Читать книгу Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories. Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas онлайн

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Incidentally, Andy Maxwell had Indian blood in his own veins. His mother told me she was a quarter-breed. She had Indian features.

Then there was another Indian story having Wetmore connections. I have in my newspaper files Catherine German-Swerdfeger’s own story — nearly a full page written for the Spectator — of the slaying by the Indians of her father and mother, a brother and two sisters; and the capture of herself and three sisters—Sophie, Julia, and Addie. John German, from Blue Ridge, Georgia, with his family, was traveling by ox-team and covered wagon, through Kansas on the way to Colorado at the time of the attack.

Catherine’s description of the abandonment of her two little sisters, aged five and six, after two weeks on the move by the roving band of Indians, on the then uninhabited plains somewhere between southwestern Kansas and the main Cheyenne camp in Texas, in the midst of a big herd of buffalo, where, after following on foot until well nigh exhausted, as mounted Indians forced the two older girls on ponies away from the scene, the little girls lived—no, existed—for six weeks, in October and November weather, with no shelter other than a clay bank, on the leavings of soldiers, (cracker crumbs, scattered grains of corn, and hackberries), in a deserted camp, by a creek, would wring your heart.