Stories

Indians outside early Cottonwood (1858??)

"Daniel," my aunt V said a few years back, "of course you've already heard about the time the Indians came to the farm when our grandfather--William Henry, I mean--was a young boy?"

"No, V****, or if I have, I've forgotten. Please tell me?"

"Well, as I remember my grandfather Holsinger telling it, it was when he was only five or six. Or was that...? Well. At any rate, they were alone, the three children, Willie, his sister Nancy, and the baby George. They were all outside on the farm, and their father, Daniel, yes, the one who had your name, was gone somewhere... when the Indians came.

"The mother saw them far away, and knew that it would probably be okay, since she could see them. If they let you see them coming from far away, that meant they were just coming to ask for things or to trade. But she hid the children in the well, anyway... you know that the Indians in those days were losing so many children to hunger and white man's diseases that they would take settler children and raise them as their own, and my greatgrandmother was afraid of that kidnapping, I am sure. So she put them in the well and used some mighty fierce language, grandfather said, to warn them to be quiet or she would do things to them, or the Indians would, and....

"Well, as it turned out, the Indians were on their way south into Oklahoma, or what would become Oklahoma, for in those days it was still the new Indian territory, to make up for taking Kansas away from them, and other states back east before forcing them out west.... They were on their way south and only wanted food and liquor but of course greatgrandmother had no drink, the church of the Brethren never drank spirits... but she gave them water and a little flour and salt, and when they drank from the well she pulled the water herself so they wouldn't look too hard down in there, and yes, the children stayed very quiet. They could hear the wind in the grass and the stamping of feet and the sound of the men talking in their strange tongue, and then in the few broken words of English they knew. And then they went."

and I think it might have been different, that the next child born might have been half red, half white, from a different sort of encounter, not pleasant, not... but no... violation like that would have meant death for several....