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Transcriber’s note:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
BOYS OF THE OLD SEA BED
Tales of Nature and Adventure
by
CHARLES ALLEN McCONNELL
Publishing House of the
Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene
Kansas City, Missouri
1913
Copyright, 1913
Publishing House of the
Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene
DEDICATION
TO THE MEMORY OF MY BROTHER ROBERT, ONE OF THE “BOYS OF THE OLD SEA
BED,” WHO, THOUGH PASSING OUT INTO THE GREAT BEYOND WHILE YET YOUNG,
WROTE HIS NAME HIGH UP AMONG THOSE TO WHOM THE WORLD ACCORDS FAME, THIS
LITTLE VOLUME OF BOYHOOD TALES IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED.
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER. PAGE
I. _In the Bed of an Ancient Sea_ 9
II. _Catching the Fawn_ 16
III. _The Great Blue Heron_ 23
IV. _The Forest Fire_ 29
V. _The First Deer Hunt_ 36
VI. _The Indian War Dance_ 42
VII. _The Floating Bog_ 55
VIII. _The Wayside Tavern_ 63
IX. _Adventure on Lake Cheteck_ 69
X. _The Paint Mine_ 79
XI. _Trapping Game Birds_ 91
XII. _The Moundbuilders_ 103
XIII. _Cooking in Camp_ 114
XIV. _Winter in the Lumber Woods_ 128
XV. _Over the Rapids_ 140
XVI. _The Gift of the Flood_ 151
XVII. _The Tragedy of the Mounds_ 160
XVIII. _College Days_ 169
FOREWORD
These tales are at last put upon paper, after having served the demands
of a generation of little folk--now grown tall--for stories of “when
papa was a boy.” All the tales are founded upon facts, and many are
incidents and experiences reproduced as faithfully as memory paints the
pictures.
The red men are gone; the great forest is no more; railroads and cities
and farms occupy the bottom of the “Old Sea Bed.” But the same courage
and hardihood and clean living which marked the pioneers of near a half
century ago is still the hope of America.
CHARLES ALLEN MCCONNELL.
_Kansas City, Mo._, October, 1913.
CHAPTER I
IN THE BED OF AN ANCIENT SEA
Men of science who have made a study of the earth’s surface, say that
Lake Erie, from which flows Niagara river northward into Lake Ontario,
will, in a certain, or uncertain, number of years, go dry, and what is
now a wide though shallow sheet of water become a plain, through which
may meander a slowly-flowing river. The reason for this prediction is
that Niagara Falls, which have cut their way back from Lewiston through
a gorge some seven miles, and are still eating their way through the
limestone and the softer underlying shale at the rate of more than two
feet a year, will finally accomplish their journey, and the great lake
be reached and drained.
A similar event seems really to have occurred in the past history of
the earth near the geographical center of the state of Wisconsin.
Draw a line through the center of the map of this state, from north
to south, and then another from east to west, at a little more than
one-third of the way up from the southern boundary, and at the
intersection you will have the location of the lower end of what
appears to have been an ancient lake, or inland sea.
The eastern boundary, evidently, was a range of hills some forty
miles to the east, along whose sides, fifty years ago, were easily
recognized traces of successive diminishing shore lines, in rows of
water-worn pebbles and shells.
The southern boundary is marked by sandstone bluffs, which bear the
fantastic carving of waves. Rising nearly perpendicular from the sands
like the front of some gigantic ramparts of a fortress, an hundred or
more feet, the upper portions are fashioned into turrets, bastions, and
domes, until at a distance it is difficult to believe that one is not
looking upon some mighty work of man.
Here and there, many miles apart, huge granite rocks rear their heads
hundreds of feet above the plain--islands of the old sea.
Of course caves abound in these water-worn bluffs, and these were
found, in the early days of settlement, to be the homes and hiding
places of bears, wolves, panthers, and the even more dreaded
“Indian-devil,” or northern lynx. Not infrequently they were utilized
for temporary human habitation. Indeed, one of these very caves became
the last hiding place of Black Hawk, the famous Indian chief, as he
sought escape from the white man after the failure of the war he had
waged, like his predecessor, Tecumseh, in hope of uniting the various
tribes against the crowding, appropriating paleface.
Near the present city of Kilbourn, at what is known as the Delles,
the Wisconsin river breaks through the rocky barrier and pours its
foaming flood down a narrow gorge that is only exceeded in size, and
not at all in wild beauty and grandeur, by the gorge and rapids below
Niagara. The falls have worn their way through, but evidently, here was
the Niagara of the ancient sea.
The shallower part of the old sea was the eastern portion, where in
width of fifty miles or more, in the time of which I write, there
stretched a level waste of sand. It was to this floor of the old sea
that people from the eastern states flocked by thousands, at the time
of the “hop boom,” when it was discovered that this vine could be
grown and would bear fairly good crops upon these sands. The ground
was easily worked, and while the hop plant required two years to come
into bearing, the profit from the dried blossoms was enormous, and the
settlers saw great fortunes ahead. Money was borrowed, possessions in
many cases mortgaged, fine houses erected, drying kilns built, hop
roots planted, and the slender tamarack poles upon which the vines
were to climb to the ripening sunlight, were set into the ground. The
country was settled. The first immigrants harvested one crop at the
bonanza price. Then rumors came of an enormous crop thrown upon the
market from the fields of Washington and Oregon, new lands of the
Pacific coast. The second season found the market overstocked, and
prices tumbled from sixty cents to eight and ten cents per pound,
which was less than would pay the expense of picking. Hundreds of the
settlers never harvested their first crop. For years afterward one
could travel miles across the sand and see nothing but deserted houses
with abandoned farms growing up to stunted pines.
Among those who had lost in the hop venture, was the family of John
Allen, in which were two boys, Robert and Ed, lads of twelve and ten
years. The Allens, coming of the rugged Scotch-Irish stock, had no
thought of returning to their old home “back east” defeated, but pushed
further westward into the wilderness. Coming to the river in the time
of low water, they easily crossed the broad bed of the “Ouis-kon-sin,”
or, as the modern spelling has it, the “Wisconsin” river, and pushed on
past the sandy plains west of the river over into the western half of
the old lake bed. It was among the beautiful hardwood trees that lined
the banks of the golden-hued Ne-ce-dah, or Yellow river, that they
halted and said, “This shall be home.”
To the city-bred boys the land was one of perpetual wonder, and their
sturdy bodies and enquiring minds were actively employed. Of course
there was much work to do, fencing and clearing willow shrubs from
the land, making hay for the winter use of their stock, but Mr. Allen
was wise enough to give the boys a large portion of time for their
“education,” as he called their excursions into the forest and along
the river.
Coming home from one of these trips, the boys were seen to be in a
state of excitement, and almost before they were near enough to be
understood they were shouting, “Neighbors, neighbors! Just around the
big bend.” It was a happy discovery for the Allens, as the new-found
neighbors proved to be a family who had come, several years before,
from Ohio, and whose young son, Dauphin, was about the age of the Allen
boys. The name of the family was Thompson, the wife, Ruth, being the
only daughter of “Old John Brown,” whose soul “goes marching on.”
During the years the Allens were neighbors to this family, they came to
learn much of the life and character of that strange man who was hated
as no other man by the slaveholders of his time, and, probably, was
as little understood by those of the north who apologized for him. To
this humble home of their only sister, in the wilderness, there came,
as occasional guests, one and another of the sons who remained of the
man who threw away his life at Harper’s Ferry, that a people might be
aroused to a knowledge of the sin of human slavery. Ruth, they said,
was the womanly image of her father. She had an abundance of red hair
like his, had his features, and more, was like him in spirit. With all
the ardor of youthful hero-worship the Allen boys bestowed homage upon
John Brown’s daughter, Ruth Thompson. If she was like her father, he
had been patient in trial, sweet of spirit in affliction, tender in
love for the unfortunate, and utterly void of any desire of retaliation
for injuries received. The hair of the Allen boys is silvering, and
Ruth has long ago passed to her rest, yet they do not forget an
incident which reveals the Christ-like spirit of the daughter of “Old
John Brown”--and perhaps of the father.
It was upon the visit of John Brown, Jr., the son who had charge of the
Canadian end of the “underground railway” over which so many of the
slaves of the South had found their way to freedom, that Mr. Thompson
and “Uncle Sam,” a younger brother, both of whom were in the attack
upon the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, and had lost other brothers in that
raid, were recalling the time when John, Jr., had been taken by the
“bushwhackers,” tied to the tail of a horse and compelled to run at
great speed for several miles, or be dragged to death. John, Jr., was a
heavy man, and the fearful experience brought on a heart trouble from
which he suffered all the rest of his life. The men, as they talked
over those days of sorrow and trial, would occasionally utter some
stout words against their persecutors, but quickly Ruth would break in,
in her gentle voice--“Boys, boys! Speak evil of none. ‘Vengeance is
mine, saith the Lord.’ It may be those poor men thought they were doing
right.”
Never did the Allen boys hear one unkind word from this daughter
against the government, the individuals, or the section that had
imposed upon her father an ignominious death.
Dauphin Thompson and the Allen boys became great friends and
inseparable companions, and in the “education” of the latter the
grandson of “Old John Brown” not only joined, but was able to initiate
them into many of the mysteries of wood and stream. The Allen boys had
new breech-loading shotguns, but Dauphin was the proud possessor of
the carbine which his father had carried from Osawatomie to Harper’s
Ferry, and which had been fitted for small-shot cartridges.
To the north, from which the Yellow river flowed, lay the vast,
unbroken forests of pine; to the west stretched many miles of swamp and
low-lying prairie. In the summer these prairies were covered with grass
often so high as to completely hide the tallest man walking through.
Game abounded. Deer were so unafraid that frequently the boys would
find them quietly feeding among the cattle when they went at night to
bring home the milch cows. Bears, panthers, and wild cats came at night
to call, and left their “cards” in great tracks on the sand along the
river front of the new home.
Here, in the bottom of the ancient sea, these boys began lessons which
made of two of them stalwart, honored men, and which one of them had
the good fortune to supplement, at a later day, in college.