Stories Of Ohio. William Dean Howells
and reward what they thought fine in him, as to rebuke what they deemed unworthy; and the second winter that they spent in Northern Ohio, they gave him a gun again for the courage and endurance he twice showed when he had lost his way from camp. Once when he was caught in a heavy storm of snow; he passed the night in the hollow of a tree, which he made snug by blocking it up with brush and pieces of wood, and by chopping the rotten inside of the trunk with his hatchet until he had a soft, warm bed. Another time, when he was looking at his beaver traps he was overtaken by the dark, and kept himself from freezing by dancing and shouting till daylight. His Indian friends honored him for his wise behavior, and as they had now beaver skins enough, they carried them to the French post at Detroit, where they bought a gun for him. They bought for themselves a keg of brandy, and they paid Smith the compliment, when he refused to drink, of making him one of the guards set over the drinkers to keep them from killing one another. He helped bring them safely through their debauch, but nothing could prevent their spending all they had got for their beaver skins in more and more brandy. Then they went back sick and sorry to the woods again.
The family Smith was taken into was honored for its uncommon virtue and wisdom. His two brothers, Tontileaugo and Tecaughretanego were men of great sense, with good heads and good hearts. They treated Smith with the greatest love and patience, and took him to task with affectionate mildness when he transgressed the laws of taste or feeling. The Indians all despised the white settlers, whom they thought stupid and cowardly, and they expected to drive them beyond the sea. They despised them for their impiety, and Tecaughretanego once said to Smith, “As you have lived with the white people, you have not had the same advantage of knowing that the Great Being above feeds his people and gives them their meat in due season, as we Indians have, who are wonderfully supplied, and that so frequently that it is evidently the hand of the Great Owaneeyo that doeth this; whereas the white people have commonly large flocks of tame cattle, that they can kill when they please, and also their barns and cribs filled with grain, and therefore have not the same opportunity of seeing and knowing that they are supported by the ruler of Heaven and Earth.”
At this time the Indians were suffering from the famine that their waste and improvidence had brought upon them; and perhaps Smith might have said something on the white man’s side. But he had nothing to say when rebuked for smiling at Tecaughretanego’s sacrifice of the last leaf of his tobacco to the Great Spirit “Brother, I have something to say to you, and I hope you will not be offended when I tell you of your faults. You know that when you were reading your books, I would not let the boys or any one disturb you; but now when I was praying I saw you laughing. I do not think you look upon praying as a foolish thing; I believe you pray yourself. But perhaps you think my mode or manner of prayer foolish; if so, you ought in a friendly manner to instruct me, and not make sport of sacred things.”
The prayer which Tecaughretanego thought ought to have escaped Smith’s derision was one which he made after he began to get well from a long sickness; and it was certainly very quaint; but if the Father of all listens most kindly to those children of his who come to him simply and humbly, he could not have been displeased with this old Indian’s petition.
“Oh, Great Being, I thank thee that I have obtained the use of my legs again, that I am now able to walk about and kill turkeys without feeling exquisite pain and misery: I know that thou art a hearer and a helper, and therefore I will call upon thee. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that my ankles and knees may be right well, and that I may be able not only to walk, but to run and to jump as I did last fall. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that on this voyage we may frequently kill bears, as they may be crossing the Scioto and Sandusky. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that we may kill plenty of turkeys along the banks, to stew with our bear meat. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that rain may come to raise the Olentangy about two or three feet, that we may cross in safety down to the Scioto, without danger of our canoe being wrecked on the rocks. And now, oh, Great Being, thou knowest how matters stand—thou knowest that I am a great lover of tobacco, and that though I know not when I may get any more, I now make a present of the last I have unto thee, as a free burnt offering. Therefore I request that thou wilt hear and grant these requests, and I thy servant will return thee thanks, and love thee for thy gifts.”
Smith tells us that a few days after Tecaughretanego made his prayer and offered up his tobacco, rain came and raised the Olentangy high enough to let them pass safely into the Scioto. He does not say whether he thought this was the effect of the old Indian’s piety, but he always speaks reverently of Tecaughretanego’s religion. He is careful to impress the reader again and again with the importance of the Indian family he had been taken into, and with the wisdom as well as the goodness of Tecaughretanego, who held some such place among the Ottawas, he says, as Socrates held among the Athenians. He was against the Indians’ taking part in the war between the French and English; he believed they ought to leave these to fight out their own quarrels; and in all the affairs of his people, he favored justice, truth, and honesty. The Indians, indeed, never stole from one another, but they thought it quite right to rob even their French allies; and it will help us to a real understanding of their principles, if we remember that the good and wise Tecaughretanego is never shown as rebuking the cruelty and treachery of the war parties in their attacks on the English settlements. The Indian’s virtues are always for his own tribe; outside of it, all the crimes are virtues, and it is right to lie, to cheat, to steal, to kill; as it was with our own ancestors when they lived as tribes.
Smith was always treated like one of themselves by his Indian brothers, and he had a deep affection for them. Once, in a time of famine, when Tecaughretanego lay helpless in his cabin, suffering patiently with the rheumatism which crippled him, Smith hunted two whole days without killing any game, and then came home faint with hunger and fatigue. Tecaughretanego bade his little son bring him a broth which the boy had made with some wildcat bones left by the buzzards near the camp, and when Smith had eaten he rebuked him for his despair, and charged him never again to doubt that God would care for him, because God always cared for those children of his who trusted in him, as the Indians did, while the white men trusted in themselves. The next day Smith went out again, but the noise made by the snow crust breaking under his feet frightened the deer he saw, and he could not get a shot at them. Suddenly, he felt that he could bear his captivity no longer, and he resolved to try and make his way back to Pennsylvania. The Indians might kill him, long before he could reach home; but if he staid, he must die of hunger. He hurried ten or twelve miles eastward, when he came upon fresh buffalo tracks, and soon caught sight of the buffalo. He shot one of them, but he could not stop to cook the meat, and he ate it almost raw. Then the thought of the old man and little child whom he had left starving in the cabin behind him became too much for him. He remembered what Tecaughretanego had said of God’s care for those who trusted in him; and he packed up all the meat he could carry, and went back to the camp. The boy ate ravenously of the half-raw meat, as Smith had done, but the old man waited patiently till it was well boiled. “Let it be done enough,” he said, when Smith wished to take off the kettle too soon; and when they had all satisfied their hunger, he made Smith a speech upon the duty of receiving the bounty of Owaneeyo with thankfulness. After this, Smith seems to have had no farther thoughts of running away, and he made no attempt to escape until he had been four years in captivity. He was then at Caughnewaga, the old Indian village which the traveler may still see from his steamboat on the St. Lawrence River near Montreal. He had come to this place with Tecaughretanego and his little son in an elm-bark canoe, all the way from Detroit; and now, hearing that a French ship was at Montreal with English prisoners of war, he stole away from the Indians and got on board with the rest. The prisoners were shortly afterwards exchanged, and Smith got home to his friends early in 1760. They had never known whether he had been killed or captured, and they were overjoyed to see him, though they found him quite like an Indian in his walk and bearing.
He married, and settled down on a farm, but he was soon in arms against the Indians. He served as a lieutenant in Bouquet’s expedition, and became a colonel of the Revolutionary army. After the war he took his family to Kentucky, where he lived until he died in 1812. The Indians left him unmolested in his reading or writing while he was among them, and he had kept a journal, which he wrote out in the delightful narrative of his captivity, first published in 1799. He modestly says in his preface that the chief use he hopes for it is from his observations on Indian warfare; but these have long ceased to be of practical