themselves warm and strong in winter when the temperature was far below
zero. Feeble-looking rabbits scud away over the snow, lithe and
elastic, as if glorying in the frosty, sparkling weather and sure of
their dinners. I have seen gray squirrels dragging ears of corn about
as heavy as themselves out of our field through loose snow and up a
tree, balancing them on limbs and eating in comfort with their dry,
electric tails spread airily over their backs. Once I saw a fine hardy
fellow go into a knot-hole. Thrusting in my hand I caught him and
pulled him out. As soon as he guessed what I was up to, he took the end
of my thumb in his mouth and sunk his teeth right through it, but I
gripped him hard by the neck, carried him home, and shut him up in a
box that contained about half a bushel of hazel-and hickory-nuts,
hoping that he would not be too much frightened and discouraged to eat
while thus imprisoned after the rough handling he had suffered. I soon
learned, however, that sympathy in this direction was wasted, for no
sooner did I pop him in than he fell to with right hearty appetite,
gnawing and munching the nuts as if he had gathered them himself and
was very hungry that day. Therefore, after allowing time enough for a
good square meal, I made haste to get him out of the nut-box and shut
him up in a spare bedroom, in which father had hung a lot of selected
ears of Indian corn for seed. They were hung up by the husks on cords
stretched across from side to side of the room. The squirrel managed to
jump from the top of one of the bed-posts to the cord, cut off an ear,
and let it drop to the floor. He then jumped down, got a good grip of
the heavy ear, carried it to the top of one of the slippery, polished
bed-posts, seated himself comfortably, and, holding it well balanced,
deliberately pried out one kernel at a time with his long chisel teeth,
ate the soft, sweet germ, and dropped the hard part of the kernel. In
this masterly way, working at high speed, he demolished several ears a
day, and with a good warm bed in a box made himself at home and grew
fat. Then naturally, I suppose, free romping in the snow and tree-tops
with companions came to mind. Anyhow he began to look for a way of
escape. Of course he first tried the window, but found that his teeth
made no impression on the glass. Next he tried the sash and gnawed the
wood off level with the glass; then father happened to come upstairs
and discovered the mischief that was being done to his seed corn and
window and immediately ordered him out of the house.
The flying squirrel was one of the most interesting of the little
animals we found in the woods, a beautiful brown creature, with fine
eyes and smooth, soft fur like that of a mole or field mouse. He is
about half as long as the gray squirrel, but his wide-spread tail and
the folds of skin along his sides that form the wings make him look
broad and flat, something like a kite. In the evenings our cat often
brought them to her kittens at the shanty, and later we saw them fly
during the day from the trees we were chopping. They jumped and glided
off smoothly and apparently without effort, like birds, as soon as they
heard and felt the breaking shock of the strained fibres at the stump,
when the trees they were in began to totter and groan. They can fly, or
rather glide, twenty or thirty yards from the top of a tree twenty or
thirty feet high to the foot of another, gliding upward as they reach
the trunk, or if the distance is too great they alight comfortably on
the ground and make haste to the nearest tree, and climb just like the
wingless squirrels.
Every boy and girl loves the little fairy, airy striped chipmunk, half
squirrel, half spermophile. He is about the size of a field mouse, and
often made us think of linnets and song sparrows as he frisked about
gathering nuts and berries. He likes almost all kinds of grain,
berries, and nuts,—hazel-nuts, hickory-nuts, strawberries,
huckleberries, wheat, oats, corn,—he is fond of them all and thrives on
them. Most of the hazel bushes on our farm grew along the fences as if
they had been planted for the chipmunks alone, for the rail fences were
their favorite highways. We never wearied watching them, especially
when the hazel-nuts were ripe and the little fellows were sitting on
the rails nibbling and handling them like tree-squirrels. We used to
notice too that, although they are very neat animals, their lips and
fingers were dyed red like our own, when the strawberries and
huckleberries were ripe. We could always tell when the wheat and oats
were in the milk by seeing the chipmunks feeding on the ears. They kept
nibbling at the wheat until it was harvested and then gleaned in the
stubble, keeping up a careful watch for their enemies,—dogs, hawks, and
shrikes. They are as widely distributed over the continent as the
squirrels, various species inhabiting different regions on the
mountains and lowlands, but all the different kinds have the same
general characteristics of light, airy cheerfulness and good nature.
Before the arrival of farmers in the Wisconsin woods the small ground
squirrels, called “gophers,” lived chiefly on the seeds of wild grasses
and weeds, but after the country was cleared and ploughed no feasting
animal fell to more heartily on the farmer’s wheat and corn. Increasing
rapidly in numbers and knowledge, they became very destructive,
especially in the spring when the corn was planted, for they learned to
trace the rows and dig up and eat the three or four seeds in each hill
about as fast as the poor farmers could cover them. And unless great
pains were taken to diminish the numbers of the cunning little robbers,
the fields had to be planted two or three times over, and even then
large gaps in the rows would be found. The loss of the grain they
consumed after it was ripe, together with the winter stores laid up in
their burrows, amounted to little as compared with the loss of the seed
on which the whole crop depended.
One evening about sundown, when my father sent me out with the shotgun
to hunt them in a stubble field, I learned something curious and
interesting in connection with these mischievous gophers, though just
then they were doing no harm. As I strolled through the stubble
watching for a chance for a shot, a shrike flew past me and alighted on
an open spot at the mouth of a burrow about thirty yards ahead of me.
Curious to see what he was up to, I stood still to watch him. He looked
down the gopher hole in a listening attitude, then looked back at me to
see if I was coming, looked down again and listened, and looked back at
me. I stood perfectly still, and he kept twitching his tail, seeming
uneasy and doubtful about venturing to do the savage job that I soon
learned he had in his mind. Finally, encouraged by my keeping so still,
to my astonishment he suddenly vanished in the gopher hole.
COMBINED THERMOMETER, HYGROMETER, BAROMETER AND PYROMETER
COMBINED THERMOMETER, HYGROMETER, BAROMETER AND PYROMETER
Invented by the author in his boyhoodToList
A bird going down a deep narrow hole in the ground like a ferret or a
weasel seemed very strange, and I thought it would be a fine thing to
run forward, clap my hand over the hole, and have the fun of
imprisoning him and seeing what he would do when he tried to get out.
So I ran forward but stopped when I got within a dozen or fifteen yards
of the hole, thinking it might perhaps be more interesting to wait and
see what would naturally happen without my interference. While I stood
there looking and listening, I heard a great disturbance going on in
the burrow, a mixed lot of keen squeaking, shrieking, distressful
cries, telling that down in the dark something terrible was being done.
Then suddenly out popped a half-grown gopher, four and a half or five
inches long, and, without stopping a single moment to choose a way of
escape, ran screaming through the stubble straight away from its home,
quickly followed by another and another, until some half-dozen were
driven out, all of them crying and running in different directions as
if at this dreadful time home, sweet home, was the most dangerous and
least desirable of any place in the wide world. Then out came the
shrike, flew above the run-away gopher children, and, diving on them,
killed them one after another with blows at the back of the skull. He
then seized one of them, dragged it to the top of a small clod so as to
be able to get a start, and laboriously made out to fly with it about
ten or fifteen yards, when he alighted to rest. Then he dragged it to
the top of another clod and flew with it about the same distance,
repeating this hard work over and over again until he managed to get
one of the gophers on to the top of a log fence. How much he ate of his
hard-won prey, or what he did with the others, I can’t tell, for by
this time the sun was down and I had to hurry home to my chores.
VIToC
THE PLOUGHBOY
The Crops—Doing Chores—The Sights and Sounds of Winter—Road-making—The
Spirit-rapping Craze—Tuberculosis among the Settlers—A Cruel
Brother—The Rights of the Indians—Put to the Plough at the Age of
Twelve—In the Harvest-Field—Over-Industry among the Settlers—Running
the Breaking-Plough—Digging a Well—Choke-Damp—Lining Bees.
At first, wheat, corn, and potatoes were the principal crops we raised;
wheat especially. But in four or five years the soil was so exhausted
that only five or six bushels an acre, even in the better fields, was
obtained, although when first ploughed twenty and twenty-five bushels
was about the ordinary yield. More attention was then paid to corn, but
without fertilizers the corn-crop also became very meagre. At last it
was discovered that English clover would grow on even the exhausted
fields, and that when ploughed under and planted with corn, or even
wheat, wonderful crops were raised. This caused a complete change in
farming methods; the farmers raised fertilizing clover, planted corn,
and fed the crop to cattle and hogs.
But no crop raised in our wilderness was so surprisingly rich and sweet
and purely generous to us boys and, indeed, to everybody as the
watermelons and muskmelons. We planted a large patch on a sunny
hill-slope the very first spring, and it seemed miraculous that a few
handfuls of little flat seeds should in a few months send up a hundred
wagon-loads of crisp, sumptuous, red-hearted and yellow-hearted fruits
covering all the hill. We soon learned to know when they were in their
prime, and when over-ripe and mealy. Also that if a second crop was
taken from the same ground without fertilizing it, the melons would be
small and what we called soapy; that is, soft and smooth, utterly
uncrisp, and without a trace of the lively freshness and sweetness of
those raised on virgin soil. Coming in from the farm work at noon, the
half-dozen or so of melons we had placed in our cold spring were a
glorious luxury that only weary barefooted farm boys can ever know.
Spring was not very trying as to temperature, and refreshing rains fell
at short intervals. The work of ploughing commenced as soon as the
frost was out of the ground. Corn-and potato-planting and the sowing of
spring wheat was comparatively light work, while the nesting birds sang
cheerily, grass and flowers covered the marshes and meadows and all the
wild, uncleared parts of the farm, and the trees put forth their new
leaves, those of the oaks forming beautiful purple masses as if every
leaf were a petal; and with all this we enjoyed the mild soothing
winds, the humming of innumerable small insects and hylas, and the
freshness and fragrance of everything. Then, too, came the wonderful
passenger pigeons streaming from the south, and flocks of geese and
cranes, filling all the sky with whistling wings.
The summer work, on the contrary, was deadly heavy, especially
harvesting and corn-hoeing. All the ground had to be hoed over for the
first few years, before father bought cultivators or small
weed-covering ploughs, and we were not allowed a moment’s rest. The
hoes had to be kept working up and down as steadily as if they were
moved by machinery. Ploughing for winter wheat was comparatively easy,
when we walked barefooted in the furrows, while the fine autumn tints
kindled in the woods, and the hillsides were covered with golden
pumpkins.
In summer the chores were grinding scythes, feeding the animals,
chopping stove-wood, and carrying water up the hill from the spring on
the edge of the meadow, etc. Then breakfast, and to the harvest or
hay-field. I was foolishly ambitious to be first in mowing and
cradling, and by the time I was sixteen led all the hired men. An hour
was allowed at noon for dinner and more chores. We stayed in the field
until dark, then supper, and still more chores, family worship, and to
bed; making altogether a hard, sweaty day of about sixteen or seventeen
hours. Think of that, ye blessed eight-hour-day laborers!
In winter father came to the foot of the stairs and called us at six
o’clock to feed the horses and cattle, grind axes, bring in wood, and
do any other chores required, then breakfast, and out to work in the
mealy, frosty snow by daybreak, chopping, fencing, etc. So in general
our winter work was about as restless and trying as that of the
long-day summer. No matter what the weather, there was always something
to do. During heavy rains or snowstorms we worked in the barn, shelling
corn, fanning wheat, thrashing with the flail, making axe-handles or
ox-yokes, mending things, or sprouting and sorting potatoes in the
cellar.
No pains were taken to diminish or in any way soften the natural
hardships of this pioneer farm life; nor did any of the Europeans seem
to know how to find reasonable ease and comfort if they would. The very
best oak and hickory fuel was embarrassingly abundant and cost nothing
but cutting and common sense; but instead of hauling great
heart-cheering loads of it for wide, open, all-welcoming,
climate-changing, beauty-making, Godlike ingle-fires, it was hauled
with weary heart-breaking industry into fences and waste places to get
it out of the way of the plough, and out of the way of doing good. The
only fire for the whole house was the kitchen stove, with a fire-box
about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep,—scant space
for three or four small sticks, around which in hard zero weather all
the family of ten persons shivered, and beneath which in the morning we
found our socks and coarse, soggy boots frozen solid. We were not
allowed to start even this despicable little fire in its black box to
thaw them. No, we had to squeeze our throbbing, aching, chilblained
feet into them, causing greater pain than toothache, and hurry out to
chores. Fortunately the miserable chilblain pain began to abate as soon
as the temperature of our feet approached the freezing-point, enabling
us in spite of hard work and hard frost to enjoy the winter beauty,—the
wonderful radiance of the snow when it was starry with crystals, and
the dawns and the sunsets and white noons, and the cheery, enlivening
company of the brave chickadees and nuthatches.
The winter stars far surpassed those of our stormy Scotland in
brightness, and we gazed and gazed as though we had never seen stars
before. Oftentimes the heavens were made still more glorious by
auroras, the long lance rays, called “Merry Dancers” in Scotland,
streaming with startling tremulous motion to the zenith. Usually the
electric auroral light is white or pale yellow, but in the third or
fourth of our Wisconsin winters there was a magnificently colored
aurora that was seen and admired over nearly all the continent. The
whole sky was draped in graceful purple and crimson folds glorious
beyond description. Father called us out into the yard in front of the
house where we had a wide view, crying, “Come! Come, mother! Come,
bairns! and see the glory of God. All the sky is clad in a robe of red
light. Look straight up to the crown where the folds are gathered. Hush
and wonder and adore, for surely this is the clothing of the Lord
Himself, and perhaps He will even now appear looking down from his high
heaven.” This celestial show was far more glorious than anything we had
ever yet beheld, and throughout that wonderful winter hardly anything
else was spoken of.
We even enjoyed the snowstorms, the thronging crystals, like daisies,
coming down separate and distinct, were very different from the tufted
flakes we enjoyed so much in Scotland, when we ran into the midst of
the slow-falling feathery throng shouting with enthusiasm: “Jennie’s
plucking her doos! Jennie’s plucking her doos (doves)!”
Nature has many ways of thinning and pruning and trimming her
forests,—lightning-strokes, heavy snow, and storm-winds to shatter and
blow down whole trees here and there or break off branches as required.
The results of these methods I have observed in different forests, but
only once have I seen pruning by rain. The rain froze on the trees as
it fell and grew so thick and heavy that many of them lost a third or
more of their branches. The view of the woods after the storm had
passed and the sun shone forth was something never to be forgotten.
Every twig and branch and rugged trunk was encased in pure crystal ice,
and each oak and hickory and willow became a fairy crystal palace. Such
dazzling brilliance, such effects of white light and irised light
glowing and flashing I had never seen before, nor have I since. This
sudden change of the leafless woods to glowing silver was, like the
great aurora, spoken of for years, and is one of the most beautiful of
the many pictures that enriches my life. And besides the great shows
there were thousands of others even in the coldest weather manifesting
the utmost fineness and tenderness of beauty and affording noble
compensation for hardship and pain.
One of the most striking of the winter sounds was the loud roaring and
rumbling of the ice on our lake, from its shrinking and expanding with
the changes of the weather. The fishermen who were catching pickerel
said that they had no luck when this roaring was going on above the
fish. I remember how frightened we boys were when on one of our New
Year holidays we were taking a walk on the ice and heard for the first
time the sudden rumbling roar beneath our feet and running on ahead of
us, creaking and whooping as if all the ice eighteen or twenty inches
thick was breaking.
In the neighborhood of our Wisconsin farm there were extensive swamps
consisting in great part of a thick sod of very tough carex roots
covering thin, watery lakes of mud. They originated in glacier lakes
that were gradually overgrown. This sod was so tough that oxen with
loaded wagons could be driven over it without cutting down through it,
although it was afloat. The carpenters who came to build our frame
house, noticing how the sedges sunk beneath their feet, said that if
they should break through, they would probably be well on their way to
California before touching bottom. On the contrary, all these
lake-basins are shallow as compared with their width. When we went into
the Wisconsin woods there was not a single wheel-track or cattle-track.
The only man-made road was an Indian trail along the Fox River between
Portage and Packwauckee Lake. Of course the deer, foxes, badgers,
coons, skunks, and even the squirrels had well-beaten tracks from their
dens and hiding-places in thickets, hollow trees, and the ground, but
they did not reach far, and but little noise was made by the
soft-footed travelers in passing over them, only a slight rustling and
swishing among fallen leaves and grass.
Corduroying the swamps formed the principal part of road-making among
the early settlers for many a day. At these annual road-making
gatherings opportunity was offered for discussion of the news,
politics, religion, war, the state of the crops, comparative advantages
of the new country over the old, and so forth, but the principal
opportunities, recurring every week, were the hours after Sunday church
services. I remember hearing long talks on the wonderful beauty of the
Indian corn; the wonderful melons, so wondrous fine for “sloken a body
on hot days”; their contempt for tomatoes, so fine to look at with
their sunny colors and so disappointing in taste; the miserable
cucumbers the “Yankee bodies” ate, though tasteless as rushes; the
character of the Yankees, etcetera. Then there were long discussions
about the Russian war, news of which was eagerly gleaned from Greeley’s
“New York Tribune”; the great battles of the Alma, the charges at
Balaklava and Inkerman; the siege of Sebastopol; the military genius of
Todleben; the character of Nicholas; the character of the Russian
soldier, his stubborn bravery, who for the first time in history
withstood the British bayonet charges; the probable outcome of the
terrible war; the fate of Turkey, and so forth.
Very few of our old-country neighbors gave much heed to what are called
spirit-rappings. On the contrary, they were regarded as a sort of
sleight-of-hand humbug. Some of these spirits seem to be stout
able-bodied fellows, judging by the weights they lift and the heavy
furniture they bang about. But they do no good work that I know of;
never saw wood, grind corn, cook, feed the hungry, or go to the help of
poor anxious mothers at the bedsides of their sick children. I noticed
when I was a boy that it was not the strongest characters who followed
so-called mediums. When a rapping-storm was at its height in Wisconsin,
one of our neighbors, an old Scotchman, remarked, “Thay puir silly
medium-bodies may gang to the deil wi’ their rappin’ speerits, for they
dae nae gude, and I think the deil’s their fayther.”
Although in the spring of 1849 there was no other settler within a
radius of four miles of our Fountain Lake farm, in three or four years
almost every quarter-section of government land was taken up, mostly by
enthusiastic homeseekers from Great Britain, with only here and there
Yankee families from adjacent states, who had come drifting
indefinitely westward in covered wagons, seeking their fortunes like
winged seeds; all alike striking root and gripping the glacial drift
soil as naturally as oak and hickory trees; happy and hopeful,
establishing homes and making wider and wider fields in the hospitable
wilderness. The axe and plough were kept very busy; cattle, horses,
sheep, and pigs multiplied; barns and corn-cribs were filled up, and
man and beast were well fed; a schoolhouse was built, which was used
also for a church; and in a very short time the new country began to
look like an old one.
Comparatively few of the first settlers suffered from serious
accidents. One of our neighbors had a finger shot off, and on a bitter,
frosty night had to be taken to a surgeon in Portage, in a sled drawn
by slow, plodding oxen, to have the shattered stump dressed. Another
fell from his wagon and was killed by the wheel passing over his body.
An acre of ground was reserved and fenced for graves, and soon
consumption came to fill it. One of the saddest instances was that of a
Scotch family from Edinburgh, consisting of a father, son, and
daughter, who settled on eighty acres of land within half a mile of our
place. The daughter died of consumption the third year after their
arrival, the son one or two years later, and at last the father
followed his two children. Thus sadly ended bright hopes and dreams of
a happy home in rich and free America.
Another neighbor, I remember, after a lingering illness died of the
same disease in midwinter, and his funeral was attended by the
neighbors in sleighs during a driving snowstorm when the thermometer
was fifteen or twenty degrees below zero. The great white plague
carried off another of our near neighbors, a fine Scotchman, the father
of eight promising boys, when he was only about forty-five years of
age. Most of those who suffered from this disease seemed hopeful and
cheerful up to a very short time before their death, but Mr. Reid, I
remember, on one of his last visits to our house, said with brave
resignation: “I know that never more in this world can I be well, but I
must just submit. I must just submit.”
One of the saddest deaths from other causes than consumption was that
of a poor feeble-minded man whose brother, a sturdy, devout, severe
puritan, was a very hard taskmaster. Poor half-witted Charlie was kept
steadily at work,—although he was not able to do much, for his body was
about as feeble as his mind. He never could be taught the right use of
an axe, and when he was set to chopping down trees for firewood he
feebly hacked and chipped round and round them, sometimes spending
several days in nibbling down a tree that a beaver might have gnawed
down in half the time. Occasionally when he had an extra large tree to
chop, he would go home and report that the tree was too tough and
strong for him and that he could never make it fall. Then his brother,
calling him a useless creature, would fell it with a few well-directed
strokes, and leave Charlie to nibble away at it for weeks trying to
make it into stove-wood.
His guardian brother, delighting in hard work and able for anything,
was as remarkable for strength of body and mind as poor Charlie for
childishness. All the neighbors pitied Charlie, especially the women,
who never missed an opportunity to give him kind words, cookies, and
pie; above all, they bestowed natural sympathy on the poor imbecile as
if he were an unfortunate motherless child. In particular, his nearest
neighbors, Scotch Highlanders, warmly welcomed him to their home and
never wearied in doing everything that tender sympathy could suggest.
To those friends he ran gladly at every opportunity. But after years of
suffering from overwork and illness his feeble health failed, and he
told his Scotch friends one day that he was not able to work any more
or do anything that his brother wanted him to do, that he was tired of
life, and that he had come to thank them for their kindness and to bid
them good-bye, for he was going to drown himself in Muir’s lake. “Oh,
Charlie! Charlie!” they cried, “you mustn’t talk that way. Cheer up!
You will soon be stronger. We all love you. Cheer up! Cheer up! And
always come here whenever you need anything.”
“Oh, no! my friends,” he pathetically replied, “I know you love me, but
I can’t cheer up any more. My heart’s gone, and I want to die.”