42 THE BLACK BEAR OF PENNSYLVANIA 



"the 'bear understood me very well; did you not ob- 

 serve how ashamed he looked while I was upbraiding 

 him?" At another time the famous Missionary wit- 

 nessed a similar scene near the falls of the Ohio. A 

 young white boy named Willie Wells, the same whom 

 Volney, the French traveler speaks of, who had been 

 when a lad, taken prisoner by a tribe of the Wabash 

 Indians, and brought up by them, and had imbibed all 

 their notions, had so wounded a large bear that he 

 could not move from the spot, and the animal cried 

 piteously. The young man went up to the bear, and 

 with seeming great earnestness, addressed him in the 

 Wabas'h language, now and then giving him a slight 

 stroke on the nose with his ram-rod. Heckewelder 

 asked him when he was done, what he had been say- 

 ing to the dying bear. "I have" he said, "upbraided 

 him for acting the part of a coward ; told him that he 

 knew the fortune of war, that one or the other of us 

 must have fallen ; that it was his fate to be conquered, 

 and he ought to die like a man, like a, hero, and not 

 like an old woman; that if the case had been reversed, 

 I would not have disgraced my nation a's he did, but 

 would have died with firmness and courage, as be- 

 comes a true warrior." 



There is grave danger in Pennsylvania that we may 

 disgrace ourselves in our handling of the fate of the 

 bear tribe ! Even while bears were frequently met with 

 in all parts of our mountains, trainers with trick bears 

 were visitors in the more remote backwoods communi- 

 ties. A. D. Karstetter, Postmaster of Loganton, Clin- 



