History & Folklore Folk Stories The Fate of Simeon Shaffer From Pennsylvania Mountain Stories by Henry W. Shoemaker, Bradford Record Publishing Co., Bradford PA 1908 Where the McElhattan and Spring Runs come together in a turbulent medley of bubbling ripples, and birches and quaking asps thrive where the forests of evergreens once prevailed, there rises a perpendicular cliff of yellow, uneven stone to the altitude of eight hundred feet. The sides are so steep that the few stunted trees stand out horizontally. On top of the forbidding cliff, which is dubbed by the mountaineers the High Rocks, a grove of pitch pines flourish, which in days gone by sheltered the Indian councils held on this natural fortress. Here it was that the powerful chief, Ho-non-waw, would sit on every clear morning, smoking his twisted pipe, and dream of perpetual victories. And here, also, the Indian signal fires blazed forth when the relentless race war was waging between the white man and red. In the peaceful lowlands, a couple of miles from the High Rocks, Simeon Shaffer, a young pioneer, had built a cabin and cleared few acres of the dark, rich soil. With his beautiful wife and three small children he was perfectly content, and refused to be drawn into the dispute between the settlers and the Aborigines. Frequently the Indians came to his cabin door to have their knives sharpened or to buy small lots of ammunition, and he seemed to be living among them on terms of honest peace. In the last days of September young Shaffer would be gone from home a day at a time on hunting expeditions, as he wished to lay in a stock of dried venison for the winter. He always left a loaded gun with his wife in case of unexpected attack, but there really appeared to be no use for such precautions. But one night, when he returned from a successful chase, he perceived that the door was wide open and no fire threw out its glow from the hearth. Inside the door lay the body of his wife, shot through the head (with perhaps the very ammunition he had sold the redskins) and scalped. The children were gone, carried off by the cruel savages. The heartbroken pioneer, in the presence of the moon and stars, vowed he would avenge the devastation of his home, and from a peaceful builder of a homestead he became a merciless enemy of the Indians, joining the Brady brothers in many skirmishes of the most desperate kind. Six months after the death of his wife he had killed eleven Indians, including Sa-lon-ah, son of Chief Ho-non-waw, and his ambition would have no rest until he had slaughtered the great chief himself. From a distance he had seen Ho-non-waw smoking on the High Rocks, but to approach him was no easy matter, as Indian pickets swarmed about the approaches to the mountains. He knew that if he shot at one of these scouts whom he might meet on his way to the chief's retreat, it would bring the others to him, so he decided to make the climb unarmed, save for a hunting knife. Stealthily he passed several sentries unnoticed, and onward and upward he crawled on the far side of the rocks, until daylight found him on the level bench, where he lay in a thicket of hogberries until the dignified chief strode to his favorite ledge and sat down to smoke his twisted pipe. The time had come! Springing from his concealment, Shaffer rushed up behind his foe and gave him a mighty shove. There was a crunching of gravel, a tearing of garments, and as Ho-non-waw fell from the cliff, with diabolical presence of mind he seized the leg of the pioneer, and together they went down, down, eight hundred feet, tumbling over each other, and lit with a crash in the topmost branches of a chestnut tree. The Indians soon discovered their loss, and reverently removed the chieftain's body and gave it burial. But as for Simeon Shaffer, his bones were left to bleach and crumble in the chestnut tree.