A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans Read Online Free PDF Page A

lingering quarrel between Thomas and his half brother John came to a bloody conclusion in 1811, when John beat Thomas to death at their mother’s home while she was away. “I returned soon after, and found my son lifeless at the door, on the spot where he was killed,” she remembered. “No one can judge my feelings on seeing this mournful spectacle; and what greatly added to my distress was the fact that he had fallen by the murderous hand of his brother.” It was a terrible tragedy for any mother, but Mary had to endure it again when John killed his other brother, Jesse, in another drunken rampage. John himself was later killed by some companions. Mary blamed the booze, and reflected upon its destructive effects on her family and her community:
    To the introduction and use of that baneful article which has made such devastation in our tribes, and threatens the extinction of our people…I can with greatest propriety impute the whole of my misfortune in losing my three sons. But as I have before observed, not even the love of life will restrain an Indian from sipping the poison that he knows will destroy him. The voice of nature, the rebukes of reason, the advice of parents, the expostulations of friends, and the numerous instances of sudden death, all are insufficient to restrain an Indian who has once experienced the exhilarating and inebriating effects of spirits from seeking his grave in the bottom of a bottle.
    After a lifetime of adventure and heartbreak, Mary told her story to James Seaver in 1823. By then she was an old woman of about eighty, careworn but still lively and engaging. “When she looks up, and is engaged in conversation, her countenance is very expressive,” wrote Seaver. “But from her long residence with the Indians, she has acquired the habit of peeping from under the eyebrows, as they do, with the head inclined downward.” The book that followed was a best seller with numerous editions, and “the White Woman of the Genesee,” as Mary was called, became familiar to generations of readers. But there was more to Mary Jemison than Seaver was able to capture with his purple prose. As she later told a visitor before her death in 1833, “I did not tell them who wrote it down half of what it was.”

6
William Dawes: The Other Midnight Rider
    William Dawes had the misfortune of being at the right place, but with the wrong rhyme. While his fellow patriot and midnight rider, Paul Revere, was immortalized in verse by Henry Longfellow, Dawes is all but forgotten. It’s a grave injustice to a man whose efforts on that fateful April night in 1775 were every bit as valiant as Revere’s. So listen, children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of William Dawes.
    Tension between Britain and the American colonists in Massachusetts had reached a breaking point in the spring of 1775. Independent-minded rebels had repeatedly defied British authority with numerous acts of subversion like the Boston Tea Party, and now the mother country was determined to enforce some strict discipline. Colonial ringleaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams were to be arrested, and a large cache of arms and ammunition stored in the town of Concord destroyed. “Keep the measure secret until the moment of execution, it can hardly fail of success,” the Earl of Dartmouth assured the royal governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage. “Any efforts of the people unprepared to encounter with a regular force, cannot be very formidable.”
    Secrets were hard to keep in Boston, however. Word of British preparations buzzed around town throughout the day on April 18, and a network of informers within the tight-knit community kept leading citizens Paul Revere and Dr. Joseph Warren apprised of their every movement. A highly placed source among the British—some historians believe it was General Gage’s American wife—confirmed to Dr. Warren that plans were indeed