Vandemark Township and Monterey County, as any one may see by looking at the map of Iowa, had to be reached from Wisconsin by crossing the Mississippi at Dubuque and then fetching across the prairie to the journey's end; and in 1855 a traveler making that trip naturally fell in with a good many of his future neighbors and fellow-citizens pressing westward with him to the new lands.
Some were merely hunting country, and were ready to be whiffled off toward any neck of the woods which might be puffed up by a wayside acquaintance as ignorant about it as he. Some were headed toward what was called "the Fort Dodge country," which was anywhere west of the Des Moines River. Some had been out and made locations the year before and were coming on with their stuff; some were joining friends already on the ground; some had a list of Gardens of Eden in mind, and meant to look them over one after the other until a land was found flowing with milk and honey, and inhabited by roast pigs with forks sticking in their backs and carving knives between their teeth.
Very few of the tillers of the soil had farms already marked down, bought and paid for as I had; and I sometimes talked in such a way as to show that I was a little on my high heels; but they were freer to tack, go about, and run before the wind than I; for some one was sure to stick to each of them like a bur and steer him to some definite place, where he could squat and afterward take advantage of the right of preemption, while I was forced to ferret out a particular square mile of this boundless prairie, and there settle down, no matter how far it might be from water, neighbors, timber or market; and fight out my battle just as things might happen. If the woman in the wagon was "scared to death" at the sight of the prairie, I surely had cause to be afraid; but I was not. I was uplifted. I felt the same sense of freedom, and the greatness of things, that came over me when I first found myself able to take in a real eyeful in driving my canal-boat through the Montezuma Marsh, or when I first saw big waters at Buffalo. I was made for the open, I guess.
There were wagon trails in every westerly direction from all the Mississippi ferries and landings; and the roads branched from Dubuque southwestward to Marion, and on to the Mormon trail, and northwestward toward Elkader and West Union; but I had to follow the Old Ridge Road west through Dubuque, Delaware, Buchanan and Blackhawk Counties, and westward. It was called the Ridge Road because it followed the knolls and hog-backs, and thus, as far as might be, kept out of the slews.
The last bit of it so far as I know was plowed up in 1877 in the northeastern part of Grundy County. I saw this last mile of the old road on a trip I made to Waterloo, and remember it. This part of it had been established by a couple of Hardin County pioneers who got lost in the forty-mile prairie between the Iowa and Cedar Rivers about three years before I came in and showed their fitness for citizenship by filling their wagon with stakes on the way back and driving them on every sightly place as guides for others--an Iowa Llano Estacado was Grundy Prairie.
This last bit of it ran across a school section that had been left in prairie sod till then. The past came rolling back upon me as I stopped my horses and looked at it, a wonderful road, that never was a highway in law, curving about the side of a knoll, the comb between the tracks carrying its plume of tall spear grass, its barbed shafts just ripe for boys to play Indian with, which bent over the two tracks, washed deep by the rains, and blown out by the winds; and where the trail had crossed a wet place, the grass and weeds still showed the effects of the plowing and puddling of the thousands of wheels and hoofs which had poached up the black soil into bubbly mud as the road spread out into a bulb of traffic where the pioneering drivers sought for tough sod which would bear up their wheels. A plow had already begun its work on this last piece of the Old Ridge Road, and as I stood there, the farmer who was breaking it up came by with his big plow and four horses, and stopped to talk with me.
"What made that old road?" I asked.
"Vell," said he, "dot's more as I know. Somebody, I dank."
And yet, the history of Vandemark Township was in that old road that he complained of because he couldn't do a good job of breaking across it--he was one of those German settlers, or the son of one, who invaded the state after the rest of us had opened it up.
The Old Ridge Road went through Dyersville, Manchester, Independence, Waterloo, and on to Fort Dodge--but beyond there both the road and--so far as I know--the country itself, was a vague and undefined thing. So also was the road itself beyond the Iowa River, and for that matter it got to be less and less a beaten track all the way as the wagons spread out fanwise to the various fords and ferries and as the movers stopped and settled like nesting cranes. Of course there was a fringe of well-established settlements a hundred miles or so beyond Fort Dodge, of people who, most of them, came up the Missouri River.
Our Iowa wilderness did not settle up in any uniform way, but was inundated as a field is overspread by a flood; only it was a flood which set up-stream. First the Mississippi had its old town, away off south of Iowa, near its mouth; then the people worked up to the mouth of the Missouri and made another town; then the human flood crept up the Mississippi and the Missouri, and Iowa was reached; then the Iowa valleys were occupied by the river immigration, and the tide of settlement rose until it broke over the hills on such routes as the Old Ridge Road; but these cross-country streams here and there met other trickles of population which had come up the belts of forest on the streams. I was steering right into the wilderness; but there were far islands of occupation--the heft of the earliest settlements strongly southern in character--on each of the Iowa streams which I was to cross, snuggled down in the wooded bottom lands on the Missouri, and even away beyond at Salt Lake, and farther off in Oregon and California where the folk-freshet broke on the Pacific--a wave of humanity dashing against a reef of water.
Of course, I knew very little of these things as I sat there, ignorant as I was, looking out over the grassy sea, in my prairie schooner, my four cows panting from the climb, and with the yellow-haired young woman beside me, who had been wished on me by the black-bearded man on leaving the Illinois shore. Most of it I still had to spell out through age and experience, and some reading. I only knew that I had been told that the Ridge Road would take me to Monterey County, if the weather wasn't too wet, and I didn't get drowned in a freshet at a ferry or slewed down and permanently stuck fast somewhere with all my goods.
"Gee-up," I shouted to my cows, and cracked my blacksnake over their backs; and they strained slowly into the yoke. The wagon began chuck-chucking along into the unknown.
"Stop!" said my passenger. "I've got to wait here for my--for my husband."
"I can't stop," said I, "till I get to timber and water."
"But I must wait," she pleaded. "He can't help but find us here, because it's the only way to come; but if we go on we may miss him--and--and--I've just got to stop. Let me out, if you won't stop."
I whoaed up and she made as if to climb out.
"He may not get out of Dubuque to-day," I said. "He said so. And for you to wait here alone, with all these movers going by, and with no place to stay to-night will be a pretty pokerish thing to do."
Finally we agreed that I should drive on to water and timber, unless the road should fork; in which case we were to wait at the forks no matter what sort of camp it might be.
The Ridge Road followed pretty closely the route afterward taken by the Illinois Central Railroad; but the railroad takes the easiest grades, while the Ridge Road kept to the high ground; so that at some places it lay a long way north or south of the railway route on which trains were running as far as Manchester within about two years. It veered off toward the head waters of White Water Creek on that first day's journey; and near a new farm, where they kept a tavern, we stopped because there was water in the well, and hay and firewood for sale. It was still early. The yellow-haired woman, whose name I did not know, alighted, and when I found that they would keep her for the night, went toward the farm-house without thanking me--but she was too much worried about something to think of that, I guess; but she turned and came back.
"Which way is Monterey Centre?" she asked.
"Away off to the westward," I answered.
"Is it far?"
"A long ways," I said.
"Is it on this awful prairie?" she inquired.
"Yes," said I, "I guess it is. It's farther away from timber than this I calculate."
"My lord," she burst out. "I'll simply die of the horrors!"
She looked over the trail toward Dubuque, and then slowly went into the house.
So, then, these two with all their strange actions were going to Monterey County! They would be neighbors of mine, maybe; but probably not. They looked like town people; and I knew already the distance that separated farmers from the dwellers in the towns--a difference that as I read history, runs away back through all the past. They were far removed from what I should be--something that I realized more and more all through my life--the difference between those who live on the farms and those who live on the farmers.
There was a two-seated covered carriage standing before the house, and across the road were two mover-wagons, with a nice camp-fire blazing, and half a dozen men and women and a lot of children about it cooking a meal of victuals. I pulled over near them and turned my cows out, tied down head and foot so they could bait and not stray too far. I noticed that their cows, which were driven after the wagon, had found too fast for them the pace set by the horse teams, had got very foot-sore, and were lying down and not feeding--for I drove them up to see what was the matter with them.
Before starting-time in the morning, I had swapped two of my driving cows for four of their lame ones, and hauled up by the side of the road until I could break my new animals to the yoke and allow them to recuperate. I am a cattleman by nature, and was more greedy for stock than anxious to make time--maybe that's another reason for being called Cow Vandemark. The neighbors used to say that I laid the foundation of my present competence by trading one sound cow for two lame ones every few miles along the Ridge Road, coming into the state, and then feeding my stock on speculators' grass in the summer and straw that my neighbors would otherwise have burned up in the winter. What was a week's time to me? I had a lifetime in Iowa before me.
"Whose rig is that?" I asked, pointing to the carriage.
"Belongs to a man name of Gowdy," the mover told me. "Got a hell-slew of wuthless land in Monterey County an' is going out to settle on it."
"How do you know it's worthless?" I inquired pretty sharply; for a man must stand up for his own place whether he's ever seen it or not.
"They say so," said he.
"Why?" I asked.
"Out in the middle of the Monterey Prairie," he said. "You can't live in this country 'less you settle near the timber."
"Instead of stopping at this farm," I said, "I should think he'd have gone on to the next settlement. Horses lame?"
"Best horses I've seen on the road," was the answer. "Kentucky horses. Gowdy comes from Kentucky. Stopped because his wife is bad sick."
"Where's he?" I asked.
"Out shooting geese," said he. "Don't seem to fret his gizzard about his wife; but they say she's struck with death."
All the while I was cooking my supper I was thinking of this woman, "struck with death," and her husband out shooting geese, while she struggled with our last great antagonist alone. One of the women came over from the other camp with her husband, and I spoke to her about it.
"This man," said she, "jest acts out what all the men feel. A womern is nothing but a thing to want as long as she is young and can work. But this womern hain't quite alone. She's got a little sister with her that knows a hull lot better how to do for her than any darned man would!"
It grew dark and cold--a keen, still, frosty spring evening which filled the sky with stars and bespoke a sunny day for to-morrow, with settled warmer weather. The geese and ducks were still calling from the sky, and not far away the prairie wolves were howling about one of the many carcasses of dead animals which the stream of immigration had already dropped by the wayside. I was dead sleepy, and was about to turn in, when my black-bearded man last seen in Dubuque with a constable holding him by the arm, came driving up, and went about among the various wagons as if looking for something. I knew he was seeking me, and spoke to him.
"Oh!" he said, as if all at once easier in his mind. "Where's my--"
"She's in the house," I said; "this is a kind of a tavern."
"Good!" said he. "I'm much obliged to you. Here's your supplies. I had to buy this light wagon and a team of horses in Dubuque, and it took a little time, it took a little time."
I now noticed that he had a way of repeating his words, and giving them a sort of friendly note as if he were taking you into his confidence. When I offered to pay him for the supplies, he refused. "I'm in debt to you. I don't remember what they cost--got them with some things for myself; a trifle, a trifle. Glad to do more for you--no trouble at all, none whatever."
"Didn't you have any trouble in Dubuque?" I asked, thinking of the man who had threatened to shoot him in front of the post-office, and how the black-bearded man had called upon the bystanders to bear witness that he was about to shoot in self-defense. He gave me a sharp look; but it was too dark to make it worth anything to him.
"No trouble at all," he said. "What d'ye mean?"
Before I could answer there came up a man carrying a shotgun in one hand, and a wild goose over his shoulder. Following him was a darky with a goose over each shoulder. I threw some dry sticks on my fire, and it flamed up showing me the faces of the group. Buckner Gowdy, or as everybody in Monterey County always called him, Buck Gowdy, stood before us smiling, powerful, six feet high, but so big of shoulder that he seemed a little stooped, perfectly at ease, behaving as if he had always known all of us. He wore a little black mustache which curled up at the corners of his mouth like the tail feathers of a drake. His clothes were soaked and gaumed up with mud from his tramping and crawling through the marshes; but otherwise he looked as fresh as if he had just risen from his bed, while the negro seemed ready to drop.
When Buck Gowdy spoke, it was always with a little laugh, and that slight stoop toward you as if there was something between him and you that was a sort of secret--the kind of laugh a man gives who has had many a joke with you and depends on your knowing what it is that pleases him. His eyes were brown, and a little close together; and his head was covered with a mass of wavy dark hair. His voice was rich and deep, and pitched low as if he were telling you something he did not want everybody to hear. He swore constantly, and used nasty language; but he had a way with him which I have seen him use to ministers of the gospel without their seeming to take notice of the improper things he said. There was something intimate in his treatment of every one he spoke to; and he was in the habit of saying things, especially to women, that had all sorts of double meanings--meanings that you couldn't take offense at without putting yourself on some low level which he could always vow was far from his mind. And there was a vibration in his low voice which always seemed to mean that he felt much more than he said.
"My name's Gowdy," he said; "all you people going west for your health?"
"I," said the black-bearded man, "am Doctor Bliven; and I'm going west, I'm going west, not only for my health, but for that of the community."
"Glad to make your acquaintance," said Gowdy; "and may I crave the acquaintance of our young Argonaut here?"
"Let me present Mr.--" said Doctor Bliven, "Mr.--Mr.--"
"Vandemark," said I.
"Let me present Mr. Vandemark," said the doctor, "a very obliging young man to whom I am already under many obligations, many obligations."
Buckner Gowdy took my hand, bringing his body close to me, and looking me in the eyes boldly and in a way which was quite fascinating to me.
"I hope, Mr. Vandemark," said he, "that you and Doctor Bliven are going to settle in the neighborhood to which I am exiled. Where are you two bound for?"
"I expect to open a drug store and begin the practise of medicine," said the doctor, "at the thriving town of Monterey Centre."
"I've got some land in Monterey County," said I; "but I don't know where in the county it is."
Doctor Bliven started; and Buckner Gowdy shook my hand again, and then the doctor's.
"A sort of previous neighborhood reunion," said he. "I expect one of these days to be one of the old residenters of Monterey County myself. I am a fellow-sufferer with you, Mr. Vandemark--I also have land there. Won't you and the doctor join me in a night-cap in honor of our neighborship; and drink to better acquaintance? And let's invite our fellow wayfarers, too. I have some game for them."
He looked across to the other camp, and we went over to it, Gowdy giving the third goose and the gun to the negro who had hard work to manage them. I had a roadside acquaintance with the movers, but did not know their names. In a jiffy Gowdy had all of them, and had found out that they expected to locate near Waverly. In five minutes he had begun discussing with a pretty young woman the best way to cook a goose; and soon wandered away with her on some pretense, and we could hear his subdued, vibratory voice and low laugh from the surrounding darkness, and from time to time her nervous giggle. Suddenly I remembered his wife, certainly very sick in the house, and the talk that she was "struck with death"--and he out shooting geese, and now gallivanting around with a strange girl in the dark.
There must be some mistake--this man with the bold eyes and the warm and friendly handclasp, with the fascinating manners and the neighborly ideas, could not possibly be a person who would do such things. But even as I thought this, and made up my mind that, after all, I would join him and the queer-behaving doctor in a friendly drink, a woman came flying out of the house and across the road, calling out, asking if any one knew where Mr. Gowdy was, that his wife was dying.
He and the girl came to the fire quickly, and as they came into view I saw a movement of his arm as if he was taking it from around her waist.
"I'm here," said he--and his voice sounded harder, somehow. "What's the matter?"
"Your wife," said the woman, "--she's taken very bad, Mr. Gowdy."
He started toward the house without a word; but before he went out of sight he turned and looked for a moment with a sort of half-smile at the girl. For a while we were all as still as death. Finally Doctor Bliven remarked that lots of folks were foolish about sick people, and that more patients were scared to death by those about them than died of disease. The girl said that that certainly was so. Doctor Bliven then volunteered the assertion that Mr. Gowdy seemed to be a fine fellow, and a gentleman if he ever saw one. Just then the woman came from across the road again and asked for "the man who was a doctor."
"I'm a doctor," said Bliven. "Somebody wants me?"
She said that Mr. Gowdy would like to have him come into the house--and he went hurriedly, after taking a medicine-case from his democrat wagon. I saw my yellow-haired passenger of the Dubuque ferry meet him before the door, throw her arms about him and kiss him. He returned her greeting, and they went through the door together into the house.
I turned in, and slept several hours very soundly, and then suddenly found myself wide awake. I got up, and as I did almost every night, went out to look after my cattle. I found all but one of them, and fetched a compass about the barns and stables, searching until I found her. As I passed in front of the door I heard moanings and cryings from a bench against the side of the house, and stopped. It was dawn, and I could see that it was either a small woman or a large child, huddled down on the bench crying terribly, with those peculiar wrenching spasms that come only when you have struggled long, and then quite given up to misery. I went toward her, then stepped back, then drew closer, trying to decide whether I should go away and leave her, or speak to her; and arguing with myself as to what I could possibly say to her. She seemed to be trying to choke down her weeping, burying her head in her hands, holding back her sobs, wrestling with herself. Finally she fell forward on her face upon the bench, her hands spread abroad and hanging down, her face on the hard cold wood--and all her moanings ceased. It seemed to me that she had suddenly dropped dead; for I could not hear from her a single sigh or gasp or breath, though I stepped closer and listened--not a sign of life did she give. So I put my arm under her and raised her up, only to see that her face was ghastly white, and that she seemed quite dead. I picked her up, and found that, though she was slight and girlish, she was more woman than child, and carried her over to the well where there was cold water in the trough, from which I sprinkled a few icy drops in her face--and she gasped and looked at me as if dazed.
"You fainted away," I said, "and I brought you to."
"I wish you hadn't!" she cried. "I wish you had let me die!"
"What's the matter, little girl?" I asked, seating her on the bench once more. "Is there anything I can do?"
"Oh! oh! oh! oh!" she cried, maybe a dozen times--and nothing more, until finally she burst out: "She was all I had in the world. My God, what will become of me!" And she sprang up, and would have run off, I believe, if Buckner Gowdy had not overtaken her, and coaxingly led her back into the house.
We come now into a new state of things in the history of Vandemark Township.
We meet not only the things that made it, but the actors in the play.
Buckner Gowdy, Doctor Bliven, their associates, and others not yet mentioned will be found helping to make or mar the story all through the future; for an Iowa community was like a growing child in this, that its character in maturity was fixed by its beginnings.
I know communities in Iowa that went into evil ways, and were blighted through the poison distilled into their veins by a few of the earliest settlers; I know others that began with a few strong, honest, thinking, reading, praying families, and soon began sending out streams of good influence which had a strange power for better things; I knew other settlements in which there was a feud from the beginning between the bad and the good; and in some of them the blight of the bad finally overwhelmed the good, while in others the forces of righteousness at last grappled with the devil's gang, and, sometimes in violence, redeemed the neighborhood to a place in the light.
In one of these classes Monterey County, and even Vandemark Township, took its place. Buckner Gowdy and Doctor Bliven, the little girl who fainted away on the wooden bench in the night, and the yellow-haired woman who stole a ride with me across the Dubuque ferry had their part in the building up of our great community--and others worked with them, some for the good and some for the bad.
Now I come to people whose histories I know by the absorption of a lifetime's experience. I know that it was Mrs. Bliven's husband--we always called her that, of course--who expected to arrest the pair of them as they crossed the Dubuque ferry; and that I was made a cat's-paw in slipping her past her pursuers and saving Bliven from arrest. I know that Buckner Gowdy was a wild and turbulent rakehell in Kentucky and after many bad scrapes was forced to run away from the state, and was given his huge plantation of "worthless" land--as he called it--in Iowa; that he had married his wife, who was a poor girl of good family named Ann Royall, because he couldn't get her except by marrying her.
I know that her younger sister, Virginia Royall, came with them to Iowa, because she had no other relative or friend in the world except Mrs. Gowdy. I pretty nearly know that Virginia would have killed herself that night on the prairie by the Old Ridge Road, because of a sudden feeling of terror, at the situation in which she was left, at the prairies and the wild desolate road, at Buck Gowdy, at life in general--if she had had any means with which to destroy her life. I know that Buck Gowdy took her into the house and comforted her by telling her that he would care for her, and send her back to Kentucky.
A funeral by the wayside! This was my first experience with a kind of tragedy which was not quite so common as you might think. Buckner Gowdy instead of giving his wife a grave by the road, as many did, sent the man of the house back to Dubuque for a hearse, the women laid out the corpse, and after a whole day of waiting, the hearse came, and went back over the road down the Indian trail through the bluffs to some graveyard in the old town by the river. Virginia Royall sat in the back seat of the carriage with Buckner Gowdy, and the darky, Pinckney Johnson--we all knew him afterward--drove solemnly along wearing white gloves which he had found somewhere. Virginia shrank away over to her own side of the seat as if trying to get as far from Buckner Gowdy as possible.
The movers moved on, leaving me four of their cows instead of two of mine, and I went diligently to work breaking them to the yoke. New prairie schooners came all the time into view from the East, and others went over the sky-line into the West.
And that day the Fewkes family hove into sight in a light democrat wagon drawn by a good-sized apology for a horse, poor as a crow, and carrying sail in the most ferocious way of any beast I ever saw. He had had a bad case of poll-evil and his head was poked forward as if he was just about to bite something, and his ears were leered back tight to his head with an expression of the most terrible anger--I have known people who went through the world in a good deal the same way for much the same reasons.
Old Man Fewkes was driving, and sitting by him was Mrs. Fewkes in a faded calico dress, her shoulders wrapped in what was left of a shawl. Fewkes was letting old Tom take his own way, which he did by rushing with all vengeance through every bad spot and then stopping to rest as soon as he reached a good bit of road. The old man was thin and light-boned, with a high beak of a nose which ought to have indicated strength of character, I suppose; but the other feature that also tells a good deal, the chin, was hidden by a gray beard which hung in long curving locks over his breast and saved him the expense of a collar or cravat. His hands were like claws--I never saw such hands doing much of the hard work of the world--and, like his face, were covered with great patches which, if they had not been so big would have been freckles. His wife was a perfect picture of those women who had the life drailed out of them by a yielding to the whiffling winds of influence that carried the dead leaves of humanity hither and yon in the advance of the frontier. She sat stooped over on the stiff broad seat, with her shoulders drawn down as no shoulders but hers could be drawn. It was her one outstanding point that she had no collar-bones. It doesn't seem possible that this could be so; but she could bring her shoulders together in front until they touched. She was rather proud of this--I suppose every one must have something to be proud of.
I guess the old man's chin must have been pretty weak; for the boys, who were seated on the back seat, both had high noses and no chins to speak of. The oldest was over twenty, I suppose, and was named Celebrate. His mother explained to me that he was born on the Fourth of July, and they called him at first Celebrate Independence Fewkes; but finally changed it to Celebrate Fourth--I am telling you this so as to give you an idea as to what sort of folks they were. Celebrate was tall and well-built, and could be a good hand if he tried; which he would do once in a while for half a day or so if flattered. The second son was named Surajah Dowlah Fewkes--the name was pronounced Surrager by everybody. Old Man Fewkes said they named him this because a well-read man had told them it might give him force of character; but it failed. He was a harmless little chap, and there was nothing bad about him except that he was addicted to inventions. When they came into camp that day he was explaining to Celebrate a plan for catching wild geese with fish-hooks baited with corn, and that evening came to me to see if he couldn't borrow a long fish-line.
"I can ketch meat for a dozen outfits with it," he said, "if I can borrow a fish-hook."
Walking along behind the wagon came the fifth member of the family, Rowena, a girl of seventeen. She went several rods behind the wagon, and as they rushed and plodded along according to old Tom's temper, I noticed that she rambled over the prairie a good deal picking flowers; and you would hardly have thought to look at her that she belonged to the Fewkes outfit at all. I guess that was the way she wanted it to look. She was as vigorous as the others were limpsey and boneless; and there was in her something akin to the golden plovers that were running in hundreds that morning over the prairies--I haven't seen one for twenty-five years! That is, she skimmed over the little knolls rather than walked, as if made of something lighter than ordinary human clay. Her dress was ragged, faded, and showed through the tears in it a tattered quilted petticoat, and she wore no bonnet or hat; but carried in her hand a boy's cap--which, according to the notions harbored by us then, it would have been immodest for her to wear. Her hair was brown and blown all about her head, and her face was tanned to a rich brown--a very bad complexion then, but just the thing the society girl of to-day likes to show when she returns from the seashore.
When her family had halted, she did not come to them at once, but made a circuit or two about the camp, like a shy bird coming to its nest, or as if she hated to do it; and when she did come it was in a sort of defiant way, swinging herself and tossing her head, and looking at every one as bold as brass. I was staring at the astonishing horse, the queer wagon, and the whole outfit with more curiosity than manners, I reckon, when she came into the circle, and caught my unmannerly eye.
"Well," she said, her face reddening under the tan, "if you see anything green throw your hat at it! Sellin' gawp-seed, or what is your business?"
"I beg your pardon," "I meant no offense," and even "Excuse me" were things I had never learned to say. I had learned to fight any one who took offense at me; and if they didn't like my style they could lump it--such was my code of manners, and the code of my class. To beg pardon was to knuckle under--and it took something more than I was master of in the way of putting on style to ask to be excused, even if the element of back-down were eliminated. Remember, I had been "educated" on the canal. So I tried to look her out of countenance, grew red, retreated, and went about some sort of needless work without a word--completely defeated. I thought she seemed rather to like this; and that evening I went over and offered Mrs. Fewkes some butter and milk, of which I had a plenty.
I was soon on good terms with the Fewkes family. Old Man Fewkes told me he was going to Negosha--a region of which I had never heard. It was away off to the westward, he said; and years afterward I made up my mind that the name was made up of the two words Nebraska and Dakota--not very well joined together. Mrs. Fewkes was not strong for Negosha; and when Fewkes offered to go to Texas, she objected because it was so far.
"Why," said the old man indignantly, "it hain't only a matter of fifteen hundred mile! An' the trees is in constant varder!"
He still harped on Negosha, though, and during the evening while we were fattening up on my bread and meat, which I had on a broad hint added to our meal, he told me that what he really wanted was an estate where he could have an artificial lake and keep some deer and plenty of ducks and geese. Swans, too, he said could be raised at a profit, and sold to other well-to-do people. He said that by good farming he could get along with only a few hundred acres of plow land. Mrs. Fewkes grew more indulgent to these ideas as the food satisfied her hungry stomach. Celebrate believed that if he could once get out among 'em he could do well as a hunter and trapper; while Surajah kept listening to the honking of the wild geese and planning to catch enough of them with baited hooks to feed the whole family all the way to Negosha, and provide plenty of money by selling the surplus to the emigrants. Rowena sat in her ragged dress, her burst shoes drawn in under her skirt, looking at her family with an expression of unconcealed scorn. When she got a chance to speak to me, she did so in a very friendly manner.
"Did you ever see," said she, "such a set of darned infarnal fools as we are?"
Before the evening was over, however, and she had hidden herself away in her clothes under a thin and ragged comforter in their wagon, she had joined in the discussion of their castle in Spain in a way that showed her to be a legitimate Fewkes. She spoke for a white saddle horse, a beautiful side-saddle, a long blue riding-habit with shot in the seam, and a man to keep the horse in order. She wanted to be able to rub the horse with a white silk handkerchief without soiling it. Ah, well! dreams hovered over all our camps then. The howling of the wolves couldn't drive them away. Poor Rowena!
I still had some corn for my cattle, of the original supply which I had got from Rucker in Madison. Hay was fifteen dollars a ton, and all it cost the producer was a year's foresight and the labor of putting it up; for there were millions of acres of wild grass going to waste which made the sweet-smelling hay that old horsemen still prefer to tame hay. It hadn't quite the feeding value, pound for pound, that the best timothy and clover has; but it was a wonderful hay that could be put up in the clear weather of the fall when the ground is dry and warm, and cured so as to be free from dust. My teams never got the heaves when I fed prairie hay. It graveled me like sixty to pay such a price, but I had to do it because the season was just between hay and grass. Sometimes I thought of waiting over until the summer of 1856 to make hay for sale to the movers; but having made my start for my farm I could not bring myself to give up reaching it that spring. So I only waited occasionally to break in or rest up the foot-sore and lame cattle for which I traded from time to time.
The Fewkes family went on after I had given them some butter, some side pork and a milking of milk. While I was baking pancakes that last morning, Rowena came to my fire, and snatching the spider away from me took the job off my hands, baking the cakes while I ate. She was a pretty girl, slim and well developed, and she had a fetching way with her eyes after friendly relations were established with her--which was pretty hard because she seemed to feel that every one looked down on her, and was quick to take offense.
"Got any saleratus?" she asked.
"No," said I. "Why?"
She stepped over to the Fewkes wagon and brought back a small packet of saleratus, a part of which she stirred into the batter.
"It's gettin' warm enough so your milk'll sour on you," said she. "This did. Don't you know enough to use saleratus to sweeten the sour milk? You better keep this an' buy some at the next store."
"I wish I had somebody along that could cook," said I.
"Can't you cook?" she asked. "I can."
I told her, then, all about my experience on the canal; and how we used to carry a cook on the boat sometimes, and sometimes cooked for ourselves. I induced her to sit by me on the spring seat which I had set down on the ground, and join me in my meal while I told her of my adventures. She seemed to forget her ragged and unwashed dress, while she listened to the story of my voyages from Buffalo to Albany, and my side trips to such places as Oswego. This canal life seemed powerfully thrilling to the poor girl. She could only tell of living a year or so at a time on some run-down or never run-up farm in Indiana or Illinois, always in a log cabin in a clearing; or of her brothers and sisters who had been "bound out" because the family was so large; and now of this last voyage in search of an estate in Negosha.
"I can make bread," said she, after a silence. "Kin you?"
When I told her I couldn't she told me how. It was the old-fashioned salt-rising bread, the receipt for which she gave me; and when I asked her to write it down I found that she was even a poorer scribe than I was. We were two mighty ignorant young folks, but we got it down, and that night I set emptins[6]for the first time, and I kept trying, and advising with the women-folks, until I could make as good salt-rising bread as any one. When we had finished this her father was calling her to come, as they were starting on toward Negosha; and I gave Rowena money enough to buy her a calico dress pattern at the next settlement. She tried to resist, and her eyes filled with tears as she took the money and chokingly tried to thank me for it. She climbed into the wagon and rode on for a while, but got out and came back to me while old Tom went on in those mad rushes of his, and circling within a few yards of me she said, "You're right good," and darted off over the prairie at a wide angle to the road.
[6]Our author resists firmly all arguments in favor of the generally accepted dictionary spelling, "emptyings." He says that the term can not possibly come from any such idea as things which are emptied, or emptied out. The editor is reconciled to this view in the light of James Russell Lowell's discussion of "emptins" in which he says: "Nor can I divine the original." Mr. Lowell surely must have considered "emptyings"--and rejected it.--G.v.d.M.
I watched her with a buying eye, as she circled like a pointer pup and finally caught up with the wagon, a full mile on to the westward. I had wondered once if she had not deserted the Fewkes party forever. I had even, such is the imagination of boyhood, made plans and lived them through in my mind, which put Rowena on the nigh end of the spring seat, and made her a partner with me in opening up the new farm. But she waved her hand as she joined her family--or I thought so at least, and waved back--and was gone.
The Gowdy outfit did not return until after I had about cured the lameness of my newly-acquired cows and set out on my way over the Old Ridge Road for the West. The spring was by this time broadening into the loveliest of all times on the prairies (when the weather is fine), the days of the full blowth of the upland bird's-foot violets. Some southern slopes were so blue with them that you could hardly tell the distant hill from the sky, except for the greening of the peeping grass. The possblummies were still blowing, but only the later ones. The others were aging into tassels of down.
The Canada geese, except for the nesters, had swept on in that marvelous ranked army which ends the migration, spreading from the east to the west some warm morning when the wind is south, and extending from a hundred feet in the air to ten thousand, all moved by a common impulse like myself and my fellow-migrants, pressing northward though, instead of westward, with the piping of a thousand organs, their wings whirring, their eyes glistening as if with some mysterious hope, their black webbed feet folded and stretched out behind, their necks strained out eagerly to the north, and held a little high I thought as if to peer over the horizon to catch a glimpse of their promised land of blue lakes, tall reeds, and broad fields of water-celery and wild rice, with dry nests downy with the harvests of their gray breasts; and fluffy goslings swimming in orderly classes after their teachers. And up from the South following these old honkers came the snow geese, the Wilson geese, and all the other little geese (we ignorantly called all of them "brants"), with their wild flutings like the high notes of clarinets--and the ponds became speckled with teal and coot.
The prairie chickens now became the musicians of the morning and evening on the uplands, with their wild and intense and almost insane chorus, repeated over and over until it seemed as if the meaning of it must be forced upon every mind like a figure in music played with greatening power by a violinist so that the heart finally almost breaks with it--"Ka-a-a-a-a-a, ka, ka, ka, ka!Ka-a-a-a-a-a-a,ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka! KA-A-A-A-A-A-A, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka, ka!"--Oh, there is no way to tell it!--And then the cock filled in the harmony with his lovely contribution: facing the courted hen, he swelled out the great orange globes at the sides of his head, fluffed out his feathers, strutted forward a few steps, and tolled his deep-toned bell, with all the skill of a ventriloquist, making it seem far away when he was on a near-by knoll, like a velvet gong sounded with no stroke of the hammer, as if it spoke from some inward vibration set up by a mysterious current--a liquid "Do, re, me," here full and distinct, there afar off, the whole air tremulous with it, the harmony to the ceaseless fugue in the soprano clef of the rest of the flock--nobody will ever hear it again! Nobody ever drew from it, and from the howling of the wolves, the honking of the geese, the calls of the ducks, the strange cries of the cranes as they soared with motionless wings high overhead, or rowed their way on with long slow strokes of their great wings, or danced their strange reels and cotillions in the twilight; and from the myriad voices of curlew, plover, gopher, bob-o-link, meadowlark, dick-cissel, killdeer and the rest--day-sounds and night-sounds, dawn-sounds and dusk-sounds--more inspiration than did the stolid Dutch boy plodding west across Iowa that spring of 1855, with his fortune in his teams of cows, in the covered wagon they drew, and the deed to his farm in a flat packet of treasures in a little iron-bound trunk--among them a rain-stained letter and a worn-out woman's shoe.