The Home in the Coulee
Our postoffice was in the village of Onalaska, situated at the mouth of
the Black River, which came down out of the wide forest lands of the
north. It was called a "boom town" for the reason that "booms" or yards
for holding pine logs laced the quiet bayou and supplied several large
mills with timber. Busy saws clamored from the islands and great rafts
of planks and lath and shingles were made up and floated down into the
Mississippi and on to southern markets.
It was a rude, rough little camp filled with raftsmen, loggers,
mill-hands and boomsmen. Saloons abounded and deeds of violence were
common, but to me it was a poem. From its position on a high plateau it
commanded a lovely southern expanse of shimmering water bounded by
purple bluffs. The spires of LaCrosse rose from the smoky distance, and
steamships' hoarsely giving voice suggested illimitable reaches of
travel. Some day I hoped my father would take me to that shining
market-place whereto he carried all our grain.
In this village of Onalaska, lived my grandfather and grandmother
Garland, and their daughter Susan, whose husband, Richard Bailey, a
quiet, kind man, was held in deep affection by us all. Of course he
could not quite measure up to the high standards of David and William,
even though he kept a store and sold candy, for he could neither kill a
bear, nor play the fiddle, nor shoot a gun--much less turn hand-springs
or tame a wild horse, but we liked him notwithstanding his limitations
and were always glad when he came to visit us.
Even at this time I recognized the wide differences which separated the
McClintocks from the Garlands. The fact that my father's people lived to
the west and in a town helped to emphasize the divergence.
All the McClintocks were farmers, but grandfather Garland was a
carpenter by trade, and a leader in his church which was to him a club,
a forum and a commercial exchange. He was a native of Maine and proud of
the fact. His eyes were keen and gray, his teeth fine and white, and his
expression stern. His speech was neat and nipping. As a workman he was
exact and his tools were always in perfect order. In brief he was a
Yankee, as concentrated a bit of New England as was ever transplanted to
the border. Hopelessly "sot" in all his eastern ways, he remained the
doubter, the critic, all his life.
We always spoke of him with formal precision as Grandfather Garland,
never as "Grandad" or "Granpap" as we did in alluding to Hugh
McClintock, and his long prayers (pieces of elaborate oratory) wearied
us, while those of Grandad, which had the extravagance, the lyrical
abandon of poetry, profoundly pleased us. Grandfather's church was a
small white building in the edge of the village, Grandad's place of
worship was a vision, a cloud-built temple, a house not made with hands.
The contrast between my grandmothers was equally wide. Harriet Garland
was tall and thin, with a dark and serious face. She was an invalid, and
confined to a chair, which stood in the corner of her room. On the walls
within reach of her hand hung many small pockets, so ordered that she
could obtain her sewing materials without rising. She was always at work
when I called, but it was her habit to pause and discover in some one
of her receptacles a piece of candy or a stick of "lickerish root"
which she gave to me "as a reward for being a good boy."
She was always making needle rolls and thimble boxes and no doubt her
skill helped to keep the family fed and clothed.
Notwithstanding all divergence in the characters of Grandmother Garland
and Grandmother McClintock, we held them both in almost equal affection.
Serene, patient, bookish, Grandmother Garland brought to us, as to her
neighbors in this rude river port, some of the best qualities of
intellectual Boston, and from her lips we acquired many of the precepts
and proverbs of our Pilgrim forbears.
Her influence upon us was distinctly literary. She gloried in New
England traditions, and taught us to love the poems of Whittier and
Longfellow. It was she who called us to her knee and told us sadly yet
benignly of the death of Lincoln, expressing only pity for the misguided
assassin. She was a constant advocate of charity, piety, and learning.
Always poor, and for many years a cripple, I never heard her complain,
and no one, I think, ever saw her face clouded with a frown.
Our neighbors in Green's Coulee were all native American. The first and
nearest, Al Randal and his wife and son, we saw often and on the whole
liked, but the Whitwells who lived on the farm above us were a constant
source of comedy to my father. Old Port, as he was called, was a
mild-mannered man who would have made very little impression on the
community, but for his wife, a large and rather unkempt person, who
assumed such man-like freedom of speech that my father was never without
an amusing story of her doings.
She swore in vigorous pioneer fashion, and dominated her husband by
force of lung power as well as by a certain painful candor. "Port,
you're an old fool," she often said to him in our presence. It was her
habit to apologize to her guests, as they took their seats at her
abundant table, "Wal, now, folks, I'm sorry, but there ain't a blank
thing in this house fit for a dawg to eat--" expecting of course to have
everyone cry out, "Oh, Mrs. Whitwell, this is a splendid dinner!" which
they generally did. But once my father took her completely aback by
rising resignedly from the table--"Come, Belle," said he to my mother,
"let's go home. I'm not going to eat food not fit for a dog."
The rough old woman staggered under this blow, but quickly recovered.
"Dick Garland, you blank fool. Sit down, or I'll fetch you a swipe with
the broom."
In spite of her profanity and ignorance she was a good neighbor and in
time of trouble no one was readier to relieve any distress in the
coulee. However, it was upon Mrs. Randal and the widow Green that my
mother called for aid, and I do not think Mrs. Whitwell was ever quite
welcome even at our quilting bees, for her loud voice silenced every
other, and my mother did not enjoy her vulgar stories.--Yes, I can
remember several quilting bees, and I recall molding candles, and that
our "company light" was a large kerosene lamp, in the glass globe of
which a strip of red flannel was coiled. Probably this was merely a
device to lengthen out the wick, but it made a memorable spot of color
in the room--just as the watch-spring gong in the clock gave off a sound
of fairy music to my ear. I don't know why the ring of that coil had
such a wondrous appeal, but I often climbed upon a chair to rake its
spirals with a nail in order that I might float away on its "dying
fall."
Life was primitive in all the homes of the coulee. Money was hard to
get. We always had plenty to eat, but little in the way of luxuries. We
had few toys except those we fashioned for ourselves, and our garments
were mostly home-made. I have heard my father say, "Belle could go to
town with me, buy the calico for a dress and be wearing it for
supper"--but I fear that even this did not happen very often. Her "dress
up" gowns, according to certain precious old tintypes, indicate that
clothing was for her only a sort of uniform,--and yet I will not say
this made her unhappy. Her face was always smiling. She knit all our
socks, made all our shirts and suits. She even carded and spun wool, in
addition to her housekeeping, and found time to help on our kites and
bows and arrows.
* * * * *
Month by month the universe in which I lived lightened and widened. In
my visits to Onalaska, I discovered the great Mississippi River, and the
Minnesota Bluffs. The light of knowledge grew stronger. I began to
perceive forms and faces which had been hidden in the dusk of babyhood.
I heard more and more of LaCrosse, and out of the mist filled lower
valley the booming roar of steamboats suggested to me distant countries
and the sea.
My father believed in service. At seven years of age, I had regular
duties. I brought firewood to the kitchen and broke nubbins for the
calves and shelled corn for the chickens. I have a dim memory of helping
him (and grandfather) split oak-blocks into rafting pins in the kitchen.
This seems incredible to me now, and yet it must have been so. In summer
Harriet and I drove the cows to pasture, and carried "switchel" to the
men in the hay-fields by means of a jug hung in the middle of a long
stick.
Haying was a delightful season to us, for the scythes of the men
occasionally tossed up clusters of beautiful strawberries, which we
joyfully gathered. I remember with especial pleasure the delicious
shortcakes which my mother made of the wild fruit which we picked in the
warm odorous grass along the edge of the meadow.
Harvest time also brought a pleasing excitement (something unwonted,
something like entertaining visitors) which compensated for the extra
work demanded of us. The neighbors usually came in to help and life was
a feast.
There was, however, an ever-present menace in our lives, the snake!
During mid-summer months blue racers and rattlesnakes swarmed and the
terror of them often chilled our childish hearts. Once Harriet and I,
with little Frank in his cart, came suddenly upon a monster diamond-back
rattler sleeping by the roadside. In our mad efforts to escape, the cart
was overturned and the baby scattered in the dust almost within reach of
the snake. As soon as she realized what had happened, Harriet ran back
bravely, caught up the child and brought him safely away.
Another day, as I was riding on the load of wheat-sheaves, one of the
men, in pitching the grain to the wagon lifted a rattlesnake with his
fork. I saw it writhing in the bottom of the sheaf, and screamed out, "A
snake, a snake!" It fell across the man's arm but slid harmlessly to the
ground, and he put a tine through it.
As it chanced to be just dinner time he took it with him to the house
and fastened it down near the door of a coop in which an old hen and her
brood of chickens were confined. I don't know why he did this but it
threw the mother hen into such paroxysms of fear that she dashed herself
again and again upon the slats of her house. It appeared that she
comprehended to the full the terrible power of the writhing monster.
Perhaps it was this same year that one of the men discovered another
enormous yellow-back in the barnyard, one of the largest ever seen on
the farm--and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I
cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly
visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant
just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel
together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with
sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his
fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his
square jaws and poisonous fangs.
Innumerable garter-snakes infested the marsh, and black snakes inhabited
the edges of the woodlands, but we were not so much afraid of them. We
accepted them as unavoidable companions in the wild. They would run from
us. Bears and wildcats we held in real terror, though they were
considered denizens of the darkness and hence not likely to be met with
if one kept to the daylight.
The "hoop snake" was quite as authentic to us as the blue racer,
although no one had actually seen one. Den Green's cousin's uncle had
killed one in Michigan, and a man over the ridge had once been stung by
one that came rolling down the hill with his tail in his mouth. But
Den's cousin's uncle, when he saw the one coming toward him, had stepped
aside quick as lightning, and the serpent's sharp fangs had buried
themselves so deep in the bark of a tree, that he could not escape.
Various other of the myths common to American boyhood, were held in
perfect faith by Den and Ellis and Ed, myths which made every woodland
path an ambush and every marshy spot a place of evil. Horsehairs would
turn to snakes if left in the spring, and a serpent's tail would not die
till sundown.
Once on the high hillside, I started a stone rolling, which as it went
plunging into a hazel thicket, thrust out a deer, whose flight seemed
fairly miraculous to me. He appeared to drift along the hillside like a
bunch of thistle-down, and I took a singular delight in watching him
disappear.
Once my little brother and I, belated in our search for the cows, were
far away on the hills when night suddenly came upon us. I could not have
been more than eight years old and Frank was five. This incident reveals
the fearless use our father made of us. True, we were hardly a mile from
the house, but there were many serpents on the hillsides and wildcats in
the cliffs, and eight is pretty young for such a task.
We were following the cows through the tall grass and bushes, in the
dark, when father came to our rescue, and I do not recall being sent on
a similar expedition thereafter. I think mother protested against the
danger of it. Her notions of our training were less rigorous.
I never hear a cow-bell of a certain timbre that I do not relive in some
degree the terror and despair of that hour on the mountain, when it
seemed that my world had suddenly slipped away from me.
Winter succeeds summer abruptly in my memory. Behind our house rose a
sharp ridge down which we used to coast. Over this hill, fierce winds
blew the snow, and wonderful, diamonded drifts covered the yard, and
sometimes father was obliged to dig deep trenches in order to reach the
barn.
On winter evenings he shelled corn by drawing the ears across a spade
resting on a wash tub, and we children built houses of the cobs, while
mother sewed carpet rags or knit our mittens. Quilting bees of an
afternoon were still recognized social functions and the spread quilt on
its frame made a gorgeous tent under which my brother and I camped on
our way to "Colorado." Lath swords and tin-pan drums remained a part of
our equipment for a year or two.
One stormy winter day, Edwin Randal, riding home in a sleigh behind his
uncle, saw me in the yard and, picking an apple from an open barrel
beside which he was standing, threw it at me. It was a very large apple,
and as it struck the drift it disappeared leaving a round deep hole.
Delving there I recovered it, and as I brushed the rime from its scarlet
skin it seemed the most beautiful thing in this world. From this vividly
remembered delight, I deduce the fact that apples were not very
plentiful in our home.
My favorite place in winter time was directly under the kitchen stove.
It was one of the old-fashioned high-stepping breed, with long hind legs
and an arching belly, and as the oven was on top, the space beneath the
arch offered a delightful den for a cat, a dog or small boy, and I was
usually to be found there, lying on my stomach, spelling out the
"continued" stories which came to us in the county paper, for I was born
with a hunger for print.
We had few books in our house. Aside from the Bible I remember only one
other, a thick, black volume filled with gaudy pictures of cherries and
plums, and portraits of ideally fat and prosperous sheep, pigs and cows.
It must have been a _Farmer's Annual_ or State agricultural report, but
it contained in the midst of its dry prose, occasional poems like "_I
remember, I remember_," "_The Old Armchair_" and other pieces of a
domestic or rural nature. I was especially moved by The Old Armchair,
and although some of the words and expressions were beyond my
comprehension, I fully understood the defiant tenderness of the lines:
I love it, I love it, and who shall dare
To chide me for loving the old armchair?
I fear the horticultural side of this volume did not interest me, but
this sweetly-sad poem tinged even the gaudy pictures of prodigious plums
and shining apples with a literary glamor. The preposterously plump
cattle probably affected me as only another form of romantic fiction.
The volume also had a pleasant smell, not so fine an odor as the Bible,
but so delectable that I loved to bury my nose in its opened pages. What
caused this odor I cannot tell--perhaps it had been used to press
flowers or sprigs of sweet fern.
Harriet's devotion to literature, like my own, was a nuisance. If my
mother wanted a pan of chips she had to wrench one of us from a book, or
tear us from a paper. If she pasted up a section of _Harper's Weekly_
behind the washstand in the kitchen, I immediately discovered a special
interest in that number, and likely enough forgot to wash myself. When
mother saw this (as of course she very soon did), she turned the paper
upside down, and thereafter accused me, with some justice, of standing
on my head in order to continue my tale. "In fact," she often said, "it
is easier for me to do my errands myself than to get either of you young
ones to move."
The first school which we attended was held in a neighboring farm-house,
and there is very little to tell concerning it, but at seven I began to
go to the public school in Onalaska and memory becomes definite, for the
wide river which came silently out of the unknown north, carrying
endless millions of pine logs, and the clamor of saws in the island
mills, and especially the men walking the rolling logs with pike-poles
in their hands filled me with a wordless joy. To be one of these brave
and graceful "drivers" seemed almost as great an honor as to be a
Captain in the army. Some of the boys of my acquaintance were sons of
these hardy boomsmen, and related wonderful stories of their fathers'
exploits--stories which we gladly believed. We all intended to be
rivermen when we grew up.
The quiet water below the booms harbored enormous fish at that time, and
some of the male citizens who were too lazy to work in the mills got an
easy living by capturing cat-fish, and when in liquor joined the
rivermen in their drunken frays. My father's tales of the exploits of
some of these redoubtable villains filled my mind with mingled
admiration and terror. No one used the pistol, however, and very few the
knife. Physical strength counted. Foot and fist were the weapons which
ended each contest and no one was actually slain in these meetings of
rival crews.
In the midst of this tumult, surrounded by this coarse, unthinking life,
my Grandmother Garland's home stood, a serene small sanctuary of lofty
womanhood, a temple of New England virtue. From her and from my great
aunt Bridges who lived in St. Louis, I received my first literary
instruction, a partial offset to the vulgar yet heroic influence of the
raftsmen and mill hands.
The school-house, a wooden two story building, occupied an unkempt lot
some distance back from the river and near a group of high sand dunes
which possessed a sinister allurement to me. They had a mysterious
desert quality, a flavor as of camels and Arabs. Once you got over
behind them it seemed as if you were in another world, a far-off arid
land where no water ran and only sear, sharp-edged grasses grew. Some of
these mounds were miniature peaks of clear sand, so steep and dry that
you could slide all the way down from top to bottom, and do no harm to
your Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. On rainy days you could dig caves in
their sides.
But the mills and the log booms were after all much more dramatic and we
never failed to hurry away to the river if we had half an hour to spare.
The "drivers," so brave and skilled, so graceful, held us in breathless
admiration as they leaped from one rolling log to another, or walked the
narrow wooden bridges above the deep and silently sweeping waters. The
piles of slabs, the mounds of sawdust, the intermittent, ferocious snarl
of the saws, the slap of falling lumber, the never ending fires eating
up the refuse--all these sights and sounds made a return to school
difficult. Even the life around the threshing machine seemed a little
tame in comparison with the life of the booms.
We were much at the Greens', our second-door neighbors to the south, and
the doings of the men-folks fill large space in my memory. Ed, the
oldest of the boys, a man of twenty-three or four, was as prodigious in
his way as my Uncle David. He was mighty with the axe. His deeds as a
railsplitter rivaled those of Lincoln. The number of cords of wood he
could split in a single day was beyond belief. It was either seven or
eleven, I forget which--I am perfectly certain of the number of
buckwheat pancakes he could eat for I kept count on several occasions.
Once he ate nine the size of a dinner plate together with a suitable
number of sausages--but what would you expect of a man who could whirl a
six pound axe all day in a desperate attack on the forest, without once
looking at the sun or pausing for breath?
However, he fell short of my hero in other ways. He looked like a fat
man and his fiddling was only middling, therefore, notwithstanding his
prowess with the axe and the maul, he remained subordinate to David, and
though they never came to a test of strength we were perfectly sure that
David was the finer man. His supple grace and his unconquerable pride
made him altogether admirable.
Den, the youngest of the Greens, was a boy about three years my senior,
and a most attractive lad. I met him some years ago in California, a
successful doctor, and we talked of the days when I was his slave and
humbly carried his powder horn and game bag. Ellis Usher, who lived in
Sand Lake and often hunted with Den, is an editor in Milwaukee and one
of the political leaders of his state. In those days he had a small
opinion of me. No doubt I _was_ a nuisance.
The road which led from our farm to the village school crossed a sandy
ridge and often in June our path became so hot that it burned the soles
of our feet. If we went out of the road there were sand-burrs and we
lost a great deal of time picking needles from our toes. How we hated
those sand-burrs!--However, on these sand barrens many luscious
strawberries grew. They were not large, but they gave off a delicious
odor, and it sometimes took us a long time to reach home.
There was a recognized element of danger in this road. Wildcats were
plentiful around the limestone cliffs, and bears had been seen under the
oak trees. In fact a place on the hillside was often pointed out with
awe as "the place where Al Randal killed the bear." Our way led past the
village cemetery also, and there was to me something vaguely awesome in
that silent bivouac of the dead.
Among the other village boys in the school were two lads named
Gallagher, one of whom, whose name was Matt, became my daily terror. He
was two years older than I and had all of a city gamin's cunning and
self-command. At every intermission he sidled close to me, walking round
me, feeling my arms, and making much of my muscle. Sometimes he came
behind and lifted me to see how heavy I was, or called attention to my
strong hands and wrists, insisting with the most terrifying candor of
conviction, "I'm sure you can lick me." We never quite came to combat,
and finally he gave up this baiting for a still more exquisite method of
torment.
My sister and I possessed a dog named Rover, a meek little yellow,
bow-legged cur of mongrel character, but with the frankest, gentlest and
sweetest face, it seemed to us, in all the world. He was not allowed to
accompany us to school and scarcely ever left the yard, but Matt
Gallagher in some way discovered my deep affection for this pet and
thereafter played upon my fears with a malevolence which knew no mercy.
One day he said, "Me and brother Dan are going over to your place to get
a calf that's in your pasture. We're going to get excused fifteen
minutes early. We'll get there before you do and we'll fix that dog of
yours!--There won't be nothin' left of him but a grease spot when we are
done with him."
These words, spoken probably in jest, instantly filled my heart with an
agony of fear. I saw in imagination just how my little playmate would
come running out to meet his cruel foes, his brown eyes beaming with
love and trust,--I saw them hiding sharp stones behind their backs while
snapping their left-hand fingers to lure him within reach, and then I
saw them drive their murdering weapons at his head.
I could think of nothing else. I could not study, I could only sit and
stare out of the window with tears running down my cheeks, until at
last, the teacher observing my distress, inquired, "What is the matter?"
And I, not knowing how to enter upon so terrible a tale, whined out,
"I'm sick, I want to go home."
"You may go," said the teacher kindly.
Snatching my cap from beneath the desk where I had concealed it at
recess, I hurried out and away over the sand-lot on the shortest way
home. No stopping now for burrs!--I ran like one pursued. I shall never
forget as long as I live, the pain, the panic, the frenzy of that race
against time. The hot sand burned my feet, my side ached, my mouth was
dry, and yet I ran on and on and on, looking back from moment to moment,
seeing pursuers in every moving object.
At last I came in sight of home, and Rover frisked out to meet me just
as I had expected him to do, his tail wagging, his gentle eyes smiling
up at me. Gasping, unable to utter a word, I frantically dragged the dog
into the house and shut the door.
"What is the matter?" asked my mother.
I could not at the moment explain even to her what had threatened me,
but her calm sweet words at last gave my story vent. Out it came in
torrential flow.
"Why, you poor child!" she said. "They were only fooling--they wouldn't
dare to hurt your dog!"
This was probably true. Matt had spoken without any clear idea of the
torture he was inflicting.
It is often said, "How little is required to give a child joy," but
men--and women too--sometimes forget how little it takes to give a child
pain.