Appalachian History

An Extraordinary Story
Told by a West Virginia Girl who was Kidnapped Sunday Night

[New York Times, April 8, 1891]


Wheeling, West Va., April 7. ---Since Sunday night, about 9:30 o’clock, there has been much excitement in this city and vicinity over the sudden and mysterious disappearance of Miss Amy Morgan, niece of Henry Morgan, Assistant Cashier of the Exchange Bank of Wheeling. The family resides two miles from the river on the Ohio side, at the extreme western end of Bridgeport.

Sunday evening the young lady left home and attended a neighboring church. She was escorted home by a gentleman friend, and after chatting at the gate for a few minutes, they separated, Miss Morgan proceeding toward the house. From that moment all trace of the girl was lost until noon to-day, when she was driven home by Charles Hill, who found her at the Bridgeport station in an exhausted condition.

Miss Morgan states that when she left her friend at the gate she found that she had dropped a letter and walked back a few steps to look for it. While thus engaged she was seized by two men, who choked her and hurried her into a closed carriage, threatening her with death if she offered to scream. After turning the carriage around several times they started off and drove all night.

About daylight they stopped and one of the men got out and pounded at a door several times. He came back and said “There’s no one there, I guess the game’s up.”

Then they deliberated as to whether they should kill her or let her go, and finally fixed upon the latter course, telling the girl that if she attempted to follow them they would kill her.

After walking several miles, the girl struck the Bellaire, Zanesville and Cincinnati Railroad and followed it. She reached Kelsey Station, fourteen miles from Bellaire. There she was given food and kept last night, and to-day a ticket was purchased for Bellaire and money given her to ride from Bellaire to Bridgeport, where she was found by Hill, as stated.



crime+in+Appalachia kidnapping Wheeling+WV appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

On the 8th of March, 1782, William White, in sight of Fort Buckhannon [ed.-in modern day Upshur County, WV], was shot from his horse, tomahawked, scalped and lacerated in the most frightful manner by the Indians. White's companions Timothy Dorman and his wife were captured. After the killing of White and capture of the Dormans, it was resolved to abandon Fort Buckhannon. A few days after the evacuation of the fort, some of its former inmates went from Clarksburg to Buckhannon for grain which had been left there. When they came in sight, they beheld a heap of ashes where the fort had been.

“Border Settlers of Western Virginia,” McWhorter

"My story's a brief but a most painful one for a wife to tell. My husband's name is Timothy Dorman. We lived in a little cabin near Buchanan Fort in the Kanawha country.

“Just about two months ago some fresh tracks of Indians were discovered, which, on account of its being so early in the season, created great alarm among the scattered settlers. As William White, a noted and active scout , my husband and myself, this little babe and little Eddy, my only other child, a curly-headed boy of six years past, were hastening to the fort, we were set upon by a lot of savages.

“Neighbor White was shot through the hips, fell from his horse, and was then tomahawked, scalped and mutilated in the most frightful manner, and we all taken prisoners.

"We were hurried rapidly through the woods, both my children having been repeatedly threatened by our captors, because, said they, their flight was impeded. The second day little Eddy began to fret and cry on account of soreness of his feet, and finally fell behind.

“This was the last I ever saw of him. An hour later some of the Indians having joined us again, I beheld — and what a sight to a fond mother!' — and here Mrs. Dorman shuddered at the harrowing memory — "the fresh, bleeding scalp of my dear boy fastened to one of the Indian's girdles. I knew it by its jetty curls, and boldly charged the cruel savage with killing and scalping it ; but he only laughed, crying out, "No, no, only otter skin." But I knew better, and from that moment lost all heart, and was indifferent to my fate.

"Three times did I throw down a heavy kettle which I was forced to carry; closed my eyes and bent my head to receive the invited stroke of the tomahawk, but no use. Each time the kettle was replaced with angry and scolding words.

“At last, I threw it off again and refused to go one step further, when a chief, kinder than the others, said I should not be made to carry the pot and my child, too.

"My husband had all this time been making up with the captors; laughed, ate and drank with them, and was so cheerful and contented and expressed himself so anxious to become an Indian, that we were now treated well enough.

“My husband, for some years, has been much given to drink and low company, and being of a very passionate disposition when in liquor, had made a number of enemies in the fort. It is a most painful and humiliating confession for a poor wife to make; but, indeed, Timothy was once a good, kind, loving man, but lately the drink seems to have so changed and debased him, that he is more cruel and revengeful than an Indian himself, and has thrice led parties against the border settlements.

"Alas, that I, once his loved wife, and the mother of his children, am compelled to confess it; but he is becoming more and more lost to all that is good. The one fatal misstep of betraying his own neighbors seems to have turned all that was good in him to gall.

“He has lost his own self-respect, and seems ashamed to show himself before white people. He is now back in yonder woods conversing with the Indians. I sometimes think, if God will not take me, that I will have to leave him, but then, again, I have hopes that by constant love and tenderness, I may win back the free, hearty and affectionate Tim of my youth — such as he was before he took to the drink.

"We were first taken to the Chillicothe towns, and there remained during the cold weather. Then we journeyed eastward along the Ohio, and fell in with a party of Cherokees from south of that river, who had the two children with whom you saw me.

“They were educated to decoy Ohio boats to the shore, and the poor little innocents seemed perfectly skilled in the use of all the arts to simulate distress. You would be perfectly amazed to see how these little ones would cry, kneel and clap their hands and run along the shore in the most artful manner. Oh, they are smart little things, and deserve a better life.

"It was only a couple of days ago that we fell in with [Simon] Girty's large party, who, marching towards the Ohio to take vengeance for what they call the Moravian massacre, easily arranged for the transfer of the children and ourselves to them.

“The result of their arts you know well, as you and your party were the first victims; but I must tell you that I long resisted every attempt to make me a party in their miserable decoy. The Indians, knowing how much their chances of success depended on having a supposed mother with children, repeatedly ordered me to play traitor. I even refused to obey my husband's commands.

"Finally, one grim, ferocious old Shawnee, made furious by my obstinacy, snatched my babe from my breast, and threatened to brain it against a tree unless I instantly complied. I wept and screamed and implored, but all to no purpose.

Your boat was just then in sight, and while I was running along shore playing the false mother, this brutal Shawnee kept behind me in the woods the whole way, holding my precious babe by one foot ready to dash out its brains at the first sign of failure on my part to do his bidding.

"Why did I not make signs? Oh, I did, I did, but they were not seen, and when I found your boat really coming in, I fainted outright, and had to be carried back out of sight."


excerpt from "Simon Girty : "The white savage"; A romance of the border," by Charles McKnight, JC McCurdy & Co, Philadelphia, 1880 online at http://www.archive.org/stream/simongirtythewhi00mckn/simongirtythewhi00mckn_djvu.txt
McWhorter citation from: www.eg.bucknell.edu/~hyde/jackson/George.html

KATY SAGE
THE LOST GIRL OF GRAYSON

By Ex-Judge D. W. Bolen,
"Hillsville Advocate"
Wytheville, VA
Friday, November 5, 1897

The 11th of April, 1793, was a bright and balmy day. Early that morning James Sage went to his "clearing" to prepare his ground for crop. The day opened so bright and clear that Mrs. Sage decided to go and do her week's washing. She left her four children in the cabin and started to a little stream near by to build a fire to heat water to wash with.

As she was leaving the door she saw a number of butterflies wandering about among the shrubbery in the garden and she called her little five-year-old daughter Katy to come and look at the butterflies. The child came and went on into the garden to enjoy a better sight of the gauzy-winged creatures, while the mother went on to build the fire.

After a while the mother returned to get the clothes she intended to wash, but Katy was missing. Mrs. Sage thought the child had wandered off after the butterflies, for the last words she had heard Katy utter was her childish language talking to the pretty butterflies. She went in search of Katy but could not find her. She called her husband and they looked for Katy all day long and all night long, but they did not find her.

The next morning the neighbors for miles and miles around began to gather in and for several long weeks they searched in every direction for Katy, but in vain. After all had been done to find the child that human ingenuity could devise, the neighbors and friends gave up the search as fruitless and returned to their homes.

But James Sage began the search anew. Starting at his cabin door, he examined every square foot of ground for miles and miles around, hoping to find some rag of clothing or some mark, however dim, that might indicate to him the fate of his lost child. But he never found one trace. At last, in his despair, he heard of an old woman in North Carolina known by the name of Granny Moses, who was said to possess the power to reveal mysteries and look into and foretell all human events.

James Sage made a journey across the mountains into the Old North State to see Granny Moses. He found her and in his own way laid before her the whole story of his lost child.

The old women consulted her occult science, gathered up her faculties and told him that his Katy was still alive and well, but she added, "Katy is where you will never see her or hear of her again in this world, but your wife (Mrs. Sage) will outlive you and in her very old age she will hear of Katy but will never see her.”

With broken spirit and sick at heart the man returned home and resumed work in the forest around his cabin. Other children with bright faces and joyous prattle came to join the three that remained at his hearthstone. Other events and other transactions came into the lives of the parents, and to all outward appearances, as the years glided along, the memory of little Katy Sage became more and more like a faded dream.

But as long as the family remained together, when father and mother and children gathered around the embers that glowed between the jambs of the old fireplace on the long winter evening they talked of the missing one.

When thirty-one years had passed since Katy's disappearance James Sage was laid to sleep in a grave in the beautiful Elk Creek Valley, and the message of Granny Moses was the only tidings that had ever reached his ears of his lost child.

Mrs. Sage outlived her husband many years. Her children, as time rolled on, became widely scattered. Some remained in Virginia and others settled in different states and territories in the west. Her son Charles settled in Kansas, and in 1854 he met with an Indian agent there, who one day asked him if he had a sister or female relative among the Shawnee Indians.

Charles answered no. But on reflection he told the agent the story of his sister who had been lost or stolen more than sixty years before.

The agent said that there was a white woman among the Shawnee Indians that bore a most striking resemblance to Charles. The woman was sent for and when Charles saw her his face became pale. It seemed to him that the very image of his mother as she appeared twenty years ago, when he had left the old homestead, lived and glowed in the face and features of the strange woman. He believed her to be his long lost sister.

She could not speak a word of English, but through an interpreter she told them that she had been stolen away from her home in Virginia by a white man when she was a small child, that he took her to the Cherokee Indians and she never saw him again, that she had lived among the Cherokees awhile, and then with the Creeks, and finally with the Shawnees, that she had been three times married to distinguished Indian Chiefs and had bore one son, that her husbands had all died and she was a widow now for the third time and her son had recently died, that her name was Katy, and that she had retained that name in all her wanderings and travels through different countries and among different Indian tribes.

Charles got her to go home with him and he at once wrote to his brother Samuel, who lived in Missouri, to come and see if he could recognize her. Samuel was older and could remember Katy. Samuel came and saw the woman and heard her history and believed her to be his sister.

The brothers then wrote to their mother, who was still living at the old place on Elk Creek, and told her about the woman they believed to be their sister, and asked the mother to tell them all she could remember about Katy. The mother was then near her ninetieth birthday, but on hearing the letter read. her memory revived and she said almost instantly: "Write and tell the boys that my daughter Katy has a ginger-colored birth mark on her shoulder," and then she went on and described the mark, and the very spot described by the mother was found upon the shoulder of the woman in Charles Sage’s house.

Her identification was now complete and beyond question, and the brothers decided to take her home to their mother at once, and Katy was anxious to go. Arrangements for the journey were made, but just as they were ready to start Katy was seized with pneumonia and died, disappearing from the world just as suddenly as when a child chasing butterflies on Elk Creek.


source: http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=bobbuckles&id=I05261