Story: "The Grateful Indian," by Martha G.; Robert Merry's Museum; also online .
Information by Pat Pflieger
Martha may have been a subscriber to the magazine.
Emily Martin, in 1862, saves a sleeping Indian chief from certain death by bear. Emily, shooting her first bear with her father's rifle, kills it with one shot, then faints.
She "redeems" the chief she saves from the bear; he was asleep because he was drunk, tricked by unscrupulous whites into drinking alcohol. Once rescued, he swears, "Me no get drunk more" and ensures it by staying away from the settlement where he was tricked into drinking. (Martha G. 35)
rescued by Emily Martin from the attacking bear, the Indian chief brings her a "beautiful deer with its fawn," which he has tamed for her.
A year later, the Museum published a poem in which a Native American man gives a white girl a similar gift: in "Jessie and Her Fawn," by "Kruna" (Julia Ballard Pratt), Jessie becomes friends with Swift-wing, a Native American girl. After Swift-wing dies, her griefstricken father brings to Jessie the white fawn he tamed for his daughter; the story implies that he goes back to the wilderness to die. Jessie loves the fawn for the sake of these overly noble individuals.
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