The Indian Captive

The news of the return spread like wildfire. The return was on Thursday the 17th of November. For days afterwards the house was besieged by anxious people eager to see the "boy" so long lost, and so strangely found. Old men who had shared with zeal in that weary and hopeless search thirty-four years ago, came up, and all who had known him as a little boy, acknowledged the identity.

At present Matthew Brayton, the hero of these strange adventures, is residing with his father and brothers, and has become somewhat reconciled to civilized life. He has abandoned his design of returning to the Indians, and is endeavoring to fit himself for the different lot now assigned him. He has attended school as frequently as the state of his eyes permitted, and can now read a little, as well as converse very readily in the English language. After his thirty-four years of wanderings and hardships it is to be hoped that he will now be content to remain among his family and partake to the full of the blessings of civilization.

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The foregoing is a reproduction of a book published in 1860, giving the strange history of this Indian Captive. After returning to civilization, he resided for a few months in Carey and Fostoria, and made several lecture tours giving an account of his adventures and the manners and customs of the Indians.

This mode of life was too much of a change from the wild life he had been living, and when the war of the Rebellion broke out he enlisted in an Indiana Regiment, and went to the South to fight for his country. He proved a brave soldier, but while in the service he was taken dangerously ill, and after a short sickness died at Pittsburgh Landing in 1862.