The Book of the Bush Part 4

"Come on, you green-horn, and take your gruel. Here's the best man on the river for you. You'll find him real grit."

The stranger sat still, said he was not a fighting man, and did not want to quarrel with anybody.

Jack grew more ferocious than ever, and aimed a blow at the peaceful man to persuade him to come on. He came on suddenly. The two men were soon writhing together on the guard deck, and I was pleased to observe the desperado was undermost. The Englishman was full of fear, and was fighting for his life. He was doing it with great earnestness. He was grasping the throat of his enemy tightly with both hands, and pressing his thumbs on the wind-pipe. We could see he was going to win in his own simple way, without any recourse to science, and he would have done so very soon had he not been interrupted. But as Jack was growing black in the face, the other Englishmen began to pull at their mate, and tried to unlock his grip on Jack's throat. It was not easy to do so. He held on to his man to the very last, crying out: "Leave me alone till I do for him.

Man alive, don't you know the villain wants to murder me?"

The desperado lay for a while gulping and gasping on his bed of glory, unable to rise. I observed patches of b.l.o.o.d.y skin hanging loose on both sides of his neck when he staggered along the deck towards the starboard sponson.

There was peace for a quarter of an hour. Then Jack's voice was heard again. He had lost prestige, and was coming to recover it with a bowie knife. He said:

"Where's that Britisher? I am going to cut his liver out."

The Englishman heard the threat, and said to him mates:

"I told you so! He means to murder me. Why didn't you leave me alone when I had the fine holt of him?"

He then hurried away and ran upstairs to the saloon.

Jack followed to the foot of the ladder, and one wild-eyed young lady said:

"Look at the Englishman [he was sitting on a chair a few feet distance]. Ain't he pale? Oh! the coward!"

She wanted to witness a real lively fight, and was disappointed. The smell of blood seems grateful to the nostrils of both ladies and gentlemen in the States. A butcher from St. Louis explained it thus:

"It's in the liver. Nine out of ten of the beasts I kill have liver complaint. I am morally sartin I'd find the human livers just the same if I examined them in any considerable quant.i.ty."

The captain came to the head of the stairs and descended to the deck.

He was tall and lanky and mild of speech. He said:

"Now, Jack, what are you going to do with that knife?"

"I am waiting to cut the liver out of that Englishman. Send him down, Captain, till I finish the job."

"Yes, I see. He has been peeling your neck pretty bad, ain't he?

Powerful claws, I reckon. Jack, you'll be getting into trouble some day with your weepons." He took a small knife out of his pocket.

"Look here, Jack. I've been going up and down the river more'n twenty years, and never carried a weepon bigg'n that, and never had a muss with n.o.body. A man who draws his bowie sometimes gets shot.

Let's look at your knife."

He examined it closely, deciphered the brand, drew his thumb over the edge, and observed:

"Why, blame me, if it ain't one of them British bowies--a Free-trade Brummagen. I reckon you can't carve anyone with a thing like this." He made a dig at the hand-rail with the point, and it actually curled up like the ring in a hog's snout. "You see, Jack, a knife like that is mean, unbecoming a gentleman, and a disgrace to a respectable boat." He pitched the British article into the river and went up into the saloon.

As Jack had not yet recovered his prestige, he went away, and returned with a dinner knife in one hand and a shingling hammer in the other. He waited for his adversary until the sun was low and the deck pa.s.sengers were preparing their evening meal. Two of the Englishmen came along towards the stairs and ascended to the saloon.

Presently they began to descend with their mate in the middle. Jack looked at them, and for some reason or other he did not want any more prestige. He sauntered away along the guard deck, and remained in retirement during the rest of the voyage. He was not, after all, a very desperate desperado.

During the next night our boat was racing with a rival craft, and one of her engines was damaged. She had then to hop on one leg, as it were, as far as Peoria. The Illinois river had here spread out into a broad lake; the bank was low, there were no buildings of any kind near the water; some of the pa.s.sengers landed, and n.o.body came to offer them welcome.

I stood near an English immigrant who had just brought his luggage ash.o.r.e, and was sitting on it with his wife and three children. They looked around at the low land and wide water, and became full of misery. The wife said:

"What are we boun' to do now, Samiul? Wheer are me and the childer to go in this miserable lookin' place?"

Samiul: "I'm sure, Betsy, I don't know. I've n.o.bbut hafe a dollar left of o' my money. They said Peoria was a good place for us to stop at, but I don't see any signs o' farmin' about here, and if I go away to look for a job, where am I to put thee and the childer, and the luggage and the bedding?"

"Oh!" said Betsy, beginning to cry; "I'm sorry we ever left owd England. But thou would come, Samiul, thou knows, and this is the end on it. Here we are in this wild country without house or home, and wi' nothin' to eat. I allus thowt tha wor a fool, Samiul, and now I'm sure and sartin on it."

Samiul could not deny it. His spirit was completely broken; he hung down his head, and tears began to trickle down his eyes. The three children--two st.u.r.dy little boys and a fair-haired little girl-- seeing their dad and ma shedding tears, thought the whole world must be coming to an end, and they began howling out aloud without any reserve. It was the best thing they could have done, as it called public attention to their misery, and drew a crowd around them. A tall stranger came near looked at the group, and said:

"My good man, what in thunder are you crying for?"

"I was told Peoria was a good place for farmin'," Samuel said, "and now I don't know where to go, and I have got no money."

"Well, you are a soft 'un," replied the stranger. "Just dry up and wait here till I come back."

He walked away with long strides. Peoria was then a dreary-looking city, of which we could see nothing but the end of a broad road, a few frame buildings, two or three waggons, and some horses. .h.i.tched to the posts of the piazzas.

The stranger soon returned with a farmer in a waggon drawn by two fine upstanding horses, fit for a royal carriage. The farmer at once hired the immigrant at ten dollars a month with board for himself and family. He put the luggage into his waggon, patted the boys on the head and told them to be men; kissed the little girl as he lifted her into the waggon, and said:

"Now, Sissy, you are a nice little lady, and you are to come along with me, and we'll be good friends."

Never was sorrow so quickly turned into joy. The man, his wife, and children, actually began smiling before the tears on their cheeks were dry.

Men on every western prairie were preparing their waggons for the great rush to California; new hands were wanted on the lands, and the immigrants who were then arriving in thousands, took the place of the other thousands who went westward across the plains. There was employment for everybody, and during my three years' residence on the prairies I only saw one beggar. He was an Italian patriot, who said he had fought for Italy; he was now begging for it in English, badly-broken, so I said:

"You are a strong, healthy man; why don't you go to work? You could earn eight or ten dollars a month, with board, anywhere in these parts."

But the Italian patriot was a high-cla.s.s beggar; he was collecting funds, and had no idea of wasting his time in hard work. He gave me to understand that I had insulted him.

Besides this patriot, there were a few horse-thieves and hog duffers on the prairies, but these, when identified, were either stretched under a tree or sent to Texas.

In those days the prairie farmers were all gentlemen, high-minded, truthful, honourable, and hospitable. There were no poor houses, no asylums. All orphans were adopted and treated as members of some family in the neighbourhood.

I am informed that things are quite different now. The march of empire has been rapid; many men have grown rich, to use a novel expression, beyond the dreams of avarice, and ten times as many have grown poor and discontented.

The great question for statesmen now is, "What is to be done for the relief of the ma.s.ses?" and the answer to it is as difficult to find as ever.

But I have to proceed up the Illinois river.

The steamboat stopped at Lasalle, the head of navigation, and we had then to travel on the Illinois and Michigan ca.n.a.l. We went on board a narrow pa.s.senger boat towed by two horses, and followed by two freight barges. We did not go at a breakneck pace, and had plenty of time for conversation, and to look at the scenery, which consisted of prairies, sloughs, woods, and rivers. The picture lacked background, as there is nothing in Illinois deserving the name of hill. But we pa.s.sed an ancient monument, a tall pillar, rising out of the bed of the Illinois river. It is called "Starved Rock." Once a number of Indian warriors, pursued by white men, climbed up the almost perpendicular sides of the pillar. They had no food, and though the stream was flowing beneath them, they could not obtain a drink of water without danger of death from rifle bullets. The white men inst.i.tuted a blockade of the pillar, and the red men all perished of starvation on the top of it.

The conversation was conducted by the captain of the ca.n.a.l boat, as he walked on the deck to and fro. He was full of information. He said he was a native of Kentucky; had come down the Ohio river from Louisville; was taking freight to Chicago; reckoned he was bound to rake in the dollars on the ca.n.a.l; was no dog-gonned Abolitionist; n.i.g.g.e.rs were made to work for white folks; they had no souls any more than a horse; he'd like to see the man who would argue the point.

Mrs. Beecher Stowe was then writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin," at too great a distance to hear the challenge, but a greenhorn ventured to argue the point.

"What about the mulatto? Half black, half white. His father being a white man had a whole soul; his mother being black had no soul. Has the mulatto a whole soul, half a soul, or no soul at all?"

The captain paused in his walk, with both hands in his pockets, gazed at the argumentative greenhorn, turned his quid, spat across the ca.n.a.l, went away whistling "Old Dan Tucker," and left the question of the mulatto's soul unsolved.

When I arrived at Joliet there was a land boom at Chicago. The ca.n.a.l company had cut up their alternate sections, and were offering them at the usual alarming sacrifice. A land boom is a dream of celestial bliss. While it lasts, the wisest men and the greatest fools walk with ecstatic steps through the golden streets of a New Jerusalem. I have been there three times. It is dreadful to wake up and to find that all the gold in the street is nothing but moonshine.