With heavy hearts they started on a long journey for the west, carrying the heart-broken mother Karendonah in a hammock, to the asylum offered to them by the Wyandots on the Muskingum. The bereaved woman carried the blood-stained, heart-pierced raiment of her heroic daughter as a priceless relic, and it was in her arms when she died suddenly on the way, in Somerset County, and was buried beside the trail, on the old Forbes Road. The Monseys, however, took the costume with them as a fetich, and for years missionaries and others interested in the tragic story of “Black Agnes” Dunbar were shown her blue jacket with the hole in the breast where the arrow entered.
That arrow pierced the hearts of all the Monseys, for they became a dejected and beaten people in their Ohio sanctuary.
While it is true that most of the very old people who lived in the vicinity of the Fourth Gap have passed away, it may yet be possible to learn the exact location of the cairn containing the remains of “Black Agnes” and place a suitable marker over it. One thing seems certain, if the tradition of the Lenni-Lenape that persons dying bravely in battle reach a higher spiritual plane once their souls are released, her ghost will not have to hunt the hideous, burnt-over slashings that were once the wildly romantic Fourth Gap; it has gone to a realm beyond the destructive commercialism of this dollar-mad age, where beauty finds a perpetual reward and recognition.
XV
Abram Antoine, Bad Indian
Abram Antoine, a Cacique of the Stockbridge Tribe of Oneida Indians, had never before while in Pennsylvania been off the watershed of the Ohe-yu, or “The Beautiful River,” called by the white men “Allegheny,” until he accepted the position of interpreter to a group of chiefs from the New York and Pennsylvania Indians, to visit “The Great White Father,” General Washington, at Mount Vernon.
While the General had not been President for several years, and was living in retirement at his Virginia home, the red Chieftains felt that his influence would be such that he could secure redress for their wrongs. Cornplanter had been on many such missions, and come home elated by promises, few of which were ever fulfilled in any shape, and none in their entirety, consequently he declined to accompany the mission on what he termed a “fool’s errand.”
Abram Antoine, through life in New England, New York and Canada, had become much of a linguist, speaking English and French with tolerable fluency[fluency], besides being well versed in the Seneca and other Indian tongues. He was a tall, handsome type of redman, powerfully muscled, his career on “The Beautiful River,” where he rafted and boated between the Reservations and Pittsburg, and his service as a ranger for the Holland Land Company, had developed his naturally powerful form to that of a Hercules. Previously he had served in the American Navy, during the Revolutionary War, which had instilled in him a lifetime respect for the name of Washington. He was eager therefore to act as interpreter on an occasion which would bring him into personal contact with the Father of his Country.
The Indians took the usual overland route, coming down the Boone Road, to the West Branch of the Susquehanna at the mouth of Drury’s Run; from there they intended hiking across the mountains to Beech Creek, there to get on the main trail leading down the Bald Eagle Valley to Standing Stone (now Huntingdon), and from thence along the Juniata to Louisbourg, then just beginning to be called Harrisburg. It had been an “open winter” thus far.
At the West Branch they met an ark loaded with coal, bound for Baltimore, in charge of some Germans who had mined it in the vicinity of Mosquito Creek, Clearfield County, near the site of the later town of Karthaus. A friendly conversation was started between the party of Indians on shore and the boatmen, with the result that the pilot of the ark, Christian Arndt, invited the redmen to climb aboard[aboard].