[Illustration: W. G. Puddefoot with hand-written signature]
THE MINUTE MAN
ON THE
FRONTIER
BY
THE REV. W. G. PUDDEFOOT, A.M.
FIELD SECRETARY OF THE HOME MISSIONARY SOCIETY
NEW YORK: 46 EAST 14TH STREET
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY
BOSTON: 100 PURCHASE STREET
COPYRIGHT, 1895,
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
TYPOGRAPHY BY C. J. PETERS & SON,
BOSTON.
PREFACE.
In a very able review of Maspero's "Dawn of Civilization," the writer
says "that for hundreds of years it was believed that history had two
eyes; but now we know she has at least three, and that archæology is
the third."
This may account for the saying that "history is a lie agreed to;" for
it needs to be argus-eyed to give us any adequate idea of the truth;
and while the writer of the following sketches does not aspire to the
rank of a historian, he has been induced to print them for two or
three reasons. First, because urged to by friends; and secondly,
because of the unique condition of American frontier life that is so
rapidly passing away forever.
One may read Macaulay, Froude, Knight, and, in fact, a half-dozen
histories of England, and then sit down to the gossipy sketches of
Sidney culled from Pepys's, Evelyn's, and other diaries, and get a
truer view of English life than in all the great histories combined.
It would be impossible to give even the slightest sketch of a country
so large as ours for a single decade in many volumes; although, in one
sense, we are more homogeneous than many suppose.
There was a greater difference in two counties in England before the
advent of the railways than between two of our Northern States to-day.
To-day a man may travel from Boston to San Francisco, and he will find
the same headlines in his morning papers, and for three thousand miles
will find the scenery desecrated by the wretched quack medicine
advertisements that produce "that tired feeling" which they profess to
cure.
If he goes into one county in the mother country, he will find the
people singeing the bristles of their swine, and counting by the
score, in another by the stone, etc., and customs kept up that had
grown settled before travel became general. But with us it is
different. We had no time to become crystallized before the iron
horse, the great cosmopolitan of the age, rapidly levelled all
distinctions; and it is only by getting away from the railway, and
into settlements that still retain all the primitiveness of an earlier
day, that we find the conditions of which much of this book treats.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE iii
I. THE FRONTIER IN RELATION TO THE WORLD 1
II. EARLY REMINISCENCES 11
III. THE MINUTE-MAN ON THE FRONTIER 22
IV. THE IMMIGRANT ON THE FRONTIER 48
V. THE ODDITIES OF THE FRONTIER 61
VI. LIGHTS AND SHADOWS 68
VII. SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN THE SOUTH 77
VIII. ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN 82
IX. THE SOUTH IN SPRINGTIME 91
X. THE NORTH-WEST 102
XI. A BRAND NEW WOODS VILLAGE 107
XII. OUT-OF-THE-WAY PLACES 123
XIII. COCKLE, CHESS, AND WHEAT 134
XIV. CHIPS FROM OTHER LOGS 142
XV. A TRIP IN NORTHERN MICHIGAN 151
XVI. BLACK CLOUDS WITH SILVER LININGS 163
XVII. SAD EXPERIENCES 171
XVIII. A SUNDAY ON SUGAR ISLAND 180
XIX. THE NEEDS OF THE MINUTE-MAN 189
XX. THE MINUTE-MAN IN THE MINER'S CAMP 197
XXI. THE SABBATH ON THE FRONTIER 211
XXII. THE FRONTIER OF THE SOUTH-WEST 220
XXIII. DARK PLACES OF THE INTERIOR 227
XXIV. THE DANGEROUS NATIVE CLASSES 235
XXV. CHRISTIAN WORK IN THE LUMBER-TOWN 244
XXVI. TWO KINDS OF FRONTIER 255
XXVII. BREAKING NEW GROUND 262
XXVIII. SOWING THE SEED 270
XXIX. "HARVEST HOME" 277
XXX. INJEANNY VS. HEAVEN 285
XXXI. THE LATEST FRONTIER--OKLAHOMA 293
XXXII. THE PIONEER WEDDING 318
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR _Frontispiece_
INDIAN CAMP, GRAND TRAVERSE BAY Page 16
VIEW NEAR PETOSKEY, MICH. 20
TYPICAL LOG HOUSE 46
TYPICAL SOD HOUSE 61
A SOUTHERN SAW-MILL 91
WINTER SCENE IN NORTHERN MICHIGAN 127
A MINUTE MAN'S PARSONAGE 190
OLDEST HOUSE IN THE UNITED STATES, SANTA FÉ,
NEW MEXICO 220
BREAKING NEW GROUND 262
LOOKING FOR A TOWN LOT 294
FORMING IN LINE TO VOTE FOR MAYOR 296
INDIANS AT PAWNEE, OKLAHOMA TER. 301
AFTER A STORM, GUTHRIE, OKLAHOMA TER. 306
FIRST CHURCH AND PARSONAGE, ALVA, OKLAHOMA TER. 307
AT A CHURCH DEDICATION 310
THE MINUTE-MAN ON THE FRONTIER.
I.
THE FRONTIER IN RELATION TO THE WORLD.
The opening up of a new frontier is world-wide in its operations.
Minnesota entered the Union as a State in 1858. The putting to
practical use the Falls of St. Anthony was felt all over Europe.
Thousands of little country mills, nestling amid the trees, and adding
to the beauty of the English pastoral scenery, to-day stand idle, the
great wheels covered with green moss; and Tennyson's "Miller" becomes
a reminiscence. Iowa became a State in 1846, and now leads the world
in the production of corn; and although it is a thousand miles from
the seaboard, yet through its immense production, and with the
cheapening of transportation, we find over seventy thousand Italians
emmigrating to this country, as, in spite of low wages, they cannot
compete on the plains of Lombardy. (See Wells's "Economic
Changes.")--We find that the man at the front can ship from Chicago to
Liverpool the product of five acres of grain for less money than the
cost of manuring one acre of land in England. (_Ibid._)
Every time a new frontier in America is opened, it means both
prosperity and disaster. So large are the opportunities, so rich the
results, that at first all calculations are upset. Natural gas in the
Middle States changes the price of coal in Europe. The finding of a
tin-mine is felt in Cornwall and Wales the next day. The opening of
the iron-mines in Michigan makes Cornish towns spring up in the upper
peninsula, while the finding of ore in desolate places has caused
communities to spring up with all the conditions of a cosmopolitan
civilization, and we have to-day men living twenty-five miles from
trees or grass. But such is the energy of the frontier type, that
grass-plats have been carried and planted on the solid rocks, as in
Duluth, where hundreds of thousands of dollars are expended in the
grading of streets, and the opening of the sewers, all having to be
blasted to do the work.
North Dakota was a wilderness of 150,000 square miles, and had not
produced a single bushel of wheat for sale, in 1881. In 1886 it
produced nearly 35,000,000 bushels; in 1887, 62,553,000. (See Wells's
"Recent Economic Changes.") The opening up of these immense
territories starts railways from California to Siberia; for, with the
Great West competing, Russia is stirred to greater effort. India, with
her great commerce with Great Britain, needs a shorter route; and the
Suez canal is made. Australia must compete with the Western plains;
and great steamers, filled with refrigerators, are constructed for
carrying fresh beef. The South American republics respond in return.
The hardy pioneer, ever on the move, explores well nigh impracticable
routes in search of precious metals. The inventive mechanic must
respond with an engine that can climb anywhere; and in almost
inaccessible mountain eyries the eagle is disturbed by the shriek of
the locomotive, and the bighorn must take refuge with the bison in the
National Park. The news of new mines flies around the world, fortunes
are made and lost in a day, and the destinies of nations determined. A
great crop starts railways, steamships. Miners, smelting-works, iron
and steel, respond. Letters fly across the Atlantic, and returning
steamers are filled with eager men and women, who answer the letters
in person. Down from the far north, Sweden and Norway have responded
with over a million of their children. Great Britain has sent nearly
six millions. Germany follows with 4,417,950; Italy, 392,000; France,
315,130; Austria, 304,976; Denmark, 114, 858; Hungary, 141,601;
Switzerland, 167,203; Russia and Poland, 326,994; Netherlands, 99,516;
and so on: in all, a total for Europe in fifty years of over
13,000,000, the great majority of whom have been started from their
homes by the opening up of new frontiers.
It has been stated on good authority, that sixty per cent of the
Germans that come are between the ages of fifteen and forty, while all
Germany has only thirty per cent of that age.
On the authority of Dr. Farr, quoted by R. Mayo Smith in his
"Emigration and Immigration," he calculates the money value of the
immigrants from the British Isles from 1837 to 1876 reached the
enormous sum of 1,400,000 pounds sterling, or 7,000,000,000 of
dollars, an average of 175,000,000 dollars a year; while the amount
sent back from British North America and the United States since 1848
was but £32,294,596. And what has been produced by the immigrant and
exported amounts to many hundred millions of dollars. It has been
computed that the country has been pushed forward a quarter of a
century by this vast mass of immigrants, nearly all of whom labor for
a living.
The frontiers of America will yet change the world. When in the not
distant future hundreds of millions cover the great continent, dotted
with schools and churches, and an intelligent population speaking one
language, and with other millions in Africa, Australia, and the
islands of the sea, using the same language, the time will come when
they will arbitrate for the world, and war shall be no more. Long
before the Atlantic cable was stretched across the ocean, millions of
heartstrings were vibrating from this land to all parts of Europe; and
to-day the letters fly homeward from the frontier immigrants in their
sod houses, bearing good cheer in words and money.
The freedom of the frontier is contagious, and the poor European
strives harder than ever to reach his kin across the sea. And when we
consider that only 300,000 square miles out of 1,500,000 miles of
arable land is under cultivation, and that already the farmers of
England and most parts of Europe are being pushed to the wall, we
begin to realize that the growth of the frontiers of the United States
not only influences our own land, but changes materially the course of
events in the whole world. The above figures are by Mr. Edward
Atkinson, as quoted in substance from "Recent Economic Changes."
To show the growth of one State during the past fifty years, let us
take Michigan. In 1840 Michigan had a population of 212,267; in 1890,
2,093,889. In 1840 there were three small railroads, with a total
mileage of 59 miles. In 1890 there were over 7,000 miles. "In 1840 [I
quote from Hon. B. W. Cutcheon, in "Fifty Years' Growth in Michigan"]
mining had not begun. In 1890 over 7,000,000 tons of iron were shipped
from her mines; while the output of copper had reached over a
100,000,000 lbs., and valued at $15,845,427.28. The salt industry, a
late one, rose from 4,000 bbls. in 1860 to 3,838,937 bbls. in 1890;
while the value of her lumber products for 1890 was over $55,000,000.
In 1840 there were neither graded nor high schools, normal schools nor
colleges. In 1890, 654,502 children were of school age, with an
enrolment of 427,032, with 33,975 additional attending private
schools. These children were taught by 15,990 teachers, who received
in salaries $3,326,287."
In 1840 Michigan had 30,144 horses and mules, 185,190 neat cattle,
99,618 sheep. In 1890 there were 579,896 horses, 3,779 mules, of milch
cows 459,475, oxen and other cattle 508,938, of sheep 2,353,779, of
swine 893,037. The total value came to $74,892,618. Over 1,700 men are
engaged in the fisheries, with nearly a million dollars invested, with
a total yield of all fish of 34,490,184 lbs., valued at over a million
and a half of dollars. The value of her apples and peaches in 1890
was $944,332; of cherries, pears, and plums, $65,217; of strawberries,
$166,033; of other berries, $267,398; and of grapes, $122,394. The
wheat crop for 1891 was valued at $27,486,910; the oats at $9,689,441;
besides 811,977 bushels of buckwheat, and 2,522,376 bushels of barley.
The capital invested in lumber alone was $111,302,797. "While her
great University, which saw its first student in 1841, and which had
but three teachers, one of them acting as president, has grown to be
one of the largest in the nation, with eighty professors and
instructors and 2,700 students registered on her rolls, conferring 623
degrees upon examination." And all this but the partial record of
fifty years in one State.
Since Michigan was entered as a State fourteen new States have been
formed (not counting Texas) and three Territories, with an aggregate
of over 17,000,000 square miles of land, and a population of nearly
15,000,000, nearly all of which fifty years ago was wilderness, the
home of the Indian and the wild beasts. With such stupendous changes
in so short a time, we see that the American frontiers have a direct
and powerful influence in changing the histories and destinies of the
nations of the whole world.
II.
EARLY REMINISCENCES.
It was in the spring of 1859 that I first saw the frontier. Our way
was over the New York Central, very little of which had two tracks. I
have a very vivid recollection of the worm fences, the log houses, and
the great forests that we passed on our way to Upper Canada. I
remember the hunters coming towards the train with their moccasons on
and the bucks slung over their shoulders. I have since that time seen
many men who were the first to cut a tree in this county or that town.
There were about forty thousand miles of railway in the whole land at
that date, against nearly two hundred thousand miles to-day. Cities
which are now the capitals of States were the feeding-ground of
buffalo; wolves and black bears had their dens where to-day we can
see a greater miracle in stone than Cheops; i.e., a stone State House
built inside the appropriation! Then six miles of travel on the new
roads smashed more china than three thousand miles by sea and rail.
The little towns were but openings in a forest that extended for
hundreds of miles. The best house in the village without a cellar;
roots were kept in pits. Houses could be rented for two dollars per
month, where to-day they are twelve dollars. Pork was two dollars a
hundred; beef by the quarter, two and one-half cents a pound;
potatoes, fifteen cents a bushel. Men received seventy-five cents a
day for working on the railroad. Cord-wood was two dollars a cord; and
you could get it cut, split, and piled for fifty cents a cord. Men
wore stogy boots, generally with one leg of the trousers outside and
one in. Blue denham was the prevailing suit for workingmen. The
shoemaker cut his shoes, and they were sent out to be bound by women.
The women wore spring-heeled shoes, print dresses, and huge
sunbonnets; and in the summer-time the settlers went barefooted. The
roads were simply indescribable. When a tree fell, it was cut off
within an inch of the ruts; the wagon would sink to the hubs, and need
prying out with poles; harnesses were never cleaned, and boot-blacking
had no sale. But the schoolhouse was in every township. In the older
settlements could be seen the log hut in which the young couple
started housekeeping, then a log house of more pretentious size; the
frame-house which followed, and a fine brick house where the family
now lived, showing the rapid progress made.
This was in western Canada. Toronto was separated from Yorkville, but
was a busy, substantial city. I remember the stores being closed when
Lincoln was buried, and black bunting hung along the principal
streets. I remember, too, the men who were loudest in their curses at
the government and against Lincoln, how the tears came to their eyes,
and how that event brought them to their senses. Most of them were
shoemakers from New England.
In 1873 I crossed into Michigan with my family. Even as late as that
the greater part of northern Michigan, and especially the upper
peninsula, was _terra incognita_ to most of the people of that State.
The railroads stopped at a long distance this side the Straits of
Mackinaw. The lumbermen had but skimmed the best of the trees; and,
with the exception of a few isolated settlements on the lakes and up
the larger rivers, it was an unbroken wilderness, abounding in fish,
deer, bears, wolves, and wild-cats; in fact, a hunter's paradise, as
it is even to this day.
But with the extension of the railways to the Straits of Mackinaw, and
the opening of new lines to the north into the iron mines of Menominee
to the Gogebic range, the great copper mines of the Keweenaw
peninsula, and the ever-increasing traffic of the lakes, the changes
were simply marvellous. Some things I shall say will seem paradoxical,
but they are nevertheless true to life.
The greater parts of southern Michigan and southern Wisconsin were
settled by people from New York State; and long before the northern
parts of Michigan and Wisconsin were opened up, new States had risen
in the West, and the tide of immigration swept past towards new
frontiers, leaving vast frontiers behind them. Sometimes a few stray
men with money at their command would pierce the country and form a
settlement, as in the case of Traverse City. Here for years the mail
was brought by the Indians on dog-sledges in the winter. It took eight
days to reach Grand Rapids on snow-shoes. It is four hundred miles by
water to Chicago. Sometimes the winters were so long that the
provisions had to be dealt out very sparingly; but all the time the
little colony was growing, and when at last the railroads reached it,
the traveller, after riding for miles through virgin forests, would
come upon a little city of four thousand people, with good churches,
fine schools, and one store that cost one hundred thousand dollars to
build.
If it chanced to be summer-time he would see the tepees of the Indians
along the bay, and two blocks back civilized homes with all the
conveniences and luxuries of modern life. Here a huge canoe made of a
single log, and there a mammoth steamer with all the elegances of an
ocean-liner. Should he go on board of one of the steamers coasting
around the lakes with supplies, he would pass great bays with lovely
islands, and steam within a stone's throw of a comparatively rare
bird, the great northern diver, and suddenly find himself near a wharf
with a village in sight--a great saw-mill cutting its hundreds of
thousands of feet of lumber a day; and near by, Indian graves with the
food still fresh inside, and a tame deer with a collar and bell around
its neck trotting around the streets.
[Illustration: INDIAN CAMP, GRAND TRAVERSE BAY, MICHIGAN.
_Page 16._]
He can sit and fish for trout on his doorstep that borders the little
stream, or he can get on the company's locomotive and run twenty miles
back into the woods and see the coveys of partridges rising in clouds,
and here and there a timid doe and her fawn, whose curiosity is
greater than their fears, until the whistle blows, and they are off
like a shot into the deep forest, near where the black bear is
munching raspberries in a ten-thousand-acre patch, while millions of
bushels of whortleberries will waste for lack of pickers. He can sit
on a point of an inland lake and catch minnows on one side, and pull
up black bass on the other; and if a "tenderfoot" he will bring home
as much as he can carry, expecting to be praised for his skill. He is
mortified at the request to please bury them. He will ride over ground
that less than fifteen years ago could be bought for a song and to-day
produces millions, and is dotted with towns and huge furnaces glowing
night and day.
If in the older settled parts, he will ride through cornfields whose
tassels are up to the car windows, where the original settler paddled
his skiff and caught pickerel and the ague at the same time, and who
is still alive to tell the story. He can talk with a man who knew
every white man by name when he first went there, and remembers the
Indian peeping in through his log-cabin window, but whose
grandchildren have graduated from a university with twenty-seven
hundred students, where he helped build the log schoolhouse; who
remembers when he had to send miles for salt, and yet was living over
a bed of it big enough to salt the world down.
He had nothing but York State pumpkins and wild cranberries for his
Thanksgiving dinner, with salt pork for turkey; and he lives to-day in
one of the great fruit belts of the world, and ships his turkeys by
the ton to the East; and to-day in the North the same experience is
going on. Places where the mention of an apple makes the teeth water,
and where you can still see them come wrapped in tissue paper like
oranges, and yet, paradoxical as it may seem, you can enter a
lumber-camp and find the men regaled on roast chicken and eating
cucumbers before the seed is sown in that part of the country.
Here are farms worth over eighty thousand dollars, which but a few
years ago were entered by the homesteader who had to live on potatoes
and salt, and cut wild hay in summer, and draw it to town on a cedar
jumper, in order to get flour for his hungry children. Here on an
island are men living who used to leave their farming to see the one
steamer unload and load, or watch a schooner drawn up over the Rapids,
and who now see sweeping by their farms a procession of craft whose
tonnage is greater than all the ocean ports of the country.
I have sat on the deck of a little steamer and drawn pictures for the
Indians, who took them and marched off with the smile of a schoolboy
getting a prize chromo, and in less than five years from that time I
have at the same place sat down in a hotel lighted with electricity,
and a menu equal to any in the country, with a bronze portrait of
General Grant embossed on the top. Within ten years I have preached,
with an Indian chief for an interpreter, in a log house in which a
half-brother of Riel of North-Western fame was a hearer, where to-day
there are self-supporting churches and flourishing schools.
Less than sixteen years ago I stopped at the end of the Michigan
Central Railway, northern division; every lot was filled with stumps.
A school was being rapidly built, while the church had a lot only. The
next time I visited the town it had fine churches and schools. The
hotel had a beautiful conservatory filled with choice flowers. I could
take my train, pass on over the Straits of Mackinaw, on by rail again,
and clear to the Pacific, with sleeper and dining-car attached.
[Illustration: VIEW NEAR PETOSKEY, MICHIGAN.
_Page 20._]
But once leave your railway, and soon you can get to settlements
twenty years old which saw the first buggy last year come into the
clearings. Here are deep forests where the preacher on his way home
from church meets the panther and the wild-cat, and where as yet he
must ford the rivers and build his church, the first in nine thousand
square miles.
III.
THE MINUTE-MAN ON THE FRONTIER.
The minute-men at the front are the nation's cheapest policemen; and
strange as it may seem, these men stand in vital relations to all the
great cities of the country from which they are so far removed. It is
a well-known fact that every city owes its life and increase to the
fresh infusion of country blood, and it depends largely on the purity
of that blood as to what the moral condition of the city shall be.
Therefore it is of the utmost importance that Zion's watchmen shall
lift up their voices day and night, until not only the wilderness
shall be glad because of them, but that the city's walls may be named
Salvation and her gates Praise.
Let us make the rounds among our minute-men to see how they live and
what they do. Our road leads along the Grand Rapids and Indiana
Railway. All day long we have been flitting past new towns, and toward
night we plunge into the dense forests with only here and there an
opening. The fresh perfume of the balsam invades the cars, the clear
trout-streams pass and repass under the track, a herd of deer scurry
yonder, and once we see a huge black bear swaying between two giant
hemlocks.
At eleven P.M. we leave the train. There is a drizzling rain through
which we see a half-dozen twinkling lights. As the train turns a curve
we lose sight of its red lights, and feel we have lost our best
friend. A little boy, the sole human being in sight, is carrying a
diminutive mail-bag. The sidewalk is only about thirty-six feet long.
Then among the stumps we wind our slippery way, and at last reach the
only frame house for miles. To the north and east we see a wilderness,
with here and there a hardy settler's hut, sometimes a wagon with a
cover and the stump of a stove-pipe sticking through the top.
After climbing the stairs, which are destitute of a balustrade, we
enter our room. It is carpeted with a horse-blanket. Starting out with
a lumber wagon next morning, with axes and whip-saw, we hew our way
through the forest to another line of railway, and returning, are
asked by the people in the settlement, "Will it ever be settled?"
"Could a man raise apples?" "Snow too deep?" "Mice girdle all the
trees, eh?" etc.
Five years later, on a sleeping-car, we open our eyes in the morning,
and what a change! The little solitary stations that we passed before
are surrounded with houses. White puffs of steam come snapping out
from factories. A weekly paper, a New York and Boston store, and the
five- and ten-cent counter store are among the developments. Our train
sweeps onward, miles beyond our first stop; and instead of the lonely
lodging-house, palatial hotels invite us, bands of music are playing,
the bay is a scene of magic, here a little naphtha launch, and there a
steam yacht, and then a mighty steamer that makes the dock cringe its
whole length as she slowly ties up to it.
Night comes on, but the woods are as light as day with electric
lights. Rustic houses of artistic design are on every hand. Here,
where it was thought apples could not be raised because of mice and
deep snow, is a great Western Chautauqua.
Eighty thousand people are pushing forward into the northern counties
of this great State. Roads, bridges, schoolhouses,--all are building.
Most of the settlers are poor, sometimes having to leave part of their
furniture to pay freight. They are from all quarters of our own and
other lands. Here spring up great mill towns, mining towns, and county
seats; and here, too, our minute-man comes. What can he do? Nearly all
the people are here to make money. He has neither church, parsonage,
nor a membership to start with. Here he finds towns with twenty
saloons in a block, opera house and electric plants, dog-fights,
men-fights, no Sabbath but an extra day for amusements and
debauchery.
The minute-man is ready for any emergency; he takes chances that would
appall a town minister. He finds a town without a single house that is
a home; he has missed his train at a funeral. It is too cold to sleep
in the woods, and so he walks the streets.
A saloon-keeper sees him. "Hello, Elder! Did ye miss yer train? Kind
o' tough, eh?" with a laugh. "Well, ye ken sleep in the saloon if ye
ken stand it." And so down on the floor he goes, comforting himself
with the text, "Though I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there."
Another minute-man in another part of the country finds a town given
up to wickedness. He gets his frugal lunch in a saloon, the only place
for him.
"Are you a preacher?"
"Yes."
"Thought so. You want to preach?"
"I don't know where I can get a hall."
"Oh, stranger, I'll give ye my dance-hall; jest the thing, and I tell
ye we need preaching here bad."
"Good; I will preach."
The saloon man stretches a large piece of cotton across his bar, and
writes,--
"Divine service in this place from ten A.M. to twelve to-morrow. No
drinks served during service."
It is a strange crowd: there are university men, and men who never saw
a school. With some little trembling the minute-man begins, and as he
speaks he feels more freedom and courage. At the conclusion the host
seizes his big hat, and with a revolver commences to take up a
collection, remarking that they had had some pretty straight slugging.
On the back seats are a number of what are called five-cent-ante men;
and as they drop in small coin, he says,--
"Come, boys, ye have got to straddle that."
He brings the hat to the parson, and empties a large collection on the
table.
"But what can I do with these colored things?"
"Why, pard, them's chips; every one redeemable at the bar in gold."
Sometimes the minute-man has a harder time. A scholarly man who now
holds a high position in New England was a short time since in a
mountain town where he preached in the morning to a few people in an
empty saloon, and announced that there would be service in the same
place in the evening. But he reckoned without his host. By evening it
was a saloon again in full blast. Nothing daunted, he began outside.
The men lighted a tar-barrel, and began to raffle off a mule. Just
then a noted bravo of the camps came down; and quick as a flash his
shooting-irons were out, and with a voice like a lion he said,--
"Boys, I drop the first one that interferes with this service."
Thus under guard from unexpected quarters, the preacher spoke to a
number of men who had been former church-members in the far East.
Often these minute-men must build their own houses, and live in such a
rough society that wife and children must stay behind for some years.
One minute-man built a little hut the roof of which was shingled with
oyster-cans. His room was so small that he could pour out his coffee
at the table, and without getting up turn his flapjacks on the stove.
A travelling missionary visiting him, asked him where he slept. He
opened a little trap-door in the ceiling; and as the good woman peered
in she said,--
"Why, you can't stand up in that place!"
"Bless your soul, madam," he exclaimed, "a home missionary doesn't
sleep standing up."
Strapping a bundle of books on his shoulders, this minute-man starts
out on a mule-trail. If he meets the train, he must step off and
climb back. He reaches the distant camp, and finds the boys by the
dozen gambling in an immense saloon. He steps up to the bar and
requests the liberty of singing a few hymns. The man answers
surlily,--
"Ye ken if ye like, but the boys won't stand it."
The next minute a rich baritone begins, "What a friend we have in
Jesus," and twenty heads are lifted. He then says,--
"Boys, take a hand; here are some books." And in less than ten minutes
he has a male choir of many voices. One says, "Pard, sing number so
and so;" and another, "Sing number so and so." By this time the
saloon-keeper is growling; but it is of no use; the minister has the
boys, and starts his work.
In some camps a very different reception awaits him, as, for instance,
the following: At his appearance a wild-looking Buffalo-Bill type of
man greeted him with an oath and a pistol levelled at him.
"Don't yer know thar's no luck in camp with a preacher? We are going
to kill ye."
"Don't you know," said the minute-man, "a minister can draw a bead as
quick as any man?" The boys gave a loud laugh, for they love grit, and
the rough slunk away. But a harder trial followed.
"Glad to see ye, pard; but ye'll have to set 'em up 'fore ye
commence--rule of the camp, ye know." But before our man could frame
an answer, the hardest drinker in the crowd said,--
"Boys, he is the fust minister as has had the sand to come up here,
and I'll stand treat for him."
It is a great pleasure to add that the man who did this is to-day a
Christian.
One man is found on our grand round, living with a wife and a large
family in a church. The church building had been too cold to worship
in, and so they gave it to him for a parsonage. The man had his study
in the belfry, and had to tack a carpet up to keep his papers from
blowing into the lake. This man's life was in constant jeopardy, and
he always carried two large revolvers. He had been the cause of
breaking up the stockade dens of the town, and ruffians were hired to
kill him. He seemed to wear a charmed life--but then, he was over six
feet high, and weighed more than two hundred pounds. Some of the facts
that this man could narrate are unreportable.
The lives lost on our frontiers to-day through sin in all its forms
are legion, and no man realizes as well as the home missionary what it
costs to build a new country; on the other hand, no man has such an
opportunity to see the growth of the kingdom.
There died in Beloit, recently, the Rev. Jeremiah Porter, a man who
had been a home missionary. His field was at Fort Brady before
Chicago had its name. His church was largely composed of soldiers; and
when the men were ordered to Fort Dearborn, he went with them, and
organized what is now known as the First Presbyterian Church of
Chicago. This minute-man lived to see Chicago one million two hundred
thousand strong.
We should have lost the whole Pacific slope but for our minute-man,
the glorious and heroic Whitman, who not only carried his wagon over
the Rockies, but came back through stern winter and past hostile
savages, and by hard reasoning with Webster and others secured that
vast possession for us. As a nation we owe a debt we can never repay
to the soldiers of the cross at the front, who have endured (and
endure to-day) hardships of every kind. They are cut off from the
society which they love; often they live in dugouts, sometimes in
rooms over a saloon; going weeks without fresh meat, sometimes
suffering from hunger, and for a long time without a cent in the
house. Yet who ever heard them complain? Their great grief is that
fields lie near to them white for the harvest, while, with hands
already full, they can only pray the Lord of the harvest to send forth
more laborers.
Often there is but one man preaching in a county which is larger than
Massachusetts. He is cut off from libraries, ministers' meetings, and
to a large extent from the sympathies of more fortunate brethren, and
is often unable to send his children to college. These men still stand
their ground until they die, ofttimes unknown, but leaving foundations
for others to build on.
One place visited by a general missionary was so full of reckless men
that the station-agent always carried a revolver from his house to the
railway station. A vile variety show, carried on by abandoned women,
was kept open day and night. Sunday was the noisiest day of all. Yet
in this place a church was formed; and many men and women, having
found a leader, were ready to take a stand for the right.
I am not writing of the past; for all the conditions that I have
spoken of exist in hundreds, yes, thousands, of places all over the
land. One need not go to the far West to find them; they exist in
every State of the Union, only varying in their types of sin.
Visiting a home missionary in a mining region within two hours' ride
of the capital, in a State not four hundred miles from the Atlantic, I
found the man in one of the most desolate towns I ever saw. The most
prosperous families were earning on an average five dollars a week,
store pay. All were in debt. When the missionary announced his
intention of going there, he was warned that it was not safe; but that
did not alter his plans.
The first service was held in a schoolhouse, the door panels of which
were out and not a pane of glass unbroken. A roaring torrent had to be
passed on an unsteady plank bridge, over which the women and children
crawled on hands and knees. It was dark when they came. The preacher
could see the gleam of the men's eyes from their grimy faces as the
lanterns flickered in the draughts. He began to preach. Soon white
streaks were on the men's cheeks, as tears from eyes unused to weeping
rolled down those black faces. At the close a church was organized, a
reading-room was added, and many a boy was saved from the saloon by
it. Yet, strange to say, although the owners (church members too) had
cleared a million out of those mines, the money to build the needed
church and parsonage had to be sent from the extreme East.
Hundreds of miles eastward I have found men living, sixty and seventy
in number, in a long hut, their food cooked in a great pot, out of
which they dipped their meals with a tin dipper. No less than
seventy-five thousand Slovaks live in this one State, and their only
spiritual counsel comes from a few Bible-readers. Ought we not then,
as Christians, to help those already there, and give of our plenty to
send the men needed to carry the light to thousands of places that as
yet sit in the darkness and the shadow?
HOW THE HOME MISSIONARY BEGINS WORK IN THE NEW COMMUNITY.
_First_, pastoral visiting is absolutely necessary to success. The
feelings of newcomers are tender after breaking the home ties and
getting to the new home, and a visit from the pastor is sure to bring
satisfactory results. Sickness and death offer him opportunities for
doing much good, especially among the poor, and they are always the
most numerous.
Some very pathetic cases come under every missionary's observation.
Once a man called at the parsonage and asked for the elder, saying
that a man had been killed some miles away in the woods, and the
family wanted the missionary to preach the funeral sermon. The next
morning a ragged boy came to pilot the minister. The way led through
virgin forests and black-ash swamps. A light snow covered the ground
and made travelling difficult, as much of the way was blocked by
fallen trees. After two hours' walking the house was reached; and here
was the widow with her large family, most of them in borrowed clothes,
the supervisor, a few rough men, and a county coffin.
The minister hardly knew what to say; but remembering that that
morning a large box had been sent containing a number of useful
articles, he made God's providence his theme. A few days after, the
box was taken to the widow's home. When they reached the shanty they
found two little bunks inside. Her only stove was an oven taken from
an old-fashioned cook-stove. The oven stood on a dry-goods box.
The missionary said, "Why, my poor woman, you will freeze with this
wretched fire."
"No," she said; "it ain't much for cooking and washing, but it's a
_good_ little heater."
A few white beans and small potatoes were all her store, with winter
coming on apace. When she saw the good things for eating and wearing
that had been brought to her, she sobbed out her thanks.
In the busy life of a missionary the event was soon forgotten, until
one day a woman said, "Elder, do you recollect that 'ar Mrs. Sisco?"
"Yes."
"She is down with a fever, and so are her children."
At this news the minister started with the doctor to see her. As they
neared the place he noticed some red streaks gleaming in the woods,
and asked what they were.
"Oh," said the doctor, "that is from the widow's house. She had to
move into a stable of the deserted lumber camp."
The chinks had fallen out from the logs, and hence the gleam of fire.
The house was a study in shadows--the floor sticky with mud brought in
with the snow; the _débris_ of a dozen meals on the table; a lamp,
without chimney or bottom, stuck into an old tomato-can, gave its
flickering light, and revealed the poor woman, with nothing to shield
her from the storm but a few paper flour-sacks tacked back of the bed.
Two or three chairs, the children in the other bed, the baby in a
little soapbox on rockers, were all the wretched hovel contained.
Medicine was left her, and the minister's watch for her to time it. He
exchanged his watch for a clock the next day. By great persuasion the
proper authorities were made to put her in the poorhouse, and she was
lost to sight; but there was a bright ending in her case.
About a year after, a rosy-faced woman called at the parsonage. The
pastor said, "Come in and have some dinner."
"I got some one waiting," she said.
"Why, who is that?"
"My new man."
"What, you married again?"
"Yes; and we are just going after the rest of the traps up at the
shanty, and I called to see whether you would give me the little clock
for a keepsake?"
"Oh, yes."
Away she went as happy as a lark. Less than two years from the time
she was left a widow, a rich old uncle found in her his long-lost
niece, and the woman became heiress to thousands of dollars.
Sometimes dreadful scenes are witnessed at funerals where strong drink
has suddenly finished the career of father or mother. At the funeral
of a little child smothered by a drunken father, the mother was too
sick to be up at the funeral, the father too drunk to realize what was
taking place, and twice the service was stopped by drunken men. At
another funeral a dog-fight began under the coffin. The missionary
kicked the dogs out, and resumed as well as he could.
At another wretched home the woman was found dying, the husband drunk,
no food, mercury ten degrees below zero, and the little children
nearly perishing with cold. The drunken man pulled the bed from under
his dying wife while he went to sleep. His awakening was terrible, and
the house crowded at the funeral with morbid hearers.
In one town visited, a county town at that, the roughs had buried a
man alive, leaving his head above ground, and then preached a mock
funeral sermon, remarking as they left him, "How natural he looks!"
As the nearest minister is miles away, the missionary has to travel
many miles in all weathers to the dying and dead. Visiting the sick,
and sitting up with those with dangerous diseases, soon cause the
worst of men not only to respect but to love the missionary; and no
man has the moulding of a community so much in his hands as the
courageous and faithful servant of Christ. The first missionary on the
field leaves his stamp indelibly fixed on the new village. Towns left
without the gospel for years are the hardest of all places in which
to get a footing. Some towns have been without service of any kind for
years, and some of the young men and women have never seen a minister.
There are townships to-day, even in New York State, without a church;
and, strange as it may seem, there are more churchless communities in
Illinois than in any other State in the Union. Until two years ago
Black Rock, with a population of five thousand, had no church or
Sunday-school. Meanwhile such is the condition of the Home Missionary
Society's treasury that they often cannot take the students who offer
themselves, and the churchless places increase.
All kinds of people crowd to the front,--those who are stranded, those
who are trying to hide from justice, men speculating. Gambling dens
are open day and night, Sundays of course included, the men running
them being relieved as regularly as guards in the army.
In purely agricultural districts a different type is met with. Many
are so poor that the men have to go to the lumber woods part of the
year. The women thus left often become despondent, and a very large
per cent in the insane asylum comes from this class.
One family lived so far from town that when the husband died they were
obliged to make his coffin, and utilized two flour-barrels for the
purpose.
So amid all sorts and conditions of men, and under a variety of
circumstances, the minute-man lives, works, and dies, too often
forgotten and unsung, but remembered in the Book; and when God shall
make up his jewels, some of the brightest gems will be found among the
pioneers who carried the ark into the wilderness in advance of the
roads, breaking through the forest guided by the surveyor's blaze on
the trees.
There are hundreds of people who pierce into the heart of the country
by going up the rivers before a path has been made. In one home found
there, the minute-man had the bed in a big room down-stairs, while
the man, with his wife and nine children, went up steps like a
stable-ladder, and slept on "shakedowns," on a floor supported with
four rafters which threatened to come down. But the minute-man, too
tired to care, slept the sleep of the just. Often not so fortunate as
then, he finds a large family and but one room. Once he missed his
way, and had to crawl into two empty barrels with the ends knocked
out. Drawing them as close together as he could, to prevent draughts,
he had a short sleep, and awoke at four A.M. to find that a house and
bed were but twenty rods farther.
In a new village, for the first visit all kinds of plans are made to
draw the people out. Here is one: The minute-man calls at the school,
and asks leave to draw on the blackboard. Teacher and scholars are
delighted. After entertaining them for a while, he says, "Children,
tell your parents that the man who chalk-talked to you will preach
here at eight o'clock." And the youngsters, expecting another such
good time as they have just enjoyed, come out in force, bringing both
parents with them. The village is but two years old. At first the
people had the drinking-water brought five miles in barrels on the
railroad, and for washing melted the snow. Then they took maple sap,
and at last birch sap; but, "Law," said a woman, "it was dreadful
ironin'!"
[Illustration: A TYPICAL LOG HOUSE.
_Page 46._]
Here was a genuine pioneer: his house of logs, hinges wood, latch
ditto, locks none; a black bear, three squirrels, a turtle-dove, two
dogs, and a coon made up his earthly possessions. He was tired of the
place.
"Laws, Elder! when I fust come ye could kill a deer close by, and
ketch a string of trout off the doorsteps; but everything's sp'iled.
Men beginning to wear b'iled shirts, and I can't stand it. I shall
clear as soon as I can git out. Don't want to buy that b'ar, do ye?"
In this little town a grand minute-man laid down his life. He was so
anxious to get the church paid for, that he would not buy an
overcoat. Through the hard winter he often fought a temperature forty
degrees below zero; but at last a severe cold ended in his death. His
good wife sold her wedding-gown to buy an overcoat, but all too late;
and a bride of a twelvemonth went out a widow with an orphan in her
arms.
Yet the children of God are said to add to their already large store
four hundred million dollars yearly, and some think of building a
ten-million-dollar temple to honor God--while temples of the Holy
Ghost are too often left to fall, through utter neglect, because we
withhold the little that would save them. We shall never conquer the
heathen world for Christ until we have learned the way to save
America. Save America, and we can save the world.
IV.
THE IMMIGRANT ON THE FRONTIER.
Whatever may be the effect of immigrants in cities, the immigrant on
the frontier has sent the country ahead a quarter of a century. In the
first place, the pioneer immigrants are in the prime of life. They
generally bring enough money to make a start. They need houses, tools,
horses, and all the things needful to start. They seldom fail. Used to
privation at home, they make very hardy settlers. In some States they
comprise seventy per cent of the voters; and the getting of a piece of
land they can call their own makes good citizens of them sooner than
any other way. You can't make a dangerous kind of a man of him who can
call a quarter section his own.
In order to show how the pioneer settler from Europe prospers, let us
begin with him at the wharf. There floats the leviathan that has a
whole villageful on board,--over twelve hundred. They are on deck; and
a motley crowd they appear, for they are from all lands. Here is a
girl dressed in the picturesque costume of Western Europe, and here a
man with a great peak to his hat, an enormous long coat, his beard
half way down his breast, a china pipe as big as a small teacup in his
mouth, his wife like a bundle of meal tied in the middle, with immense
earrings, and an old colored handkerchief over her head. Behind them a
half-dozen little ones with towheads of hair, looking as shaggy as
Yorkshire terriers, blue-eyed and healthy. They are carrying copper
coffee-pots and kettles; and away they march, eight hundred of them
and more, up Broadway.
Here and there a man steps into a bakery, and comes out with a yard of
bread, and breaks it up into hunks; and the little children grind it
down without butter, with teeth that are clean from lack of meat,
with all the gusto of Sunday-school children with angel-cake at a
picnic. They are soon locked in the cars, and night comes on. Go
inside and you will see the good mother slicing up bolognas or a
Westphalia ham, and handing around slices of black bread. After supper
reading of the Bible and prayers; and then the little ones are put
into sack-like nightgowns, and put up in the top bunks, where they
lie, watching their elders playing cards, until they fall asleep.