Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Friends on the Frontier: The Clendenon Family

1965; Volume: 54; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/qkh.1965.0013

1934-1504

Dorothy G. Wayman,

Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

Indiana Yearly Meeting, 1844, by Marcus Mote First painted in 1844. This version repainted and enlarged in 1885. FRIENDS ON THE FRONTIER THE CLENDENON FAMILY By Dorothy G. Wayman* Friend Lydia Clendenon was fourteen years old1 when in May 1812, with her parents, Robert and Elizabeth (Battin) Clendenon and her older sister, Hannah, she made the journey by Conestoga wagon from Philadelphia up the Schuylkill valley, across the Susquehanna , and up Pine Creek to Ceres, Pennsylvania.2 There the original settlers, the Quaker families of John King and John Bell, hospitably entertained them while Joel Swayne and two Seneca Indians built a raft, removed the wheels from the wagon and placed it on the raft. The mother and daughters rode and slept in the wagon for the two nights and three days that the raft floated down the Allegheny River forty circuitous miles to Tunesassa (now Quaker Bridge in Elko Township, Cattaraugus County, New York). Letters preserved in an old Red Tin Box tell the story. Robert Clendenon must have been one of the prosperous farmers of fertile Lancaster County, if we can judge from the record he kept of his "vendue" on April 2, 1812. He was literally obeying the injunction of the Gospel3 and forsaking family and friends to bring loving help to the Indians. Moreover, his wife Elizabeth and the two young daughters were of one mind, consenting and going with him. A month later, as the documents show, they accompanied him to Tunesassa. They knew what they were doing. It was no effort of the imagination for them, as for us of the twentieth century, to envisage their future home. They well knew it was in a country covered with virgin forest, where the nearest white neighbor might be forty miles distant. They realized that they must live * Author of many books, Dorothy G. Wayman was formerly Reference Librarian at St. Bonaventura University. 1 Dates on her tombstone at Ceres, Pennsylvania: February 20, 1798-1878. s See Quaker History, LI (1962), 20-31. 3 Mark X, 21 : "Go: sell what thou hast and give to the poor." 4 Quaker History in a log cabin, poorly chinked against the winter blasts, heated only by a fireplace, with water to be brought from spring or river in leathern buckets, with wolves and panthers howling about at night, rattlesnakes coiled in their scant-trodden paths, deep snows in winter, floods in spring, no food but what they could raise from the clearings made by labor, no cloth but what they could spin and weave for clothing. The Clendenons were living (1812-1816) in a log house at Tunesassa. The cooking was done over a wood fire in an open fireplace of fieldstone. As yet glass had not been imported; windows were covered with oiled paper or wooden shutters. Doors, in the early days, were closed only by a woolen blanket. Mary (Bee) Gilbert, whom Lydia met at Ceres, told of wolves howling near her as she gathered sap from maples in the "sugar bush," and of a panther in broad daylight confronting her in the narrow roadway through the forest. Wolves, she remembered, often came after dark to look in at the open windows.4 Wolves were particularly dreaded as carriers of hydrophobia, for which no cure was then known. An early physician, Dr. Joseph Doddridge (1769-1826), wrote of a mad wolf leaping through the open door of a log cabin to attack a man and of the man's lingering death in such horrible agony that he begged his neighbors to shoot him to end the pain.6 Great flocks of passenger pigeons paused in the area. Bald eagles nested in the great trees that covered the high hills that shut in the river and its tributary valleys. At fourteen, Lydia was naturally skilled in the women's arts of spinning, weaving, knitting, and took part in teaching them to the Indian women, while the Quaker men inculcated lessons in farming to the men, as a letter indicates: Charlestown, Chester Co, 111. Oct. 28 [no year] to Lydia Clendenon Drumore township, Lancaster Co, Penna. My friend I received thy letter of the 6th mo 8th [torn] it...