School Life
Our new house was completed during July but we did not move into it till
in September. There was much to be done in way of building sheds,
granaries and corn-cribs and in this work father was both carpenter and
stone-mason. An amusing incident comes to my mind in connection with the
digging of our well.
Uncle David and I were "tending mason," and father was down in the well
laying or trying to lay the curbing. It was a tedious and difficult job
and he was about to give it up in despair when one of our neighbors, a
quaint old Englishman named Barker, came driving along. He was one of
these men who take a minute inquisitive interest in the affairs of
others; therefore he pulled his team to a halt and came in.
Peering into the well he drawled out, "Hello, Garland. W'at ye doin'
down there?"
"Tryin' to lay a curb," replied my father lifting a gloomy face, "and I
guess it's too complicated for me."
"Nothin' easier," retorted the old man with a wink at my uncle, "jest
putt two a-top o' one and one a-toppo two--and the big eend out,"--and
with a broad grin on his red face he went back to his team and drove
away.
My father afterwards said, "I saw the whole process in a flash of light.
He had given me all the rule I needed. I laid the rest of that wall
without a particle of trouble."
Many times after this Barker stopped to offer advice but he never quite
equalled the startling success of his rule for masonry.
The events of this harvest, even the process of moving into the new
house, are obscured in my mind by the clouds of smoke which rose from
calamitous fires all over the west. It was an unprecedentedly dry season
so that not merely the prairie, but many weedy cornfields burned. I had
a good deal of time to meditate upon this for I was again the plow-boy.
Every day I drove away from the rented farm to the new land where I was
cross-cutting the breaking, and the thickening haze through which the
sun shone with a hellish red glare, produced in me a growing uneasiness
which became terror when the news came to us that Chicago was on fire.
It seemed to me then that the earth was about to go up in a flaming
cloud just as my grandad had so often prophesied.
This general sense of impending disaster was made keenly personal by the
destruction of uncle David's stable with all his horses. This building
like most of the barns of the region was not only roofed with straw but
banked with straw, and it burned so swiftly that David was trapped in a
stall while trying to save one of his teams. He saved himself by
burrowing like a gigantic mole through the side of the shed, and so,
hatless, covered with dust and chaff, emerged as if from a fiery burial
after he had been given up for dead.
This incident combined with others so filled my childish mind that I
lived in apprehension of similar disaster. I feared the hot wind which
roared up from the south, and I never entered our own stable in the
middle of the day without a sense of danger. Then came the rains--the
blessed rains--and put an end to my fears.
In a week we had forgotten all the "conflagrations" except that in
Chicago. There was something grandiose and unforgettable in the tales
which told of the madly fleeing crowds in the narrow streets. These
accounts pushed back the walls of my universe till its far edge included
the ruined metropolis whose rebuilding was of the highest importance to
us, for it was not only the source of all our supplies, but the great
central market to which we sent our corn and hogs and wheat.
My world was splendidly romantic. It was bounded on the west by THE
PLAINS with their Indians and buffalo; on the north by THE GREAT WOODS,
filled with thieves and counterfeiters; on the south by OSAGE AND CHICAGO;
and on the east by HESPER, ONALASKA and BOSTON. A luminous trail ran from
Dry Run Prairie to Neshonoc--all else was "chaos and black night."
For seventy days I walked behind my plow on the new farm while my father
finished the harvest on the rented farm and moved to the house on the
knoll. It was lonely work for a boy of eleven but there were frequent
breaks in the monotony and I did not greatly suffer. I disliked
cross-cutting for the reason that the unrotted sods would often pile up
in front of the coulter and make me a great deal of trouble. There is a
certain pathos in the sight of that small boy tugging and kicking at the
stubborn turf in the effort to free his plow. Such misfortunes loom
large in a lad's horizon.
One of the interludes, and a lovely one, was given over to gathering the
hay from one of the wild meadows to the north of us. Another was the
threshing from the shock on the rented farm. This was the first time we
had seen this done and it interested us keenly. A great many teams were
necessary and the crew of men was correspondingly large. Uncle David was
again the thresher with a fine new separator, and I would have enjoyed
the season with almost perfect contentment had it not been for the fact
that I was detailed to hold sacks for Daddy Fairbanks who was the
measurer.
Our first winter had been without much wind but our second taught us the
meaning of the word "blizzard" which we had just begun to hear about.
The winds of Wisconsin were "gentle zephyrs" compared to the blasts
which now swept down over the plain to hammer upon our desolate little
cabin and pile the drifts around our sheds and granaries, and even my
pioneer father was forced to admit that the hills of Green's Coulee had
their uses after all.
One such storm which leaped upon us at the close of a warm and beautiful
day in February lasted for two days and three nights, making life on the
open prairie impossible even to the strongest man. The thermometer fell
to thirty degrees below zero and the snow-laden air moving at a rate of
eighty miles an hour pressed upon the walls of our house with giant
power. The sky of noon was darkened, so that we moved in a pallid
half-light, and the windows thick with frost shut us in as if with gray
shrouds.
Hour after hour those winds and snows in furious battle, howled and
roared and whistled around our frail shelter, slashing at the windows
and piping on the chimney, till it seemed as if the Lord Sun had been
wholly blotted out and that the world would never again be warm. Twice
each day my father made a desperate sally toward the stable to feed the
imprisoned cows and horses or to replenish our fuel--for the remainder
of the long pallid day he sat beside the fire with gloomy face. Even his
indomitable spirit was awed by the fury of that storm.
So long and so continuously did those immitigable winds howl in our ears
that their tumult persisted, in imagination, when on the third morning,
we thawed holes in the thickened rime of the window panes and looked
forth on a world silent as a marble sea and flaming with sunlight. My
own relief was mingled with surprise--surprise to find the landscape so
unchanged.
True, the yard was piled high with drifts and the barns were almost lost
to view but the far fields and the dark lines of Burr Oak Grove remained
unchanged.
We met our school-mates that day, like survivors of shipwreck, and for
many days we listened to gruesome stories of disaster, tales of stages
frozen deep in snow with all their passengers sitting in their seats,
and of herders with their silent flocks around them, lying stark as
granite among the hazel bushes in which they had sought shelter. It was
long before we shook off the awe with which this tempest filled our
hearts.
The school-house which stood at the corner of our new farm was less than
half a mile away, and yet on many of the winter days which followed, we
found it quite far enough. Hattie was now thirteen, Frank nine and I a
little past eleven but nothing, except a blizzard such as I have
described, could keep us away from school. Facing the cutting wind,
wallowing through the drifts, battling like small intrepid animals, we
often arrived at the door moaning with pain yet unsubdued, our ears
frosted, our toes numb in our boots, to meet others in similar case
around the roaring hot stove.
Often after we reached the school-house another form of suffering
overtook us in the "thawing out" process. Our fingers and toes, swollen
with blood, ached and itched, and our ears burned. Nearly all of us
carried sloughing ears and scaling noses. Some of the pupils came two
miles against these winds.
The natural result of all this exposure was of course, chilblains! Every
foot in the school was more or less touched with this disease to which
our elders alluded as if it were an amusing trifle, but to us it was no
joke.
After getting thoroughly warmed up, along about the middle of the
forenoon, there came into our feet a most intense itching and burning
and aching, a sensation so acute that keeping still was impossible, and
all over the room an uneasy shuffling and drumming arose as we pounded
our throbbing heels against the floor or scraped our itching toes
against the edge of our benches. The teacher understood and was kind
enough to overlook this disorder.
The wonder is that any of us lived through that winter, for at recess,
no matter what the weather might be we flung ourselves out of doors to
play "fox and geese" or "dare goal," until, damp with perspiration, we
responded to the teacher's bell, and came pouring back into the entry
ways to lay aside our wraps for another hour's study.
Our readers were almost the only counterchecks to the current of
vulgarity and baseness which ran through the talk of the older boys, and
I wish to acknowledge my deep obligation to Professor McGuffey, whoever
he may have been, for the dignity and literary grace of his selections.
From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of
Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth and a long line of the English
masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes
which I read in these books.
With terror as well as delight I rose to read _Lochiel's Warning_, _The
Battle of Waterloo_ or _The Roman Captive_. Marco Bozzaris and William
Tell were alike glorious to me. I soon knew not only my own reader, the
fourth, but all the selections in the fifth and sixth as well. I could
follow almost word for word the recitations of the older pupils and at
such times I forgot my squat little body and my mop of hair, and became
imaginatively a page in the train of Ivanhoe, or a bowman in the army
of Richard the Lion Heart battling the Saracen in the Holy Land.
With a high ideal of the way in which these grand selections should be
read, I was scared almost voiceless when it came my turn to read them
before the class. "STRIKE FOR YOUR ALTARS AND YOUR FIRES. STRIKE FOR
THE GREEN GRAVES OF YOUR SIRES--GOD AND YOUR NATIVE LAND," always
reduced me to a trembling breathlessness. The sight of the emphatic
print was a call to the best that was in me and yet I could not meet the
test. Excess of desire to do it just right often brought a ludicrous
gasp and I often fell back into my seat in disgrace, the titter of the
girls adding to my pain.
Then there was the famous passage, "Did ye not hear it?" and the
careless answer, "No, it was but the wind or the car rattling o'er the
stony street."--I knew exactly how those opposing emotions should be
expressed but to do it after I rose to my feet was impossible. Burton
was even more terrified than I. Stricken blind as well as dumb he
usually ended by helplessly staring at the words which, I conceive, had
suddenly become a blur to him.
No matter, we were taught to feel the force of these poems and to
reverence the genius that produced them, and that was worth while.
Falstaff and Prince Hal, Henry and his wooing of Kate, Wolsey and his
downfall, Shylock and his pound of flesh all became a part of our
thinking and helped us to measure the large figures of our own
literature, for Whittier, Bryant and Longfellow also had place in these
volumes. It is probable that Professor McGuffey, being a Southern man,
did not value New England writers as highly as my grandmother did,
nevertheless _Thanatopsis_ was there and _The Village Blacksmith_, and
extracts from _The Deer Slayer_ and _The Pilot_ gave us a notion that
in Cooper we had a novelist of weight and importance, one to put beside
Scott and Dickens.
A by-product of my acquaintance with one of the older boys was a stack
of copies of the _New York Weekly_, a paper filled with stories of noble
life in England and hair-breadth escapes on the plain, a shrewd mixture,
designed to meet the needs of the entire membership of a prairie
household. The pleasure I took in these tales should fill me with shame,
but it doesn't--I rejoice in the memory of it.
I soon began, also, to purchase and trade "Beadle's Dime Novels" and, to
tell the truth, I took an exquisite delight in _Old Sleuth_ and _Jack
Harkaway_. My taste was catholic. I ranged from _Lady Gwendolin_ to
_Buckskin Bill_ and so far as I can now distinguish one was quite as
enthralling as the other. It is impossible for any print to be as
magical to any boy these days as those weeklies were to me in 1871.
One day a singular test was made of us all. Through some agency now lost
to me my father was brought to subscribe for _The Hearth and Home_ or
some such paper for the farmer, and in this I read my first chronicle of
everyday life.
In the midst of my dreams of lords and ladies, queens and dukes, I found
myself deeply concerned with backwoods farming, spelling schools,
protracted meetings and the like familiar homely scenes. This serial
(which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should
read it first) was _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, by Edward Eggleston, and
a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of
the middle border.
To us "Mandy" and "Bud Means," "Ralph Hartsook," the teacher, "Little
Shocky" and sweet patient "Hannah," were as real as Cyrus Button and
Daddy Fairbanks. We could hardly wait for the next number of the paper,
so concerned were we about "Hannah" and "Ralph." We quoted old lady
Means and we made bets on "Bud" in his fight with the villainous drover.
I hardly knew where Indiana was in those days, but Eggleston's
characters were near neighbors.
The illustrations were dreadful, even in my eyes, but the artist
contrived to give a slight virginal charm to Hannah and a certain
childish sweetness to Shocky, so that we accepted the more than mortal
ugliness of old man Means and his daughter Mirandy (who simpered over
her book at us as she did at Ralph), as a just interpretation of their
worthlessness.
This book is a milestone in my literary progress as it is in the
development of distinctive western fiction, and years afterward I was
glad to say so to the aged author who lived a long and honored life as a
teacher and writer of fiction.
It was always too hot or too cold in our schoolroom and on certain days
when a savage wind beat and clamored at the loose windows, the girls,
humped and shivering, sat upon their feet to keep them warm, and the
younger children with shawls over their shoulders sought permission to
gather close about the stove.
Our dinner pails (stored in the entry way) were often frozen solid and
it was necessary to thaw out our mince pie as well as our bread and
butter by putting it on the stove. I recall, vividly, gnawing, dog-like,
at the mollified outside of a doughnut while still its frosty heart made
my teeth ache.
Happily all days were not like this. There were afternoons when the sun
streamed warmly into the room, when long icicles formed on the eaves,
adding a touch of grace to the desolate building, moments when the
jingling bells of passing wood-sleighs expressed the natural cheer and
buoyancy of our youthful hearts.