The effect of Mr. White’s confidence was just what might be expected. From this time the Indians were his friends; had he acted with timidity, and refused to let his child visit them, they would have had no confidence in him.
Shen-an-do-ah was an Oneida chief of some celebrity, having fought on the side of the Americans in the Revolutionary war. He lived to be a hundred years old, and though in his youth he was very wild, and addicted to drunkenness, yet by the force of his own good sense, and the benevolent exhortations of a Christian missionary, he lived a reformed man for more than sixty years.[3] He was intrepid in war, but mild and friendly in the time of peace. His vigilance once preserved the infant settlements of the German flats (on the Mohawk) from being cruelly massacred by a tribe of hostile Indians; his influence brought his own tribe to assist the Americans, and his many friendly actions in their behalf gained for him, among the Indian tribes, the appellation of the “White man’s friend.”
To one who went to see him a short time before his death, he thus expressed himself: “I am an aged hemlock—the winds of a hundred winters have whistled through my branches—I am dead at the top. The generation to which I belonged have passed away and left me. Why I still live, the Great Spirit alone knows! But I pray to him that I may have patience to wait for my appointed time to die.”
[3] In 1775 Shen-an-do-ah was present at a treaty made in Albany. At night he was excessively drunk, and in the morning he found himself in the street, stripped of all his ornaments, and every article of clothing. His pride revolted at his self-degradation, and he resolved never more to deliver himself over to the power of “strong water.”
“THE SPELL OF A GENTLE WORD.”
BY MARGARET J. BURWELL.
’Twas night, and the cool and perfumed breeze,
Breath’d soft mid the boughs of the waving trees,
Or low to the wild wood-flowers it sigh’d,