The Tobacco Tiller Part 1

The Tobacco Tiller.

by Sarah Bell Hackley.

FOREWORD

Behold, friend, a mult.i.tude traversing a road shaded at its edge by mighty plants whose leaves are thick, broad, and rank in their odor,--the nicotiana tabac.u.m. Who are they of the mult.i.tude?

They are those who have had to do with the making of the history of the weed whose cousins are the thorn-apple, and the night-shade, from the time its existence came to be known to the civilized nations.

Listen, friend, to the roll-call.

Ye whose bread was the banana,--whose garb was the sunshine,--whose G.o.ds were worshiped in the smoke-cloud from the burning leaf of the Petun,--whose weapons of war were arrows, poison-tipped in the oil of tobacco,--ye red barbarians of Central America, of the off lying islands, and of the farther northward country; ye from whom the world learned to use tobacco,--answer to your names!

Sir of the silken robe and waving plume,--dizzy with visions of the wealth of the Montezumas to be conquered,--you who in the beginning of the sixteenth century, presented the Indian weed to your Sovereign at Madrid,--Fernando Cortez--answer to your name!

Sir Frances Drake, the first son of Old England to look to the borders of the Peaceful Ocean,--bring forward Ralph Lane, starving pearl-hunter of Roanoke Island, whom you rescued. Answer, Lane, you who introduced the Indian custom of "drinking tobacco" into your country!

n.o.ble prisoner of the Tower,--chivalrous subject of Her Sovereign Majesty, Elizabeth, in whose honor was named the sunny land which grew the herb of enchantment,--you who made the herb fashionable in Britain,--Sir Walter Raleigh, answer to roll call!

Silversmith, maker of the pipe of silver of the Queen's Favorite, and of the scales that enabled him to ascertain the weight of the smoke of a pipeful of tobacco, and win his majesty's wager,--answer to your name!

You, whose name, by courtesy of the great Swedish student of nature, the Indian's weed bears,--John Nicot, of the Country of Charlemagne, answer roll-call!

And you, Madame, of the day-fair face, and the night-black heart, wife to one King, and mother to another,--huntress, builder of the Tuileries,--you, at whose feet lie the victims of that mid-summer night of horror, the eve of St. Bartholomew's Day,--you, Madame, first snuff-taker of Europe, and christener of the Herbe de La Reine,--Catherine de Medici,--murderess,--answer to roll-call!

Mariners of the Mediterranean, Merchants of Venice, Genoan tradesmen,--ye who enlightened the Levant, and the wide Continent to the borders of the deepest ocean, as to the intoxicating delights of the plant solanaceae,--your names are called!

Hear all ye, who by might of Sovereign rule, of priestly power, and example, have endeavored to drive the weed of the West from your domains,--answer to your names!

Unhappy prisoner of St. Helena, who in your day of power, secured to your Government the exclusive right of making and selling tobacco,--answer to your name!

Governor of Virginia,--compelled to adjust the proportion between the corn and the tobacco to be raised in the cleared lands,--when the colonists, mad with thoughts of gold, neglected the culture of that which they could eat, for that which they could sell,--Sir Thomas Dale,--answer roll-call!

Ye one hundred young women of "agreeable persons and respectable character," whose over seas pa.s.sage was paid with the tobacco of your husbands-to-be,--answer to your names!

All ye vast mult.i.tude concerned in the making of the past history of tobacco,--answer to roll-call!

They have answered, friend! they have pa.s.sed beyond our vision, and yet the tobacco shadowed highway is traversed by a great throng.

Who are they? They are the present day consumers of the weed of the red children of the woods,--they are the subjects of Edward, men of the Fatherland, of France, of Spain, of the cold barren steppes of Russia, of the parched plains of Africa, of the Americas, and the islands of the seas; soldiers, sailors, civilians, barbarians, infidels, Christians, the earth over, and their number is hundreds of millions!

Tobacco! Tobacco for the millions of the past! Tobacco for the millions of the present! Whence come the supplies for these? Whence come the supplies for these?

For a time, Virginia supplied the world, but the culture of the weed spread with its use, until it came to be grown in many parts of the old world.

The United States, however, produces more tobacco than any other country in the world, and of her great output,--Kentucky, possessed of the soil combined with conditions of climate that makes good tobacco in greater measure than any other of the States, raises more than one-third.

Within Kentucky's borders, friend, the number of the agricultural folk who depend for daily bread on crops of tobacco, is great. Every year's August sees more than three hundred thousand of Kentucky's rich acres, yellow green with the growing tobacco, and every year's March sees near three hundred millions of pounds of matured tobacco sent away.

The central and north central parts of the State, embracing the Blue Gra.s.s region, wherein lies the home of the great Pacificator, is known as the White Burley District, and is world-renowned for the quality and quant.i.ty of the famous White Burley tobacco, largely used in the domestic trade. Here this tobacco is produced at its best.

In the western part of the State, the lands south-bounded by the waters of the c.u.mberland, and over which, in the olden day, annual prairie fires swept, are known as the Regie, or Dark Tobacco district, and here are grown the dark heavy varieties of tobacco, adapted to the export trade.

A hard life the tobacco tiller's, friend. He who has not seen the tobacco grown, can have no conception of the physical hardships endured, the ceaseless toil, the care and the anxiety as to the likelihood of failure, that enter into the growing of a tobacco crop.

It is a crop that requires the very best quality of land on which to cultivate it, and the most arduous of toil in its cultivation. Work may be hard in another crop, but set the work necessary to raise any crop beside the labor entailed in a tobacco crop--from its beginning until it is ready for the manufacturer--and friend, it will be as the labor of the little lad who digs a miniature trench in the beach sands, beside the completed digging of the ca.n.a.l that will unite two oceans!

THE TOBACCO TILLER

CHAPTER I

MR. DOGGETT AT HOME

"Awake, awake my lyre, and tell thy silent master's humble tale."

"Dock and me went out this mornin' and sc.r.a.ped up about three tablespoonfuls o' frost offen that plank a layin' right thar by the fence,--yes, sir, three tablespoonfuls, nigh about. Ef we don't watch, some o' our terbaccer's a goin' to git ketched a standin'. Frost a holdin' off ontel the last o' September hain't seasonable. What you thenk about hit, Mr. Brock?"

The pale blue eyes, half-hidden by the bushy red side-burns that floated wildly out on either side of Mr. Doggett's face, like sunburnt bunches of broom sedge blown in a high wind, included all his audience with a comprehensive beam of agreeability. Finally these pleasant eyes rested, in the enforced deference due the most prosperous guest, on the thick-set man with the hog-like neck, and the enormous mole, that stood, sentinel-like beside the left nostril of his rose-colored, aquiline nose.

For reasons domestic and infantile, a portion of the Doggetts' Sunday's company,--Susie Dutton and Hattie Leeds, the two daughters, and Lem and Jim, the two married sons, the four spouses and the eight babes, had taken a reluctant mid-afternoon departure.

The unfettered guests, Mr. Nathan Lindsay, Gran'dad Doggett, who was staying with his daughter, Lindy Gumm, over on the River,--and Mr.

Galvin Brock (he of the mole and the nose) who had been young Callie Doggett's second husband, lingered.

Mr. Lindsay, who held himself a step above the Doggetts, but was not averse to a Sunday's visit to that hospitable household, had suggested that it was warmer outdoors than in the house. The three guests, with their host and his youngest son, sat in the pleasant warmth of the late afternoon's sunshine, at the woodpile on the west side of the house.

Mr. Brock's usual manner of answering a question was by an a.s.senting or dissenting grunt. This time, however, his mouth left its grim line an instant.

"If it keeps as dry as it is now," he observed, "n.o.body's tobaccer will see a killin' frost unhoused."

During the Civil War, Gran'dad Doggett, on account of what he called "a leetle shootin' sc.r.a.pe, but nothin' criminal," had brought his young family from Bell County, in the Kentucky Mountains, to the Blue Gra.s.s.

Before this flitting of necessity, he had been a Justice of the Peace, which fact, ever afterward caused him to affect an air of conscious superiority toward his son.

"More than that, Ephriam," he remarked, corroborating Mr. Brock's observation, "more than that, frost don't never kill in the dark o' the moon. I'd 'a' thought in the thirty year you've been a raisin'

terbaccer, you'd 'a' learned that!"

"That's right, old man, yes, sir"--Mr. Doggett's slow drawl was affable in the extreme--"that's jest what I told the boys. A body hain't no use to cross a bridge afore they gits to hit! Jim now, he wuz might' night'

wilted down along in July, afeerd the best part o' his crop wuz a Frenchin', but hit growed off all right, and now hit's the best terbaccer he's got! I'm afeerd he'll have too much fer his barn and he'll want to put some in mine.