Description

Caty Sage, a five-year old white girl, was stolen in 1792 from her home in Elk Creek, Grayson County, Virginia, and carried on horseback to a Cherokee Indian camp at Trade, Tennessee. Four days after her capture she was taken by the Cherokees on a grueling 60 mile trek north which included a wild canoe ride down the New and Kanawha Rivers. In Ohio she was adopted by Wyandot Indians and named Yourowquanins. At seventeen she married Tarhe, Chief of the Wyandots. At age twenty-eight she became Tarhe’s widow. Under an 1817 treaty with the Americans, Caty received a large track of Ohio land. She later married Tauyaurontoyou, a noble Wyandot warrior and leader who too became a Chief. Being Christianized herself, in a wilderness missionary effort in 1820; she gave encouragement to Tauyaurontoyou as he became a licensed Methodist minister and famous preacher under his translated name “Between-The-Logs”. Following the death of Between-The-Logs, Caty married an Indian warrior named Frost. Two years later she was again widowed. In 1843 Caty and her Wyandot Tribe were driven out of Ohio by relentless U.S. Government pressure urged on by land-hungry whites. She and her fellow Wyandots traveled in wagons across Ohio and by steamboats from Ohio to Kansas. In Kansas, Caty built a new life among many hardships. Trauma from being stolen had erased her childhood memory, but after a life as an Indian with much persecution by whites, one day in 1848 fate put her face-to-face with a brother she had never met. At last Yourowquains learned her own identity.