Coshocton County Centennial History, 1911: That a white woman named Mary Harris came into this county some time about the year 1710 there can be no doubt. Where she died, who were her parents, or when, where or how she died we have not reliable tradition.

In some of the forays of the Indians about the year mentioned she had been captured and brought into the valley when she was about ten years of age. Soon afterward she was married in the Indian fashion to an Indian of the Delaware tribe named Eagle Feather, who was a Munsey Indian and hence belonging to the rougher class of this tribe.

She and her husband lived together for many years in apparent Indian domestic felicity. She was very much admired by all the Indians of the tribe, not only because of her white blood, but because of her adaptability to their ways and habits of life, her shrewdness and cunning and sympathy with their wrongs, and by reason of her strong personality, which manifested itself in entire self-reliance. Her sympathy with the redman and his wrongs, as she saw them, finally made of her a very savage of savages.

To Mr. Gist in 1751 she complained bitterly of the cruelty and mendacity of the white men in their relation to the Indian. To her Indian spouse and his associates when on the warpath she urged vengeance against her own race and delighted in decorating her home with their scalps.

An Indian woman in the presence of warriors was silent and retiring. Mary Harris was loquacious and self-assertive. At first this was resented by the braves, both she and her husband reproved for it, but at last her right to be heard was established and her advice and criticism listened to.

So wide was her renown that the village in which she and her husband lived and the river on which it was located became known as Walhonding village and river, or, in our tongue, White Woman village and river.

Eagle Feather, though a drunken fellow of no particular value, as the husband of so renowned a woman, began shedding a certain amount of reflected light and received attentions not merited by his achievements. He was what is, in this age, called a "hen pecked husband." Occasionally resenting the insinuations against his manhood he and his wife came to blows, the final result of which encounters ending largely on the quantity of firewater Eagle Feather had consumed. Whatever the results, however, Mary Harris continued to exert a powerful influence over the braves of the tribe and Eagle Feather only grew more intolerant of the gibes of his associates.

Along in the early fifties of the eighteenth century Eagle Feather returned from a foray east of Ohio River in quest of scalps and brought with him a young white woman whose name and place of capture are unknown. This woman was, we are told, both young and beautiful, while Mary Harris was by this time past fifty years of age, and whatever beauty may have had when Eagle Feather was charmed by her, the life of hardship and exposure she had lived had obliterated.

On the way home Eagle Feather, with his captive, stopped at the Forks to finish the carousal he and his friends had begun about the time they started for home. From the Forks they went up the river to White Woman's Village, and there Eagle Feather notified Mrs. Eagle Feather of the addition to their family. The average white man would require no detailed description of what followed in that household. It is enough for us to know that Eagle Feather and his companion, whom Mary Harris had already christened the Newcomer, spent the balance of the day in the woods near the village in company with a bottle of whiskey Eagle Feather had brought along.

After nightfall the two returned to his house and crept softly to bed, not wishing to disturb the peaceful slumbers of the wife. Next morning Mary Harris aroused the village with her cries, and when the neighbors came in she pointed to the body of Eagle Feather with the head cleft with a hatchet, and told the astounding story that the "New Comer" had slain Eagle Feather and fled. Pursuit was quickly inaugurated and the New Comer captured at the village, ever after until the present day known as Newcomerstown on the Tuscarawas.

She was brought back, and being questioned described Mary Harris as coming in the night to the bed occupied by her and Eagle Feather and of her taking flight and leaving. By a law of the Delaware tribe the effort at escape justified the taking of a prisoner's life, and as the, New Comer had run away they slew her and later considered the question as to her guilt of the death of Eagle Feather. Mary Harris's influence at that time was sufficient to protect her from any charge of murder and the incident was soon forgotten.

An effort has been made in times past to, in some wise, connect these two women with the large stone lying near the Walhonding River and known as White Woman Rock, the story being that one of them sprang from that rock to save her life or virtue and was drowned, but this can hardly be the case, as the New Comer was slain in White Woman village with a hatchet or tomahawk, and Mary Harris was not of the kind who fled for any reason.