The Project Gutenberg eBook ofFrontier BalladsThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Frontier BalladsAuthor: Joseph Mills HansonIllustrator: Maynard DixonRelease date: March 28, 2014 [eBook #45240]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by David Widger from page images generouslyprovided by The Internet Archive*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRONTIER BALLADS ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Frontier BalladsAuthor: Joseph Mills HansonIllustrator: Maynard DixonRelease date: March 28, 2014 [eBook #45240]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by David Widger from page images generouslyprovided by The Internet Archive
Title: Frontier Ballads
Author: Joseph Mills HansonIllustrator: Maynard Dixon
Author: Joseph Mills Hanson
Illustrator: Maynard Dixon
Release date: March 28, 2014 [eBook #45240]Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Widger from page images generouslyprovided by The Internet Archive
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRONTIER BALLADS ***
010m
011m
CONTENTS
MY CREED
I. SOLDIER SONGS
DAKOTA MILITIA
THE GIRL OF THE YANKTON STOCKADE
THE BALLAD OF SERGEANT ROSS
THE SPRINGFIELD CALIBRE FIFTY
A GARRISON CHRISTMAS
TROOP HORSES
A KHAKI KICK
SERGEANT NOONAN EXPLAINS
LARAMIE TRAIL
II. PRAIRIE SONGS
THE CALL OF THE WIND
THE FUR TRADERS
COWBOY SONG
CHRISTMAS EVE AT KIMBALL
A LAMENT
JESUS GARCIA
A CHRISTMAS LETTER
THE COYOTEVILLE PEACE MEETING
THE SONG OF THE WINCHESTER
PRAIRIE FIRE
III. RIVER SONGS
THE MISSOURI
THE OLD CARRY
JAKE DALE
THE ENGINEER OF THE "GOLDEN HIND"
THE "PAULINE"
AFTERGLOW
NOW, this is the simple, living faith of a humble heart and mind,
Drunk up from the storm-brewed Western streams, breathed inwith the prairie wind.
My paints are crude and my pictures rude, but if some worththey show
Which those may see who have thoughts as free, the rest maylet them go.
I hold that the things which make earth good may work mostharm in use
If the wit of men heed not the line 'twixt temperance and abuse,
For speech or mood, or drink or food may be a curse at will,
Though, rightly weighed, they only aid the cup of life to fill.
I hold that the silent sea and plain, the mountain, wood, anddown.
Are better haunts for the feet of men than the streets of theroaring town,
And that those who tread for the price of bread in the thronginghives of toil
Will stronger grow with the more they know of the kiss of thevirgin soil.
I hold that our sons should learn to love, not gods of gold andgreed,
But the virile men of brain and brawn who served our country'sneed,
And should more delight in a clean-cut fight, stout blade andcourage whole,
That the morbid skill of a critic's drill in the core of a sin-sicksoul.
Three stars that shine on the trail of life can make man'spathway bright,
And one is the strength of the living God, that stands in hisheart upright,
And one is a noble woman's love, on which his heart may lean,
And one is the sight of his country's flag, to keep his couragekeen.
Who knows the balm of the summer's calm or the chords of theblizzard's hymn
And finds not God in blast and breeze, his sense is strangely dim.
For he whose ear is attuned can hear the very planets sing
That the soul of man, by a God-wrought plan, is the heir ofcreation's King.
Who feels the joy of the golden days with her who shares hismood
In the sun-washed wastes of the prairie hills or the breaks ofthe tangled wood;
Who has won the fate of a steel-true mate, real comrade, friendand wife,
He tastes the kiss of Elysian bliss in instant, earthly life.
Who sees the gleam of the Stars and Stripes, on land or seadisplayed,
Atilt in the reek of the battle-smoke or aloft o'er the marts oftrade—
Unless his veins are the sluggish drains for the blood of a craven race.—
He will gain new life for a better strife, whatever the odds heface.
So that is the rede and the homely creed of one who has spelledit forth
In the rivers' sweep and the splendors deep of the stars of thehardy North;
To some, I ween, it may seem but mean; too short, too blunt, too plain,
But if those I touch who have felt as much, it will not have beenin vain.
NO "scare-heads" in big city papers,
No "puffs" in Department reports,
No pictures by "special staff artists"
Of assaults on impregnable forts;
We are far from the war-vexed Potomac,
Our fights are too small to make news;
We are merely Dakota militia,
Patrolling the frontier for Sioux.
Three hundred-odd "empire builders,"
Gathered in from three hundred-odd claims,
Far scattered across the wide prairies
From Pierre to the mouth of the James.
Perhaps they seemed little or nothing,
Our losses, our toil, and our pain,
The rush of the war ponies, tearing
Through cornfields and yellowing grain;
The whoop of the hostile at midnight,
The glare of the flaming log shacks,
A beacon of hate and destruction
As we fled, with the foe at our backs;
Our women and young driven, weeping,
Exhausted, half-naked, afraid,
To the refugee huts of Vermillion
Or the sun-smitten Yankton stockade.
Small things to a Nation embattled,
But great to the pioneer band
Who are blazing the roads of the future
Through the wastes of a wilderness land.
We plod past the desolate coulées
In the sweltering afternoon heat.
While the far ridges shine in a waving blue line
Where the earth and the brazen sky meet.
No sound save the hoofs of the column
As they swish through the dry prairie grass,
No life anywhere save a hawk, high in air,
Gazing down as we wearily pass.
There is never a foe we may grapple
In the heat of a steel-clashing fray.
For the quarry we hunt is a shadow in front
That flits, and comes never to bay;
A feather of smoke to the zenith,
The print of a hoof in the sod,
A shot from the grass where the far flankers pass
Sending one more poor comrade to God.
Would we rest when the day's work is over
And the stars twinkle out in the sky?
There is double patrol round the lean water-hole
And the picketed horses hard by.
Breast-down in the rain-rutted gully.
With muskets clutched close in our hands,
The hours of night drag their heavy-winged flight
Like Eternity's slow falling sands.
While the Great Dipper, pinned to the Pole Star,
Swings low in the dome of the North
And, faint through the dark, sounds the prairie wolf's bark
Or a snake from the weeds rustles forth.
And the darkness that chokes like a vapor
Is thronged with the visions which come
Of children and wife and the dear things of life
That peopled the lost cabin home.
Till the East flushes red with the morning
And the dawn-wind springs fresh o'er the plain,
And the reveille's note from the bugle's clear throat
Calls us up to our labors again.
We were not in the fight at Antietam,
We never have seen Wilson's Creek,
We were guiding our trains over Iowa's plains
While the shells at Manassas fell thick,
But we're waging a war for a new land
As the East wages war for the old,
That the mountains and plains of the red man's domains
May be brought to Columbia's fold,
And though only a squad of militia
That the armies back East never knew,
We are playing a game which is largely the same
With the truculent, turbulent Sioux.
024m
YES, it's pretty, this town. And it's always been so;
We pioneers picked it for beauty, you know.
See the far-rolling bluffs; mark the trees, how they hide
All its streets, and, beyond, the Missouri, bank-wide,
Swinging down through the bottoms. Up here on the height
Is the college. Eh, sightly location? You're right!
It has grown, you may guess, since I've been here; but still
It is forty-five years since I looked from this hill
One morning, and saw in the stockade down there
Our women and children all gathered at prayer,
While we, their defenders, with muskets in rest
Lay waiting the Sioux coming out of the West.
They had swept Minnesota with bullet and brand
Till her borders lay waste as a desert of sand,
When we in Dakota awakened to find
That the red flood had risen and left us behind.
Then we rallied to fight them,—Sioux, Sissetons, all
Who had ravaged unchecked to the gates of Saint Paul.
Is it strange, do you think, that the women took fright
That morning, and prayed; that men, even, turned white
When over the ridge where the college now looms
We caught the first glitter of lances and plumes
And heard the dull trample of hoofs drawing nigh,
Like the rumble of thunder low down in the sky?
Such sounds wrench the nerves when there's little to see;
It seemed madness to stay, it was ruin to flee.
But, handsome and fearless as Anthony Wayne,
Our captain, Frank Ziebach, kept hold on the rein,
Like a bugle his voice made us stiffen and thrill—
"Stand steady, boys, steady! And fire to kill!"
So the most of us stayed. But when dangers begin
You will always find some who are yellow within.
We had a few such, who concluded to steer
For the wagon-train, parked in the centre and rear.
They didn't stay long! But you've heard, I dare say,
Of the girl who discouraged their running away.
What, no? Never heard of Miss Edgar? Why, sir,
Dakota went wild with the praises of her!
As sweet as a hollyhock, slender and tall,
And brave as the sturdiest man of us all.
By George, sir, a heroine, that's what she made.
When her spirit blazed out in the Yankton stockade!
The women were sobbing, for every one knew
She must blow out her brains if the redskins broke through,
When into their midst, fairly gasping with fright,
Came the panic-struck hounds who had fled from the fight.
They trampled the weak in their blind, brutal stride,
Made straight for the wagons and vanished inside.
Then up rose Miss Edgar in anger and haste
And grasped the revolver that hung at her waist;
She walked to the wagon which nearest her lay,
She wrenched at the back-flap and tore it away,
Then aiming her gun at the fellow beneath
She held it point-blank to his chattering teeth.
"Go back to your duty," she cried, "with the men!
Go back, or you'll never see sunrise again!
Do you think, because only the women are here,
You can skulk behind skirts with your dastardly fear?
Get out on the ground. Take your gun. About, face!
And don't look around till you're back in your place!"
Well, he minded; what's more, all the others did, too.
That girl cleared the camp of the whole scurvy crew,
For a pistol-point, hovering under his nose,
Was an argument none of them cared to oppose.
Yet so modest she was that she colored with shame
When the boys on the line began cheering her name!
Well, that's all; just an echo of old border strife
When the sights on your gun were the guide-posts of life.
Harsh times breed strong souls, by eternal decree,
Who can breast them and win—but it's always struck me
That the Lord did an extra good job when He made
Miss Edgar, the girl of the Yankton stockade.
028m
029m
THE south wind's up at the break of dawn
From the dun Missouri's breast,
It has tossed the grass of the Council Hill
And wakened the flames on its crest;
The flames of the sentry fires bright,
Ablaze on the prairies pale,
Where sixty men of the Frontier Corps
Are guarding the Government Trail.
A rattle of hoofs from the northern hills,
A steed with a sweat-wrung hide
And Olaf Draim, of the Peska Claim,
Swings off at the captain's side.
A limb of the sturdy Swedes is he,
Marauders in days of old,
But the swart of his face is stricken white
And the grip of his hand is cold.
"Now, hark ye, men of the Frontier Corps,
I ride from the Beaver Creek,
Where I saw a sight at the grim midnight
That might turn a strong man weak.
"Chief Black Bear's out from the Crow Creek lands,
The buzzards his track have showed;
Last eve he pillaged at Old Fort James,
To-day on the Firesteel road,
"And Corporal Stowe, of the Frontier Corps,
On furlough to reap his grain,
At the Peska stage-house lieth dead
With his wife and his children twain."
Then up and spoke First Sergeant Ross,
Who had bunked with Corporal Stowe:
"By the glory of God, they shall pay in blood
The debt of that dastard blow!
"Ye know the path to the Crow Creek lands;
It is sown with this spawn of hell,
And there's deep ravine and there's plum-hedge green
To shelter a foeman well.
"Now, who of my comrades mounts with me
For a murdered mess-mate's wrong,
That the Sioux who rides with those scalps at his side
May swing from a hempen thong?"
Of three-score men there were only ten
Would gird for that chase of death.
Quoth Ross: "As ye please. For the cur, his fleas,
But men for the rifle's breath."
They have tightened cinches and passed the lines
Ere the lowland mists have flown;
The men are astride of the squadron's best,
And Ross, of the Captain's roan.
They ride till the crickets have sought the shade;
They ride till the sun-motes glance;
And they have espied on a far hillside
The whirl of the Sioux scalp-dance.
Then it's up past the smouldering stage-house barn
And out by the well-curb's marge;
The Sioux are a-leap for the tether-ropes:—
"Revolvers! Guide centre! Charge!"
The Sioux, they flee like a wild wolf-pack
At the flick of the shot-tossed sod,
Six braves have lurched to the fore fetlocks
And two of the Sergeant's squad.
But Ross has tightened his sabre-belt
And given the roan his head,
And set his pace for a single chase,
A furlong's length ahead.
He has set his pace for the chief, Black Bear,
Who shrinks from a strong man's strife
But flaunts in the air the long, brown hair
Of the scalp of the Corporal's wife.
The eight, they follow like swirled snow-spume,
A-drive o'er an ice-bound bar,
But the redskin's track is the dim cloud-wrack
That streams in the sky afar.
They ride till the hearts of their steeds are dead
And they gallop with lolling tongues,
And the tramp of their feet is a rhythmic beat
To the sob of their panting lungs.
And two are down in a prairie draw
And three on a chalk-stone ledge.
And three have won to the Bon Homme Run
And stuck in the marsh-land sedge.
But Black Bear's horse still holds the course,
Though her breath is a thick-drawn moan,
And a length behind is the straining stride
Of the Captain's steel-limbed roan.
The Sergeant rides with a loose-thrown rein,
Nor sabre nor shoot will he
Till the pony has pitched at a gopher mound
And flung her rider free;
And Ross has wrenched the knife from his hand
And smitten him to the ground;—
"Did ye think to win to the Bijou Hills,
Ye whelp of a Blackfoot hound?
"I had riddled your carcass this six miles back
And left ye to rot on the plain,
Had the blood of the slaughtered not called on me
That I hail ye to Peska again,
"To point this lesson to all your tribe.
That the price of a white man's soul
No longer goes, in the mart of death,
Unpaid to its last dark goal.
"Wherefore, that your tribesmen may see and feel
The cost of a white man's wrong,
And to sweeten the rest of my mess-mate's kin,
Ye shall swing from a hempen thong."
He has slung the chief to the saddle-bow,
Triced up in his own raw-hide,
And has borne him back to the stage-house yard,
All bleak on the green hillside.
And they swung him at dawn from a scaffold stout,
As a warning to all his kind,
To fatten the birds and to scare the herds
And to sport with the prairie wind.
033m
WAS wrought of walnut blocks and rolled rod steel,
I was hammered, lathed, and mandrelled, stock and plate,
I was gauged and tested, bayonet to heel,
Then shipped for service, twenty in a crate.
For I was the calibre fifty,
Hi!—dough-boys, you haven't forgot
The click of my tumblers shifty
And the kick of the butt when I shot?
I was nothing too light on your shoulder,
You were glad when you stacked me o' nights,
But I'd drill an Apach'
From the thousand-yard scratch
If you'd only hold straight on the sights—old sights!
My trusty old Buffington sights!
In oil-soaked chests at Watervliet I've laid,
I have rusted in Vancouver through the rains,
I have scorched on Fort Mohave's baked parade,
And caked with sand at Sedgwick on the plains.
For I led every march on the border,
And I taught every rookie to fight;
Though he'd curse me in close marching order,
Lord!—he'd hug me on picket at night
As he thought of the herd-guard at Buford
When Sitting Bull swooped within reach,
And 'twas every man's life,
It was bullet and knife
Had my cartridges jammed in the breech—lock breech!
In my solid block, hammer-lock breech!
It was I who lashed the Modocs from their lair
With Wheaton in the Tule Lava Bed;
It was I who drove Chief Joseph to despair
When I streaked the slopes of Bear Paw with his dead.
For I was a proof most impressive—
The Springfield the infantry bore—
To redskins with spirits aggressive
That peace is more healthful than war;
I showed them on Musselshell River
And again, yet more plain, at Slim Butte;
They were plucky as sin
But they had to come in
When they found how the Springfield could shoot—
Shoot, shoot!
How my blue-bottle barrel could shoot!
I was Vengeance when, with Miles through trackless snow,
The "fighting Fifth" took toll for Custer's fall;
I was Justice when we flayed Geronimo;
I was Mercy to the famished horde of Gall.
Oh, I was slow-plodding and steady;
Not hot, like the carbine, to raid,
But when he found trouble too ready
He was glad of his big brother's aid;
For sometimes he'd scatter the outposts,
Then wait, if the foe proved too stout,
Till, at "Front into line!"
It was business of mine
While the infantry volleyed the rout—rout, rout!
While I cleared out the village in rout!
But those years have sped; long silent are my lips;
Now my sturdy grandson rules the host I knew,
And a drab-clad army trusts his five-shell clips
As of old the blue-clad held my one shot true.
Still, my dotage takes solace of glory
From my turbulent youth and its scenes.
As vivid with valorous story
As the isles of the far Philippines.
Though the steel-jacket smokeless is sovereign
And I'm proud of my name on his crest,
It was black smoke and lead
When the skirmish lines spread
With the Springfield that conquered the West—West,
West!
With the hard-fighting arm of the West!