Heroes of the Middle West: The French

by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

Not finding any one, they went away and the door was again locked. Henry crept out of hiding. There was a feather bed on the floor and he stretched himself on it, so worn out by what he had seen and endured that he fell asleep.

He was roused by the door opening again. Madame Langlade came in, and she was surprised and frightened at finding him. It was nearly night and a fierce summer rain beat upon the roof, dripping through cracks of the heat-dried bark. Madame Langlade had come to stop a leak. She told Henry that all the English except himself were killed, but she hoped he would escape. She brought him some water to drink.

As darkness came on, he lay thinking of his desperate state. He was four hundred miles from Detroit, which he did not then know was besieged, and with all his stores captured or destroyed by the Indians, he had no provisions. He could not stay where he was, and if he ventured out, the first red man who met him would kill him.

By morning the Indians came to the house inquiring for Henry, whom they had missed. Madame Langlade was in such fear that they might kill her children if they found Henry sheltered in the house, that she told her husband where he was and begged to have him given up. This the Frenchman at first refused to do; but he finally led the Indians again to the attic.

Henry stood up, expecting to die.

The Indians were all partially drunk and had satisfied themselves with slaughter. One of them seized Henry by the collar and lifted a knife to plunge into his breast. White man and red man looked intently at each other, and the savage, perhaps moved by the fearless despair in the young Englishman's eyes, concluded to take him prisoner. Henry began to think he could not be killed.

He found that the captain and lieutenant of Michilimackinac were also alive and prisoners like himself. The missionary priest was doing all he could to restrain his maddened flock. At a council held between Chippewas and Ottawas, Henry was bought with presents by a Chippewa chief named Wawatam, who loved him, and who had been absent the day of the attack Wawatam put Henry in his canoe, carried him across the strait to Michilimackinac Island, and hid him in a cave, which is now called Skull Rock by the islanders, because Henry found ancient skulls and bones in the bottom of it. As the island was held sacred by the Indians, this was probably one of their old sepulchres. Its dome top is smothered in a tangle of evergreens and brush. There is a low, triangular entrance, and the hollow inside is shaped like an elbow. More than one island boy has since crept back to the dark bend where Henry lay hidden on the skulls, but only a drift of damp leaves can be found there now.

The whole story of Alexander Henry's adventures, before he escaped and returned safely to Canada, is a wonderful chapter in western history.

The Indians were not guilty of all the cruelties practiced in this war. Bounties were offered for savage scalps. One renegade Englishman, named David Owen, came back from adoption and marriage into a tribe, bringing the scalps of his squaw wife and her friends.