A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier (14 page)

However, the next day, evidence of the warriors’ trail was finally discovered. The militia followed their path to within a short distance of the cave in which the Wyandot were hiding but could track them no further. As they searched the area, the militia came so close to the cave that Phebe could hear their voices clearly. She later told Lucullus McWhorter, “Not only were their voices plainly audible, and I recognized some of them, but the slightest rustle of their shot pouches was borne to my ear.”
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However, the warriors stood over her with rifles and tomahawks at the ready, indicating that she and her infant must remain silent and that any attempt to cry out would bring a swift death. Phebe crouched in the cave with her captors, holding Tommy close to her breast so he would not cry and give them away.
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Finding nothing, the searchers returned to the Cunningham farm that evening. During the night, one of the search party who was familiar with the area remembered the presence of a cave along Little Indian Run and led the group to it, reaching the cave just after dawn the next morning. However, having heard the militia so close the day before, the raiding party had elected to leave during the night, taking Phebe and Tommy with them.

Thomas returned a few days later to find his home in ashes, three of his children dead and his wife and infant son missing. His grief must have been almost unimaginable. As time passed, many would try to convince him that Phebe and Tommy were likely dead, as well, and that he needed to relinquish whatever hope he might harbor in his heart. Nevertheless, Thomas would never give up.

Officially, Phebe was reported as being killed in the attack by Colonel John P. Duval, the County Lieutenant of Harrison County, in a dispatch to Governor Patrick Henry of Virginia, dated September 5, 1785:

The Indians have again repeated their barbarities in Harrison County on the 31
^st
of August by killing the wife and four children of Thomas Cunningham and burning his house and that of Edward Cunningham. The people are terrified. Expresses are arriving with intelligence of traces of Indians being nearby. He would do all he could to keep the people together until succor should arrive, but the Militia were not organized, and ammunition very scarce. He had sent out fifty men and six spies. The effective force in county being only about two hundred and fifteen men and about one hundred and thirty guns. He is about to send for the powder and lead agreeable to directions, but adds in case there are any rifles belonging to the State in any of the back magazines at Alexandria, Winchester or Fredericksburg should acknowledge it as a singular favor to send an order for about two hundred of them
.
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As Duval’s report made its way to Governor Patrick Henry in Richmond, Phebe continued marching to the west with her captors, unaware of just how long this journey would eventually be in terms of both distance and time.

Chapter 4

A New World

T
HE
J
OURNEY

On the second night in the cave, the Wyandot conferred about what might be their next course of action. They had managed to take only two captives, their wounded comrade would not live through the night and the militia had come dangerously close to discovering their hiding place during the day. The only logical path was to abandon the cave before dawn, leaving the dead warrior behind, take the captive woman and her baby with them and start the long trek back to their village.

Before the sun began to rise, Phebe watched as the warriors carried their comrade out of the cave on his litter, and her impression was that they hid the body in a neighboring pool of water.
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Once the Wyandot returned, they pulled her to her feet, and as she carried Tommy, they marched out into the darkness and headed west, away from the slowly brightening skies behind them. The warriors moved swiftly, as years of training and experience had taught them to do. They knew their pursuers might very well find the cave and pick up their trail, so time could not be wasted. Phebe did her best to keep up, concerned that any sign of weakness on her part might convince the warriors that she and her infant son were not worth the trouble.

Over the course of the next few days, Phebe’s fatigue and hunger increased dramatically. Her Wyandot captors were conditioned by a lifetime of hunting and raiding to move great distances in a short amount of time and do so with little need for food or water. As a result, they did not make stops to rest, much less take a drink of water or have meals. They did take the time to kill a wild turkey; however, they only gave Phebe the head to eat. After that, they only provided her with three papaws, and despite her intense hunger, she carefully husbanded the fruit, eating each one slowly, making them last several days.

Shortly thereafter, they crossed the Ohio River and continued their march into the Ohio Country. After nine days, Phebe’s body began to wear down under the strain induced by days of walking with little food or water. Her feet were badly swollen, and because of their frequent wading across streams, her skin and nails soon stuck painfully to her stockings. Her repeated requests to stop and allow her to remove the stockings so she could tend to her injured feet were denied, and she did her best to keep up the pace.
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However, the worst side effect of the lack of nourishment and increasing dehydration Phebe experienced was that her breasts stopped producing milk. Little Tommy sucked plaintively at her nipples, but now only blood came from them. Without food, he began to suffer badly and cried continuously. At this point, the warriors decided the child had become a liability and they would dispense with him. As Phebe held him, they suddenly and swiftly killed him with a single tomahawk blow. Taking Tommy’s lifeless little body from her arms, one of the warriors tossed the infant boy’s body into the bushes, jerked Phebe to her feet and pulled her onward down the trail.
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There was no burial, not even time for a prayer. The last of her children was dead, and her future was darkly uncertain, at best. For Phebe, it must have felt as if her descent into hell was now complete. Still, one can only wonder what her thoughts were as she marched on, numb with deep grief, despair and pain, following the Wyandot onward into the Ohio woods.

A few days later, the small party reached a Delaware village, probably somewhere near the Muskingum River. Here, the warriors finally stopped to rest and eat something more substantial. By this time, Phebe’s feet were so badly torn that she could barely walk. Seeing her plight, one of the Delaware women took pity on this dirty, ragged young white captive. As the warriors rested, she knelt next to Phebe and carefully removed the shreds that were all that remained of her stockings. She tenderly washed Phebe’s feet and then applied a mix of medicinal herbs to the swollen, bleeding skin. The treatment seemed almost a miracle to Phebe, as the pain soon subsided and her feet actually began to heal.

However, the rest was short-lived, as the warriors continued their march to the north and west. As they approached the Scioto River and drew closer to their home village, the landscape changed dramatically, with hills and dense forest giving way to a broad, flat plain dotted with the occasional patch of woodlands. This area was described by a missionary of the time as a place where “there is nothing but grass which is so high and long that on horseback a man can hardly see over it, only here and there a little clomp [
sic
] of bushes.”
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After several more days of walking, the Wyandot finally reached their village in the area that is now Madison County, Ohio, about 20 miles west of Columbus.
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The raiding party had traveled over 250 miles on foot, dragging Phebe with them every step of the way. Phebe’s journey was over, although a new sort of journey was about to begin. As she walked through the palisade gates of the Wyandot town, she entered a new world, one that, in some ways, must have been as alien as that of another planet.

T
HE
W
YANDOT

The French explorer Jacques Cartier first encountered the Wyandot in his journey up the St. Lawrence River in October 1535. At that time, one group of the Wyandot occupied a large town known as Hochelaga near the current site of Montreal. However, by 1615, when Samuel de Champlain arrived in Canada, these Wyandot had moved west into what is now Ontario, where they joined the rest of their people in a land the Wyandot called “Wendake.”
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The French called them the Huron, a disparaging term that derived from the French
hure
, or “boar’s head,” which designated an individual as boorish, unmannerly and “savage.”

However, the people of Wendake referred to themselves as the “Wendat,” from which the word “Wyandot” is derived.
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In the Wyandot tongue, Wendake means “the island,” and the Wendat, therefore, are “those that live on the island.” Wendake was a lush land of forests and lakes located between what we refer to today as Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, where the Wyandot had lived since before 1300. Located between two bodies of water and surrounded by dense woods and wetlands, Wendake did probably feel like an island world unto itself.

Wendake’s landscape included deep woodlands, hills and plentiful water in the form of clear, cold streams filled with trout and bass as well as lakes holding even larger fish, such as northern pike and sturgeon. These provided a source of food all year, and the forests were alive with game, including rabbits, squirrel and white-tailed deer that were drawn to the habitat surrounding the Wyandot fields. Those fields were planted on a sandy soil that supported what was known as the “three sisters” of Wyandot agriculture: corn, beans and squash, with corn being the centerpiece of their diet. As one historian points out, this made corn an important crop: “This was crucial in a land powerfully marked by the four seasons, each bearing its own color and foods to add to the staple of corn: muddy brown spring with turkeys calling for males, green summer with plentiful turtles and frogs, orange autumn with pumpkins ripening on the vine, and white winter, difficult to be sure, but also an opportunity to catch fish through the ice and to hunt deer struggling through the crusty snow.”
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Maps indicating the location of the major woodland Indian nations and the Wyandot homeland of Wendake.
Drawn by the author using data from Bruce Trigger’s
The Huron: Farmers of the North
and Erik Seeman’s
The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead.

However, Wendake was much more than a mere place or even a homeland. It was also a crucial element in the Wyandot belief system and its underlying mythology.
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For them, Wendake was the center of a larger universe, and the story of its creation provides a critical basis for understanding their concept of the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds, as well as their own unique sense of morality, good and evil.

The Wyandot believed that, in the beginning, a female spirit named Aataentsic lived in the sky with other spirits. One day, as she worked in her fields, her dog saw a bear nearby and began to chase him. Aataentsic ran after her dog and the bear but, in the process, she fell into a hole and plunged out of the sky down to the watery world below the spirit realm. The large turtle that lived in waters below saw her falling and called on the other aquatic animals to help him save her, telling them to gather soil from the seabed and place it on his back. The other animals responded to the turtle’s pleas, and in short order, they had created an island on his back where Aataentsic gently landed.

As it would turn out, Aataentsic was pregnant when she fell from the sky and soon gave birth to a daughter who magically became pregnant as well but died giving birth to twin sons, Tawiscaron and Iouskeha. Aataentsic raised her grandsons to manhood, but as they grew up, the two boys’ personalities diverged, with Iouskeha becoming something of a malevolent troublemaker, while his brother was gentle and very benevolent. As a result, the twins began to quarrel, and eventually, they battled to the death. Using a sharp set of deer antlers, Iouskeha wounded his brother and then chased him down and killed him. However, Tawiscaron’s death was not totally in vain, as his blood droplets became flint, from which the Wyandot could make axes and arrowheads.

Following Tawiscaron’s death, Iouskeha, representing the sun, and his grandmother, Aataentsic, being the moon, returned to the sky. There, grandmother and grandson lived much as the Wyandot did below, in a village surrounded by cornfields, forests and lakes, which became the village of the dead. The village of the dead was said to be far to the west and was the final destination for human souls after death. Unlike Christians, however, the Wyandot did not believe in one afterlife for the “good” and another for the “evil.” In fact, they did not see good and evil as two forces in battle but, rather, as two natural elements of life that provided balance for all living things.

For example, from their village in the sky, Iouskeha and Aataentsic influenced the lives of humans below. Following his brother’s death, Iouskeha adopted much of Tawiscaron’s innate goodness, and it was he who created the animals that provided food for the Wyandot, and as the sun, he delivered good weather and warmth. Meanwhile, his grandmother, Aataentsic, often worked to spoil Iouskeha’s good works by bringing bad weather, disease and death. As such, she was a spirit to be feared. For that reason, when she took human form (personified by a dancer) and made her appearance at Wyandot feasts, the people would shout insults at her.
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