I gratefully acknowledge my debt to the following: Heckwelder’s Memoirs of the Indian Nations; Brinton and Anthony’s Lenape-English Dictionary; The First Michigan Frontier by Goodrich; the Zeisberger writings; The American Indian by Haines; Donehoo’s Indian Villages of Pennsylvania; Hunter’s Forts on the Pennsylvania Frontier; Kennedy’s Anthology of Old English Poetry; the historical accounts of Wing and Rupp; and to other volumes suggested or made available by Donald H. Kent of the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, who also furnished rare old maps; Charles W. Ness of the Pennsylvania State Library; Genevieve Porter of the Library of the University of New Mexico; Robert H. Land of the Library of Congress; D. W. Thompson of Carlisle, a collector of early Pennsylvaniana; Martha W. McCann of the Detroit Historical Museum; the Burton Collection and Public Library of Detroit; the Rev. John Youse of Pine Grove and others. I am especially indebted to Mrs. Howard A. Brinton of Wallingford and Arnold P. Pilling of Wayne University for their counsel.

Finally I want to thank three friends who lent their warm aid and support: Clarence E. Shaffner of Detroit for his indefatigable efforts to find certain material; Walter D. Edmonds, the novelist, who generously shared from his wide knowledge of the early history of the state of New York; and Paul A. W. Wallace, Pennsylvania historian, who kindly read the manuscript and made invaluable contributions and suggestions.

C. R.

THE girl in gray deerskins was fifteen, perhaps older, she wasn’t exactly sure. She couldn’t remember, was she four or five when she had been taken? Just that it was Pooxit, the Month of Falling Leaves. Before that there were only red clouds in her mind. Sometimes the clouds thinned a little, not much, barely enough to make out strange forms behind them. One was a house of pink stones all the same shape and size, a house far bigger than her own Indian bark cabin. And sometimes faintly shining through the mist she thought she could make out a face with yellow hair piled on top such as never had she laid eyes on here among the coarse black heads of her Indian people.

She saw the face with yellow hair clearly the day they brought the news from the Forks of the Muskingum. The word flew like Tskinnak, the blackbird, among the cabins of the village. It was that the Lenni Lenape must give up all children who had once been white, captives taken in raids across the Ohio and adopted into the tribe, even those who had married Indians, and their children. The white captain at the Forks had decreed it. He had come into the Indian forest with more warriors than leaves on a tree. Should the Indians refuse, his army would never depart but settle here in the heart of the Indian country, cutting down the Indian forest, shooting the Indian game, and growing like a white cancer in the breast of the red man.