A Son of the Middle Border Part 29

It was about one o'clock of an autumn night, sharp and clear, and I spent the remainder of the morning on a bench in the railway station, waiting for the dawn. I could not sleep, and so spent the time in pondering on my former experiences in seeking work. "Have I been wrong?"

I asked myself. "Is the workman in America, as in the old world, coming to be a man despised?"

Having been raised in the splendid patriotism, perhaps one might say flamboyant patriotism, of the West during and following our Civil War, I had been brought up to believe that labor was honorable, that idlers were to be despised, but now as I sat with bowed head, cold, hungry and penniless, knowing that I must go forth at daylight--seeking work, the world seemed a very hostile place to me. Of course I did not consider myself a workman in the ordinary hopeless sense. My need of a job was merely temporary, for it was my intention to return to the Middle West in time to secure a position as teacher in some country school.

Nevertheless a lively imagination gave me all the sensations of the homeless man.

The sun rose warm and golden, and with a return of my courage I started forth, confident of my ability to make a place for myself. With a wisdom which I had not hitherto shown I first sought a home, and luckily, I say luckily because I never could account for it, I knocked at the door of a modest little boarding house, whose mistress, a small blonde lady, invited me in and gave me a room without a moment's hesitation. Her dinner--a delicious mid-day meal, so heartened me that before the end of the day, I had secured a place as one of a crew of carpenters. My spirits rose. I was secure.

My evenings were spent in reading Abbott's _Life of Napoleon_ which I found buried in an immense pile of old magazines. I had never before read a full history of the great Corsican, and this chronicle moved me almost as profoundly as Hugo's _Les Miserables_ had done the year before.

On Sundays I walked about the country under the splendid oaks and beeches which covered the ridges, dreaming of the West, and of the future which was very vague and not very cheerful in coloring. My plan so far as I had a plan, was not ambitious. I had decided to return to some small town in Illinois and secure employment as a teacher, but as I lingered on at my carpenter trade till October nothing was left for me but a country school, and when Orrin Carter, county superintendent of Grundy County, (he is Judge Carter now) informed me that a district school some miles out would pay fifty dollars a month for a teacher, I gladly accepted the offer.

On the following afternoon I started forth a pa.s.senger with Hank Ring on his way homeward in an empty corn wagon. The box had no seat, therefore he and I both rode standing during a drive of six miles. The wind was raw, and the ground, frozen hard as iron, made the ride a kind of torture, but our supper of buckwheat pancakes and pork sausages at Deacon Ring's was partial compensation. On the following Monday I started my school.

The winter which followed appalled the oldest inhabitant. Snow fell almost daily, and the winds were razor-bladed. In order to save every dollar of my wages, I built my own fires in the school-house. This means that on every week-day morning, I was obliged to push out into the stinging dawn, walk a mile to the icy building, split kindling, start a flame in the rude stove, and have the room comfortable at half-past eight. The thermometer often went to a point twenty degrees below zero, and my ears were never quite free from peeling skin and fevered tissues.

My pupils were boys and girls of all sizes and qualities, and while it would be too much to say that I made the best teacher of mathematics in the county, I think I helped them in their reading, writing, and spelling, which after all are more important than algebra. On Sat.u.r.day I usually went to town, for I had in some way become acquainted with the princ.i.p.al of a little normal school which was being carried on in Morris by a young Quaker from Philadelphia. Prof. Forsythe soon recognized in me something more than the ordinary "elocutionist" and readily aided me in securing a cla.s.s in oratory among his students.

This work and Forsythe's comradeship helped me to bear the tedium of my work in the country. No Sat.u.r.day was too stormy, and the roads were never too deep with snow to keep me from my weekly visit to Morris where I came in contact with people nearer to my ways of thinking and living.

But after all this was but the final section of my eastern excursion--for as the spring winds set in, the call of "the sunset regions" again overcame my love of cities. The rush to Dakota in March was greater than ever before and a power stronger than my will drew me back to the line of the middle border which had moved on into the Missouri Valley, carrying my people with it. As the spring odors filled my nostrils, my wish to emigrate was like that of the birds. "Out there is my share of the government land--and, if I am to carry out my plan of fitting myself for a professorship," I argued--"these claims are worth securing. My rights to the public domain are as good as any other man's."

My recollections of the James River Valley were all pleasant. My brother and father both wrote urging me to come and secure a claim, and so at last I replied, "I'll come as soon as my school is out," thus committing all my future to the hazard of the homestead.

And so it came about that in the second spring after setting my face to the east I planned a return to the Border. I had had my glimpse of Boston, New York and Washington. I was twenty-three years of age, and eager to revisit the plain whereon my father with the faith of a pioneer, was again upturning the sod and building a fourth home. And yet, Son of the Middle Border--I had discovered that I was also a Grandson of New England.

CHAPTER XXV

The Land of the Straddle-Bug

A night in Chicago (where I saw Salvini play Oth.e.l.lo), a day in Neshonoc to visit my Uncle Richard, and I was again in the midst of a jocund rush of land-seekers.

The movement which had begun three years before was now at its height.

Thousands of cars, for lack of engines to move them, were lying idle on the switches all over the west. Trains swarming with immigrants from every country of the world were haltingly creeping out upon the level lands. Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Russians all mingled in this flood of land-seekers rolling toward the sundown plain, where a fat-soiled valley had been set aside by good Uncle Sam for the enrichment of every man. Such elation, such hopefulness could not fail to involve an excitable youth like myself.

My companion, Forsythe, dropped off at Milbank, but I kept on, on into the James Valley, arriving at Ordway on the evening of the second day--a clear cloudless evening in early April, with the sun going down red in the west, the prairie chickens calling from the knolls and hammers still sounding in the village, their tattoo denoting the urgent need of roofs to shelter the incoming throng.

The street swarmed with boomers. All talk was of lots, of land. Hour by hour as the sun sank, prospectors returned to the hotel from their trips into the unclaimed territory, hungry and tired but jubilant, and as they a.s.sembled in my father's store after supper, their boastful talk of "claims secured" made me forget all my other ambitions. I was as eager to clutch my share of Uncle Sam's bounty as any of them. The world seemed beginning anew for me as well as for these aliens from the crowded eastern world. "I am ready to stake a claim," I said to my father.

Early the very next day, with a party of four (among them Charles Babc.o.c.k, a brother of Burton), I started for the unsurveyed country where, some thirty miles to the west, my father had already located a pre-emption claim and built a rough shed, the only shelter for miles around.

"We'll camp there," said Charles.

It was an inspiring ride! The plain freshly uncovered from the snow was swept by a keen wind which held in spite of that an acrid prophecy of sudden spring. Ducks and geese rose from every icy pond and resumed their flight into the mystic north, and as we advanced the world broadened before us. The treelessness of the wide swells, the crispness of the air and the feeling that to the westward lay the land of the Sioux, all combined to make our trip a kind of epic in miniature.

Charles also seemed to feel the essential poetry of the expedition, although he said little except to remark, "I wish Burton were here."

It was one o'clock before we reached the cabin and two before we finished luncheon. The afternoon was spent in wandering over the near-by obtainable claims and at sundown we all returned to the shed to camp.

As dusk fell, and while the geese flew low gabbling confidentially, and the ducks whistled by overhead in swift unerring flight, Charles and I lay down on the hay beside the horses, feeling ourselves to be, in some way, partners with G.o.d in this new world. I went to sleep hearing the horses munching their grain in the neighboring stalls, entirely contented with my day and confident of the morrow. All questions were answered, all doubts stilled.

We arose with the sun and having eaten our rude breakfast set forth, some six miles to the west, to mark the location of our claims with the "straddle-bugs."

The straddle-bug, I should explain, was composed of three boards set together in tripod form and was used as a monument, a sign of occupancy.

Its presence defended a claim against the next comer. Lumber being very scarce at the moment, the building of a shanty was impossible, and so for several weeks these signs took the place of "improvements" and were fully respected. No one could honorably jump these claims within thirty days and no one did.

At last, when far beyond the last claimant, we turned and looked back upon a score of these glittering guidons of progress, banners of the army of settlement, I realized that I was a vedette in the van of civilization, and when I turned to the west where nothing was to be seen save the mysterious plain and a long low line of still more mysterious hills, I thrilled with joy at all I had won.

It seemed a true invasion, this taking possession of the virgin sod, but as I considered, there was a haunting sadness in it, for these shining pine pennons represented the inexorable plow. They prophesied the death of all wild creatures and a.s.sured the devastation of the beautiful, the destruction of all the signs and seasons of the sod.

Apparently none of my companions shared this feeling, for they all leaped from the wagon and planted their stakes, each upon his chosen quarter-section with whoops of joy, cries which sounded faint and far, like the futile voices of insects, diminished to shrillness by the echoless abysses of the unclouded sky.

As we had measured the distance from the township lines by counting the revolutions of our wagon-wheels, so now with pocket compa.s.s and a couple of laths, Charles and I laid out inner boundaries and claimed three quarter-sections, one for Frank and one each for ourselves. Level as a floor these acres were, and dotted with the bones of bison.

We ate our dinner on the bare sod while all around us the birds of spring-time moved in myriads, and over the swells to the east other wagons laden with other land-seekers crept like wingless beetles--stragglers from the main skirmish line.

Having erected our pine-board straddle-bugs with our names written thereon, we jubilantly started back toward the railway. Tired but peaceful, we reached Ordway at dark and Mrs. Wynn's supper of ham and eggs and potatoes completed our day most satisfactorily.

My father, who had planned to establish a little store on his claim, now engaged me as his representative, his clerk, and I spent the next week in hauling lumber and in helping to build the shanty and ware-room on the section line. As soon as the place was habitable, my mother and sister Jessie came out to stay with me, for in order to hold his pre-emption my father was obliged to make it his "home."

Before we were fairly settled, my mother was forced to feed and house a great many land-seekers who had no other place to stay. This brought upon her once again all the drudgery of a pioneer house-wife, and filled her with longing for the old home in Iowa. It must have seemed to her as if she were never again to find rest except beneath the sod.

Nothing that I have ever been called upon to do caused me more worry than the act of charging those land-seekers for their meals and bunks, and yet it was perfectly right that they should pay. Our buildings had been established with great trouble and at considerable expense, and my father said, "We cannot afford to feed so many people without return,"

and yet it seemed to me like taking an unfair advantage of poor and homeless men. It was with the greatest difficulty that I brought myself to charge them anything at all. Fortunately the prices had been fixed by my father.

Night by night it became necessary to lift a lantern on a high pole in front of the shack, in order that those who were traversing the plain after dark might find their way, and often I was aroused from my bed by the arrival of a worn and bewildered party of pilgrims rescued from a sleepless couch upon the wet sod.

For several weeks mother was burdened with these wayfarers, but at last they began to thin out. The skirmish line moved on, the ranks halted, and all about the Moggeson ranch hundreds of yellow shanties sparkled at dawn like flecks of gold on a carpet of green velvet. Before the end of May every claim was taken and "improved"--more or less.

Meanwhile I had taken charge of the store and Frank was the stage driver. He was a very bad salesman, but I was worse--that must be confessed. If a man wanted to purchase an article and had the money to pay for it, we exchanged commodities right there, but as far as my selling anything--father used to say, "Hamlin couldn't sell gold dollars for ninety cents a piece," and he was right--entirely right.

I found little to interest me in the people who came to the store for they were "just ordinary folk" from Illinois, and Iowa, and I had never been a youth who made acquaintances easily, so with nothing of the politician in me, I seldom inquired after the babies or gossiped with the old women about their health and housekeeping. I regretted this att.i.tude afterward. A closer relationship with the settlers would have furnished me with a greater variety of fictional characters, but at the time I had no suspicion that I was missing anything.

As the land dried off and the breaking plow began its course, a most idyllic and significant period of life came on. The plain became very beautiful as the soil sent forth its gra.s.ses. On the shadowed sides of the ridges exquisite shades of pink and purple bloomed, while the most radiant yellow-green flamed from slopes on which the sunlight fell. The days of May and June succeeded one another in perfect harmony like the notes in a song, broken only once or twice by thunderstorms.

An opalescent mist was in the air, and everywhere, on every swell, the settlers could be seen moving silently to and fro with their teams, while the women sang at their work about the small shanties, and in their new gardens. On every side was the most cheerful acceptance of hard work and monotonous fare. No one acknowledged the transient quality of this life, although it was only a novel sort of picnic on the prairie, soon to end.

Many young people and several groups of girls (teachers from the east) were among those who had taken claims, and some of these made life pleasant for themselves and helpful to others by bringing to their cabins, books and magazines and pictures. The store was not only the social center of the township but the postoffice, and Frank, who carried the mail (and who was much more gallant than I) seemed to draw out all the school ma'ams of the neighborhood. The raising of a flag on a high pole before the door was the signal for the post which brought the women pouring in from every direction eager for news of the eastern world.

In accordance with my plan to become a teacher, I determined to go to the bottom of the laws which govern literary development, and so with an unexpurgated volume of Taine, a set of Chambers' _Encyclopaedia of English Literature_, and a volume of Greene's _History of the English People_, I set to work to base myself profoundly in the principles which govern a nation's self-expression. I still believed that in order to properly teach an appreciation of poetry, a man should have the power of dramatic expression, that he should be able to read so as to make the printed page live in the ears of his pupils. In short I had decided to unite the orator and the critic.

As a result, I spent more time over my desk than beside the counter. I did not absolutely refuse to wait on a purchaser but no sooner was his package tied up than I turned away to my work of digesting and transcribing in long hand Taine's monumental book.

Day after day I bent to this task, pondering all the great Frenchman had to say of _race_, _environment_, and _momentum_ and on the walls of the cabin I mapped out in chalk the various periods of English society as he had indicated them. These charts were the wonder and astonishment of my neighbors whenever they chanced to enter the living room, and they appeared especially interested in the names written on the ceiling over my bed. I had put my favorites there so that when I opened my eyes of a morning, I could not help absorbing a knowledge of their dates and works.

However, on Sat.u.r.day afternoon when the young men came in from their claims, I was not above pitching quoits or "putting the shot" with them--in truth I took a mild satisfaction in being able to set a big boulder some ten inches beyond my strongest compet.i.tor. Occasionally I practiced with the rifle but was not a crack shot. I could still pitch a ball as well as any of them and I served as pitcher in the games which the men occasionally organized.