The Minute Man of the Frontier Part 6

One brother, over eighty years of age, walks fifteen miles, and preaches three times. Some of his sermons take two hours in delivery, without the aid of a sc.r.a.p of note; and the talk for days after is on the sermon. No quarterlies, monthlies, or weeklies lie at home to divert. No lecturer strays to that region. Here and there is a village house with an organ or a piano, and, of course, a paper.

I am speaking of the rural South,--and nearly all the South is rural, nearly all American, even the cities, with few exceptions, and the operatives are Southern, and mostly from the farms; so that one may find a city whose operatives live in another State, across a river, in a community numbering nearly seven thousand souls, and most of them keeping pigs and a cow (or, rather, not keeping them, for they roam at their own sweet will down gra.s.sy, ungraded streets). In such a place one meets old ladies of quite respectable appearance, with the little snuffing-stick in their mouths, or a pipe; and here one small grocery shop may sell two hundred dozen of little tin snuff-boxes in a month! There are cities in the South where you will find as fine hotels and stores as any on the continent. But from any such city it is only a step to the most primitive conditions.

Let me describe a characteristic night scene near a large city. My friend met me at the depot with his little light wagon and diminutive mule, and we started for the homestead. Our road lay between banks of honeysuckle that saturated the air with its rich perfume; wild-goose plum, persimmon, bullice, and chinquapin (the latter somewhat like a chestnut, but smaller), huckleberries on bushes twelve feet high, called currants there, lined the road on either side. The house was surrounded by the _debris_ of former corn-cribs and present ones; stables were scattered here and there in picturesque confusion. One end of the house was open, and had been waiting for years for its chimney; there was shrubbery of every kind all about. I had the usual hearty welcome and supper, and then attended the inevitable meeting in the grove.

In the glare of the setting sun everything seemed indescribably wretched; but it was May, and night came on apace. The stars in the deep blue glowed like gems; and then the queen of night on her sable throne threw her glamour over the scene, and the stencil-marked ground became a fairy scene. High perched upon a mighty oak the mistress of the grove rained music on the cool night air,--first a twitter like a chaffinch, then an aria worthy of Patti, then the deep notes of the blackbird, then a whip-poor-will, then a grand chorus of all the night-birds.

A short breathing-spell, and off on another chorus, and so the whole night through. When we awoke the music still poured from that wondrous throat of the American mocking-bird. How calm, how peaceful, was the scene, how pure the air! The lights went out from neighboring cots, and the heavenly hosts seemed to sing together once more the song of Bethlehem--but alas! Herod plots while angels sing. Not far off is another little house with its small outbuildings. This night it is occupied by a mother and three children. The father is away attending a religious meeting. The servant who usually sleeps in the house when the man is away gives a trifling excuse and sleeps in the shed. Before retiring she quietly unfastens the pin which holds the shutter. At midnight the mother is awakened from her troubled sleep and sees the shadow of a man, and then another shadow, and still another. The children shrink to the back of their bunk. Oh, what a triple crime was enacted under that peaceful sky! Morning came. The mocking-bird still sang, and cheered the returning husband. But alas, it was a mocking song for him; for instead of pleasant welcomes, he found his wife delirious, and his children cowering like hunted partridges in a neighbor's house. The frenzied husband, soon joined by friends made furious by the atrocious crime (so common in the South), soon hunted the ravishers of the little home; and when the moon arose the next night, the beauty of the scene was marred by three black corpses swinging from a bridge.

X.

THE NORTH-WEST.

The first impression a man has of the North-west is like Pats in St.

Patrick's Cathedral,--"Begorra, it's bigger inside than out."

Take the map, and see what a little thin strip the upper peninsula of Michigan makes. Now start on the best train at St. Ignace in the morning, and it is eight at night before you reach the copper regions or the Gogebic Range. When I lived in St. Ignace, and the connections were poor, it took two days to travel from that port to Calumet. If we went by water we had to sail forty miles east before we doubled Point Detour; and then we threaded our way among scenes of beauty equal to the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence. Every mile of the way is alive with historic interest. In St. Ignace lie the bones of Father Marquette; across the Straits, Mackinaw City, where the terrible ma.s.sacre occurred, spoken of by Parkman; midway, is Mackinaw Island, called by the Indians The Great Turtle.

Here to-day on the Island are the old block forts, and here the little iron safe in which John Jacob Astor kept his money when in the fur-trade. Full of natural beauty, to-day the past and present crowd one another. Here are Indians, half-breeds, and Americans, and modern hotels. There are no mosquitoes; for the Island is but three miles in diameter, and the wind blows too strong for them. Here you may find the lilac in full bloom on the Fourth of July, and in the fall delicious blue plums that have not been hurt by the black knot. The daylight is nearly eighteen hours long in midsummer. The people are sowing oats when the southern farmers in the State are thinking of cutting theirs. In April, near Grand Rapids, I picked the arbutus. In early May, at Vanderbilt, I picked it again, and saw pure white snow in patches in the woods. Later in May I saw it again north of the Straits of Mackinaw, and in June I found it in the Keweenak Peninsula.

At Hanc.o.c.k I saw a foot of snow compressed under the cordwood, and some between buildings not exposed to the sun. On account of the lateness of the season, pease escape the bugs, which are elsewhere so destructive; and thousands of bushels of seed are sent every year to the upper Peninsula.

But to return to St. Ignace. It is so unlike any other American town, that I did not wonder at an old lady of over ninety, who was born there, speaking of her visit to Detroit as the time when she went to the States. Here the old Catholic church dates back to the early days of French settlement. The lots run from the water-front back. Your Frenchman must have a water-front, no matter how narrow. So the town was four miles long, and composed mostly of one street, which followed the water-front; and although there were four thousand people living there in 1884, and we had a mayor, the primeval forest came right into the city.

The only house I could get was new,--so new that we moved in while the floors were still wet. The lumber in it was green, and we could not open the sashes for months; but before winter came, the shrinkage caused the windows to rattle like castanets. To get our furniture there, we had to cross the railway tracks twice,--once the regular road, and then the branch which ran to the great furnace at the point.

And yet so new was everything in this old town, that our street had not been graded, and our wagons had to cross land where they sunk up to the axles. A few miles up the road the deer, the wolves, and black bear lived; and no less than eleven deer were seen in the road at one time near Allenville. We moved in the month of June, and put up our base-burner, and started the fire.

The climate is delicious from June to October; the air and waters are as clear as crystal. You can see fish forty feet below you, and the color of the pebbles at the bottom. There is an indescribable beauty about these northern sh.o.r.es; the tender green of the larch-fir, or tamarack, the different shades of blue-green among the cedars, the spruce, hemlock, and balsam, mixed with the lovely birch, and multi-colored rocks, make up some of the loveliest scenery on the continent. Little islands, so small that but one or two trees can find root, up to the islands that take hours to steam by, while the streams team with trout and grayling, the lakes with white-fish, muskalonge, and mackinaw trout and herring. Thousands of men are engaged in the fisheries, and millions of dollars are invested.

You sit at your door, and can see the home and people of old France, with their primitive canoe, and at the same time see propellers of three thousand tons' burden glide stately by.

XI.

A BRAND NEW WOODS VILLAGE.

It does not take long to build a new village on the prairie,--the hardest work, the clearing of the ground, is already done; but here in the dense forest it is a different thing, even when the railway runs through it. First the men go in, and begin to clear the ground. It is virgin soil, and not an inch of ground but has something growing.

Giant maples--some of them bird's-eye, some curly--are cut down and made into log heaps; black walnuts are burned up, that, made into veneer, would bring thousands of dollars.

Such was the state of things within twelve years. To-day it is different. The settler will take a quarter section, bark the trees to find the desired kind, cut them down, and leave for another section.

Rich companies came in, and began to devastate the forests to make charcoal, until the State had to make a law that only a certain number of acres in the hundred may be cut.

In some few cases women will go with their husbands, and sometimes one woman will find herself miles and miles away from another. I visited one such house; and while the good woman was getting the dinner ready, I strolled about and took notes. On the rude mantel-shelf, I saw some skulls, and asked what kind of an animal they belonged to. She said,--

"Oh! them's beavers' skulls. My! I wish we had some beavers here now; I would make you some beaver-tail soup."

"Why, did you have them here since you came?"

"Oh, yes! plenty of them. When I got lonesome--and that was pretty much every day--I used to go and watch them build their dams. I don't know how they did it; but I have seen them sink a log so that it would stay put, and not come up. I tried it dozens of times, but could not do it. I had lots of time, nothing to read, and the nearest town fifteen miles away. I used to think I should go mad sometimes, and even a land-hunter coming from outside was a G.o.dsend. Indeed, I remember one coming here, and he took sick, and died in spite of all we could do. We had neither boards nor planks, nothing but logs. So we slipped two flour-barrels over him, and he looked real nice. We buried a little boy too. I keep the graves clear of weeds, and plant flowers about them, and often sit there with my work and think of those early days."

"How long ago was that?" I asked.

"Four years ago! Why, you know there wan't no railway then; but now,--why, I got Zeke to cut down the trees, and I can see the trains go by with parlor cars and sleepers. There'll be one pretty soon if it is on time." And sure enough, in a few minutes a long train thundered by.

Sometimes a train stopped near us, and hundreds of men from the south of Ohio came with their dogs, guns, and men-servants, and went hunting and fis.h.i.+ng; and, strange as it may seem, you can find ten times as many deer to-day as you could forty years ago. The settling of new lands has driven them into closer quarters, and the game-law does much good. The State fish-hatcheries supply the streams with fry; and at times the men sent out to stock the streams get misled by the settlers, who show them the different streams, and only too late they find they have put the whole stock of young fry into the same stream.

The average conscience is not yet fine enough to see anything but a joke in this.

But to the building of our village. Often at first no house has more than one room. The men are making their homes, and will stop to cut out a piece of the log, and make a place for a little child's doll.

Cupboards, too, are made in the same way.

Water is one of the indispensable necessities; and, as a rule, the town will be built on a stream, or near a spring. Sometimes wells have to be dug over a hundred feet deep. Arrow-heads, and implements of the chase, and bones of men and extinct races of animals, turn up.

In one town I visited, before the wells were dug, the water for drinking was brought in barrels on flat cars, while melted snow answered for was.h.i.+ng.

"But what did you do when that was gone?" I asked.

"Well, the maple-sap begun to run, and then the birch, which was better; but lor! you couldn't iron nothin'."

I pa.s.sed a little log house standing out of line with the street; and I thought it was a chicken-coop, and asked why it was built that way.

"My!" said the woman with a laugh, "that ain't a chicken-coop; that's our first meeting-house. Us women built that. We had one or two old men to help, and the children; and we women did the rest. We were quite proud of it too. It cost fourteen dollars complete. For the minister's chair we cut down a barrel, and covered it with green baize."

A minister writes, "My room is one end of the garret of a log house, where I can barely stand erect under the ridgepole. My study-table and bookcase I made from rough boards. As I sit writing, I look forth from a window two by three, upon a field dotted with stumps, log huts, and charcoal kilns, and skirted with dense forests."

While I was visiting this section, a woman showed me her hands cracked with the frost. The tears came to her eyes as she said, "I tell ye it's pretty hard lines to have to milk cows when it is forty below zero." No man can imagine the arduous work and the awfulness of life in a northern winter. What is a joy to the well-dressed, well-fed man, with his warm house and the comforts of a civilized community, is often death to the poor minute-man and settler on the frontier. I have sat by the side of the minute-man, and heard from him a story that would bring tears to the eyes of the most cynical.

One man I shall never forget, a good hardy Scotchman, with a brave little wife and four children. His field was near Lake Superior; his flock poor homesteaders and Indians. The winters have a hundred and fifty days' sleighing; the frost sometimes reaches 50 below zero, and is often for days together 30 below; so that when it suddenly rises to zero, one can hardly believe it is freezing. Here is his story:--

"We were twelve miles from a doctor; and towards spring two of our children complained of sore throats. It proved to be diphtheria. We used all the remedies we had, and also some herbs given us by an old squaw; but the children grew worse, and we determined to go back to the old settlement. My wife carried the youngest, and I the next one.

The other children walked behind, their little legs getting scratched with the briers. We had twelve miles to go to reach the steamer. When we got there, one of the little ones died; and before we reached home the other expired. We buried our two treasures among the friends in the cemetery; and after a while I said to my wife,--

"'Shall we go back to the field? Ought we to go?'

"Her answer was, 'Yes.'

"We went back. Our old paris.h.i.+oners were delighted to see us; and soon we were hard at work again. Winter came on, and G.o.d gave us another little one. You may be sure he had a double welcome; but as the cold became intense, our little lamb showed signs of following his brothers. I tried to keep my wife's spirits up, while I went about my work dazed. At last the little fellow's eyes seemed so large for his face, and he would look at us so pitifully, that I would break down in spite of myself.

"He died; and the ground was frozen over six feet deep, and we had to bury him in a deep snow-bank that nearly covered our little shanty. My wife would go out nights when she could hear the wolves howling, and stand with an old Paisley shawl over her head, while I was miles away preaching to a handful of settlers in a log cabin; and when I would return I would find her there keeping watch, and sometimes I would have hard work to get her into the house. Pardon these tears, my brother, but come they will."

He need not have said it; my own were running, though my head was turned away.

Yes, we weep, and hold on to our money, while brave men and women, with their little ones, suffer for the lack of it, and lay down their lives for those who come after them. How men and women can live in fine homes, and spend ten times as much on luxuries as they give to the Lord, and still sing they love his kingdom, is more than I can understand --except it be they don't mean what they sing.