PO-NO-KAH
AN INDIAN TALE OF LONG AGO
By Mary Mapes Dodge
1903
PO-NO-KAH.
AN INDIAN STORY OF LONG AGO.
I.
THE HEDDEN FAMILY.
We who live in comfortable country homes, secure from every invader,find it difficult to conceive the trials that beset the hardy pioneerswho settled our Western country during the last century.
In those days, and for many a year afterward, hostile Indians swarmed inevery direction, wherever the white man had made a clearing, or starteda home for himself in the wilderness. Sometimes the pioneer would beunmolested, but oftener his days were full of anxiety and danger.Indeed, history tells of many a time when the settler, after leavinghome in the morning in search of game for his happy household wouldreturn at night to find his family murdered or carried away and hiscabin a mass of smoking ruins. Only in the comparatively crowdedsettlements, where strength was in numbers, could the white inhabitantshope for security—though bought at the price of constant vigilance andprecaution.
In one of these settlements, where a few neatly whitewashed cabins, androugher log huts, clustered on the banks of a bend in the Ohio River,dwelt a man named Hedden, with his wife and three children. His farmstretched further into the wilderness than his neighbors', for his hadbeen one of the first cabins built there, and his axe, ringing merrilythrough the long days, had hewn down an opening in the forest, afterwardfamous in that locality as "Neighbor Hedden's Clearing." Here he hadplanted and gathered his crops year after year, and in spite ofannoyances from the Indians, who robbed his fields, and from bears, whosometimes visited his farm stock, his family had lived in security solong that, as the settlement grew, his wife sang at her work, and hislittle ones shouted at their play as merrily as though New York orBoston were within a stone's throw. To be sure, the children were biddennever to stray far from home, especially at nightfall; and the crack ofrifles ringing now and then through the forest paled their cheeks foran instant, as the thought of some shaggy bear, furious in his deathagony, crossed their minds.
Sometimes, too, the children would whisper together of the fate of poorAnnie Green, who, a few years before had been found killed in theforest; or their mother would tell them with pale lips of the night whentheir father and neighbor Freeman encountered two painted Indians nearthe cabin. The tomahawk of the Indian who tried to kill their father wasstill hanging upon the cabin wall.
But all this had happened twelve years earlier—before Bessie, theoldest girl, was born—and seemed to the children's minds like a bit ofancient history—almost as far off as the exploits of Hannibal or JuliusCaesar appear to us. So, as I have said, the girls and boys of thesettlement shouted joyously at their play, or ran in merry groups to therough log hut, called "The School-House," little dreaming of the caresand anxieties of their elders.
Bessie Hedden was a merry-hearted creature, and so pretty that, had shebeen an Indian maiden, she would have been known as "Wild Rose," or"Singing Bird," or "Water Lily," or some such name. As it was, many ofthe villagers called her "Little Sunshine," for her joyous spirit couldlight up the darkest corner. She was faithful at school, affectionateand industrious at home, and joyous and honorable among her playmates.What wonder, then, that everybody loved her, or that she was happiestamong the happy? Her brother Rudolph was much younger than she,—arosy-checked, s