The Story of Our Country / Every Child Can Read

by Unknown

DO you not think there are a great many interesting stories in American history? I have told you some, and I could tell you many more. I am going to tell you one now, about a brave young man who had a great deal to do with the making of our glorious country. But to reach it we will have to take a step backward over one hundred and fifty years. That is a pretty long step, isn't it? It takes us away back to about the year 1750. But people had been coming into this country for more than a hundred and fifty years before that, and there were a great many white men and women in America at that time.

These people came from Spain and France and Great Britain and Holland and Germany and Sweden and other countries besides. The Spaniards had spread through many regions in the south; the French had gone west by way of the Great Lakes and then down the Mississippi River; but the British were settled close to the ocean, and the country back of them was still forest land, where only wild men and wild beasts lived. That is the way things were situated at the time of the story which I now propose to tell.

The young man I am about to speak of knew almost as much about life in the deep woods as Daniel Boone, the great hunter, of whom I have just told you. Why, when he was only sixteen years old he and another boy went far back into the wild country of Virginia to survey or measure the lands there for a rich land-holder.

The two boys crossed the rough mountains and went into the broad valley of the Shenandoah River, and for months they lived there alone in the broad forest. There were no roads through the woods and they had to make their own paths. When they were hungry they would shoot a wild turkey or a squirrel, or sometimes a deer. They would cook their meat by holding it on a stick over a fire of fallen twigs, and for plates they would cut large chips from a tree with their axe.

All day long they worked in the woods, measuring the land with a long chain. At night they would roll themselves in their blankets and go to sleep under the trees. If the weather was cold they gathered wood and made a fire. Very likely they enjoyed it all, for boys are fond of adventure. Sometimes a party of Indians would come up and be very curious to know what these white boys were doing. But the Indians were peaceful then, and did not try to harm them. One party amused the young surveyors by dancing a war dance before them. A fine time they had in the woods, where they stayed alone for months. When they came back the land-holder was much pleased with their work.

Now let us go on for five years, when the backwoods boy-surveyor had become a young man twenty-one years of age. If we could take ourselves back to the year 1753, and plunge into the woods of western Pennsylvania, we might see this young man again in the deep forest, walking along with his rifle in hand and his pack on his back. He had with him an old frontiersman named Gill, and an Indian who acted as their guide through the forest.

The Indian was a treacherous fellow. One day, when they were not looking, he fired his gun at them from behind a tree. He did not hit either of them. Some men would have shot him, but they did not; they let him go away and walked on alone through the deep woods. They built a fire that night, but they did not sleep before it, for they were afraid the Indian might come back and try to kill them while they were sleeping. So they left it burning and walked on a few miles and went to sleep without a fire.

A few days after that they came to the banks of a wide river. You may find it on your map of Pennsylvania. It is called the Allegheny River, and runs into the Ohio. It had been frozen, for it was winter time; but now the ice was broken and floating swiftly down the stream.

What were they to do? They had to get across that stream. The only plan they could think of was to build a raft out of logs and try to push it through the ice with long poles. This they did, and were soon out on the wild river and among the floating ice.

It was a terrible passage. The great cakes of ice came swirling along and striking like heavy hammers against the raft, almost hard enough to knock it to pieces. One of these heavy ice cakes struck the pole of the young traveler, and gave him such a shock that he fell from the raft into the freezing cold water. He had a hard enough scramble to get back on the raft again.