Old John Engle, mighty Nimrod of Brungard’s Church (Sugar Valley), on the nights of the Northern Lights, or as the Indians called them, “The Dancing Ghosts”, used to hear a strange, weird, unaccountable ringing echo, like exultant shouting, over in the region of the horizon, beyond the northernmost Allegheny ridges. He would climb the “summer” mountain all alone, and sit on the highest summits, thinking that the wolves had come back, for he wanted to hear them plainer. In the Winter of 1859 the distant acclamation continued for four successive nights, and the Aurora covered the entire vault of heaven with a preternatural brilliance. Great bars of intensely bright light shot out from the northern horizon and broke in mid-sky, and filled the southern skies with their incandescence. The sky was so intensely red that it flared as one great sheet of fire, and engulfed the night with an awful and dismal red light. Reflected on the snow, it gave the earth the appearance of being clothed in scarlet.
The superstitious Indians, huddled, cold and half-clad, and half-starved in the desert reservations, when they saw the fearful glow over beyond Lake Erie, and heard the distant cadences, declared that they were the signal fires and the cries for vengeance of the Indian braves imprisoned up there in star-land, calling defiance to the white hosts, and inspiration to their own depleted legions, the echo of the day of reckoning, when the red men would come to their own again, and finding their lost people, lead them to a new light, out of the Indians’ twilight.
XI
Hugh Gibson’s Captivity
After the brutal massacre, by the Indians, of the Woolcomber family, came fresh rumors of fresh atrocities in contemplation, consequently it was considered advisable to gather the women and children of the surrounding country within the stockade of Fort Robinson, under a strong guard, while the bulk of the able-bodied men went out in companies to reap the harvest. Some of the harvesters were on guard part of the time, consequently all the men of the frontier community performed a share of the guard duty.
Among the most energetic of the guardsmen was young Hugh Gibson, son of the Widow Gibson, a name that has later figured prominently in the public eye in the person of the Secretary of the American Legion at Brussels, who endured a trying experience during the period of the over-running of the Belgian Paris by the hordes of blood-thirsty Huns, as rapacious and merciless as the red men of Colonial Pennsylvania.
Hugh Gibson, of Colonial Pennsylvania, was under twenty, slim and dark, and very anxious to make a good record as guardian of so many precious lives. As days wore on, and no Indian attacks were made, and no fresh atrocities committed by the blood-loving monster, Cooties, the terror of the lower Juniata Valley, even the punctilious Gibson relaxed a trifle in the rigidity of his guardianship.
It was near the end of the harvest when the majority of the men announced that they would remain away over night at a large clearing on Buffalo Creek, as it would be difficult to reach the fort by nightfall and be back at work by daybreak the next morning. Hugh Gibson was made captain of the guard and placed in charge of the safety of the stockade full of refugees.
All went well with Gibson and his fellow pickets until about midnight, when the Indians launched a gas attack. The wind being propitious, they built a fire, into which they stirred a large number of oak balls, and the fumes suddenly engulfing the garrison, all became very drowsy, with the result that the nimble redskins rushed in on the defenders, who were gaping about, thinking that there must be a forest fire somewhere, but too dazed and semi-conscious to think very succinctly about anything.
When the guards saw that it was red men, and not red fire, they roused themselves as best they could, and fought bravely to save the fort and its inmates. By throwing firebrands into the stockade, the women and children, and cattle, were stampeded, and by a common impulse burst open the gates, and dashed past the defenders, headed for the creek, to escape the threatened conflagrations. Then the Indians closed in, and in the darkness, amid the crackling of the fire–for a forest fire was now in progress, and part of the stockade wall was blazing, amid war whoops and shrieks of hatred and agony, the barking of dogs, the bellowing of cattle running amuck, rifle shots, the crack of tomahawks on defenseless skulls, the midnight air resounded with uncouth and horrible medley.