It was still too dark for any of them to get a good shot at him if he made a dash from their midst, and Davis decided to try for life and liberty. He knocked a large warrior before him into the fire, bounded over him, burst through the group around him, and before they could seize their rifles, which were all stacked together, he had vanished in the shadows of the forest. They followed him, whooping and yelling, but none could draw a bead on him, and not a shot was fired. One Indian was so near that Davis fancied he felt his grasp at times, but he fell behind, and Davis kept on. When he had distanced them all, he stopped to tear up his waistcoat, and wrap his feet, naked and bleeding from the sharp stones which had cut them in his wild flight, and then hurried on toward the Ohio. Three days without food or fire, in the cold of the early winter, passed before he reached the river, eight or ten miles below the mouth of the Scioto. He then saw a large boat coming down the stream, but his troubles did not end with this joyful sight. One of the dreadful facts of the dreadful time was the frequent deception of boatmen by Indians and renegades who pretended to be escaping prisoners, and who lured them to their destruction by piteous appeals for help. The boatmen now refused to land for Davis; they told him they had heard too many stories like his, and they kept on down the stream, while he followed wearily along the shore. At last he entreated them to row in a little nearer, so that he could swim out to them. They consented to this, and he plunged into the icy water, and was taken on board just as his strength was spent.
In 1782, John Alder, then a child of eight years, was captured in Wythe County, Virginia, by a party of Min-goes, who at the same time wounded and killed his brother. They already had two prisoners, Mrs. Martin, the wife of a neighbor, and her little one four or five years old: it proved troublesome, on their rapid march across the Ohio country to their village on Mad River, and they tomahawked and scalped it. The next morning little Alder was somewhat slow in rising from his breakfast when bidden, and on the ground he saw the shadow of an arm with a lifted tomahawk. He glanced upward and found an Indian standing over him, who presently began to feel of Alder’s thick black hair. He afterwards confessed that he had been about to kill him, but when he met his pleasant smile he could not strike, and then he thought that a boy with hair of that color would make a good Indian, and so spared him.
At the Mingo village Alder was made to run the gantlet between lines of children armed with switches, but he was not much hurt, and he was now taken into the tribe. He was given to a Mingo family, and the mother washed him and dressed him in the Indian costume. They were kind to him, but for a month he was very homesick, and used to go every day to a large walnut tree near the town and cry for the friends and home he had lost. After he had learned the Mingo language he began in time to be more contented. He had no complaint to make of any of the family, except one sister, who despised him as a prisoner, and treated him like a slave. Another sister and her husband were his special friends, and he relates that when he used to sit up with the Indians round their camp fire, listening to their stories, he would sometimes drowse; then this gentle sister and her husband would take him up in their arms and carry him to bed, and he would hear them saying, “Poor fellow! We have sat up too long for him, and he has fallen asleep on the cold ground.”
About a year after he was adopted, Alder met that poor mother, whose little one the Indians had cruelly murdered before her eyes. “When she saw me, she came smiling, and asked if it was me. I told her it was. She asked me how I had been. I told her I had been very unwell, for I had had fever and ague for a long time. So she took me off to a log, and there we sat down; and she combed my head, and asked a great many questions about how I lived, and if I didn’t want to see my mother and little brothers. I told her I should be glad to see them, but never expected to see them again. We took many a cry together, and when we parted, took our last and final farewell, for I never saw her again.”
Alder always remained delicate, and could not thrive on the Indians’ fare of meat and hominy, with no bread or salt; of sugar and honey there was plenty; but he missed the things he was used to at home. When he grew older he was given a gun, and sent hunting, and whenever he came back with game the Indians praised his skill and promised him he should be a great hunter some day. He continued with them until the peace of 1795, which followed Wayne’s victory, and even then he stayed for a time in the region where he had dwelt so long. He had married a squaw, and had become a complete Indian, so that the first settlers in his neighborhood had to teach him to speak English. But he did not live happily with his Indian wife; they agreed to part, and then Alder thought of going back to his own people. He reached the house of one of his brothers in the neighborhood of his old home, one Sunday afternoon, and found several of his brothers and sisters there, and his mother with them. They could scarcely be persuaded that it was their son and brother come back to them, and he had to tell them of some things that no one else could know before they would believe him. His old, white-haired mother whom he remembered in her youth with a “head as black as a crow,” was the first to take him in her arms, and she said, as she wept over him, “How you have grown! I dreamed that you had come to see me, but you was a little ornary-looking fellow, and I would not own you for my son; but now I find I was mistaken, that it is entirely the reverse, and I am proud to own you for my son.”
In 1792, Moses Hewit was taken near Neil’s Station, on the Little Kanawha, by three Indians, who at once pushed off with him towards Sandusky. They used him very kindly, and shared fully with him the wild honey which they found in the bee trees, and invited him to take part in their foot races and other sports. He found that he could outrun two of them, and he resolved to try for his liberty, though he kept a cheerful outside with them, and seemed contented with his lot. One day they left him tied hand and foot and fastened to two small trees while they went on a hunt, but he contrived to free himself, and made his escape with their whole stock of provisions, two small pieces of venison. He struck out for the settlements on the Muskingum, and the first night his captors passed so near him in pursuit that he might have touched them in the darkness. Nine days later he came in sight of a station on the Muskingum, so spent with hunger and fatigue that he could not halloo to the garrison. He had nothing on his wasted and bleeding body, which was all torn by briers and brushwood, except a cloth about his loins, and he was afraid of being mistaken and shot for an Indian. He waited till nightfall and then crept to the station, where his presence was unknown till a young man of his acquaintance caught sight of his face in the firelight, and called out, “Here is ‘Hewit!”
Captain Charles Builderback and his wife were surprised by a party of Indians while they were looking for cattle in the Ohio country, near Wheeling, in 1789. Mrs. Builderback hid herself, but the Indians had captured her husband, and now they forced him to call out to her. She hesitated to answer, thinking of the children they had left at home in the cabin which she could see across the river, and knowing how useless it would be to give herself up. But he called again, saying that if she surrendered, it might save his life. Then she showed herself, and was seized and hurried away by one band of savages, while her husband remained with the others. A few days later these came up and showed her his scalp: he was one of the assassins of the Gnadenhiitten Indians, and he was doomed as soon as they knew his name. She was taken to their towns on the Great Miami, where she lived nine months, drudging with the squaws and suffering from the rude and filthy life of the savages, but not ill-treated. Then the commandant at Cincinnati ransomed her and sent her home to her two orphan children.
So lately as 1812 two little girls were stolen from their fathers’ houses in Preble County by the Indians. They could not be traced, but twenty-five years later, one of them, named Parker, was found living with her savage husband in Indiana. She refused then to go home with her father, saying coldly that she should be ridiculed there for her Indian customs.