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Updated: May 18, 2025
Their few precious knives, made from lengths of hoop-iron, and their few and more precious tomahawks from cheap trade hatchets, he had surmised they had captured in war from the bushmen of the jungle beyond the grass lands, and that they, in turn, had similarly gained them from the salt-water men who fringed the coral beaches of the shore and had contact with the occasional white men.
Directly in front were placed the securely bound prisoners, surrounded by aspiring young braves, too willing to show their skill in throwing arrows and tomahawks as near as possible to the captives' heads, delighting the dusky children, who with the women formed the outside circle. For several minutes the pipe, with the sweet-scented kinny-kinick, was passed from one to another in silence.
Thereupon several members of the class undertook, as a part of the next Sunday's lesson, to deliver such a sermon as they thought the savage might have given. Two of the boys brought hatchets on that Sunday to represent tomahawks, which they used as aids in making gestures, and their five-minute speeches showed a careful study of the whole situation.
Meantime, a number of women who had been left in the ship had jumped overboard, and were swimming to the shore, after having cut her cable, so that she drifted, and ran aground on the bar near the mouth of the river. The natives had not sense to shake the reefs out of the sails, but had chopped them off along the yards with their tomahawks, leaving the reefed part behind.
A volley from the woods on either side swept them down, and before the remainder could recover from the panic into which they were thrown by the volley, they were assailed with swords, bayonets and tomahawks, and but four out of the party escaped and these with severe wounds.
When they reappeared from the shelter of the trees the boat was out of range. Nevertheless they fired two or three shots that spattered on the water, waved their tomahawks and shouted in anger. Shif'less Sol stood up in the boat and shouted back at them: "Keep cool, my red brethren, keep cool! We have escaped and you see that we have! So do not waste good bullets which you may need another time!
But Grandfather delayed its momentous history, while he touched briefly upon some of the bloody battles, sieges, and onslaughts, the tidings of which kept continually coming to the ears of the old inhabitants of Boston. The woods of the north were populous with fighting men. All the Indian tribes uplifted their tomahawks, and took part either with the French or English.
At the same time it provided, curiously, that their children already born or yet to be born were to be the company's slaves. It was proposed at one time by some of the inhabitants, and again by Governor Stuyvesant, that negroes be armed with tomahawks and sent in punitive expeditions against the Indians, but nothing seems to have come of that.
"Brothers, we must be avenged upon every white man and woman here. We will shoot them like dogs." The answer to this harangue was the clanking of barbaric instruments of music, the brandishing of tomahawks, and the gleam of hunting-knives. Secretly the Indians went among the Bois-Brules squatting about, and revealed their plans; but some of these people shrank with fear from the proposal.
The upper story projects over the lower one, and in the huge double door that gives entrance to the hall there are traces of Indian bullets and tomahawks, reminiscences of that period when it was used as a blockhouse and served as a fortalice to protect the inhabitants of the surrounding district, who fled hither for protection from the vengeful steel and lead of the aborigines.
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