Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

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ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
us: he had been taken as a child from the Sioux nation to
Marietta, Ohio, to be educated, and when he returned to his
own people and saw his mother he was greatly shocked. We
were much interested in this man. His band was allowed to
remain in that vicinity to hunt and trap. During this time
Lorenzo Laurence asked the church people for the hall where
our meetings were held, as he desired to conduct a service for
his Indian brethren. We went to it, and I noticed that but a
small number were in attendance. Lorenzo conducted but a
simple service, singing some of our hymns which had been
translated into the Sioux language. I saw there an old chief
with a very solemn countenance, who, the preacher informed
me, was in his youth a cruel and bloody man, but now was a
humble Christian. I remember one of the young braves
carried himself like a warrior, with a high head, while his face
was grotesquely painted, one eye being surrounded by green,
the other by yellow. The whole audience was orderly and well
behaved. Lorenzo Laurence told me his text was "The house
of many mansions." Episcopalian as was the minister, he
closed the meeting without form, simply saying "Pockachee!"
when all made a bee line for the door. This is noteworthy,
as Lorenzo Laurence was heard from during the Indian out-
break, when he headed a party of refugees at the risk of his
own hfe and took them to the fort in safety. As we waited in
bright expectancy for the rest of our family to come, we httle
thought they were arriving to share days of fear and flight.
They were to leave Walnut Tree Farm for their new home
in that spring of 1862, and they were busily preparing for the
great change from southern Ohio to the most northerly state
in the Union. The farm which father had inherited from the
energy and enterprise of his father, James Watkins, had to be
sold, and all the business connected with removal from a home
of more than one generation was to be settled. Father and
Brother Joseph attended to all this, and the latter had then
begun to show that business sense which afterward distinguished
him.
Among the characteristics which had descended to our father
from his ancestors was what may be called a love of ad-