In imagination we lean out our souls to listen to the sobs and sighs that went up from those hearts—hearts bleeding from wounds and pains tenfold more poignant than those that lacerated and wrung their quivering flesh. We look upon them, as with their captors they encircle the wild light of the successive camp-fires, kindled for long distant halts, upon their way to the yet unseen and dreaded home of the “inhabitants of rocks and tents.” We look upon them as they are ushered into their new home, greeted with the most inhuman and terror-kindling reception given them by this unfeeling horde of land-sharks; thus to look, imagine, and ponder, we find enough, especially when the age and circumstances of these captive girls are considered, to lash our thoughts with indignation toward their oppressors, and kindle our minds with more than we can express with the word sympathy for these their innocent victims.
In little less than one year, and into that year is crowded all of toil and suffering that we can credit as possible for them to survive, and then they are sold and again en route for another new and strange home, in a wild as distant from their Apache home as that from the hill where, but a year before, in their warm flowing blood, their moaning, mangled kindred had been left.
Scarcely had they reached the Mohave Valley ere the elder sister saw with pain, the sad and already apparently irremovable effects of past hardships upon the constitution of the younger. What tenderness, what caution, what vigilant watching, what anxious, unrelieved solicitude mark the conduct of that noble heart toward her declining and only sister? Indeed, what interest prompted her to do all in her power to preserve her life? Not only her only sister, but the only one (to her then) that remained of the family from whom they had been ruthlessly torn. And should her lamp of life cease, thereby would be extinguished the last earthly solace and cordial for the dark prison life that inclosed her, and that threw its walls of gloom and adamant between her and the abodes and sunshine of civilized life. Yet death had marked that little cherub girl for an early victim. Slowly, and yet uncomplainingly, does her feeble frame and strength yield to the heavy hand of woe and want that met her, in all the ghastliness and horror of unchangeable doom, at every turn and hour of her weary days. What mystery hangs upon events and persons! How impenetrable the permissions of Providence! How impalpable and evasive of all our wisdom that secret power, by which cherished plans and purposes are often shaped to conclusions and terminations so wide of the bright design that lighted them on to happy accomplishment in the mind of the mortal proposer!
Mary Ann had been the fondly cherished, and tenderly nursed idol of that domestic group. Early had she exhibited a precocity in intellect, and in moral sensitiveness and attainment, that had made her the subject of a peculiar parental affection, and the ever cheerful radiating center of light, and love, and happiness to the remainder of the juvenile family. But she ever possessed a strength of body and vigor of health far inferior, and disproportioned to her mental and moral progress. She was a correct reader at four years. She was kept almost constantly at school, both from her choice, and the promise she gave to delighted parents of a future appreciation and good improvement of these advantages. With the early exhibition of an earnest thirst for knowledge that she gave, there was also a strict regard for truth, and a hearty, happy obedience to the law of God and the authority of her parents. At five years and a half she had read her Bible through. She was a constant attendant upon Sabbath school, into all the exercises of which she entered with delight; and to her rapid improvement and profit in the subjects with which she there became intimate and identified, may be attributed the moral superiority she displayed during her captivity.
She had a clear, sweet voice, and the children now live in this state who have witnessed the earnestness and rapture with which she joined in singing the hymns allotted to Sabbath-school hours. O how little of the sad after-part of Mary’s life entered into the minds of those parents as thus they directed the childish, tempted steps of their little daughter into the paths of religious pursuits and obedience.
Who shall say that the facts in her childish experience and years herein glanced at, had not essentially to do with the spirit and preparedness that she brought to the encountering and enduring of the terrible fate that closed her eyes among savages at eight years of age.
As we look at her fading, withering, and wasting at the touch of cold cruelty, the object of anxious watchings and frequent and severe painstaking on the part of her elder sister, who spared no labor or fatigue to glean the saving morsel to prolong her sinking life, we can but adore that never-sleeping Goodness that had strewn her way to this dark scene with so many preparing influences and counsels.
Young as she was, she with her sister were first to voice those hymns of praise to the one God, in which the grateful offerings of Christian hearts go up to him, in the ear of an untutored and demoralized tribe of savages. Hers was the first Christian death they ever witnessed, perhaps the last; and upon her, as with composure and cheerfulness (not the sullen submission of which they boast) she came down to the vale of death, they gazed with every indication of an interest and curiosity that showed the workings of something more than the ordinary solemnities that had gathered them about the paling cheek and quivering lip of members of their own tribe.
Precious girl! sweet flower! nipped in the bud by untimely and rude blasts. Yet the fragrance of the ripe virtues that budded and blossomed upon so tender and frail a stalk shall not die. If ever the bright throng that flame near the throne would delight to cease their song, descend and poise on steady wing to wait the last heaving of a suffering mortal’s bosom, that at the parting breath they might encircle the fluttering spirit and bear it to the bosom of God, it was when thou didst, upon the breath of sacred song, joined in by thy living sister, yield thy spirit to Him who kindly cut short thy sufferings that he might begin thy bliss.
A Sabbath-school scholar, dying in an Indian camp, three hundred miles from even the nearest trail of the white man, buoyed and gladdened by bright visions of beatitudes that make her oblivious of present pain, and long to enter upon the future estate to which a correct and earnest instruction had been pointing!