The "Pennsylvania Dutch" Colony on the Wabash
SLEEPY Obadiah Holman shivered and pulled the covers over his head, for gusts of wind were fanning his cheek.
"Sniff, snuff," said the wind. "Grunt—g-r-o-w-l!"
The boy jumped from his bed to the middle of the cabin's puncheon floor. Wide awake now, he listened. What was that sound?
A bear was smelling at his pillow through a crack between the logs of the wall.
Slowly his feet grew cold. Slowly his scalp began to itch.
Only that morning, Father George Rapp, the chief man of the town of Harmony, had said to his boy guest, "Better mix up wet clay with grass, Doby, and chink the hole by your bed, or some wild creature will come along and nip your nose while you are asleep."
At the moment of Father Rapp's command, Doby had been busy. Everybody in Harmony always was busy. The industry of the settlement was epidemic. Even growing boys caught it.
The Harmonists worked early and late. Their clean, blue, homespun-covered figures moved sedately through their gardens, fields and dairies, through their cocoonery and silk-factory, through their brickyard and woolen and oil mills. They toiled without hurry and without useless motions to the time of their own singing or to the music of their little German band.
Even the dogs climbed into the treadmills to do a daily task of turning the smaller machines.
Nothing was bought which they could possibly make themselves. All their surplus goods were sold to outside settlers. Thus, by never taking anything out of their treasury and by always putting something into it, they became so very rich that in 1825, ten years from the time they founded their settlement, Robert Dale Owen, a social experimenter, was glad to buy the town because it seemed to offer such a promise of prosperity to the communistic colony which he himself wanted to establish there.
After a few hours with the strong-willed Father Rapp, who kept the colony going so successfully, Doby had found himself as busyas the other Harmonists. As soon as it was suggested to him, he went to work driving half a dozen pegs into the wall between the logs, and on them laying a board which he had helped split from an oak-tree. He had been obliged to pick up his shavings and his scraps. No carpenter's litter was allowed to mar the perfect neatness and order of the spotless town.
In trying to live up to this high standard of tidiness, Doby had forgotten to daub the fresh clay over the place where his pounding had jarred the chinking out.
He had been proud of his work, for that board on its pegs formed his bed. It was such a comfortable bed with its homespun tick filled with leaves and its patchwork quilt on top.
Now on this very first night he was driven from it by a bear.
"But I'm not scared," said Doby to himself. "I just know I can't be scared. It's nothing but a she bear taking a walk."
While the bear strolled round the cabin and came back to try another sniff, strolled round the other way and came back for yet more sniffs, Doby stood in his linsey-woolsey bed-gown, wondering why he felt so chilly on an August night, and saying over and over in hismind: "I'm trusted to take care of myself. I'm trusted to look after this place. What ought I to do now?"
Doby and his father had been given the cabin to use while they were staying in this Posey County Eden, fifty miles up from the mouth of the Wabash.
As change was the only unchanging thing in Doby's moving life, he was not surprised to find himself alone at night in an outlying cabin of this quaint "Pennsylvania Dutch" colony, while his father, who had brought an important message from Vincennes to George Rapp and Frederick Rapp, his son, was still closeted in the house of those great men.
It had seemed easier in the bright sunset to say to his father, "I'll take care of this place while you are with the Rapps," than it did now all by himself in the dim cabin with that big brute pacing near.
He tried to think, "She can't get me."
Indeed she couldn't. The cabin was as stout as stout could be. The door was four inches thick. Its inside bar was of double strength. The windows were tiny. The wide chimney-top was withed across; nothing could drop down it.
"She can't get the stock."
Cows and oxen were secured in a log barn assnug as the cabin. Pigs were in a lean-to quite as strong. Chickens roosted in tall saplings no bear could climb.
Oh, the men who usually stayed in this cabin knew how to look after stock in the safest way! No one person owned the stock. Each man and woman in the community owned an equal share in every house and in every beast and every tool in the whole property. But no person owned any one thing, not even the clothes he wore. It was all a partnership affair.
"As long as I stay here I must act like one of the community family and do my share. I wonder if they have any partnership rules about bears? What harm can she do?
"She might trample the garden. She might steal the corn."
Another chill shook the small visitor.
"She has sneaked round the bear-traps. She has chosen the farthest-away field." He began to hope, "P'r'aps she won't go in the corn."
There were sounds outside which told him that she was doing the very thing he feared.
Doby silently crept up the ladder to the loft. He peered from its gable window.
The bear was walking along in the moonlight, standing up straight on her hind legs like a person in a fur overcoat.
Over the rail fence, which almost touched the corner of the cabin, she climbed exactly as his mother might have done.
She went down one corn row and up the next, pulling open the husks with her forepaws and examining each ear of the green corn. If it were well filled out and milky, she picked it and piled it, one ear after another, on her arm as his mother might have held firewood. When she had a dozen she walked to the fence and started to climb out of the field. She was not forty feet from Doby.
"Good," he thought. "Now she is going home."
In getting over the fence, she dropped an ear of corn. This provoked her and she threw the whole armload on to the ground. Then she turned back for more.
She could not have noticed Doby nor have suspected any harm, for she selected as much more corn. In the ear it is not easy to carry and she had the same luck with the second batch. As an ear slid out, she spitefully threw the rest away and turned into the field again.
"Oh, the wicked, wasteful thing!" raged Doby. "If she does that many times there won't be half a crop left in this garden."
He slipped down the ladder and stared at agun hanging on forked sticks over the door. It was a queer gun; the latest-style rifle with cap and ball, which was destined to replace the ordinary flintlock then used by most frontiersmen.
Traders on the river had explained the mechanism of this kind of gun to every passing emigrant. Doby thought: "I can remember every thing I've heard about that newfangled cap gun. Now is my chance to try it."
It was loaded. Every pioneer kept firearms ready for instant use.
Without a sound, Doby moved the table, put a stool on top of it and mounted to the rack.
He could not lift the gun from its place. It was a huge weapon. Even his fifteen-year-old shoulders and his stocky legs were not equal to the task of getting it down. He began to sweat as he glanced round the room. "What shall I do?"
His eyes caught a dark blotch of clothes hanging on the wall. "There are my best breeches. I know I look big in them. I reckon if I had them on I could handle the gun."
In desperate haste he tore off his bed-gown. He girded himself in the manlier garments. He made a final trial—a supreme test of his muscle—and—b-o-o-s-t-e-d the rifle over the hooks!
Remembering to keep the barrel pointed from him and to guard the trigger, he toiled at white heat and dragged the thing up the ladder, "'Cause there may be trouble, and if thereistrouble a high spot is the place for me."
He took a peep. The thief had already thrown away another armload, at the same place in the fence, almost under the window. She was in the field.
When she came back again she would be very close to him. He knew he could hit her. He meant to swing the rifle to his shoulder and to take careful aim. He braced his feet. He made the start. But he could not—he couldnot—positivelycould notraise that gun to his shoulder. It was more than five feet long and weighed a dozen pounds.
But nothing could stop him now. "I'll have to set it on a rest."
He pulled an old spinning-wheel close to the window. The bar held the gun at an angle, sloping downward. The distaff kept the butt from slipping. He sighted along the barrel's shining steel, training it on the length of fence where the bear was sure to come.
There was a queer thumping under his galluses. "I can't point it at her. But—if—she—gets—in—range—"
He held his eye on the sight and waited. He waited and waited and waited and waited. He grew numb with crouching and goose-fleshed with suspense.
"Suppose she went out the other way! Suppose she climbed some other part of the fence. Suppose—
"Ha! Here she is."
Doby pulled the trigger. The gun roared. The bear roared.
Flames sparkled round him. The gun's recoil kicked him end over end. Banged and battered, and rubbing his shoulder, he lay and blinked. If the safe end of the gun had done this to him, what might not its full cannon force have done to the bear?
He was quite prepared for the scene which was before him as he crawled shakily to the window and ventured a look below. The bear lay stretched out on a huddle of rails and corn.
"Of course she's dead." Doby breathed deep. "I know she must be. But—I guess I'll stay up here 'til pa comes. It won't be long before the folks who heard that gun will get here in a flock." He took another peep and another breath. "That is a big bear. Her pelt is almost prime now in the last of August." Hegot out his knife and examined its edge. A knife must be in perfect trim to skin a bear.
Then an entirely new suspicion dismayed the boy.
"The pelt of a community bear can't belong to any one person. Nearly a thousand people will each have a small share in it. Father George Rapp, the church and state, will direct Frederick Rapp, the business manager, to sell the pelt. Then we will all have an equal interest in the money after it is in the bank."
In the midst of its successes, the Rapp colony finally failed, as did Owen's socialistic colony after it. Both dwindled away after the strong leaders were gone. Both were forsaken, as all others like them have been, and always for much the same reason as Doby gave, when all by himself in the darkness the honest human nature in his soul said to the listening walls in a burst of indignation: "Iam the person who killed the bear.Iam the one who ought to have the pelt to do with as I please.I want my own things!Be sensible and sell the fur for money? Put the money in the bank? Own one and nine one hundred and seventy-eighth part of the proceeds? No! I'd like to have the pelt to sit on and to look at and to tell hunters about!"
Still another disagreeable thought came to him. It was so appalling that it turned him pale. "If we came here to live, my stone knife would be everybody's knife. I would have to bring my new dog here to be everybody's dog."
He took another peep at the bear. Then he gazed at the ideal town, perfect in its beauty of flower-hung artistic houses, perfect in its thrifty business arrangement, perfect in the justice of its laws.
He thought of happy-go-lucky old Vincennes, struggling to maintain herself under all sorts of faults and difficulties, of that promised foxhound who was already waiting for him, of the house that his father and mother had planned, and he tightened his galluses, jerked on his shoes, donned his cap, like a knight buckling on his armor, as he proclaimed aloud: "I shall let the town keep the pelt, because it is the polite thing to do. But I am glad that pa chose the other town to live in. I'm going to take my knife and get back home to old Vincennes!"
And so it happened, on account of this decision of the boy's and the more practical investigations of his father, that the stone knife found itself established on the farm which the Holmans bought near the old capital of the Northwest Territory.
There the flint entered upon an age of wood.
Out of the forest on the banks of the Wabash came the farm—by clearing.
Out of the forest rose a house and barn of logs.
Out of the forest were made the tools for the farm and the furniture for the house.
From the trees about them all the pioneers who settled in the Ohio Valley took most of their necessities and many of their luxuries.
The ax, the cross-cut saw, and the draw-knife cut the material for the heavy building. The father's Barlow knife and the son's stone one fashioned all the finer work upon it.
When the big fireplace was finished, Doby could sit in the glow of the back log with his foxhound at his knee in the long autumn evenings, and set his knife to the interesting task of making the utensils which the household needed. After that came the joy of whittling animal-traps, fiddles, darts, drums, bows and arrows, snow-shoes, sleds—anything—everything—the happiest boy in the world could want!