EARLY DAYS IN INDIANA.
When Jacob Van de Grift arrived in Indianapolis in 1836 the first
rawness of frontier life had passed away, and many of the comforts of
civilization had made their way out from the East or up from New
Orleans. When he married Esther Keen he took her to live in the little
red house, which, as I have already said, he had built next door to
Henry Ward Beecher's church, opposite the Governor's Circle. Seven
children in all were granted to them, of whom the eldest, a daughter,
was born on March 10, 1840, in this same little red house on the
Circle. When the infant was two years old she and her mother were
taken into the Second Presbyterian Church, and were baptized by Henry
Ward Beecher in the White River, in the presence of a concourse of
several thousand spectators. The record of this noteworthy occasion is
still preserved in the church at Indianapolis.
The little girl was named Frances Matilda, but when she grew older the
second name was finally dropped. To her family and friends she was
known as "Fanny."
The main source, in fact almost the only one, from which I have been
able to draw a description of the childhood of Fanny Stevenson is an
article on early reminiscences written by my sister herself, which was
found among her papers after her death. As she was always her own
worst critic, she has dwelt on mischievous childish escapades and has
said little of the sweetness and charm and warm generosity that even
then drew all hearts to her. From this article, called _A Backwoods
Childhood_, I quote the following extracts for the sake of the vivid
picture they give of those Indiana days:
"Our life in the backwoods was simple and natural; we had few
luxuries, but we had few cares. In our kitchen gardens potatoes,
cabbages, onions, tomatoes, Indian corn, and numerous other vegetables
grew most luxuriantly; and of fruits we had great abundance. We lived
a natural life and were content. The loom and the spinning-wheel,
though they had by this time largely disappeared from the towns, still
had a place in every farmhouse. We raised our own food and made our
own clothing, often of the linsey-woolsey woven by the women on their
home-made looms. We breakfasted by the light of a tin lamp fed with
lard, four o'clock being a not unusual hour, dined at noon, supped at
five, and went to bed with the chickens. Our carpets were made of our
old cast-off garments torn into strips, the strips then sewn together
at the ends and woven into carpet breadths by a neighbor, who took her
pay in kind. Wheat broken and steeped in water gave a fine white
starch fit for cooking as well as laundry work. We tapped the maple
tree for sugar, and drank our sassafras tea with relish. The virgin
forest furnished us with a variety of nuts and berries and wild
fruits, to say nothing of more beautiful wild flowers than I have
seen in any other part of the world, and, laid up in the trunks of
hollow trees, were rich stores of wild honey.
"Except for ague we had little sickness, and for ordinary ailments
healing herbs waited everywhere for seeing eyes. These were calamus,
bloodroot, snakeroot, slippery elm, tansy, and scores that I do not
remember the names of. There was sumach for tanning and butternut for
dyeing; hickory wood for our fires and hard black walnut for our
house-building and fences. Everything that we needed for comfort or
health was within reach of our hands. Nor in this wholesome simple
life were the arts forgotten. Among us lived a poetess who is quoted
wherever English is spoken.[1] Theatricals were cultivated, and my
father belonged to a Thespian society. We had good painters, too, and
at this moment there hangs before me my father's portrait at the age
of twenty, done by Cox of Indianapolis, which has been praised and
admired by both French and English artists of reputation.
[Footnote 1: Sarah Tittle Bolton, known for her
patriotic and war songs, among them "Paddle Your Own
Canoe" and "Left on the Battlefield."]
"When we made maple sugar there were the great fires built
out-of-doors with logs that needed the strength of two men to carry;
the bubbling cauldrons, and the gay company of neighbors come to help;
the camp where the work went on all night to the sound of laughter and
song.
"And the woods, traversed by cool streams, where wild vines clambering
from tree to tree made bowers fit for any fairy queen--what a place of
enchantment for a child! There were may apples to be gathered and
buried to ripen, and as you turned up the earth there was always the
chance that you might find a flint arrowhead.
"Then, too, there were shell barks, hickory nuts, walnuts, and
butternuts to be gathered, husked and dried, an operation which
produced every fall a sudden eruption of the society of the 'Black
Hand' among the boys and girls. Haw apples, elderberries, wild
gooseberries, blackberries, and raspberries provided variety of
refreshment. Or you might, as I often did, gather the wild grapes from
over your head, press them in your hands, catch the juice in the neck
of a dried calabash, and toss off the blood-red wine. With my romantic
notions, imbibed from my reading, I always called it the blood-red
wine, though it was in reality a rather muddy looking gray-colored
liquid with the musky flavor peculiar to wild grapes. This wild
dissipation I felt compelled to abandon after I joined a temperance
society and wore a tinsel star on my breast.
"Through the little hamlet where I was born ran, like a great artery,
the National Road. Starting in the far East, it crossed the continent,
looked in on us rustics, and finally lost itself in the wilds of
Illinois. Though we lay on the banks of a romantic river, and a canal,
a branch of the Erie, languidly crawled beside us, breathing fever and
ague as it passed, the Road was our only real means of communication
with the outside world. The river, though of a good breadth, had too
many shoals and rapids to be navigable; and though now and then boats
crept along by the towpath of the canal, I never heard that they
landed or received any produce. The streets of Indianapolis had no
names then; it was too lost a place for that, and we just said the
'main street.' This was afterwards called Washington Street, and was
really a part of the National Road. Oh but that was romantic to me,
leading as it did straight out into the wide, wide world! At certain
intervals, about once in two weeks, the weather and the state of the
road allowing, a lumbering vehicle called a 'mud wagon' left for
regions unknown to me with passengers and freight. I don't know where
it came from, but on its return it brought letters to my father from
his mother, who lived in Philadelphia.
"Sometimes bands of Indians, wrapped in blankets, came through the
town. They seemed friendly enough and no one showed any fear of them.
"We little girls wore pantalettes, to our ankles, and our dresses were
whale-boned down the front, with very long bodices. We had wide flat
hats trimmed with wreaths of roses and tied under our chins. We wore
low necks and short sleeves summer and winter. I was thin but very
tough. My Aunt Knodle[2] made long mittens for me out of nankeen
beautifully embroidered; they came up to my shoulders, and were sewn
on every day to keep me from spoiling my hands. My hair was braided in
front and my everyday gingham sunbonnet sewn to my hair. This was done
in the vain hope of keeping off sunburn, for I was dark, like my
mother, and my complexion was the despair of her life. Beauty of the
fair blonde type was in vogue then, so that I was quite out of
fashion. It was thought that if one was dark one had a wicked temper."
[Footnote 2: The "k" is silent in this name. Elizabeth
Knodle was the elder sister of Esther Van de Grift.]
In reality, Fanny, with her clear olive skin, her bright black eyes,
her perfectly regular features, and mass of half-curling dark hair,
was the prettiest in the family; but the dictates of fashion are
imperious, so her mother put lotions on her face and her grandmother
washed it with strong soap, saying: "She is that color by nature--God
made her ugly." The little girl asked rather pathetically if they
would not change her name to Lily, to which her mother replied: "You
are a little tiger lily!" In after years in her many gardens in
different parts of the world there were always tiger lilies growing.
She was a high-spirited, daring creature, a little flashing firefly of
a child, eagerly seeking for adventure, that might have brought upon
her frequent punishment were it not that her parents held exceedingly
liberal views in such matters. About this she says:
"Henry Ward Beecher and my father were great friends, and used to
discuss very earnestly the proper method of bringing up children. At
that time it was the custom to be extremely severe with youth, and
such axioms as 'spare the rod and spoil the child,' 'to be seen and
not heard,' were popular; so that the views held by Mr. Beecher and my
father were decidedly modern. They argued that if a child was bad by
nature it would grow up bad, and that if it was good it would grow up
good, and that it was best not to interfere with the development of
children's characters, but to allow them to have their own way."
As Esther Van de Grift limited her corrections of her children to an
occasional mild remonstrance, they worked out their own
individualities with little interference. Fanny was what the children
called a "tomboy," and always preferred the boys' sports, the more
daring the better. She roamed the woods with her cousin Tom Van de
Grift, and the two kindred wild spirits climbed trees, forded streams
up to their necks, did everything, in fact, that the most adventurous
boy could think of. School was a secondary affair then, and, except
for drawing and painting, in which she was thought to have a
remarkable talent, Fanny paid little attention to her studies.
When she was a little girl she was caught in the wave of a great
temperance revival which was sweeping over the country, and, in her
enthusiasm to aid in the work, she produced two drawings that caused a
sensation. One, representing a rickety house with broken windows, a
crooked weed-grown path leading up to a gate fallen off the hinges,
and a fence with half the pickets off, she labelled "The Drunkard's
Home." Then she drew a companion picture of a neat farmhouse with a
straight path, and fence and gate all in apple-pie order, which she
called "The Reformed Drunkard's Home." These two drawings she
presented at a public meeting to Doctor Thompson, the leader of the
movement. Fifty years afterwards she met Mrs. Thompson, who said she
still had the pictures and thought them "very beautiful."
In spite of her indifference to study she was very precocious, and
learned to read at what was considered by her parents' friends as an
objectionably early age. Her father was very proud of the
accomplishments of his little daughter, and liked to show her off
before his friends, who, to speak the truth, looked with extreme
disfavour upon the performance. Once Mr. Page Chapman, editor of a
newspaper, put her through an examination on some subjects about which
she had been reading in _Familiar Science_, a work arranged in the
form of questions and answers. He asked: "What is the shape of the
world?" "Round," she replied. "Then why don't we fall off?" he asked,
and she answered: "Because of the attraction of gravitation." "This is
awful," he said, in horror at such precocity.
Her father had a taste for verse, and often when walking with his
children would recite a favourite poem, more, evidently, for his own
amusement than theirs. Of this Fanny writes: "He used to declaim so
often, in a loud, solemn voice, 'My name is Norval--on the Grampian
Hills my father feeds his flocks,' that I naturally received the
impression that these flocks and hills were part of my paternal
grandfather's estate. Years afterwards when I was travelling in
Scotland and asked the name of some hills I saw in the distance, I
felt a mental shock when told they were the Grampian Hills."
As I have said before, there was no discipline in the Van de Grift
household, and though the neighbours predicted dire results from such
a method of bringing up a family, one result, at least, was that every
one of Jacob Van de Grift's children adored him, and none more
whole-heartedly than his eldest born. She writes of him:
"My father was a splendid horseman and excelled in all athletic
things. He had such immense shoulders and such a deep chest, though
his hands and feet were remarkably small. I can remember when he and I
would go out to a vacant lot that he owned near Indianapolis and I
would sit on the fence and watch him ride and perform circus tricks on
horseback, riding around in a circle. Though his hands were so small
and fair, with rosy palms and delicately pointed fingers, they were
strong hands and capable, for they fashioned the cradle my mother
rocked me in, and the chest of drawers made of maple-wood stained to
imitate mahogany, where she stored my baby linen with those
old-fashioned herbs, ambrosia and sweet basil. Years ago the cradle
was passed on to a neighbor who needed it more than we, but the chest
of drawers is still in use, a sound and very serviceable piece of
furniture, good for several generations more. It was an eventful day
in my childhood when, perched on a high chair, I was allowed to
explore the mysteries of the top drawer and hold in my own hands the
trinkets, ear-rings, brooches, and fine laces worn by my mother in her
youth, but now laid aside as useless in this new, strange, and busy
life of the backwoods. There, too, were pieces of my maternal
grandmother's (Kitty Weaver's) gowns, satin that shimmered and changed
from purple to gold, 'stiff enough,' as my mother said, 'to stand
alone,' and my great-grandfather Miller's tortoise-shell snuff-box
containing a tonquin bean that had not yet lost its peculiar
fragrance.
"While I gazed reverently on these treasures, the tale of Kitty
Weaver's death, which I already knew by heart, was told me once again.
She was a beauty and loved gaiety, and got her death by going to a
ball in thin slippers. I supposed, in my childish ignorance, that this
radiant creature went about all day long in shining silks that stood
alone, and never by any chance wore other than red satin slippers. My
paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Miller, sniffed a little at my
enthusiasm, and averred that she, too, in her time, had worn silks
that stood alone and slippers of a much smaller size than those of
Kitty Weaver. But when I looked at my grandmother, with her high
hooked nose, her large black-browed blue eyes, as keen as swords, the
haughty outline of her curved lips, her massive shoulders and deep
chest, her domineering expression, and listened to her imperious
voice, doubts assailed me. I could believe that she had led an army of
amazons in cuirass and buckler, but my imagination refused to picture
her in a silken train smiling at gallants from behind her fan; and
surely, I thought, no one in the whole world ever went tripping to a
ball in such strange and monstrous headgear as she wore. Yet she had
been a notable beauty in her day, and even in her old age was still
something of a coquette.
"It was sometimes my privilege to sleep with my grandmother, and I
felt it to be a great one, for she was the best teller of stories I
ever heard. Her religion was of the most terrible kind--the
old-fashioned Presbyterianism which taught that hell was paved with
infants' souls, and such horrors. She always said, when she heard of
the death of a young child, that the chances were it would become a
little angel, which it would not have done if it had lived to be a
little older. I was shocked to hear my mother say she preferred having
her children little living devils rather than dead angels. After
prayers, all about hell and damnation, which she said aloud, I was put
to bed against the wall. The bedstead, a big mahogany four-poster, had
to be mounted like an omnibus. That, and the feather bed, and the
mattress stuffed with the 'best curled hair,' were presents sent to my
father from Philadelphia, and were a great source of pride to me,
especially the mattress, which I believed to be stuffed with beautiful
human curls.
"From my nest in the feather bed I watched my grandmother disrobe with
growing terror. First she unpinned and folded away a white kerchief
she always wore primly crossed over her bosom. Then she removed a
white lace cap that was tied under her chin with ribbons; then she
took off what I supposed to be a portion of her scalp, but now know
was a 'false front.' This was bad enough, but there was worse to come;
there still remained a black silk skull cap that covered the thick
white hair worn cropped closely to her head. When she took off this
cap she seemed to stand before me as some strange and terrible man, so
at this point I always covered my head with the bedclothes until the
light was extinguished.
"After getting into bed, my grandmother, who told every incident as
dramatically as though she had participated in it herself, related
appalling stories about witches, death, apparitions, and the
Inquisition. These stories made such a powerful impression on me that
it is no wonder that I remember them after sixty years. Though my
terror of my grandmother in this guise was excessive, I do not think I
should have liked the stories, generally grim and tragic, so well in a
different setting.
"Aunt Knodle was very neat and orderly, high-tempered and somewhat
domineering, but possessing a singular charm. Children liked to go to
her house even though they were made to be on their best behavior
while they were there. Everything in her house was in what we would
call good taste to-day. She had beautiful old china, fine silver, and
good furniture, everything rich and dark. The house was a long
rambling cottage, with a turn in it to match the irregular shape of
the lot. It had many gables and dormer windows, and the whole was
covered with creeping roses, and there was a faint sweet smell about
it that I think I would know now. The master of this delightful house,
Adam Knodle, was as near a saint on earth as a man can be; he was kind
to everybody and everything. He was extremely absent-minded, and his
wife liked to tell how he once killed a chicken for the family dinner
and threw away the chicken and brought in the head.
"My aunt was an ardent lover of animals, and abhorred cruelty to them
in any form. She had a dog named Ponto, an ugly ill-tempered little
black dog of no pedigree whatever, who ruled as king in that house. He
was accustomed to lie on a silk cushion in the window commanding the
best view. My aunt used to sit at one of the windows--not Ponto's, I
can tell you--ready, like Dickens's heroine, Betsy Trotwood, to pounce
out upon passing travellers. Sometimes, when she thought a horse was
being driven too fast, she rushed out and seized it by the bridle
while she read its driver a severe lecture."
As the years passed the young girl's restless energies found other
outlets. At school she was a brilliant but not an industrious pupil.
It was in composition that she shone especially, and one of her
schoolmates says of her: "She always wrote her compositions in such an
attractive way, weaving them into a story, so that the children were
eager to hear them."
While attending high school she became fired with the idea of writing
a book in conjunction with a friend, a beautiful Southern girl named
Lucy McCrae. The writing was done secretly, after school hours, on the
steps of the schoolhouse, while a third friend, Ella Hale,[3] kept
guard, for the whole thing was to be a profound secret until the world
should receive it as the wonder of the age. This great work was
brought to a sudden end by the illness of Lucy McCrae.
[Footnote 3: Now Mrs. Thaddeus Up de Graff, of Elmira,
New York.]
At this time the Van de Grift family were living in a house on
Illinois Street. This house had a cellar door at the back. To quote
the words of her schoolmate, Ella Hale: "At this cellar door the
children used to gather to hear fairy and ghost stories. Fanny was
always the central figure, because she was the only one who could tell
really interesting stories. These gatherings always took place after
supper, and as the shadows grew darker and darker during the recital
of a particularly thrilling ghost story, I clearly remember the
fearful glances toward the dark corners and the crowding closer
together of the little ones, till it sometimes resulted in a
landslide, and we would find ourselves in a heap on the ground at the
foot of the slanting door, our laughter quickly dispelling all our
fears."
Among Fanny's playmates there was a dark, handsome boy, with large,
melancholy eyes, named George Marshall, who was not only exceedingly
attractive in looks but had many other graces. He was a born artist,
and could dance, and act, and sing like an angel; and, best of all, he
was as good as he was charming. These two were close companions in all
sorts of strenuous sports, and nothing annoyed them more than to have
little teasing Josephine, Fanny's younger sister, trailing after them
and breaking up their games. George finally announced that he would
play no more unless Josephine could be kept away. But boys change, and
when he grew up he married Josephine.
[Illustration: The Van de Grift residence at the corner of Illinois
and Washington Streets, Indianapolis.]
All too soon came the time when these days of careless childish joys
were brought to a close. A new era opened, and romance, which budded
early in that time and place, began to unfold its first tender leaves.
Various youths of the town, attracted by the piquant prettiness and
sparkling vivacity of the eldest daughter, began to haunt the Van de
Grift house. In the sentimental fashion of the day, these sighing
swains carved her name on the trees, and so wide was the circle of
her fascination that there was scarcely a tree in the place that did
not bear somewhere on its long-suffering trunk the name or initials of
Fanny Van de Grift. None of these suitors, however, made any
impression on the object of their attentions, who was so much of a
child that she was walking on stilts in the garden when Samuel
Osbourne first called at the house. He was an engaging youth, a
Kentuckian by birth, with all the suavity and charm of the Southerner.
Behind him lay a truly romantic ancestry, for, through John Stewart,
who was stolen and brought up by the Indians, and never knew his
parentage, he was a collateral descendant of Daniel Boone.[4]
[Footnote 4: Stewart, who acquired by his life among the
Indians a thorough knowledge of the trails of the
country, became a guide, and it was he that led Boone on
the expedition to explore Kentucky. The connection
between them became even closer when he married Boone's
youngest sister, Hannah. At the State capitol there is a
picture of him in the striking costume of the hunter and
trapper, pointing out to Boone the lovely land of
Kentucky.]
On December 4, 1857, in a house on Michigan Street, which had already
been prepared and furnished for their occupancy, Samuel Osbourne, aged
twenty, and Fanny Van de Grift, aged seventeen, were united in
marriage. All the notables of the town, including Governor Willard, to
whom young Osbourne was private secretary, and the entire staff of
State officers, attended. The young bride looked charming in a
handsome gown of heavy white satin, of the kind that "could stand
alone," of the "block" pattern then in vogue, and made in the fashion
of the day, with full long-trained skirt and tight low-necked bodice
trimmed with a rich lace bertha. Her hair was worn in curls, fastened
back from the face on each side. The groom, who is seldom mentioned
in these affairs, deserves a word or two, for he made a gallant figure
in a blue coat with brass buttons, flowered waistcoat, fawn-coloured
trousers, strapped under varnished boots, and carrying a bell-topped
white beaver hat. One who was a guest at the wedding says, "They
looked like two children," as indeed they were. It was a boy-and-girl
marriage of the kind people entered into then with pioneer
fearlessness, to turn out well or ill, as fate decreed.
The young couple took up their residence in the same house in which
they were married, and before the young husband was twenty-one years
old their first child, Isobel, was born. The little mother was so
small and young-looking that once when she was on a railroad-train
with her infant an old gentleman, looking at her with some concern,
asked: "Sissy, where is the baby's mother?"
It was now that the great black storm-cloud which had been hovering
over the nation for years broke in all its fury upon this border
State. The Osbournes, together with nearly all their friends and
relatives, cast in their lot with the North, and young Osbourne left
his family and went to the war as captain in the army.
We must now return to the dark, handsome boy, George Marshall, once
the favourite playmate and now the brother-in-law of Fanny Van de
Grift. He, too, joined the colours, in command of a company of Zouaves
whom he had himself gathered and trained. After a time spent in active
service on some of the hardest fought battle-fields of the Civil War,
the hardships and exposure of the life told upon a constitution never
at any time robust, and he returned to his young wife a victim of
tuberculosis. The doctors said his only chance was to get to the
milder climate of California, and at the close of the war Samuel
Osbourne, who was his devoted friend, gave up position and prospects
to accompany him thither. The two young men, leaving their families
behind them, took ship at New York for Panama; but the Angel of Death
sailed with them, and Captain Marshall breathed his last while
crossing the Isthmus.
Osbourne decided to go on to California, and on his arrival there was
so pleased with the country that he wrote to his wife to sell her
property at once and follow him. Bidding a long farewell to the loving
parents who had up to that time stood between her and every trouble,
Fanny Osbourne, at an age when most young women are enjoying the
care-free life of irresponsible girlhood, took her small daughter
Isobel and set forth into a new and strange world.
Crossing the Isthmus by the crookedest railroad ever seen, she stopped
at Panama to visit the burial-place of the young soldier, George
Marshall, her childhood playmate, beloved friend, and brother-in-law,
and over that lonely grave the child for the first time saw her
girlish mother shed tears.