GEORGE RAYNOR. 



DUCK SHOOTING AND A TRAGEDY. 



THE time came when school was left and business 

 began. The happy days were in the past. No 

 more Saturday holiday, and the grind of record- 

 ing shipping marks, weighing goods and signing re- 

 ceipts, when ducks were flying down the river and car- 

 loads of venison were coming in, was getting too much 

 to bear. In that vast and vague country called the West 

 there was freedom and game. Finding opposition 

 useless, father sent to Michigan for his rifle, the one that 

 William and Joe Brockway had used for years, and gave 

 it to me when I left. 



Said he, "You may have this rifle, if you are bound 

 to go, and the only thing I ask of you is never to join 

 any expedition that goes out to murder poor Indians." 



That was an easy thing to promise because there had 

 never been such a thought or desire. I was twenty-one 

 and bound for the great West, with no definite idea what 

 part of it would be best to go to or just what was to be 

 done when the journey ended. Pete Loeser, the Ger- 

 man boy mentioned in the last history, wanted to go to 

 some relatives in Wisconsin, and he went along. At 

 Chicago we could decide what would be best to do, and 

 there we stuck. 



One day while fishing in the lake off the breakwater 

 an old gentleman of eighty years named George Raynor, 

 who had frequently fished with us, told me this story: 

 "At the massacre of Wyoming, in 1778, my old parents 



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