Woman on the American Frontier Part 34

Such was the condition of frontier society and education when Miss M. came to Illinois. Her immediate field of labor was a wide prairie, over which were thinly scattered the cabins of the pioneer families. There were no books, no school house, no antecedent knowledge of what was needed. But under the advice and suggestions of this intelligent young lady every want was, in a measure, supplied. A rough structure, with logs for seats, and planks for benches, was soon prepared, books provided, and the children gathered together into the comfortless room, where Miss M. made her first essay as a preceptor of the little pioneers.

The children were like wild things caught and confined in a cage. Their restlessness was a severe tax to the patience of the delicate girl. The long walk to and from the school room in all weathers, through the snows of winter, the mud of spring, and against the blast which sweeps those plains, formed no small part of her labor. Luxuries and even comforts were denied her. They gave her the best they had, but that was poor enough. Her chamber was an unplastered loft; her bed a shakedown of dried gra.s.s. The moonbeams showed her the crevices where the rain trickled in, and the snow fringed her coverlid. Her fare was of the coa.r.s.est, and her social intercourse, to her sensitive nature, was almost forbidding.

But she never swerved from the course she had marked out, nor shrank from the labors and duties incident to her mission. Her body, extremely fragile, was the tenement of an intellect of premature activity and grasp, a native delicacy, sensibility, and great moral force. She was a born missionary, and in the difficult and trying career which she had chosen, she showed courage, self-denial, tenacity of purpose, which, combined with a sweetness of disposition, soon made her beloved by her scholars and enabled her to soften their wildness, smooth their rudeness, and impress upon their minds the lessons of knowledge which it was her study to impart.

In sunshine or storm her presence was never wanting at her post of duty. On the dark mornings of winter she could have been seen convoying her little _proteges_ through the driving sleet, or the snow, or slush, and those rough but not unkindly parents scarcely dreamed that her life was waning.

The vivid carnation of her cheeks was not painted by the frosty air, nor by the scorching heat of the iron box which warmed her little charges as they gathered beneath the ethereal splendors of her eye in the school room. The destroyer had set his seal upon her, but her frail body was swayed and animated by the spirit whose energies even mortal disease could not subdue.

The discovery of the sacrifice was too late, though, all that rude kindness and unlearned thoughtfulness could do was lavished upon her in those few days that remained to her. Months of exposure, hardship, solitude of the soul, and intense ambition in her n.o.ble mission had done their work, and before the light of the tenth day after she was driven to her couch, had faded, surrounded by a score of her pupils, she pa.s.sed away, and was numbered in the army of missionary heroines and martyrs.

Those brave labors and that n.o.ble life was not for nought. The lessons taught those pupils, the high example set before them, and the life expended for their sake were not lost or forgotten. Some of those little scholars have grown to be good and useful men and women, and are now repeating, in other schools, farther towards the setting sun, the lessons and example of devotion which they learned from the teacher who gave her life that they might have knowledge.

The place which woman, as an educator, now fills, and so long has filled upon the frontier, is not bounded, however, by the home-school, nor by the district school, in both of which she is the teacher of the young. She is the educator of the man. She moulds and guides society.

The home where she rules is the center and focus from which wells out an influence as light wells out from the sun. The glow of the fireside where the mother sits, is a beacon whose light stretches far out to guide and guard.

The word "home," as used among the old races of Northern Europe, contains in its true signification something mystic and religious. The female patriarch of the household was regarded with superst.i.tious veneration. Her sayings were wise and good, and the warrior sat at her feet on the eve of battle and gathered from her as from an oracle, the confidence and courage which nerved him for the fight; and today the picture of an aged mother sitting by the hearth, and the recollection of her counsels, is a source of comfort and strength to many a son who is far away fighting the battle of life. The home and mother is the polar-star of absent sons and daughters.

She who sat by the cradled bed of childhood, "the first, the last, the faithfulest of friends," she, the guardian of infancy, is the loving and never to be forgotten guide of riper years. As far as thought can run upon this earthly sphere, or memory fondly send back its gaze, so far can the influence of a mother reach to cheer, to sustain, to elevate, and to keep the mind and heart from swerving away from the true and the right.

One who received his early training from a mother's lips in a frontier State, and afterward attained to wealth and influence in one of our mountain republics, lately told the writer that he kept the picture of his mother hanging up in his chamber, where it was the last object which his eyes lighted on before retiring, and the first upon rising; and whenever he was about to adopt any new course, or commence any new enterprise into which the question of right or wrong entered, he always asked himself, "what will my mother say if I do thus and thus?" That mother's influence was upon him though a thousand miles away from her, and the thought of her in the crises of his life was the load-star of his strong heart and mind.

We may well imagine those hardy sons who are now building up our empire in the Rocky Mountains, as finding in a mother's portrait a tie which binds them fast to the counsels and the love of their earliest guardian, and that as they gaze on the "counterfeit presentment" of those endeared features, they might long to hear again the faithful counsels which guided their youth, exclaiming with the poet,

"O, that those lips had language! life has pa.s.sed With me but roughly since I saw thee last."

We have elsewhere spoken of the refining and humanizing influence of woman, amid the rude and almost barbarous atmosphere of frontier life. The mother moulds and trains the child, the wife moulds and trains the husband, the sister moulds and trains the brother, the daughters mould and train the father. We speak now of moulding and of training in a broader sense than they are embraced in the curriculum of books. The influence exerted is subtle, but not the less potent. _Woman is the civilizer par excellence_.

Society in its narrower meaning exists by her and through her. That state of man which is best ordered and safest, is only where woman's membership is most truly recognized.

Man _alone_ gravitates naturally towards the savage state. Communities of men, such as exist in some of our most remote territories, are mere clubs of barbarians. They may be strong, energetic, and brave, but their very virtues are such as those which savages possess.

Into one of the loneliest valleys in the Rocky Mountains, some years since, fifty men, attracted by the golden sands which were rolled down by the torrents, built their huts and gave the settlement a name. There were cabins, a tavern, and a bar-room. There were men toiling and spending their gain in gambling and rioting. There was rugged strength and hardihood.

There was food and shelter, and yet there was no basis for civil and social organism, as those terms are properly understood, because no wife, no mother, no home was there.

Those strong and hardy men clove the rock and sifted the soil, and chained the cataract, but their law was force and cunning, and the only tie they recognized was a partnership in gain. What civilization or true citizenship could there be in a society in which the family circle and its kindred outgrowth--the school and the church--were unknown! The denizens of that mountain camp slid, by an irresistible law of gravitation, away from civil order, from social beneficence, and from humanity. They gorged themselves, and swore, and wrangled, and fought, and like the "dragons of the prime,"

they tore each other in their selfish greed for that which was their only care.

Into this savage semi-pandemonium entered one day, two unwonted visitors--the wives of miners who had come to join their husbands. Polite, kind, gentle, intelligent, and pious, their very presence seemed to change the moral atmosphere of the place. All the dormant chivalry of man's nature was awakened. Their appearance in the midst of that turbulent band was a sedative which soon allayed the chronic turmoil in which the settlement was embroiled. The reign of order commenced again: manners became softened, morals purified: the law of kindness was re-established, and slowly out of social chaos arose the inchoate form of a well-ordered civil society.

This ill.u.s.trates woman's influence in one of the peculiar conditions of our American frontier communities. But in all other phases of true pioneer life, her influence is as strongly, if not as strikingly displayed as a humanizing, refining, and civilizing agent.

We have said that woman is the cohesive force which holds society together.

This thesis may be proved by facts which show that power in all those relations in which she stands to the other s.e.x. In cultured circles she shapes and controls by the charms of beauty and manner. But in the lonely and rude cabin on the border her plastic power is far greater because her presence and offices are essentials without which development dwindles and progress is palsied. There, if anywhere, should be the vivified germ of the town and the state. There, if anywhere, should be the embryonic conditions which will ripen one day into a mighty civil growth. A wife's devotion, the purity of a sister's and a daughter's love, the smiles and tears and prayers of a mother--these make the sunshine which transforms the waste into a paradise, the wild into a garden, and expands the home by a law of organic growth into a well ordered community.

The basis of civil law and social order is the silent compact which binds the household into one sweet purpose of a common interest, a common happiness. Woman is the unconscious legislator of the frontier. The gentle restraints of the home circle, its calm, its rest, its security form the unwritten code of which the statute book is the written exponent.

The cross is emblazoned on the rude entablature above the hearth-stone of the cabin, and where woman is, there is the holy rest of the blessed sabbath. She, who is the child's instructor in the truths of revealed religion, is also the father's guide and mentor in the same ways. Faith and hope in these doctrines as cherished by woman are the sheet anchors of our unknit civilizations.

Law is established because woman's presence renders more desirable, life, property, and the other objects for which laws are made.

Religion purifies and sanctifies the frontier home because she is the repository and early instructress in its Holy Creeds.

The influence that woman exerts on man is one that exalts: while she educates her child she elevates and enn.o.bles the entire circle of the family.

If we cast our eyes back over the vast procession of actors and events which have composed the migrations of our race across the continent, from ocean to ocean, we are first struck by the bolder features of the march. We see the battles, the feats of courage and daring, the deeds of high enterprise in which woman is the heroine, standing shoulder to shoulder beside her hero-mate. Again we look and see the wife and mother worn with toils and hardships, and wasted with suffering which she endures with unshaken heart--a miracle of fort.i.tude and patience. Then we behold her as the comforter and the guardian of the household amid a thousand trying scenes, soothing, strengthening, cheering, and preserving.

Grand and beautiful indeed are such spectacles as these. They rivet the eye, they swell the breast, they lift the soul of the gazer, because they are an exhibition of great virtues exercised on a wide field, in a n.o.ble cause--the subjugation of the wilderness, and the extension of the area of civilization. The hero who fights, the martyr who dies, the sufferer who bleeds, the spirit of kindness and sympathy which comforts and confirms are objects which call for our tears, our praise, our grat.i.tude. But after all, these are incidents merely, glorious and soul-stirring indeed, yet scarcely more than superficial features and external agencies of the grand march, compared to the moral influence which emanates from the wife and mother in a million homes and through a million lives with a steadfastness and power and beneficence which can best be likened to the sunshine.

We praise it less because it is everywhere. We hardly see it, but we know that it is present, and that society--frontier society--could not long exist without that penetrating, shaping, elevating force. And so while we applaud the heroine we may not forget the patient and often unconscious educator.

When the philosophical historian of the future collects the myriad facts upon which he is to base those generalizations which show the progress of the race upon this continent, and how that progress was induced, he will draw from woman's record a n.o.ble array of names and virtues, and a vast mult.i.tude of good, kind, and brave deeds, but he will not forget to take note also of the silent agencies, and the un.o.btrusive but ever-present influence of woman which will be found to outweigh the potency of the stronger and more brilliant virtues with all the acts that they have wrought.

And so it is to-day. As we gaze fixedly on the great expanse which the record of our time unrolls, we see high up on the majestic scroll a thousand bright and speaking evidences of woman's silent agency in the building of a new empire upon our dark and distant borderland.