shawl she wounded the savage, nearly severing his thumb from his hand. The Indian ran across the way to Mrs. St. John, whom he ordered to bind it up; then hurried back, she knew too well for the purpose of vengeance. The next thing she heard was a scream, and presently the savage appeared again, a scalp with a woman's long hair hanging from his belt.

Mrs. Chapin preserved several pieces of plate which were at that time in her possession. A silver pitcher in her house bears the inscription :-"Presented by the citizens of Buffalo to Colonel Cyrenius Chapin, the brave soldier, the good citizen, the honest man."

Tradition

says

that Tecumseh often caused much annoyance to one lady in Detroit, by cutting the air with his tomahawk close to her daughters' heads; also that her ingenuity devised a scheme of revenge on one occasion, when her children had the measles, and the chief had laid himself on her floor to sleep. She gave him the pillow from under the heads of the sick ones, hoping he would take the disease and lose his life by following the Indian practice of jumping into the water in case of fever. There was no time to test the success of her plan, for shortly after this occurred the battle of the Thames, in which Tecumseh lost his life.

A woman in one of the remote counties of Michigan told one of her neighbors, that after her removal to her new house, when the few provisions they had been able to bring were exhausted, and the roads so wretched through the heavily timbered land that it was scarcely possible to bring supplies from Detroit, her family had lived on potato tops, boiled with a little salt, till something better could be raised. In the early settlement of Wayne county a family having succeeded in getting a pig, penned it up and began to fatten it for slaughter, when the matron one day, at home alone with her children, was alarmed by the sight of a huge bear helping himself without ceremony at her out-of-door larder. Fortunately, she was acquainted with the use of a rifle, and having wounded, succeeded in driving away the bear; he was afterwards tracked by the men, and his thieving career ended with his life.

The story of Lucy Chapin-no relative of those mentioned-is mentioned among the reminiscences of this period. A New England family, sensible, well-educated, and accustomed to all the advantages found in long established communities, from a flaw in the deed securing their farm, found themselves suddenly homeless. One of the brothers, who had learned the carpenter's trade, went with his sister Lucy to Hamburg, near Buffalo, and purchased land, which he set about clearing to make a home for his mother and the rest of the family. He built a rough log hut, which was for some time without a window, the opening being closed when it was cold or stormy, and the room left in darkness. The brother was obliged to work out at his trade, for means to carry on improvements at his own place, and meanwhile the sister was often left alone for three weeks at a time. She became so nervously sensitive, that the slightest noise would alarm her, and but for a determined spirit, and her brother's cheerful temperament, she thought her reason would have given way. On one occasion, a weary old man called at the house to ask for a cup of water; Lucy, terrified she knew not at what, ran off, and was found by her brother on his return after one of his long absences, sitting on a stump weeping. He encouraged her, and both returned home, where they found the stranger waiting quietly. Their neighbors lived at a considerable distance, and were all poor and illiterate; they found no congenial society, avoided all association with others except what necessity and civility required, and led a life of hermit-like seclusion, Lucy assisting to provide necessaries by sewing whenever she could get any work to do. It was not long before a family by the name of Russell, agreeable, intelligent, and kind-hearted, came to live in their vicinity; they had been banished by change of fortune from their early home, but were cultivated, and had books, and their arrival was joyfully welcomed by the emigrants. Miss Chapin afterwards kept house in Buffalo for her brother Roswell, who was engaged in the practice of law, and many anecdotes are told of her economy, industry, and ingenuity. She described, among her experiences in the backwoods, her sufferings during an illness when

the snow-wreaths often lay upon the coverlet of her bed; their only security for the door, till it could be hung, being to push the washtub against it. She would never allow her friends at home in New England to know the trials she endured. "They can never know the half," she used to say. The loneliness, anxieties, and hardships she suffered so long, seriously impaired her health in after life.

An anecdote illustrative of female quickness of apprehension and presence of mind, is related of the housekeeper of Gen. Porter, at Black Rock. Early one morning, before the General had risen, a party of Indians in the British service, who had crossed from the Canada side, came to the door, demanding to see him. The housekeeper, without betraying the least surprise or alarm, informed them that the General had just gone up to Buffalo, pointing to the road which led thither by the most circuitous course. As the savages hurried away, in hopes of overtaking the object of their pursuit, she gave the alarm to the General, who lost no time in mounting his horse and riding by the shortest way to the town, where he arrived in time to make preparation for the enemy.

Mr. Turner relates a story of " a night with the wolves," which is worth mentioning as an incident of pioneer life. One of the early settlers of Niagara County had just finished building a log hut-the door only wanting-in the woods, for the occupancy of his family. It was so far to go to mill, that when it was necessary to fetch a supply of flour, he was always obliged to be a night away from home. One night, in his absence, the wife heard wolves snarling just at the door, which was only defended by a blanket. Terrified for the safety of her young children, she forgot all fears for herself, and stood with axe in hand at the opening, keeping guard during the long hours of that night, till the howling died away in the distance, and she was satisfied the fierce creatures would return no

more.

"The early settlers in Farmershill, Cataraugus, drew up a code of rules for their mutual advantage, from which the following curious section is extracted: 'If any single woman over fourteen years of age shall come to reside in our village, and no one of this

confederacy shall offer her his company within a fortnight thereafter, then in such case our board shall be called together, and some one shall be appointed to make her a visit, whose duty it shall be to perform the same, or forfeit the approbation of the company and pay a fine sufficiently large to buy the lady thus neglected a new dress.' Few towns," continues Turner, "in the Purchase have been more prosperous; and it is quite likely that this early regulation aided essentially in the work of founding a new settlement and speeding its progress

As an offset to the above, the same writer gives an account of a bachelor's settlement in Orleans County, which, as might be expected, turned out a failure. A cotemporary says: "They began in a year or two to go east and get them wives." This broke up the establishment, and most of its bachelor founders became Benedicts and heads of families.

"By perseverance I succeeded early one morning in getting to the old burial place of the Senecas. The Indian church-now used as a stable, with hay protruding from the windows and manure heaps outside-arrested my attention, and I stopped opposite the lane leading from the main road to the spot I sought. At the end of this lane, leaping over a broken rail fence, and following a little foot-path running by the side of a potato patch, a few steps brought me to one of the most beautiful and quiet nooks in the world; a pleasant opening, rather more elevated than the rest of the field with which it was enclosed, and shaded here and there by large oaks, the branches of which were now swaying in the wind, and sighing a requiem to the memory of the red man. Graves were thickly sown around—some marked by boards, others only by the swelling of the turf. There were four marble slabs; two in a picketed enclosure were monuments of white children; one of the daughter of a clergyman, probably the local missionary. The most prominent, which was not enclosed, bore the inscription, ‘In memory of the white woman, Mary Jemison, daughter of Thomas Jemison and Jane Irwin, born on the ocean between Ireland and Philadelphia in 1742 or '3, taken captive at Marsh Creek, Pa. in

1755, carried down the Ohio, adopted into an Indian family in 1759, removed to Genesee River, naturalized in 1817, removed to this place in 1831. Having survived two husbands and five children, leaving three still alive, she died Sept. 19th, 1833, aged about ninety-one years, having a few weeks before expressed a hope of pardon, etc. A little beyond Mary Jemison's grave, was that of Red Jacket, the celebrated orator and chief." The stone was much mutilated, being broken off so as to deface the inscription.

MRS. ANDERSON, whose house was visited by depredators, boldly faced them for the protection of her property. Seating herself on a trunk they were about to carry off, she told them they might shoot her, but should never possess it while she lived. The Indians, with a significant "ugh" left her, saying she was too much of a man to be robbed. One of the early settlers in Plymouth, Wayne County, Michigan, showed a more timid spirit and fared worse, it being her practice at first to yield implicitly to their demands. Once she was compelled to hand out of the oven the rolls she had just baked for supper. One evening, her husband having gone to a neighbor's a quarter of a mile distant, her child lying asleep in the bed, and she occupied in sewing, the door was softly opened, and an Indian entered, "with the stealthy tread peculiar to the moccasined foot." He made signs that he wanted whiskey. After going around the house as if in search of the article, followed by the savage, she took up her child, and making him understand that it was to be had at the neighbor's house, motioned him to follow her, and walked the whole distance through the woods with him to the place of safety, where she arrived breathless with terror and agitation.