Through the deep wilderness, where scarce the sun
Can cast his darts, along the winding path
The pioneer is treading.
Street
An energy
A spirit that will not be shaken.
Willis
One of the first two settlers of Northumberland, New Hampshire, was Daniel Spaulding, who removed thither in the summer of 1767. On the way to his new home, with his wife and child, the last burnt himself so badly at Plymouth that the mother was obliged to remain and take care of him, while Mr. Spaulding proceeded to the end of the journey. She soon became uneasy, and, anxious to join her husband, started off with her child, twenty-one months old, to travel twenty-six miles through the wilderness. A friend who had agreed to accompany her the whole distance with a horse, returned after traveling about one third of the way. Undaunted and persevering, she pushed on, alone and on foot; waded through Baker’s river with her child in her arms; was overtaken by a heavy “thunder gust” in the afternoon, and thoroughly drenched; seated herself beside a tree when darkness appeared, and held her child in her lap through a long and sleepless night; resumed her journey early the next morning; waded through a small pond, with the water waist-high; pushed on to another river, which, though swollen by the rain of the preceding day and looking rapid and terrifying, she forded in safety; and at eleven o’clock that day, the second of her journey, she met her husband, who was on his way back with a horse for her accommodation.*
*The substance of this anecdote we find in the second number of the first volume of a periodical called “Historical Collections,” published nearly thirty years ago at Concord, New Hampshire, and edited by J. Farmer and J. B. Moore. The anecdote was communicated by Adino N. Brackett, Esq. of Lancaster, and appeared in the June number for 1822.
*This pioneer matron of northern New Hampshire, was living at Lancaster, in 1822, then in her eighty second year. She was a descendant, “in the third degree,” of Mrs. Dustin, the heroine of Penacook.
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Excerpted from Noble Deeds of American Women
(Patriotic Series for Boys and Girls)
Edited by J. Clement
——
With an Introduction by Mrs. L. H. Sigourney
Illustrated
BOSTON: Lee and Shepard, Publishers
Entered by Act of Congress, in the year of 1851,
by E. H. Derby and Co., in the Clerk’s Office of the Northern District of New York
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