The Daughter of the Chieftain

Two settler children and the daughter of a Delaware chief are caught on the wrong side of the Wyoming Valley massacre of 1778, and the girl leads them east through the woods. Ellis wrote frontier stories by the hundred and knew the ground; this one turns on an Indian child's judgement of adults at war. The massacre is real and so is the flight; the friendship is what the book is actually about. Fifty-six plates of rivers, mills, and wooded streams by painters including Eastman Johnson and George Inness keep the water and the woods of the flight in view from 1698 to 1891.