of the fact of his marriage and stated that compHance on her part would be actually necessary. She must receive the new wife into their home. She was determined, however, not to be the passive dupe of his duplicity. With her two children she returned to her parental teepee. In the autumn she joined her friends and kinsmen in an expedition up the.Mississippi and spent the winter in hunting. In the springtime, as they were returning, laden wi;th peltries, she and her children occupied a canoe by themselves. On nearing the Falls of St. Anthony she lingered in the rear till the others had landed a little above the falls.
She then pain.ted heirself and children, paddled her canoe into the swift current of the rapids and began chanting her death song, in which she recounted her former happy life, with her husband, when she enjoyed his undivided affection, and the wretchedness in which i"he was now involved by his infidelity. Her friends, alarmed at her imminent peril, ran to the shore and begged her to paddle out of the current before it was too late, while her parents, rending their clothing and tearing their hair, besought her to come to their arms of love; but all in vain. Her wretchedness was complete and must terminate with her existence! She continued her course till her canoe was borne headlong down the roaring cataract, and it and the deserted, heartbroken wife and the beautiful and innocent children, were dashed to pieces on the rocks below. No traces of the canoe or its occupants were found. Her brothers avenged her death by slaying the treacherous husband of the deserted wife.
They say that still that song is heard Above the mighty torrent's roar,
When trees are by the night-wind stirred
And darkness broods on stream and shore.
AUNT JANE
The Red Song Woman
Miss Jane Smith Williamson, the subject of this sketch, was one of the famous missionary women in our land in the nineteenth century. She was widely known among both whites and Indians as "Aunt Jane." The Dakotas also called her ''Red Song Woman." She was born at Fair Foresit, South Carolina, March 8, 1803. Through her father she was a lineal descendant of the Rev. John Newton and Sir Isaac Newton. Her father was a revolutionary soldier.
Her mother was Jane T Smith) Williamson. They believed that negroes had souls and therefore treated the twenty-seven slaves they^had inherited like human beings. Her mother was fined in South Carolina, for teaching her slaves to read the Bible. Consequently, in 1804, in her early infancy, her parents emigrated to Adams county, Ohio, in order to be able to free their slaves and teach them to read the Word of God and write legibly.
The storv of Aunt Jane's life naturally falls into three divisions.
I PREPARATION FOR HER GREAT LIFE WORK.
This covered forty years. She grew up in an atmosphere of sincere and deep piety and of devotion to Christian principles. Her early educational advanta-o-es were necessarily limited, but she made the most of Ihem. She became very accurate in the use of Ian-
AUNT JANE, Or, The Ked Song Woman.
giiage, wrote a clear round hand and was very thorough in everything she studied. She was a great reader of good and useful books, possessed an excellent memory and a lively imagination and very early acquired a most interesting style of composition.
From her ancestors she inherited that strong sympathy for the colored race, which was a marked characteristic of her whole life. In her young womanhood, she taught private schools in Adams county, Ohio. The progress made by her pupils was very rapid and her instruction was of a high order. She sought out the children of the poor and taught them without charge. She admitted colored pupils as well as whites. For this cause, many threats of violence were made a-gainst her school. But she was such an excellent teacher that her white pupils remained with her; and a guard of volunteer riflemen frequently surrounded her school house. She calmly oursued the even tenor of her way.
In 1820, when she was oniy 17 years of age, she and her brother rode on horseback all the way from Manchester, Ohio^ to .South Carolina and back again, and brought with them two slaves they had inherited. They could have sold them in the • South for $300 each, and stood in great need of the money; but instead, they gave to these two poor colored persons the priceless boon of liberty. Miss Williamson's slave was a young woman of her own age, called Jemima. She was married to another slave named Logan. She was the mother of two children. Logan was a daring man, and rendered desperate by the loss of his young
wife, he determined tc be free and folloAv her. He fled from South Carolina, and after passing through many adventures of the most thrilling character, he found liis wife in Ohio, and lived and died a free man. He was fully determined to die rather than return to slavery. Jemima lived to a great age, surviving her husband, who was killed accidcntly in the fifties. They left a family highly respected.
During all these years ''Aunt Jane" was a very active worker in Sabbath schools, prayer meetings and missionary societies. In her own day schools, she made religious worship and Bible study a prominent feature of the exercises. In 1835, when her brother. Dr. Williamson, went as a missionary to the Dakotas, she strongly desired to accompany him. But her duty required her to remain at home and care for her aged father, who died in 1839, at the age of yy. She did not join her brother, however, until 1843, ^t the age of forty.
II—HER WORK AMONG THE DAKOTAS.
This covers one-third of a century. The missionary spirit was a part of her life,—born with her,—a heritage of several generations. The blood of the Newtons flowed in her veins. When she arrived in Minnesota, she went to work without delay and with great energy and with untiring industry greatly -beyond her strength. She was very familiar with the Bible. She taught hundreds of Indians, perhaps fully one thousand, to read the Word of God, and the greater part of them tc write a legible letter. She visited all
the sick within her reach, and devoted much of her time to instructing the Dakota women in domestic duties. She conducted prayer meetings and conversed with them in reference to the salvation of their souls. Many of them, saved by the Holy Spirit's benediction upon her self-denying efforts, are now shining like bright gems in her crown of glory on high.
Lac-qui-Parle,—the Lake-that-speaks,—^two hundred miles west of St. Paul, was her first missionary home. There she gathered the young Indians together and taught them as opportunity offered. The instruction of the youth—especially the children, of whom she was ever a devoted lover, was her great delight.
It was more than a year before any mail reached her at this remote outpost. She was absent in the Indian village when she heard of the arrival of her first mail. She. in her eagerness to hear from her friends in Ohio, ran like a young woman to her brother's house. She found the mail in the stove-oven. The carrier had brought it through the ice, and it had to be thawed out. That mail contained more than fifty letters for Iitr and the postage on them was over five dollars In 1846, she removed with her brother to Kaposia, Little Crow's village (now South St. Paul), and in 1852 to Yellow Medicine, thirty-two miles south of Lac-qui-Parle. The privations of the missionaries were very great. White bread was more of a luxury to them then, than rich cake ordinarily is now. Their houses and furnishings were of the rudest kind. Their environments were all of a savage character.