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Some have long rifles of Daniel Boone's time, not fired for thirty years. And the impedimenta are a sight. Open wagons and conestogas and carryalls and buggies, and even barouches, weighted down with frying-pans and chairs and feather beds. But we've got spirit, and we can whip Lyon's Dutchmen and Yankees just as we are.
The latter, with springs, were no doubt the more luxurious travelling carriages of such Saints as may have been in easier circumstances at home; while the ox-drawn "Conestogas" belonged to the common crowd. With the larger waggons, a "corral" had been formed as is the usual custom of the prairie caravan.
Along this thirty-seven-foot road, of which twenty-four feet were laid with stone, the new era of American inland travel progressed. The array of two-wheeled private equipages and other family carriages, the stagecoaches of bright color, and the carts, Dutch wagons, and Conestogas, gave token of what was soon to be witnessed on the great roads of a dozen States in the next generation.
The arm of the white men cannot reach him here, in these woods, far from their wigwams and warriors and guns; it cannot pluck him back to be beaten. He toils no more in their fields. He is a real man again, a warrior of the long house, a chief of the Conestogas.
Agreskoi was angry: he hid his face behind a cloud. With their guns the palefaces beat the Conestogas like fleeing women back to their village on the banks of a great river, and themselves returned in triumph to their board wigwams, bearing with them many captives. Monakatocka, son to a great chief, was one. The palefaces made him to work like a squaw in their fields of tobacco and maize.
The region which has been described was not, however, the original seat of those nations. They belonged to that linguistic family which is known to ethnologists as the Huron-Iroquois stock. This stock comprised the Hurons or Wyandots, the Attiwandaronks or Neutral Nation, the Iroquois, the Eries, the Andastes or Conestogas, the Tuscaroras, and some smaller bands.
I know not even now if they were events or mere dreams, seeing that, all the long way, I was half asleep in the saddle! It was a veritable Drowsyland that we moved through on horseback! The Dutchmen, the "fraus," the "spreading," the sauer-kraut the conestogas, the red barns, the guttural voices, the strange faces were these actual things, or the mere fancies of a somnambulist?
And through the marvels of the Inland Seas, and by white conestogas threading flat forests and floating over wide prairies, until the two tides met in a maelstrom as fierce as any in the great tawny torrent of the strange Father of Waters.
Those who thus remained were known by various names, mostly derived from one root Andastes, Andastogues, Conestogas, and the like and bore a somewhat memorable part in Iroquois and Pennsylvanian history.
And through the marvels of the Inland Seas, and by white conestogas threading flat forests and floating over wide prairies, until the two tides met in a maelstrom as fierce as any in the great tawny torrent of the strange Father of Waters.
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