A Son of the Middle Border Part 30

As harvest came on, mother and sister returned to Ordway, and cooking became a part of my daily routine. Charles occasionally helped out and we both learned to make biscuits and even pies. Frank loyally declared my apple-pies to be as good as any man could make.

Meanwhile an ominous change had crept over the plain. The winds were hot and dry and the gra.s.s, baked on the stem, had became as inflammable as hay. The birds were silent. The sky, absolutely cloudless, began to scare us with its light. The sun rose through the dusty air, sinister with flare of horizontal heat. The little gardens on the breaking withered, and many of the women began to complain bitterly of the loneliness, and lack of shade. The tiny cabins were like ovens at mid-day.

Smiling faces were less frequent. Timid souls began to inquire, "Are all Dakota summers like this?" and those with greatest penetration reasoned, from the quality of the gra.s.s which was curly and fine as hair, that they had unwittingly settled upon an arid soil.

And so, week by week the holiday spirit faded from the colony and men in feverish unrest uttered words of bitterness. Eyes ached with light and hearts sickened with loneliness. Defeat seemed facing every man.

By the first of September many of those who were in greatest need of land were ready to abandon their advanced position on the border and fall back into the ranks behind. We were all nothing but squatters. The section lines had not been run and every pre-emptor looked and longed for the coming of the surveying crew, because once our filings were made we could all return to the east, at least for six months, or we could prove up and buy our land. In other words, the survey offered a chance to escape from the tedious monotony of the burning plain into which we had so confidently thrust ourselves.

But the surveyors failed to appear though they were reported from day to day to be at work in the next township and so, one by one, those of us who were too poor to buy ourselves food, dropped away. Hundreds of shanties were battened up and deserted. The young women returned to their schools, and men who had counted upon getting work to support their families during the summer, and who had failed to do so, abandoned their claims and went east where settlement had produced a crop. Our song of emigration seemed but bitter mockery now.

Moved by the same desire to escape, I began writing to various small towns in Minnesota and Iowa in the hope of obtaining a school, but with little result. My letters written from the border line did not inspire confidence in the School Boards of "the East." Then winter came.

Winter! No man knows what winter means until he has lived through one in a pine-board shanty on a Dakota plain with only buffalo bones for fuel.

There were those who had settled upon this land, not as I had done with intent to prove up and sell, but with plans to make a home, and many of these, having toiled all the early spring in hope of a crop, now at the beginning of winter found themselves with little money and no coal. Many of them would have starved and frozen had it not been for the buffalo skeletons which lay scattered over the sod, and for which a sudden market developed. Upon the proceeds of this singular harvest they almost literally lived. Thus "the herds of deer and buffalo" did indeed strangely "furnish the cheer."

As for Charles and myself, we also returned to Ordway and there spent a part of each month, brooding darkly over the problem of our future. I already perceived the futility of my return to the frontier. The mysterious urgings of a vague yet deep-seated longing to go east rendered me restless, sour and difficult. I saw nothing before me, and yet my hard experiences in Wisconsin and in New England made me hesitate about going far. Teaching a country school seemed the only thing I was fitted for, and there shone no promise of that.

Furthermore, like other pre-emptors I was forced to hold my claim by visiting it once every thirty days, and these trips became each time more painful, more menacing. February and March were of pitiless severity. One blizzard followed another with ever-increasing fury. No sooner was the snow laid by a north wind than it took wing above a southern blast and returned upon us sifting to and fro until at last its crystals were as fine as flour, so triturated that it seemed to drive through an inch board. Often it filled the air for hundreds of feet above the earth like a mist, and lay in long ridges behind every bush or weed. Nothing lived on these desolate uplands but the white owl and the wolf.

One cold, bright day I started for my claim accompanied by a young Englishman, a fair-faced delicate young clerk from London, and before we had covered half our journey the west wind met us with such fury that the little c.o.c.kney would certainly have frozen had I not forced him out of the sleigh to run by its side.

Poor little man! This was not the romantic home he had expected to gain when he left his office on the Strand.

Luckily, his wretched shanty was some six miles nearer than mine or he would have died. Leaving him safe in his den, I pushed on toward my own claim, in the teeth of a terrific gale, the cold growing each moment more intense. "The sunset regions" at that moment did not provoke me to song.

In order to reach my cabin before darkness fell, I urged my team desperately, and it was well that I did, for I could scarcely see my horses during the last mile, and the wind was appalling even to me--an experienced plainsman. Arriving at the barn I was disheartened to find the doors heavily banked with snow, but I fell to in desperate haste, and soon shoveled a pa.s.sageway.

This warmed me, but in the delay one of my horses became so chilled that he could scarcely enter his stall. He refused to eat also, and this troubled me very much. However, I loaded him with blankets and fell to work rubbing his legs with wisps of hay, to start the circulation, and did not desist until the old fellow began nibbling his forage.

By this time the wind was blowing seventy miles an hour, and black darkness was upon the land. With a rush I reached my shanty only to find that somebody had taken all my coal and nearly all my kindling, save a few pieces of pine. This was serious, but I kindled a fire with the blocks, a blaze which was especially grateful by reason of its quick response.

Hardly was the stove in action, when a rap at the door startled me.

"Come," I shouted. In answer to my call, a young man, a neighbor, entered, carrying a sack filled with coal. He explained with some embarra.s.sment, that in his extremity during the preceding blizzard, he had borrowed from my store, and that (upon seeing my light) he had hurried to restore the fuel, enough, at any rate, to last out the night.

His heroism appeased my wrath and I watched him setting out on his return journey with genuine anxiety.

That night is still vivid in my memory. The frail shanty, cowering close, quivered in the wind like a frightened hare. The powdery snow appeared to drive directly through the solid boards, and each hour the mercury slowly sank. Drawing my bed close to the fire, I covered myself with a buffalo robe and so slept for an hour or two.

When I woke it was still dark and the wind, though terrifying, was intermittent in its attack. The timbers of the house creaked as the blast lay hard upon it, and now and again the faint fine crystals came sifting down upon my face,--driven beneath the shingles by the tempest.

At last I lit my oil lamp and shivered in my robe till dawn. I felt none of the exultation of a "king in fairyland" nor that of a "lord of the soil."

The morning came, bright with sun but with the thermometer forty degrees below zero. It was so cold that the horses refused to face the northwest wind. I could not hitch them to the sleigh until I had blanketed them both beneath their harness; even then they snorted and pawed in terror.

At last, having succeeded in hooking the traces I sprang in and, wrapping the robe about me, pushed eastward with all speed, seeking food and fire.

This may be taken as a turning point in my career, for this experience (followed by two others almost as severe) permanently chilled my enthusiasm for pioneering the plain. Never again did I sing "Sunset Regions" with the same exultant spirit. "O'er the hills in legions, boys," no longer meant sunlit savannahs, flower meadows and deer-filled glades. The mingled "wood and prairie land" of the song was gone and Uncle Sam's domain, bleak, semi-arid, and wind-swept, offered little charm to my imagination. From that little cabin on the ridge I turned my face toward settlement, eager to escape the terror and the loneliness of the treeless sod. I began to plan for other work in other airs.

Furthermore, I resented the conditions under which my mother lived and worked. Our home was in a small building next to the shop, and had all the shortcomings of a cabin and none of its charm. It is true nearly all our friends lived in equal discomfort, but it seemed to me that mother had earned something better. Was it for this she had left her home in Iowa. Was she never to enjoy a roomy and comfortable dwelling?

She did not complain and she seldom showed her sense of discomfort. I knew that she longed for the friends and neighbors she had left behind, and yet so far from being able to help her I was even then planning to leave her.

In a sullen rage I endured the winter and when at last the sun began to ride the sky with fervor and the prairie c.o.c.k announced the spring, hope of an abundant crop, the promise of a new railroad, the incoming of jocund settlers created in each of us a confidence which expressed itself in a return to the land. With that marvellous faith which marks the husbandmen, we went forth once more with the drill and the harrow, planting seed against another harvest.

Sometime during these winter days, I chanced upon a book which effected a profound change in my outlook on the world and led to far-reaching complications in my life. This volume was the Lovell edition of _Progress and Poverty_ which was at that time engaging the attention of the political economists of the world.

Up to this moment I had never read any book or essay in which our land system had been questioned. I had been raised in the belief that this was the best of all nations in the best of all possible worlds, in the happiest of all ages. I believed (of course) that the wisdom of those who formulated our const.i.tution was but little less than that of archangels, and that all contingencies of our progress in government had been provided for or antic.i.p.ated in that inspired and deathless instrument.

Now as I read this book, my mind following step by step the author's advance upon the citadel of privilege, I was forced to admit that his main thesis was right. Unrestricted individual ownership of the earth I acknowledged to be wrong and I caught some glimpse of the radiant plenty of George's ideal Commonwealth. The trumpet call of the closing pages filled me with a desire to battle for the right. Here was a theme for the great orator. Here was opportunity for the most devoted evangel.

Raw as I was, inconspicuous as a gra.s.shopper by the roadside, I still had something in me which responded to the call of "the prophet of San Francisco," and yet I had no definite intention of becoming a missionary. How could I?

Penniless, dependent upon the labor of my hands for a livelihood, discontented yet unable to decide upon a plan of action, I came and went all through that long summer with laggard feet and sorrowful countenance.

My brother Franklin having sold his claim had boldly advanced upon Chicago. His ability as a bookkeeper secured him against want, and his letters were confident and cheerful.

At last in the hour when my perplexity was greatest--the decisive impetus came, brought by a chance visitor, a young clergyman from Portland, Maine, who arrived in the town to buy some farms for himself and a friend. Though a native of Madison Mr. Bashford had won a place in the east and had decided to put some part of his salary into Dakota's alluring soil. Upon hearing that we were also from Wisconsin he came to call and stayed to dinner, and being of a jovial and candid nature soon drew from me a fairly coherent statement of my desire to do something in the world.

At the end of a long talk he said, "Why don't you come to Boston and take a special course at the University? I know the Professor of Literature, and I can also give you a letter to the princ.i.p.al of a school of Oratory."

This offer threw me into such excitement that I was unable to properly thank my adviser, but I fell into depths of dejection as soon as he left town. "How can I go east? How can I carry out such a plan?" I asked myself with bitter emphasis.

All I had in the world was a small trunk, a couple of dozen books, a valise and a few acres of barren unplowed land. My previous visit to Boston was just the sort to tempt me to return, but my experiences as a laborer in New England had lessened my confidence in its resources--and yet the thought of being able to cross the Common every day opened a dazzling vista. The very fact that Mr. Bashford had gone there from the west as a student, a poor student, made the prodigiously daring step seem possible to me. "If only I had a couple of hundred dollars," I said to my mother who listened to my delirious words in silence. She divined what was surging in my heart and feared it.

Thereafter I walked the floor of my room or wandered the prairie roads in continual debate. "What is there for me to do out here?" I demanded.

"I can farm on these windy dusty acres--that's all. I am a failure as a merchant and I am sick of the country."

There were moments of a morning or at sunset when the plain was splendid as a tranquil sea, and in such moments I bowed down before its mysterious beauty--but for the most part it seemed an empty, desolate, mocking world. The harvest was again light and the earth shrunk and seamed for lack of moisture.

A hint of winter in the autumn air made me remember the remorseless winds and the iron earth over which the snows swept as if across an icy polar sea. I shuddered as I thought of again fighting my way to that desolate little cabin in McPherson County. I recalled but dimly the exultation with which I had made my claim. Boston, by contrast, glowed with beauty, with romance, with history, with glory like the vision of some turreted town built in the eastern sky at sunset.

"I'll do it," I said at last. "I'll sell my claim. I'll go east. I'll find some little hole to creep into. I'll study night and day and so fit myself for teaching, then I'll come back west to Illinois or Wisconsin.

Never will I return to this bleak world."

I offered my claim for sale and while I continued my daily labor on the farm, my mind was far-away amid the imagined splendors of the east.

My father was puzzled and a good deal irritated by his son's dark moods.

My failure to fit into the store was unaccountable and unreasonable. "To my thinking," said he, "you have all the school you need. You ought to find it easy to make a living in a new, progressive community like this."

To him, a son who wanted to go east was temporarily demented. It was an absurd plan. "Why, it's against the drift of things. You can't make a living back east. Hang onto your land and you'll come out all right. The place for a young man is in the west."

Bitter and rebellious of mood, uneasy and uncertain of purpose my talks with him resulted only in irritation and discord, but my mother, with an abiding faith in my powers, offered no objection. She could not advise, it was all so far above and beyond her, but she patted my hand and said, "Cheer up! I'm sure it will come out all right. I hate to have you go, but I guess Mr. Bashford is right. You need more schooling."

I could see that she was saddened by the thought of the separation which was to follow--with a vague knowledge of the experience of all the mothers of pioneer sons she feared that the days of our close companionship were ended. The detachment was not for a few months, it was final. Her face was very wistful and her voice tremulous as she told me to go.

"It is hard for me to leave you and sister," I replied, "but I must. I'm only rotting here. I'll come back--at least to visit you."

In tremendous excitement I mortgaged my claim for two hundred dollars and with that in my hand, started for the land of Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne, believing that I was in truth reversing all the laws of development, breasting the current of progress, stemming the tide of emigration. All about me other young men were streaming toward the sunset, pushing westward to escape the pressure of the earth-lords behind, whilst I alone and poor, was daring all the dangers, all the difficulties from which they were so eagerly escaping.

There was in my heart an illogical exaltation as though I too were about to escape something--and yet when the actual moment of parting came, I embraced my sorrowing mother, and kissed my quaint little sister good-bye without feeling in the least heroic or self-confident. At the moment sadness weakened me, reducing me to boyish timidity.