"While the steamer was passing the Indian reservation, some twenty odd miles above Warren, the famous chief, Cornplanter, paddled his canoe out to the vessel and actually paddled his small craft up stream and around the Allegheny, the old chief giving a vigorous war hoop as he accomplished the proud feat.
"Chief Cornplanter, alias John O’Bail, first took his young men to Clarion County, about 1795, to learn the method of lumbering, and in 1796 he built a sawmill on Jenneseedaga Creek, later named Cornplanter Run, in Warren County, and rafted lumber down the Allegheny[Allegheny] to Pittsburg for many years.
"Many tributary streams, such as Clarion, Tionesta and Oswayo, contributed rafts each year to make up the fleets that descended the Allegheny River from 1796 to 1874, our rafting days.
"We must mention the Hotel Boyer, on the Duquesne Way, on the Allegheny River bank, near the “Point” at Pittsburg, where the raftsmen and the lumbermen foregathered, traded, ate and drank together, after each trip. Indians were good pilots, but must be kept sober on the rafts. ‘Bootleggers’ along the river often ran boats out to the rafts and relieved the droughty crews by dispensing bottles of ‘red-eye’ from the long tops of the boots they wore."
Of the big trees in the Allegheny country, Dr. J. T. Rothrock, “Father of Pennsylvania Forestry,” has said: "About 1860, when I was with a crew surveying the line for the Sunbury & Erie Railroad, we had some difficulty in getting away from a certain location. A preliminary line came in conflict with an enormous original white pine tree, and the transitman shouted ‘cut down that tree’. After it was felled another nearby was found to be in the way, and was ordered out. The stump of the first tree, four feet above the ground measured 6 feet, 3 inches in diameter; of the second tree a trifle over 6 feet. Such was the wastefulness of the day."
As soon as Oscar returned he saw Anna forthwith. She was in a particularly pliant mood, and in response to his direct question if she would marry him, replied she would, and the couple boarded the train at Warren for Buffalo City, where they were married.
When Andrew McMeans came back from his protracted expedition they were already home from their honeymoon, and residing with the elder McNamors in the big brick house, overlooking the Bend. Andrew McMeans felt his jilting deeply; it was the first time that any real disappointment had come in the twenty-one years of his life; he had imagined that, despite her predilection for Wellendorf, he would yet win her, and his pride as well as his heart was lacerated. Outwardly he revealed little, but inwardly a peculiar melancholy such as he had never felt before overcame him, and like Lincoln, after the death of Ann Rutledge, he realized that he must either “die or get better.”
Anna seemed happy enough in her new life, and liked to flaunt her devotion to Oscar whenever her rejected lover was about. Ordinarily this might have wounded him still deeper, but he was absorbing fresh anxieties, reading Herbert Spencer, whose abominable agnosticism soon wrecked his faith, and bereft of love and the solace of immortality, he became the most wretched of men.
It was five years after Anna’s elopement, and when she was twenty-one years old, that one morning she started for Endeavor to get the mail and make some purchases at the country store. It was a cold, raw day in the early spring, and the wild pigeons were flying. The beechwoods on both sides of the road were alive with gunners, old and young. Some one fired a shot which hurtled close to the nose of the old roan family horse, a track horse in his day, and he took the bit in his teeth and ran away madly, with the buggy careening after him. Anna, standing up in the vehicle, was sawing on the lines until he crashed into a big ash tree and fractured the poor girl’s skull. She was picked up by some of the hunters and carried home unconscious the[unconscious the] next thing was to get the news to her husband. Oscar at that time had just finished a raft on West Hickory Creek, while his old time rival, McMeans, was completing one on East Hickory, which stream flowed into “The Beautiful River”, almost directly opposite to the West Hickory Run.
About the moment that Anna received her cruel death stroke, the two rafts were being launched simultaneously, with much cheering on both banks, for partisanship ran high among dwellers on either side of the river. Members of the family hurried to the river side to watch for the Wellendorf raft, to “head him off” before it was too late. It was several hours after the accident when the two rival rafts, with the stalwart young pilots at[at] the sterns, swept around the Bend, traveling “nip and tuck”. It promised to be an evenly matched race, barring accidents, clear to Pittsburg. The skippers of the contending yachts for the American Cup could not have been more enthused for their races than were Andrew McMeans and Oscar Wellendorf.