shore of our lake, was going to a spring he saw a man wade out through
the rushes and lily-pads and throw himself forward into deep water.
This was poor Charlie. Fortunately, Mr. Anderson had a skiff close by,
and as the distance was not great he reached the broken-hearted
imbecile in time to save his life, and after trying to cheer him took
him home to his brother. But even this terrible proof of despair failed
to soften his brother. He seemed to regard the attempt at suicide
simply as a crime calculated to bring harm to religion. Though snatched
from the lake to his bed, poor Charlie lived only a few days longer. A
physician who was called when his health first became seriously
impaired reported that he was suffering from Bright’s disease. After
all was over, the stoical brother walked over to the neighbor who had
saved Charlie from drowning, and, after talking on ordinary affairs,
crops, the weather, etc., said in a careless tone: “I have a little job
of carpenter work for you, Mr. Anderson.” “What is it, Mr. ——?” “I want
you to make a coffin.” “A coffin!” said the startled carpenter. “Who is
dead?” “Charlie,” he coolly replied. All the neighbors were in tears
over the poor child man’s fate. But, strange to say, the brother who
had faithfully cared for him controlled and concealed all his natural
affection as incompatible with sound faith.
The mixed lot of settlers around us offered a favorable field for
observation of the different kinds of people of our own race. We were
swift to note the way they behaved, the differences in their religion
and morals, and in their ways of drawing a living from the same kind of
soil under the same general conditions; how they protected themselves
from the weather; how they were influenced by new doctrines and old
ones seen in new lights in preaching, lecturing, debating, bringing up
their children, etc., and how they regarded the Indians, those first
settlers and owners of the ground that was being made into farms.
I well remember my father’s discussing with a Scotch neighbor, a Mr.
George Mair, the Indian question as to the rightful ownership of the
soil. Mr. Mair remarked one day that it was pitiful to see how the
unfortunate Indians, children of Nature, living on the natural products
of the soil, hunting, fishing, and even cultivating small corn-fields
on the most fertile spots, were now being robbed of their lands and
pushed ruthlessly back into narrower and narrower limits by alien races
who were cutting off their means of livelihood. Father replied that
surely it could never have been the intention of God to allow Indians
to rove and hunt over so fertile a country and hold it forever in
unproductive wildness, while Scotch and Irish and English farmers could
put it to so much better use. Where an Indian required thousands of
acres for his family, these acres in the hands of industrious,
God-fearing farmers would support ten or a hundred times more people in
a far worthier manner, while at the same time helping to spread the
gospel.
Mr. Mair urged that such farming as our first immigrants were
practicing was in many ways rude and full of the mistakes of ignorance,
yet, rude as it was, and ill-tilled as were most of our Wisconsin farms
by unskillful, inexperienced settlers who had been merchants and
mechanics and servants in the old countries, how should we like to have
specially trained and educated farmers drive us out of our homes and
farms, such as they were, making use of the same argument, that God
could never have intended such ignorant, unprofitable, devastating
farmers as we were to occupy land upon which scientific farmers could
raise five or ten times as much on each acre as we did? And I well
remember thinking that Mr. Mair had the better side of the argument. It
then seemed to me that, whatever the final outcome might be, it was at
this stage of the fight only an example of the rule of might with but
little or no thought for the right or welfare of the other fellow if he
were the weaker; that “they should take who had the power, and they
should keep who can,” as Wordsworth makes the marauding Scottish
Highlanders say.
Many of our old neighbors toiled and sweated and grubbed themselves
into their graves years before their natural dying days, in getting a
living on a quarter-section of land and vaguely trying to get rich,
while bread and raiment might have been serenely won on less than a
fourth of this land, and time gained to get better acquainted with God.
I was put to the plough at the age of twelve, when my head reached but
little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater
part of the ploughing. It was hard work for so small a boy;
nevertheless, as good ploughing was exacted from me as if I were a man,
and very soon I had to become a good ploughman, or rather ploughboy.
None could draw a straighter furrow. For the first few years the work
was particularly hard on account of the tree-stumps that had to be
dodged. Later the stumps were all dug and chopped out to make way for
the McCormick reaper, and because I proved to be the best chopper and
stump-digger I had nearly all of it to myself. It was dull, hard work
leaning over on my knees all day, chopping out those tough oak and
hickory stumps, deep down below the crowns of the big roots. Some,
though fortunately not many, were two feet or more in diameter.
And as I was the eldest boy, the greater part of all the other hard
work of the farm quite naturally fell on me. I had to split rails for
long lines of zigzag fences. The trees that were tall enough and
straight enough to afford one or two logs ten feet long were used for
rails, the others, too knotty or cross-grained, were disposed of in log
and cordwood fences. Making rails was hard work and required no little
skill. I used to cut and split a hundred a day from our short, knotty
oak timber, swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands,
from early morning to night. Father was not successful as a
rail-splitter. After trying the work with me a day or two, he in
despair left it all to me. I rather liked it, for I was proud of my
skill, and tried to believe that I was as tough as the timber I mauled,
though this and other heavy jobs stopped my growth and earned for me
the title “Runt of the family.”
In those early days, long before the great labor-saving machines came
to our help, almost everything connected with wheat-raising abounded in
trying work,—cradling in the long, sweaty dog-days, raking and binding,
stacking, thrashing,—and it often seemed to me that our fierce,
over-industrious way of getting the grain from the ground was too
closely connected with grave-digging. The staff of life, naturally
beautiful, oftentimes suggested the grave-digger’s spade. Men and boys,
and in those days even women and girls, were cut down while cutting the
wheat. The fat folk grew lean and the lean leaner, while the rosy
cheeks brought from Scotland and other cool countries across the sea
faded to yellow like the wheat. We were all made slaves through the
vice of over-industry. The same was in great part true in making hay to
keep the cattle and horses through the long winters. We were called in
the morning at four o’clock and seldom got to bed before nine, making a
broiling, seething day seventeen hours long loaded with heavy work,
while I was only a small stunted boy; and a few years later my brothers
David and Daniel and my older sisters had to endure about as much as I
did. In the harvest dog-days and dog-nights and dog-mornings, when we
arose from our clammy beds, our cotton shirts clung to our backs as wet
with sweat as the bathing-suits of swimmers, and remained so all the
long, sweltering days. In mowing and cradling, the most exhausting of
all the farm work, I made matters worse by foolish ambition in keeping
ahead of the hired men. Never a warning word was spoken of the dangers
of over-work. On the contrary, even when sick we were held to our tasks
as long as we could stand. Once in harvest-time I had the mumps and was
unable to swallow any food except milk, but this was not allowed to
make any difference, while I staggered with weakness and sometimes fell
headlong among the sheaves. Only once was I allowed to leave the
harvest-field—when I was stricken down with pneumonia. I lay gasping
for weeks, but the Scotch are hard to kill and I pulled through. No
physician was called, for father was an enthusiast, and always said and
believed that God and hard work were by far the best doctors.
None of our neighbors were so excessively industrious as father; though
nearly all of the Scotch, English, and Irish worked too hard, trying to
make good homes and to lay up money enough for comfortable
independence. Excepting small garden-patches, few of them had owned
land in the old country. Here their craving land-hunger was satisfied,
and they were naturally proud of their farms and tried to keep them as
neat and clean and well-tilled as gardens. To accomplish this without
the means for hiring help was impossible. Flowers were planted about
the neatly kept log or frame houses; barnyards, granaries, etc., were
kept in about as neat order as the homes, and the fences and corn-rows
were rigidly straight. But every uncut weed distressed them; so also
did every ungathered ear of grain, and all that was lost by birds and
gophers; and this overcarefulness bred endless work and worry.
As for money, for many a year there was precious little of it in the
country for anybody. Eggs sold at six cents a dozen in trade, and
five-cent calico was exchanged at twenty-five cents a yard. Wheat
brought fifty cents a bushel in trade. To get cash for it before the
Portage Railway was built, it had to be hauled to Milwaukee, a hundred
miles away. On the other hand, food was abundant,—eggs, chickens, pigs,
cattle, wheat, corn, potatoes, garden vegetables of the best, and
wonderful melons as luxuries. No other wild country I have ever known
extended a kinder welcome to poor immigrants. On the arrival in the
spring, a log house could be built, a few acres ploughed, the virgin
sod planted with corn, potatoes, etc., and enough raised to keep a
family comfortably the very first year; and wild hay for cows and oxen
grew in abundance on the numerous meadows. The American settlers were
wisely content with smaller fields and less of everything, kept indoors
during excessively hot or cold weather, rested when tired, went off
fishing and hunting at the most favorable times and seasons of the day
and year, gathered nuts and berries, and in general tranquilly accepted
all the good things the fertile wilderness offered.
After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake
farm, fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame
house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses,—after
all this had been victoriously accomplished, and we had made out to
escape with life,—father bought a half-section of wild land about four
or five miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and
fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the
stunting, heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging,
rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so
forth.
By this time I had learned to run the breaking plough. Most of these
ploughs were very large, turning furrows from eighteen inches to two
feet wide, and were drawn by four or five yoke of oxen. They were used
only for the first ploughing, in breaking up the wild sod woven into a
tough mass, chiefly by the cordlike roots of perennial grasses,
reinforced by the tap-roots of oak and hickory bushes, called “grubs,”
some of which were more than a century old and four or five inches in
diameter. In the hardest ploughing on the most difficult ground, the
grubs were said to be as thick as the hair on a dog’s back. If in good
trim, the plough cut through and turned over these grubs as if the
century-old wood were soft like the flesh of carrots and turnips; but
if not in good trim the grubs promptly tossed the plough out of the
ground. A stout Highland Scot, our neighbor, whose plough was in bad
order and who did not know how to trim it, was vainly trying to keep it
in the ground by main strength, while his son, who was driving and
merrily whipping up the cattle, would cry encouragingly, “Haud her in,
fayther! Haud her in!”
“But hoo i’ the deil can I haud her in when she’ll no _stop_ in?” his
perspiring father would reply, gasping for breath between each word. On
the contrary, with the share and coulter sharp and nicely adjusted, the
plough, instead of shying at every grub and jumping out, ran straight
ahead without need of steering or holding, and gripped the ground so
firmly that it could hardly be thrown out at the end of the furrow.
Our breaker turned a furrow two feet wide, and on our best land, where
the sod was toughest, held so firm a grip that at the end of the field
my brother, who was driving the oxen, had to come to my assistance in
throwing it over on its side to be drawn around the end of the landing;
and it was all I could do to set it up again. But I learned to keep
that plough in such trim that after I got started on a new furrow I
used to ride on the crossbar between the handles with my feet resting
comfortably on the beam, without having to steady or steer it in any
way on the whole length of the field, unless we had to go round a
stump, for it sawed through the biggest grubs without flinching.
The growth of these grubs was interesting to me. When an acorn or
hickory-nut had sent up its first season’s sprout, a few inches long,
it was burned off in the autumn grass fires; but the root continued to
hold on to life, formed a callus over the wound and sent up one or more
shoots the next spring. Next autumn these new shoots were burned off,
but the root and calloused head, about level with the surface of the
ground, continued to grow and send up more new shoots; and so on,
almost every year until very old, probably far more than a century,
while the tops, which would naturally have become tall broad-headed
trees, were only mere sprouts seldom more than two years old. Thus the
ground was kept open like a prairie, with only five or six trees to the
acre, which had escaped the fire by having the good fortune to grow on
a bare spot at the door of a fox or badger den, or between straggling
grass-tufts wide apart on the poorest sandy soil.
The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies produced
so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree could live
on it. Had there been no fires, these fine prairies, so marked a
feature of the country, would have been covered by the heaviest
forests. As soon as the oak openings in our neighborhood were settled,
and the farmers had prevented running grass-fires, the grubs grew up
into trees and formed tall thickets so dense that it was difficult to
walk through them and every trace of the sunny “openings” vanished.
THE HICKORY HILL HOUSE, BUILT IN 1857
THE HICKORY HILL HOUSE, BUILT IN 1857ToList
We called our second farm Hickory Hill, from its many fine hickory
trees and the long gentle slope leading up to it. Compared with
Fountain Lake farm it lay high and dry. The land was better, but it had
no living water, no spring or stream or meadow or lake. A well ninety
feet deep had to be dug, all except the first ten feet or so in
fine-grained sandstone. When the sandstone was struck, my father, on
the advice of a man who had worked in mines, tried to blast the rock;
but from lack of skill the blasting went on very slowly, and father
decided to have me do all the work with mason’s chisels, a long, hard
job, with a good deal of danger in it. I had to sit cramped in a space
about three feet in diameter, and wearily chip, chip, with heavy hammer
and chisels from early morning until dark, day after day, for weeks and
months. In the morning, father and David lowered me in a wooden bucket
by a windlass, hauled up what chips were left from the night before,
then went away to the farm work and left me until noon, when they
hoisted me out for dinner. After dinner I was promptly lowered again,
the forenoon’s accumulation of chips hoisted out of the way, and I was
left until night.
One morning, after the dreary bore was about eighty feet deep, my life
was all but lost in deadly choke-damp,—carbonic acid gas that had
settled at the bottom during the night. Instead of clearing away the
chips as usual when I was lowered to the bottom, I swayed back and
forth and began to sink under the poison. Father, alarmed that I did
not make any noise, shouted, “What’s keeping you so still?” to which he
got no reply. Just as I was settling down against the side of the wall,
I happened to catch a glimpse of a branch of a bur-oak tree which
leaned out over the mouth of the shaft. This suddenly awakened me, and
to father’s excited shouting I feebly murmured, “Take me out.” But when
he began to hoist he found I was not in the bucket and in wild alarm
shouted, “Get in! Get in the bucket and hold on! Hold on!” Somehow I
managed to get into the bucket, and that is all I remembered until I
was dragged out, violently gasping for breath.
One of our near neighbors, a stone mason and miner by the name of
William Duncan, came to see me, and after hearing the particulars of
the accident he solemnly said: “Weel, Johnnie, it’s God’s mercy that
you’re alive. Many a companion of mine have I seen dead with
choke-damp, but none that I ever saw or heard of was so near to death
in it as you were and escaped without help.” Mr. Duncan taught father
to throw water down the shaft to absorb the gas, and also to drop a
bundle of brush or hay attached to a light rope, dropping it again and
again to carry down pure air and stir up the poison. When, after a day
or two, I had recovered from the shock, father lowered me again to my
work, after taking the precaution to test the air with a candle and
stir it up well with a brush-and-hay bundle. The weary
hammer-and-chisel-chipping went on as before, only more slowly, until
ninety feet down, when at last I struck a fine, hearty gush of water.
Constant dropping wears away stone. So does constant chipping, while at
the same time wearing away the chipper. Father never spent an hour in
that well. He trusted me to sink it straight and plumb, and I did, and
built a fine covered top over it, and swung two iron-bound buckets in
it from which we all drank for many a day.
The honey-bee arrived in America long before we boys did, but several
years passed ere we noticed any on our farm. The introduction of the
honey-bee into flowery America formed a grand epoch in bee history.
This sweet humming creature, companion and friend of the flowers, is
now distributed over the greater part of the continent, filling
countless hollows in rocks and trees with honey as well as the millions
of hives prepared for them by honey-farmers, who keep and tend their
flocks of sweet winged cattle, as shepherds keep sheep,—a charming
employment, “like directing sunbeams,” as Thoreau says. The Indians
call the honey-bee the white man’s fly; and though they had long been
acquainted with several species of bumblebees that yielded more or less
honey, how gladly surprised they must have been when they discovered
that, in the hollow trees where before they had found only coons or
squirrels, they found swarms of brown flies with fifty or even a
hundred pounds of honey sealed up in beautiful cells. With their keen
hunting senses they of course were not slow to learn the habits of the
little brown immigrants and the best methods of tracing them to their
sweet homes, however well hidden. During the first few years none were
seen on our farm, though we sometimes heard father’s hired men talking
about “lining bees.” None of us boys ever found a bee tree, or tried to
find any until about ten years after our arrival in the woods. On the
Hickory Hill farm there is a ridge of moraine material, rather dry, but
flowery with goldenrods and asters of many species, upon which we saw
bees feeding in the late autumn just when their hives were fullest of
honey, and it occurred to me one day after I was of age and my own
master that I must try to find a bee tree. I made a little box about
six inches long and four inches deep and wide; bought half a pound of
honey, went to the goldenrod hill, swept a bee into the box and closed
it. The lid had a pane of glass in it so I could see when the bee had
sucked its fill and was ready to go home. At first it groped around
trying to get out, but, smelling the honey, it seemed to forget
everything else, and while it was feasting I carried the box and a
small sharp-pointed stake to an open spot, where I could see about me,
fixed the stake in the ground, and placed the box on the flat top of
it. When I thought that the little feaster must be about full, I opened
the box, but it was in no hurry to fly. It slowly crawled up to the
edge of the box, lingered a minute or two cleaning its legs that had
become sticky with honey, and when it took wing, instead of making what
is called a bee-line for home, it buzzed around the box and minutely
examined it as if trying to fix a clear picture of it in its mind so as
to be able to recognize it when it returned for another load, then
circled around at a little distance as if looking for something to
locate it by. I was the nearest object, and the thoughtful worker
buzzed in front of my face and took a good stare at me, and then flew
up on to the top of an oak on the side of the open spot in the centre
of which the honey-box was. Keeping a keen watch, after a minute or two
of rest or wing-cleaning, I saw it fly in wide circles round the tops
of the trees nearest the honey-box, and, after apparently satisfying
itself, make a bee-line for the hive. Looking endwise on the line of
flight, I saw that what is called a bee-line is not an absolutely
straight line, but a line in general straight made of many slight,
wavering, lateral curves. After taking as true a bearing as I could, I
waited and watched. In a few minutes, probably ten, I was surprised to
see that bee arrive at the end of the outleaning limb of the oak
mentioned above, as though that was the first point it had fixed in its
memory to be depended on in retracing the way back to the honey-box.
From the tree-top it came straight to my head, thence straight to the
box, entered without the least hesitation, filled up and started off
after the same preparatory dressing and taking of bearings as before.
Then I took particular pains to lay down the exact course so I would be
able to trace it to the hive. Before doing so, however, I made an
experiment to test the worth of the impression I had that the little
insect found the way back to the box by fixing telling points in its
mind. While it was away, I picked up the honey-box and set it on the
stake a few rods from the position it had thus far occupied, and stood
there watching. In a few minutes I saw the bee arrive at its
guide-mark, the overleaning branch on the tree-top, and thence came
bouncing down right to the spaces in the air which had been occupied by
my head and the honey-box, and when the cunning little honey-gleaner
found nothing there but empty air it whirled round and round as if
confused and lost; and although I was standing with the open honey-box
within fifty or sixty feet of the former feasting-spot, it could not,
or at least did not, find it.
Now that I had learned the general direction of the hive, I pushed on
in search of it. I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile when I caught
another bee, which, after getting loaded, went through the same
performance of circling round and round the honey-box, buzzing in front
of me and staring me in the face to be able to recognize me; but as if
the adjacent trees and bushes were sufficiently well known, it simply
looked around at them and bolted off without much dressing, indicating,
I thought, that the distance to the hive was not great. I followed on
and very soon discovered it in the bottom log of a corn-field fence,
but some lucky fellow had discovered it before me and robbed it. The
robbers had chopped a large hole in the log, taken out most of the
honey, and left the poor bees late in the fall, when winter was
approaching, to make haste to gather all the honey they could from the
latest flowers to avoid starvation in the winter.
VIIToC
KNOWLEDGE AND INVENTIONS