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men, unwilling to be outdone by a woman, followed at full gallopreached the spot where Higgins fainted and fell, before the Indians came up, and while the savage, with whom he had been engaged, was looking for his rifle, his friends lifted the wounded ranger up, and throwing him across a horse before one of the party, reached the fort in safety.

Higgins was insensible for several days, and his life was preserved by continual care. His friends extracted two of the balls from his thigh; two however yet remained-one of which gave him a good deal of pain. Hearing, afterward, that a physician had settled within a day's ride of him, he determined to go and see him. The physician asked him fifty dollars for the operation. This Higgins flatly refused, saying it was more than a half year's pension. On reaching home, he found the exercise of riding had made the ball discernible; he requested his wife, therefore, to hand him his razor. With her assistance he laid open his thigh, until the edge of the razor touched the bullet; then inserting his two thumbs into the gash, "he flirted it out," as he used to say, "without costing him a cent." The other ball yet remained; it gave him, however, but little pain, and he carried it with him to his grave. Higgins died in Fayette County, Illinois, a few years since. He was the most perfect specimen of a frontier man in his day, and was once assistant doorkeeper of the House of Representatives, in Illinois. The facts, above stated, are familiar to many, to whom Higgins was personally known, and there is no doubt of their cor

rectness.

WILD BILL, OR THE MISSISSIPPI ORSON.

WILD BILL, or the Mississippi Orson, as he has been called, was secured about the year 1809, in the Mississippi Swamp, not far from the site of Pinckney ville. The circumstances that led to his being taken were these. Some persons, who had recently settled in the vicinity, saw on the margins of the swamps the prints of the bare foot of a young person, and on close examination, they soon discovered a naked boy walking with the gait and in the manner of a wild animal on the shore of one of the lakes that abound in that region. Ilis object was to catch frogs, a species of hunting at which he seemed very expert. When he had caught them, he devoured them raw. The discoverer attempted to approach him, but so soon as the wild lad saw him he fled, with the usual terror of an untamed creature at the sight of man, toward a lake, into which he plunged, diving and swimming with the ease of an amphibious. animal.

These occurrences naturally excited much interest among the settlers; and they collected in a body to make a united effort to take him. After hunting for him for some time, they at length discovered him under a persimmon tree, eating the fruit. As soon

as he observed his pursuers, he fled as before, doubling like a fox, and making again for the water. Excusing themselves by their motive, the hunters adopted their usual expedient for catching animals. They put their dogs on the trail of the strange game. They soon tired him down and brought him to bay. Though no metaphysicians to form mental theorems out of the case of their new conquest, they discovered that the two-legged unfeathered creature had the natural instinct of fight-for he had made battle upon dogs and men with the full amount of courage and ferocity that might be expected from his age and physical strength. But, although he fought like any other animal, he was compelled to yield to numbers, and was fairly caught and bound.

He was then, it is supposed, not far from nine years old, naked, and perfectly speechless. His form was slender, but well-propor tioned, and capable of extreme agility. His eyes were brilliant, his hair sandy, and his complexion florid; a circumstance which may be accounted for, by his having lived almost entirely in the deep shades of the forest. Woodville was the nearest considerable settlement, and thither he was carried and placed in the family of Mr. Benjamin Rollins for domestication.

In two years after his capture, he has made some progress in learning to converse; he was also quite intelligible, although he had a wild look, perfectly indicative of his name. It was more

difficult to overcome his appetite for raw flesh than to learn him to speak. The love of the excitement of alcohol seems to be another common appetite of the man of nature, for he soon manifested an unconquerable longing for spirits in any form, especially when rendered sweet-upon which he became intoxicated whenever he had an opportunity. Whether he discovered the usual developments of the other animal propensities we do not know; but he always remained a wild animal in the fierceness of his temper. When playing with lads of his age, the moment his passions were aroused in any way, his first movement was to strike them with whatever instrument was nearest at hand. After his partial domestication they attempted to put him at work; but he showed a truly savage disrelish for labor. He was sure to run away, generally making for the town, where his amusement was to mount on horseback, whenever he was allowed the opportunity. Riding was his passion, and he would successively mount every horse in the livery stable for the pleasure of riding him to water. In other respects, he was quick and intelligent, and his appearance rather agreeable and prepossessing.

The training which he received was either unfavorable to a good mental development, or it had originally been denied him by nature; for he became quarrelsome, addicted to drunkenness, and not at all a lover of the truth. Consequently a good deal of doubt and uncertainty must rest upon his account of his early recollections, though they were so often repeated, and so nearly in the same. form, as to have gained credence with the people among whom

he lived. He stated that he had a dim remembrance of coming down the Mississippi with his father's family in a flatboat-that the boat landed-that his father killed his mother-and that he fled in terror into the swamps, expecting that his father would kill him. also; and that from that time he had subsisted on frogs, animals, and berries-living in warm weather among the cane, and in cold weather, in a hollow tree.

It is extremely unfortunate that so few details of the character and domestication of Wild Bill remain. He died, it is believed, at the age of eighteen or nineteen; that is near the year 1818, after a domestication of about nine years.

THE FANATICAL PILGRIMS.

THE principles of religious fanaticism ever appear similar in their manifestations; the same intolerant bigotry, the same superabundant zeal, the greater in proportion to the ignorance of the subjects, and the same arrogant assumptions have always been exhibited in the history of fanaticism. With the character of the Mormon delusion, the public are familiar. Not so with, perhaps, a more singular class of enthusiasts, known by the name of "the Pilgrims," who emigrated from the North to the Valley of the Mississippi, about the year 1817. A gentleman who resided a few years later as a missionary on the Arkansas at the Post, about fifty miles from its mouth, met in that vicinity with the wretched remains of that singular class of enthusiasts, dwindled down by sickness and misfortune to only six persons, the "prophet" and his family. They were sick and living in poverty; and the rags with which they were originally habited, to excite attention and to be in keeping with their name and assumption, were then retained from necessity. From the wife of the prophet and other sources, he gleaned the information which follows, of their origin, progress, and end.

It seems that the fermenting principles of the society began to operate in Lower Canada. A few religious people began to talk about the deadness and unworthiness of all churches as bodies, and they were anxious to separate from them in order to form a more perfect society. The enthusiasm caught in other minds, like a spark fallen in flax. A number immediately sold everything and prepared to commence a course toward the Southwest. In their progress through Vermont, they came in contact with other minds affected with the same longing with themselves, and doubtless most of them perfectly honest. The "prophet," a compound of hypocrite and enthusiast, joined himself to them, and from his superior talents or contributions to the common stock of the society, became their leader.

They went on accumulating through New York; when their

numbers amounted to nearly fifty. There they encountered the Shakers, and as they had some notions in common, a kind of coalition was attempted with them. But the Shakers are neat and industrious, to a proverb; but industry made little part of the religion of the Pilgrims, and neatness still less; for it was a maxim with them to wear their clothes as long as they would last on the body, without washing or changing; and the more patched or particolored the better. If they wore one whole shoe, the other-like the pretended pilgrim of old time-was clouted and patched. They made it a point, in short, to be as ragged and dirty as might be.

Of course, after a long debate with the Shakers-in which they insisted upon industry, cleanliness, and parting from their wives, proving abundantly and quoting profusely, that it ought to be so; and the Pilgrims proving by more numerous and opposite quotations, that they ought to cleave to their dirt, rags, laziness, and wives, and that they ought to go due southwest to find the New Jerusalem-it terminated as most religious disputes do; each party claimed the victory, and lamented the obduracy, blindness, and certain tendency to everlasting destruction of the other; and they probably parted with these expectations of the other's doom.

I knew nothing of their course from that place to New Madrid, below the mouth of the Ohio. They were then organized to a considerable degree, and had probably eight or ten thousand dollars in common stock. The prophet was their ruler, spiritual and temporal. He had visions by night, which were expounded in the morning, and determined whether they should stand still or go on; whether they should advance by land or water; in short, everything was settled by immediate inspiration. Arrived at New Madrid, they walked ashore in Indian file; the old men in front, then the women and children in the rear. They chanted a kind of tune, as they walked, the burden of which was, “Praise God! Praise God!""

Their food was mush and milk, prepared in a trough, and they sucked it up, standing up, through a perforated stalk of corn. They enjoined severe penances according to the state of grace in which the penitent was. For the lower stages, the penance was very severe, as to stand for four successive days without reclining or sitting; to fast one or two days. In fact, fasting was a primary object of penance, both as severe in itself and as economical. They affected to be ragged, and to have different stripes in their dresses and caps, like those adopted in penitentiaries as badges in the character of the convicts.

So formidable a band of ragged Pilgrims, marching in perfect order, chanting with a peculiar twang, the short phrase, "Praise God! Praise God!" had in it something imposing to a people like those of the West, strongly governed by feelings and impressions. Sensible people assured me that the coming of a band of these Pilgrims into their houses, affected them with a thrill of

alarm which they could hardly express. The untasted food before them, lost its savor, while they heard these strange people call upon them, standing themselves in the posture of statues, and uttering only the words, "Praise God! repent! fast! pray!" Small children, waggish and profane as most of the children are, were seen to shed tears, and ask their parents if it would not be fasting enough to leave off one meal a day.

Two of their most distinguished members escaped from them at New Madrid, not without great difficulty, and having been both of them, confined to prevent their escape. One of them, an amiable and accomplished woman, whose over-wrought imagination had been carried away by their imposing rites, died soon after, worn down by the austerities and privations which she had endured. The husband had an emaciated look, like the Shakers, a sweet voice for music, and was preaching in union with the Methodists. At Pilgrim Island, thirty miles below, and opposite the Little Prairie, they staid a long time.

There dissensions began to spring up among them. Emaciated with hunger and feverish from filth and the climate, many of them left their bones. They were ordered by the prophet, from some direct revelation which he received, to lie unburied; and their bones were bleaching on the island when we were there. Some escaped from them at this place, and the sheriff of the county of New Madrid, indignant at the starvation imposed as a discipline upon the little children, carried to them a pirogue of provisions, keeping off with his sword the leaders, who would have fain prevented those innocents from satiating their appetites. While on that island, a great number of boatmen are said to have joined, to take them at their profession of having no regard for the world or the things of it, and robbed them of all their money, differently stated to be from five to ten thousand dollars. From that place, reduced in number by desertion and death, in their descent to the mouth of the Arkansas, there were only the numbers surviving which I saw.

This history of the delusion and destruction of between thirty and forty people, most of them honest and sincere, left a deep and melancholy impression of the universal empire of bigotry, and its fatal influence in all ages and countries. To this narrative, I shall only add, that I heard an aged man, with a long beard, preaching, as they called it, at New Madrid. He descended the Mississippi a year after these unfortunate people, and he also called himself a Pilgrim. He was as wild and visionary as they were, and talked and acted like a maniac. He was descending the Mississippi, as he said to the real Jerusalem in Asia. Ile appeared deeply impressed that by going in that direction, he should finally reach that city. There was a numerous audience, and I heard many of them express their admiration of his preaching.

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