One of the two writers who coined this interesting “fake” was Hon. James Thompson, the eminent jurist, who learned printing in Butler, practiced law in Venango county, served three terms—the last as speaker—in the Legislature and one in Congress, was district-judge six years and sat on the Supreme bench fifteen years, five of them as chief-justice of this state. Judge Thompson removed to Erie in 1842 and finally to Philadelphia. He married a daughter of Rev. Nathaniel R. Snowden, first pastor of the First Presbyterian church in Harrisburg, in 1794-1803, and afterwards master of a noted academy at Franklin. Mr. Snowden’s wife was the daughter of Dr. Gustine, a survivor of the frightful Wyoming massacre. Their son, an eminent Franklin physician of early times, was the father of the late Dr. S. Gustine Snowden and of Major-General George R. Snowden, of Philadelphia, commander of the National-Guard of Pennsylvania. The good minister died in Armstrong county, descending to the grave as a shock of wheat fully ripe for the harvest.
COL. ALEXANDER MCDOWELL.
——“What is death
To him that meets it with an upright heart?
A quiet haven, where his shatter’d bark
Harbors secure till the rough storm is past,
After a passage overhung with clouds.”
Judge Thompson’s literary co-worker was the Rev. Cyrus Dickson, D. D., who resigned his first charge in 1848, settled in the east and gained distinction in the pulpit and as a forcible writer. How thoroughly these kindred spirits, now happily reunited “beyond the smiling and the weeping,” must have enjoyed the overwhelming success of their ingenious plot and laughed at the easy credulity which accepted every line of their contributions as gospel-truth! They could not fail to relish the efforts, prompted mainly by their fanciful scene on Oil Creek, to identify as Children of the Sun the savage braves in buckskin and moccasins whose noblest conception of heaven was an eternal surfeit of dog-sausage!
The Indian may be superstitious,