Among other stories that the river told me was the following:
Once, while on their way to Canada through these mountains, a war-party of Indians, fresh from a successful forray on the sea-coast, halted with their prisoners on the banks of a stream whose waters stopped their way. For weeks these miserable captives had toiled through trackless forests, through swollen and angry torrents, sometimes climbing mountains on their hands and knees—they were so steep—and at night stretching their aching limbs on the cold ground, with no other roof than the heavens.[16]
The captives were a mother, with her new-born babe, scarcely fourteen days old, her boy of six, her two daughters of fourteen and sixteen years, and her maid. Two of her little flock were missing. One little prattler was playing at her knee, and another in the orchard, when thirteen red devils burst in the door of their happy home. Two cruel strokes of the axe stretched them lifeless in their blood before her frenzied eyes. One was killed to intimidate, the other was despatched because he was afraid, and cried out to his mother. There was no time for tears—none even for a parting kiss. Think of that, mothers of the nineteenth century! The tragedy finished, the hapless survivors were hurried from the house into the woods. There was no resistance. The blow fell like a stroke of lightning from a clear sky.
This mother, whose eyes never left the embroidered belt of the chief, where the reeking scalps of her murdered babes hung; this mother, who had tasted the agony of death from hour to hour, and whose incomparable courage not only supported her own weak frame, but had so far miraculously preserved the lives of her little ones, now stood shivering on the shores of the swollen torrent with her babe in her arms, and holding her little boy by the hand. In rags, bleeding, and almost famished, her misery should have melted a heart of stone. But she well knew the mercy of her masters. When fainting, they had goaded her on with blows, or, making a gesture as if to snatch her little one from her arms, significantly grasped their tomahawks. Hope was gone; but the mother’s instinct was not yet extinguished in that heroic breast.
But at this moment of sorrow and despair, what was her amazement to hear the Indians accost her daughter Sarah, and command her to sing them a song. What mysterious chord had the wild, flowing river touched in those savage breasts? The girl prepared to obey, and the Indians to listen. In the heart of these vast solitudes, which never before echoed to a human voice, the heroic English maiden chanted to the plaintive refrain of the river the sublime words of the Psalmist:
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
“We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
“For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth.”
As she sung, the poor girl’s voice trembled and her eyes filled, but she never once looked toward her mother.
When the last notes of the singer’s voice died away, the bloodiest devil, he who murdered the children, took the babe gently from the mother, without a word; another lifted her burden to his own shoulder; another, the little boy; when the whole company entered the river.