A COUNTRY OF STRANGERS

by CONRAD RICHTER

Early Americana (SHORT STORIES) (1936)

The Sea of Grass (1937)

Tacey Cromwell (1942)

The Free Man (1943)

The Trees (1940) WHICH IS CONTINUED IN

The Fields (1946) AND

The Town (1950)

Always Young and Fair (1947)

The Light in the Forest (1953)

The Mountain on the Desert (1955)

The Lady (1957)

The Waters of Kronos (1960)

A Simple Honorable Man (1962)

The Grandfathers (1964)

A Country of Strangers (1966)

The Awakening Land (WHICH CONTAINS THE TREES, THE FIELDS, AND THE TOWN) (1966)

The Aristocrat (1968)

THESE ARE BORZOI BOOKS, PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY

Alfred A. Knopf

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Published May 16, 1966
Fifth Printing, June, 1969

© Copyright 1966 by Conrad Richter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Distributed by Random House, Inc.
Published in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada Limited.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-14921
eISBN: 978-0-8041-5018-7

v3.1

For Alfred

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Foreword

Chapter i

Chapter ii

Chapter iii

Chapter iv

Chapter v

Chapter vi

Chapter vii

Chapter viii

Chapter ix

Chapter x

Chapter xi

Chapter xii

Chapter xiii

Chapter xiv

A Note About the Author

Oft it befalls by the grace of God

That into this world woman and man

Bring child to birth. They dress it in colors,

Love it and train it till time shall come

When its limbs are sturdy and strong with life.

Father and mother carry and lead it,

Feed it and clothe it but God alone knows

What the years may give for the growing child!

Fates of Men,
Exeter Book, Old English,
8th or 9th Century

Charles W. Kennedy’s translation into alliterative verse of Fates of Men from the Exeter Book is from An Anthology of Old English Poetry, © 1960 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Foreword

LIKE its earlier companion novel, The Light in the Forest, this tale concerns the fortunes of one of many white captives taken prisoner as children and adopted into families of the early Indians. When later forcibly returned to their white homes, no small number of these tried desperately to run away and return to the free wild life of the forest and to their Indian fathers and mothers whom they admired and considered their real parents.

In The Trees and The Town I have written of the Indian from the white man’s point of view. Here I would like to continue the design of The Light in the Forest, which observes the white man from the viewpoint of that not ignoble race which once called this continent home but whose people were deprived, often rooked, of their rights and lands; their native conceptions of primitive justice and national defense cried out against; their very presence hated and despised; their reduced numbers, never large in the first place, driven from exile to exile; their solemn treaties with us repeatedly broken by their “white fathers”; their poetic, generally honorable and childlike savage nature corrupted by the white man’s perfidy, liquor, and disease until their fate today remains a blot on our national conscience.

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.

Memories long buried in Stone Girl’s mind rose up to trouble her. They were the words of Never Laugh, the white woman captive taken on the same raid as she. That was when Stone Girl had been very small and not long here. Never Laugh would take her into the forest. There in a small patch of sunlight she would talk to her in the white tongue, first bringing out pale scraps of dried scalp from her dress. It was all she had left of her own little girl. The child had cried too much on the long way to the Waldhoning, she said, and Fish Spear had dashed her head against a rock. Never Laugh would stroke the pitiful shreds of pale hair and cry. Afterward she would put them away, get out her comb, and comb the Indian lice from Stone Girl’s head.

“You must remember, Mary, who you are,” she would say. “Not Stone Girl, daughter of Feast Maker and granddaughter of Machilek, but Mary Stanton, daughter of Captain Peter Stanton, assemblyman and friend of the proprietaries in Pennsylvania.”

“I am Mary,” Stone Girl would answer obediently but in her mind she would say, “I am Stone Girl, too.”

“They will try to make you a savage,” Never Laugh would go on. “They want you to be a squaw. When you are older, young men will stand in the path waiting for you when you go to the spring. Do not stop and talk but walk around them. They look harmless enough. Oh, you would never guess the Indian warrior from what he is here in the village. He furnishes deer meat for his family. He sits and smokes like the most peaceful of men. When he walks, it is slow like a king. Hardly ever does he raise his voice and when he talks it’s as if butter would not melt in his mouth. But it’s different out on a war party. Then he turns into a wolf.”

“Not my father?”

“Not Captain Stanton, your white father. Oh, a few white men in the woods run wild and do things they would never do at home. Other white men would punish them if they did. But for Indians, savagery is second nature. At home they are the kind husband and sympathetic father. On the war trail they do cruel things I do not want to speak to you about. It is best for you not to know, for you must live with Machilek, your grandfather, since your Indian father is dead, and you must never show fear. But don’t forget what I have told you.”

“I will remember,” Stone Girl would say but in her heart she did not believe such words about Feast Maker, her father, or Machilek, only about Fish Spear who had dashed Never Laugh’s child against a stone.

“They will work on you every day,” Never Laugh would warn her. “You are young and strong. Just the kind they want. An Indian likes nothing better than to get a white squaw. It makes him feel important among his fellows. The time is coming when I won’t be here to remind you. When I’m gone you must remember. Keep your white tongue alive. Talk English every day to yourself and never give up.”

Had she given up? Stone Girl asked herself. Well, she had, she reckoned, after Never Laugh died. While the white woman lived it was not too hard to think that perhaps she, Stone Girl, was white also. But once the white woman had been put in the ground, her words had gone into the ground, too. Besides, her grandfather, Machilek, had reminded her who she was.

“You must not believe what Never Laugh tells you,” he had said. “She is white. She has never been made one of us. She is too old to be adopted. She is tied by dead vines to white ways. She can understand nothing of the red people. But you are different. You are young and have become our daughter and granddaughter. You understand us. You speak our words and breathe our air. You are one of us. You are Lenni Lenape, the original people.”

Then it was a fierce joy for Stone Girl to think and know she was Indian.

“I am Lenni Lenape, too,” the blue-eyed son of Munache the Badger told her. “I will never go back to the Yengwe devils. And no one can make me.”

But back he went in the hands of his father and uncles to the white captain, and Stone Girl felt the blood in her veins run slow. What would happen to her and her child, Otter Boy, now?

“Is my life to go from here?” she asked Espan, her husband. “And that of your son and likeness?”

“Do not let such in your head,” he answered. “Never will I give you and Otter Boy to the white captain.”

“Then I stay?” Stone Girl said, and a great joy seized her, for Espan was a man of honor and long experience against the white man.

“You will stay,” he agreed. “But first you must go from the village. My friend Smashed Head is one of the Shawanose where the sun sets in summer and is not bound by the white captain. I will ask him and his wife to keep you and Otter Boy. When the white captain leaves, I will bring you back to my cabin. But of this you must breathe to no one.”

“I will not breathe,” she promised, but in her heart fresh despair seized her. So she was to be taken away after all? What difference did it make to be dragged toward the setting or the rising sun? Either way she and her child would be torn from Espan and her home village.

IT WAS DEEP in the pit of night when they left the cabin.

“Now tread with a light foot,” Espan instructed her.

She knew what he meant, not the light foot that goes with a light heart. No, even with a heavy heart and the burden of her child on her back, her foot must crack no stick on the ground. None in the village dare hear them go and say that Espan had disobeyed orders of the white captain. She must simply disappear. Then if the white soldiers came looking for her and Otter Boy, all that anyone in the village could tell was that one day Stone Girl and her small son were here and the next day the earth had swallowed them up.

It was true enough, Stone Girl told herself as they went. The earth was swallowing them up. Not even Getanitowit, He Who Is Above All, she thought, could peer down through the darkness and see her being taken away. At this bewitched hour nothing looked familiar. The path was a will-o’-the-wisp, the trees they passed under, phantoms. Strange bushes stood in the form of unknown beasts and opened their mouths at her as she went by. All she knew was that they tramped into the teeth of Lomache, the north wind, which blew from the Place of Dancing Wraiths far from the home village on the Waldhoning, or White Woman’s River.

From the beginning, the omens were not good. When daylight came, they passed old scalps hanging from a tree beside their path. The hair swayed dismally in the breeze. The following day they reached Smashed Head’s village. Dogs tried to tear them apart and nobody called them off. At Smashed Head’s cabin his wife said he was away in council with the Northward Indians and nobody knew, not even he himself, when he would be back. Espan asked for Smashed Head’s brother but he was gone, too. For a time, Espan stood thwarted, flicking no eyelash, waiting, reserved and proud. Then he went through the ceremony with Smashed Head’s wife, presenting his gift of strouding for her husband, telling her of his mission, reciting Stone Girl’s merits as a worker, and at the end announcing he must be back in his own village before the white soldiers came.

Stone Girl felt a sinking when he gave her and Otter Boy farewell. He was going home without them. She stood outside this unaccustomed cabin with her child in her arms and watched his figure depart, moving into the forest until he passed from sight and she could make out nothing more among the trees. But the rest of the day her mind went with him on the path, passing the places they had seen together, lying at night under the same high bank for warmth, all the time coming closer to the home village. At last she could see him on the familiar path climbing the yellow bluffs and now he reached their snug cabin. But their fire would be out, their bed cold, and the cabin lifeless without Otter Boy. Espan would have to go to his brother, Slow Day, for flame to warm him and something to eat.

The night was long and yet when morning came Stone Girl could sing to her son a little tune. The Indian words were meaningless but the air said, “It is all right now, Little Mouse. Night has passed. So will the long winter. The ugly white captain will go. The handsome red father will come. We must only endure like the stone.”

Then Smashed Head arrived home. He looked stern when he found Stone Girl and Otter Boy. As a Shawano his tongue was different but Stone Girl could understand him.