I BECOME COW VANDEMARK
I was off with the spring rush of 1855 for the new lands of the West! I
kept thinking as I drove along of Lawyer Jackway's sarcastic toast,
"Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!" But after
all I couldn't keep myself from feeling pretty proud, as I watched the
play of my horses' ears as they seemed to take in each new westward view
as we went over the tops of the low hills, and as I listened to the
"chuck, chuck" of the wagon wheels on their well-greased skeins. Rucker
and Jackway might have given me a check on the tow-path; but yet I felt
hopeful that I was to make a real success of my voyage of life to a home
and a place where I could be somebody. There was pleasure in looking
back at my riches in the clean, hard-stuffed straw-tick, the stove, the
traveling home which belonged to me.
It seems a little queer to me now to think of it as I look out of my
bay-window at my great fields of corn, my pastures dotted with stock, my
feedyard full of fat steers; or as I sit in the directors' room of the
bank and take my part as a member of the board. But I am really not as
rich now as I was then.
I was going to a country which seemed to be drawing everybody else, and
must therefore be a good country--and I had a farm. I had a great farm.
It was a mile square. It was almost like the estate that General Cantine
had near the canal at Ithaca I thought. To my boy's mind it looked too
big for me; and sometimes I wondered if I should not be able to rent it
out to tenants and grow rich on my income, like the Van Rensselaers of
the Manor before the Anti-Rent difficulties.
All the while I was passing outfits which were waiting by the roadside,
or making bad weather of it for some reason or other; or I was passed by
those who had less regard for their horse flesh than I, or did not
realize that the horses had to go afoot; or those that drew lighter
loads. There were some carriages which went flourishing along with
shining covers; these were the aristocrats; there were other slow-going
rigs drawn by oxen. Usually there would be two or more vehicles in a
train. They camped by the roadside cooking their meals; they stopped at
wayside taverns. They gave me all sorts of how-d'ye-does as I passed.
Girls waved their hands at me from the hind-ends of rigs and said bold
things--to a boy they would not see again; but which left him blushing
and thinking up retorts for the next occasion--retorts that never seemed
to fit when the time came; and talkative women threw remarks at me about
the roads and the weather.
Men tried half a dozen times a day to trade me out of my bay mare Fanny,
or my sorrel mare Flora--they said I ought to match up with two of a
color; and the crow-baits offered me would have stocked a horse-ranch.
People with oxen offered me what looked like good swaps, because they
were impatient to make better time; and as I went along so stylishly I
began turning over in my mind the question as to whether it might not
be better to get to Iowa a little later in the year with cattle for a
start than to rush the season with my fine mares and pull up standing
like a gentleman at my own imaginary door.
2
As I went on to the westward, I began to see Blue Mound rising like a
low mountain off my starboard bow, and I stopped at a farm in the
foot-hills of the Mound where, because it was rainy, I paid four
shillings for putting my horses in the stable. There were two other
movers stopping at the same place. They had a light wagon and a yoke of
good young steers, and had been out of Madison two days longer than I
had been. I noticed that they left their wagon in a clump of bushes, and
that while one of them--a man of fifty or more, slept in the house, the
other, a young fellow of twenty or twenty-two, lay in the wagon, and
that one or the other seemed always to be on guard near the vehicle. The
older man had a long beard and a hooked nose, and seemed to be a still
sort of person, until some one spoke of slavery; then he broke out in a
fierce speech denouncing slaveholders, and the slavocracy that had the
nation in its grip.
"You talk," said the farmer, "like a black Abolitionist."
"I'm so black an Abolitionist," said he, "that I'd be willing to
shoulder a gun any minute if I thought I could wipe out the curse
of slavery."
The farmer was terribly scandalized at this, and when the old man walked
away to his wagon, he said to the young man and me that that sort of
talk would make trouble and ruin the nation; and that he didn't want
any more of it around his place.
"Well," said the traveler, "you won't have any more of it from us. We're
just pulling out." After the farmer went away, he spoke to me about it.
"What do you think of that kind of talk?" he asked.
"I don't own any niggers," said I. "I don't ever expect to own any. I
don't see how slavery can do me any good; and I think the slaves
are human."
I had no very clear ideas on the subject, and had done little thinking
about it; but what I said seemed to be satisfactory to the young man. He
told his friend about it, and after a while the old man, whose name was
Dunlap, came to me and shook my hand, saying that he was glad to meet a
young fellow of my age who was of the right stripe.
"Can you shoot?" he asked.
I told him I never had had much chance to learn, but I had a good gun,
and had got some game with it almost every day so far.
"What kind of a gun?" he asked.
I told him it was a double-barreled shotgun, and he looked rather
disappointed. Then he asked me if I had ever thought of going to Kansas.
No, I told him, I thought I should rather locate in Iowa.
"We are going to Kansas," he said. "There's work for real men in
Kansas--men who believe in freedom. You had better go along with Amos
Thatcher and me."
I said I didn't believe I could--I had planned to locate in Iowa. He
dropped the subject by saying that I would overtake him and Thatcher on
the road, and we could talk it over again. When did I think of getting
under way? I answered that I thought I should stay hauled up to rest my
horses for a half-day anyhow, so perhaps we might camp that
night together.
"A good idea," said Thatcher, smilingly, as they drove off. "Join us; we
get lonesome."
I laid by that forenoon because one of my mares had limped a little the
day before, and I was worrying for fear she might not be perfectly
sound. I hitched up after noon and drove on, anxiously watching her to
see whether I had not been sucked in on horse flesh, as well as in the
general settlement of my mother's estate. She seemed to be all right,
however, and we were making good headway as night drew on, and I was
halted by Amos Thatcher who said he was on the lookout for me.
"We have a station off the road a mile or so," said he, "and you'll have
a hearty welcome if you come with me--stable for your horses, and a bed
to sleep in, and good victuals."
I couldn't think what he meant by a station; but it was about time to
make camp anyhow, and so I took him into the wagon with me, and we drove
across country by a plain trail, through a beautiful piece of oak
openings, to a big log house in a fine grove of burr oaks, with a log
barn back of it--as nice a farmstead as I had seen. There were fifteen
or twenty cattle in the yards, and some sheep and hogs, and many fat
hens. If this was a station, I thought, I envied the man who owned it.
As we drove up I saw a little negro boy peeping at us from the back of
the house, and as we halted a black woman ran out and seized the
pickaninny by the ear, and dragged him back out of sight. I heard a
whimper from the little boy, which seemed suddenly smothered by
something like a hand clapped over his mouth. Mr. Dunlap's wagon was not
in sight, but its owner came out at the front door and greeted me in a
very friendly way.
"What makes you call this a station?" I asked of Thatcher.
Dunlap looked at him sternly.
"I forgot myself," said Thatcher, more to Dunlap than to me.
"Never mind," replied Dunlap. "If I can tell B from a bull's foot, it's
all right."
Then turning to me he said, "The old lady inside has a meal of victuals
ready for us. Come in and we'll let into it."
There was nothing said at the meal which explained the things that were
so blind to me; but there was a good deal of talk about rifles. The
farmer was named Preston, a middle-aged man who shaved all his beard
except what grew under his chin, which hung down in a long black fringe
over his breast like a window-lambrequin. His wife's father, who was an
old Welshman named Evans, had worked in the lead mines over toward
Dubuque, until Preston had married his daughter and taken up his farm in
the oak openings. They had been shooting at a mark that afternoon, with
Sharp's rifles carried by Dunlap and Thatcher, and the old-fashioned
squirrel rifles owned on the farm. After supper they brought out these
rifles and compared them. Preston insisted that the squirrel rifles
were better.
"Not for real service," said Dunlap, throwing a cartridge into the
breech of the Sharp, and ejecting it to show how fast it could be done.
"But I can roll a squirrel's eye right out of his head most every time
with the old-style gun," said Preston. "This is the gun that won the
Battle of New Orleans."
"It wouldn't have won against the Sharp," said Thatcher; "and you know
we expect to have a larger mark than a squirrel's head, when we get
to Kansas."
This was the first breech-loader I had ever seen, and I looked it over
with a buying eye. It didn't seem to me that it would be much better for
hunting than the old-fashioned rifle, loaded with powder and a molded
bullet rammed down with a patch of oiled cloth around it; for after you
have shot at your game once, you either have hit it, or it runs or flies
away. If you have hit it, you can generally get it, and if it goes away,
you have time to reload. Besides those big cartridges must be costly, I
thought, and said so to Mr. Dunlap.
"When you're hunting Border Ruffians," said he, "a little expense don't
count one way or the other; and you may be willing to pay dear for a
chance to reload three or four times while the other man is ramming home
a new charge. Give me the new guns, the new ideas, and the old doctrine
of freedom to fight for. Don't you see?"
"Why, of course," said I, "I'm for freedom. That's why I'm going out on
the prairies."
"Prairies!" said old Evans. "Prairies! What do you expect to do on the
prairies?"
"Farm," I answered.
"All these folks that are rushing to the prairies," said the old man,
"will starve out and come back. God makes trees grow to show men where
the good land is. I read history, and there's no country that's good for
anything, except where men have cut the trees, niggered off the logs,
grubbed out the stumps, and made fields of it--and if there are stones,
it's all the better. 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,'
said God to Adam, and when you go to the prairies where it's all ready
for the plow, you are trying to dodge God's curse on our first parents.
You won't prosper. It stands to reason that any land that is good will
grow trees."
"Some of this farm was prairie," put in Preston, "and I don't see but
it's just as good as the rest."
"It was all openings," replied Evans. "The trees was here once, and got
killed by the fires, or somehow. It was all woods once."
"You cut down trees to make land grow grass," said Thatcher. "I should
think that God must have meant grass to be the sign of good ground."
"Isn't the sweat of your face just as plenty when you delve in the
prairies?" asked Dunlap.
"You fly in the face of God's decree, and run against His manifest
warning when you try to make a prairie into a farm," said Evans.
"You'll see!"
"Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!" was the
ditty that ran through my head as I heard this. Old man Evans' way of
looking at the matter seemed reasonable to my cautious mind; and,
anyhow, when a man has grown old he knows many things that he can give
no good reason for. I have always found that the well-educated fellow
with a deep-sounding and plausible philosophy that runs against the
teachings of experience, is likely, especially in farming, to make a
failure when he might have saved himself by doing as the old settlers
do, who won't answer his arguments but make a good living just the same,
while the new-fangled practises send their followers to the poor-house.
At that moment, I would have traded my Iowa farm for any good piece of
land covered with trees. But Dunlap and Thatcher had something else to
talk to me about. They were for the prairies, especially the prairies
of Kansas.
"Kansas," said Dunlap, "will be one of the great states of the Union,
one of these days. Come with us, and help make it a free state. We need
a hundred thousand young farmers, who believe in liberty, and will fight
for it. Come with us, take up a farm, and carry a Sharp's rifle against
the Border Ruffians!"
This sounded convincing to me, but of course I couldn't make up my mind
to anything of this sort without days and days of consideration; but I
listened to what they said. They told me of an army of free-state
emigrants that was gathering along the border to win Kansas for freedom.
They, Dunlap and Thatcher, were going to Marion, Iowa, and from there by
the Mormon Trail across to a place called Tabor, and from there to
Lawrence, Kansas. They were New England Yankees. Thatcher had been to
college, and was studying law. Dunlap had been a business man in
Connecticut, and was a friend of John Brown, who was then on his way
to Kansas.
"The Missouri Compromise has been repealed," said Thatcher, his eyes
shining, "and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill has thrown the fertile state of
Kansas into the ring to be fought for by free-state men and pro-slavery
men. The Border Ruffians of Missouri are breaking the law every day by
going over into Kansas, never meaning to live there only long enough to
vote, and are corrupting the state government. They are corrupting it by
violence and illegal voting. If slavery wins in Kansas and Nebraska, it
will control the Union forever. The greatest battle in our history is
about to be fought out in Kansas, a battle to see whether this nation
shall be a slave nation, in every state and every town, or free. Dunlap
and I and thousands of others are going down there to take the state of
Kansas into our own hands, peacefully if we can, by violence if we must.
We are willing to die to make the United States a free nation. Come
with us!"
"But we don't expect to die," urged Dunlap, seeing that this looked
pretty serious to me. "We expect to live, and get farms, and make homes,
and prosper, after we have shown the Border Ruffians the muzzles of
those rifles. Thatcher, bring the passengers in!"
3
Thatcher went out of the room the back way.
"We call this a station," went on Dunlap, "because it's a stopping-place
on the U. G. Railway."
"What's the U. G. Railway?" I asked.
"Don't you know that?" he queried.
"I'm only a canal hand," I answered, "going to a farm out on the
prairie, that I was euchred into taking in settling with a scoundrel for
my share of my father's property; and I'm pretty green."
Thatcher came in then, leading the little black boy by the hand, and
following him was the negro woman carrying a baby at her breast, and
holding by the hand a little woolly-headed pickaninny about three years
old. They were ragged and poverty-stricken, and seemed scared at
everything. The woman came in bowing and scraping to me, and the two
little boys hid behind her skirts and peeked around at me with big
white eyes.
"Tell the gentleman," said Thatcher, "where you're going."
"We're gwine to Canayda," said she, "'scusin' your presence."
"How are you going to get to Canada?" asked Thatcher.
"The good white folks," said she, "will keep us hid out nights till we
gits thar."
"What will happen," said Thatcher, "if this young man tells any one that
he's seen you?"
"The old massa," said she, "will find out, an' he'll hunt us wif houn's,
an' fotch us back', and then he'll sell us down the ribber to the
cotton-fiel's."
I never heard anything quite so pitiful as this speech. I had never
known before what it must mean to be really hunted. The woman shrank
back toward the door through which she had come, her face grew a sort of
grayish color; and then ran to me and throwing herself on her knees, she
took hold of my hands, and begged me for God's sake not to tell on her,
not to have her carried back, not to fix it so she'd be sold down the
river to work in the cotton-fields.
"I won't," I said, "I tell you I won't. I want you to get to Canada!"
"God bress yeh," she said. "I know'd yeh was a good young gemman as soon
as I set eyes on yeh! I know'd yeh was quality!"
"Who do you expect to meet in Canada?" asked Thatcher.
"God willin'," said she, "I'm gwine to find Abe Felton, the pa of dese
yere chillun."
"The Underground Railway," said Dunlap, "knows where Abe is, and will
send Sarah along with change of cars. You may go, Sarah. Now," he went
on, as the negroes disappeared, "you have it in your power to exercise
the right of an American citizen and perform the God-accursed legal duty
to report these fugitives at the next town, join a posse to hunt them
down under a law of the United States, get a reward for doing it, and
know that you have vindicated the law--or you can stand with God and
tell the law to go to hell--where it came from--and help the Underground
Railway to carry these people to heaven. Which will you do?"
"I'll tell the law to go to hell," said I.
Dunlap and Thatcher looked at each other as if relieved. I have always
suspected that I was taken into their secret without their ordinary
precautions; and that for a while they were a little dubious for fear
that they had spilt the milk of secrecy. But all my life people have
told me their secrets.
They urged me hard to go with them; and talked so favorably about the
soil of the prairies that I began to think well again of my Iowa farm.
When I had made it plain that I had to have a longer time to think it
over, they began urging me to let them have my horses on some sort of a
trade; and I began to see that a part of what they had wanted all the
time was a faster team as well as a free-state recruit. They urged on me
the desirability of having cattle instead of horses when I reached
my farm.
"Cows, yes," said I, "but not steers."
So I slept over it until morning. Then I made them the proposition that
if they would arrange with Preston to trade me four cows, which I would
select from his herd, and would provide for my board with Preston until
I could break them to drive, and would furnish yokes and chains in
place of my harness, I would let them have the team for a hundred
dollars boot-money. Preston said he'd like to have me make my selection
first, and when I picked out three-year-old heifers, two of which were
giving milk, he said it was a whack, if it didn't take me more than a
week to break them. Dunlap and Thatcher hitched up, and started off the
next morning. I had become Cow Vandemark overnight, and am still Cow
Vandemark in the minds of the old settlers of Vandemark Township and
some who have just picked the name up.
But I did not take on my new name without a struggle, for Flora and
Fanny had become dear to me since leaving Madison--my first horses. How
I got my second team of horses is connected with one of the most
important incidents in my life; it was a long time before I got them and
it will be some time before I can tell about it. In the meantime, there
were Flora and Fanny, hitched to Dunlap and Thatcher's light wagon,
disappearing among the burr oaks toward the Dubuque highway. I thought
of my pride as I drove away from Madison with these two steeds, and of
the pretty figure I cut the morning when red-haired Alice climbed up,
offered to go with me, and kissed me before she climbed down. Would she
have done this if I had been driving oxen, or still worse, those animals
which few thought worth anything as draught animals--cows? And then I
thought of Flora's lameness the day before yesterday. Was it honest to
let Dunlap and Thatcher drive off to liberate the nation with a horse
that might go lame?
"Let me have a horse," said I to Preston. "I want to catch them and tell
them something."
I rode up behind the Abolitionists' wagon, waving my hat and shouting.
They pulled up and waited.
"What's up?" asked Dunlap. "Going with us after all? I hope so, my boy."
"No," said I, "I just wanted to say that that nigh mare was lame day
before yesterday, and I--I--I didn't want you to start off with her
without knowing it."
Dunlap asked about her lameness, and got out to look her over. He felt
of her muscles, and carefully scrutinized her for swelling or swinney or
splint or spavin or thoroughpin. Then he lifted one foot after another,
and cleaned out about the frog, tapping the hoof all over for soreness.
Down deep beside the frog of the foot which she had favored he found a
little pebble.
"That's what it was," said he, holding the pebble up. "She'll be all
right now. Thank you for telling me. It was the square thing to do."
"If you don't feel safe to go on with the team," said I, "I'll trade
back."
"No," said he, "we're needed in Kansas; and," turning up an oil-cloth
and showing me a dozen or so of the Sharp's rifles, "so are these. And
let me tell you, boy, if I'm any judge of men, the time will come when
you won't feel so bad to lose half a dozen horses, as you feel now to be
traded out of Flora and Fanny, and make a hundred dollars by the trade.
Get up, Flora; go long, Fanny; good-by, Jake!" And they drove off to the
Border Wars. I had made my first sacrifice to the cause of the
productiveness of the Vandemark Farm.
That night a wagon went away from the Preston farm with the passengers
going to Canada by the U.G. Railway The next morning I began the task of
fitting yokes to my two span of heifers, and that afternoon, I gave
Lily and Cherry their first lesson. I had had some experience in driving
cattle on Mrs. Fogg's farm in Herkimer County, but I should have made a
botch job of it if it had not been for Mr. Preston, who knew all there
was to know about cattle, and while protesting that cows could not be
driven, helped me drive them. In less than a week my cows were driving
as prettily as any oxen. They were light and active, and overtook team
after team of laboring steers every day I drove them. Furthermore, they
gave me milk. I fed them well, worked them rather lightly, and by
putting the new milk in a churn I bought at Mineral Point, I found that
the motion of the wagon would bring the butter as well as any churning.
I had cream for my coffee, butter for my bread, milk for my mush, and
lived high. A good deal of fun was poked at me about my team of cows;
but people were always glad to camp with me and share my fare.
Economically, our cows ought to be made to do a good deal of the work of
the farms. I have always believed this; but now a German expert has
proved it. I read about it the other day in a bulletin put out by the
Agricultural Department; but I proved it in Vandemark Township before
the man was born that wrote the bulletin. If not pushed too hard, cows
will work and give almost as much milk as if not worked at all. This
statement of course won't apply to the fancy cows which are high-power
milk machines, and need to be packed in cotton, and kept in satin-lined
stalls; but to such cows as farmers have, and always will have, it
does apply.
I was sorry to leave the Prestons, they were such whole-souled, earnest
people; and before I did leave them I was a full-fledged Abolitionist
so far as belief was concerned. I never did become active, however, in
spiriting slaves from one station to another of the U.G. Railway.
I drove out to the highway, and turning my prow to the west, I joined
again in the stream of people swarming westward. The tide had swollen in
the week during which I had laid by at the Prestons'. The road was
rutted, poached deep where wet and beaten hard where dry, or pulverized
into dust by the stream of emigration. Here we went, oxen, cows, mules,
horses; coaches, carriages, blue jeans, corduroys, rags, tatters, silks,
satins, caps, tall hats, poverty, riches; speculators, missionaries,
land-hunters, merchants; criminals escaping from justice; couples
fleeing from the law; families seeking homes; the wrecks of homes
seeking secrecy; gold-seekers bearing southwest to the Overland Trail;
politicians looking for places in which to win fame and fortune; editors
hunting opportunities for founding newspapers; adventurers on their way
to everywhere; lawyers with a few books; Abolitionists going to the
Border War; innocent-looking outfits carrying fugitive slaves; officers
hunting escaped negroes; and most numerous of all, homeseekers "hunting
country"--a nation on wheels, an empire in the commotion and pangs of
birth. Down I went with the rest, across ferries, through Dodgeville,
Mineral Point and Platteville, past a thousand vacant sites for farms
toward my own farm so far from civilization, shot out of civilization by
the forces of civilization itself.
I saw the old mining country from Mineral Point to Dubuque, where lead
had been dug for many years, and where the men lived who dug the holes
and were called Badgers, thus giving the people of Wisconsin their
nickname as distinguished from the Illinois people who came up the
rivers to work in the spring, and went back in the fall, and were
therefore named after a migratory fish and called Suckers; and at last,
I saw from its eastern bank far off to the west, the bluffy shores of
Iowa, and down by the river the keen spires and brick and wood buildings
of the biggest town I had seen since leaving Milwaukee, the town
of Dubuque.
I camped that night in the northwestern corner of Illinois, in a regular
city of movers, all waiting their turns at the ferry which crossed the
Mississippi to the Land of Promise.
4
Iowa did not look much like a prairie country from where I stood. The
Iowa shore towered above the town of Dubuque, clothed with woods to the
top, and looking more like York State than anything I had seen since I
had taken the schooner at Buffalo to come up the Lakes. I lay that
night, unable to sleep. For one thing, I needed to be wakeful, lest some
of the motley crowd of movers might take a fancy to my cattle. I was
learning by experience how to take care of myself and mine; besides, I
wanted to be awake early so as to take passage by ferry-boat "before
soon" as the Hoosiers say, in the morning.
That April morning was still only a gray dawn when I drove down to the
ferry, without stopping for my breakfast. A few others of those who
looked forward to a rush for the boat had got there ahead of me, and we
waited in line. I saw that I should have to go on the second trip rather
than the first, but movers can not be impatient, and the driving of
cattle cures a person of being in a hurry; so I was in no great taking
because of this little delay. As I sat there in my wagon, a
black-bearded, scholarly-looking man stepped up and spoke to me.
"Going across?" he asked.
"As soon as the boat will take me," I said.
"Heavy loaded?" he asked. "Have you room for a passenger?"
"I guess I can accommodate you," I answered. "Climb in."
"It isn't for myself I'm asking," he said. "There's a lady here that
wants to ride in a covered wagon, and sit back where she can't see the
water. It makes her dizzy--and scares her awfully; can you take her?"
"If she can ride back there on the bed," said I.
He peeped in, and said that this was the very place for her. She could
lie down and cover up her head and never know she was crossing the river
at all. In a minute, and while it was still twilight, just as the
ferry-boat came to the landing, he returned with the lady. She was
dressed in some brown fabric, and wore a thick veil over her face; but
as she climbed in I saw that she had yellow hair and bright eyes and
lips; and that she was trembling so that her hands shook as she took
hold of the wagon-bow, and her voice quivered as she thanked me, in low
tones. The man with the black beard pressed her hand as he left her. He
offered me a dollar for her passage; but I called his attention to the
fact that it would cost only two shillings more for me to cross with her
than if I went alone, and refused to take more.
"There are a good many rough fellows," said he, "at these ferries, that
make it unpleasant for a lady, sometimes--"
"Not when she's with me," I said.
He looked at me sharply, as if surprised that I was not so green as I
looked--though I was pretty verdant. Anyhow, he said, if I should be
asked if any one was with me, it would save her from being scared if I
would say that I was alone--she was the most timid woman in the world.
"I'll have to tell the ferryman," I said.
"Will you?" he asked. "Why?"
"I'd be cheating him if I didn't," I answered.
"All right," he said, as if provoked at me, "but don't tell any one
else."
"I ain't very good at lying," I replied.
He said for me to do the best I could for the lady, and hurried off. In
the meantime, the lady had crept back on my straw-bed, and pulled the
quilts completely over her. She piled pillows on one side of her, and
stirred the straw up on the other, so that when she lay down the bed was
as smooth as if nobody was in it. It looked as it might if a heedless
boy had crawled out of it after a night's sleep, and carelessly thrown
the coverlet back over it. I could hardly believe I had a passenger.
When I was asked for the ferriage, I paid for two, and the ferryman
asked where the other was.
"Back in the bed," I said.
He looked back, and said, "Well, I owe you something for your honesty.
I never'd have seen him. Sick?"
"Not very," said I. "Don't like the water."
"Some are that way," he returned, and went on collecting fares.
As we drove up from the landing, through the rutted streets of the old
mining and Indian-trading town, the black-bearded man came to me as we
stopped, held back by a jam of covered wagons--a wonderful sight, even
to me--and as if talking to me, said to the woman, "You'd better ride on
through town;" and then to me, "Are you going on through?"
"I've got to buy some supplies," said I; "but I've nothing to stop me
but that."
"Tell me what you want," he said hurriedly, and looking about as if
expecting some danger, "and I'll buy it for you and bring it on. Which
way are you going?"
"West into Iowa," I answered.
"Go on," said he, "and I'll make it right with you. Camp somewhere west
of town. I'll come along to-night or to-morrow. I'll make it right
with you."
"I don't see through this," I said, with my usual indecision as to doing
something I did not understand. "I thought I'd look around Dubuque
a little."
"For God's sake," said the woman from the bed, "take me on--take me on!"
Her tones were so pleading, she seemed in such an agony of terror, that
I suddenly made up my mind in her favor. Surely there would be no harm
in carrying her on as she wished.
"All right," I said to her, but looking at him, "I'll take you on! You
can count on me." And then to him, "I'll drive on until I find a good
camping-place late this afternoon. You'll have to find us the best
way you can."
He thanked me, and I gave him a list of the things I wanted. Then he
went on up the street ahead of us, walking calmly, and looking about him
as any stranger might have done. We stood for some time, waiting for the
jam of teams to clear, and I gee-upped and whoa-hawed on along the
street, until we came to a building on which was a big sign,
"Post-Office." There was a queue of people waiting for their mail,
extending out at the door, and far down the sidewalk. In this string of
emigrants stood our friend, the black-bearded man. Just as we passed, a
rather thin, stooped man, walking along on the other side of the street,
rushed across, right in front of my lead team, and drawing a pistol,
aimed at the black-bearded man, who in turn stepped out of line and drew
his own weapon.
"I call upon you all to witness," said the black-bearded man, "that I
act in self-defense."
A bystander seized the thin man's pistol hand, and yelled at him not to
shoot or he might kill some one--of course he meant some one he did not
aim at, but it sounded a little funny, and I laughed. Several joined in
the laugh, and there was a good deal of confusion. At last I heard the
black-bearded man say, "I'm here alone. He's accused his wife of being
too thick with a dozen men. He's insanely jealous, gentlemen. I suppose
his wife may have left him, but I'm here alone. I just crossed the river
alone, and I'm going west. If he's got a warrant, he's welcome to have
it served if he finds his wife with me. Come on, gentlemen--but take the
fool's pistol away from him."
As I drove on I saw that the woman had thrown off the quilt, and was
peeping out at the opening in the cover at the back, watching the
black-bearded and the thin man moving off in a group of fellows, one of
whom held the black-bearded man by the arm a good deal as a deputy
sheriff might have done.
The roads leading west out of Dubuque were horrible, then, being steep
stony trails coming down the hollows and washed like watercourses at
every rain. Teams were stalled, sometimes three and four span of animals
were used to get one load to the top, and we were a good deal delayed. I
was so busy trying to keep from upsetting when I drove around stalled
outfits and abandoned wagons, and so occupied in finding places where I
might stop and breathe my team, that I paid little attention to my
queer-acting passenger; but once when we were standing I noticed that
she was covered up again, and seemed to be crying. As we topped the
bluffs, and drew out into the open, she sat up and began to rearrange
her hair. After a few miles, we reached a point from which I could see
the Iowa prairie sweeping away as far as the eye could see. I drew out
by the roadside to look at it, as a man appraises one with whom he must
live--as a friend or an enemy.
I shall never forget the sight. It was like a great green sea. The old
growth had been burned the fall before, and the spring grass scarcely
concealed the brown sod on the uplands; but all the swales were coated
thick with an emerald growth full-bite high, and in the deeper, wetter
hollows grew cowslips, already showing their glossy, golden flowers. The
hillsides were thick with the woolly possblummies[5] in their furry
spring coats protecting them against the frost and chill, showing
purple-violet on the outside of a cup filled with golden stamens, the
first fruits of the prairie flowers; on the warmer southern slopes a
few of the splendid bird's-foot violets of the prairie were showing the
azure color which would soon make some of the hillsides as blue as the
sky; and standing higher than the peering grass rose the rough-leafed
stalks of green which would soon show us the yellow puccoons and
sweet-williams and scarlet lilies and shooting stars, and later the
yellow rosin-weeds, Indian dye-flower and goldenrod. The keen northwest
wind swept before it a flock of white clouds; and under the clouds went
their shadows, walking over the lovely hills like dark ships over an
emerald sea.
[5] "Paas-bloeme" one suspects is the Rondout Valley origin of this term
applied to a flower, possibly seen by the author on this occasion for
the first time--the American pasque-flower, the Iowa prairie type of
which is _Anemone patens_: the knightliest little flower of the Iowa
uplands.--G.v.d.M.
The wild-fowl were clamoring north for the summer's campaign of nesting.
Everywhere the sky was harrowed by the wedged wild geese, their voices
as sweet as organ tones; and ducks quacked, whistled and whirred
overhead, a true rain of birds beating up against the wind. Over every
slew, on all sides, thousands of ducks of many kinds, and several sorts
of geese hovered, settled, or burst up in eruptions of birds, their
back-feathers shining like bronze as they turned so as to reflect the
sunlight to my eyes; while so far up that they looked like specks, away
above the wind it seemed, so quietly did they circle and sail, floated
huge flocks of cranes--the sand-hill cranes in their slaty-gray, and the
whooping cranes, white as snow with black heads and feet, each bird with
a ten-foot spread of wing, piping their wild cries which fell down to me
as if from another world.
It was sublime! Bird, flower, grass, cloud, wind, and the immense
expanse of sunny prairie, swelling up into undulations like a woman's
breasts turgid with milk for a hungry race. I forgot myself and my
position in the world, my loneliness, my strange passenger, the
problems of my life; my heart swelled, and my throat filled. I sat
looking at it, with the tears trickling from my eyes, the uplift of my
soul more than I could bear. It was not the thought of my mother that
brought the tears to my eyes, but my happiness in finding the newest,
strangest, most delightful, sternest, most wonderful thing in the
world--the Iowa prairie--that made me think of my mother. If I only
could have found her alive! If I only could have had her with me! And as
I thought of this I realized that the woman of the ferry had climbed
over the back of the spring-seat and was sitting beside me.
"I don't wonder," said she, "that you cry. Gosh! It scares me to death!"