The biggest thing to be aware of for Chrisitan parents is a common one for very old books like this. It is a reality that at the time much of the wealthy of this country used servants and/or slaves to operate their large estates. That is the case in this story. Unfortunately for the modern reader, this leads to several instances of variations of “the n-word”. These are never derogatory, but they occur quite a few times throughout as a part of the normal vocabulary of the time. This was a reality of this time and therefore it appears throughout this story. There is a reference to a group of Native Americans as savages once as well. There is a note from Lamplighters that they considered changing it, but decided to leave the text as-is.

There are a few intense moments from the wicked characters. We hear a story of a woman who was abducted by two men late at night. One of the men tells her to keep quiet or he will “blow her brains out”. Another old story is told where a terribly wicked man (“a human devil”) set a trap for a group of Native American braves who stood in the way of him acquiring a huge piece of land. His action leads to the death of each of the braves. Even worse, the children of those native americans “set upon the house and massacred the whole family… after killing and scalping the father, mother and children, the savages threw the dead bodies down that trap door”. Another villain somewhat flippantly comments how much easier it would have been to kill a baby years ago than it will be now that she is a young girl. A group of bad guys wait under a young girl’s bed with weapons to capture her. Later a newspaper headlines a “terrible murder”. We hear comments such as, “He could have killed her instantly in any one of a dozen ways” (a couple are listed in some detail). One character, one of the very best, admits that she considered taking her life in the absolute most hopeless of circumstances (brings up a situation where someone points to God as the reason not to). None of this ever feels dark or too scary, but obviously you will want to judge for your younger readers.

One of the very first characters we meet is “Old Hurricane”. He is a character who is meant to be good, and who grows throughout, but is certainly flawed. He has an absolutely terrible temper. He screams, threatens violence, banishes people from the house (everyone knows he won’t enforce it after he cools down), etc. One character, a servant, gets so frustrated by this he exaggerates that, “It’s nuff to make anybody go put his head underneath of a meat-ax”.

There are a handful of other items for Christian parents to know about:

We hear of a lady who is said to be a fortune teller. Later we meet her and she appears to read a palm to “tell their future”.

There are a few references to alcohol, some by name such as wine and brandy. A character smokes a pipe.

An area is referred to as “Devil’s Punch Bowl” (referenced several times).

There are a handful of occurrences of content around what appear to be ghosts. Later the reader finds this has a different explanation, but this takes quite a while to get to.