THE ROAD TO PARIS.
CHAPTER I.
A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS.
In the Jacobite army that followed Prince Charlie and shared defeat with him at Culloden in 1746, were some who escaped hanging at Carlisle or elsewhere by fleeing to Scottish ports and obtaining passage over the water. A few, like the Young Chevalier himself, fled to the continent of Europe; but some crossed the ocean and made new lives for themselves in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other provinces. Two of these refugees, tarrying not in the thickly settled strip of country along the Atlantic coast, but pushing at once to the backwoods of Pennsylvania, were Hugh Mercer, the young surgeon destined to die gloriously as an American general thirty years later, and Alexander Wetheral, one of the few Englishmen who had rallied to the Stuart standard at its last unfurling. From Philadelphia, where they disembarked from the vessel that had brought them from Leith, straight westward through Lancaster and across the Susquehanna, the two young men made a journey which, thanks to the privations they had to endure, was a good first lesson in the school of wilderness life.
They arrived one evening at the wigwams of a Shawnee village on the verge of a beaver pond, and were received in so friendly a manner by the Indians that Wetheral decided to live for a time among them. Mercer, joined by some other enterprising newcomers from the old country, went farther westward; but the two friends were destined to meet often again. Wetheral built himself a hut near the Indian village and indulged to the full his love of hunting, fishing, and roaming the silent forest. Often he saw other white men, for already the Scotch and Irish and English had begun to build their cabins and to clear small fields on both sides of the Susquehanna, across which river there were ferries at a few infantile settlements. By 1750 so many other English and Scotch, some of the men having their wives with them, had put up log cabins near Wetheral's, and had cleared ground for farming all around, that the settlement merited a name, and took that of Carlisle. The Indians, succumbing to the inevitable, betook themselves elsewhere.
Wetheral, with all his love for the free life of the woods, welcomed civilization, for he was of gentle birth and of what passed in those days as good education, and had a taste for learning. His life was now more diversified. He not only hunted and fished, but also cultivated a few acres, and during a part of each year he did the duties of schoolmaster to the settlement,—for the Scotch-Irish, like the Puritans of New England, went in for book-learning. He sent the skins obtained by him in the chase to Philadelphia by pack-horse, and sometimes, for the sake of variety, accompanied them, passing, on the way, through the belt of country industriously tilled by the growing German Protestant population, and through that occupied by Quakers and other English, in the immediate vicinity of Philadelphia. In his own neighborhood the people of the best manners and information were Presbyterians, and in course of time he came to count himself as one of them, less from religious ideas than from a natural wish to associate himself with the respectable and lettered element; for, much as he loved the roaming life of the hunter, he was repelled by the coarseness and violence and ill living of a certain class of nomadic frontiersmen who doubtless had good reason to keep their distance from politer communities.
He was one of the Pennsylvanians who went as pioneers in Braddock's fatal expedition, and on that he saw Colonel Washington. He marched with his old friend, Hugh Mercer, in the battalion of three hundred men under Col. John Armstrong, of Carlisle, in 1756, from Fort Shirley to the Indian town of Kittanning, which the troops destroyed after killing most of its hostile inhabitants. During a part of that year and of the next, he served in the provincial garrison at Fort Augusta, far north from Carlisle, and east of the Susquehanna.
Returning home when his period of enlistment was up, he stopped at the large house of a prosperous English settler possessing part of a fine island in the Susquehanna, fell in love with one of the settler's daughters, prolonged his visit two weeks, proposed marriage to the daughter, was accepted, spoke to her father, was by him violently rejected and subsequently ejected, ran away with the girl, or rather paddled away, for the means of locomotion in this elopement was an Indian canoe, and was married in the settlement of Paxton, near John Harris's ferry, by the Reverend John Elder.