Rensselaer Gazette, Volume 3, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1859 — An Indian and Indiana Romance. [ARTICLE]

An Indian and Indiana Romance.

The Philadelphia Press relates the following story which we think our readers will find interesting: An incident in connection with one of the many romances of the Wyoming Valley may here be mentioned, especially as the writer of this article (while the editor of the Lancaster Intelligencer, more than twenty years ago) was an humble instrument in unravelling probably the most touching mystery in the records of this theater of Indian and British barbarity and crime. At Scranton we met a member of the Slocum family (one of the energetic pioneers of that town,) and recalled to his attention the fact that, in 1837, while Mrs. MuryJDickson, postmistress of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, (an excellent woman, who only lately departed this life,) she sent ns a faded letter, written to her post office by a gentleman named Geo. W. Ewing, who dated, we think, Logansport, i Indiana, in which he desired to know if any ! of the Slocum family lived in that neighborhood. He detailed in this letter his visit to an Indian cabin, and hie discovery of the long lost Frances Slocum, who had been stolen from her father’s family (Mr. Johnathan Slocum) some fifty-eight years before by the Indians, and by them carried into captivity. A fter every effort had been made to rescue the lost child, or even to hear of her whereabouts, the 'eil of years fell like a dark and impenetrable cloud before the harrowing sei "ret, and her brothers and their posterity | mourned over herns one forever lost to them. ’ We published the letter in the Intelligencer, and, aided bv the Rev. Samuel Bowman, (now assistant Bishop of this Episcopal diocese,) himself a native of the Wyoming region, we were enabled to send the first in- < formation to the Slocum family. The pub- ' lished letter fell into the hands of Mr. Slo- ' cum of Wilkesbarre, who was a little boy of ; two years of age when his sister Frances j was taken. The remainder of the story is a household word in northern Pennsylvania, but it may have been forgotten in other parts of the State. The family seek the little Frances sixty years after her captivity, and find her at the home of the Miami Indians. They go into a cabin where they see an Indian woman having the appearance of seventy five years of age, painted, jewelled and dressed like an Indian queen; nothing but her hair and colored skin indicated her origin. By the aid of an interpreter they converse, and are satisfied that t is is their long lost sister. She had forgotten her Christian name and the very language of her race, though she responded to “Frances,” and admitted, in her Indian dialect, that that was her name. While her brothers and sister sat throbbing and weeping at this strange revelation, the poor Indian woman was motiuless and passionless. She had become ' one of another people, she had been married and reared two daughters, both married, and living in all tlie glory of an Indian cabin, deer skin clothing, and a cow-skin head-dress. For Indians, she belonged to a rich commu- : nity, owned houses, could use the rifle, bri- : die her own horses, and mount a la Turk, i whenever she desired to do so. She could ■ sleep on the floor or on the bare earth, : wrapped in her blanket, as soundly as i her wealthy relatives slept in their ] beautiful residences in the Valley of the . Wyoming. They tried to persuade her to I return, but she refused to do so. She had : always lived with the Indians since her capture; they had always been kind to her, and ; she promise 1 her late husband on his death i bed, that she never would leave the Indian i cuuntr. (_gy"A book has recently been published j by Capt. Alfred W. Drayton, of the British j army, on the present, past and future condij tion of the earth. He undertakes to prove that “our earth is growing larger, and our ' distance from the sun increasing. He ob- • serves that measured degrees of the meridian in modern tunes have often been longer than ] those of olden time. The yearly growth of j the planet seems to be stated at three-quar- ■ tors of an inch in the mile. When the earth becomes ;jg large as Jupiter, the obliquity of I the ecliptic will be only 2 degrees.” So it appears that our earth has not gut its grow th 1 yet, a m. re yearling of a world a dirty little scrub of a planet, that won’t come of age. ■ and wear its man’s clothes, for several milI lions of years yet. What an upset of our : tellurian dignity, and smash up of geological j theories!

I A Handy Article.—Adam Slonake, a . number of years ago, came to Huntingdon i Furnace, and seeing there, for the first time, La pair of snuffer-, he asked: I “What’s them fur!” • “To snuff the, candle.” “To snuff the candle?” T he candle just then needed attention, and Adam, with his thumb and finger pinched □/: the snuff, and carefully poked it into the snuffer, saying: - “VI ell, now, them ls handy.” (t>*There was recently a duel at Napoleon, Arkansas, between a doctor and a tailor, in which the doctor shot the tailor through the leg, and the tailor the doctor through the lower extremity of the coat, they were made friends upon the ground—the doctor agreeing to dress the tailor’s leg, and the tnilorto mend the doctor’* cost-tail.