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He was greatly interested in his horse-breeding farms established on the fine pasturelands of Maragha, near Lake Urumia, and made frequent visits there. He is a good horseman and a keen sportsman with gun, rifle, and falcon, just as his father was, and his love of life in the open brought him much in contact with the people in a manner that developed the good-nature for which he is known.
For the bloodthirsty Turks and the even more cruel and wilder Kurds of the mountains were marching on the land. The Great War was raging across the world and even the hidden peoples of this distant mountain land were swept into its terrible flames. For Urumia city lies to the west of the southern end of the extremely salt lake of the same name.
They looked southward across the mountains to the British Army there in Mesopotamia for aid. But, as the Assyrians looked up from Urumia to the north they could already see the first Turks coming down upon the city.
Within two hours the Turks and Kurds were crashing into houses and burning them to the ground; but most of the people had gone for Dr. Shedd was practically the last to leave Urumia. Ahead of them were the Armenians and Syrians in flight. They came to a little bridge a mass of sticks with mud thrown over them. Here, and at every bridge, pandemonium reigned. This is how Mrs.
The mountains of Navarre and Biscay were within sight from the time they had left the river, and it did not need the compass to show them which way they should steer. There were many fishing boats from Nivelle, Urumia, and Saint Sebastian to be seen, dotted over the sea on their left. They kept farther out than the majority of these, and did not pass any of them nearer than half a mile.
So he also stood single-handed between Turks and five hundred Assyrians who had taken refuge in the missionary compound, and stopped the Turks from massacring the Christians. But even as he worked in this way the tide of the great war flowed towards Urumia. The people there were mostly Assyrians with some Armenians; they were Christians.
They passed on to the plain, and then as they were in a village guns began to be fired. Three hundred Turks and Persians were attacking under Majdi Sultana of Urumia. Dr. Shedd, riding his horse, gathered together some Armenian and Assyrian men with guns and stayed with them to help them hold back the enemy, while the women drove on.
Night fell and they were in a long line of wagons close to a narrow bridge built by the Russians across the Baranduz river. They had come some eighteen miles from Urumia. So they lay down in the wagons to try to sleep. But they could not and at two o'clock in the night they moved on, crossed the river and drove on for hour after hour toward the mountains that rose in a wall before them.
At last at midday on the third day they left Hadarabad at the south end of Lake Urumia. Two hours later the sound of booming guns was heard. A horseman galloped up. "The Turks are in Hadarabad," he said. "They are attacking the rear of the procession." "It seemed," said Mrs. Shedd, "as if at any moment we should hear the screams of those behind, as the enemy fell upon them."
A dark-haired American with black, penetrating eyes that looked you steadily in the face, and sparkled with light when he laughed, sat on a chair in a hall in 1918 in the ancient city of Urumia in the land of Assyria where Persia and Turkey meet. His face was as brown with the sunshine of this eastern land as were the wrinkled faces of the turbaned Assyrian village men who stood before him.
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