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The next night we had another singular escape: we had arrived near the entrance of a horrible pass called "El puerto de la puente de las tablas," or the pass of the bridge of planks, which wound through a black and frightful mountain, on the farther side of which was the town of Onas, where we meant to tarry for the night. The sun had set about a quarter of an hour.
They loved him so much that the highest praise they could give any man was to say "he is like the great Onas," and it was said that any one dressed like a Quaker was far safer among the Indians than one who carried a gun. Life seemed so easy in Pennsylvania that in the first years thousands of colonists came flocking to the new colony.
The Onas not being naturally a quarrelsome people, it may be that this realization and foreboding of the attack accounts for their tendency to run away from their associates, when they have endured the strain as long as they can, thus placing themselves in a position to avoid deliberate attack or injury to those about them.
In the same manner, Onas, Feather or Quill, became the official name of William Penn, and all succeeding Governors of Pennsylvania. The two prisoners were allowed to roam at will about the settlement, withheld from escaping by an Indian point of honor. Montmagny soon after sent them to Three Rivers, where the Iroquois taken during the last summer had remained all winter.
He undertook that neither he nor any of his friends should ever do the slightest injury to the person or the property of an Indian; and they, in reply, bound themselves 'to live in love with Onas' as they called him 'and with the children of Onas, as long as the sun and the moon shall endure. 'This treaty of peace and friendship was made, as Bancroft says, 'under the open sky, by the side of the Delaware, with the sun and the river and the forest for witnesses.
The Onas formerly occupied the entire northern half of Tierra del Fuego and possibly numbered some 3,000, but through contact and warfare with the whites, who drove them south off the open lands of the north, they have been reduced to about 300. These peoples are of a light cinnamon colored skin, black haired, and of a decided Amerindian type.
"Ay!" exclaimed the prisoner, and his eyes shot fire as he spoke, "they fell under his hand, man and boy there was not one of them spared they were of the blood of Wenonga!" "Wenonga is a great chief!" cried the Indian: "he is childless; but childless he has made the Long-knife." "The Long-knife, and the son of Onas!" said Nathan.
Ever afterwards too they called the Governor of Pennsylvania Onas, and whoever and whatever he was, for them he was great and good. But Penn was not only the great Chief Onas, he was also Father Penn. For he roamed the woods with the Indians, talking with them, and sharing their simple food like one of themselves.
The stern voice of necessity commanded even delicate women to undertake tasks for which their frames were far too frail. In that emergency the Indians came to the rescue. The red men worked for them, trapped for them, hunted for them, and served them in a thousand ways. 'You are all the children of Onas! they said. Nothing delighted the Indians more than to receive the great Onas as their guest.
For instance, a rancher of Tierra del Fuego, was in the company of some Onas when suddenly a hatchet whizzed by him, barely missing his head, and buried itself in a log of the Indian shelter. This was the result of an attack which seized upon one of the Onas who was afflicted thus from time to time.
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