e of Terra Haute), making great havoc among his
forces.

When, the terrible war-whoop was heard, the heroism of these hundred
women rose equal to the emergency. They did not cling helplessly to
their husbands--the women of those early days were made of sterner
stuff--but with pale, set faces, they joined in the defense, and the
records say, were most of them killed fighting bravely. They died a
soldier's death upon the field of battle in defense of home and
country. They died that the prairies of the West and the wilderness of
the North should at a later period become the peaceful homes of untold
millions of men and women. They were the true pioneers of the
Northwest, the advance-guard of civilization, giving their lives in
battle against a terrible enemy, in order that safety should dwell at
the hearth-stones of those who should settle this garden of the
continent at a future period. History is very silent upon their
record; not a name has been preserved; but we do know that they lived,
and how they died, and it is but fitting that a record of woman's work
for freedom should embalm their memory in its pages. Many other women
defended homes and children against the savage foe, but their deeds of
heroism have been forgotten.

There is scarcely a portion of the world so far from civilization as
Indiana was at that day. No railroads spanned the continent, making
neighbors of people a thousand miles apart; no steamboat sailed upon
the Western lakes, nor indeed upon the broad Atlantic; telegraphy,
with its annihilation of space, was a marvel as yet unborn; even the
Lucifer match, which should kindle fire in the twinkling of an eye,
lay buried in the dark future. Little was known of these settlements;
the Genesee Valley of New York was considered the _far West_, to which
people traveled (the Erie Canal was not then in existence) in strong,
spring less wagons, over which large hoops, covered with white cloth,
were securely fastened, thus sheltering the inmates from sun and
storm. These wagons, afterward known as "Prairie Schooners," were for
weeks and months the traveling homes of many a family of early
settlers.

But even in 1816 Indiana could boast her domestic manufactures, for
within the State at this time were "two thousand five hundred and
twelve looms and two thousand seven hundred spinning-wheels, most of
them in private cabins, whose mistresses, by their slow agencies,
converted the wool which their own hands had