“Them two’ll never amount to a hill of beans.” But Jimmie and Charlie amazed and fooled them all.
At the rather seedy, uneventful and undecided age of five years, when a youngster wants to be everything from a minister of the gospel to heavyweight boxing champion of the world, both Jimmie’s and Charlie’s parents decided that their sons should embark upon some sort of careers. Before Jimmie was born, his parents had decided what their second son would do for his life’s work. They had chosen music and the classics for him; Charlie’s parents had chosen literature and the arts for him.
So for a short while Jimmie practiced his music lessons but soon gave them up as hopeless, as did his parents, for the lad hated music lessons at that age with an undying hatred. As far as Charlie’s future in the field of literature was concerned, he too abandoned his parents’ choice.
Many things enter into the course of a child’s life even as they do with a grown-up, and consequently the career of a musician for Jimmie did not materialize. Instead the lad developed into one of the world’s foremost authors and conservationists of his time. It was Charlie Miller who became quite adept as an accomplished musician.
With the surrender of Lord Cornwallis came a man of adventurous spirit and Dutch descent into the land of the Mohawks and the Oneidas. As he journeyed through this country making friends with the Indian tribes, he chanced upon and fell madly in love with a beautiful Mohawk princess from a little village near the head waters of the Canada river. As to her name, it has not been learned, but as to her beauty, all the men and women of those days readily vouched. For she was as tall and as slender as the most delicate reed. The tiny moccasins which covered her feet were the smallest ever seen by her tribe. Indeed, she was the pride and joy of that village of Mohawks and of all tribes who had seen her as she roamed the forests.
Jim Curwood’s mother very distinctly remembers seeing this wilderness beauty. At that time Mrs. Curwood was but a child of ten and the lovely Indian princess was well past her eightieth birthday.
Her beauty was indeed bewitching and all white men, as well as the redman who had set eyes upon her loveliness, fell in love with her. Her hair was long, black and radiantly glossy. The shoes she wore upon her feet were so small that Jim’s mother, then but ten years of age, could not have put her feet into them.
It was the adventurous Dutchman wandering through the Mohawk region shortly after the Cornwallis surrender who married the Indian princess. This man was Jim Curwood’s phlegmatic great grandfather, an adventurer of the old school who ended up by marrying an Indian chief’s daughter. It is little wonder that young Jimmie became such a carefree, vagabond lover of the deep forests. Indian blood flowed deep within his veins and throughout his entire life the forests, the streams and the lakes were his home despite the fact that he owned a mansion in the very heart of civilization.
Shortly after the blond Dutchman had wooed and won his princess, there was born in England a man who later became a great naval officer in the Queen’s navy and a world famous writer of sea tales. A man who delved deeply into his memories and imagination to spin yarns of thrilling adventure on the land as well as on the swelling sea. His name was Captain Frederick Marrayat. That famous personage turned out to be a great-uncle of Jim Curwood’s.