by Robin Moore
"Kittanning. What is it ya want from us?" "I'm starvin'. Can you give me somethin' to eat?" "What!" the man shouted. "Does this look like a tavern?"
"A tavern," Maggie repeated, "yes, that's what I'm after. Is there a tavern around here?"
"About a half mile downstream, ya'll see it along the riverbank."
Maggie yipped with joy. "Is there a woman there named Franny?"
But the man had already shut the door. The dog was straining at its tether rope now, trying to get at Maggie. She wagged her finger at the dog, then turned and stepped into the canoe and pushed off downstream.
It was almost dark. Maggie had to paddle carefully, steering clear of the rocks that jutted up through the river's surface.
Snow was falling lightly on the water now. Up ahead, she could see the lights from the tavern windows on the water. They shone like gold coins.
"That is a real tavern," Maggie said through frozen lips. "That's a real place because that man back there was a real man and he told me it would be here."
The wind tugged at Maggie as she pulled the canoe up on shore and trudged through the deep snow up to the tavern door.
She pushed against the big oaken door but it wouldn't open; it seemed bolted from the inside. Maggie pounded on the door but felt as though her fists made no sound. She was so weak that she felt she might die here on the doorstep before anyone heard her. She tried to shout but her voice was thin and reedy in the wind.
Then the door opened and Maggie collapsed onto the floor. She looked up and there, in the poor light, were two ghostly figures in long white robes. It was Franny and Uncle Thomas.
"Please," Maggie breathed, "please be real this time."
Then one of the visions, the one who looked like Uncle Thomas, spoke. "Look, mum . . . it's her!"
Franny bent down. "Maggie, child! Ye've come back to us!"
Then Maggie felt the embrace: real arms and real shoulders, real hands smoothing back her hair, and real lips kissing her forehead and muttering, "Thank God, thanks be to God in heaven fer bringin' ye to us!"
Thomas built up the fire and they drew Maggie over to the blaze, and she saw they were not wearing ghostly robes, but white nightshirts.
"You're real," Maggie repeated, "you're real."
Maggie fell into the warmth of her aunt's embrace and they wept.
"We been prayin' and thinkin' of ye everyday, child," Franny said at last. "Wonderin' if ye were still amongst the Indians ..."
Maggie looked up. "How did you know I was with the Indians?"
"Jake told us, dear."
"Jake! Is he here?"
"Well, surely. He's snorin' away up in the loft. He wandered in here 'bout nine months ago, told us the whole story."
"Franny," Maggie said, "I've got a story to tell."
"Aye, child, aye. And ye'll tell it too. But first it's out of these wet clothes and inta a warm nightshirt. Then it's a mug of hot cider and some Callahan bread inta ye."
"Ah, the bread," Maggie sighed. "I lost the spook yeast, Franny, it's gone. ..."
Franny reached down and held up the pouch that hung around her own neck. "No, child. Tis not gone. And 'twill never be lost, so long as there is a Callahan woman alive. I've got plenty here for the both of us."
Maggie stepped out of her wet, frozen clothes and into a warm nightshirt and thick woolen socks. She devoured the food and drink Franny set before her.
But bread and cider are rich foods to a stomach that has learned to live on pine-needle tea. Maggie suddenly felt sick. She stumbled out the tavern door. Outside, she was able to lean against a big pine tree and breathe in the cold, cleansing mountain air. At last, Maggie felt quiet inside.
She heard a sound in the pine branches overhead. It was the fluttering of an owl's wings.
Maggie smiled. She knew that somewhere, up north, huddled in the Ragpicker's arms, her boy was still alive. She also knew, without knowing just when, that someday she would find her little Hoot Owl and hold him in her arms again.
THE END
About The Seneca
The Seneca were the largest and most powerful of the five tribes that made up the Great Iroquois Confederacy. The Confederacy, or, as they called themselves, the League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, bound together all the Indian people living in the region we now know as New York State. But their influence spread much farther. Trade, diplomatic, and war missions carried them from Canada to the Carolinas, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River.
It was inevitable that the Iroquois would become involved in the wars Europeans waged on this soil. While the Confederacy attempted to maintain a neutral position, cleverly playing each side off against the other, they were eventually drawn into two disastrous wars: The French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Unfortunately, in both cases they picked the losing side.
Maggie comes among the Seneca during the last chapter of this drama. During the Revolution, the Seneca, and most of the other Iroquois, had aligned themselves with the British, who fought against the rebellious American colonists.
The Seneca warriors became useful tools for the British forces. Indian raiding parties drove American settlers out of their wilderness homes and created a general panic on the frontier during their raids in the summer of 1778. In central Pennsylvania, this period was referred to as "The Great Runaway." It is during one of these raids that Maggie is captured and carried north to the Seneca Country.
Maggie had no way of knowing the role war captives played in Seneca life. To the Seneca, prisoners were an important by-product of warfare. When the captives were brought to the home village, weak or unacceptable prisoners would be killed outright or tortured to death.
While much has been made of the terrible tortures Indians were capable of imposing on their victims, little has been said about the adoption system that acted in the prisoner's behalf.
It is a matter of historical record that many frontier women were not killed by their captors, but were adopted and became productive members of Seneca society.
. In many cases, when the captured women had an opportunity to return to their homes, they elected to stay with their Indian families. Mary Jemison and Frances Slocum were two Pennsylvania women who serve as examples.
Why did these women prefer Seneca society to their former life in the colonies? Part of the answer lies in the roles women occupied in these radically different cultures.
Few in the history of human civilization enjoyed as much control over their own lives as the Seneca women. Women in Seneca society had the power to start and end wars, depose leaders, and divorce their husbands at will. A matriarchal society, the Seneca lineage was passed down through the female side of the family. Families were organized into clans. Marriages, arranged by the mothers, had to be outside the clan.
Women had strong economic power because they were responsible for the agriculture that fed their people. Seneca women enjoyed a role of power and influence in the domestic sphere, free from interference by the men.
At the same time, men had their own, complementary, sphere of influence: in the woods and on the trails crisscrossing the Iroquois land. Men were often gone on hunting, trapping, war, or diplomatic missions.
Women and men moved in a time and place where gender-defined roles made sense and allowed families to live together in relative harmony.
Little Beard's Village, along the Genesee River in upstate New York, was a sterling example of the kind of world the Seneca women were able to build. Before General John Sullivan led his colonial army down to burn the village, he said to his men, "This is probably the most beautiful place in America."
The historian Lewis Henry Morgan refers to Sullivan's sweep through the Iroquois Country as "The Holocaust." To the Confederacy, it certainly was. The Seneca never recovered from the destruction caused by Sullivan's Raid in the summer of 1779. In a short time, they became refugees in the land they once called their own.
Although Little Beard's Village is
gone, the Genesee Valley is still there, as beautiful as ever. During my research trip for this book, I was able to find the old village site along the banks of the Genesee. Today it is still as it was: acres and acres of lush corn and bean fields growing in the rich black loam deposited by the river
And Now...
Up the Frozen River
Book Three
of
The Bread Sister Trilogy
Robin Moore
Introduction
Welcome, dreamers of all ages.
In these pages, we will be stepping back in time, into an era when North America was a vast wilderness, populated by wild animals and wild people. A great deal has been written about our frontier grandfathers, the men who subdued the wilderness. But not enough has been written about frontier women, women like Maggie Callahan. Maggie's story is a combination of historical fiction, heart-pounding adventure, and good, old-fashioned storytelling, created especially for those who still live the dream. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed dreaming it up.
This book is the last in The Bread Sister Trilogy, a three-volume series which tells the story of Maggie Callahan's adventures in the wilderness regions of what is now Pennsylvania and Up-State New York, during the turbulent years of the American Revolution, from 1776 to 1780.
Even though Maggie is a fictional character, both adults and children have written me over the years, insisting that she is as real to them as the historical characters they read about in their history books. I think she would be pleased to hear that.
Maggie certainly is alive for me, even if she only exists in the world of the imagination. Whether she is "real" or not, I have learned a great deal from her while we have been making these books together.
One of the most important things she has taught me is that it is not my job as a writer to tell my characters what to do. To be really alive, Maggie must have a life of her own and the freedom to live it as she chooses, without my interference. It's true, as a writer, I can lure her into my story. I can give her a problem to solve, but it is her job to solve it, not mine.
My job is to enter her world, on her terms, and allow her to act as my guide, fully immersing myself in the flow of the story, faithfully writing down what I have witnessed. This is so much more interesting than "making up" stories. Maggie and her compatriots have done a much better job on this series than I ever could have done on my own.
Strange events occur when a writer works in this way. For instance, after I had completed The Bread Sister of Sinking Creek, the first book in the series, I was doing some genealogical research into my family's history. I was surprised to find that I had a great-great-great grandmother who was a Scotch-Irish frontier woman, similar to my "fictional" character. What's more, I was astonished to learn that her name was Maggie. She married John Calhoun and her married name was Maggie Calhoun. She lived on a 160-acre farm at the foot of Bald Eagle mountain, just a few miles from the location of Maggie's "fictional" cabin in Centre County, Pennsylvania.
A meaningless coincidence? Perhaps.
But there's more. While I was looking over an old map of the region, I discovered that Sinking Creek, which runs right near Maggie's cabin in The Bread Sister, was actually called Sinking Meadow Creek. At the place where the McGrew's had their mill, a small notation on one of the old maps I found at the Centre County Historical Society refers to this spot as "Maggie's Dip." There is a steep dip in the road there. I've often asked myself: Who was this Maggie, to have dip in the road named after her? By some strange coincidence, this is also the very spot where my wife picked me up hitchhiking on the day we met. Maybe the real dip in the road was me.
I have often wondered: Are these just random events, meaningless coincidences, things which have no possible relationship to each other?
I don't think so. I think that the lives of our ancestors still echo within us, in some deep, rarely-explored region of the imagination. I believe that if we listen very deeply, we can hear the echoes of the lives that were lived before us. In any case, I like to believe that some remnant of my frontier ancestors' lives still exists in these stories of Maggie Callahan.
As I mentioned before, this book is the third in a series. It's not necessary to have read the previous two books in order to enjoy this one. But it may be helpful for me to give you a brief summary of Maggie's previous adventures, so you can more fully enjoy the tale told in Up The Frozen River.
In The Bread Sister of Sinking Creek, we met Maggie Callahan, who was then fourteen years old and living in the old family house on Spruce Street in Philadelphia. The year: 1776.
Because her mother had died of the fever and her father was away at sea, Maggie decided to push westward, into the wilderness of Central Pennsylvania, in search of her only remaining relative: Her Irish Aunt Franny. Franny had left Philadelphia years before to stake out a homestead with her husband, Thomas, in the wilds of the Seven Mountains Region.
But when Maggie arrived there, she found that her aunt and uncle had moved on, headed further west, leaving behind an abandoned mountainside cabin. But her aunt had also left her a strange inheritance: A leather pouch containing the Great Callahan Spook Yeast, the secret for baking the Callahan Bread, passed down for seven generations in Maggie's family. Wearing the pouch on a leather cord around her neck, Maggie nurtured the Spook Yeast, giving her a place on the frontier as the Bread Sister. Having no family, she was forced to hire herself out as a servant to the McGrew family who ran the mill along Sinking Creek.
After surviving the dangers of a flashflood, a cabin fire, a snow storm and and the clumsy advances an over-zealous suitor, Maggie broke free to make her way in the wild world with the help of Jake Logan, a reclusive mountain man who had a strong dislike for civilization but a real weakness for fresh-baked bread.
Hardened by two years on the frontier, Maggie pushed further west in "Maggie Among The Seneca," searching for her lost aunt, only to be captured by Seneca Indians and carried up north, to the Seneca town called Little Beard's village, where she was adopted, married and birthed a child among the Seneca, a baby boy named Hoot Owl. Maggie settled into village life with the help of an English-speaking French captive known as Frenchgirl. Frenchgirl's brother, Firefly, was to become Maggie's husband for a short but rewarding time.
But trouble was on the horizon. During an elk hunting trip in November of 1778, Firefly was attacked and killed by wolves. When she and Frenchgirl returned to their village, Maggie's life was struck a further blow when General John Sullivan's Colonial Army came in September of 1779 and burnt the village to the ground, leaving the Seneca to face the winter without provisions or shelter.
It was on that day of smoke and fire and confusion that Maggie lost Hoot Owl. Maggie had wrapped him in a rabbitskin blanket and run down into the thicket by the river to hide. Pursued by a British Army Officer hungry to ransom Maggie off as a captive, she was forced to give her child into the care of an mysterious old Indian woman who the Seneca called the Ragpicker. The old woman was said to be a witch, with magical powers. She lived with her pack of wild dogs down beyond the garbage heaps on the outskirts of the village, living on whatever she could scavenge.
As Maggie was pursued by the British soldier, she ran into the old woman. Without a word, the hag snatched Hoot Owl from Maggie's arms and hurried off into the woods to hide him. That was the last Maggie saw of her baby.
She managed to elude both the British and the Colonial soldiers. After the armies moved along, Maggie searched the smoking ruins of the village, and the woods and fields beyond, but she never found a sign of the old woman or the little boy.
With the cruel November weather at her back, Maggie headed downriver, stole a canoe, and paddled downstream to her Aunt Franny's Tavern on the banks of the Allegheny, in the town of Kittanning, just north of Fort Pitt (The present-day site of Pittsburgh.)
Of course, Maggie never intended to abandon her son to the old woman. She knew that sometime in the future, without knowing jus
t when, she would find her little Hoot Owl. At last, in the winter of 1780, after she had been recovering at the tavern for three months, she couldn't wait any longer. It was time to go back and find what she had left behind.
Which brings us to the story told in this book.
Like the other volumes in this series, Up The Frozen River is designed to be read aloud in the old-fashioned tradition of family evenings by the hearthfire.
Enjoy the story. Live the dream.
Chapter One
It was a bitterly cold night in February 1780, deep in the heart of the Western Pennsylvania Wilderness.
Everywhere, the hand of winter was on the land: In the dark hemlock woods, the snow was drifted deep, shaped and scoured by the wind. The creekbeds and swamplands were choked with ice. Even the great Allegheny River was frozen, hard as iron.
But Maggie Callahan and Old Jake Logan were warm enough. Tonight they were camped in a sheltered stand of hemlocks along the banks of the river, fifty miles north of any farm or settlement, out in the great beyond, where only wild things go.
The red-haired girl and the old mountain man had been traveling hard for seven days now, following the winding course of the river as it took them north, back to the Seneca Indian Country, back to the land of dreams and memories and ghosts, back to Little Beard's Village, where Maggie had been held captive the year before.
There, in the fire-blackened remains of the Seneca town, they would look for signs: for owls and wild dogs and pointy-toed moccasin tracks in the snow. They would do what they could to pick up the trail of the Ragpicker, the old Indian woman who lived with her wild dogs in the thicket down beyond the town dump. They would do what they could to recover what Maggie had lost.
Maggie knew that what they were doing was crazy: Setting off in the dead of winter like this, trekking upriver, not sure of where they would end up or what they would do when they got there. If they had any sense, they would be back at Aunt Franny's tavern, basking before the hearthfire, drinking mulled cider and telling stories.