Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
The stars came out one by one and blinked down at his bent figure still in prayer, his eyes uplifted in an uncanny glare. As he slowly moved back to his camp he met Townsley. Frederick and Oliver had reached camp and Townsley had caught a note of the sinister in their whispered talk. He didn't like the looks of it. Brown had told him there was trouble brewing on the Pottawattomie.
He had brought to Kansas a complete outfit for surveying land. He instructed Owen and Frederick to act as chain carriers, Salmon as axeman and Oliver as marker. He reached the little Southern settlement on the Pottawattomie Creek the fifteenth of May. He planted his compass on the bank of the creek near the Doyles' house and proceeded to run a base line.
The Surveyor of the lands of Pottawattomie Creek was shaping the organization of a band of followers. To this little group, composed as yet of his own sons in the main, he talked of his work, his great duty, his mission with mystic elation. A single idea was slowly fixing itself in his mind as the purpose of life. It was fast becoming an obsession. He slept but little.
His scalp is hanging in the belt of a Pottawattomie who is now with Dieskau. Black Rifle will roam the forest no more. He was killed by my own men, and the wolves have eaten his body. The hunter Willet was taken alive, but he perished at the stake. He was a very strong man, and he burned nearly a whole day before the spirit left him.
Brown spent the night alone reconnoitering the settlement of the Pottawattomie, marking the place of his game and making sure that no alarm could be given. All was still. There was nowhere the rustle of a leaf along a roadway that approached the unsuspecting quarry. Saturday dawned clear and serene. His plans required that he lie concealed the entire day.
The huntsman hurried to the stable and took Wilkinson's horse. It was two o'clock before they reached the home of James Harris on the other side of the Pottawattomie. Harris lived on the highway and kept a rude frontier boarding place where travelers stopped for the night. With him lived Dutch Henry Sherman and his brother, William. Brown had no difficulty in entering this humble one-room house.
The God he worshipped was a fiend, but he worshipped Him with all the more passionate devotion for that reason. When he committed murder on the Pottawattomie he stalked his prey as a panther. He sang praises to his God as he paused in the brush before he sprang. His narrow mind, with a single fixed idea, was inaccessible to any influences save those which fed his mania.
It was then agreed that there should be no more hostilities between the Americans and the Pottawattomies. Two of the white chiefs, with eight Pottawattomie braves, and five others, Americans, had gone down to St. Louis to have the treaty of peace confirmed. This, said Washeown, is good news; for we can now go to our hunting grounds, and, for my part, I never had anything to do with this war.
Yet, armed and surrounded by a small band of faithful followers, he led a charmed life. His deed on the Pottawattomie made murder the chief sport of the unhappy Territory. The life of the frontier was reduced to anarchy. Outrages became so common it was impossible to record them. Murder was a daily incident. Many of them passed in secret.
Until within an hour I have hoped it might be peace, that the older chiefs would hold their young men in control, and the red wampum be not seen at Dearborn. Twenty minutes ago one of the noblest advocates of peace, a Pottawattomie warrior named Black Partridge, sought interview with Captain Heald, and his words have shown me how desperate indeed has our situation become."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking