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    White Squaw: The True Story of Jennie Wiley
    White Squaw: The True Story of Jennie Wiley
    White Squaw: The True Story of Jennie Wiley
    Ebook217 pages3 hours

    White Squaw: The True Story of Jennie Wiley

    By Arville Wheeler

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    THE TRUE STORY OF JENNIE WILEY—WHITE SQUAW

    Thomas and Jennie Wiley lived on Walker’s Creek in Bland County, Virginia. In 1789 a small band of Indians attacked the Wiley cabin and killed Jennie’s three older children and her brother. Jennie was taken captive along with her baby son.

    Quickly the Indians and their captives moved westward into what is now Kentucky. Jennie’s only hope for herself and her child was to keep pace with her captors. The Indians moved northwest into the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky. Unable to cross the flooded Ohio River, they retreated to a series of winter camps in present-day Carter, Lawrence and Johnson (Kentucky) Counties.

    With only a rock bluff for shelter Jennie spent the winter laboring as a slave. After almost a year in captivity Jennie escaped, miraculously evading pursuit as she made her way to a small settlement at Harman’s Station on John’s Creek where settlers helped her return to her husband.

    The author Arville Wheeler was inspired to write this book because his grandmother told him the story of Jennie Wiley when he was a child.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGolden Springs Publishing
    Release dateNov 11, 2016
    ISBN9781787202733
    White Squaw: The True Story of Jennie Wiley
    Author

    Arville Wheeler

    ARVILLE WHEELER (May 8, 1900 - 1997) was an American teacher and writer. A native of Paintsville, Kentucky, he graduated with honours from Centre College in Danville in 1926, receiving his A. B. Degree, majoring in English. He became superintendent of Schools for Paintsville City Schools in 1934 and received his Masters Degree in School Administration and Supervision from the University of Chicago in 1939. Wheeler had a long and successful teaching career, holding various important positions: he was Assistant Director of Research at Cornell University and an Associate Professor of Education at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado (1938-1940); Superintendent of Schools in Ashland (1940-1946) and George Peabody College for Teachers (1947-1965); and Professor of Education at Eastern Kentucky University at Richmond (1965-1972). He devoted his spare time to writing and authored several tests and many professional books, as well as classics such as “White Squaw” (1958). He died at the age of 97 in 1997.

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      Book preview

      White Squaw - Arville Wheeler

      This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING—www.pp-publishing.com

      To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books—picklepublishing@gmail.com

      Or on Facebook

      Text originally published in 1958 under the same title.

      © Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

      Publisher’s Note

      Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

      We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

      WHITE SQUAW:

      THE TRUE STORY OF JENNIE WILEY

      BY

      ARVILLE WHEELER

      ILLUSTRATED BY TURE BENGTZ

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Contents

      TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

      DEDICATION 6

      DEAR READERS 8

      WARNINGS 9

      THE FIGHT IN THE FOREST 16

      THE ATTACK ON THE CABIN 21

      THE CHIEFS’ QUARREL 29

      JOHN BORDERS’ RETURN 32

      PLANS FOR RESCUE 36

      FORCED MARCHING FOR JENNIE 41

      THE SECOND NIGHT IN CAPTIVITY 46

      INDIAN THREATS 51

      ANOTHER DAY OF MARCHING 56

      TUG RIVER CROSSING 61

      THE RESCUE PARTY OUTDISTANCED 65

      DEPARTURE OF THE CHEROKEE 69

      THE SHAWNEE CHIEF AS MEDICINE MAN 74

      ON THE MARCH AGAIN 78

      AT LITTLE MUDLICK FALLS 84

      COOKING FOR THE INDIANS 87

      THE BEAR HUNT 93

      TRAPPING SMALL GAME 98

      INDIAN VISITORS 103

      HUNDREDS OF FISH 106

      LEAD INTO BULLETS 112

      A FEAST OF CORN 115

      BUFFALO ROBES AND DEERSKIN CLOTHES 119

      RETURN OF THE CHEROKEE 122

      TORTURE 126

      FIVE HUNDRED SILVER BROOCHES 131

      JENNIE’S DREAM 134

      A BREAK FOR FREEDOM 137

      MOMENTS OF SUSPENSE 140

      SAFE AT LAST 145

      REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 148

      DEDICATION

      to L. V. W.

      DEAR READERS

      This book is not a product of the imagination. It is a story based on fact. All incidents in it have been authenticated. Those which could not be authenticated and about which there has been speculation have not been recorded. The omission of them adds to rather than detracts from the value of the story.

      Names of all the principal characters are real. Families now living in the region in which this story has its setting still bear these names. The title, White Squaw, was, according to history, the name the Indians gave to Jennie Wiley from the moment they took her captive.

      Many of the places described in the story remain today in their original state. The rockhouses at Cherokee and at Mudlick Falls are in the same condition as they were when White Squaw left them. Over the years weather conditions and the thoughtless scribbling of sightseers have removed Indian writings from their stony walls, but the rocks still stand. The tall poplar, spruce, sycamore, and beech trees that once lifted their leafy boughs above Mudlick Falls are gone, no doubt, but trees like them stand where they stood. Yes, the story is true.

      Just imagine that you were living almost 200 years ago. Can you? Then, as you read this story and turn page after page, you will see how the dauntless courage of a pioneer woman, with tremendous odds against her, finally triumphed over the Indians. You will see real Indian fighting taking place before your very eyes the very minute you read about it.

      I believe you will get the thrill out of the story that I got when my Grandmother Wheeler first told it to me.

      Sincerely yours,

      4428 Lealand Lane

      Nashville, Tennessee

      WARNINGS

      Jennie! Jennie!" a voice called outside the cabin. It was a man’s voice, low, as if the speaker were half afraid of being overheard. And yet who, unless he were within a few paces, could have heard any sound above the wind which whistled around the corners of the cabin and through the open space between the cabin’s two rooms?

      Inside the cabin Jennie Wiley heard it and stopped weaving. She placed the threaded shuttle upon the new cloth in front of her. All day long she had been weaving the linsey-woolsey material which was to be used for winter clothes. A few minutes more and the length of material would have been finished.

      Three small children dropped pieces of kindling with which they had been building make-believe cabins and looked toward their mother. The fourth, a baby of fifteen months, crawled across the room to her. He pulled at the hem of her long skirt and looked at her pleadingly. His little lips were puckered but no sound escaped them although his eyes plainly said, Pick me up, Mama! Pick me up!

      It’s all right, Tommy, Jennie assured him. That is Uncle John Borders at the door. You know Uncle John. What, she wondered, could bring John here in this awful downpour of rain!

      Jennie pushed the short, split-log bench away from the loom. She took the child in her arms. We’ll open the door for Uncle John, she said, patting the child’s back gently with her right hand.

      Let me open the door, said Batt Sellards, laying aside the piece of split-hickory he had been shaping into an ax handle.

      Batt was Jennie’s youngest brother. He was fifteen years old and as brave a lad as ever lived in the Virginia backwoods. He was tall, straight, slender, and handsome. Batt was not his real name, but a nickname. He had first been called Batt by Jennie’s little daughter Ruth, who couldn’t say his real name. The nickname stuck, and he became known as Batt Sellards by every settler in Walker’s Gap.

      From the brackets on either side of the door, Batt lifted the hickory crossbar and leaned it against the wall. Then he turned the big wooden buttons at top and bottom and pulled the heavy door open. It creaked on its wooden hinges as it swung inward.

      John Borders, you are wet to the skin! said Batt. What brings you here in this terrible weather?

      The water ran down John’s leather jacket and dropped off its fringed edges. His coonskin cap was soaking wet. It looked more like the racoon itself than like a cap.

      Come in, said Jennie, who was still holding Tommy in her arms. Come in, John, and warm yourself.

      John Borders shook himself, and drops of water, like the first big drops in a summer shower, fell on the floor about him. It’s a wet day, he said, as he walked to the huge fireplace, where blazing logs threw out warmth and comfort. He turned his back to the fire. His long arms hung loosely at his side. He rubbed the fringed edges of his hunting jacket between the tips of his long, bony fingers. In the heat of the open fire, dampness steamed from his clothes like mist.

      What’s on your mind, John? Batt asked.

      Yes, said Jennie. What brings you here on a day like this?

      Indians, Jennie! answered John Borders, I fear the Indians are about.

      What makes you think so? asked Jennie. Tell us about it.

      So John told them how, that morning, he had left his cabin at the break of day. He had gone into the forest in search of sheep that had escaped from the fold the night before. Following their trail had been easy for a time. They had left footprints. Here and there they had pawed leaves to get at the tasty leaf of the teaberry plant. Bits of wool had been left hanging to the thorns of the wild crab apple and the hawthorn bushes. But toward noon, rain had begun to fall. It was a slow drizzle at first. Then it came down harder—the chilly rain of November. It washed away signs of hoofprints. It hung like drops of crystal to twigs and to bits of wool alike, making it hard to tell one from the other. Low-hanging clouds covered the hilltops. Pockets of fog formed in the narrow valleys and in the deep hollows. One could see hardly any distance at all.

      But sheep were the pioneers’ most valuable possession. They furnished wool for clothing and, when other food was scarce, meat for the table. Wolves had made so many raids on the flocks at Walker’s Gap that neither John Borders nor the other settlers could afford to lose any more sheep, if they could help it. So John had kept up the search.

      Toward mid-afternoon he had stopped under an oak tree, trying to think where to look next. Suddenly, through the rain, he had heard the hooting of owls on the ridges nearby. The hootings came first from one ridge and then from another. They were rhythmically spaced. They seemed like signals.

      Signals! The thought had startled him. Signals! Of course they were signals! Signals of the Shawnee Indians!

      The Shawnees, he knew, used many signals of this kind—the call of birds and the cry of wild beasts. They had a signal for every occasion, a signal suitable to the event and to the weather. Suitable to the weather! Owls often hoot on rainy days. The more he had thought about it, and listened, the surer he had become that the hootings were Shawnee signals.

      In that case the settlement must be in danger of attack by the Indians. The settlers must be warned. There was no time to lose, for the Indians must already be close at hand—close enough for him to hear their signals—and the settlement was almost defenseless. Thomas Wiley, Jennie’s husband, had gone to the trading post.

      The Harmans—Tice, Daniel, George, and Henry—were all away on the short hunt, the hunt of two or three weeks that the hunters always made in order to lay in meat for their families for the winter. Even the Harmans’ father, Henry Harman himself, was away on the short hunt. So were Henry Skaggs, James Skaggs, Sid Damron, and Allen Draper. Was there another man in the settlement? He tried to think. But that, he had realized, was beside the point. The settlers must be warned; first Jennie and her children—they were nearest—and then the others.

      Jennie listened quietly while her brother-in-law told his story. She had lived close to danger all her life. She knew how to face it. Her father had moved his family from the Shenandoah Valley to Walker’s Gap when Jennie was only three years old, but she remembered well an attack of the Indians at that time. Her mother had poked her into the hollow of a beech tree, where she had remained without making a sound until the skirmish was over.

      Many times, before she was grown up, there had been attacks upon the settlement and upon the family. Once an Indian had tried to seize her as she returned from the spring with a bucket of water, but she had dashed the water in his face and escaped. On more than one occasion since her marriage, she had defended her own brood. Yes, Jennie Wiley knew the Indians and had good reason to fear them.

      She brushed her hair back from her forehead. What would you suggest we do, John? she asked.

      I think you had better go to our house for the night, Jennie, John answered. "I’m afraid the Indians plan an attack upon the settlement before morning. We will be in a better position to defend ourselves if we all stay together. I believe the Indians have already had a skirmish with the hunters and have been forced to flee

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