40 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



One of these had both arms broken, the other was similarly 

 disabled as to his legs. It was told that they managed to sub- 

 sist by combining their limited resources. The man with sound 

 legs drove game up within range of the other cripple's gun, and 

 as the turkeys or rabbits fell, he kicked them within reach of 

 his hands, and in like manner provided him with sticks for their 

 fire. This legend, much elaborated in the telling, gave me, I 

 believe at about my eighth year, my first sense of an historic 

 past, and it led to much in the way of fanciful invention of like 

 tales. 



Among those men who in their youth, and even their boy- 

 hood, had been in tussles with the savages in the wars with the 

 Illinois Indians, was a certain ancient of the name of Harris, 

 who kept a small hardware shop which, because of his stories, I 

 much inhabited. His exploits, more or less true, were summed 

 up in certain rules as to how to "manage an Injun," which he 

 used to exemplify, to my grinning delight, on my little body. 

 Much as in the preparation for rabbit pie, you were first to catch 

 your " Injun." The clutch was well prescribed with preliminary 

 dissertation on the folly of "standing off and monkeying with 

 him." Then he was to be laid face to the ground; your knees 

 were to be planted in the small of his back; with the left hand 

 you were to seize his scalp lock and pull up his head, and with 

 the right holding the knife, taken from its sheath in your belt, 

 you cut his throat. You were not to scalp him, as some unculti- 

 vated persons were wont to do, Harris considered that to be 

 bad form, "real Injun manners," but proceed smartly to 

 the next. I have never had occasion to "manage an Injun," 

 but if such had come to me, I am quite sure that I should in- 

 stinctively have essayed the task in the manner presented by 

 my veteran instructor. 



I recall that several of these old fighters, who had worked at 

 the theory of battle with their savage enemies, held to the 

 notion that any white man could "lay down" in the manner 

 above described any Indian he could manage to clutch. I have 



