and Johnny Appleseed became his right name if men are rightly named from
their works. Wherever he went he carried a store of apple seeds with
him, and when he came to a good clear spot on the bank of a stream, he
planted his seeds, fenced the place in, and left them to sprout and grow
into trees for the orchards of the neighborhood. He soon had hundreds
of these little nurseries throughout Ohio, which he returned year after
year to watch and tend, and which no one molested. When the trees were
large enough he sold them to the farmers for a trifle, an old coat or an
old shirt, and when he needed nothing he gave them for nothing. He went
barefoot in the warm weather, and in winter he wore cast-off shoes; when
he could get none and the ways were very rough he protected his feet
with rude sandals of his own making. His hats were of his own making
too, and were usually of pasteboard with a broad brim in front to shield
his eyes from the sun; but otherwise he dressed in the second-hand
clothing of others, for he thought it wrong to spend upon the vanities
of dress. He dwelt close to the heart of nature, whose dumb children he
would not wound or kill, even poisonous snakes or noxious insects. The
Indians knew him and loved him for the goodness of his life, and they
honored him for the courage with which he bore the pain he never would
inflict. He could drive pins into his flesh without wincing; if he got
hurt he burned the place, and then treated it as a burn; he bore himself
in all things, to their thinking, far above other white men.
It was believed that he had come into the backwoods to forget a
disappointment in love, but there is no proof that he had ever suffered
this. What is certain is that he was a man of beautiful qualities of
heart and mind, who could at times be divinely eloquent about the work
he had chosen to do in this world. He was a believer in the philosophy
of Emanuel Swedenborg; he carried books of that doctrine in his bosom,
and constantly read them, or shared them with those who cared to know
it, even to tearing a volume in two. If his belief was true and we are
in this world surrounded by spirits, evil or good, which our evil or
good behavior invites to be of our company, then this harmless, loving,
uncouth, half-crazy man walked daily with the angels of God.
In those early days when the people were poor and ignorant, and had
little hope of bettering themselves in this world, their thoughts
turned much to the other world. The country was often swept by storms of
religious excitement; at the camp-meetings the devout fell in fits and
trances or were convulsed with strange throes called the jerks, and all
sorts of superstitions grew up easily among them. The wildest of these
perhaps was that of the Leatherwood God which flourished in Guernsey
County, about the year 1828. The name of this fanatic or impostor, who
was indeed both one and the other, was Joseph C. Dylks, and his title
was given him because of his claim to be the Supreme Being, and because
he first appeared to his worshipers on Leather-wood Creek at the town
of Salesville. The leatherwood tree which gave this creek its name had
a soft and pliable bark, which could be easily tied into knots, and was
used as cordage by the pioneers; and the dwellers on Leatherwood Creek
had a faith of much the same easy texture. Yet they were of rather more
than the average intelligence, and they were so far from bigoted or
intolerant that all sects among them worshiped in one sanctuary, a large
cabin which they had built in common, and which they called the Temple.
Here on a certain night, while they sat listening to one of their
preachers, they were thrilled by a loud cry of “Salvation!” followed by
a fierce snort, like that of a startled horse, and they discovered in
their midst a stranger of a grave and impressive aspect, who had come no
one knew whence or how. When he rose he stood nearly six feet high,
and showed himself of a perfect figure, with flashing black eyes, a low
broad forehead and a fine arched nose; his hair, black and thick, fell
in a mass behind his ears over his shoulders; he wore a suit of black
broadcloth, a white neckcloth, and a yellow beaver hat. His weird snort
and his striking presence seem to have been his sole equipment for
swaying the faith of the people; though some of the earliest believers
saw a heavenly radiance streaming from his countenance at times, and
when he rode, they beheld above his head a ring of light which hung
in the air over the saddle if he dismounted. But he soon began to make
converts, and he had quickly enough, of the best among those good men
and women, to gain the sole use of the Temple. At first he claimed
merely to be the Lord Jesus Christ, but he presently announced himself
God Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth; and his followers readily
believed him, though he failed in the simple miracle of making a
seamless garment out of a bolt of linsey-woolsey cloth, and kept none of
his promises to them. He probably found it sufficient to be the Deity,
and his worshipers, among whom were two ministers, were certainly
content; but the unbelievers felt the scandal to be too great. They had
Dylks arrested, and brought before two justices of the peace, who one
after the other decided that there was no law of Ohio which forbade a
man to declare himself the Almighty.
[Illustration: Proclaimed himself the Lord Jesus Christ 205]
The wretched creature was acquitted, but he was thoroughly frightened.
He made his escape from his guards, and took to the woods, where he was
some time in hiding. When he came back to the believers, he had bated
nothing of his claim to divinity, but he was no longer so bold. He now
told them that the New Jerusalem would not come down at Leatherwood
Creek, but in the city of Philadelphia, and he departed to the scene of
his glory. Three of the believers followed him over the rugged mountains
and through the pathless woods, finding food and shelter by hardly
less than a miracle; but they did not find the New Jerusalem at their
journey’s end. Dylks had told them that where they should see the
heavenly light the brightest, there they should behold the beginning of
the New Jerusalem; but they nowhere saw this light, though they
walked the streets of the earthly city night and day. Two of them were
substantial farmers, and when they had lost all hope, and had lost even
Dylks himself (for he soon vanished), they pledged their tobacco crops
and so got money enough to come home, where they lived and died in the
full faith that Joseph C. Dylks was God Almighty, though he never did
anything to prove it but snort like a startled horse, wear long hair on
foot and a halo on horseback, and fail in everything else he attempted.
The third of this company of his followers, a young minister of the
United Brethren, did not return for some years; then he came, well
dressed and looking fat and sleek, and preached to the people on
Leatherwood Creek the faith in which he had not faltered. He accounted
for the disappearance of Dylks from the eyes of his other worshipers in
Philadelphia very simply: he had seen him taken up into heaven.
But the people had merely his word for the fact; Dylks never descended
to earth again as his apostle promised, and the belief in his divinity
died out with those who first accepted him.
XX. WAYS OUT.
In 1893 Jacob S. Coxey, a respectable citizen of Massillon, started a
movement in favor of good roads which took the form of a pilgrimage to
Washington to petition Congress for its object. Several armies, as they
were called, from different parts of the country, met in Massillon, and
under Mr. Coxey’s leadership, set out on a long and toilsome march over
the Alleghanies to the capital, living by charity on the way. Many of
the soldiers of these armies might well have been idle and worthless
persons; there were doubtless others who were sincere and sane in their
hope that the representatives of the people might be persuaded to do
something for bettering the highways; but the affair was so managed as
to meet with nothing but ridicule, and in trying to force a hearing
from Congress Mr. Coxey and some of his followers were arrested for
trespassing on the Capitol grounds, and were sentenced to several weeks
in jail. This ended the latest crusade for good roads from Ohio; but
there is no Ohio idea more fixed than that we ought to have good roads,
and this was by no means the first time that Ohio men had asked the
nation to lend a hand in making them. The first time they succeeded as
signally as they failed the last time; but that was very long ago, and
it may surprise some of my readers to know that we have a National Road
crossing our whole state, which is still the best road in it.
Almost as soon as the Western people had broken into the backwoods it
became their necessity to break out again, to find and to make roads
between them and the civilization they had left. The ways of the
different emigrations in reaching Ohio were: for the New Engenders,
through New York state to Lake Erie, and westwardly along the shore
of that water; for the Pennsylvanians, through their own state to the
headwaters of the Ohio, and then down the river and inwardly from it;
for the Virginians, Marylanders, and Carolinians, the valley of the
Shenandoah and the mountain gaps to Kentucky, and so into Southwestern
Ohio. At first the white men came by the _streets_, as the pioneers
called the trails that the buffalo and deer had made; but they soon cut
traces through the woods, and later these traces became wagon roads. Of
course they used the rivers wherever they could and traveled by canoe,
by flatboat, by keelboat, and by ark; and there grew up on the rivers a
wild life which had its adventures and heroes like the Indian warfare.
The most famous of the boatmen was Mike Fink, who drank hard and fought
hard, and was a miraculous shot with his rifle. He was captain of a
keelboat, which was the craft mostly used in ascending the river. The
flatboats were broken up and sold as lumber when they had drifted down
to their points of destination on the lower rivers, but the keelboat
could make a return trip by dint of pushing with a long pole on the
shore side and rowing on the other; sometimes even sails were used, and
then the keelboat sped up stream at the rate of fifty miles instead of
twelve miles a day.
But these means of traffic and travel soon ceased to suffice. Then the
Ohio people felt the need of getting out with their increasing crops,
their multiplying flocks and herds, and they made their need known to
the nation, to which they were everywhere akin, and the nation answered
through Congress by beginning, in 1806, the National Road, which was
finished by 1838, from Baltimore as far as Indiana. This road first
opened the East to Ohio; then in 1811 a steamboat made its appearance on
the Beautiful River, and after that steam commanded all the Southern and
Southwestern waters for us, as well as those of the inland seas on the
North. Then, that all these waters might be united, the state began in
1825 to build a system of canals, from Cleveland to Portsmouth and
from Toledo to Cincinnati. When these canals were completed, with their
branches, they gave the people some nine hundred miles of navigable
waters within their own borders. The main lines were built, not by
companies for private profit as the railroads have since been built,
but by the people for the people, and it may be said that the great
prosperity of Ohio began with them. Wherever they ran they drained the
swamps and made the land not only habitable but beautiful. They were dug
by Ohio people, and the sixteen millions of dollars that they cost
came back into the hands of the men who gladly taxed themselves for the
outlay. The towns along their course grew, and new towns rose out of the
forests and prairies.
The Ohio people had the impulse to this great work from the New York
people, who had built the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, and whose
governor, De Witt Clinton, had urged forward that work. Now, when our
whole state was ablaze with joy at the action of the legislature in
providing for the work, Governor Clinton was invited to come and first
strike the spade into the earth in digging the new canals. He arrived by
steamboat at Cleveland, where the people received him and his train of
distinguished New Yorkers with rejoicings worthy of the great event. He
took stage for Newark, and on the 4th of July, 1825, when our state
had just come of age, in the presence of all the Ohio magnates and
dignitaries, and a mighty throng of citizens, he lifted a spadeful from
the ground on the Licking Summit. Governor Morrow of Ohio lifted the
second spadeful, and then followed a struggle among the distinguished
men as to which should lift the third. New Yorkers and Ohioans vied in
filling a wheelbarrow with successive spadefuls, and a happy citizen
of Chillicothe had the honor of wheeling it away and dumping it over a
bank. He was the captain of a company of militia, and the crowd was so
great that a squadron of cavalry had to keep a space for the speakers
in the midst of their hollow square. Thomas Ewing delivered the oration,
and men all round him wept for joy.
[Illustration: Governor Clinton 211L]
There were like scenes when the canals were completed. Multitudes
gathered to see the water let into the channels which to their
impatience had been so long in digging, and they took hopefully the
disappointment of having it sink into the gravelly beds, before it could
slowly fill the banks, instead of rushing like a flood to their brims.
At Dayton, 1829, when the first fleet of three canal boats arrived from
Cincinnati, it was greeted with the firing of cannon and the shouts of
an immense crowd lining the canal banks. This was as it should be, and
will be wherever a great work is done for the common good; and it ought
never to be forgotten that the canals of Ohio were dug by Ohio men that
all Ohio men might freely prosper more and more, and not that a few rich
men might get richer.
After the National Road, which was our first way out, came the steam
navigation of the lake and the river, and after that came the railroad,
which will be our main reliance for getting back and forth over the
state and to and from it, till some of the many schemes of travel
through the air are realized. We cannot tell how far off the event may
be; but in the mean time it is curious, if not very flattering to our
Ohio pride, to learn that the first railroad enterprise within our
borders was fostered by Michigan. The legislature of that state granted
the charter of the Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad, which opened in 1836.
The line ran from Toledo to Adrian, thirty-three miles, but when it was
projected the matter was so far from serious with the legislature which
authorized it, that it was granted because it was “merely a fanciful
scheme that could do no harm, and would greatly please” certain citizens
of Toledo; just as now a balloon line might be laughingly authorized. It
was entirely successful, however, as far as the running was concerned,
though the road was so hampered by the cost of fighting enemies and the
expenses of building that it was seized for debt seven years later.
This has been the history of many railroads since in Ohio, and if we
could read between the lines that now cobweb the map of the state, we
should come to know many tales of broken fortunes and of broken hopes.
The railroads are no different in this from other business enterprises,
but they are different from the canals. These, as we have seen, were
the work of the state for the advantage of the whole people, while the
railroads were from the beginning private schemes for making money. Each
kind of highway came in its time, and each in its way served the purpose
of Ohio. At the time the companies began to build their railroads,
the state system of canals was in its highest usefulness, and it is no
wonder that the people should have regarded the railroads as fanciful
schemes. No one could then have dreamed how rapidly they would increase
and multiply, and that in less than fifty years they should so far
surpass the canals in service to the public that some of these would
be abandoned by the state, and become grass-grown ditches hardly
distinguishable in their look of ancient ruin from the works of the
Mound Builders. At the most there were once nine hundred miles of
canals in Ohio, and now there are twelve or fourteen thousand miles of
railroads. Yet the canals were a greater achievement for Ohio in 1837
than the railroads are in 1897.
The children of this day can hardly imagine what rude and simple affairs
the earliest railroads were. Instead of the long smooth steel rails
which now carry the great trains, with their luxurious cars, in their
never-ceasing flight, day in and day out the whole year round, flat
bands of iron, spiked to wooden rails, formed the path of the
small carriages drawn by a locomotive of the size and shape of a
threshing-machine engine. These amazed by a speed of ten or twelve miles
an hour the gaping spectator whose grandchildren do not turn their heads
to look at the express as it makes its sixty miles in sixty minutes. In
the very beginning, indeed, the carriages were drawn by horses, and it
was several years before steam was used.
[Illustration: Early Railroad 214]
Little by little the railroads began to be built on the easy levels of
the state, and before a great while a line was projected from Cincinnati
to Columbus along the course of the Little Miami River. This was
completed piecemeal, from point to point, and at last carried through.
In the mean time other lines were laid out, and then all at once
the railroad era was at hand. It was a time of great excitement and
expectation, if not of that public rejoicing which had welcomed the
canals.
In a few years the magnificent fleets of the river began to feel
the fatal rivalry of the trains that swept along its borders. Travel
deserted them, and traffic sought the surer and swifter transportation
of the shore. The great packets that had carried swarms of passengers
to and from Pittsburg and Cincinnati and all the points between,
disappeared or were converted into freight-boats, and then these
began to fail for want of traffic, and the Beautiful River was almost
abandoned to the stern-wheeler pushing a flotilla of coal-barges. A
like change took place upon the lake; steamers which formed the means
of communication between the towns and cities from Cleveland to Buffalo,
and from Cleveland to Detroit, ceased to touch at the smaller ports,
and became the pleasure-craft of the summer tourists, or the carriers
of heavy freight, and the ports which did not become the feeders of the
railroads dwindled to insignificance. But the railroads could not affect
the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river;
the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea
from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could
not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had
his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period
of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them
dry. or where he left their slow currents to stagnate unstirred by the
keels of the leisurely craft once so jubilantly welcomed to them.
Except for the occasional breaking of an embankment, the history of the
canals could hardly be marked by any incidents of exciting interest. It
was not so with steamboating and railroading, which has each its long
tale of disasters such as give times of peace almost as dark a record
as those of war. The most tragical of these events took place at the
opposite extremities of the state, in Cincinnati and in Ashtabula, and
they occurred at the beginning and the end of an interval of nearly
forty years.
The rise of steamboating on the Western rivers was perhaps all the more
rapid because of the daring and reckless spirit of the Western people,
who took almost any risk in order to carry a point in their rivalries
or to gain an end of their ambition. It is certain at any rate that the
builders and the crews of the popular boats joined in contriving and
urging them to a speed that should leave all competitors behind. There
was frequent racing between the packets on the Ohio and Mississippi, and
the frightful calamities from bursting boilers continued for a long time
before public opinion quelled the boyish love of victory which tempted
not only the steamboatmen but their passengers too. These joined with
the captain in forcing the boat to the top of its speed, at the risk
of a swift or agonizing death to all on board; and it was no doubt
with their full approval that the master of the beautiful new steamer
_Moselle_ took the chance that resulted in the loss of more than two
hundred lives on the 26th of April, 1838. She had just left her moorings
at Cincinnati for her trip to Louisville, and had run up to take on a
family from a raft a little way above the city. In order that she might
show her speed before the crowd on the landing, and pass a rival boat in
sight of all as she returned, the captain held to the full head of steam
with which he had started. Her wheels had scarcely turned, after she
parted from the raft, when her boilers burst with a roar like thunder.
The air was instantly filled with the flying fragments of the wreck,
and with the bodies and the heads and limbs of men, women, and children.
These fell, strewing the shore and dropping into the river, where what
was left of the Moselle sank within fifteen minutes. Cries of anguish,
groans and shrieks from the sufferers, followed the awful sound of the
explosion. Many of the victims whom the accident had spared were drowned
before boats could reach them. The mangled body of the captain was
hurled into the street; the pilot was thrown a hundred feet into the air
and fell back into the stream.
[Illustration: Steamboat Explosion 217]
In 1876, on the evening of December 29, an express train of the Lake
Shore Railroad, broke through the bridge at Ashtabula, and plunged
seventy-five feet down into the bed of the creek below. The train was
of eleven cars with a hundred and fifty-six passengers on board, and the
bridge was further strained by the weight of the two massive locomotives
which drew it. The night was extremely cold, and a blinding snow storm
was raging, while the freezing wind blew a gale. The wreck at once took
fire, and with the cries of the wounded were now mingled the agonized
prayers of those who saw themselves doomed to death in the blazing ruins
which imprisoned them. Nearly every one on the train was hurt more or
less severely; eighty persons perished in the fall or the fire, and five
died after they were rescued.
There were other paths which the Ohio people had to open before they
could reach a yet wider world than any that lay to the east of them, or
the south of them. Their course to civilization lay not only through
the woods and down the rivers and over the mountains, but it ran also
through the great realm of books, and every log schoolhouse was a
station or a junction on it; or rather, as they had things in these
days, a milestone or a finger-post.
The great glory and strength of the Ohio people, as I have hinted
before, came from their varied origin.
They have shown themselves among the first of the Americans, not because
they were born in Ohio, but because they were born of the Massachusetts
and Connecticut men, the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the New
Jerseymen and Marylanders, the Virginians and Carolinians and
Kentuckians who made Ohio what it was to be by the mixture of their
characteristics and qualities here. It is of no use to pretend, however,
that it was their virtues alone which got into the Ohio people; their
foibles got in too, and their prejudices and their vices. A traveler
in our state, just after it had become a state, believed that we were
destined to be more like the people of the North and East than the
people of the South, whom he then found, in Kentucky at least, much
livelier in mind and manner than the Pennsylvanians, fond of public life
and society, very hospitable and courteous, but dissipated, restless,
and reckless. Our public spirit did not come from our Southern ancestry,
but from our New England ancestry. The South gave Ohio perhaps her
foremost place in war and politics, but her enlightenment in other
things was from the North. It was the aristocratic indifference of the
South to public schools that for twenty-four years after Ohio became
a state kept her from profiting by the magnificent provision of school
lands made for her by the whole nation through Congress. It was not
until almost a generation after Ohio became a state that she began to
have schools partly free, and it was still a generation later before
the men of New England blood framed the present school law, and got
it enacted by the legislature. This was in 1853, but in 1825 the first
great effort for public schools was made. There was then a party in
favor of canals in the legislature, and another party in favor of
schools, and these two parties fought each other a long time. At last
they united, and together gave the people canals and schools, the two
ways out of the wilderness.