Wetzel, Lou.

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Wetzel, Lou.—The present generation is not too old to recall the flood of Indian stories of their youth, for in the‘70s the Indian was still a factor in the contest for the development of the West and the papers at times contained thrilling accounts of battles with Indians on our frontier. Cooper was still a much-read novelist, and less famous writers still sought their inspiration in the French and Indian wars, the wars which the English and Tories, with their Indian allies, carried into the valleys of the Schoharie and the Mohawk, as well as in the bloody conflicts in Kentucky and Ohio. In these stories no names were of more frequent occurrence than those of Lou Wetzel, the scout and Indian fighter, and Simon Girty, the renegade. Both these names are strictly historic. Wetzel, was next to Daniel Boone, the most famous frontiersman of our early middle west history. His father was born in the Palatinate and came to Pennsylvania, settling afterwards in Ohio, where each of his four sons won fame as frontiersmen, scouts and guides, but above all, Lou, who after an eventful career and many hairbreadth escapes, died in Texas and was buried on the banks of the Brazos. Other noted Indian fighters of the period who were of German descent were Peter Nieswanger, Jacob Weiser, Carl Bilderbach, John Warth and George Rufner. The Poes, too, were well known in early border history, and were the sons of German settlers from Frederick County, Md. The elder, Frederick Poe, who moved west in1774, and died in1840 at the age of93, was, like his younger brother, Andrew, a typical backwoodsman, contesting for every foot of ground with the native Indian.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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