Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler Part 21

"No."

"Then it's a lie!" responded Mr. Jones. "I know Caleb May well enough to know that when you get him somebody 's going to get hurt."

Mr. May had for years been a temperance man, in the midst of a drinking population of the frontiers of Arkansas and Missouri, and made the first temperance speech ever made in De Kalb. His oldest son, when fifteen, had never tasted whisky. One day, when Mr. May had gone on a journey, the boy was in town, and loafers, seeing him pa.s.s a saloon, shouted, "Cale May's gone; let's have some fun with his boy."

So they dragged him into the saloon, and poured whisky down his throat, and sent him home drunk to his mother. When Mr. May returned home they told him what had happened.

At that time there was a local option temperance law in Missouri, under which a majority of the people in a township, by signing a pet.i.tion to the court, could have the saloons abolished as public nuisances. De Kalb was full of saloons, and there was one on almost every road corner in the county.

Years afterwards I heard Mr. May tell the incident, and his eyes flashed, as he said with his slow, strong emphasis, "When I came home and heard what had happened, _you bet I_ WAS _wrathy_! I just jumped on my horse, and I rode that township up and down, and I never stopped until I had signers enough to my pet.i.tion, and I cleaned every saloon out of that township."

Doubtless many a man signed that pet.i.tion because he dared not refuse; for, although usually kind and quiet, few dared to face his anger.

When Lawrence was besieged, in May, a company of Free State men was raised around here, and they sent John Quiett to Lawrence to offer their services for the defense of the town, but were refused by Mr.

Pomeroy. Soon after the return of the South Carolinians from Lawrence they found Mr. Quiett in the Atchison postoffice. They at once seized him as a Free State leader, and began to debate whether to shoot or hang him. But one of the Pro-slavery merchants of Atchison interfered, and begged them to let him go. He got out, mounted his horse, and started for home, twelve miles away. But the Carolinians, like Pharaoh of old, repented that they had let him go, and soon started in pursuit. It was a hot race, for as Mr. Quiett reached the top of each hill he could see his pursuers coming behind him. But he reached home; and when they came to the creek near his home, they were afraid to pa.s.s through the woods--probably fearing an ambush--and returned to town. But parties were sent out to take him when he was unprepared; and, finding that he was hunted, he was afraid to stay at home nights.

I have heard Mrs. Quiett say, that one day, when her husband had been away several days, he came home for a little while, and she gave him something to eat. After eating he lay down to sleep on a lounge that stood along the front side of the bed. She was rocking her baby in the middle of the cabin, when the Border Ruffians rode up to the house, and one of them, riding so close that his horse's head was inside of the door, leaned forward and looked around the cabin. The door was at the foot of the bed, and it so happened that the lounge on which Mr.

Quiett lay was so close to the bed, and so low, that the edge of the bed just hid his body. The Ruffian said not a word, but looked until he seemed satisfied that there was no one in the room but Mrs. Quiett, and then they both rode away. She said that she could not speak, but felt as though she was frozen to her chair, for she was sure that, if they had seen Mr. Quiett, they would have shot him before her eyes.

Not until they were out of sight did she speak or stir.

Mr. Quiett and Mr. Ross went with father to Topeka, when the Free State Legislature and Convention met, July 4, 1856, of which father speaks in chapter XVI. Mr. Quiett says that the Free State men went there determined to defend the Legislature. There were several large companies of well-armed men stationed near, awaiting orders from the Convention; and one company armed with Sharp's rifles lay behind a board fence by the side of the road. Several speakers made excited speeches, urging the members of the Convention to be men, and defend their lawful rights, even at the risk of their lives. The Free State men were wrought up to the verge of desperation. The vote was about to be taken, whether or not to resist the troops. There was much suppressed excitement; and, had the vote been taken then, it would undoubtedly have been in favor of resistance. Father, in the meanwhile, was on a committee, in a back room. Mr. Quiett began calling for Pardee Butler. Others took up the call, and, hearing it in the committee room, he came out. They demanded a speech on the question in debate. He begged them to bear their wrongs patiently, and to allow no provocation to cause them to resist the United States authorities. He besought them to be loyal to their country, and never fire on the old stars and stripes. Mr. Quiett said it was a powerful speech, timely and eloquent. When he sat down the tide had turned. The vote was taken, and it was decided not to resist the troops. Mr.

Quiett says that without a doubt that speech not only saved them from a b.l.o.o.d.y battle that day, but that it saved the Territory from a long, fierce war.

After they disbanded, the members of the Convention went out and sat down on the prairie gra.s.s to eat their dinner, which each took from his pocket, or his wagon. Mr. Quiett and Mr. Ross took theirs from the wagon, in which they had ridden to Topeka; but father had gone on horseback, as he usually did, and took his dinner from the capacious pocket of his preacher's saddle-bags. Mr. Quiett said that in getting out his dinner, father took a pistol out of his saddlebags. This created much merriment for them, as they thought it would have been of little use to him in case of attack. They told him that if that was where he carried it, the South Carolinians would shoot him some day before he could unbuckle his saddle-bags.

But father disliked very much to carry arms, and I think he never did in his life, except for about two months during that dreadful summer.

About two weeks afterwards we started to Illinois, in the buggy. We crossed the River at Iowa Point. About nine miles northeast of Savannah, in Gentry county, Missouri, father was taken very sick, and we were obliged to stop at the nearest house. The man at whose house we happened to stop was a Mr. Brown, from Maine; and he and his family were very kind to us. There, for four weeks, father lay sick of a fever. One day, while mother was in father's room, Mrs. Brown questioned me about living in Kansas, and whether the Border Ruffians ever troubled us. So I told her how father had been treated. Father called me into the bed-room, and said that I ought not to have told that, under the circ.u.mstances; that it would be a dreadful thing for us to be attacked, with him flat on his back, and we among strangers.

I replied that I thought it would do no harm, because Mr. Brown's folks were from the North, and our friends. But he said it might bring trouble on Mr. Brown if his neighbors should learn that he had harbored Pardee Butler. When Mr. Brown came in at noon, his wife told him the news. He went right in, and told father that Butler was such a common name, that he had no idea that he had the honor of sheltering Pardee Butler. "Now," said he, "you need not be uneasy while you are here. Yonder hang four good Sharp's rifles, and I and my boys know how to use them; and n.o.body shall touch you unless they walk over our dead bodies."

As soon as father was able to travel we finished our journey in safety. We visited our old friends in Illinois, and father preached on Sundays. While we were at Mt. Sterling, he lectured on temperance one night, and the bad fellows made a little disturbance. The previous afternoon I had visited a little girl in the village, and we had found and thrown away a nest full of rotten eggs. The next time I saw her she said that her big brother was mad at us, for he was saving those eggs, and he and some other big boys had intended to throw them at Pardee Butler while he was making that temperance speech; but when they went to the barn, their eggs were gone. The truth was, that her big brother was one of many boys who were fast being made drunkards by the village saloons.

Mother went to Ohio on a visit, and father went to Iowa to attend to some business. On his return he met one of the State Republican Committee, who insisted on making arrangements for him to stay in Illinois until the presidential election, and speak for Fremont.

It was raw November weather when we started back to Kansas, with a one-horse wagon, drawn by Copper, and a heavily loaded mule team, driven by a boy named Henry Whitaker, who is now one of the merchants of Atchison. Mother was sick, and we had to stop a week. Then the mud became so deep that father had to buy a yoke of oxen and hitch on behind the mules. Then it froze up, rough and hard, and we stopped for a blacksmith to make shoes for the oxen, and were directed to stay with a widow who had an empty house. She had built a new house of hewed logs, with a window in it, and we were allowed to stay in the old cabin. She could not keep from talking about that window.

"I've lived all my days without ary winder, an' got along mighty well," said she. "For my part, I don't like winders; they make a house look so glarin', like. We uns never had ary one where I had my raisin'. But the childern is gettin' a heap o' stuck up notions these days, an' they jes' set up that we had to have a winder in our new house."

The weather was very cold the rest of the way, and father suffered severely from a felon on his hand. When we reached St. Joseph the Missouri River was frozen, and our teams were the first to cross on the ice. Father took the teams to the top of the icy banks, and hitched them to the ends of the wagon-tongues by means of long chains.

We traveled all day over unsettled prairie, hoping to reach Mr.

Wymer's house, on Independence Creek. We reached the place at nine o'clock, but no house; it had been burned. It was very dark, and bitter cold, but we traveled on. At eleven o'clock we found Mr.

Snyder's cabin, where Lancaster is now built. A little later and we should have seen no light. A party of belated surveyors had found the house before the family went to bed; and they were just lying down when we drove up. In those days no one thought of refusing a traveler lodging. The cabin was about fourteen feet square. The family had crowded into one bed, part of the surveyors occupied the other, and the rest were on the floor. We had not eaten a bite since morning. The cooking stove was in a little, cold, floorless shed, and there mother baked some corn griddle-cakes for our supper. The surveyors gave their bed to mother and me, and the men all crowded down on the floor--nineteen in one room. The next morning we drove on to our own house before getting breakfast, glad to find it had not been burned.

On Sunday, May 10, 1857, a meeting was held at our house, at which it was agreed that a Sunday-school should be organized the next Sunday, in Mr. Cobb's grove, near Pardee. There we met nearly every Sunday that summer, and father usually preached.

Much of his time that summer was spent in improving forty acres of his farm, on which he raised some sod corn and vegetables, Our corn for bread was ground in Mr. Wigglesworth's treadmill, turned by-oxen. We had no fruit for many years, but a few wild sorts, and the vegetables were a welcome variation in our diet of meat and mola.s.ses.

August, 29, 1857, the Pardee church was organized, at the house of Bro. A. Elliott, with twenty-seven members. In October a frame school-house was finished at Pardee, which was thereafter used for church purposes. During father's absence the meetings were led by our elders, Dr. Moore, Bro. Elliott, and Bro. Brockman. We often rode to meeting in the ox-wagon, as did some of our neighbors.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

REMINISCENCES--CONTINUED.

Father again preached in Illinois from October, 1857, until New Year. He preached in Pardee the rest of the winter; but in the spring he began traveling and preaching in various parts of the Territory. It was the wettest summer I ever knew, and he was continually swimming streams. Mother often told him that a man who could not swim ought not to swim a horse. But he continued to do so until the streams were bridged, many years later. The last time he did so was in the spring of 1871. He was riding a little Indian pony, and carried some bundles.

The Stranger Creek was full, and very cold, and when his heavy overcoat became water-soaked, he saw that the pony was about to be swept down the current. Sliding off from its back, he kept his arm about its neck, thinking the water would hold part of his weight. But he soon saw that he was pulling it down stream, so that it was likely to be tangled in some willows, and he reached back and caught hold of its tail, and it pulled him safely to sh.o.r.e. He reached home very wet, but with bundles and overcoat all safe.

He then determined to have a bridge on the road along his boundary line.

But every man, up and down the creek, wanted a bridge on his own line, and so there was much opposition. But he at length succeeded in obtaining a bridge. This was the only one of father's many contests in which he contended for a personal benefit: his other contests were all for the good of the public.

From this deviation I will now return to the year 1858. Father was so busy preaching in other places, that he only preached occasionally in Pardee.

He has sometimes been accused of preaching politics. A good brother who formerly lived in Missouri, said, not long before father's death: "They used to tell me before I came to Kansas that Pardee Butler preached politics, and I said that if ever I heard him begin to preach politics, I was going to get right up in meeting, and ask him to show his Scripture for preaching politics. Now I've been hearing him preach, off and on, for twenty years, and I've never got up in meeting yet, for I've never heard him preach any politics."

The only sermon that I can remember as containing any allusion to politics, was one that he preached at Pardee that summer of 1858. It was from the text, "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

for ye pay t.i.the of mint and anise and c.u.mmin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone." After speaking in a general manner of Christian duties that are left undone by those who are precise about certain theological points, he spoke plainly of the injustice and unmercifulness of slavery, and besought Christians to be careful how they upheld it in any manner, lest they be condemned by the words of the text.

Another sermon that he preached at Pardee, August 1, 1858, was from I.

Kings xviii. 21: "If the Lord be G.o.d, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him." After delineating very graphically the terrible drouth, and the long contest of Elijah with Ahab and Jezebel, he told of the final triumph of religion, and the merited defeat and punishment of wickedness. He finished with an eloquent appeal from the text, "If the Lord be G.o.d, then serve him." At the close two boys confessed their Savior. One of them was an orphan boy, then making his home at my father's house, and since known as Judge J. J. Locker, of Atchison, who died last September.

But winter came, and the co-operation that had engaged father that summer felt that they had paid all they could raise. It had not been enough to pay a hired man, and meet our frugal expenses. Yet that was the first money he had made for three and a half years, except by his two trips to Illinois. He had appealed to the General Missionary Society, and they had declined to support him, unless he would promise not to say a word about slavery. But the people were calling to him from every direction to come and organize churches. He decided to appeal personally to the churches in the older States. From December, 1858, until May, 1859, he preached constantly in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, collecting what money he could. He reported $365 as the amount received, expenses $110, leaving a balance of $255. He received enough more during the summer to make his salary #297.42.

The next summer he preached in Kansas; but was not gone all the time, as when in other States. When preaching in distant counties he was sometimes gone four or five weeks, but he was sometimes at home a part of every week. When at home he worked very hard on the farm, to accomplish what he saw must be done, that he might go back to his preaching as soon as possible. Mother looked after the work in his absence, and was a good manager, but there was much to which she could not attend. Father was nervously energetic, always working and walking rapidly. Even after he was sixty years old, although he was a slender man, only five feet nine inches in height, with his right arm trembling with palsy, I have known robust young men to complain that they did not like to work for Pardee Butler, because he would work with them, and they were ashamed to have such an old man do more than they did, and he worked so hard that he wore them out. He scarcely spent an idle moment. Other men could be content to pa.s.s their time in careless conversation, but he never could. Unless he had some subject that he thought especially worthy of conversation, he said little. He seldom spoke of what he had done, and scarcely ever related any of the many experiences of his trips away from home. In his backwoods boyhood experiences he had learned to make or mend almost every article used by a farmer. He was full of projects, always improving something on the place. Every spare moment was used, either in fixing something about the farm, or in reading or writing. He sometimes complained that the days were not half long enough to suit him. He once told his sister that the Border Ruffians never knew what a service they did him when they rafted him, for he had leisure to think while he was going down the river. My brother Charley once said that father was so greedy of time he was afraid he might lose a minute. Often in the evening we had to make room by the cooking stove for his shaving-horse, or his leather and harness tools, while he worked until ten or eleven o'clock making or mending some implement or harness. And often, after laboring all day, he read or wrote until eleven or twelve o'clock at night. He read a great variety of books and newspapers, but was particularly fond of church history and religious books of a doctrinal nature.

He wrote much for various papers, and was a painstaking writer. He usually wrote his articles two or three times, and the account of his second mob that was written for the _Herald of Freedom_ he re-wrote seven times. He could write best in the morning, and frequently read and wrote half of the forenoon; and then worked and ch.o.r.ed until nine or ten at night, to make up lost time.

Few ever knew the strong desire that he constantly felt for a life devoted wholly to study and preaching. Living, as we did in those days, in a log house with only one room, he had no private place for study, but read or wrote in the midst of the family. Yet neither crying babies nor the noisy play of older children distracted him.

Often he sat, with a look of abstraction, in the midst of our conversation; and we frequently had to speak to him several times before we could attract his attention.

We have several hundred of his newspaper articles saved in sc.r.a.p-books. He preached altogether without notes, and never seemed to make any especial preparation for preaching a sermon. I once asked him how long it took him to prepare a sermon, and he replied, "Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, generally two or three years. Of course I do not think of it all that time, but I seldom preach on a subject when it first enters my mind, but let it mature. I always have several subjects on hand at once, and when I am reading I retain whatever strikes me as pertaining to anyone of my subjects." "When do you do most of your thinking?" I asked. "Whenever I can; mostly on horseback."

His education was never finished; he was a student to the day of his death. Even during his last sickness he asked me to return a volume of Macaulay's "History of England" that I had borrowed, so that some one could read to him from it.

In July, 1859, he was sick for some time; but in September reports thus: "Since I recovered from my sickness I have held a series of meetings,--one near Atchison, which resulted in eight additions; one at Big Springs, at which four were added by baptism; and one at Pardee, where there was one baptized."

November 1, 1859, the Northwestern Christian Missionary Society was organized at Indianapolis. Father attended it, and remained preaching and collecting money until February. He collected about the same amount as the previous year.

In March, 1860, father and Bro. Hutchinson held the meeting at Pardee, of which he speaks in Chapter XXIX., at which there were forty-five additions. Father preached on Sunday night. The school-house was closely seated with planks, and crowded almost to suffocation, while a crowd stood outside at doors and windows. Father preached on the life of Paul, although he did not mention Paul's name until near the close of the sermon. He spoke of him as a talented young n.o.bleman, brought up in ease and luxury in a great city, to whom were open the highest positions in his nation. There were but few Christians in the land, and they were poor and despised. But at length he felt the power of G.o.d, and learned to love the Savior. He told how he gave up wealth and position, and became poor and despised, and went everywhere preaching Christ and his mighty power to save. He told of his wonderful zeal and energy, as he traveled from country to country, preaching Christ to eager thousands. He vividly depicted the courage with which he endured trials, hardships, and persecutions. Then he told of his last days--a feeble, gray-haired old man, ending his days in a prison, his few faithful friends far away, enemies on every hand, and a painful, violent death in store for him. Did he see the folly of his course?

And then he quoted Paul's triumphant words: "I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things.... For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth' there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day, and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing." After speaking of the powerful effect of Paul's life and teachings, in helping to transform the world, he eloquently appealed to the young men and women to turn their ambition to life's highest object, to follow the example of that grand old hero, and live a life of true heroism in this world, and win honor and immortality in the world to come.

The house rang with that rousing old hymn, "Come, you sinners, poor and needy," and eleven young men and women rose to their feet and confessed their Savior.

No sermon to which I have ever listened has impressed itself so deeply on my memory as that sermon twenty-nine years ago.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII.

REMINISCENCES--CONTINUED.