The Project Gutenberg EBook of Po-No-Kah, by Mary Mapes Dodge

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Title: Po-No-Kah
An Indian Tale of Long Ago

Author: Mary Mapes Dodge

Release Date: April 11, 2004 [EBook #11991]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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PO-NO-KAH

AN INDIAN TALE OF LONG AGO

By Mary Mapes Dodge

1903

PO-NO-KAH.

AN INDIAN STORY OF LONG AGO.

I.

THE HEDDEN FAMILY.

We who live in comfortable country homes, secure from every invader,
find it difficult to conceive the trials that beset the hardy pioneers
who settled our Western country during the last century.

In those days, and for many a year afterward, hostile Indians swarmed in
every direction, wherever the white man had made a clearing, or started
a home for himself in the wilderness. Sometimes the pioneer would be
unmolested, but oftener his days were full of anxiety and danger.
Indeed, history tells of many a time when the settler, after leaving
home in the morning in search of game for his happy household would
return at night to find his family murdered or carried away and his
cabin a mass of smoking ruins. Only in the comparatively crowded
settlements, where strength was in numbers, could the white inhabitants
hope for security--though bought at the price of constant vigilance and
precaution.

In one of these settlements, where a few neatly whitewashed cabins, and
rougher log huts, clustered on the banks of a bend in the Ohio River,
dwelt a man named Hedden, with his wife and three children. His farm
stretched further into the wilderness than his neighbors', for his had
been one of the first cabins built there, and his axe, ringing merrily
through the long days, had hewn down an opening in the forest, afterward
famous in that locality as "Neighbor Hedden's Clearing." Here he had
planted and gathered his crops year after year, and in spite of
annoyances from the Indians, who robbed his fields, and from bears, who
sometimes visited his farm stock, his family had lived in security so
long that, as the settlement grew, his wife sang at her work, and h