It seemed that Andrew McMeans and Oscar Wellendorf were born to be engaged in rivalryrivalry, although judging by their antecedents, the former was in a class beyond, McMeans being well-born, of old Scotch-Irish stock, a valuable asset on the Allegheny. Wellendorf, of Pennsylvania Dutch origin, of people coming from one of the eastern counties, was consequently rated much lower socially, had much more to overcome in the way of life’s obstacles. The boys were almost of school age; Wellendorf, if anything, was a month or two older. In school in Hickory Valley neither was a brilliant scholar, but they were evenly matched, and although not aspiring to lead their classes, felt a keen rivalry between one another.

When school days were over, and they took to rafting as the most obvious occupation in the locality, their rivalries as to who could run a fleet quickest to Pittsburg, and come back for another, was the talk of the river. In love it was not different, and despite the talk in McMean’s family that he should marry Anna McNamor, daughter of his father’s life-long friend, Tabor McNamor, the girl showed an open preference for Oscar Wellendorf.

The old Scotch-Irish families were, as the London Times said in commenting on some of the characteristics of the late Senator Quay (inherited from his mother, born Stanley) “clannish to degree,” and Anna’s “people” were equally anxious that she marry one of her own stock, and not ally herself with the despised and socially insignificant “Dutch”. Old Grandmother McClinton called attention to the fact that the headstrong beauty was not without a strain of “Dutch” blood herself, for her great, great grandmother had been none other than the winsome Madelon Ury, a Swiss-Huguenot girl of Berks County, who, when surprised in the field hoeing corn by a blood-thirsty Indian, had dropped her hoe and taken to her heels. She ran so fast over the soft ground that she would have escaped her moccasined pursuer had she not taken time to cross a stone fence. This gave the red man the chance to throw his tomahawk, striking her in the neck, and she fell face downward over the wall. Just as her foe was overtaking her, Martin McClinton, a sword maker from Lancaster, who was passing along the Shamokin trail en route to deliver a sabre to Colonel Conrad Weiser, at Heidelberg, rushed to her rescue and shot down the Indian, so that he fell dead across his fair victim.

McClinton extricated the tomahawk from her neck, bound up the wound with his own neckerchief and carried her to her parent’s home, near the Falling Springs. He remained until the wound healed, when he married her. Later the pair migrated west of the Alleghenies.

Madelon McClinton was very dark, with an oval face and aquiline features, possibly having had a strain of Pennsylvania Jewish blood to account for her brunette type of beauty. She always wore a red scarf wrapped about her neck, being proud and sensitive of the ugly long white scar left by the Indian’s weapon.

This ancestress, so Grandmother McClinton thought, was responsible for Anna’s affinity for the rather prosaic Dutchman Wellendorf. Although the girl was open in her preference for Oscar, she did not make a decision as to matrimony for some time. When Wellendorf was absent, she was nicer to McMeans than anyone else. However, if Oscar appeared on the scene, she had eyes and ears for no other.

On one occasionoccasion when the two young men started down the river on their rafts, proudly standing at the steering oars in the rear, for the Allegheny pilots rode at the back of the rafts, whereas those on the Susquehanna were always at the front. Anna was at the water’s edge, under a huge buttonwood tree–or, as Wellendorf called it in the breezy vernacular of the PennsylvaniaPennsylvania Dutch, a “wasserpitcher”–and waved a red kerchief impartially at both.

McMean’s raft on this trip was of “pig iron”, that is unpeeled hemlock logs, as heavy as lead, and became submerged when he had only gotten as far as the mouth of French Creek. He had to run ashore to try and devise ways and means to save it from sinking altogether, while Wellendorf floated along serenely on his raft of white pine, and was to Pittsburg and back home before McMeans ever reached the “Smoky City.” “John C. French tells us, "White Pine (pinus strobus) was King, and his dusky Queen was a beautiful Wild Cherry, lovely as Queen Alliquippa of the redmen. Rafting lumber from Warren County began about 1800, and it reached its maximum in the decade, 1830 to 1840. The early history of Warren County abounds in very interesting incidents, along the larger Allegheny River, from rafts of pine lumber assembled to couple up for Pittsburg fleets.

"After the purchase of Louisiana, in 1804, the hardy lumbermen decided to extend their markets for pine beyond Pittsburg, Wheeling, Cincinnati and Louisville–to go, in fact, to New Orleans with pine and cherry lumber. So large boats were built in the winter of 1805 and 1806 at many mills. Seasoned lumber of the best quality was loaded into the flat boats and they untied on April 1, 1806, for the run of two thousand miles, bordered by forests to the river’s edge.

"It was in defiance to ‘All Fools’ Day’, but they went through and sold both lumber and boats. For clear pine lumber, $40.00 was the price per one thousand feet received at New Orleans–just double the Pittsburg price at that date. For three years thereafter the mills of Warren County sent boats to New Orleans loaded with lumber, and the men returned on foot. Joseph Mead, Abraham Davis and John Watt took boats through in 1807, coming back via Philadelphia on coastal sailing ships.

"The pilots and men returned by river boats or on foot, as they best could. The markets along the Ohio from Pittsburg to St. Louis soon took all the lumber from the Allegheny mills, and the longer trips were gladly discontinued.

"It was in 1850 that there came the first lumber famine at Pittsburg. Owing to the low price of lumber and an unfavorable winter for the forest work, few rafts of lumber and board timber went down the Allegheny on the spring freshets, but the November floods brought one hundred rafts that sold for more favorable prices than had previously prevailed. Clear pine lumber sold readily for $18.00 and common pine lumber for $9.00 per one thousand feet.

"The renown of these prices stimulated lumbering on the Allegheny headwaters and the larger creeks. So the demand for lumber was supplied and the railroads soon began to bring lumber from many sawmills. The board timber was hewed on four sides, so there were only five inches of wane on each of the four corners. These rafts of round-square timber were sold by square feet to Pittsburg sawmills.

"Rafts of pine boards at headwater mills were made up of platforms, 16 feet square and from 18 to 25 courses thick, 9 pins or “grubs” holding boards in place as rafted. Four or five platforms were coupled in tandem with 3 feet “cribs” at each joint, making an elastic piece 73 feet or 92 feet long for a 4 or 5 platform piece as the case might be, 10 feet wide.

"At Larrabee or at Millgrove four of these pieces were coupled into a Warren fleet, 32 feet wide, 149 feet or 187 feet long.

"Four Warren pieces or fleets were put together at Warren to make up a Pittsburg fleet. At Pittsburg four or more Pittsburg fleets were coupled to make an Ohio River fleet. Some became very large, often covering nearly two acres of surface, containing about 1,500,000 feet of lumber at CincinnattiCincinnatti or at Louisville. They each had a hut for sheltering the men and for cooking their food. They often ran all night on the Ohio. To find where the shore was on a very dark night, the men would throw potatoes, judging from the sound how far away the river bank was and of their safe or dangerous position. These men were of rugged bodies and of daring minds.

"A small piece, in headwaters and creeks, had an oar or sweep at each end of the piece to steer the raft with. Each oar usually had two men to pull it. An oar-stem was from 28 to 35 feet long, 8 by 8, and tapered to 4 by 4, shaved to round hand-hold near the end toward center of raft. The oar blade was 12', 14' or 16' long, and 18 to 20 wide, a pine plank, 4 thick at the oar-stem socket, and 1 thick at the out-end, tapered its whole length.

"There were other sizes of stem and blade, but the above indicates the power that guided a raft of lumber along the flood-tides, crooked streams, and over a dozen mill dams to the broader river below.

"From the Allegheny boats or scows, 30 feet long and 11 feet wide, carried loads of baled hay, butter, eggs and other farm produce to the oil fields of Venango County in the ’60’s, sold there and took oil in barrels to the refinery at Pittsburg. Then sold the scows to carry coal or goods down the Ohio.

"Mr. Westerman built five boats at Roulette about 1870, 40 feet long and 12 feet wide, loaded them with lumber and shingles and started for Pittsburg, but the boats were too long for the dams and broke up at Burtville, the first dam.

"Much of the pine timber of the west half of Potter county was cut in sawlogs and sent to mills at Millgrove and Weston’s in log drives down the river and Oswayo Creek into the State of New York. The lumber was shipped via the Genesee Valley Canal to Albany and New York City and other points on the Hudson River.

"The first steamboat to steam up the river from Warren was in 1830. It was built by Archibald Tanner, Warren’s first merchant, and David Dick and others of Meadville. It was built in Pittsburg; the steamer was called Allegheny. It went to Olean, returned and went out of commission.

"The late Major D. W. C. James furnished the incident of the Allegheny voyage. A story was told by James Follett regarding the trip of the Allegheny from Warren, which illustrates the lack of speed of steamboats on the river at that early day.

"While the steamer was passing the Indian reservation, some twenty odd miles above Warren, the famous chief, Cornplanter, paddled his canoe out to the vessel and actually paddled his small craft up stream and around the Allegheny, the old chief giving a vigorous war hoop as he accomplished the proud feat.

"Chief Cornplanter, alias John O’Bail, first took his young men to Clarion County, about 1795, to learn the method of lumbering, and in 1796 he built a sawmill on Jenneseedaga Creek, later named Cornplanter Run, in Warren County, and rafted lumber down the AlleghenyAllegheny to Pittsburg for many years.

"Many tributary streams, such as Clarion, Tionesta and Oswayo, contributed rafts each year to make up the fleets that descended the Allegheny River from 1796 to 1874, our rafting days.

"We must mention the Hotel Boyer, on the Duquesne Way, on the Allegheny River bank, near the “Point” at Pittsburg, where the raftsmen and the lumbermen foregathered, traded, ate and drank together, after each trip. Indians were good pilots, but must be kept sober on the rafts. ‘Bootleggers’ along the river often ran boats out to the rafts and relieved the droughty crews by dispensing bottles of ‘red-eye’ from the long tops of the boots they wore."

Of the big trees in the Allegheny country, Dr. J. T. Rothrock, “Father of Pennsylvania Forestry,” has said: "About 1860, when I was with a crew surveying the line for the Sunbury & Erie Railroad, we had some difficulty in getting away from a certain location. A preliminary line came in conflict with an enormous original white pine tree, and the transitman shouted ‘cut down that tree’. After it was felled another nearby was found to be in the way, and was ordered out. The stump of the first tree, four feet above the ground measured 6 feet, 3 inches in diameter; of the second tree a trifle over 6 feet. Such was the wastefulness of the day."

As soon as Oscar returned he saw Anna forthwith. She was in a particularly pliant mood, and in response to his direct question if she would marry him, replied she would, and the couple boarded the train at Warren for Buffalo City, where they were married.

When Andrew McMeans came back from his protracted expedition they were already home from their honeymoon, and residing with the elder McNamors in the big brick house, overlooking the Bend. Andrew McMeans felt his jilting deeply; it was the first time that any real disappointment had come in the twenty-one years of his life; he had imagined that, despite her predilection for Wellendorf, he would yet win her, and his pride as well as his heart was lacerated. Outwardly he revealed little, but inwardly a peculiar melancholy such as he had never felt before overcame him, and like Lincoln, after the death of Ann Rutledge, he realized that he must either “die or get better.”

Anna seemed happy enough in her new life, and liked to flaunt her devotion to Oscar whenever her rejected lover was about. Ordinarily this might have wounded him still deeper, but he was absorbing fresh anxieties, reading Herbert Spencer, whose abominable agnosticism soon wrecked his faith, and bereft of love and the solace of immortality, he became the most wretched of men.

It was five years after Anna’s elopement, and when she was twenty-one years old, that one morning she started for Endeavor to get the mail and make some purchases at the country store. It was a cold, raw day in the early spring, and the wild pigeons were flying. The beechwoods on both sides of the road were alive with gunners, old and young. Some one fired a shot which hurtled close to the nose of the old roan family horse, a track horse in his day, and he took the bit in his teeth and ran away madly, with the buggy careening after him. Anna, standing up in the vehicle, was sawing on the lines until he crashed into a big ash tree and fractured the poor girl’s skull. She was picked up by some of the hunters and carried home unconscious theunconscious the next thing was to get the news to her husband. Oscar at that time had just finished a raft on West Hickory Creek, while his old time rival, McMeans, was completing one on East Hickory, which stream flowed into “The Beautiful River”, almost directly opposite to the West Hickory Run.

About the moment that Anna received her cruel death stroke, the two rafts were being launched simultaneously, with much cheering on both banks, for partisanship ran high among dwellers on either side of the river. Members of the family hurried to the river side to watch for the Wellendorf raft, to “head him off” before it was too late. It was several hours after the accident when the two rival rafts, with the stalwart young pilots atat the sterns, swept around the Bend, traveling “nip and tuck”. It promised to be an evenly matched race, barring accidents, clear to Pittsburg. The skippers of the contending yachts for the American Cup could not have been more enthused for their races than were Andrew McMeans and Oscar Wellendorf.

In front of the McNamor homestead several women were to be seen running up and down the grassy sward, franticallyfrantically waving red and green shawls. What could they mean? They were so vehement that Oscar divined something was wrong, and steered ashore, followed by McMeans, who, noting the absence of Anna from the signaling partyparty, feared that a mishap had befallen her.

Both young men jumped ashore almost simultaneously, leaving their rafts to their helpers. The worst had happened–Anna was in the house with a fractured skull, and the doctorsdoctors said she could not live the night. If anything, McMeans turned the paler of the two. The men said little as they followed the women up the boardwalk to the house.

That night McMeans, who asked to be allowed to remain until the outcomeoutcome of the case, for the river had lost its attractions, was sitting in the kitchen with Grandmother McClinton. The raw air had blown itself into a gale after sundown, and during the night the fierce wind beat about the eaves and corners of the house like an avenging fury. The old tall clock, made years before by John Vanderslice, of Reading, on top of which was a stuffed Colishay, or gray fox, with an uncommonly fine brush, was striking twelve. Amid the storm a wailing voice joined in the din, incessantly, so that there was no mistaking it, the Warning of the McClintons.

The old grandmother watched McMeans’McMeans’ face until she saw that he understood. Then she nodded to him. "It is strange how that thing has followed the McClinton family for hundreds of years. In Scotland it was their ‘Caointeach’, in Ireland their ‘Banshee’, in Pennsylvania their ‘Token’ or ‘Warning’. It never fails."

As McMeans listened to the terrible shrieks of anguish, which sometimes drowned the storm, he shivered with pity for the lost soul out there in the cold, giving the death message, so melancholy and sad, and perhaps unwillingly. Anna lay upstairs in her room, facing the river, or windward side of the house, and the Warning was evidently somewhere below her window, where the water in waves like the sea, was over-running the banks.

On a kitchen chair still lay a red Paisley shawl that had been used to signal to Wellendorf earlier in the day. It seemed ample and warm. Picking it up, McMeans went to the kitchen door, which he opened with some effort in the force of the gale, and, walking around the house, laid it on one of the benches at the front door, saying, “Put on this shawl, and come around to the leeward side of the house.”

When he returned, he said to Grandmother McClinton, “That Token’s voice touched me somehow tonight. Something tells me she hated her task, is cold and miserable. I left the shawl on the front porch and told her to come out of the wind.”

After that they both noticed that the unhappy wailings ceased, there was nothing that vied with the storm.

“Perhaps you have laid her,” said Grandmother McClinton. “Anna may now pull through.”

But these words were barely out of her mouth, when Oscar Wellendorf, pale as a ghost, appeared in the kitchen to say that Anna had just passed away. Andrew felt her death keenly, but he was also satisfied that perhaps he had by an act of kindness, removed the Warning of the McClintons. He was more convinced when a year later Anna’s father joined the majority, then her mother, with no visits from the mournful-voiced Warning.

Five years more rolled around, and Andrew McMeans, still unmarried, and cherishing steadfastly the memory of his beloved Anna, embarked his fleet for Pittsburg. It was a morning in the early spring, the air was soft and warm, and the shad flies were flitting about. He arrived in safety, but was some time collecting his money, as he was dealing with a scamp, and meanwhile put up at a boarding house on the river front, near the Hotel Boyer. The afternoon after his arrival he was sitting on the porch of his lodgings, gazing out at the rushing, swirling river, which ran bank full, on a bench similar in all ways to the one on which he had laid the shawl to warm the freezing back of the Warning of the McClintons. Somehow he fell to thinking about that ghost, and its disappearance, and of Anna McNamor; how much he would give if only he could see her again.

He recalled how the old grandmother had told him that some families married out of the Warning, while others married into it, much as he had heard was the case with the Assembly Ball in Philadelphia. The McClinton Warning had evidently clung to the female line, as it had been very much in evidence when Anna McNamor’s time had come.

Something made him look up the street. Coming slowly towards him was a slender school girl, with a little green hat perched on her head, the living image of Anna, dead for five years! He almost fell off the bench in surprise, to note the same slim oval face, the aquiline features, and hazel eyes that he had known and loved so well. She paused for a moment in front of the house next door, holding her school books in her arms, while she looked out at the raging river. The spring breezes blowing her short skirts showed her slim legs encased in light brown worsted stockings. Then she went indoors.

It did not take him long to seek his landlady and learn that she was a flesh and blood, sure enough girl, Anna Harbord by name, whose mother, widow of Mike Harbord, an old time riverman, also ran a boarding house. It was not many days before some errand brought the girl to the house where McMeans was stopping, and matters fortuitously adjusted themselves so that he met her.

He was struck by her similarity to the dead girl, even the tones of her voice, and it seemed strange she should have such a counterpart. She appeared friendly disposed towards him from the start, and it was like a compensation sent after all his years of disappointment and loneliness. She was then sixteen years old, and must have been eleven when her “double” passed away.

As their acquaintance grew into love, and all seemed so serene, as if it was to be, Andrew McMeans gradually regaining his faith, human and divine, felt he owed his happiness to the Warning of the McClintons’, whose misery he had appeased by taking the cloak out to her, while engaged in her disagreeable duty of fortelling the coming dissolution of the unfortunate girl.

McMeans and Anna Harbord married. They decided to remain in Pittsburg, and he became in a few years a successful and respected business man.

If few persons had been kind to ghosts, certainly he had profited by his interest in the welfare of the “Warning of the McClintons”. The girl’s mother informed him that in the early spring, about five years before, her daughter had been seized with a cataleptic attack, had laid for days unconscious, and when she came out of it, her entire personality, even the color of her eyes, had changed. Could it have been, the young husband often thought, as he sat gazing at his bride with undisguised admiration, some act of the grateful “Warning,” in sending Anna McNamor’s soul to enter the body of this girl in Pittsburg, and reserving her for him, safe and sound from Wellendorf and all harm, until his travels brought her across his path! Human personality, he reasoned, is merely a means to an end. The unfinished life of Anna McNamor could not go on, like a flower unfolding, until her fragrance had been spent on the one who needed it most. Then he would shudder at the idea that if the school girl, who stopped to look at the flooded river, had started on again, passing him by, never to see her again. He would feel that he had been dreaming perhaps, until, touching his wife’s soft creamy cheeks, would realize that she was actually there, and his.

Through her his soul took on new light, and from a vigorous young woodsman, he was slowly but surely passing into an intellectual existence. He had been strangely favored by the mainsprings of destiny, and why should he not give the world all that was best in him. Life, ruthless though it seems, has always compensations, and if we live rightly and truly, the debt will be owing us, whereas most of us through mistakes and misdeeds, have a great volume of retribution coming in an inevitable sequence.