Part 1 (1/2)
The Cabin on the Prairie.
by C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson.
A FRONTIER PROPHET.
INTRODUCTORY.
”If you stay here long, you will become so Westernized that you will lose all love for New England. That's my experience.” So said a brawny pioneer, a man of large mind, and generous heart, and a sledge-hammer fist that never struck a coward's blow; but when swung in defence of the right was like ”the jaw-bone” of Samson to the Philistines. He had emigrated from Maine twenty years before, and was one of the first settlers I met on the prairie near the scene of my story. Was his prediction fulfilled? Ah, how like sweetest music sounded the bells of Salem (city of peace) the first Sunday of my return to the Old Bay State! Besides, the frontiersman misrepresented himself. For, seated by his ample clay-stick-and-stone fireplace, how his eye kindled, and tones mellowed, as he treated us to reminiscences of his early days!
And what a grip he gave the hand of a freshly-arrived Yankee!
Then there were those east who said, ”You will soon tire of the West.”
They, also, were mistaken. An invalid, with shadowy form and trembling limbs, when I left New England, I awakened to a new life in Minnesota.
”Take a gun on your shoulders, kill and eat the wild game of the prairies,” said my medical friends. I antic.i.p.ated vicissitude and deprivation in following such counsel; but these toughened my weak frame, and added zest to frontier labors and pleasures; for I was soon able to do a man's share of the former, and in threading forest and prairie I was brought into delightful nearness to nature in its beauty, freshness, and magnitude, and in visiting the lodge of the Indian and the cabins of the settlers I met with plenty of adventure.
In writing this work, I have, with peculiar interest, lived over the scenes and incidents of my varied frontier experience; have travelled once more amid the waving gra.s.ses and beckoning flowers; heard again the bark of the wolf, and the voices of birds; felt on my brow the kiss of the health-giving breeze; wors.h.i.+pped anew in the log-cabin sanctuary. Yes, East and West are both dear to me. One fittingly supplements the other. Each holds the ashes of kindred. By a singular providence, since this tale was completed, a much-loved relative, one of the gentlest and most self-sacrificing whose presence ever glorified the earth, has found a resting-place in the bosom of the very prairie I had in mind while penning these pages. Sent west by physicians to save her life, she reached that spot in time to die, thus attaching my heart to that soil by another and sorrowful tie.
That East and West may be bound together by love, as well as by national and commercial relations, and that this story may tend in its humble way to so happy a result, is the earnest wish of
THE AUTHOR.
THE CABIN ON THE PRAIRIE.
CHAPTER I.
THE PIONEER FAMILY.--A SPIRITED CHASE.
”There, the last hill is dug, and I'm glad!” and Tom Jones leaned on his hoe, lost in thought.
He was a stout lad of sixteen, with frowzy brown hair, crowned by a brimless straw hat, and his pants looked as if they had been turned inside out and outside in, upside down and downside up, and darned and patched and re-darned and patched again, until time, and labor, and cloth enough, such as it was, had been used to fabricate a number of pairs of pants. As for boots,--for his lower extremities were not wholly dest.i.tute of protection,--they might have come down to him as an heir-loom from a pauper of a preceding generation. But what mattered it to him that his clothes were threadbare, many-hued, and grotesque? or that his boots let the deep, rich soil in at sides and toes? Was he not a ”squatter sovereign,” or the son of one, free in his habits as the Indian that roamed the prairies of his frontier home? He had not heard of ”the latest fas.h.i.+on,” and paid no attention to the cut of his garments, although, it must be confessed, he sometimes wished them a trifle more spruce and comfortable. His home, as I have hinted, was on the prairie. Nevertheless, the family domain was an unpretending one. Less than an acre, fenced in the rudest manner, enclosed the ”farm and farm buildings,” the latter consisting of a small log house and log pigsty, the cabin, at the time our sketch opens, being, it is evident, at least two seasons old--a fact which serves to show the more plainly the poverty and thriftlessness of the inmates; for they have had time, certainly, to cultivate quite a tract of the easily-tilled land, had they enterprise and industry. But they belonged to a cla.s.s not famous for these virtues--the restless, ever-moving cla.s.s that pioneer the way towards the setting sun. But perhaps we are leaving the boy propped too long on his hoe. Let us take a more critical look at him. ”Fine feathers don't make fine birds,” observes the old proverb. Forgetting the dress, then, please study his face. A clear, deep-blue eye, delicately-arched eyebrows, regular features, mouth and chin indicating decision and native refinement, and a well-developed forehead. Ah, here may be a diamond in the rough! Who knows?
The squatter's son looked about him with a dissatisfied air. ”I do wish,” he soliloquized, ”that I could see something of the world, and do something for myself. Here we've been changing around from one place to another, doing nothing but raise a few potatoes and a little corn, living in a miserable cabin, where there are no schools, and scarcely any neighbors. It's too bad to spend all our days so. I believe we were made for something better; and, as the minister told us Sunday, we ought to try and be somebody, and not float along as the stick on the stream. I'm sure it isn't, and never was, to mother's mind; and, as to father--” And here he stopped and pondered, as if trying to solve a mystery, and in a style that would have been p.r.o.nounced philosophic, had he been a college professor--scratched his head. Then, with his ragged sleeve, he wiped the sweat from his brow, leaving a streak of black that made that part of his face present quite a different appearance from what it did, reader, when you and I noticed it a moment ago. And going to the cabin, he returned with a rickety basket, and, commencing at the lower end of the field, began picking up the potatoes that had been left drying in the sun. A goodly crop had the little patch produced; for the vegetable decays and fertilizing rains and snows of centuries had covered the prairie with a dressing with which art could not compete, and it was more difficult not to get a harvest from the seed sown than to get one. The rows of hills were covered with the bountiful returns brought up to the light of day by Tom's well-used hoe. It was not, however, the size, quality, or number of the potatoes that most interested Tom just then. The fact that they were all out of the ground; that the corn was cut and stacked, and the pumpkins ready to be housed; that the fall work could be finished by that afternoon's sun-setting,--stirred him strangely; for he had of late begun to question the future, to learn what it had in store for him. He had come to realize, in a degree, that that future would be very much what he chose to make it. And serious dissatisfaction with the past and the present filled his heart with disquiet.
Tom's memory had been active for a few days. How like yesterday it seemed, when he was a little child, and his father, getting together money enough, bought a horse and wagon, and, putting the family in the vehicle, started out prospecting for a new home farther from the advancing waves of civilization! How many similar expeditions had they taken since, and how painfully had their experiences ill.u.s.trated the saying, ”A rolling stone gathers no moss”! But roll Mr. Jones would. Tom knew this too well. It was, indeed, viewed in one aspect, an easy way to get on, this going in one's own conveyance from place to place of Uncle Sam's unsettled lands; this living off the country, gypsying in the woods and on the prairies; this two thirds savage and one third civilized mode of putting a growing family through the world; and if you were to see Mr. Jones seated in the emigrant wagon, reins in hand and pipe in mouth, or with shouldered rifle on the track of a deer, you would say that such a life was eminently agreeable to him. Every man is made for something; and you would say that he was cut out for a wandering frontier loafer, who gets his subsistence by doing the least possible work in the easiest possible manner, and hunting and fis.h.i.+ng. A horse and wagon, or extemporized log cabin, for a shelter; tools enough for the simplest tilling of the soil, and furniture for the rudest housekeeping and clothing; the making over, by the industrious wife, of clothes bought ”some time back,”--such was the way the Joneses lived. Putting up a small log house by the bank of a river for the sake of the fish, and near a forest for the game, with ”a strip of clean prairie” for ”garden sarce,”--there they might remain for a year or two; then you would be quite sure to find the immigrant friend looking discontented, and expressing a wish to ”sell his claim.”
”It's growing so crowded with folks coming into the country, I can't go three miles without stumbling against a shanty or a house; and cart tracks are getting so plenty, I can't stand it. I must pull up stakes, and go farther on to find a place to breathe in.”
And, perchance, realizing a trifle for his claim and improvements, Dobbin is. .h.i.tched anew into the crazy old wagon. The broken crockery, and leaky black tea-pot, and ancient cooking-stove--the pipe of the latter running up through the wagon-top--are once more aboard, wife and children packed in, and the uneasy frontiersman is pus.h.i.+ng out again towards solitude.
Tom had been reviewing this bit of family history more in detail, and much more vividly than we have now done. The result was a feeling of disgust, and a resolution to break away from such a life, and an endeavor for something higher.
But what had brought the squatter's son to such a conclusion? The condition of the family had for some time been unsatisfactory to Tom.
Though brought up in this roving, improvident way, his better nature often revolted against it; not, however, so strongly and decisively as now. Still, desires, and even longings, for something better had flitted through his mind, only to make him moody and irritable.
Doubtless these aspirations were due, in no small measure, to his mother--a woman much superior to her condition, but who, clinging to her husband with a pure and changeless love, accepted the privations of her lot without a murmur. Taken by her marriage from the comforts and advantages of a good home, she had followed his fortunes ”for better or for worse,” having much more of the latter, in a worldly point of view, than the former. Not that Mr. Jones was a hard or a dissipated man; but his roving habits, and the deprivations and poverty they endured, had made her days sad and toil-worn.
Tom, in his tastes, was like his mother. But a new event had recently occurred. A G.o.dly minister, in search of the lost sheep of the heavenly fold, had made his way into the region, and, the Sabbath previous to the opening of our sketch, had, in earnest, eloquent words, preached the gospel to the settlers. The log cabin, in which the services were held, was only a mile and a half distant, and Tom and his father, with the neighbors generally, attended. How differently the gospel message affects different persons! Some are softened, others are hardened, by it. Some are stirred up to certain duties, while, under the same sermon, others are incited to an entirely different train of thought and course of action. The effect on Tom of the sermons of the preacher was to incite his feelings to revolt against his lot in life, and arouse him to the necessity of a purpose in living. He did not look forward so much to the world to come as to the ”to come” of this world. The present in its relations to life here--this was the point with him; and he revolved the subject, viewing it in every possible light, until a decision was reached.