FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER
THE BARTON FARM, FARIBAULT COUNTY,
MINNESOTA, July 6, 1892.
For a week past I have been Mr. Barton’s hired man, but in the early
morning I must take leave of the family and renew the long journey.
More than once during the past year I have found it hard to say good-by
to an employer, but that is altogether apart from the real sadness of
the present farewell.
It might have been months ago, so strong has my attachment to Mr.
Barton’s family grown and so well do I feel that I know them, that Mr.
Barton stopped me on the wayside as I was leaving Blue Earth City and
offered me work on his farm. I hesitated, but finally agreed to accept
his offer for a week. I am staggered now at realizing how near I came
to missing an experience which will always be a cherished memory of my
life.
With utmost hospitality I, a mere chance workman, picked up on
the public highway, was taken in by the Bartons and made one of
themselves; and during the days since I have shared their life of
summer industry with hard work for all of us from five in the morning
until nightfall, but healthful, worth-while work, and with it a home
most daintily neat, and having an atmosphere of true refinement and of
simple, genuine religion.
My pain at leaving is precisely that which one feels in the farewells
which end the rare, halfborn friendships of life. A voyage, perhaps, or
a short sojourn in a foreign country proves the chance occasion of a
meeting, and kindred hearts awaken to quick recognition of one another,
and then their roads diverge and from the parting of the ways each
bears a sorrow which is of the tragedy of existence. Who has not felt
that sadness and seen its shadow fall over the face of nature and far
over the coming days?
There is, in my mind, no smallest fear of fresh encounter with an
untried world. I have long since lost all such feeling, and can set
forth of a morning as light of heart, as free from anxious care as are
the birds which share my early start, and with a sense of pure animal
enjoyment which is, I sometimes dream, not far removed from their own.
And with small wonder can I be so careless, for ever since I left
Chicago work has ceased to be a difficult thing to find and has grown
to be an increasingly difficult matter to avoid. It has come to be a
positive embarrassment, for every day I am stopped by the way and urged
to go to work, and it is not easy to refuse men who are most evidently
short-handed. I shall set out in the morning with six dollars--five
earned from Mr. Barton and one remaining from my last employment--and
I shall try to cover a wide strip of country before settling down to
another job; but, upon the basis of my past experience, I am sure that
on an average of at least once a day in the coming march some farmer
will ask me to help him at his work. All through Illinois and from
Minneapolis to this point, which is near the Iowa border, this has been
my uniform experience.
It was late in the spring when I left Chicago. Almost continuous rains
compelled me to defer my start from day to day until the month of May
was far advanced, and then I stopped at Joliet and joined for a week a
gang of laborers in the works of the Illinois Steel Company. So that
it was the first of June before I found myself in the open country
once more, after six months as a city workman. Even then the skies
continued threatening, and frequent rains forced me from the soft loam
of the country roads to a firmer footing on the line of the Rock Island
Railway for most of the journey to the Mississippi. I was relatively
flush with wages earned at Joliet, and so was under no necessity to
stop. But the chance of work never failed me, for not only in the
rich farming region about Morris but also in the brick-kilns in the
neighborhood of Ottawa and Utica I found abundant offers of a job.
From Davenport I went by rail to Minneapolis, for I had resolved to
emerge for a week and attend the National Republican Convention in that
city, and not days enough remained, when I reached the river, to admit
of my walking there in time for the political gathering. But when the
Convention closed I started again, penniless and afoot, on the long
march which I have interrupted twice, once when working for a fine old
Irish farmer near Belle Plain, and a second time when I accepted Mr.
Barton’s offer.
It is difficult to pass thus lightly over wide stretches of the
journey. Under every casual sentence is a mine of what proved valuable
experience to me: The days in the Steel Works, for example, as a member
of a gang of foreign laborers and associated with an army of skilled
and disciplined workmen, meeting some of them on familiar terms at the
boarding-house and at the club, which is an interesting experiment on
the part of the company. Then a tramp along the Illinois River through
a rich country which teemed with vegetation in the luxuriance of the
tropics; and a day’s march on the railway with a veritable hobo who
had lost his partner and cheerfully took up with me, and who proved
to be a delightful fellow, by no means lost to manliness, from whom I
parted most regretfully when a job was found for him in a brick-kiln
near Ottawa. Then the Convention itself, with its vast array of
party organization, and its highly dramatic incidents as affecting
the careers of political leaders, and its strong undercurrents of
personal and sectional ambition, and the interesting personages, and
picturesque figures; all so intensely real and finely typical and
keenly alive with national spirit, and splendidly representative of
wide, heterogeneous empire bound together in marvellous union. And then
a few days spent near Belle Plain, where, driven by the rain from the
road, I found shelter in a farm-house shed and was eagerly seized upon
by the farmer as a hired man, until one morning, when, as usual, I had
risen at sunrise and had cleaned the stables and curried the horses
and was milking the old white cow, the longing for the tramp laid
sudden hold of me and soon after breakfast my eager feet were again
on the main-travelled road. The storm had passed, the sun was shining
from a cloudless sky, and a strong, cool wind was tossing the graceful
branches of a cluster of American elms at the roadside as I left the
farm, and was blowing through the dewy, dark recesses of a bit of
fragrant woodland as I climbed the hill, giving the sense of infinite
vitality; when I reached the summit there lay below me, embedded in
deep green, one of the hundred exquisite lakes of southern Minnesota,
with its rippling surface joyously dancing in the sunlight and adding
a touch of magic beauty to the rich, undulating landscape of varying
field and forest and deep meadow-land. All about me were the homes of
original settlers, where yet live some of the very men and women who,
only a generation ago, began to reclaim this paradise from a boundless
waste of treeless prairie. Looking out upon it now from such a height,
seeing its dense woodlands, the fields rank with standing grain, the
farm-houses gleaming white in the sun, the blue sheets of living water,
and the distant Minnesota threading its way by towns and villages along
fertile banks, one could but dream of its future, when the crudeness
will be gone, and close culture will have made it all a very garden of
the Lord!
It was through such country as this that my way led me toward the Iowa
border. I walked along the valley of the Minnesota by Le Sueur and St.
Peter to Mankato, where I spent Sunday, and then, cutting over the
ridge, I went by Lake Crystal to Garden City, and so through Vernon and
Amboy to Winnebago and on to Blue Earth City.
Not often on the march am I offered a lift, but now and again I am
picked up and hurried over some miles of the road, and it was one of
the best of these windfalls that befell me on this particular journey.
I had left Amboy only a few miles behind, and the long, dusty road
stretched far to the south in the direction of Winnebago, where I meant
to spend the night. The day was clear and gratefully warm; in the
meadows had just begun the metallic music of the mowers, and on the air
was the first fragrance of new-mown hay. Soon I caught the sound of the
rapid drum of horses’ hoofs behind me, and, turning, I saw a gentleman
seated in a light open four-wheeler, driving a pair of Indian ponies
at a spanking pace in my direction. He drew up beside me, and asked,
pleasantly, whether I cared to ride. I lost no time in thanking him
and in mounting to the seat at his side; in a moment more we were off
at a ten-mile gait, and I was watching with delight the business-like
movement of the ponies’ pace, with their backs so straight and level
that each might almost have held a coin without dropping it.
In the meantime Dr. Brooks (for so I shall call the gentleman, who
was returning to Winnebago from a professional visit on the outskirts
of his practice) was engaging me in conversation. We very naturally
discussed the recent nominations and the issues of the coming general
election, and then I had ample opportunity of learning much from him of
actual local conditions.
He seemed to me to be singularly well informed. He had travelled widely
over the West, and this particular region he had known familiarly since
its early settlement. Every farm-house which we passed he pointed out
to me, telling me the farmer’s name meanwhile, and something of his
history. There was a curious uniformity in the narrative. The life was
rough enough in the beginning, no doubt, and of the essence of hard
frontier struggle, but it sounded like a fairy tale as he told me of
one man and another who had come out in the early days almost penniless
from the East or the Middle West or, in some cases, from a foreign
country, and had “squatted” on the soil; now these settlers had each a
hundred and sixty acres under high cultivation and a good, substantial
house and adequate barns and machinery and stock; they could secure
money on easy terms at the local bank when they needed it, and the
market value of their land had risen two hundred per cent and even
higher in the past twenty-five years.
I should have suspected a land-boomer in the doctor had there been
anything aggressive or boastful in his manner, but he was speaking with
the simple directness of one who knows and who needs no bluster to
disguise ignorance or an ulterior motive.
I was deeply interested, and presently remarked that, coming as I did
from the East, the demand for labor on the Western farms had been
a surprise to me, and that I was sure that what he was telling me
would sound strange to Eastern men, whose preconceptions of agrarian
conditions at the West are formed largely from the representations of
certain political parties which are recruited from the farming classes.
Dr. Brooks smiled indulgently, and kept his eyes straight ahead while
he answered me.
“If you stay out here long enough,” he said, “you’ll find that there
are two kinds of farmers in the West. There is one kind that know their
business and that are farmers, and there’s another kind that are a good
deal more interested in politics than they are in farming. You can
put it down as a pretty safe rule that the farmers who have the best
knowledge of their business and who are the most industrious and frugal
and economical are the least dissatisfied with their conditions and
the least anxious to change them by political action, while the more
inefficient and shiftless and thriftless a farmer is, the more likely
he is to be a violent agitator for financial or political change.
“There seems to be a growing weakness among whole masses of our
people,” he went on, “which leads them to look to the Government
for help instead of to themselves in their own industry and thrift.
Not only the farmers are affected by it, for every demand upon the
Government for special legislation in the interest of one class or
another is evidence of this spirit. We need very much, as a people, to
relearn the simple, common-sense maxims of Benjamin Franklin, and to
practise them.”
I told him something at this point of my past winter in Chicago--of an
army of unemployed and of other armies of underpaid workers, and of
hosts of sweat-shop victims who could scarcely be said to be lacking in
industry and at least a measure of enforced economy.
He listened patiently and with some curiosity, I thought, and when I
had done he took up the subject quite eagerly.
“What you say is true enough,” he answered. “We live in an age of high
civilization, and civilization means city life, and that means great
centres of population, and that gives rise to congested labor markets
with all the want and misery which you describe. All this, as we have
it now, in this country, is of comparatively recent growth, being
complicated by the vast numbers of our ignorant immigrant population,
and we have by no means adjusted ourselves to it yet. You tell me of
an army of unemployed in Chicago, and I can tell you, in reply, of a
chronic demand for help in this country-side, which I know well; a
demand so great that within the limits of a few neighboring counties we
could put fifty thousand men of the right kind to work.”
“Yes,” I said, “I have met with an amazing demand for workers ever
since I left Chicago. But this is the busy season in the country; when
the winter comes, would not the men who answered to the demand for
agricultural laborers be forced out of employment again and back upon
the chance livelihood of the towns?”
“Not unless they preferred it,” he replied. “Of course the demand
is exceptional at this season. How great it is you can infer when
I tell you that, for the next five or six weeks, almost any sort of
a man could get his board and a dollar a day, and men of fair skill
and experience two and two dollars and a half a day, while the best
men will command, for certain kinds of work, as high a wage as three
dollars and a half a day besides their keep.
“But the point is that our farmers prefer to hire men by the month for
the whole season. They want their help from the 1st of April until the
end of November, and they are willing to pay an active, steady fellow
twenty dollars a month and everything found, even to his washing. And
the demand is so steady and the difficulty of getting good, industrious
men so great, that multitudes of our farmers would be willing enough
to keep the right sort of hands through the winter months and pay them
something for the little that they could find for them to do, for the
sake of having them through the spring and summer and autumn when men
are hard to find.”
* * * * *
On the next day I reached Blue Earth City at noon, and spent a dime at
a bakery for a mid-day meal, and then went bowling off toward the Iowa
border at Elmore, which place I counted upon reaching by nightfall.
One dollar remained to me of my last store, and there is a marvellous
fund of the feeling of independence in a dollar for one who is familiar
with the sense of cowing, unmanning insecurity which comes of being
penniless. Already I had stopped once in southern Minnesota, and so
large a sum as a dollar would certainly see me well into Iowa, I was
thinking, before I should be obliged to halt again to replenish my
purse.
It was this view of the case which made me not very hospitable to the
offer of a farmer who presently called to me with an inquiry as to
whether I would work for him.
The incident was an every-day occurrence, and I felt at first only the
usual embarrassment in my effort to evade the offer with some show of
reason; but Mr. Barton, for it was he, asked me to at least give it
a trial before deciding the matter, and, seeing in the suggestion an
admirable opportunity for a short term of service, I replied that, if I
concluded to stay at all, I could not consent to remain for longer than
a week together, and must be held free to go at the end of the first
week if I chose.
Mr. Barton agreed to this immediately, and invited me to a seat beside
him on a load of wheat which he was taking to the mill. I said that I
preferred to walk on to his farm, the direction of which he had pointed
out to me and which was but a couple of miles down a side road.
At first every step which bore me away from the main-travelled road
added to my uncertainty of mind. Was I acting wisely in stopping so
soon again when I might easily push on for another fifty miles or more?
Presently I came to a railway crossing, and sitting down to rest on the
roadside, I thought the matter over, and decided finally to go on to
the farm.
I had no difficulty in recognizing it from Mr. Barton’s description.
A row of poplars stood just within a trim picket-fence which enclosed
the farm-house yard from the road. Opening the gate I walked up the
foot-path which cut its way for a hundred yards through a well-kept
lawn, shaded with fruit-trees, to the house standing on the crest
of the ridge, surrounded by well-grown maples. It was the usual
two-storied, white farm-house with green shutters, having a wing at the
side with a porch in front of it overgrown with honeysuckle.
I had come armed with a message for Mrs. Barton from her husband; but
for all that, an increasing feeling of embarrassment accompanied me up
the walk, and when I knocked at the screen-door which opened upon the
porch, I was sorely tempted for a moment to break and run. The inner
door was open, and through the screen I could see Mrs. Barton and one
of her daughters, whom I shall call Miss Emily, ironing at opposite
ends of a table, while another daughter, Miss Julia let us say, was
sewing beside them. The faultless order and precision which had
appeared in every external detail of the farm were in perfect keeping
with what I could see of the interior of the home. It contained only
the plainest furniture, but the room was redolent of a clean, cool,
inviting comfort, perfectly suited to the needs of men who come in from
long, hard work in the heat of the fields. The windows and outer doors
were guarded by close-fitting screens; the inner wood-work was painted
a light, delicate color, as fresh and clean as though newly applied;
and the walls were covered with a simple, harmonious paper which
matched well with the prevailing shade in the clean rag-carpet on the
floor. A large rocker and a sofa, covered with Brussels carpet, were
supplemented by a plentiful supply of plain chairs.
Miss Julia was the first to notice me; putting down her sewing, she
stepped to the door and stood facing me from behind the screen.
“Is this Mr. Barton’s house?” I asked.
“Yes,” said his daughter.
“Well, he has sent me here with a message for Mrs. Barton,” I went on;
“and wishes me to say that he has hired me to work on the farm.”
I was sadly ill at ease by this time, and very sorry that I had not
accompanied Mr. Barton to the mill, and then to his home, and left to
him all necessary explanations. But it was too late now for regrets,
and Mrs. Barton, a sweet-faced, gentle little lady, had joined her
daughter at the door.
“I did not know that father meant to hire any more men just now,” she
said, while a nervous alarm played in her timid eyes at sight of so
rough an applicant for work.
I do all that I can to keep a respectable appearance, and never a day
passes without the opportunity of a bath in a lake or a wayside stream,
and sometimes I am so fortunate as to come upon two or three such
chances for refreshment in a day’s march. But a long course of wearing
the same outer garments and sleeping in brick-kilns and hay-ricks must
inevitably produce an effect in clothing which, accompanied by an
unshaven face, gives rise to a somewhat scandalous figure.
I could only say, in reply to Mrs. Barton, that her husband’s
instructions to me were simply to deliver the message which I had
brought, and then to await his coming at the farm.
She was by no means reassured, but her hospitality overcame her fear,
and, unfastening the screen-door, she opened it with an invitation to
me to come in.
The dust on my boots and the general condition of my dress became the
instant source of poignant feeling as I stepped upon the speckless
carpet and took a seat in a straight-backed wooden chair which shone as
though the varnish were but newly dry.
The situation was unmistakably awkward, and, under the disturbing spell
of it, I sat very straight in the chair with feet close together and my
hands on my knees, anathematizing myself for stopping before there was
any need for it and getting myself into a mess. Then I began to cast
about for some excuse for going out-of-doors once more, so that I could
cut and run for the road.
Out of purest kindness of heart Mrs. Barton was trying to set me at
ease. There was some threat of rain, she remarked; and we had had a
great deal of rain this spring, she added; and where had I met Mr.
Barton? and when did he say that he would be home? she inquired.
My best efforts at responsiveness were dismal failures, and the gloom
was growing denser when Miss Julia came to my rescue with a copy of
_The Youth’s Companion_, which she suggested that I might care to read
while waiting.
Over and over again I read sections of continued “boys’ stories” and
a number of interesting anecdotes and tried to study out certain
puzzles, but Mr. Barton did not come. Mrs. Barton and her daughters had
immediately resumed their work and their conversation, and, with kind
considerateness, had left me to the paper. The hot summer afternoon
slowly dragged its length toward evening. Through breaks in rolling
clouds, heavy with rain, the sun shone at intervals with piercing heat.
A warm, damp, sun-lit air, laden with honeysuckle and the fragrance
of strawberry-beds, came floating idly through the open doors and
windows, bearing the droning hum of many bees, which was like a low
accompaniment to the soft voices of the women. Moving up the lane with
the stately, steady motion of an elephant, came presently a huge rick
of hay, the horses almost concealed under the overdrooping load and two
hired men seated comfortably on top.
Soon after this Mr. Barton arrived, and I went out to meet him in the
yard and helped him unhitch the horses. Then he set me to ploughing
potatoes in the garden with his youngest son, an intelligent,
gentlemanlike lad of seventeen, who, as I discovered later, was
preparing for college, for scarcely a day passed that his sister
Julia, who teaches school in a neighboring town through the winters,
did not find time to help him with his Algebra and Latin. When we were
called to supper I found that my case was satisfactorily explained to
the family, and that I could now read my title clear to a perfectly
comfortable position among them.
Would that I could do justice to the exquisite charm which I began to
feel at once in that simple, natural home-life! The men assembled at
the call to supper from different quarters of the farm. There were
five of us, Mr. Barton and his son Richard, and, besides me, two other
hired men, Al, an inflexible Yankee transplanted from far down East,
and Harry, a stalwart young Englishman of the grown-up “butcher’s boy”
variety, whose “h’s” had grown to be a source of discomfort to him. We
washed on the kitchen porch, and, contrary to the usual custom on the
farms, we put on our coats before entering the dining-room, which is
also the family sitting-room, where I had found Mrs. Barton and her
daughters at work.
The table was spread with clean linen, and a napkin was at each place.
Mr. Barton said grace in the midst of a reverent silence, which
continued while we began upon a meal abundant enough for a hungry man
and dainty enough for a lady.
After supper Harry and I went to fetch the cows, which had to be driven
in from a pasture beyond a little river that flows through the farm.
There were thirty-seven of them in all to be milked, but Miss Emily
and Miss Julia lent a hand, so that it did not take long, and when
the horses had been fed and their stalls made ready for the night, we
men were free. In the dark, star-lit evening, which followed almost
instantly upon the setting of the sun, we walked down to the river for
the regular evening bath.
It is early yet for sight of the past week in true perspective,
but even now its events take form in memory with a certain natural
sequence. With only one exception, clear, radiant summer days have
followed one another, days begun for us at five o’clock and spent in
the hay-fields when the chores were done and breakfast over. Long days
they were, full of hard work in the heat of the meadows, but there was
the refreshing cool of the house at mid-day, and a dinner excellent in
itself but to our whetted appetites a keen physical delight. And better
even than dinner was supper at the end of the day’s work in the fields,
a delicious supper of cold meats and potatoes and home-made bread and
milk and tea, and finally cake with strawberries from the garden. If
anything could have been better than that it was when Richard and we
three hired men took towels down to the river in the gloom of the early
evening, and under the clear summer stars from the high embankment
covered with soft turf, with the glitter of fire-flies all about us and
the air full of the deep croaking of frogs and the sharp reiterations
of the katydids, dove headlong into the dark, cool, flowing water. We
swam about for a quarter of an hour and came out with scarcely a trace
left in our muscles of the ache of the day’s labor and then went to bed
to eight hours of deepest sleep.
One was a rainy day when work in the fields was impossible, and we
spent it in the barn running some of last year’s wheat through the
fanning mill and measuring and sacking it ready for shipment. Then
Sunday came with its long, peaceful rest. Al and Harry secured each a
buggy and were given the use of two of the farm horses, and, in their
best Sunday black, they started after the chores were done to take
their best girls to church, and for a long drive in the afternoon.
The family attend church in Blue Earth City, but their rector has
another parish and can preach here only on alternate Sundays. This was
his Sunday in the other parish and there was a Sunday-school service
here. The restful observance of the day seemed to me in most natural
keeping with the deeply religious tone of the family life. Morning
worship followed breakfast as usual; then came the preparation for
church, and after the morning service and the mid-day meal, which was
almost wholly prepared on Saturday, the afternoon was spent in reading.
After a light supper in the evening Miss Julia played the harmonium in
the parlor, and we all joined in singing hymns until bedtime.
If there is one scene more than another which I shall always remember
as eminently characteristic of the household, it surely is that of
morning prayers. No pressure of work, even at the very height of the
haying season, is allowed to interfere with this act of worship.
Immediately after breakfast the family group themselves about the
dining-room, drawing off a little from the table, and Mr. Barton,
taking down an old Bible from the mantel-shelf, seats himself in the
rocker and begins to read the morning lesson. The passages have been
from the prophecy of Ezekiel, and, stronger than any other association
with that book, will hereafter be for me the sturdy figure of Mr.
Barton in his working clothes, seated in a rocking-chair with his head
bowed over a Bible as he reads, reverently, the oft-recurrent phrase:
The Word of the Lord came again unto me saying, Son of Man,----
The prayer that followed has been always a simple, earnest appeal
for help and guidance. It was as though our dependence upon God and
His right to supreme devotion in every act of life was instinctively
recognized, and that the worship was a natural expression of love to
the Father of us all, thus renewing our wills and bringing us into
captivity unto the obedience of Christ, and sending us forth to the
duties of the day strong in the sense of the sacredness of work as
service to the Lord, and of His presence with us as the source of all
life and hope and strength.
Monday was the Fourth of July. Harry and Al were early off again with
buggies and best girls, and Mr. Barton invited me to join the family in
celebrating the day in town. We hitched a team to a four-seated market
wagon, and Mr. Barton’s son and his wife, who live on an adjoining
farm, drove with us to Blue Earth City, where we were to attend the
festivities and go for dinner to the home of a married daughter of Mr.
Barton, whose husband is a merchant there.
All along the country roads converging toward the county seat we saw
lines of farmers’ wagons driving to the common centre. There was great
variety of equipage; some were very rude and plain, but others were
exceedingly well appointed, and not a few of the low phaeton-buggy type
rose to a degree of elegance.
Many of the nearer dwellers were walking in, and as we approached our
destination the foot-paths were crowded, chiefly with young men and
boys, and the town itself, when we entered it, we found thronged with
holiday-seekers, the women in light dresses and bright ribbons, the men
in sober black, and all of them in their movements giving the sense of
heavily conscientious merry-making in spite of the glorious sunshine
and the air that throbbed with the joy of a ripe summer’s day.
When the horses were put up we fell in with the stream of people moving
toward the main street, and there in the thick of the serious throng
we stood on the curb watching a procession of local organizations
file past, headed by a brass band from Winnebago, all gorgeous in
new uniform and led by citizens on horseback as important and
uncomfortable as the marshals in a St. Patrick’s Day parade.
There was a common movement then of the crowd, through streets which
cracked to the continuous discharge of explosives, toward a wood on
the outskirts, where a rough booth had been erected and row on row
of benches placed before it in the shade. We found seats near to
the front, and presently there fell a hush upon the assembly which
quieted the flutter of fans and the mingled interchange of neighborly
conversation. A procession of little girls in white, with bright blue
sashes, each wearing the name of a State or Territory in silver letters
across the band of her sailor hat, which had long blue streamers
behind, came filing in among the crowd, all intensely trim and
self-conscious with their fingers protruding stiffly from white cotton
mits. Following them were a minister and a schoolmaster and a small
group of other prominent citizens, from among whom towered the tall,
massive figure and the clean-cut, rugged, beardless face of an old
ex-senator who was the orator of the day.
The little girls grouped themselves on benches which rose like steps
from the ground to the level of the floor of the booth, and the
citizens took seats assigned them on the platform. One of their
number, the chairman of the occasion, introduced the minister, who
led the company in prayer. Then the schoolmaster was presented as the
reader of the Declaration of Independence. A few explanatory sentences
in unconventional English served to bring vividly to the minds of the
people the familiar circumstances of the signing of the Declaration,
and then in sonorous, ringing voice he read, amid breathless stillness,
the deep natural stillness of the woodland, the well-remembered phrases
of that great document. There was no applause when he ceased, no
outward demonstration of any kind, but through the great still company
one could feel the strong movement of the sense of national life.
The ex-senator then rose to speak. He was himself a frontiersman,
having known the Northwest from its early settlement and having
represented it in Congress a generation ago, and he spoke to people
whose history he knew and whose temper he thoroughly understood. It was
inspiriting to catch the dominant note of what he said and to watch
its effect upon his hearers. There was talk of national growth, but
without boasting, and there was very serious reckoning of national
problems, but without carping, and there was high appeal to national
responsibility, but without canting, and when at the end, out of
the wealth of his own personal association with the man, he spoke of
Lincoln and enforced all that he had said with homely, cogent teachings
drawn from the life and the words of the great apostle of the common
people, the assembly was moved and stirred as no other appeal could
have affected it.
After this the crowd scattered for dinner, most of the people
re-entering the town, and the spirit of fun, no longer to be restrained
by a conscientious sense of the seriousness of enjoyment, broke loose
in a bit of genuine American horseplay, when a company of boys and
young men, in most fantastic disguise, passed in grotesque procession
through the streets, and for a few minutes the solemn crowds really
lost self-consciousness in true _abandon_ to the spontaneous sport.
The Barton family had soon gathered at the married daughter’s home, and
there with the greatest good cheer we had a picnic dinner of delightful
cold meats, and the thinnest of bread and butter, and olives, and
dainty home-made cakes, and the reddest of ripe cherries--all served to
us as we sat just within the dining-room door or ranged in a semicircle
about it in the shade on the lawn.
When it was over everyone was eager to start for the public green
outside the town, where the afternoon’s sports were to be held. It was
not far, and we walked out, but almost a continuous stream of carriages
was passing us in a common movement, and when we reached the bridge
just outside the town the stream had narrowed to an unbroken line of
vehicles moving slowly in single file. At the centre of the bridge
which spans a narrow stream below the public green stood an interesting
figure as we drew up. He was a tall, lean man of sixty, perhaps, but
without a suggestion of old age in his lithe, sinewy frame; a Yankee
by every gift of nature, with the sharply inquisitive face of a ferret
and shrewd blue eyes with a gleam of humor in them and a little tuft
of whiskers on his chin. Every vehicle, as it passed, underwent an
interested scrutiny from him, and his whiskers worked comically up and
down as he cordially greeted the occupants whom he knew. I was walking
with Mr. Barton, and seeing us in the crowd on foot, he eagerly hailed
Mr. Barton as a sympathetic old acquaintance.
“John,” he said, “I was just thinking as I stood here how I was to the
Fourth of July celebration in these parts thirty years ago to-day,
in ’62. And my gracious, it’s hard to realize the change! Why, there
warn’t a team of horses in the hull county then, and everybody come on
foot or else behind a yoke of oxen. But just look at that percession
now! There ain’t a ox-team in the hull outfit, and ther’s some rigs
here that’s fine enough for the President to ride in.”
The common presented a truly festive scene when we reached it. As
large as a ten-acre lot, it was covered with a soft, rich turf and
enclosed on three sides by beautiful woodland and on the fourth by the
main-travelled road. Horses, tied in the shade along the outer rim of
trees, were munching hay from piles which had been thrown down before
them. Deserted vehicles, ranging from white-canopied prairie-schooners
and rough market-carts to the smartest of new buggies, stood idly
among the trees, and, with changing lights and shadows playing over
them, were groups of picnickers seated on the mossy ground about white
table-cloths which bore their viands, and some on rustic benches at
rough tables hastily put up for the occasion.
But the dinner-hour was nearly over, and those who had picnicked in
the woods were fast joining the crowds who poured in upon the common
from the town. The peanut and popcorn and lemonade venders were out in
force, and you could hear from many quarters the professional tones
of fakirs who invited the crowds to throw rings at walking-sticks,
or rubber balls at stuffed dolls for cigars, or to various tests of
strength on a variety of ingenious machines. These had their votaries
for a time, and there was much laughter and chaffing about the jousts,
but the current of the crowd soon set overwhelmingly toward a quarter
of the field where a baseball game was being started. Two townships
were to play each other. There was no organized nine in either, but
a volunteer one was presently secured from both. Not without some
difficulty, however. I saw one sturdy young farmer offer his services
as pitcher, and his wife, who stood by with her baby in her arms,
pleaded with him to desist.
[Illustration: THE FOURTH OF JULY--“TWO TOWNSHIPS WERE TO PLAY EACH
OTHER.”]
“Charlie,” she repeated with whining petulance, “you hadn’t ought to;
you _know_ you hadn’t ought to. Just think how stiff and sore you’ll
be to-morrow. You won’t be fit for the haying.” But the spirit of the
sport was upon Charlie, and not only did he pitch for his township, but
he took off his boots and played in stocking-feet to facilitate his
base running.
Another young farmer, a gorgeous swell, with his best girl beside him
in a phaeton-buggy, and with no end of a white waistcoat and a white
cravat, and with a high, stiff collar chafing his well-burned neck, sat
spectator to the scene for a time; then, unable to resist longer the
demand for a catcher for his township nine, he asked the young woman
to hold the horses, and, leaving his coat and waistcoat and high collar
in her care, he caught a plucky game without a mask or a breast-pad and
with only an indifferent glove, and he threw so well to second that the
other side had to give up trying to steal that base.
It was a perfectly delightful game; not at all a duel of batteries, but
like a contest between two newly organized rival freshman nines before
any team-work has been developed, for both pitchers were hit freely,
and there were plenty of the most engaging errors and the wildest of
excited throwing, and at times a perfect merry-go-round of frantic
base-running, during which it was difficult to keep track of the score.
We drove back to the farm in the cool of the evening in time for supper
and the chores before nightfall, and at five o’clock on the next
morning began again a day of work in the hay-fields.
* * * * *
DENVER, COL., September 21, 1892.
It is a long cry from Mr. Barton’s farm to this beautiful Western
city, but the story of the journey can easily be shortened to a few
pages, which will serve to picture its salient incidents. Even at
this distance of time and space I cannot touch in passing upon my
parting with the Barton family without feeling again the sense of
homesickness which accompanied me as, in the glory of an early July
morning, I walked down the garden-path to the road, with her good-by
and a gentle “God bless you!” from Mrs. Barton sounding in my ear, and
a last repeated generous offer from Mr. Barton of a permanent home,
if I would stay with them, almost following me to the gate. It was
the best of the many chances which I have found open to men who are
honestly in search of work and willing to work their way industriously
and patiently to advancement. I have found many jobs thus far, and
in scarcely one of them have I failed to see the means of winning
promotion and improved position, while not a few have seemed to me to
open a way to considerable business success to a man shrewd enough to
seize it and persistent enough to develop it. Often, as I look back
upon two thousand miles of country crossed--apart from the splendor
of it--the almost overwhelming impression that it leaves of boundless
empire wherein a growing, intelligent, industrious, God-fearing people
are slowly working out great ends in industrial achievement and
personal character and in national life, an impression which thrills
one with a new-found knowledge and love of one’s country, with her
“glorious might of heaven-born freedom” and the resistless resurgence
of her boundless energies, and, notwithstanding all waywardness, a
deep-seated, unalterable consciousness of national responsibility to
the most high God; apart from all this, the strongest sense which
possesses one in any retrospect of a long, laborious expedition like
mine, is that of a wide land, which teems with opportunities open
to energy and patient toil. Local labor markets there are which are
terribly crowded, as I found in Chicago to my cost. Awful suffering
there is among workers who are in the clutch of illness, or, bound by
ties which they cannot break, are unable to move to more favorable
regions; pitiful degradation there is among many who lack imagination
to see a way and the energy to pursue it, and who, without the
congenital qualities which make for successful struggle, sink into
the slough of purposeless idleness; deep depravity and unutterable
misery there are in the great congested labor-centres, many of whose
conditions are the price which we pay for our economic freedom. But the
broad fact remains, that the sun never shone upon a race of civilized
men whose responsibilities were greater and whose problems were more
charged with the welfare of mankind, among whom energy and thrift and
perseverance and ability were surer of their just rewards, and where
there were so many and such various chances of successful and honorable
career.
In leaving Mr. Barton’s farm I found much the same external conditions
as those with which I had grown familiar ever since I left Chicago.
It was a rich agricultural region, and was inhabited throughout this
section in curious, clearly defined communities. In one quarter
was a German settlement, and in another a Norwegian, and a Swedish
settlement in a third, while I heard of a French colony as a curiosity
in another direction, and even an organization of Quakers. But there
were native-born Americans in plenty, and chiefly of New England
antecedents, as I found in my chance acquaintance with farmers by
the way, and from observations of such a charming town as Algona, in
northern Iowa, where I spent several days. On every hand it was borne
in upon one, not merely from what appeared but from the invariable
assurances of those who have lived long in the region, that among the
foreign population no fact is more thoroughly established than that of
its swift assimilation. So swift and sure a process is this said to
be that the children born upon the soil, of immigrant parentage, seem
to lose certain physical characteristics which would link them to an
alien ancestry, and to take on others which approximate to recognized
American types. Their children, in turn, are said to be natives of
established character; but of them all none surpasses the first-comers,
when once they are settled and grown familiar with our institutions,
in a stanch, honest conservatism and in a loyal, patriotic devotion to
their adopted country.
It was nearly the end of July when I reached Council Bluffs. I was
well worn with walking, for the last two hundred miles I had covered
in six days’ march, and I was glad enough to stop for a time. But I
did not wish to stop there, for my letters for several weeks past had
been forwarded to Omaha, and were now awaiting me across the river.
Unluckily for me, there was a five-cent toll for foot-passengers on the
bridge, and I had only one cent left.
It was the middle of an intensely hot afternoon. I was too tired to
begin an immediate search for work, and so I took a seat on a bench in
the shade of the public square, near to a fountain which played with a
delicious sound of coolness under the trees. The park walks converged
toward the fountain as a centre, and thither came the people who wished
to rest in the shade or whose errands carried them through the public
square. Presently a sharer of my bench got up and walked on, leaving
behind him a copy of a local paper, which I eagerly seized upon and
read and re-read until I became conscious of the dimming light of
early evening. I was stiff and sore with the long, hot, dusty march,
and uncomfortable at failing to get the letters upon which I had long
counted, and I lacked utterly the energy to surmount even so slight a
difficulty. But with the cool of the early evening came the natural
hunger bred of a day’s march, and the necessity of providing for that
and a shelter for the night.
One of the streets of the city through which I had walked to the
central square was named Fifth Avenue, and from one point on its
pavement I could see through the open windows of a cheap hotel the
tables in the dining-room spread for supper. There were screens at the
windows and light cotton curtains, and the table-linen appeared clean
and the shaded depth of the room looked to me, from the blistering
pavement, like the subdued, fragrant coolness of real luxury.
I retraced my steps to the hotel and asked for work, but there was
none for me. I found the way to the stables and applied there, but an
old man with a long nose and a white, patriarchal beard told me that
they were in no need of more men. This was very different from my
experience in the country, where everyone was in need of men and one
had not to ask for employment but was everywhere urged to accept it,
and I began to wonder whether for the sake of work I should be forced
out again to the farms.
Near this “Fifth Avenue” hotel I had noticed a livery-stable which
fronted on one street and extended through to another bordering
the public square. I went there next, and found its keeper seated
comfortably in the wide, open doorway. Taciturn and non-committal at
first, he confessed eventually to his needing a man in addition to the
two already at work in the stable, and, after some questioning, he told
me to come back at nine o’clock that evening and receive his decision.
I was supperless and without the means of securing anything to eat,
and there remained an hour and a half before nine o’clock. In this
predicament I had the good fortune to chance upon a delightful public
library on the second floor of a building overlooking the square. It
was like the library at Wilkesbarre in its charming accessibility;
and, without a trace of the feeling of weariness or hunger left, I was
reading ravenously, when, by some happy chance, I caught sight of a
clock that was almost on the stroke of nine. With thanks, which were
exceedingly short and abrupt, I returned the books to an attendant
in the library and then bolted for Mr. Holden’s livery-stable. He was
standing in the door when I came up, and, without preliminary remarks,
“I will take you on,” he said, and then he added, almost without a
pause,
“I will give you twenty dollars a month and arrange for your board at
the hotel [indicating the “Fifth Avenue” one], or thirty dollars a
month and you manage for your own keep. You will sleep in the loft over
the harness-room.”
Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted the first offer, and wishing
us good-night Mr. Holden left the stable in charge of Ed, one of the
other hired men, and me.
It was too late to get anything to eat at the hotel, and so I sat up
with Ed and helped unhitch the horses and put up the traps as they came
in. The last horse was housed by eleven o’clock. I then found that with
the aid of a hose a capital bath was possible in the carriage-washing
section of the stable, and then I went to bed on a cot in the
well-ventilated loft, very content in the knowledge that I had found a
good place and should have a breakfast in the morning.
Ed called me at five o’clock as he was going below, and when I followed
him he assigned me the two rows of stalls next to his own, which
contained twelve horses and which were to be my first care. All these
stalls had to be cleaned and the horses fed before I was at liberty
to go to breakfast, and it was with a royal appetite that about seven
o’clock I applied at the hotel. It was a very decent hostelry, largely
made use of by farmers apparently. I was at once accepted as an employé
of Mr. Holden, and served to an excellent meal by a trim little
waitress, at one of the very tables which I had looked in upon on the
previous afternoon with such genuine longing, and with the feeling of
its belonging to a degree of luxury far beyond my reach.
The twelve horses which had fallen to my share had all to be curried
after breakfast and got ready for the day’s orders. Calls for vehicles
began to arrive in the middle of the morning, and they continued to
come at intervals throughout the day, so that there was much hitching
and unhitching to interfere with regular tasks.
Jake, the third hired man, was boss in the absence of the owner. He had
long been in Mr. Holden’s employ, and had a wife and several children
in a home of his own somewhere in the outskirts of the city. All the
feeding, and cleaning, and currying, and carriage-washing, fell to Ed
and me, while Jake, in addition to a general superintendence, had as
his special trust the care of all the harnesses. He took great pride
in them, and certainly kept them in admirable condition. Ed was chief
carriage-washer and next in command under Jake, while to me, when my
regular work was done, fell the odd jobs of keeping the carriages
oiled, and watering the horses at the proper hours, and lending a hand
at the unloading of the hay and feed as they came in--of holding myself
in readiness, in short, to do anything that anyone in the stable asked
of me. A very good position it was, as I very soon found. I had no
great difficulty in learning the various tasks, and in a stable which,
even in the fierce heat of August, was always comfortable, and at forms
of work which were always interesting, and with every cost of living
provided for, I was clearing five dollars a week.
By no means were the demands of our work continuous. Nearly every
afternoon we had an hour or two or even three together, when there was
little to be done. I found a book-shop across the way from the stable,
where second-hand books could be rented at the rate of six cents a week
and the books exchanged as often as you pleased.
Then in the evenings, when we all had supped in turn, and the stalls
had been made ready for the night, and the traps sent out in answer to
the evening trade, Jake and Ed and I used to sit out in front, within
easy hearing of the telephone-bell, with our chairs tilted against the
stable-wall and our feet caught by the heels on the chair-rounds, and
there we talked by the hour together, until Jake went home and left Ed
and me to care for the outstanding horses and traps, and lock up the
stable for the night.
I was at a disadvantage in these conversations. Jake and Ed were
Yankees, both of them shrewd, hard-headed, steady fellows. Jake was the
father of a family, and Ed an unmarried man of three-and-thirty, who
was working with all his might to pay off the mortgage on his father’s
farm back in Illinois. Both of them had had some district-school
training, but nothing beyond, and while they had a perfectly
intelligent knowledge of affairs which concerned them as men and as
citizens, their farther intellectual horizon was limited.
One evening as we sat under the stars the talk turned upon astronomy,
and Ed began to comment disparagingly upon the claims of astronomers
of an ability to weigh the heavenly bodies, and to measure their
distances from one another and from the earth. Jake heartily agreed
with him, and insisted that not until a line could be carried from
one to another, and each star weighed accurately in a scale, would he
put any confidence in these pretended results. My attempt to point out
that there were methods of determining weight and distance other than
the very direct ones which they insisted upon, was very damaging to my
reputation for intelligence, and was set down as of a piece with the
general ignorance which I had shown in the work of a livery-stable.
And when, later in the discussion, I stood out for the validity of
the doctrine of the conservation of energy, against Ed’s immediate
demonstration of its falsity in the heaps of refuse which he pointed
out were thrown every day from our stable alone, and which must to some
degree effect a variation in the totality of matter--I found that my
position in the crew was threatened with unpleasantness.
But in reality both Jake and Ed were exceedingly friendly to me. They
were at pains from the first to teach me my work, and to give me a hint
now and again, which counted for much, in the matter of getting the job
well in hand. Soon the days began to go by with astonishing rapidity. I
had told Mr. Holden that I should not be with him very long, and at the
end of two weeks I left the livery-stable with ten dollars and one cent
in my pocket, minus the twelve cents which were due for book-hire, and
which I felt had been well invested.
At Omaha I stopped for several days. Like Minneapolis and Denver,
of the Western towns which I have seen, it is a splendid type of
the American city of a generation’s growth, where almost miraculous
progress has been made in actual material development, and where the
higher demands of civilization are responded to with an energy and
enthusiasm which are inspiring, and which are prophetic of splendid
results.
Then out I walked one perfect afternoon upon the level plains of
Nebraska, with wild sunflowers in prolific bloom and square miles of
Indian-corn fields standing lusty and stark to the very horizon with
puffs of belated pollen powdering the warm red light, and the corn-silk
turning black at the ends, and the long, drooping, cane-like blades
beginning to show the ripe yellow of the autumn.
The mere writing down the bare fact of the journey stirs in one’s blood
again the joy of that free life. The boundlessness of the world and
your boundless enjoyment of it, the multiplicity of abundant life and
your blood-kinship with it all, some goal on the distant horizon and
your “spirit leaping within you to be gone before you then!” There is
scarcely a recollection of all the tramp through Illinois and Minnesota
and Iowa and eastern Nebraska which is without the charm of a free,
wandering life through a rich, beautiful country. What I saw of the
wealth of a fertile region in central Illinois I found again enhanced
in beauty and productiveness in southern Minnesota, and, varying in
outward configuration but scarcely less attractive or fruitful, across
the face of Iowa, losing only its variety as it modulates in Nebraska
to the plains which slope upward gently for five hundred miles to the
Rockies.
My mind throngs with the pictures of splendid cultivation, of leagues
on leagues of farms which were had for the taking or were purchased
from the Government at a dollar and a quarter an acre, and where I saw
countless comfortable homes and fields white to the harvest, with no
demand so strong as the one for laborers.
It was not wealth in the sense of opulence, but it was the plenty
which is beyond the fear of want that marked the character of that
broad domain. The poor were there, and the suffering and the deeply
discontented, and there were hard conditions of life and very sordid
ones, but never the hopelessness which gives to town-bred destitution
its quality of despair. In the gradual development of actual resources
about you appeared to be the remedies of most of the obvious ills.
“This is a rich region,” said a handsome young farmer who had offered
me a lift one blistering hot day in Iowa--“this is a rich region, and
it is more than rich, it is reliable. We never know a total failure of
crops here; we can always make a living. This country, for hundreds of
miles around, is a garden, and we live in the heart of it.” And he was
one of the discontented. I only regret that I have not space here for
his interesting account of the tyranny of capital under which, from his
point of view, the farmers live and work, and the imperative need of
monetary reform as a means of bringing about their emancipation.
It was the thing which I had heard many times from many farmers at
the West, only never presented with quite equal cogency before. The
opposite views had been represented to me, and there was often a
singular alternation of presentation within the course of a day or two,
and I had come to recognize a comical uniformity between condition and
views.
If I chanced upon a farmer who had no particular quarrel with the
existing order of things, who was conservative and cautious and
sceptical of the efficacy of change, I was quite sure to find that
he was an admirable farmer, thrifty and energetic and industrious,
with a thorough knowledge of his business down to a frugal care of
minor details. But if, on the other hand, I fell in with a farmer who
was clamorous for radical economic change, on the ground that he and
his class were being ruined by the injustices of existing economic
conditions, I soon began to feel a suspicion, which all my observation
deepened into a conviction, that the man of this type was fundamentally
a poor farmer; his buildings and fences were sure to be out of repair,
and his stock showed signs of suffering for want of proper care, and
the weeds grew thick in his corn, and his machines were left unhoused
and suffered more from rust than ever they did from wear.
This would be absurd as a generalization with any claim to wide
applicability, as would be any generalization based upon my casual
experimenting; it was the comical uniformity of my experience in this
case as in some others that impressed me.
The real difficulties of the situation for many of the Western farmers
one could not fail to see. Apart from material misfortune and apart
from sickness and ill-luck, there is the inexorableness of conditions
which seem at times to hold them to a life of servitude with no escape
from unprofitable drudgery, and from the carking care which burdens
men who are hopelessly in the clutch of debt.
I grew impatient at times with the tone of Philistine patronage and
superiority adopted by the sturdier farmers. Theirs was the harder work
no doubt and theirs the shrewder carefulness and the more provident
handling of their instruments, but even hard-won success is sometimes
so strangely blind to the obligations which arise from the fact that
subjective difficulties are as real and are often far more difficult of
mastering than those which are objective. Often it appears at its worst
as, with utter disregard of the duty of helpfulness, it chants its
heartless creed in the terms of the fore-ordination which lightly dooms
all the non-elect of high efficiency to the deep damnation of beggarly
dependence or of endless failure in the struggle of life.
Two hundred miles west of Omaha the wages earned at the livery-stable
in Council Bluffs were exhausted, and I was obliged to look for another
job with which to replenish my store. I was following the line of the
Union Pacific Railway, and, having spent my last cent one mid-day
for a dinner, I went up to the first section-boss whom I met in the
afternoon’s walk and asked him for a job. He was a burly Irishman of
massive figure. Without a moment’s hesitation he told me that he was
in no need of a man, but that Osborn, the boss of the next westward
section, the thirty-second, with head-quarters at Buda, he knew was
looking for one.
About eight miles farther on I came upon Osborn and two men at
work near the little station at Buda, a scant four miles east of
Kearney, and it was as the Irishman had said, for instantly, upon my
application, Osborn accepted me as a section-hand at wages of a dollar
and a quarter a day for ten hours’ work, and offered me board and
lodgings at his home for three dollars a week, an arrangement with
which I instantly closed.
For the remaining afternoon and until six o’clock I lay resting in the
tall prairie grass in the shade of the railway station, and at seven
o’clock on the next morning I began a term of three weeks’ service as a
section-hand under the orders of Osborn the boss, and with a strapping
young Irishman, “Cuckoo” Sullivan by name, as my partner.
That was the last long stop before I reached Denver. And now, as I
am about to leave this city for the remaining thousand miles of my
journey, I look back over a summer and autumn spent in the country
and in towns and villages of the thousand miles from the seaboard to
Chicago, and then a winter and a spring within the limits of the
foremost city of the Middle West, and then a summer in the vast farming
region between Chicago and Minneapolis and Denver. A thousand miles
remain, but with what eager anticipation do I look forward to them!
I shall strike in among the mountains, and then leave to the natural
development of events the determining of my westward journey. Whichever
course it takes, my way must lie through the frontier, and by force of
necessity I must come into contact with a life which is something other
than the monotonous daily round of work. There will be mining regions
with the chances of prospecting, and the ranches with the wide range
of their free living, and Indian reservations to be crossed, and many
lonely mountain-trails to be followed.
It was never without interest and charm, this summer’s walk with its
intervals of work, over a thousand miles of the mid-continent. It
varied in beauty with every day’s march, and even the dead level of
the Nebraska prairies as the Indian-corn fields grew thinner and faded
completely into boundless plains of sage-brush, where the alkali lay
white on the glittering soil, and the bleaching skeletons of cattle
joined their mute appeal to the cloudless sky for water to quench a
burning thirst--even here was an attraction and an interest of its own.
Days ago I caught sight of the mountains rising from out the level
plain, and, through the haze of distance and above the mists which
shrouded their gaunt sides, I saw their “silent pinnacles of aged snow”
appearing clear against the blue of high heaven. Now, as I have drawn
nearer in this marvellous air, a hundred miles of the range stand out
in glorious vividness of color and of every detail of configuration,
and my heart leaps again to the joy of their companionship, and I
realize with a tingling of blood that the best of the journey, in any
sense of adventure, lies before me in the life which they hold upon
their slopes and fertile valleys, and in the gloomy depths of their
vast cañons.