J . Marvin Hunter, Sr.

This is a true story of the bravery of a pioneer mother in early Texas. Not far from the present town of Belton there was a place called Taylor's Valley, and it may still be known by that name, although there are but few living there who have any idea whence the name came. Here, near the Three Forks of Little river, Joseph Taylor settled with his family during the early 1830s and built one of those double log cabins that became so common when the Texans began spreading through the West in later years. The structure was really two long buildings, each containing a single room, with an interval between and one roof covering the whole.

One moonlight night in November, 1835, a dozen or more Indians stole in upon the clearing. They were in the brush down near the barn when the dog got wind of them and set up a loud barking. One of the savages slew the animal with an arrow almost as soon as he began, but the noise had already awakened Taylor and his wife. The man leaped from his bed and ran to a window. It was bright moonlight, and as he peered through a loophole in the heavy wooden shutter, he got sight of several moving forms.

Two daughters grown to womanhood were sleeping in this half of the house. Two boys, the eldest thirteen and the other twelve, were in the other room. The mother ran to the door and threw it open. As she stood there in the open areaway calling her sons, the Indians fired upon her from the shelter of the thickets. Several of them were armed with smooth-bore muskets. The arrows and bullets rattled on the green logs around the woman, and pandemonium of war yells rose above the noise of the firing. She stuck to her post until the youngsters came to her, then she hurried them into the room, slammed the door behind them and dragged a heavy table against it.

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The cabin was newly built, and all the chinking was not yet completed. Over the door there was an aperture of several inches. Mrs. Taylor posted her twelve-year-old son upon the table with a rifle. The elder boy took one window and his father took another. The two girls had a fire going and went to work molding bullets on the hearthstone. The noise in the thickets has died away now, and for a long time there was no sound without. Then the small boy on the tabletop got sight of something stirring where the dark line of brush merged with the moonlight halfway between the house and barn. He waited in silence, straining his young eyes until the shape grew more distinct, and he knew it was an Indian crawling on his belly toward the house. The rifle was longer than himself, but the top of the door made a good rest . He pressed his cheek against the walnut stock and lined his sights as carefully as if his target were a squirrel on a distant limb, then pressed the trigger, and the sharp report brought his mother running to the table. He stood there waiting for the smoke to clear away, and turned to calmly announce that he had got his first Indian.

Within a minute Mr. Taylor slew another warrior who was squirming along the edge of the brush toward the dead form. An uproar began in the thickets and arrows and musket balls came rattling against the log walls, and three or four Indians leaped into the open. The thirteen year-old son wounded one of these and the forms of the others vanished in the shadows. There was another interval of silence. The watchers at the windows were pressing their faces to the narrow loopholes when Mrs. Taylor heard a faint sound at the end of the room beside the fireplace. A bit of chinking was missing between the logs there. She got a glimpse of two eyes outside the hole. The shovel was lying on the hearth, and she scooped it full of live coals and flung its glowing contents through the aperture. The savage fled howling through the night.

Meantime the rest of the band had managed to steal up on the other end of the house and within a few minutes the smell of smoke told the family of their new danger. A red light rose and spread until the whole clearing was as bright as day. Mr. Taylor said to his wife: "You take the two girls. The boys and I will keep them busy with our rifles while you make for the brush. There's a chance that you can slip away and save yourselves."

But she shook her head. "I'd rather die here—and have the girls die— than run the risk of one of us being captured," she told him. "You stand them off from the windows as best you can. I'm going to put the fire out."

There was a barrel of home-made vinegar in the room, and she told the girls to bring this and a half dozen milk pans to her. Leaping to the top of the table, she broke away the shakes above her. The logs were green, and the fire had not yet spread to them. But the roof of the other room was all ablaze. She thrust her head and shoulders through the hole, and did not seem to mind the musket balls and arrows which pelted like hailstones all about her. She stood there, taking the buckets that her daughters passed up to her, as the breath of the flames was hot in her face. An arrow cut away a strand of her hair beside the temple, and they found a half dozen bullet holes in her dress afterward. The rifles of her husband and the two boys spoke slowly from the loopholed windows, and the war yells began to dwindle in the thickets. The fire was retreating now, and she crept out on the roof and extinguished until there remained no glowing fringe of sparks.

This was the last of the attack. The Indians had given it up as a bad job and stolen away. The family waited for two hours, then the father and the boys stood guard on the roof while the women cached their household valuables, and that night they made their way afoot more than ten miles to the cabin of their nearest neighbor, where they told their story.

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