FORGOTTEN HISTORY

An Address Delivered Before Clearfield, Pa., Rotary Club September 17, 1928

By M.I.McCreight, "The Wigwam", DuBois, Pa.

"All things on earth have their time, and in the most joyous career of their vanity and splendor, their strength fails and they sink into dust. All the round world is but a sepulcher and there is nothing that lives on its surface that shall not be entombed beneath it. The great, the wise, the valiant, Alas, where are they now? --They are all mingled with the clod; and that which has happened to them will befall us and those who come after us,--yet take courage, illustrious nobles and chieftains,--the horrors of the tomb are but the cradle of the sun."

That was the last utterance of an Indian chief who had ruled over his people for many years and was about to die. Twenty-two years later a white man named Christopher Columbus came, and then another twenty-seven years elapsed--and Cortez destroyed the nation of that great chief. Cortez: His name is so steeped in blood and banditry that we gasp with amazement and shudder with shame at the record of it all.

The Spaniards admitted that in many respects the Aztecs had a better system of courts and hospitals than they themselves could boast of,--and their civilization generally was superior in many ways to their own.

The exploitation of Peru, Mexico and our own southwest by these pirates Cortez and Pizzaro,--for plunder, rapine and murder has no parallel,--it was the deliberate butchery of a race of people that represented the best there was on half of all the world.

And the plunder of the red man by the white has continued ever since and still continues. It is a sordid tale. Leif Ericson shot the skralings when they came to offer welcome and to trade five centuries before Columbus came.

Columbus only stole them and took them as slaves to Spain. Raleigh tried the game of exploitation but failed and then John Smith with better guns and ammunition sponged off old Chief Powhatan until he learned that only work and willing hands win.

The Smith crowd was merely a band of British adventurers who tried to imitate Pizzaro,--but there was no gold in the tide lands of Virginia,--there were no stores of precious gems and hand-wrought jewels; no silverplate and rich robes of feather-work, incense and 'cotton richly wrought with black and white embroidery', such as the Spaniards had found in Peru and Mexico. Powhatan shared with the starving Englishmen his stores of corn until his own people faced the same starvation that confronted these idle and disappointed whites,--and then when Powhatan asked how long they were going to stay Smith lied to him. He told the chief that they were shipwrecked and that they were waiting on other ships to come with plenty of food for all, and to take them away. When the ships came it was merely to land another lot of the same kind of people, without food or proper supplies. This only added to former difficulties, and when the Red folks tried to protect their meager stores of corn, Smith used his guns and took what and when he pleased. In spite of force, the Smith colony starved. Smith went back to England and wrote a book eight years later,--and to make it popular, he incorporated the romance of Pocahontas saving his life. He forgot that he had written a letter to a friend some six or eight years before that turned up after the book was out--in which he described the little maid in her true light,--and how the old chief had treated him with the utmost kindness.

The Pocahontas story as we were taught it in our school history, was a myth. It was merely an early edition of the later-day squaw-man, and his wife,--this Rolf and Pocahontas tale. I have a water-color portrait, well authenticated, and it shows this Indian girl to have been rather attractive. And why should not Rolf marry her? He had a small child on his hands whose mother had died at sea. It needed care and the Indian maid was willing and competent to furnish it,--but when they took her to England she died of homesickness and a broken heart.

Descendants of Rolf pride themselves in the fact that he was the husband of Pocahontas, --not that he was merely an ancestor.