the terror of the Indians; the
grandchildren of the pioneers holding baronial tracts of land under
grant from Washington: mule-raisers, most of them, droning out their
lives in great rambling stone houses, card-playing, Champagne-drinking,
waited on by a few slaves, and carrying in their own tawny skins, high
cheekbones, and beetling eyebrows, hints that the blood of these same
pioneers had mixed too freely, perhaps, with that of their savage foes
and allies.

By this time, however, the drowsy, sunshiny burghs have swelled, like
the frog in the fable, and burst out into jaunty modern cities, with
mills belching soot and oily smoke down into the muddy streets; the
pavements are crowded with Uncle Sam's boys in their light blue coats;
the shops are stocked by Northern capital; the hard-headed, taciturn
Western man, with his broad common-sense, has set his solid foot down on
the ground, and begins to dominate over both the sloth of the natives
and the keen Yankee speculators. The women of the old-country families
look out sullenly, talk a great deal of "shoddy"; are loyal, certainly,
but say nothing of "Jack" or "Ned" who hold commissions under Lee or
Hood.

However, this is not what I meant to tell you. While I was passing
through one of the border towns, I accidentally met again the traces of
a curious old character, well known through all that region, who, if
fate had but placed her in the compressed action of a court, instead of
the loose, inconsequent hurly-burly of a republic, would have made
herself a footing in history before now. She deserves a more thorough
record than this mere sketch must be.

But I must go back to my own first journey to that country. It was the
fulfilment of an old, boyish plan. My father had been a land-surveyor,
and had hunted and trapped, in those early days, from the fat
river-bottoms of the Monongahela and Cross-Creek valleys up to the great
Cheat Mountains. He was a contemporary of the pioneers Wetzel, the
Leets, M'Cullochs, etc., and when I was a boy, used to fill up the
winter evenings with wild stories of border Indian warfare,
bear-hunting, and the like. I formed a hotter resolve, each new time of
hearing, to make a pilgrimage, as soon as I was a man, to his old
camping-ground, ("the Ohio" we called it then,) to hunt out and open the
mounds left by the Creeks and Delawares, and to find the forts where
these battles of his had been won and lost. It always pleased my father
that I