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Daring and Heroic Deeds of American Women
Daring and Heroic Deeds of American Women Author:John Frost Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE WAR-WOMAN CREEK. In Georgia and North Carolina there is hardly a river, creek, or stream, that has not connected with it some old Indian tradition. The ti... more »tle of the present sketch is, taken from one of these—I believe one of the principal tributaries of Natahalee .river, in the Cherokee nation, North Carolina. The story, as told by the few Indians remaining since the removal in the fail of 1838, runs thus: JJany years ago, in the first settlement of the country, a wandering party of their tribe attacked the house of a squatter, somewhere upon their borders, during his absence, and massacred all his children, and left his wife covered with the mangled bodies of her butchered offspring; scalped like them and apparently dead. She was not, however, wounded so badly as they had supposed, and no sooner did she hear the sound of their retreating footsteps, than disengaging herself from the heap of slain, haggard, pale, x and drenched with her own and the blood of her chil- ren, she peered steadily from the door, and finding I her enemies no longer in sight, hastily extinguished the fire, which before leaving they had applied to her cabin, but which had, as yet, made very little impression on the green logs of which it was composed. Wiping from her eyes the warm blood, still reeking from her scalpless head, she directed her agonized gaze to the bleeding and disfigured forma of those who scarce an hour before were playing at the door, and gladdening her maternal heart with their merry laughter, and as she felt, in the full sense of her desolation, the last ray of hope die within her bosom, there stole over her ghostly face an expression as savage as was ever worn by the ruthless slayers of her innocent babes. Her eye gleamed with the wild fury of the tigress robbed of its y...« less