A TYPICAL LOG HOUSEA TYPICAL LOG HOUSE.Page 46.
Here was a genuine pioneer: his house of logs, hinges wood, latch ditto, locks none; a black bear, three squirrels, a turtle-dove, two dogs, and a coon made up his earthly possessions. He was tired of the place.
"Laws, Elder! when I fust come ye could kill a deer close by, and ketch a string of trout off the doorsteps; but everything's sp'iled. Men beginning to wear b'iled shirts, and I can't stand it. I shall clear as soon as I can git out. Don't want to buy that b'ar, do ye?"
In this little town a grand minute-man laid down his life. He was so anxious toget the church paid for, that he would not buy an overcoat. Through the hard winter he often fought a temperature forty degrees below zero; but at last a severe cold ended in his death. His good wife sold her wedding-gown to buy an overcoat, but all too late; and a bride of a twelvemonth went out a widow with an orphan in her arms.
Yet the children of God are said to add to their already large store four hundred million dollars yearly, and some think of building a ten-million-dollar temple to honor God—while temples of the Holy Ghost are too often left to fall, through utter neglect, because we withhold the little that would save them. We shall never conquer the heathen world for Christ until we have learned the way to save America. Save America, and we can save the world.
Whatever may be the effect of immigrants in cities, the immigrant on the frontier has sent the country ahead a quarter of a century. In the first place, the pioneer immigrants are in the prime of life. They generally bring enough money to make a start. They need houses, tools, horses, and all the things needful to start. They seldom fail. Used to privation at home, they make very hardy settlers. In some States they comprise seventy per cent of the voters; and the getting of a piece of land they can call their own makes good citizens of them sooner than any other way. You can't make a dangerous kind of a man of him who can call a quarter section his own.
In order to show how the pioneer settlerfrom Europe prospers, let us begin with him at the wharf. There floats the leviathan that has a whole villageful on board,—over twelve hundred. They are on deck; and a motley crowd they appear, for they are from all lands. Here is a girl dressed in the picturesque costume of Western Europe, and here a man with a great peak to his hat, an enormous long coat, his beard half way down his breast, a china pipe as big as a small teacup in his mouth, his wife like a bundle of meal tied in the middle, with immense earrings, and an old colored handkerchief over her head. Behind them a half-dozen little ones with towheads of hair, looking as shaggy as Yorkshire terriers, blue-eyed and healthy. They are carrying copper coffee-pots and kettles; and away they march, eight hundred of them and more, up Broadway.
Here and there a man steps into a bakery, and comes out with a yard of bread, and breaks it up into hunks; and the little children grind it down withoutbutter, with teeth that are clean from lack of meat, with all the gusto of Sunday-school children with angel-cake at a picnic. They are soon locked in the cars, and night comes on. Go inside and you will see the good mother slicing up bolognas or a Westphalia ham, and handing around slices of black bread. After supper reading of the Bible and prayers; and then the little ones are put into sack-like nightgowns, and put up in the top bunks, where they lie, watching their elders playing cards, until they fall asleep.
In the morning you go up to one of the women who is washing a boy and ask, as you see the great number of children around her, whether they are all hers: she courtesies and says, "Me no spik Inglish;" but by pantomime you make her understand, and she laughingly says, "Yah, yah;" and you think of Russell's song,—
"To the West, to the West, to the land of the free,Where Mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea;Where a man is a man, if he's willing to toil,And the humblest may gather the fruits of the soil.Where children are blessings, and he who has most,Has aid for his fortune, and riches to boast;Where the young may exult and the aged may rest—Away, far away, to the land of the West!"
"To the West, to the West, to the land of the free,Where Mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea;Where a man is a man, if he's willing to toil,And the humblest may gather the fruits of the soil.Where children are blessings, and he who has most,Has aid for his fortune, and riches to boast;Where the young may exult and the aged may rest—Away, far away, to the land of the West!"
Their train is a slow one; it is side-tracked for the great fliers as they reach a single-track road.
The very cattle-trains have precedence of them. We watch their train as it reaches the great brown prairie; a little black shack or two is all you can see. The very tumble-weeds outstrip their slow-moving train; but after many weary hours they reach the end of the road, so far as it is built that day; it will go three miles farther to-morrow. As yet there are no freight-sheds, and they camp out on the prairie. The cold stars come out, the coyotes' sharp bark is heard in the distance, blended with the howl of the prairie wolf. Some of them dig holes in the side-hill, and put their little ones in them for the night. Tears come into the eyes of the mothers as they think of home and relatives beyond the seas.
And there we will leave them for twelve years, and then on one of our transcontinental palaces on wheels we will follow the immigrant trail. Where they passed black ash-swamps and marshes and scattered homes, we go through villages with public libraries; where they touched the brown prairie, we view a sea of living green; where they took five days, we go in two; where they stepped off at the end of the road, we stop at a junction whose steel rails run on to the Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico; where they made the shelter for their little ones in the ground, we find a good hotel, a city alive to the finger-tips, electric cars on the streets, an opera-house, and a high school just about to keep its commencement. On the street we notice some people that appear somewhat familiar, but we are not sure. When we spoke to them twelve years ago they said with a courtesy, "Me no spik Inglish;" but now without a courtesy they talk in broken English. The man has lost his big beard, his clothes are well-made; thewife is no longer like a bag of meal with a string around it. No; with a daily hint from Paris, she has all the feathers the law allows.
They are making for the high schoolhouse, and we follow them. A chorus of fifty voices, with a grand piano accompaniment, is in progress as we take our seats, after which a boy stands forth and declaims his piece. We should never know him. It is one of our tow-headed youngsters from the wharf. The old father sits with tears of joy running down his wrinkled face. He can hardly believe his senses. He remembers when his grandsire was a serf under Nicholas, and it seems too good to be true. But he hears the neighing of his percherons under the little church-shed; and by association of ideas his fields and waving grain, his flocks, herds, and quarter section, rise before his mind's view, and he opens his eyes to see his favorite daughter step on the platform dressed in white, and great June roses drooping on her breast; and the old man'seyes sparkle as his daughter steps down amid a round of applause as she says in the very spirit of old Cromwell, "Curfew shall not ring to-night."
And this is real. It has been going on for a quarter of a century. States with whole counties filled with Russians voting, and being the banner counties to have prohibition in the State's Constitution; or, like North Dakota, with nearly seventy per cent foreign voters, driving the lottery from them when needing money sorely. Men and women who could scarcely speak the English language living to see their sons senators and governors.
All the dismal prophecies about ruin from the immigrant are disproved as one looks over Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas to-day; and instead of having a great German nation on this side of the Atlantic, as one writer predicted, we have in the great agricultural States some of our stanchest American citizens.
One of the mightiest factors in humanlife to-day is the language we use. Three centuries ago there were about 6,000,000 using it; to-day 125,000,000 speak the English tongue. The Duke of Argyle was once asked which was the best language. He said, "If I want to be polite I use the French, if I want to be understood I take the English, if I want to praise my Maker I take the Gaelic, my mother-tongue." Foreigners coming here think in their own language, even though they may be able to speak in ours; gradually they come to think in English, but still they dream in their mother-tongue; at last they dream, think, and speak in the language of the land, and become homogeneous with the nation.
God's greatest gift to this New World is the foreigner. The thought came to me while on my way to Savannah: Why did not the discoverers of the Western Hemisphere find a higher civilization than the one they left? Why should God have kept so large a portion of theworld hidden from the eyes of Europe for thousands of years? Had he not some grand design that in the fulness of time he would lead Columbus, like Abraham of old, to found a new nation?
Take your map and find those States which the stream of immigration has passed by, and in every case you find them behind the times. Strange how prejudice warps our vision! Jefferson said, "Would to God the Atlantic were a sea of flame;" and Washington said, "I would we were well rid of them, except Lafayette." Strange words for a man who would not have been an American had his ancestors not been immigrants. Hamilton, the great statesman, was an immigrant. Albert Gallatin the financier, Agassiz the scientist, and thousands of illustrious names, make a strong list. One-twelfth of the land foreigners!—but one-fourth of the Union armies were foreigners too.
WHAT THEY BECOME.
When Linnæus was under gardener, the head gardener had a flower he could not raise. He gave it to Linnæus, who took it to the back of a pine, placed broken ice around it, and gave it a northern exposure. In a few days the king with delight asked for the name of the beautiful gem. It was the Forsaken Flower.
So there are millions of our fellow-men in Europe to-day, in a harsh environment, sickly, poor, and ready to die; but when they are transplanted, they find a new home, clothes, food, and, above all, the freedom that makes our land the very paradise for the poor of all lands. These immigrants have made the brown prairie to blossom as the rose, the wilderness to become like the garden of the Lord. They drove the Louisiana Lottery out of North Dakota; they voted for temperance in South Dakota. Their hearts beat warm for their native land, but they are true to their adopted country.
The mixture of the nationalities is the very thing that makes us foremost: it has produced a new type; and if we but do our duty we shall be the arbitrator of the nations. There is no way to lift Europe so fast as to evangelize her sons who come to us. Sixteen per cent go home to live, and these can never forget what they saw here; did we but teach them aright, they would be an army of foreign missionaries, fifty thousand strong, preachers of the gospel to the people in the tongue in which they were born, and thus creating a perpetual Pentecost.
One other great fact needs pointing out. The discovery of this land was by the Latin races; and yet they failed to hold it, lacking the genius for colonization for which the Anglo-Saxon is pre-eminent. During the last fifty years, over 13,000,000 immigrants have come to this land. Great Britain sent nearly 6,000,000; Germany, 4,500,000; Norway and Sweden, 939,603; Denmark, 144,858; the Netherlands, 99,522; Belgium, 42,102. Here wehave over 11,000,000 Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and Scandinavian, of the 13,000,000, and almost half of them speaking English, while Italy, Russia, Poland, France, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, and all other nations sent but 1,708,897 out of the 13,296,157. And we must note also that nearly all of the Latin races came within the last few years; so that we were a nation 50,000,000 strong before many of them came, and eighty per cent of all our people speak English.
No nation ever drove out its people without loss, as witness Spain and France with their Protestants and Huguenots. England took them, and they helped to make her great. Often when a nation has actually been conquered in war, she in turn conquers her victors and is made better. Germany conquered Rome; but Roman laws and Roman government conquered the invaders, and made Germany the mother of modern civilization. Norsemen, Danes, and Saxons invaded Britain, and drenched her fields in blood. The Normans broughttheir beef, their mutton, and their pork, but the English kept their oxen, sheep, and swine; and eventually from the Norman, Dane, and others came the Anglo-Saxon race. England has four times as much inventive genius as the rest of Europe, but America has ten times as much as England; and why? Because added to the English colony is all Europe; and in our own people we have the practical Englishman, the thoughtful German, the metaphysical Scot, the quick-witted Irishman, the sprightly Gaul, the musical and artistic Italian, the hardy Swiss, the frugal and clear-headed Swede and Norwegian; and all united make the type which the world will yet come to, the manhood which will recognize the inherent nobility of the race, its brotherhood, and the great God, Father.
A TYPICAL SOD HOUSEA TYPICAL SOD HOUSE.Page 61.
As the waves of the sea cast up all sorts of things, so the waves of humanity that flood the frontiers cast up all sorts and conditions of men. To go into a sod house and find a theological library belonging to the early part of the century, or to hear coming up through the ground a composition by Beethoven played on a piano, is a startling experience; so are some of the questions and assertions that one hears in a frontier Sunday-school.
I remember one old man who was in class when we were studying that part of the Acts of the Apostles where the disciples said, "It is not reason that we should leave the word of God and serve tables;" the old fellow said, "I have an idee that them tables was the two tables of stone that Moses brought down fromthe Mount." This was a stunner. I thought afterwards that the old man had an idea that they were to leave the law and stick to the gospel; but still it did not seem right to pick out men to serve the tables if that was what he meant.
Another would be satisfied with nothing but the literal meaning of everything he read. So when I explained to the class the modern idea of the Red Sea being driven by the wind so as to leave a road for light-laden people to walk over, the old man was up in arms at once, "Why," said he, "it says a wall;" and no doubt the pictures which he had seen in his youth, of the children of Israel walking with bottle-green waters straight as two walls on either side, and the reading of a celebrated preacher's sermon, where it spoke of the fish coming up to peep at the little children, as if they would like a nibble, confirmed the old man in his views.
In vain I told him that a wind that would hold up such a vast mass of water would blow the Israelites out of theirclothes; still he stuck to his position until I asked him whether, when Nabal's men told him that David's men had been a wall unto them day and night, he thought that David had plastered them together?
He said, "No; it meant a defence," and apparently gave in, but muttered, "It says a wall, anyway."
Another man told me that if a man cut himself in the woods, there was a verse in the Bible so that if he turned to it and put his finger upon it, the blood would at once stop running; and he wanted to know whether I knew where to find it. I told him I was very sorry that I did not know.
On the other hand, you may find a man with a Greek Testament, and well up in Greek, making his comments from the original. Here a Barclay & Perkins brewer from London, who has plunged into the woods to get rid of drink, and succeeded. Here a family, one of whom was Dr. Norman McLeod's nurse, and a playmate of the family. Another informsyou he preached twenty-five years, "till his voice give out;" and here a Hard-shell Baptist, who "don't believe in Sunday-schools nohow."
The minute-man at the front needs to be ready for all emergencies, for he meets all kinds of original characters. One of the most successful men I ever heard of was the famous Father Paxton described by the Rev. E. P. Powell in theChristian Registerin a very bright article from which I quote:—
When "blue," I always went down to the Depository, and begged him for a few stories. He rode a splendid horse, that was in full sympathy with his master, and bore the significant name, Robert Raikes. There were few houses except those built of logs, and these were not prejudiced against good ventilation. He laughed long and loud at his experience in one of these, which he reached one night in a furious storm. He was welcomed to the best, which was a single rude bed, while the family slept on the floor, behind a sheet hung up for that special occasion. Paxton was so thoroughly tired that he slept sound as soon as he touched the bed; but he half waked in the morning with the barking of a dog. The master ofthe house was shaking him, and halloing, "I say, stranger! pull in your feet or Bowser 'll bite 'em!" Stretching out in the night, he had run his feet through the side of the house, between the logs; and the dog outside had gone for them. The time he took in pulling in was so trifling as to be hardly worth the mention.Those who know little of frontier life can have no idea of the difficulties to be met by a man with Paxton's mission. There was one district, not far from Cairo, that was ruled by a pious old fellow who swore that no Sunday-school should be set up "in that kidntry." Some one cautioned "the missioner" to keep away from M——, who would surely be as good as his word and thrash him. M—— was a Hard-shell Baptist, and owned the church, which was built also of logs. He lived in the only whitewashed log house of the region. Instead of avoiding him, Father Paxton rode up one day, and jumping off Robert Raikes, hitched him to the rail that always was to be found before a Southern house. Old M—— sat straddle of a log in front of his door eating peaches from a basket. Paxton straddled the log on the other side of the basket, and helped himself. This was Southern style. You were welcome to help yourself so long as there was anything to eat. The conversation that started up was rather wary, for M—— suspected who his visitor was. Pretty soon Paxton noticed some hogs in a lot near them. "Mighty fine lot of hogs, stranger!""And you mought say well they be a mighty fine lot of hogs.""How many mought there be, stranger?""There mought be sixty-two hogs in that there lot, and they can't be beat."Just then a little boy went up and grabbed a peach."Mought that be your young un, stranger?" asked Paxton."As nigh as one can say, that mought be mine.""And a fine chap he be, surely.""A purty fine one, I reckon myself.""How many young ones mought you have, my friend?""Well, stranger, that's where you have me. Sally, I say, come to the door there! You count them childer while I name 'em—no, you name 'em, and I'll count."So they counted out seventeen children. Paxton had his cue now, and was ready."Stranger, I say," he said, "this seems to me a curious kind of a kidntry.""Why so, stranger?""Because, when I axed ye how many hogs ye had, ye could tell me plum off; but when I axed ye how many children ye had, ye had to count right smart before ye could tell. Seems to me ye pay a lettle more attention to your hogs than ye do to your childer.""Stranger," shouted M——, "ye mought sure be the missioner. You've got me, sure! You shallhave the church in the holler next Sunday, and me and my wife and my seventeen shall all be there."True to his word, he helped Paxton to establish a school. When I was in St. Louis, there was a Sunday-school convention there. A fine-looking young man came up to Father Paxton, who was then in charge of the Sunday-school Depository, and said,—"Don't ye know me, Father Paxton?""No," said Paxton; "I reckon I don't recall ye.""Well, I am from ——; and I am one of the seventeen children of M——. And I am a delegate here, representing over one hundred Sunday-schools sprung from that one."
When "blue," I always went down to the Depository, and begged him for a few stories. He rode a splendid horse, that was in full sympathy with his master, and bore the significant name, Robert Raikes. There were few houses except those built of logs, and these were not prejudiced against good ventilation. He laughed long and loud at his experience in one of these, which he reached one night in a furious storm. He was welcomed to the best, which was a single rude bed, while the family slept on the floor, behind a sheet hung up for that special occasion. Paxton was so thoroughly tired that he slept sound as soon as he touched the bed; but he half waked in the morning with the barking of a dog. The master ofthe house was shaking him, and halloing, "I say, stranger! pull in your feet or Bowser 'll bite 'em!" Stretching out in the night, he had run his feet through the side of the house, between the logs; and the dog outside had gone for them. The time he took in pulling in was so trifling as to be hardly worth the mention.
Those who know little of frontier life can have no idea of the difficulties to be met by a man with Paxton's mission. There was one district, not far from Cairo, that was ruled by a pious old fellow who swore that no Sunday-school should be set up "in that kidntry." Some one cautioned "the missioner" to keep away from M——, who would surely be as good as his word and thrash him. M—— was a Hard-shell Baptist, and owned the church, which was built also of logs. He lived in the only whitewashed log house of the region. Instead of avoiding him, Father Paxton rode up one day, and jumping off Robert Raikes, hitched him to the rail that always was to be found before a Southern house. Old M—— sat straddle of a log in front of his door eating peaches from a basket. Paxton straddled the log on the other side of the basket, and helped himself. This was Southern style. You were welcome to help yourself so long as there was anything to eat. The conversation that started up was rather wary, for M—— suspected who his visitor was. Pretty soon Paxton noticed some hogs in a lot near them. "Mighty fine lot of hogs, stranger!"
"And you mought say well they be a mighty fine lot of hogs."
"How many mought there be, stranger?"
"There mought be sixty-two hogs in that there lot, and they can't be beat."
Just then a little boy went up and grabbed a peach.
"Mought that be your young un, stranger?" asked Paxton.
"As nigh as one can say, that mought be mine."
"And a fine chap he be, surely."
"A purty fine one, I reckon myself."
"How many young ones mought you have, my friend?"
"Well, stranger, that's where you have me. Sally, I say, come to the door there! You count them childer while I name 'em—no, you name 'em, and I'll count."
So they counted out seventeen children. Paxton had his cue now, and was ready.
"Stranger, I say," he said, "this seems to me a curious kind of a kidntry."
"Why so, stranger?"
"Because, when I axed ye how many hogs ye had, ye could tell me plum off; but when I axed ye how many children ye had, ye had to count right smart before ye could tell. Seems to me ye pay a lettle more attention to your hogs than ye do to your childer."
"Stranger," shouted M——, "ye mought sure be the missioner. You've got me, sure! You shallhave the church in the holler next Sunday, and me and my wife and my seventeen shall all be there."
True to his word, he helped Paxton to establish a school. When I was in St. Louis, there was a Sunday-school convention there. A fine-looking young man came up to Father Paxton, who was then in charge of the Sunday-school Depository, and said,—
"Don't ye know me, Father Paxton?"
"No," said Paxton; "I reckon I don't recall ye."
"Well, I am from ——; and I am one of the seventeen children of M——. And I am a delegate here, representing over one hundred Sunday-schools sprung from that one."
Perhaps no man gets such a vivid idea of the dark and bright sides of frontier life as the general missionary. One week among the rich, entertained sumptuously, and housed with all the luxuries of hot air and water and the best of cooking; and then, in less than twelve hours, he may find himself in a lumber-wagon, called a stagecoach, bumping along over the wretched roads of a new country, and lodged at night in a log house with the wind whistling through the chinks where the mud has fallen out, to sit down with a family who do not taste fresh meat for weeks together, who are twelve miles from a doctor and as many from the post-office.
Nowhere in the world can a man so soon exchange the refinements of civilized life for one of hardship and toilas in a new country. Our minute-man must share with the settler all his toils, and yet often forego the settler's hope. The life among frontiersmen is apt to unfit a man for other work. His scanty salary will not allow many new books, and often his papers are out of date. The finding of a home is one of the worst of hardships. Let us start with the missionary to the front; our way lies through a rich valley. The moon is at her full, and we pass fine farms. The scent of the hay floats in at the car windows; fine orchards surround the houses, while great flocks of sheep are seen feeding, and herds resting, comfortably chewing the cud.
But morning comes, and we must change cars. We are in a city of 80,000 people, with 498 factories with 15,000 employees, where a few years ago a few log houses only were in sight. As we change cars we change company too. We left the train at a Union Station, with its green lawns and trim garden, tofind a station with old oil-barrels around it, the mud all over everything, the train filled with lumbermen, with their red mackinaw shirts and great boots spiked on the bottoms, and a comforter tied around the waist.
A few women are on the train, often none at all. Our new road is poorly ballasted, and the train bounces along like a great bumble-bee. The men are all provided with pocket-pistols that are often more deadly than a revolver. At the first station—a little mouse-colored affair, sometimes without a ticket-agent—we notice the change. The stumps are thick in the fields; many of the houses have the building-paper fluttering in the wind; the streets are of sawdust. You can see the flags growing up from the swamp beneath. The saloons are numerous; and as the train is a mixed one in more senses than one, abundant time is given while shunting the freight-cars for the men to reload their pocket-pistols and get gloriously drunk.
"Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious."
"Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious."
And so on we go again for forty miles, when all leave the train but one solitary man, who lies prostrate in the car, too big for our little conductor to lift, and so he goes to the terminus with us. It is getting late, and the last ten miles are through a wilderness of dead pines, with here and there a winding line of timothy and clover that has sprung up from seeds dropped by the supply teams. But presently we see a pretty stream with bosky glades, and visions of speckled trout come up; then an immense mill, and a village of white houses with green Venetian blinds, and a pert little church. We had expected some good deacon to meet us and take us home to dinner; but, alas! no deacon is waiting, or dinner either for some time. For out of eight hundred people only five church-members can be found, four of them women.
It well nigh daunts the minute-man's courage as he sees the open saloons, thebig, rough men, the great bull-terriers on the steps of the houses. The awful swearing and vile language appal him, and the thought of bringing his little ones to such a place almost breaks his spirits; but here he has come to stay and work. The hotel is his home until he can find a house for his family. There is but one place to rent in the town, and that is in a fearful condition. It is afterwards whitewashed and used as a chicken-coop. But at length a family moves away, and the house is secured just in time; for the new schoolmaster is after it, and meets the man on the way with a long face.
"You got the house?"
"Yes."
"What can I do? my goods are on the way!"
"Oh, they will build one for you, but not for a preacher."
"No, they won't. Could I get my things in for eight or ten days?"
"Oh, yes." The minister is so glad to get the place that he feels generous. Butthe good man stays eleven months; and he has besides his wife and child, a mother-in-law, a grandmother-in-law, a niece, aprotégée, and a young man, a nephew, who has come to get an education and do the chores. They are all very nice people, but it leaves the minute-man and his wife and four children with but three rooms. The beds must stand so that the children have to climb over the head-boards to get at them. The family sit by the big stove at their meals, and can look out on the glowing sand and see the swifts darting about; while in the winter the study is sitting-room and playground too.
But this is luxury. Often the minute-man must be content with one room, for which the rent charged may be extortionate. Even then he must keep his water in a barrel out in the hall. In cold weather perhaps it must be chopped before getting it into the kettle.
I knew of one man who lived in a log house. It had been lathed and plastered on the inside, and weather-boarded on theoutside, so that it was very warm, and so thick that you could not hear the storms outside, which raged at times for days together.
One day late in March a fearful snowstorm arose, and for three days and nights the snow came thick and fast. Luckily it thawed fast too. On the fourth day there was need for the minute-man to go for the doctor, who lived some miles away. On the road he engaged a woman to go to his house, where her services were in demand. After he had summoned the doctor the good man took his time, and reached home in the afternoon. He was greeted by a duet from two young strangers from a far land.
Night closed in fast; the house was so thick that no one suspected another storm; but on going out to milk the cow, it was storming again, and the man saw he had need to be careful or he would not find his way back from the barn, though it was only a few yards away.
When he reached the house, the goodlady visitor, who had insisted that she could not stay later than evening, gave up all hope of getting home that night. She stayed a fortnight! For this time the storm raged without thawing, and for three nights and days the snow piled up over the windows, and almost covered the little pines, in drifts fifteen feet deep. Not a horse came by for two weeks.
Once another man started in a storm on a similar errand; but in spite of his love, courage, and despair, he was overwhelmed, and sinking in agony in the drift, he never moved again. When the storm was over, the sun came out; and what a mockery it seemed! The squirrels ran nimbly up the trees, the blue jays called merrily; but the settlers looked over the white expanse, and missed the gray smoke that usually rose from the little log shanty.
The men gathered to break the roads; the ox-team and snow-plough were brought out, and the dogs were wild with delight as they ploughed up the snow with their snouts, and barked for very joy; but themen were sorrowful, and worked as for life and death. Half way to the house the husband was found motionless as a statue, his blue eyes gazing up into the sky. The men redoubled their efforts, and gained the house. The stoutest heart quailed. A poor cat was mewing piteously in the window. And when at last the oldest man went in, he found mother and new-born child frozen to death.
The South has two kinds of frontier,—that which has never been settled, and once thickly settled parts that have grown up to wild woods and wastes since the war. In old times the slave had a half-holiday on Saturday, which custom the colored brother still keeps up; and a more picturesque scene is not to be found than that presented by a town, say of three thousand inhabitants, where the county has seven colored people to one white.
Never was such a motley company gathered in one place,—old men with grizzled heads, all with a rabbit-foot in their pocket, a necklace for a charm around their necks, their bronzed breasts open to view; old mammies with scarlet bandannas; young belles of all shades—here a mulatto girl in pale-blue dress andpointed shoes, her waist as disfigured as any Parisian's, there a mammoth, coal-black negro driving a pair of splendid mules.
Here is an original turnout; it was once a sulky. The shafts stick out above the great ears of the mule; the seat has been replaced by an old rocking-chair; the wheels are wired-up pieces of a small barrel that have replaced some of the spokes, while fully half the harness is made up of rope, string, and wire. The owner's clothes are one mass of patchwork, and his hat is full of holes, out of which the unruly wool escapes and keeps his hat from blowing off.
The sidewalk presents a moving panorama unmatched for richness of color. As we leave the town, we ride past plantations that once had palatial residences, whose owners had from one to three thousand slaves, the little log cabins arranged around and near the house. In many cases the houses are still there, but dilapidated.
Here, where each white person was once worth on an average thirty thousand dollars, to-day you may buy land for a dollar an acre, with all the buildings. It is a lovely park-like country, with clear streams running through meadows, branching into a dozen channels, where the fish dart about; and the trees shade and perfume the air with their rich blossoms, and the whole region is made exquisitely vocal with the song of the peerless mocking-bird. Here, too, the marble crops out from the soil, and some of the richest iron ore in the world, all waiting for the spirit of enterprise to turn the land into an Eldorado.
To be sure, there are obstacles; but the Southern man of to-day was born into conditions for which he is not responsible, any more than his father and ancestors before him were responsible for theirs. And those that started the trouble lived in a day when men knew no better. Did not old John Hawkins as he sailed the seas in his good ship Jesus, packed withGuinea negroes, praise God for his great success? So we find the men of that day piously presenting their pastor and the church with a good slave, and considering it a meritorious action.
Time, with colonies settling in the new South, will yet bring back prosperity without the old taint, and keep step with all that is good in the nation. It cannot be done at once. I knew an energetic American who had built a town, and thought he would go South, and at least start another; but, said he, "I had not been there a week when I felt, as I rocked to and fro, listening to the music of the birds, and catching the fragrance of the jessamine, that I did not care whether school kept or not."
There is no great virtue in the activity that walks fast to keep from freezing. We owe a large portion of our goodness to Jack Frost.
Dr. Ryder tells a story of one of our commercial travellers who had been overtaken by night, and had slept in the homeof a poor white. In the morning he naturally asked whether he could wash. "Ye can, I reckon, down to the branch." A little boy belonging to the house followed him; for such clothes and jewellery the lad had never before seen. After seeing the man wash, shave, and clean his teeth, he could hold in no longer, and said,—
"Mister, do you wash every day?"
"Yep."
"And scrape yer face with that knife?"
"Yep."
"And rub yer teeth too?"
"Yep."
"Wal, yer must be an awful lot of trouble to yerself."
Civilization undoubtedly means an awful lot of trouble.
The frontier is the place to find all sorts of conditions and also of men. Monotony is not one of the troubles of the minute-man. He is frequently too poor to dress in a ministerial style, and quite often he is not known until he begins the services. This sometimes leads to the serio-comic, as witness the following:—
Our man was looking over a portion of the country where he wished to locate, and in making the necessary inquiries he asked many questions about homesteads and timber claims. Notice having been given that there would be preaching at the schoolhouse, the people assembled; and while waiting for the preacher, they discussed this stranger, whom they all thought to be a claim jumper. He certainlywas not a very handsome man. They proposed to hang him to the first tree. Trees were scarce there, and possibly that fact saved him. He came up while they were talking, entered the schoolhouse, and from the desk told them he was the preacher, and was going to settle among them. Here was a promising field, where people were ready to hang a man on their way to church. It is a fact that where we find people ready for deeds of this kind we have the material for old-fashioned revivals of the Cartwright type.
When Jesse James was shot, it was easy to find a man to preach a sermon full of hope to the bereaved relations, and to crown the ruffian with martyrdom.
The minute-man has some hair-breadth escapes. He comes upon a crowd of so-called vigilants, who have just hanged some men for horse-thievery; and, as he has on store-clothes, he narrowly escapes the same fate. In one instance he was able to prove too late that they hadhanged an innocent lad; and in that case the poor boy had not only pleaded his innocence but had explained that he was tired, and had been invited to ride by the gang who had stolen the horses, the men themselves corroborating his story; but it did not avail; and the poor boy was strung up, and a mother's heart was broken in the far East. Often these border ruffians act from unaccountable impulse, just as the Indians would torture some captives and adopt others from mere whim.
It is an awful commentary on the condition of things on our frontiers, that a man has a better chance of escape when he has murdered a fellow creature than when he has stolen a horse. And yet in this year 1895, I have seen a man who was trying in vain to sell a horse for $1.50.
To illustrate how much more valuable life is than gold, a minister relates this anecdote of a California miner who, to save a young girl in a shipwreck, threw his belt of gold away and saved her life. After the meeting was over a matronlywoman came up to him and said, "Sir, I was the young girl the miner saved." Or he enters a log house, and finds a beautiful woman and her no less beautiful daughter, and soon learns that, a few years before, they were moving among the brilliant throng that surround royalty in Europe; and in that little room the mother has the dress and some of the jewels in which she was presented to Queen Victoria. He finds them in the little log house, apparently contented; but there is a romance and a mystery here that many would like to unravel. Or, maybe, he enters the neat frame house of a broken-down Wall-street stockbroker, who with the remnants of his fortune hopes to retrieve himself upon his one hundred and sixty acre homestead, and who, with his refined and cultured family, makes an oasis in the desert for the tired missionary.
In the winter he sometimes rides a hundred miles to Conference, and time and again is upset as he attempts to passthrough the immense drifts. His harness gives way when he is miles from a house; and he must patch it up as best he can from the other harness, and lead one horse. He must learn to ride a tricking broncho, to sleep out on the prairie, to cover himself with a snowdrift to keep from freezing, and in case of extremity to kill his horse and crawl inside, perhaps barely to escape with his life as the warm body changes into a refrigerator. If he lives in a sod house, he must often put the sheets above his head to keep away the lizards that crawl out as the weather becomes warm, and an occasional rattler waking up from his torpid winter sleep. At times the rains thaw his roof out, and it drops too; and then he must reshingle with sod.
Often he is called to go forty and fifty miles to visit the sick, to sit up with the dying, and to cheer their last moments. He can and does do more useful work when attending the poor and sickly than in any other way. Many a family hasbeen won through the devotion of the minute-man to some poor little sufferer.
One day he meets a man hauling wood with a pair of wretched mules. The man is dressed in blue denim, the trousers are stuffed into boots that are full of holes. A great sombrero hat is on his head. By his side is a beautiful young woman. She is the wife. He finds on inquiry that the man has been a brilliant preacher, writer, and lecturer; yet here, two thousand miles from his Eastern home, he is hauling railway ties for a living.
I once visited a family living in a house so small that the kitchen would barely hold more than one person at a time. There was a sick man there, whom I used to call upon two and three times a week. In order to turn himself, he had a leather strap hung from the rafters. The woman of the house was of a cruel disposition. She was the second wife of the sick man's brother, and had a daughter who was about thirteen years of age, but who waslarge for her years. I used to find this child working about in her bare feet and singing, "I'm so glad that my Father in heaven." And I felt quite encouraged, as the child had a bad reputation.
One day this girl came to the parsonage and brought a silver napkin-ring, saying it was a New Year's gift, and that her mother was sorry she could not have engraved upon it "For my dearpasture." My wife said we ought not to take it; but I replied,—
"Yes; these people get fair wages, and would feel offended."
So we kept it. Some days after, as two men were felling a large pine-tree which was hollow at the base, they were surprised to see albums, bracelets, napkin-rings, combs, spoons, and other articles falling out. About this time a saleswoman had been missing just such things from her counter; and it was soon discovered that my youthful convert was a first-class kleptomaniac, equal to anycity thief of the same class. Her mode of operation was to call the woman's attention to something on the shelf behind her; then taking anything within reach, and with an "Oh, how pretty!" she would decamp.
I met the mother on my way to visit the sick man. "O Elder!" she said, "I am in a peck of trouble. That gal of mine has cleared off on a raft with a lumberman, and she has been stealing too. What shall I do?"
As I knew that the woman had tied the girl's tongue with whip-cord, and beaten it with birch bark until it bled, to cure her of lying, I said, "You had better send her to the Reform School." It appeared afterward that the man who had run off with the girl was a minister's son; and he said in court he had taken pity on the girl, and wanted to save her from the cruelty of her mother. The girl was sent to the Reform School at Adrian, but not before she had given the sheriff the slip, and taken anothergirl with her, getting as far as Rochester, N. Y., before she was recaptured.
Sometimes in these frontier towns the sermon is stopped in a most unexpected way. I remember one good man preaching on Jacob. An old woman, who was sitting on the front bench, became deeply interested; and when the minister said, "When the morning came, Jacob, who had served all these long years for his wife, found not the beautiful Rachel, but the weak-eyed Leah," the old lady broke out with "Oh, my God, what a pity!" That ended the discourse, and the benediction was omitted.
In another back settlement a young student was preaching on the Prodigal Son. "And what, my friends, would you have done had your son come home in that way after such conduct?" The answer was prompt, "I would have shot the boy, and saved the calf."