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| Caty Sage at 17 years. (Artist Rendering) |
Lovisa Sage struggled down to the edge of Elk Creek, carrying her heavy iron washing pot on a hot July day in 1792. As with many women of her era, Lovis’ daily tasks were demanding—laundry, meal planning and cooking, sewing, gardening, and watching her and James’ children. She was grateful she only needed to wash clothes once a week! Setting the pot down, she started a fire beneath it to heat the water, then walked back up the hill to their little log cabin to collect the clothes to be washed. Since Samuel and James Jr. helped their father in the fields, she left 6-year-old Polly and 5-year-old Caty to watch 3-year-old Lovis, 2-year-old Peggy, and 5-month-old Sampson. Returning to the cabin, she found Polly dutifully minding the toddlers while Caty, true to her nature, was in the meadow overlooking the cabin, picking flowers and chasing butterflies. Lovis sighed. That child! If only she were more like her sister Polly!
Lovis gathered the laundry and trudged back down to the creek to scrub it clean. After some time, the sun sank lower, signaling it was nearing time to start preparing the evening meal, but as she neared the cabin, Caty was nowhere in sight. Inside the cabin, Polly had not seen her since earlier that day. Lovis anxiously searched the area around the cabin, fear gripping her heart as she called Caty’s name but found no trace of her. Lovis sent Polly to fetch James and the boys for help. They searched until the darkness of night fell but to no avail.
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| Site of the Sage Home. The Site of Caty's Kidnapping. |
The next morning, they enlisted their neighbors’ help. About 50 or 60 of them searched the surrounding forests, rivers, caves, and mountainside. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. In despair, the fruitless search ended. Lovis tried to accept that Caty was gone, but James could not accept that fate. He heard tales of Granny Moses, an old black woman who lived over the mountains in North Carolina and was reputed to be able to speak to the spirits and foretell events. Desperate and determined, James made the arduous journey to see if she could tell him if he would ever see his daughter again. Granny Moses listened to his story and told him that Caty was alive, but he would never see or hear from her again in his lifetime. However, she predicted that his wife, who would outlive him, would hear from Caty in her old age. With nothing more to do, James returned home. He and Lovis continued their life along Elk Creek, welcoming four more children to their family but bearing the heartache of not knowing what had become of Caty.
But what happened to Caty that summer day in 1792? To answer that question, we must return to the previous spring. One of the Sage’s neighbors, Mr. Cornett, lost three of his finest horses to theft. Locals believed three white strangers who had been seen in the area were the thieves. Seeking help from their neighbors, James and Cornett searched for the horses and found them hobbled and grazing between White Top Mountain and Balsam Mountain, but they never found the thieves. Later, Caty’s accounts revealed that one of the thieves wanted revenge and sold the blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl to Cherokee Indians at the Trading Gap in Tennessee, a two-day ride southwest Elk Creek. Caty recalled she was snatched by a white man, a handkerchief stifling her screams, and taken away on horseback; her muffled cries lost in the wind. Once at the Trading Gap, she was sold to the Cherokee, who took her north through Virginia, eventually bringing her to a Wyandot village near the Scioto River in Ohio.
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| Chief Tarhe, "The Crane" |
Tarhe, the Grand Sachem (head chief) of the Wyandot Indians,
belonged to the Porcupine clan of the Wyandot Nation and had participated in
all his tribe’s battles since boyhood. His wife, Ronyouquaines, was believed to
be the daughter of Chevalier La Durante, a French Canadian. She was said to have
been captured as a child, grew up with the Wyandots, and eventually married the
great Tarhe. Their daughter, Myerrah, married a white man who also had been
captured as a child and raised by the Wyandots. Under Tarhe’s order, Caty was
adopted into the Turtle clan with his full blessing, becoming his new daughter.
The tribe gave her the name “Yourowquainsa name, partially translating to
“Sally” in English.
As the American Army and the Indian Nations prepared for a significant conflict, tension filled the air. The Wyandots and other tribes had prepared themselves for battle for some time. In 1794, at the Battle of the Fallen Timbers, 1,300 braves from the Indian Nations, supported by 80-150 British Canadian militia, faced off against 3,000 American Army soldiers on the Maumee River. The bloody battle lasted only about an hour, but it left the Indian nations defeated and subdued. Of the 13 chiefs that had left for the battle, only one returned—the great Tarhe, who was wounded in the arm. By the spring of 1797, Tarhe had relocated the Wyandots camp from near the Hocking River north to the Upper Sandusky River of Ohio.
In the winter of 1803, Chief Tarhe’s wife passed away. At 62 years old, Tarhe took Caty, now 17, as his wife. They had a son who died in infancy—a sorrowful but common occurrence among Indian newborns at the time. In November 1816, at the age of 74, the Great Crane, Chief Tarhe, passed away, leaving Caty and the entire Wyandot nation in mourning and adrift without their beloved leader. Duon-quote (Half-King) of the Porcupine clan eventually succeeded him.
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| Between-The-Logs |
It was about this time that the Christianization of the Indians began. John Stewart, a Methodist missionary, committed himself to working among Native Americans, following his calling to the Wyandot country around the Upper Sandusky River. He introduced them to the Christian message, which brought reconciliation and peace among fractured tribal relationships. Caty was allotted her own land, where she had a house built. Soon after, she married Between-The-Logs, who moved into her house along with his daughter, brother, and two sisters, one of whom was blind. Caty’s love and caring for others became well-known throughout the tribe, and many sought her advice. Shortly after their marriage, Between-The-Logs was made chief of the Wyandot nation. He converted to Christianity at one of Stewart’s early meetings and took an interest in the mission’s growth. Together, Caty and Between-The-Logs improved their way of life by adopting new ways of doing things, which they learned from the missionaries. Between-The-Logs died of consumption at his home in 1827, and his funeral at the mission church he cared for so much was attended by a large number of people.
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| "Frost" |
Two years after Between-The-Logs died, Caty married again,
this time to a Wyandot warrior named Frost. Embracing the Christian tradition, Caty
changed her name to Sally Frost, taking the name of her husband as her
surname. Together, they raised Between-The-Log’s daughter and Frost’s
sister’s children, who were orphaned. With their growing household, they
decided to build a larger cabin about 300 yards from her old one on a ridge
near a very good spring. Frost and several other families worked together,
cutting trees and fashioning them into logs for the cabin. But tragedy struck
again in 1842 when Frost passed away. Their nephew, Michael, stepped up as the
man of the family, taking on chores such as tending crops, chopping
firewood, and carrying water from the spring.
As America expanded into the Midwest, the government sought to buy the Wyandot Indian lands for settlement. Feeling they had no choice, the Wyandots ceded their land to the United States and were relocated to Kansas. Fifty-one years after Caty’s abduction from her home in Elk Creek, she found herself relocated once again to a strange land.
In the spring of 1848, a Wyandot interpreter approached Caty
to tell her about a white man he met at Fort Leavenworth who bore a striking
resemblance to her. The man mentioned he had an older sister who disappeared
before he was born and that her fate was a mystery. The interpreter, who had
known Caty since Tarhe brought her into the tribe, revealed the man’s name was
Charles Comer Sage, a trader from Virginia. Eager to find out if she was his
long-lost sister, Charles wanted to meet her. Caty agreed to meet him at the
Wyandot council house with the interpreter, as she only spoke the Wyandot
language and not English.
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| Charles Comer Sage, Caty's Brother |
Caty was filled with angst as she prepared to meet this stranger who claimed to be her brother. She had long since forgotten any details about her home in Virginia. As she listened, the interpreter explained to Charles that the Cherokee had given her to the Wyandots as a gift during one of their annual festivals. She learned that her father, brothers, and neighbors had searched for her for weeks when she went missing. She discovered that her father, James Sage, had died but her mother, Lovisa Sage, was still living at the family homestead on Elk Creek. While Caty was convinced that Charles was indeed her brother, Charles himself was still unsure and decided to write to his family to inquire if there were any identifying marks that would confirm her identity. His older brother, Samuel, who had been eleven years old when Caty disappeared, lived about 200 miles from Ft. Leavenworth and agreed to meet her as well.
In his letter home, Charles wrote:
“She looks to be about 58 or 60 years in age. She is about the height of Sister Esther. She stands straight under my arm. Her hair is yellow like Esther’s. She has a large nose like Sister Betsey. She has a foot and toenails like Mother and walks with a kind of swing like Mother used to do when going from you. She cannot talk one word of our language nor understand it. I had to talk to her through an interpreter. I asked her whether there were any particular marks on her that she could be distinguished by and she showed me her left hand. I examined her fingers. They are shorter than common and more thick and clumbsy (sic) at the end. Her left thumb resembles a thumb [--if you can imagine, or] supposed [that] it was cut off at the root of the nail, and then a broad, flat nail [were] to grow on the stump.”
In June, Samuel met Charles and arranged to meet Caty at the Council house. He received the information he needed to confirm Caty’s identity from his youngest sister, Betsey. In his letter to Virginia dated 20 June 1848, Charles described the meeting:
“Samuel looked at her [Caty] and recognized her immediately. He had been told before he saw her she had a burn on her thigh. We asked her if it was there. She said it was and when she was a small girl, she asked the woman that raised her how that mark came there and she told her it was always there. We then examined and found the mark between her shoulders, as Mother described it, and Caty said she never knew it was there before. Also, the mark that brother James described on the right side just above the collar bone [was there] and so it seems that every mark proves it to be her. We have no doubt nor has she any doubt but she is our real sister and the Indians are satisfied she is our sister. She has been claimed by two families before but they never could convince her nor describe her by any mark.”
Caty initially agreed to accompany her brothers home to see their mother and the rest of her family. However, after two days she changed her mind. In his letter home, Charles explained her reason was the long distance “and that it would be no satisfaction because she cannot talk to you nor you to her and I am sure it would be the case.”
“As to her situation, it is as good as any of ours. She appears to have plenty. Sister Caty is a very pious woman. She was adopted into the Turtle [clan] and claims the whole tribe as her children by adoption and they claim her as a grandmother.”
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| Charles Comer Sage |
Charles continued to visit Caty whenever his job for the trading company brought him to the area. Caty often wondered whether she had made the right decision in not returning to Virginia to see her family, but the thought of traveling such a long distance frightened her. At 63 and nearly blind, she had heard rumors that the government might force the Wyandots to relocate to Oklahoma. No, she decided, she had made the right decision to stay and care for her people. Then, in the spring of 1849, cholera struck the Wyandot tribe. When Charles again came to see her again, Caty, through an interpreter, asked him to write a letter to her mother.
“Though I am blind I can hear. Write to my mother and tell her though I have lost my vision, and all is dark without, all is light within. Tell her it has been some 30 years since I first heard the Gospel preached and the name of Jesus. I then embraced the calls of mercy and though I felt at the time an outcast and did not know that I had a relative on earth, I found Jesus precious to my soul. And from that [day] to the present time I have thought that when this mortal body put on immortality, I should meet my relations according to the flesh in that world where all circumstances of my mysterious life should be known. Though you may think that my lot has been a hard one, and certainly it has, I have no reason to complain. I have always been treated tenderly in the way I have been raised, and now that a mysterious providence has made known to me that I have a mother and brothers and sisters yet on earth, and the idea is forever precluded that I can see them in this world, my soul is buoyant in the hope that you all will meet me in heaven where we can tell all our sufferings and enjoyments over, where parents and children, brothers and sister, will meet to part no more.”
On Sunday, 23 Jan 1853, Catharine “Yourowquains” Sage passed away from pneumonia 16 days after her 66th birthday. Known among the Wyandots as “Aunt Sally Frost,” “Mother,” and “Grandmother,” she was the wife of chiefs, the grandmother to the Wyandot Nation, and the missing child of Elk Creek. She was laid to rest near the Church of the Old Methodist in the Wyandot Nation. Today, the cemetery where Caty rests is called the Quindaro Cemetery in Kansas City. In Grayson County, Virginia, along Highway 21, a historical marker commemorates the place where a 5-year-old girl with blonde hair and laughing blue eyes was abducted from her family and became a family legend.
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