Adam RAMER

                   From Centennial History, Events of a Century in the Muskingum andTuscarawas Valley by Mitchner, 1876.
       Adam Reamer, who lived in what is Wayne Township, was born between176-1777, and was one of the first Tuscarawas pioneers in 1810-1811, andkilled in his day many wolves.  He obtained premiums for thirty five, andhad handed down this legend in modern times: He was out on the FrenchHills hunting about 1811, and passing a cabin was asked to assist inholding a mad woman, who had been wolf-bitten.  Her husband had shot acub wolf, running with its mother.  He fired at her, but the ball passedthrough her ear and killed the cub.  He carried it home and gave the deadcub to his young wife, throwing it into her lap, and saying its hidewould make a lining for a baby cradle, which in those days was a sugartrough.  Some weeks thereafter, she saw, while sitting at the cabin door,a wolf coming in full speed along the path.  She screamed and boundedinto the cabin followed by the wolf.  Her husband, making an ax handlenear by, hearing the scream, and supposing she had seen a snake, rushedto the door with the ax handle, just as the wolf was coming out.  Onestroke felled it, and he killed the beast, but was horror struck to seeits mouth filled with saliva, and a half healed bullet hole in its ear.His wife then told him the wolf had bitten her.  They applied all theremedies of prevention of madness then known among the settlers forhydrophobia, an no troublesome indications of madness appeared.  But thebullet hole in the ear of the dead wolf satisfied him that she was themother of the cub whose skin had been cured and pegged on the wallwaiting for the time to be made into a baby bed.  Informing his wife ofhis suspicion, she was terrified with ominous forebodings.  He endeavoredto appease her by taking the cub's pelt and burying it from sight.  Thecircumstance soon passed out of mind at their new home in the wilderness,surrounded by live wolves, bears, and panthers, and in due time the womangave birth to her first son, who soon died, but the mother had terribledreams that she had contracted hydrophobia, which she actually did in ashort time, and it was just as she had become most furious when Ramercalled at the cabin.  The poor mother, suffering intensely, became sostrong that two men could scarcely hold her in bed, died in a spasm.  Shewas buried temporarily in a shallow grave near the cabin, for want of agrave-yard in the neighborhood.  The husband in a short time met the oldhunter, and told him he had cut a tree down over the grave to keep thewolves out of it, but the the howling of the animals around his cabin atnight so terrified him that he would soon leave the country, and he did.Reamer, passing by the deserted cabin soon after the young settler hadleft, went to the grave, only to find that the wolves and forest animalshad disinterred the body of the mad woman, and eaten the flesh from herbones.  The country for twenty miles around was warned, and little elsewas done for a time but to hunt down and slaughter wolves.  Theseincidents illustrate the dangers attendant upon the lives of the earlysettlers, and from the present generation are exempt.  In those daysthere were few burglars among men, but every wolf was a thief andmarauder in its day, and caused or committed some ravage on thepioneers.  It may be remembered that old Adam Reamer was past sixty whenhe killed his last wolf, and died over three score and ten, leavingdescendants.