The weekly Ottumwa courier. [volume] (Ottumwa, Iowa) 1857-1872, 1861-01-16
The War.WOmau Creek,


In Georgia and North Carolina there is
hardly river, creek, or stream, that has not
connected with it some old Indian tradition.
The title ofthe present sketch is taken from
one of tlese-l believe one of the principle
tributaries of Nathalee river, IN the Chero-
kee nation North Carolina The story, as
told by the few remaining Indians since the
removal in the fall of 1888, runs thus:
Many years ago, in the first settlement of
the country, wandering party of the tribe
attacked the house Of a squatter, somewhere
upon their orders, during his absence, and
massacreed all his children, and left his wife
covered with the maneled bodies of her butch
cred offspring; scalped like them and appar-
emily dead. She was not, how,ver, wounded
so badly as they had supposed, and no soon
er did she hear their retreating footsteps,
than disengaging herself from the heap Of
slain, haggard, pale, and drenched with her
own and the blood of her children, she peer
ed stealthily from the door, and finding her
enemies no longer in sight, hastily extin-
guished the fire, which before leaving they
had applied to her cabin, but which had, as
yet, made very little impression upon the
green logs ofwhich it was composed.
Wiping from her eyes .he warm blood,
still reeking from her seal lpless head, she di-
rected her gaze to the bleeding and disfig-
ured forms of those who scarce an hour
before were playing at the door, and gladden.
ing her maternal heart with their merry
laughter, and as she felt, in the full sense of
her desolation, the last ray of nope die with
in her bosom, there stole over her ghas,ly
face look as savage as was ever worn by
the ruthless slayers of her innocent babes.
Her eye cleaned with the wild fury of the
tigress robbed of her young, and closing her
cabin carefully behind her, with counten-
ance animated by some desperate purpose,
she started off in the same path by which the
murderers had departed. Needless of her
wounds and wasting blood, and lost to all
sense Of hunger and fatigue in the one alb
sorbing and fell purpose which actuated her,
shepaused not upon the trail of her foes,
until at night, when she came up to them
encamped at the side of the creek, which is
indebted to her for its present name.
Emerging from the gloom Of the surround
Ing darkness, on her hands and knees, she
crept noiselessly toward the fire, the blaze
of which, as 1t fickcred upward, disclosed to
her the PROSTATE forms of the Indians, who
overcome by an unusually fatigueing DAYS
travel, were wrapped in deep sleep, with
their only weapons, their tomahawks, in
their belts. Her stealthy advancing figure,
as the uncertain light of the burning pine fell
upon it with more or less distinctness-ro
exposing its lineamcnts clotted with blood
and distorted by an expression, which her
wrong, and the disolators other hearthstone,
exaggerated to degree almost fiendish and
row shading all, two cleaning, spectral eyes
was even more striking than the swarthy
faces which she gazed upon.
Assuring herself that they were fasta asleep,
she gently removed their tomahawks, and
dropped all but one in the creek. With this
remaining weapon in her hand, and cool
resolution in her heart, she bent over the
nearest enemy, and lifting the instrument, to
which her own and her childrens blood still
adhered, with one terrific blow, buried it in
the temple Of its owner. The savage moved
no more than to partly turn upon his side,
gasped little, quiyered minute like an
aspen, and sunk back into his former posi-
ton, quite dead. Smiling ghastiy in his
rigid face, the desperate woman left him,
and noiselessly as before, she despatched all
the sleepers but one to that long rest from
which nothing but the last trump can awaken
them.
The last devoted victim, however, was