenely on his raft of white pine, and was to Pittsburg and back home before McMeans ever reached the “Smoky City.” “John C. French tells us, "White Pine (pinus strobus) was King, and his dusky Queen was a beautiful Wild Cherry, lovely as Queen Alliquippa of the redmen. Rafting lumber from Warren County began about 1800, and it reached its maximum in the decade, 1830 to 1840. The early history of Warren County abounds in very interesting incidents, along the larger Allegheny River, from rafts of pine lumber assembled to couple up for Pittsburg fleets.
"After the purchase of Louisiana, in 1804, the hardy lumbermen decided to extend their markets for pine beyond Pittsburg, Wheeling, Cincinnati and Louisville–to go, in fact, to New Orleans with pine and cherry lumber. So large boats were built in the winter of 1805 and 1806 at many mills. Seasoned lumber of the best quality was loaded into the flat boats and they untied on April 1, 1806, for the run of two thousand miles, bordered by forests to the river’s edge.
"It was in defiance to ‘All Fools’ Day’, but they went through and sold both lumber and boats. For clear pine lumber, $40.00 was the price per one thousand feet received at New Orleans–just double the Pittsburg price at that date. For three years thereafter the mills of Warren County sent boats to New Orleans loaded with lumber, and the men returned on foot. Joseph Mead, Abraham Davis and John Watt took boats through in 1807, coming back via Philadelphia on coastal sailing ships.
"The pilots and men returned by river boats or on foot, as they best could. The markets along the Ohio from Pittsburg to St. Louis soon took all the lumber from the Allegheny mills, and the longer trips were gladly discontinued.
"It was in 1850 that there came the first lumber famine at Pittsburg. Owing to the low price of lumber and an unfavorable winter for the forest work, few rafts of lumber and board timber went down the Allegheny on the spring freshets, but the November floods brought one hundred rafts that sold for more favorable prices than had previously prevailed. Clear pine lumber sold readily for $18.00 and common pine lumber for $9.00 per one thousand feet.
"The renown of these prices stimulated lumbering on the Allegheny headwaters and the larger creeks. So the demand for lumber was supplied and the railroads soon began to bring lumber from many sawmills. The board timber was hewed on four sides, so there were only five inches of wane on each of the four corners. These rafts of round-square timber were sold by square feet to Pittsburg sawmills.