She was none the worse for the night’s adventure except for her fright at the howling of the wolves, and from the pain of her slightly frost-bitten feet. But the fate of a little boy who wandered from home in Williams County was of a singular pathos. He was found dead after a three-days search, when the poor little body, which was half clad, was still warm. It was supposed that he had undressed each night when he lay down to sleep, as he was used to do at home, and that the third night he had been so chilled by the October cold that he could not put on all his clothes again, and so strayed feebly about till he lay down and died just before rescue came.
Encounters with wolves and bears were not so common as these animals were, by any means; but now and then the settlers came in conflict with them. In Crawford County so lately as 1826, a young man named Enoch Baker, in coming home from rather a late call on a young lady, fought a running fight with wolves, which left him only when he reached the clearing where his father’s cabin stood; then they fell back into the woods. Daniel Cloe, a boy of the same neighborhood, was attacked by a pack of eleven wolves one morning before daybreak, but was saved by his bulldog, which seized the foremost wolf by the throat, and gave the boy time to climb a tree.
A brother of this boy found his dogs one morning in ferocious clamor about some animal which they seemed afraid to grapple with. He came up and found that it was a bear. He had no gun, but he caught up a club, and when he had contrived to catch the bear by one of his hind legs, and to throw him over, he beat him about the head with his bludgeon and killed him.
This was pretty well for a boy of sixteen, but the reader must not award the palm to him without first knowing the adventure of John Gillett of Williams County, who clambered down a hollow tree to get some bear cubs. While he was securing them, the opening overhead was darkened by the body of the mother bear. There was only one thing to do, and Gillett drove his knife into the haunch of the bear, which scrambled out in surprise and terror, and pulled him and the cubs out with her. She did not stay to look after her family, and Gillett took the cubs to the next town, and got five dollars apiece for them. As he told this story himself, I suppose it must have been true.
There are some stories of wolves and bears in Ashtabula County which are by no means bad. Not the worst of these is told of Elijah Thompson, who was hunting in the woods near Geneva, when a pack of seven wolves fell upon his dog. He clubbed his rifle and beat them off; then when the last had slunk away, he gathered up his wounded dog under his arm, and walked away with the barrel, which was all that was left of his rifle, on his shoulder.
Bears were very common, and very fond of pork. One night two ladies who were alone in their cabin, were alarmed by wild appeals from the pigpen, and found it invaded by a bear. They tried to frighten the intruder away with firebrands, but failed. Then they loaded the family rifle, which they had heard the men folks say took two fingers of powder. They therefore poured in the powder to the depth of six inches, and drove home the bullet. One held a light while the other pulled the trigger. Both were knocked down by the recoil of the gun, which flew into the bushes. What became of the bear was never known; but it was probably blown to atoms.
Other pioneer women were effective with firearms, and Mrs. Sarah Thorp of Ashtabula County was one of these. The family fell short of food in their first year in the backwoods, and in June, 1799, the husband started to Pennsylvania, twenty miles away, to get supplies. Before he could return, his wife and little girls had begun to live upon roots and the few grains of wheat which she found in the straw of her bed. When these were all gone, and she was in despair, a wild turkey one day alighted near the cabin. She found that there was barely powder enough left in the house for the lightest charge; but she loaded her husband’s rifle and crept on her hands and knees from bush to bush and log to log, till she was close upon the bird, wallowing in the loose plowed earth. Then she fired and killed it, and her children were saved.
Starvation was one of the horrors which often threatened the newcomers in the wilderness, as it had often beset its improvident red children. In the first year of the settlement at Conneaut, James Kingsbury was forced to leave his family and go some distance into New York state. He fell sick, and was unable to return before winter set in. Then he hurried homeward as fast as he could with a sack of flour on horseback. His horse became disabled, and then he carried the flour on his shoulders. He reached home one day at nightfall, and found his older children starving; his wife, wasted with famine, lay on the floor, and near her the little one born in his absence, already dead for want of the nourishment which the poor mother could not give it.