Stories of American Life and Adventure

STORIES OF AMERICAN LIFE AND ADVENTURE.

A WHITE BOY AMONG THE INDIANS.

Among the people that came to Virginia in 1609, two years after the colony was planted, was a boy named Henry Spelman. He was the son of a well-known man. He had been a bad and troublesome boy in England, and his family sent him to Virginia, thinking that he might be better in the new country. At least his friends thought he would not trouble them so much when he was so far away.

Many hundreds of people came at the same time that Henry Spelman did. Captain John Smith was then governor of the little colony. He was puzzled to know how to feed all these people. As many of them were troublesome, he was still more puzzled to know how to govern them.

In order not to have so many to feed, he sent some of them to live among the Indians here and there. A chief called Little Powhatan asked Smith to send some of his men to live with him. The Indians wanted to get the white men to live among them, so as to learn to make the things that the white men had. Captain Smith agreed to give the boy Henry Spelman to Little Powhatan, if the chief would give him a place to plant a new settlement.

Spelman staid awhile with the chief, and then he went back to the English at Jamestown.

But when he came to Jamestown he was sorry that he had not staid among the Indians. Captain John Smith had gone home to England. George Percy was now governor of the English. They had very little food to eat, and Spelman began to be afraid that he might starve to death with the rest of them. Powhatan--not Little Powhatan, but the great Powhatan, who was chief over all the other chiefs in the neighborhood--sent a white man who was living with him to carry some deer meat to Jamestown. When it came time for this white man to go back, he asked that some of his countrymen might go to the Indian country with him. The governor sent Spelman, who was glad enough to go to the Indians again, because they had plenty of food to eat.

Three weeks after this, Powhatan sent Henry Spelman back to Jamestown to say to the English, that if they would come to his country, and bring him some copper, he would give them some corn for it. The Indians at this time had no iron, and what little copper they had they bought from other Indians, who probably got it from the copper mines far away on Lake Superior.

The English greatly needed corn, so they took a boat and went up to the Indian country with copper, in order to buy corn. They quarreled with the Indians about the measurement of the corn. The Indians hid themselves near the water, and, while the white men were carrying the corn on their vessel, the Indians killed some of them. About this time, seeing that the white men were so hungry, the Indians began to hope that they would be able to drive them all out of the country.

Powhatan saved Spelman from being killed by the Indians; but, now that the Indians were at war with the white men, who were shut up in Jamestown without food, they wished to kill all the white people in the country.

Spelman and a Dutchman, who also lived with Powhatan, began to be afraid that he would not protect them any longer. So, when a chief of the Potomac Indians visited Powhatan, and asked the Dutchman and the boy to go to his country, they left Powhatan and went back with them. Powhatan sent messengers after them, who killed the Dutchman. Henry Spelman ran away into the woods. Powhatan's men followed him, but the Potomacs got hold of Powhatan's men, and held them back until Spelman could get away. The boy managed at last to get to the country of the Potomac Indians.

It was very lucky for Spelman that he was among the Indians at this time. Nearly all the white people in Jamestown were killed, or died of hunger. Spelman lived among the Indians for years. During this time more people came from England, and settled at Jamestown. A ship from Jamestown came up into the Potomac River to trade. The captain of the ship bought Spelman from the Indians. He was now a young man, and, as he could speak both the Indian language and the English, he was very useful in carrying on trade between the white men and the Indians.

At the time that Henry Spelman first went among the Indians, they had no iron tools except a very few that they had bought of the white people. They had no guns, nor knives, nor hatchets. They had no hoes nor axes. They made their tools out of hard wood, shells, stones, deer horns, and other such things. They had not yet bought blankets from the white men, but made their clothes mostly out of the skins of animals.

The Indians could not learn much about the white man's arts from Spelman, because he did not know much. Besides, he had no iron of which to make tools. He learned to make arrows of cane such as we use for fishing rods. He also learned to point his arrows with the spur of a wild turkey, or a piece of stone. These arrow points he stuck into the arrow with a kind of glue. But he first had to learn how to make his glue out of deers' horns. Before he could make any of the tools, he had to make himself a knife, as the Indians did. Having no iron, the blade of his knife was made out of a beaver's tooth, which is very sharp, and will cut wood. He set this tooth in the end of a stick. You see how hard it was for an Indian to get tools. He had to learn to make one tool in order to use that in making another tool.

One of the principal things that an Indian had to do was to make a canoe; for, as the Indians had no horses, they could travel only by water, unless they went afoot. Canoes were the only boats they had. They had to make canoes without any of the tools that white men use. Let us explain this by a story about Henry and an Indian boy. The things in the story may not have happened just as they are told, but the account of how things are made by the Indians is all true.

THE MAKING OF A CANOE.

Henry had a young Indian friend whose name was Keketaw. One day Keketaw said to him, "Let us go into the woods and make a canoe."

"If we had an ax to cut down the trees," said the white boy, "or an adz, such as they have at Jamestown, or if we could get a hatchet, we might make a canoe; but we have not even a little knife."

"We will make a canoe in the Indian way," said Keketaw. "I will show you how. Let us get ready."

"What shall we do to get ready?" asked Henry.

"We must take our bows, and we must make many arrows, so as to get something to eat, and we must have fishing lines," said Keketaw, "or we shall not be able to live in the woods."

For some days the two boys were getting ready. It took them a long time to scrape a piece of bone into a fishhook by means of a beaver's tooth set in a stick, but they made three of these hooks. They made some more hooks not so good as these by tying a splinter of bone to a little stick. Keketaw's mother made fishing lines for them. She took the long leaves of the plant which we call Spanish bayonet, and separated these threads into a hard cord, rubbing them between her hand and her knee.

"We must have swords," said Keketaw.

"We can cut our meat with this," said Henry, pointing to a knife made of cane, such as the Indians called a pamesack.

"But the Monacans may come," said Keketaw. "If we should see one sticking up his head, I should want a sword to fight him with; and if we should kill him, we could cut off his scalp with it;" and Keketaw's eyes glistened a little at the thought of fetching home a Monacan's scalp.

The Monacans were fierce Indians of a tribe living in the country west of the Powhatan Indians. They were deadly enemies of Keketaw's tribe.

The two boys, by much slow work with stones and shells and beaver-tooth chisels, managed to scrape a wooden sword into shape. This, Henry was to wear at his back. Keketaw, for his part, found a piece of deer's horn. He stuck it into a stick so that it made something like a small pickax. With this he said he could quickly break the head of a Monacan. It would also serve as a sort of hatchet.

The land round the village in which Keketaw lived had been cleared of trees. This had been done by burning the trees in order to make room for fields. In these fields the Indians planted corn, beans, pumpkins, and tobacco, and a plant something like a sunflower, which is called an artichoke. Of the root of this artichoke they made a kind of bread.

For many miles there were no good canoe trees near the water. They had all been picked out and used. Henry and Keketaw traveled twenty miles into a deep woods, and chose a tree that would make a good canoe, and that stood near a stream which ran into the James River.

The first thing they did was to break down young trees and boughs, and build themselves a brush tent. They made a bed out of dry leaves. The first night they had nothing to eat, for they had no time to shoot any game. The next morning they were too hungry to sleep late, and they knew that squirrels are early risers. Soon after daylight the Indian boy killed a squirrel with an arrow. Having no fire, they ate it without cooking; for, when one is a savage, one must not be too nice.

How should they get a fire? They first took a piece of dry wood, which they scraped flat with stones. Then, with a blow of his tomahawk of deer's horn, Keketaw made a round hole in the wood. One end of a dry stick was placed in this hole. The other end was supported in the hollow of a shell which Keketaw held in his hand.

The string to Henry's bow was made of one of the cords or sinews of a deer's leg. He wound this once round the stick. With his left hand, Keketaw then put some dry moss about the stick where it entered the hole in the dry wood.

When all was ready, Henry drew his bow to and fro like a saw. Keketaw pressed the shell down on the upper part of the stick. The bow-string holding the stick made it whirl in the hole beneath. At first this seemed to produce no effect. After a while the rapid rubbing of the piece of wood in the hole made heat. Presently a very thin thread of smoke began to come up through the little heap of moss about the stick. Henry was now pretty well out of breath, but he sawed the bow faster than ever. At last the moss began to smolder and to show fire.

Keketaw then withdrew the smoking stick, and gathered the moss together. Lying down by it, and putting his arm about it, the Indian lad began to blow it gently. The smoldering fire increased until a little blue flame, which he could barely see, appeared. Keketaw now added some very thin paper-like bits of dry bark and some small twigs to the pile of smoking moss. These caught fire, and sent up a straw-colored flame. Henry put on larger twigs until there was at last a crackling blaze.

Taking lighted sticks from this fire, the boys made a fire all round the base of a large tree from which they meant to get the canoe. This fire they kept going constantly for two days. They even got up at night to put dead boughs on, it.

On the third night of their stay in camp, they didn't lie down at the usual time, for the tree was burned nearly through. About two o'clock in the morning a little breeze rustled in the leaves of the great tree. Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly, the tree fell with a tremendous crashing sound, until with a final thundering roar it lay flat upon the ground.