The Minute Man of the Frontier Part 13

Several people were sitting on a large veranda; and one man, a preacher lately from Texas, was telling us of his visit. Among other things he spoke of the cyclone-pits, and said, "Seems to me, brother, a man can't have much faith in G.o.d who would go into a pit. I would not; would you?"

"No," replied mine host. "Men seem to me to be losing faith. I once raised a woman up by prayer that three doctors had given up. Aunt Sally, have ye any of that liver invigorator? I kind of feel as if I needed some."

Here was a man who had prayed a woman out of the jaws of death, calling for liver medicine. None of them seemed to see the incongruity of it. One good old deacon that I knew horrified his pastor, who was a strong temperance man, by furnishing the communion with rye whiskey.

The old man meant all right; but he had neglected to replenish the wine, and thought something of a spirituous nature was needed, and so brought the whiskey.

It is a fact worth noting, that we have to-day, in the year 1895, millions of men living in conditions as primitive as those of the eighteenth century, while in the same land we are building houses which are lighted and heated with electricity; that some men worship in houses built of logs, without gla.s.s windows, and others worship in buildings that cost millions; that in the former case men have lived in this way for over two hundred years, and the latter less than fifty since the Indian's tepee was the only dwelling in sight; that to-day may be seen the prairie schooner drawn by horses, oxen, or mules, and in one case a horse, a cow, and a mule, the little shanty on wheels, the man sitting in the doorway driving, and his wife cooking the dinner. But so it is. We have all the varieties of habitation, from the dugout of the prairie to the half-million summer cottage at Bar Harbor; and from a single Indian pony, we have all kinds of locomotion, up to the vestibuled palace on wheels.

That I may not seem to be over stating the condition of the mountain whites, and the dangers among our own people, I close with a quotation from Dr. Smart's Saratoga address:--

"Let me tell you of just one experiment of letting a people alone, and its result. Shall we trust that American inst.i.tutions and American ideas, that the press and schools, will ultimately Americanize them? In the eastern part of Kentucky, in the western part of North Carolina and West Virginia, there is a section of country about the size of New Hampshire and New York,--one of the darkest spots on the map of the South. The people living there have been there for over a hundred years, and are of Scotch-Irish extraction. Whole counties can be found in which there is not a single wagon-road. Most of the houses are of one story, without a window, or only a small one; and the door has to be kept open to let in the light. I have it from good authority that when the first schoolmistress went there to teach, she stipulated that she should have a room with a window in it, and a lock to the door. Very few of the people can read or write. They have no newspapers, no modern appliances for agriculture, no connection with the world outside and around them. This is the land of the 'moonshiner.' They love whiskey, and so they manufacture it.

The pistol and bowie-knife are judge and sheriff. Bloodshed is common, and barbarism a normal state of society. These men were not slaveholders in the times before the war. They were as loyal to the Union as any others who fought for the old flag, and they served in the Union army when they got a chance. When Bishop Smith in a large and influential meeting spoke of them, he touched the Southern and Kentucky pride, especially when he pointed out what a moral and spiritual blot they were upon the South. Now, why are they there a hundred years behind us in every respect? Why are they sunk so low? Simply because they have been let alone.

They are just as much separated from this land, without any share in its marvellous progress, as if a Chinese wall had been built around them. They have been let alone; and American inst.i.tutions, American schools, and the American press, have flowed around them and beyond them without effect."

XXV.

CHRISTIAN WORK IN A LUMBER-TOWN.

Until a few years ago I knew little or nothing of mill-towns or lumber-camps. I had seen a saw-mill that cut its thousand feet a day when running, and it was generally connected with some farm through which ran a stream. It was a very innocent affair. But in 1889 I saw for the first time the great forests of pine, and became acquainted with part of the immense army of lumbermen. Michigan alone had at that time some forty thousand; Wisconsin has as many; Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana are now engaged in a vast work; and when we add the great States of Oregon and Washington, with their almost illimitable forests, we feel that we are speaking within bounds when we say an immense army.

The one great difficulty of the problem is the transitory character of the work--like Count Rumford's stoves, if they could only have been patented and money made out of them, every house would use them; so if the lumber village had come to stay, many a church would have gone in and built. But more than once a man in authority has said, "Oh, I have looked that field over, and it won't amount to much." No one who has not had experience in the field can form any adequate idea of its vastness or its crying needs. The one great trouble of the whole question is the ma.s.sing of so many men away from the softening influence of wife and mother. It is unnatural; and nature's laws, as sacred as the Decalogue, are broken in unnatural crimes, and sins unknown to the common run of men.

The lumber business may be divided into three distinct cla.s.ses of workers,--the mill-men, the camp-men, and the river-men. The last are the smallest company, but the hardest to reach. They flit from stream to river, from the river to the lake, from scenes of sylvan beauty to the low groggery--and worse. Their temporary home is often made of blackened logs papered with _Police Gazettes_, which come in vast numbers, and form the largest part of their not very select reading.

Books of the Zola type, but without their literary excellence, are legion. Good books and good literature would be a boon in these camps.

To give you an idea of the rapid march of the lumber-camp, come with me into the primeval forest. It is a winter day. The snow is deep, and the lordly pines are dressed like brides in purest white; one would think, to look at their pendent branches, that Praxiteles and all his pupils had worked for a century in sculpturing these lovely forms. Not a sound is heard save our sleigh-bells, or some chattering squirrel that leaps lightly over the powdery snow; a gun fired would bring down a harmless avalanche. It is a sight of unsurpa.s.sed beauty in nature's privacy; but alas, how soon the change!

An army of brawny men invade the lovely scene. Rude houses of logs are quickly erected; and men with axe and saw soon change the view, and with peavey and cant-hook the logs are loaded and off for the rollway.

Inside the largest house are bunks, one above another; two huge stoves with great iron cylinders, one at each end, give warmth; while in picturesque confusion, socks and red mackinaws and shirts hang steaming by the dozens. There is a c.o.c.kloft, where the men write their letters, and rude benches, where they sit and smoke and tell yarns till bedtime. In a few weeks at the farthest the grand old forest is a wreck; a few scrubby oaks or dwindling beech-trees are all that are left. The buildings rot down, the roofs tumble in, and a few camp-stragglers trying to get a living out of the stumpy ground are all that are left; and solitude reigns supreme.

On stormy days hundreds of the men go into the nearest village, and sin revels in excess. In many a small town, mothers call their little ones in from the streets, which are soon full of men drunken and swearing, ready for fight or worse. At such times they hold the village in a reign of terror, and often commit crimes of a shocking nature, and no officer dares molest them. A stranger coming at such a time would need to conduct himself very discreetly or he would get into trouble. A volume might be filled with the outrageous things done in these small lumber-towns. Ireland is not the only place that suffers from absentee landlords.

The condition of the children is pitiable, brought up in an atmosphere of drunkenness and debauchery; swearing as natural as breathing; houses packed so closely that you can reach across from one window to another. The refuse is often emptied between the houses; diseases of all kinds flourish, and death is ever busy. Eight or ten nationalities are often found in these towns,--men who cannot spell their names, and men who went to St. Paul's and admired Canon Liddon, or New York men that went to Beecher's church.

Here a house which cost less than a hundred dollars, and inside of it an organ costing one hundred and twenty-five dollars, and a forty-dollar encyclopaedia. The next house is divided by stalls like a stable, with bed in one, stove in another, and kitchen in the third.

With a population as mixed as this, and in constant flux, what, you ask, can the church do? I answer, much, very much, if you can only get a church there; but when the church which gives much more than any other gives but a quarter of a cent per day per member, is it any wonder that hundreds of churchless lumber-towns call in vain for help from the sanctuary? Some small villages can be found where every family is living in unlawful relations.

Now, remember this, the lumberman is made of the same clay that we are, and it is his environment that brings to the front the worst that is in him. He is reached by practical Christianity as easily as any other man. The shame and reproach belong to us for neglecting him, and there is no other way that we so dishonor him whom we call Master as to say his commands are not practicable. Is it asking too much from the rich men who get their money by the toil of these men, that out of their millions they should spend thousands for the moral welfare of those who make them rich? And yet too often they do not even know their own foremen, and in many cases have never visited the property they own.

I once asked a rich lumber-man for a subscription for missions, saying I was sorry he was not at the church when I took up my collection.

"Jinks! I am glad I was not there," he said; "I gave away ten dollars Sat.u.r.day night."

Now, this man had been cutting off from his land for thirty years, and had just sold a quarter of a million dollars' worth of it, and still had land left. But on the other hand, be it known that the men in these villages who make no profession of religion actually give dollar for dollar with the Christian church-members to sustain the frontier churches. Saloon-keepers, and often Roman Catholics, help to support the missionary church.

The mission churches of the lumber regions are like springs in the desert, but for which the traveller would die on his way; and thousands of church-members scattered from ocean to ocean were born of the Spirit in some one of these little churches that did brave work in a transient town.

To do work in these places aright, one must drop all denominational nonsense,--be as ready to pray and work with the dying Roman Catholic as with a member of his own church, and do as I did,--lend the church building to the priest, because disease in the town would not permit of using the private houses at the time, and so help to fill up the gap between us and the old mother that nursed us a thousand years.

In every new town, in every camp, should be a standing notice, "No cranks need apply."

Here is a brawny man who does not like the church. He hates the name of preacher, and threatens that he had better not call at his house.

Scarlet fever takes his children down. The despised preacher, armed with a basket of good things, raps at the door. Pat opens it.

"Good-morning, Pat. I heard your little ones were sick, and my wife thought your wife would have her hands full, and she has sent a few little things--not much, but they will help a little, I hope."

The tears are in Pat's eyes. "Come in, Elder, if you are not afraid, for we have scarlet fever here."

"That is the very reason I came, my boy;" and Pat is won. The very man that swore the hardest because the elder was near, now says, "Don't swear, boys; there's the elder."

Yes; and when men have heard that the new preacher has helped in the house stricken with small-pox or typhoid, he has the freedom of the village, or the camp, and is respected. And so the village missionary does some good in the mill-town. But what is one man among so many?

See this little place with less than five hundred population. Two thousand men come there for their mail, and the average distance to the next church is over twenty miles; and one man is totally inadequate to the great work before him.

These villages and camps ought to have good libraries, a hall well lighted, innocent amus.e.m.e.nts, lectures, and entertainments, and in addition to this, an army of men carrying good books and visiting all the camps; and there is nothing to hinder but the lack of money, and the lack of will to use it in those who have abundance. I lately pa.s.sed through a lumber-town of seven thousand inhabitants. Four or five millionnaires lived there. One had put up an $80,000 training-school, another a memorial building costing $160,000. This is the other extreme. But up to date the lumber-regions have been shamefully neglected, and thousands of boys and girls are growing up to drift to our great cities and form the dangerous cla.s.ses, fitted for it by their training. It is better to clear the water-sheds than to buy filters, and the cheapest policeman of the city is the missionary in the waste places of our land.

XXVI.

TWO KINDS OF FRONTIER.

Some years ago it is said that a man lost his pig, and in searching for it he found it by hearing its squealing. The pig had fallen in a hole; and in getting it out, the man saw the rich copper ore which led to the opening of the Calumet and Hecla mines, and more recently the Tamarack. More ore per ton goes into the lake from the washing than comes out of most mines. So rich is this ore that very few fine mineral specimens are found in the mines. Millions of money have been expended in developing them, and millions more have come out of them.

With such richness one would expect to find the usual deviltry that abounds in mining regions; but such is not the case. In the early days, the mines were worked on Sunday in the Keweenaw region; but through the resolute stand of two Scotchmen, who would not work on Sunday, the work was stopped on Sat.u.r.day night at twelve o'clock, and resumed again Monday at twelve A.M. And this was found to be a benefit all round, as it generally is. I knew of a salt-well where the man thought it must be kept going all the time; but one Sunday he let it rest, and found that, instead of coming up in little spits, it acc.u.mulated, so that, as he said, it came "ker-plump, ker-plump."

When the little church was first started in Calumet, the projectors of it were asked how much money they would want from the society to help them. The answer was, a check for two hundred dollars for home missions. Knowing this, I was not surprised to find good churches, good schools, good society, a good hotel, and as good morals as you can find anywhere. Not a drop of liquor is sold in Calumet. This shows what may be done by starting right; and there is no occasion for a mining-camp to be any worse except through criminal neglect of the owners.

We pa.s.s on to the new mines farther west, and what do we find? Saloons packed twenty in a block, dance-houses with the most degrading attachments, scores of young lives sacrificed to man's l.u.s.t, the streets dangerous after dark, and not pleasant to be on at any time.

The local newspaper thus heralded a dog-fight at the theatre, "As both dogs are in good condition, it will prove one of the most interesting fights ever seen on this range."

Here is the copy of an advertis.e.m.e.nt: "At the Alhambra Theatre.

Prize-fight, thirty rounds or more. Prize, $200,00. Don't mistake this for a hippodrome. Men in fine condition. Plucky. Usual price."

Here is another: "Sat.u.r.day, Sunday, and Monday, balloon ascension. A lady from the East will go up hanging by her toes. At a great height she will drop deeds of lots, the lucky possessor only to write his or her name to own the lot. Persons coming from a distance, and buying lots, will have railroad money refunded. Men leaving work, and buying, their wages paid. Everybody come and have a good time. Remember the date's Sat.u.r.day, Sunday, and Monday."

Here pandemonium reigned. What a place to raise a family! Thousands of little children were growing up under these awful conditions. I have gone up the lake more than once when innocent young girls were on the boat, expecting to find places at the hotel, only to meet with temptation and ruin; some committing suicide, some becoming more reckless than the brutes that duped them.

The harbor could be reached only by daylight, and with vessels of light draft; and no sooner were they unloaded than they steamed off again, not to return for a week. Thus there was no way for these unfortunate girls to get back if they wished, for it was a dense forest for thirty miles to the nearest railway point, in the meanwhile, worse than death came to those who fell into the clutches of such fiends in human shape.

One man, the chief owner there, threatened the bold rascals; but they said they would build their house upon a raft and defy him. He said, "I will cut you loose." They snapped their fingers at him, burnt his hotel, and shot him. Did this go on in the dark? No; the Chicago and Minneapolis and St. Paul's newspapers wrote it up. I spoke of it until warned I must not tell such awful things: it would be too shocking.

Into such awful places our minute-man goes, and takes his family too.

It is hard work at first, but little by little sin must give way before righteousness. It is strange that Christian men and women can draw incomes from these mines, and feel no duty towards the poor men who work for them. I met one such man upon the steamer coming from Europe. He had been over twice that season. He had made his thousands, and was going back with his family to travel in Egypt, and leave his children with their nurses at Cairo.

He admitted everything I told him about the condition of things on his own property; and in answer as to whether he would help, said, "No; it's none of my funeral." How any man could walk those streets, and see fair young girls drunk at nine A.M., and in company with some of the worst characters that ever disgraced humanity, and not feel his obligations to his Lord and fellow-man, is more than I can understand.