Did those snipers come from the wilderness of Park Ridge?

Once upon a time, exactly 11 months ago today, I wrote about a little girl who was raised in the Big Woods of Park Ridge.

She was named Hillary by her Ma and Pa, for when they peered out the smoky glass of their log cabin, there were hills visible through the giant trees.

The family's tiny gray house at the corner of Elm and Wisner Streets was at the edge of the Park Ridge settlement. Onward from the Rodham family homestead was a wagon trail that meandered out of sight into the Big Woods where you'd sometimes see hyenas, sharp-toothed cats, mink and otter.

At night, when Hillary lay awake in her trundle bed, she could hear a great bird howl every minute or so as if flying right over her head, and it would then go silent in the distance.

In the column last spring, I described how Hillary had thrilled audiences across the country with her tale of surviving in the Big Woods of Park Ridge and how she managed to come from so little to the cusp of such power.

"When I was growing up, the neighborhoods I lived in were surrounded by farm fields, and every harvest season we had a lot of the migrants who come up from Mexico, through Texas, following the harvest, all the way up through Illinois and Michigan," Mrs. Rodham Clinton has told the spellbound.

When I suggested that Hillary's description of Park Ridge as a migrant farm worker village might have been a tad, um, overstated… many of her supporters gagged on their chai tea. I heard from dozens of readers who were outraged at such a scurrilous suggestion. How dare I indict the pride of Park Ridge as an embellisher of her formative years!

They didn't care that the Encyclopedia of Chicago reported that "many of the farms on Chicago's Far Northwest and Southwest Sides disappeared in the face of the speculative building boom of the 1920s."

Nor were her supporters concerned that Park Ridge's official history stated that "by the time of our incorporation in 1873, Park Ridge had been transformed from an agricultural community to an affluent business town."

They offered historical proof and personal observations that Hillary was telling the truth when she described how she used to help migrant farm families right there in Park Ridge. They told me that she was correct when she said that "the children would go to school with us and every Saturday morning my church group, we'd go out and babysit the younger children, so that the older children could join their families in the fields."

And so for the last 11 months I have felt terrible about ever questioning Mrs. Rodham Clinton's wonderful childhood memories of community service. I was close to making a request for forgiveness because she apparently was the role model for Little House on the Prairie.

Then she turned to a new frontier: the Bullets of Bosnia.

In a recent speech about her 1996 trip to Bosnia, Mrs. Clinton said, "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

It didn't take much effort for news organizations to go to the videotape of that airport arrival and determine that: there were no snipers firing at Mrs. Clinton or anyone else and no one ran for their lives.

Indeed, as pictures frequently do (remember Monica in the beret), the smiling photos of Mrs. Clinton and her entourage arriving in Bosnia said it all.

No longer content with simply exaggerating her playlot days in Park Ridge, she was putting herself in the line of non-existent fire as an adult.

Caught in the act, Mrs. Clinton said she "misspoke" about dodging snipers and suggested that it was the result of being overtired.

"This has been a very long campaign. Occasionally, I am a human being like everybody else. The military took great care of us. They were worried about taking a first lady to a war zone and took some extra precautions and worried about all sorts of things. I have written about it in my book and talked about it on many other occasions and last week, you know, for the first time in 12-or-so years, I misspoke."

Maybe fatigue just confused her "memories."

Perhaps Hillary was actually flashing back to what it was like walking home from school on the day of the Fort Dearborn Massacre … when Park Ridge musket brigades opened fire on The Potawatomi as they came up Dee Road.