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under his own roof I do not wonder that he wasn’t more gregarious. My great-great-grandmother, Mary Edie, was his second child by hisfirst wife, a Miss Dunbar. One of his sons became a doctor and another served in the Virginia legislature. Alexander Edie was sufficiently well-regarded by his fellow citizens to serve as foreman of the first grand jury of Washington County, Pennsylvania, and he seems to have witnessed a good many wills. On petition of the town of Washington, he and four others were appointed to view and if necessary lay out a road from Catfish Camp to the Presbyterian meeting house. He secured by deed from the Commonwealth of Virginia a tract of a thousand acres on the Ohio River near Steubenville. On this land there was a large blockhouse, half fort and half dwelling, where the people of the community took refuge during Indian raids. He went security for a friend who got into trouble, and when the man fled, Alexander Edie had to pay the bond of £5,000, which all but ruined him.
    Standing in my grandmother’s bedroom, with a distant look in her eyes, as if she saw it all happening, Max Fuller’s mother told me a story that I now know was about the frontiersman’s daughter, Mary Edie. In the early spring, Robert Maxwell, having told his wife he would return at a certain time, went farther west, into Ohio, in search of better land, in a valley that was reasonably flat and fertile. He found land that he liked the look of, but the crop had to go in at once, so he stayed and planted before he started back. When he did not return at the time he said he would, his wife decided that something had happened to him, for he always did what he said he would do. She waited a week while she made him a pair of trousers and parched a bag of corn, and then, with the baby in her arms, wrapped in a shawl, she set out on foot, along a footpath through the forest. The trees frequently had trunks five or six feet thick, and almost no sunlight penetrated their dense foliage. The virgin forest was gloomy and oppressively silent. She could have twisted her ankle and been unable to go on or turnback. She could have been overtaken by a drunken hunter who had been too long without a woman. She could have met up with a party of Indians and been scalped and the baby’s brains dashed out against the trunk of a tree. She could have lost her way and starved to death. Instead, after many days, she met my great-great-grandfather coming home.
    Apart from their gravestones, which their descendants soon lost track of, the people who settled in the wilderness did not leave lasting memorials; they left stories instead. The music of Beethoven’s
Fidelio
always rises up in my mind when I think of that meeting in the forest, and my throat constricts with an emotion that is, I’m afraid, purely factitious—unless feelings are more a part of our physical inheritance than is commonly believed, in which case it is Mary Edie’s joy, unquenchable, passed on, and then passed on again, generation after generation, along with the color of eyes and the shape of hands and characteristic habits of mind and temperament.
    In 1800 Robert Maxwell took out a patent for land lying along Indian Short Creek. In that same book about the early days of Harrison County, there are a good many references to him. The scouting party is mentioned, and the fact that he and his brother Thomas were among the first white settlers and came before the roads were built. In 1805 Robert Maxwell was paid $1 for a wolf’s scalp. In 1810 he was elected constable and held this office for nine years. He served as a private in the War of 1812. At about this time he was elected county commissioner and squire—a title of office and courtesy usually given to justices of the peace. In 1824 and 1830 he took title to more land. From 1834 to 1840 he was an associate justice of the Court of Common Pleas.
    His oldest daughter, the same old woman I spoke of, said that he was a man of clear,