Memoirs by Charles Godfrey Leland Part 20

The next week we returned to Cincinnati, and thence to Philadelphia. On my way from New York to Providence I became acquainted in the train with a modest, gentlemanly man, who told me he was a great-grandson or descendant of Thomson who wrote the "Seasons." I thought him both great and grand in an incident which soon occurred. A burly, bull-necked fellow in the car was attacked with an epileptic fit. He roared, kicked, screamed like a wildcat; and among fifty men in the vehicle, I venture to say that only Thomson and I, in a lesser degree, showed any plain common sense. I darted at the epileptic, grappled with him, held him down by what might be called brutal kindness, for I held his head down, while I sat on his arm and throttled him _sans merci_--I avow it--and tore off in haste his neckcloth (his neck was frightfully swelled), while Thomson brought cold water from the "cooler," with which we bathed his face freely, and chafed his pulse and forehead. Little by little he recovered. The other pa.s.sengers, as usual, did nothing, and a little old naval officer, who had been fifty years in service (as Thomson told me), simply kicked and screamed convulsively, "Take him away! take him away!"

The epileptic was George Christy, the original founder of the Christy Minstrels. I can never think of this scene without exclaiming, "_Vive_ Thomson!" for he was the only man among us who displayed quiet self-possession and _savoir faire_. As for me, my "old Injun" was up, and I had "sailed in" for a fight by mere impulse. _Vive_ Thomson! _Bon sang ne peut mentir_.

I went to Providence, where I was empowered to return to Cannelton to pay Goshorn $5,000, and renew the leases on Elk River. I should have to travel post to antic.i.p.ate the Yankee. It was not concealed from me that even if I succeeded, I had before me a very dangerous and difficult task.

But after what I had already gone through with I was ready for anything.

I was really developing rapidly a wild, reckless spirit--the "Injun" was coming out of me. My old life and self had vanished like dreams. Only now and then, in the forests or by torrents, did something like poetry revisit me; _literature_ was dead in me. Only once did I, in a railway train, compose the "Maiden mit nodings on." I bore it in my memory for years before I wrote it out.

I arrived in Philadelphia. The next morning I was to rise early and fly westward. No time to lose. Before I rose, my sister knocked at the door and told us the awful news that President Lincoln had been murdered!

As I went to the station I saw men weeping in the streets, and everybody in great grief, conversing with strangers, as if all had lost a common relation. Everywhere utter misery! I arrived in Pittsburg. It was raining, and the black pall of smoke which always clothes the town was denser than ever, and the long black streamers which hung everywhere as mourning made the whole place unutterably ghastly. In the trains nothing but the murder was spoken of. There was a young man who had been in the theatre and witnessed the murder, which he described graphically and evidently truthfully.

I reached Cincinnati, and as soon as possible hurried on board the steamboat. We went along to Charleston, and it will hardly be believed that I very nearly missed the whole object of my journey by falling asleep. We had but one more very short distance to go, when, overcome by fatigue, I dropped into a nap. Fortunately I was awakened by the last ringing of the bell, and, seizing my carpet-bag, ran ash.o.r.e just as the plank was to be withdrawn.

I went directly to Goshorn's hotel. He was a stout, burly man, shrewd in his way, good-natured, but not without temper and impulses. He looked keenly after business, played the fiddle, and performed a few tricks of legerdemain. He had a ladylike wife, and both were very kind to me, especially after they came to know me pretty well. The lady had a nice, easy horse, which ere long was lent me freely whenever I wanted to ride.

One day it was missing. The master grieved. They had named it after me in compliment. "Goshorn," I said, "in future I shall call _you Horse- gone_." But he was not pleased with the name. However, it was recovered by a miracle, for the amount of horse-stealing which went on about us then was fabulous.

After a few days Goshorn and I prepared to go up Elk River, to renew the leases of oil and coal lands. Now I must premise that at all times the man who was engaged in "ile" bore a charmed life, and was venerated by both Union men and rebels. _He_ could pa.s.s the lines and go anywhere. At one time, when not a spy could be got into or out of Richmond to serve us, Goshorn seriously proposed to me to go with him into the city! I had a neighbour named Fa.s.sit, an uncle of Theodore. He had oil-wells in Virginia, and when the war begun work on them was stopped. This dismayed the natives. One morning there came to Mr. Fa.s.sit a letter imploring him to return: "Come back, o come agin and bore us some more wels. We wil protec you like a son. We dont make war on _Ile_." And I, being thus respected, went and came from the Foeman's Land, and joined in the dreadful rebel-ry and returned unharmed, leading a charmed if _not_ particularly charming life all winter and the spring, to the great amazement and bewilderment of many, as will appear in the sequence.

The upper part of Elk River was in the debatable land, or rather still in Slave-ownia or rebeldom, where a Union man's life was worth about a chinquapin. In fact, one day there was a small battle between me and home--with divers wounds and deaths. This going and coming of mine, among and with rebels, got me into a droll misunderstanding some time after. But I think that the real cause lay less in oil than in the simple truth that these frank, half-wild fellows _liked_ me. One said to me one day, "You're onlike all the Northern men who come here, and we all like you. What's the reason?" I explained it that he had only met with Yankees, and that as Pennsylvania lay next to Virginia, of course we must be more alike as neighbours. But the cause lay in the _liking_ which I have for Indians, gypsies, and all such folk.

Goshorn began by buying a dug-out poplar canoe sixty-four feet in length, and stocking it with provisions. "Money won't be of much use," he said; "what we want chiefly is whisky and blue beads for presents." He hired two men who had been in the Confederate army, but who had absented themselves since the proceedings had become uninteresting. These men took to me with a devotion which ended by becoming literally superst.i.tious. I am quite sure that, while naturally intelligent, anything like a mind stored with varied knowledge was something _utterly_ unknown to them. And as I, day by day, let fall unthinkingly this or that sc.r.a.p of experience or of knowledge, they began to regard me as a miracle. One day one of them, Sam Fox, said to me meaningly, that I liked curious things, and that he knew a nest where he could get me a young _raven_. The raven is to an Indian conjuror what a black cat is to a witch, and I suppose that Sam thought I must be lonely without a familiar. Which recalls one of the most extraordinary experiences of all my life.

During my return down the river, it was in a freshet, and we went headlong. This is to the very last degree dangerous, unless the boatmen know every rock and point, for the dugout canoe goes over at a touch, and there is no life to be saved in the rapids. Now we were flying like a swallow, and could not stop. There was one narrow shoot, or pa.s.s, just in the middle of the river, where there was exactly room to an inch for a canoe to pa.s.s, but to do this it was necessary to have moonlight enough to see the King Rock, which rose in the stream close by the pa.s.sage, and at the critical instant to "fend off" with the hand and prevent the canoe from driving full on the rock. A terrible storm was coming up, thunder was growling afar, and clouds fast gathering in the sky.

The men had heard me talking the day before as to how storms were formed in circles, and it had deeply impressed them. When Goshorn asked them what we had better do, they said, "Leave it all to Mr. Leland; he knows everything." I looked at the moon and saw that the clouds were not driving dead against it, but _around_ while closing in, and I know not by what strange inspiration I added, "You will have just time to clear King Rock!"

It was still far away. I laid down my paddle and drew my blanket round me, and smoked to the storm, and sang incantations to myself. It was a fearful trial, actually risking death, but I felt no fear--only a dull confidence in fate. Closer grew the clouds--darker the sky--when during the very last second of light King Rock came in sight. Goshorn was ready with his bull-like strength and gave the push; and just as we shot clear into the channel it became dark as pitch, and the rain came down in a torrent. Goshorn pitched his hat high into the air--_aux moulins_--and hurrahed and cried in exulting joy.

"Now, Mr. Leland, sing us that German song you're always so jolly with--_lodle yodle tol de rol de rol_!"

From that hour I was _Kchee-Bo-o-in_ or Grand Pow-wow to Sam Fox and his friends. He believed in me, even as I believe in myself when such mad "spells" come over me. One day he proved his confidence. It was bright and sunshiny, and we were paddling along when we saw a "summer duck"

swimming perhaps fifty yards ahead. Sam was sitting in the bow exactly between me and the duck. "Fire at it with your revolver!" cried Sam.

"It is too far away," I replied, "and you are right in the way."

Sam bent over sideways, glaring at me with his one strange eye. It was just about as close a shot as was William Tell's at the apple. But I knew that reputation for nerve depended on it, so I fired. As the duck rose it dropped a feather.

"I knew you'd hit!" cried Sam triumphantly. And so I had, but I should not like to try that shot again.

Reflex action of the brain and secondary automatism! It must be so--Haeckel, thou reasonest well. But when the "old Injun" and my High- Dutch ancestor are upon me, I reason not at all, and then I see visions and dream dreams, and it always comes true, without the _least_ self-deception or delusion.

It is a marvellous thing that in these canoes, which tip over so easily, men will pa.s.s over mill-dams ten or twelve feet high, as I myself have done many a time, without upsetting. The manner of it is this. The canoe is a log hollowed out. This is allowed to pa.s.s over till it dips like a seesaw, or falls into the stream below. It is a dangerous, reckless act, but generally succeeds. One day Sam Fox undertook to shoot our dug-out over a fall. So he paddled hard, and ran the canoe headlong to edge, he being in the bow. But it stuck halfway, and there was my Samuel, ere he knew it, high in the air, paddling in the atmosphere, into which thirty feet of canoe was raised.

Meanwhile, the legal business and renewal of the leases and the payment of money was performed accurately and punctually. Talk about _manna_ in the wilderness! _money_ in the wilderness came to the poor souls impoverished by the war as a thousandfold nicer. But over and above that, half a pound of coffee or a drink of whisky would cause a thrill of delight. One day, stopping at a logger's camp, I gave a decent-looking man a tin cup full of whisky. The first thing he did was to put it to the mouth of a toddling two-year-old child and it took a good pull. I remonstrated with him for it, when he replied, "Well, you see, sir, we get it so seldom, that whisky is a kind o' _delicacy_ with us."

Sometimes the log huts were twenty miles apart. In such isolation there is no rivalry of ostentation, and men care only to _live_. One day we came to a log house. The occupant had several hundred acres of very good land, and only a half acre under cultivation. He was absent at a county court for amus.e.m.e.nt. All that I could see in the cabin was a rude seat, an iron pot and spoon, and a squirrel-gun. There were two cavities or holes in the bare earth floor, in which the old man and his wife slept, each wrapped in a blanket. Even our boatman said that such carelessness was unusual. But all were ignorant of a thousand refinements of life of which the poorest English peasant _knows_ something, yet every one of these people had an independence or pride far above all poverty.

One night we stopped at the house of a man who was said to possess $150,000 (30,000 pounds) worth of land. The house was well enough. His two bare-legged daughters, girls of seventeen or eighteen, lounged about smoking pipes. I gave one a cigar. She replied, "I don't keer if I do try it. I've allays wanted to know what a cigar smokes like." But she didn't like it. Apropos of girls, I may say that there is a _far_ higher standard of morals among these people than among the ignorant elsewhere.

It was indeed a wild country. One day Goshorn showed me a hill, and a hunter had told him that when standing on it one summer afternoon he had seen in a marshy place the very unusual spectacle of forty bears, all wallowing together in the mud and playing at once. Also the marks of a bear's claws on a tree. Game was plenty in this region. All the time that I stayed with Goshorn we had every day at his well-furnished table bear's meat, venison, or other game, fish, ham, chickens, &c.

There was a great deal of very beautiful scenery on Elk River, and some of its "incidents" were marvellously strange. The hard sandstone rocks had worn into shapes resembling castles and houses, incredibly like buildings made by man. One day I saw and copied a vast square rock through which ran to the light a perfect Gothic archway sixty feet high, with a long wall like the side of a castle, and an immense square tower.

There are the most natural-looking houses and Schlosser imaginable rising all alone in the forest. Very often the summits of the hills were crowned with round towers. On the Ohio River there is a group of these shaped like segments of a truncated cone, and "corniced" with another piece reversed, like this:

{Round tower: p304.jpg}

These are called "Devil's Tea-tables." I drew them several times, but could never give them the appearance of being _natural_ objects. It is very extraordinary how Nature seems to have mocked man in advance in these structures. In Fingal's Cave there is an absolutely original style of architecture.

The last house which we came to was the best. In it dwelt a gentlemanly elderly man with two ladylike daughters. His son, who was dressed in "store clothes," had been a delegate to the Wheeling Convention. But the war had borne hard on them, and for a long time _everything_ which they used or wore had been made by their own hands. They had a home-made loom and spinning-wheel--I saw several such looms on the river; they raised their own cotton and wool and maple sugar, and were in all important details utterly self-sustaining and independent. And they did not live rudely at all, but like ladies and gentlemen, as really intelligent people always can when they are _free_. The father had, not long before, standing in his own door, shot a deer as it looked over the garden gate at him. Goshorn, observing that I attached some value to the horns (a new idea to him), secured them for himself.

A day or two after, while descending the river, we stopped to see an old hunter who lived on the bank. He was a very shrewd, quaint old boy, "good for a novel." He examined Goshorn's spectacles with so much interest, that I suspect it was really the first time in his life that he ever fully ascertained the "true inwardness and utilitarianism" of such objects. He expressed great admiration, and said that if he had them he could get twice as many deer as he did. I promised to send him a pair. I begged from him deer-horns, which he gave me very willingly, expressing wonder that I wanted such rubbish, and at my delight. And seeing that my companion had a pair, he said scornfully:

"Dave Goshorn, what do _you_ know about such things? What's set _you_ to gittin' deer's horns? Give 'em to this here young gentleman, who understands such things that we don't, and who wants 'em fur some good reason."

I will do Goshorn the justice to say that he gave them to me for a parting present. My room at his house was quite devoid of all decoration, but by arranging on the walls crossed canoe-paddles, great bunches of the picturesque locust-thorn, often nearly a foot in length, and the deer's horns, I made it look rather more human. But this arrangement utterly bewildered the natives, especially the maids, who naively asked me why I hung them old bones and thorns up in my room. As this thorn is much used by the blacks in Voodoo, I suppose that it was all explained by being set down to my "conjurin'."

The maid who attended to my room was a very nice, good girl, but one who could not have been understood in England. I found that she gathered up and treasured many utterly worthless trifling bits of pen-drawing which I threw away. She explained that where she came from on Coal River, anything like a picture was a great curiosity; also that her friends believed that all the pictures in books, newspapers, &c., were drawn by hand. I explained to her how they were made. When _I_ left I offered her two dollars. She hesitated, and then said, "Mr. Leland, there have been many, many gentlemen here who have offered me money, but I never took a cent from any man till _now_. And I _will_ take this from you to buy something that I can remember you by, for you have always treated me kindly and like a lady." In rural America such girls are really lady- helps, and not "servants," albeit those who know how to get on with them find them the very best servants in the world; but they must be treated as _friends_.

I went up Elk River several times on horse or in canoe to renew leases or to lease new land, &c. The company sent on a very clever and intelligent rather young man named Sandford, who had been a railroad superintendent, to help me. I liked him very much. We had a third, a young Virginian, named Finnal. At or near Cannelton I selected a spot where we put up a steam-engine, and began to bore for oil. It was very near the famous gas- well which once belonged to General Washington. This well gave forth every week the equivalent of _one hundred and fifty_ tons of coal. It was utilised in a factory. After I sunk our shaft it gave out; but I do not believe that we stopped it, for no gas came into our well. Finnal was the superintendent of the well. One day he nearly sat down--_nudo podice_--on an immense rattlesnake. He had a little cottage and a fine horse. He kept the latter in a stable and painted the door _white_, so that when waking in the night he could see if any horse-thief had opened it. Many efforts were made to rob him of it.

At this time Lee's army was disbanded, and fully one-half came straggling in squads up the valley to Charleston to be paroled. David Goshorn's hotel was simply crammed with Confederate officers, who slept anywhere.

With these I easily became friends; they seemed like Princeton Southern college mates. Now I have to narrate a strange story. One evening when I was sitting and smoking on the portico with some of these _bons compagnons_ I said to one--

"People say that your men never once during the war got within sight of Harrisburg or of a Northern city. But I believe they did. One day when I was on guard I saw five men scout on the bank in full sight of it. But n.o.body agreed with me."

The officer laughed silently, and cried aloud to a friend with a broken arm in a sling, who lay within a room on a bed, "Come out here, L---.

Here is something which will interest you more than anything you ever heard before."

He came out, and, having heard my story, said--

"n.o.body ever believed your story, nor did anybody ever believe mine. Mine is this--that when we were at Sporting Hill a corporal of mine came in and declared that he and his men had scouted into within full sight of Harrisburg. I knew that the man told the truth, but n.o.body else would believe that any human being dared to do such a thing, or could do it.

And now you fully prove that it was done."

There came to Goshorn's three very interesting men with whom I became intimate. One was Robert Hunt, of St. Louis. He was of a very good Virginia family, had been at Princeton College, ran away in his sixteenth year, took to the plains as a hunter, and for twenty-three years had ranged the Wild West from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. At the end of the time an uncle in the Fur Company had helped him on, and he was now rich. He was one of the most genial, gay, and festive, reckless yet always gentlemanly men I ever knew. He expressed great astonishment, as he learned gradually to know me, at finding we were so congenial, and that I had so much "real Injun" in me. His eyes were first opened to this great fact by a very singular incident, of which I can never think without pleasure.

Hunt, with two men who had been cavalry captains all through the war, and his friend Ross, who had long been an Indian trader, and I, were all riding up Elk Valley to look at lands. We paused at a place where the road sloped sideways and was wet with rain. As I was going to remount, I asked a German who stood by to hold my horse's head, and sprang into the saddle. Just at this critical instant--it all pa.s.sed in a second--as the German had not heard me, my horse, feeling that he must fall over on his left side from my weight, threw himself _completely over backward_. As quick as thought I jumped up on his back, put my foot just between the saddle and his tail, and took a tremendous flying leap so far that I cleared the horse. I only muddied the palms of my gloves, on which I fell.

The elder cavalry captain said, "When I saw that horse go over backwards, I closed my eyes and held my breath, for I expected the next second to see you killed." But Robert Hunt exclaimed, "Good as an Injun, by G.o.d!"

And when I some time after made fun of it, he shook his head gravely and reprovingly, as George Ward did over the gunpowder, and said, "It was a _magnificent_ thing!"

That very afternoon Hunt distinguished himself in a manner which was quite as becoming an aborigine. I was acting as guide, and knowing that there was a ford across a tributary of the Elk, sought and thought I had found it. But I was mistaken, and what was horrible, we found ourselves in a deep quicksand. On such occasions horses become, as it were, insane, trying to throw the riders and then jump on them for support. By good luck we got out of it soon, but there was an _awful_ five minutes of kicking, plunging, splashing, and "ground and lofty" swearing. I got across dry by drawing my legs up before me on the saddle, _a la_ tailor, but the others were badly wet. But no sooner had we emerged from the stream than Robert Hunt, bursting into a tremendous "_Ho_! _ho_!" of deep laughter, declared that he had shown more presence of mind during the emergency than any of us; for, brandishing his whisky flask, he declared that while his horse was in the flurry it occurred to him that the best thing he could do was to lighten the load, and he had therefore, with incredible presence of mind, drunk up all the whisky!

However, he afterwards confessed to me that the true reason was that, believing death was at hand, and thinking it a pity to die thirsty, he had drained the bottle, as did the old Indian woman just as she went over the Falls of Niagara. Anyhow, the incorrigible _vaurien_ had really emptied his flask while in the "quick."

Though I say it, I believe that Hunt and I were a pretty well matched couple, and many a wild prank and Indian-like joke did we play together.

More than once he expressed great astonishment that I, a man grown up in cities and to literary pursuits, should be so much at home where he found me, or so congenial. He had been at Princeton, and, _ex pede Herculem_, had a point whence to judge me, but it failed. {309} His friend Ross was a quiet, sensible New Englander, who reminded me of Artemus Ward, or Charles Browne. He abounded in quaint anecdotes of Indian experiences.

As did also a Mr. Wadsworth, who had pa.s.sed half his life in the Far West as a surveyor among the Chippeways. He had written a large ma.n.u.script of their legends, of which Schoolcraft made great use in his _Algic_ book. I believe that much of Longfellow's _Hiawatha_ owed its origin thus indirectly to Mr. Wadsworth. In after years I wrote out many of his tales, as told to me, in articles in _Temple Bar_.

The country all about Charleston was primitively wild and picturesque, rocky, hilly, and leading to solitary life and dreams of _sylvani_ and forest fairies. There were fountained hills, and dreamy darkling woods, and old Indian graves, and a dancing stream, across which lay a petrified tree, and everywhere a little travelled land. I explored it with Goshorn, riding far and wide into remote mountain recesses, to get the signatures in attestation of men who could rarely write, but on the other hand could "shoot their mark" with a rifle to perfection, and who would a.s.suredly have placed such signature on me had I not been a holy messenger of _Ile_, and an angel of coming moneyed times.