CHILDHOOD DAYS.
My mother said I was "always the busiest young'en she ever saw," which
meant I was restless from the beginning—born so.
According to the best information obtainable, I was born in a log
cabin, where the fireplace was nearly as wide as the cabin. The two
doors on opposite sides admitted the horse, dragging the backlog, to
enter in one, and go out at the other, and of course the solid puncheon
floor defied injury from rough treatment.
The crane swung to and fro to regulate the bubbling mush in the pot.
The skillet and dutch oven occupied places of favor, instead of the
cook stove, to bake the pone or johnny cake, or to parch the corn, or
to fry the venison, which was then obtainable in the wilds of Ohio.
A curtain at the farther end of the cabin marked the confines of a bed
chamber for the "old folk", while the elder children climbed the ladder
nailed to the wall to the loft of loose clapboard that rattled when
trod upon and where the pallets were so near the roof that the patter
of the rain made music to the ear, and the spray of the falling water,
not infrequently, would baptize the "tow-heads" left uncovered.
Mother used to give us boys mush and milk for supper, and only that,
and then turned us out to romp or play or do up chores as the case
might be, and sometimes as I now think of it, we must almost have made
a burden of life for her, but she always seemed to think that anything
we did in the way of antics was funny and about right.
It is mete to recall to mind that this date (of my birth) 1830, was
just after the first railroad was built (1826) in the United States,
just after friction matches were discovered (1827), just when the
first locomotive was run (1829), and "daguerreotype" was invented.
Following these came the McCormick reaper, immortalizing a name; the
introduction of photography (1839), and finally the telegraph (1844)
to hand down the name of Morse to all future generations as long as
history is recorded. Then came the sewing machine (1846) to lighten the
housewife's labor and make possible the vast advance in adornment in
dress.
The few pioneers left will remember how the teeth were "yanked"
out, and he must "grin and bear it" until chloroform came into use
(1847), the beginning of easing the pain in surgical work and the near
cessation of blood-letting for all sorts of ills to which the race was
heir.
The world had never heard of artesian wells until after I was eleven
years old (1841). Then came the Atlantic cable (1858), and the
discovery of coal oil (1859). Time and events combined to revolutionize
the affairs of the world. I well remember the "power" printing press
(the power being a sturdy negro turning a crank), in a room where I
worked a while as "the devil" in Noel's office in Indianapolis (1844)
that would print 500 impressions an hour, and I have recently seen
the monster living things that would seem to do almost everything but
think, run off its 96,000 of completed newspapers in the same period of
time, folded and counted.
The removal to "Lockland", alongside the "raging canal", seemed only a
way station to the longer drive to Indiana, the longest walk of my life
in my younger days, which I vividly remember to this day, taken from
Lockland, ten miles out from Cincinnati, to Attica, Indiana a distance
approximately of two hundred miles, when but nine years old, during the
autumn of 1839. With the one wagon piled high with the household goods
and mother with two babies, one yet in arms. There was no room in the
wagon for the two boys, my brother Oliver Meeker, eleven years old, and
myself, as already stated but nine. The horses walked a good brisk gait
and kept us quite busy to keep up, but not so busy as to prevent us at
times from throwing stones at squirrels or to kill a garter snake or
gather flowers for mother and baby, or perhaps watch the bees gathering
honey or the red-headed woodpeckers pecking the trees. Barefooted and
bareheaded with tow pants and checkered "linsy woolsy" shirt and a
strip of cloth for "galluses", as suspenders were then called, we did
present an appearance that might be called primitive. Little did we
think or care for appearance, bent as we were upon having a good time,
and which we did for the whole trip. One dreary stretch of swamp that
kept us on the corduroy road behind the jolting wagon was remembered
which Uncle Usual Meeker, who was driving the wagon, called the "Big
Swamp", which I afterwards learned was near Crawfordsville, Indiana.
I discovered on my recent trip with the ox-team that the water of the
swamp is gone, the corduroy gone, the timber as well, and instead
great barns and pretentious homes have taken their places and dot the
landscape as far as the eye can reach.
One habit we boys acquired on that trip stuck to us for life; until the
brother was lost in the disaster of the steamer Northerner, January 5,
1861, 23 years after the barefoot trip. We followed behind the wagon
part of the time and each took the name of the horse on his side of
the road. I was "Tip" and on the off side, while the brother was "Top"
and on the near side. "Tip" and "Top", a great big fat span of grey
horses that as Uncle Usual said "would run away at the drop of a hat"
was something to be proud of and each would champion his favorite ahead
of him. We built castles in the air at times as we trudged along, of
raising chickens, of getting honey bees, such as we saw at times on the
road; at other times it would be horses and then lambs, if we happened
to see a flock of sheep as we passed by—anything and everything that
our imagination would conjure and which by the way made us happy and
contented with our surroundings and the world at large. This habit of
my brother's walking on the near side and I on the off side continued,
as I have said, to the end of his life, and we were much together in
after life in Indiana, on the plains, and finally here in Washington.
We soon, as boys, entered into partnership, raising a garden, chickens,
ducks, anything to be busy, all of which our parents enjoyed, and
continued our partnership till manhood and until his death parted us.
It is wonderful how those early recollections of trivial matters will
still be remembered until old age overtakes us, while questions of
greater importance encountered later on in life escape our memory and
are lost.