ite River the party divided, and the Williams
family were separated and carried off in various directions. Eunice, the
youngest daughter, about eight years old, was handed over by the
Indians to the mission at St. Louis on their arrival there, and although
many efforts were made on the part of the Governor, who had purchased
and befriended Williams, to ransom her, the Jesuits flatly refused to
give her up. On one occasion he went himself with the minister to St.
Louis. This time the Jesuits, whose authority within their mission
seemed almost to override that of the Governor himself, yielded so far
as to allow the father to see his daughter, on condition that he spoke
to no other English prisoner. He spoke to her for an hour, exhorting her
never to forget her catechism, which she had learned by rote. The
Governor and his wife afterwards did all in their power to procure her
ransom, but of no avail.

"'She is there still,' writes Williams two years later, 'and has
forgotten to speak English.' What grieved him still more, Eunice had
forgotten her catechism." But now we come to this strange
transformation, unprecedented, we think, which made an Indian squaw out
of a white woman. "Eunice, reared among Indian children, learned their
language and forgot her own; she lived in a wigwam of the Caughnawagas,
forgot her catechism, was baptized in the Roman Catholic faith, and in
due time married an Indian of the tribe, who henceforth called himself
Williams. Thus her hybrid children bore her family name.

"Many years after, in 1740, she came, with her husband, to visit her
relatives at Deerfield, dressed as a squaw and wrapped in an Indian
blanket. Nothing would induce her to stay, though she was persuaded on
one occasion to put on a civilized dress and go to church, after which
she impatiently discarded her gown and resumed her blanket."

Could a sadder instance of degeneration be written in the annals of the
human family? "She was kindly treated by her relatives, and no effort
was made to detain her. She came again the following year, bringing two
of her children, and twice afterwards she repeated the visit. She and
her husband were offered land if they would remain, but she positively
refused, saying it would endanger her soul. She lived to a great age, a
squaw to the last. One of her grandsons became a missionary to the
Indians of Green Bay, Wisconsin."

This is one of the most drastic instances of a woman's devotion to
hus