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Margaret Smith's Journal - Part 1, from Volume V., the Works of Whittier: Tales and Sketches by John Greenleaf Whittier
page 21 of 171 (12%)
sight of the poor starving women and children, chased from place to
place like partridges. Even the Indian fighters, I found, had sorrows
of their own, and grievous wrongs to avenge; and I do believe, if we had
from the first treated them as poor blinded brethren, and striven as
hard to give them light and knowledge, as we have to cheat them in
trade, and to get away their lands, we should have escaped many bloody
wars, and won many precious souls to Christ."

I inquired of him concerning his captivity. He was wounded, he told me,
in a fight with the Sokokis Indians two years before. It was a hot
skirmish in the woods; the English and the Indians now running forward,
and then falling back, firing at each other from behind the trees. He
had shot off all his powder, and, being ready to faint by reason of a
wound in his knee, he was fain to sit down against an oak, from whence
he did behold, with great sorrow and heaviness of heart, his companions
overpowered by the number of their enemies, fleeing away and leaving him
to his fate. The savages soon came to him with dreadful whoopings,
brandishing their hatchets and their scalping-knives. He thereupon
closed his eyes, expecting to be knocked in the head, and killed
outright. But just then a noted chief coming up in great haste, bade
him be of good cheer, for he was his prisoner, and should not be slain.
He proved to be the famous Sagamore Squando, the chief man of the
Sokokis.

"And were you kindly treated by this chief?" asked Rebecca.

"I suffered much in moving with him to the Sebago Lake, owing to my
wound," he replied; "but the chief did all in his power to give me
comfort, and he often shared with me his scant fare, choosing rather to
endure hunger himself, than to see his son, as he called me, in want of
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