Rodney, the Ranger, with Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield

by John V. Lane

He was to run the gauntlet! For an instant his heart stopped beating, the next, a sharp blow from a stick set the blood inherited from a brave ancestry tingling through his veins.

Lowering his head he charged, as a mad bull charges, warding off what blows he might with his sturdy arms. He was thwacked with clubs, jabbed with sharpened sticks, tripped and pommelled till it seemed that not an inch of his body escaped. One old hag threw a handful of sand in his eyes and he stumbled, but crawled the few feet remaining between where he fell and the wigwam toward which he had run. Once inside, his tormentors left him. He was so sore that he almost wished he could die. After a time he slept and thought his mother came to comfort him, but it was only a young squaw who brought him food. Then one of the men came and the boy complained of the rough treatment. The Indian said that running the gauntlet was the custom, that he had been brave and the Indians would adopt him into the tribe, and 76 Conrad could have cried for joy, only that he was a boy who did not cry.

Conrad never forgot the day he was formally adopted into the tribe. First in the ceremony was washing away his white blood and, it seemed to the boy, at least a part of his skin as well.

In full view of the assembled tribe, whose ideas of modesty differed much from those of civilized people, he was stripped and led into a pool in the river and there thrust under the water and then stood upon his feet and scoured with sand. This was the most thorough scrubbing Conrad ever was to have. Life with the Vuysens had not been conducive to cleanliness and Indians in those days were not noted for bathing.

Following the bath came the process of greasing him from head to foot and decorating his face with pigments, after which he was clad in breech-clout and moccasins. This done, he was seated upon the bank for a no less severe ordeal.

This consisted in plucking out the hair of his head, all but a tuft, or scalp lock, to which coloured feathers were tied. An Indian did the work, dipping his fingers in ashes that he might get better hold. Conrad never winced or made outcry throughout the various ordeals.

A blanket was given to the boy, who was then led into a wigwam, where an old Indian conducted ceremonies, on which Conrad looked with awe, though understanding but little of them. Their solemnity, however, impressed him deeply and it is very doubtful 77 whether, after they were over, he would have dared run away had he been so inclined.

The boy’s eyes were light blue and his hair was yellow; but his cheekbones were high, his face stolid, so that now, when paint and grease had been added to sunburn, and he stood clothed in full Indian garb, no one would think him other than an Indian but for those tell-tale blue eyes.

The Wyandottes, of which people he now considered himself one, occupied territory in what is now the north-central portion of Ohio.

The year was 1772, not long ago in history, but measured by change, very long ago. Then, the country was little different from what it had been for thousands of years. Now, it seems another world and the map of it shows great cities where were forests and connecting these are what at first resemble spiders’ webs, but which are highways. Few white men then came to that region, where now few red men are seen, indeed none living the life they then lived. Such whites as came were a few French voyageurs and Jesuit missionaries and hunters and traders from the English colonies. The traders did not scruple to exchange, for valuable furs, guns, tomahawks and ammunition, which they knew would be turned against the whites of the frontier in time of war; and many of them sold the savages liquor, knowing an Indian would sell his soul for it and having drank it would become a fiend incarnate.