"Nobody ever believed your story, nor did anybody ever believe mine. Mine
is this--that when we were at Sporting Hill a corporal of mine came in
and declared that he and his men had scouted into within full sight of
Harrisburg. I knew that the man told the truth, but nobody else would
believe that any human being dared to do such a thing, or could do it.
And now you fully prove that it was done."
There came to Goshorn's three very interesting men with whom I became
intimate. One was Robert Hunt, of St. Louis. He was of a very good
Virginia family, had been at Princeton College, ran away in his sixteenth
year, took to the plains as a hunter, and for twenty-three years had
ranged the Wild West from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. At the end
of the time an uncle in the Fur Company had helped him on, and he was now
rich. He was one of the most genial, gay, and festive, reckless yet
always gentlemanly men I ever knew. He expressed great astonishment, as
he learned gradually to know me, at finding we were so congenial, and
that I had so much "real Injun" in me. His eyes were first opened to
this great fact by a very singular incident, of which I can never think
without pleasure.
Hunt, with two men who had been cavalry captains all through the war, and
his friend Ross, who had long been an Indian trader, and I, were all
riding up Elk Valley to look at lands. We paused at a place where the
road sloped sideways and was wet with rain. As I was going to remount, I
asked a German who stood by to hold my horse's head, and sprang into the
saddle. Just at this critical instant--it all passed in a second--as the
German had not heard me, my horse, feeling that he must fall over on his
left side from my weight, threw himself _completely over backward_. As
quick as thought I jumped up on his back, put my foot just between the
saddle and his tail, and took a tremendous flying leap so far that I
cleared the horse. I only muddied the palms of my gloves, on which I
fell.
The elder cavalry captain said, "When I saw that horse go over backwards,
I closed my eyes and held my breath, for I expected the next second to
see you killed." But Robert Hunt exclaimed, "Good as an Injun, by God!"
And when I some time after made fun of it, he shook his head gravely and
reprovingly, as George Ward did over the gunpowder, and said, "It was a
_magnificent_ thing!"
That very afternoon Hunt distinguished himself in a manner which was
quite as becoming an aborigine. I was acting as guide, and knowing that
there was a ford across a tributary of the Elk, sought and thought I had
found it. But I was mistaken, and what was horrible, we found ourselves
in a deep quicksand. On such occasions horses become, as it were,
insane, trying to throw the riders and then jump on them for support. By
good luck we got out of it soon, but there was an _awful_ five minutes of
kicking, plunging, splashing, and "ground and lofty" swearing. I got
across dry by drawing my legs up before me on the saddle, _a la_ tailor,
but the others were badly wet. But no sooner had we emerged from the
stream than Robert Hunt, bursting into a tremendous "_Ho_! _ho_!" of deep
laughter, declared that he had shown more presence of mind during the
emergency than any of us; for, brandishing his whisky flask, he declared
that while his horse was in the flurry it occurred to him that the best
thing he could do was to lighten the load, and he had therefore, with
incredible presence of mind, drunk up all the whisky!
However, he afterwards confessed to me that the true reason was that,
believing death was at hand, and thinking it a pity to die thirsty, he
had drained the bottle, as did the old Indian woman just as she went over
the Falls of Niagara. Anyhow, the incorrigible _vaurien_ had really
emptied his flask while in the "quick."
Though I say it, I believe that Hunt and I were a pretty well matched
couple, and many a wild prank and Indian-like joke did we play together.
More than once he expressed great astonishment that I, a man grown up in
cities and to literary pursuits, should be so much at home where he found
me, or so congenial. He had been at Princeton, and, _ex pede Herculem_,
had a point whence to judge me, but it failed. {309} His friend Ross was
a quiet, sensible New Englander, who reminded me of Artemus Ward, or
Charles Browne. He abounded in quaint anecdotes of Indian experiences.
As did also a Mr. Wadsworth, who had passed half his life in the Far West
as a surveyor among the Chippeways. He had written a large manuscript of
their legends, of which Schoolcraft made great use in his _Algic_ book. I
believe that much of Longfellow's _Hiawatha_ owed its origin thus
indirectly to Mr. Wadsworth. In after years I wrote out many of his
tales, as told to me, in articles in _Temple Bar_.
The country all about Charleston was primitively wild and picturesque,
rocky, hilly, and leading to solitary life and dreams of _sylvani_ and
forest fairies. There were fountained hills, and dreamy darkling woods,
and old Indian graves, and a dancing stream, across which lay a petrified
tree, and everywhere a little travelled land. I explored it with
Goshorn, riding far and wide into remote mountain recesses, to get the
signatures in attestation of men who could rarely write, but on the other
hand could "shoot their mark" with a rifle to perfection, and who would
assuredly have placed such signature on me had I not been a holy
messenger of _Ile_, and an angel of coming moneyed times.
One day we stopped at a farm-house in a wild, lonely place. There was
only an old woman there--one of the stern, resolute, hard-muscled
frontier women, the daughters of mothers who had fought "Injuns"--and a
calf. And thereby hung a tale, which the three men with me fully
authenticated.
The whole country thereabouts had been for four years so worried,
harried, raided, raked, plundered, and foraged by Federals and
Confederates--one day the former, the next the latter; blue and grey, or
sky and sea--that the old lady had nothing left to live on. Hens, cows,
horses, corn, all had gone save one calf, the Benjamin and idol of her
heart.
One night she heard a piteous baaing, and, seizing a broom, rushed to the
now henless hen-house, in which she kept the calf, to find in it a full-
grown panther attacking her pet. By this time the old lady had grown
desperate, and seizing the broom, she proceeded to "lam" the wild beast
with the handle, and with all her heart; and the fiend of ferocity,
appalled at her attack, fled. I saw the calf with the marks of the
panther's claws, not yet quite healed; I saw the broom; and, lastly, I
saw the old woman, the mother in Ishmael; whose face was a perfect
guarantee of the truth of the story. One of us suggested that the old
lady should have the calf's hide tanned and wear it as a trophy, like an
Indian, which would have been a strange reversal of Shakespeare's
application of it, or to
"Hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs."
Then there came the great spring freshet in Elk River, which rose
unusually high, fifty feet above its summer level. It had come to within
an inch or two of my floor, and yet I went to bed and to sleep. By a
miracle it rose no more, for I had a distinct conviction it would not,
which greatly amazed everybody. But many were drowned all about us. The
next day a man who professed bone-setting and doctoring, albeit not
diplomaed, asked me to go with him and act as interpreter to a German
patient who had a broken thigh. While felling a tree far away in the
forest, it thundered down on him, and kept him down for two or three days
till he was discovered. To get to him we went in a small canoe, and
paddled ourselves with shingles or wooden tiles, used to cover roofs. On
the way I saw a man on a roof fiddling; only a bit of the roof was above
water. He was waiting for deliverance. Many and strange indeed were all
the scenes and incidents of that inundation, and marvellous the legends
which were told of other freshets in the days of yore.
I never could learn to play cards. Destiny forbade it, and always
stepped in promptly to stop all such proceedings. One night Sandford and
friends sat down to teach me poker, when _bang_, _bang_, went a revolver
outside, and a bullet buried itself in the door close by me. A riotous,
evil-minded darkey, who attended to my washing, had got into a fight, and
was forthwith conveyed to the Bull-pen, or military prison. I was afraid
lest I might lose my shirts, and so "visited him" next day and found him
in irons, but reading a newspaper at his ease. From him I learned the
address of "the coloured lady" who had my underclothing.
The Bull-pen was a picturesque place--a large log enclosure, full of
strange inmates, such as wild guerillas in moccasins, grey-back
Confederates and blue-coat Federals guilty of many a murder, arson, and
much horse-stealing, desolate deserters, often deserving pity--the
_debris_ of a four years' war, the crumbs of the great loaf fallen to the
dirt.
Warm weather came on, and I sent to Philadelphia for a summer suit of
clothes. It came, and it was of a _light grey colour_. At that time
Oxford "dittos," or a suit _pareil partout_, were unknown in West
Virginia. I was dressed from head to foot in Confederate grey. Such a
daring defiance of public opinion, coupled with my mysterious stealing
into the rebel country, made me an object of awe and suspicion--a kind of
Sir Grey Steal!
There was at that time in Charleston a German artillery regiment which
really held the town--that is to say, the height which commanded it. I
had become acquainted with its officers. All at once they gave me the
cold shoulder and cut me. My friend Sandford was very intimate with
them. One evening he asked their Colonel why they scorned me. The
Colonel replied--
"Pecause he's a tamned repel. Aferypody knows it."
Sandford at once explained that I was even known at Washington as a good
Union man, and had, moreover, translated Heine, adding other details.
"Gott verdammich--_heiss_!" cried the Colonel in amazement. "Is dot der
Karl Leland vot dranslate de _Reisebilder_? Herr je! I hafe got dat
very pook here on mein table! Look at it. Bei Gott! here's his name!
_Dot_ is der crate Leland vot edit de _Continental Magazine_! Dot moost
pe a fery deep man. Und I dink _he_ vas a repel!"
The next morning early the Colonel sent his ambulance or army waggon to
my hotel with a request that I would come and take breakfast with him. It
was a bit of Heidelberg life over again. We punished Rheinwein and lager-
beer in quantities. There were old German students among the officers,
and I was received like a brother.
At last Sandford and I determined to return to the East. There was in
the hotel a coloured waiter named Harrison. He had been a slave, but "a
gentleman's gentleman," was rather dignified, and allowed no ordinary
white man to joke with him. On the evening before my departure I said to
him--
"Well, Harrison, I hope that you haven't quite so bad an opinion of me as
the other people here seem to have."
He manifested at once a really violent emotion. Dashing something to the
ground, he cried--
"Mr. Leland, you _never_ did anything contrary to a gentleman. I always
maintained it. Now please tell me the truth. Is it true that you're a
great friend of Jeff Davis?"
"Damn Jeff Davis!" I replied.
"And you ain't a major in the Confederate service?"
"I'm a clear-down Abolitionist, and was born one."
"And you ain't had no goings on with the rebels up the river to bring
back the Confederacy here?"
"Devil a dealing."
And therewith I explained how it was that I went unharmed up into the
rebels' country, and great was the joy of Harrison, who, as I found, had
taken my part valiantly against those who suspected me.
There was a droll comedy the next day on board the steamboat on which I
departed. A certain Mr. H., who had been a rebel and recanted at the
eleventh hour and become a Federal official, requested everybody on board
not to notice me. Sandford learned it all, and chuckled over it. But
the captain and mate and crew were all still rebels at heart. Great was
my amazement at being privately informed by the steward that the captain
requested as a favour that I would sit by him at dinner and share a
bottle of wine. I did so, and while I remained on board was treated as
an honoured guest.
And now I would here distinctly declare that, apart from my political
principles, from which I never swerved, I always found the rebels--that
is, Southern and Western men with whom I had had intimate
dealings--without one exception _personally_ the most congenial and
agreeable people whom I had ever met. There was not to be found among
them what in England is known as a prig. They were natural and
gentlemanly, even down to the poorest and most uneducated.
One day Sam Fox came to me and asked me to use my influence with the
Cannelton Company to get him employment at their works.
"Sam," I replied, "I can't do it. It is only three weeks now, when you
were employed at another place, that you tried to stuff the overseer into
the furnace, and if the men had not prevented, you would have burned him
up alive."
"Yes," replied Sam, "but he had called me a -- son --- of ---."
"Very good," I answered; "and if he had called me _that_, I should have
done the same. But I don't think, if I _had_ done it, I should ever have
expected to be employed again on another furnace. You see, Samuel, my
son, that these Northern men have very queer notions--_very_."
Sam was quite convinced.
At Cincinnati a trifling but droll incident occurred. I do not set
myself up for a judge of wines, but I have naturally a delicate sense of
smell or _flair_, though not the extraordinary degree in which my brother
possessed it, who never drank wine at all. He was the first person who
ever, in printed articles or in lectures, insisted that South New Jersey
was suitable for wine-growing. At the hotel Sandford asked me if I could
tell any wine by the taste. I replied No, but I would try; so they gave
me a glass of some kind, and I said that honestly I could only declare
that I should say it was Portugal common country wine, but I must be
wrong. Then Sandford showed the bottle, and the label declared it to be
grown in Ohio. The next day he came to me and said, "I believe that
after all you know a great deal about wine. I told the landlord what you
said, and he laughed, arid said, 'I had not the American wine which you
called for, and so I gave you a cheap but unusual Portuguese wine.'" This
wine is neither white nor red, and tastes like sherry and Burgundy mixed.
At Cincinnati, Sandford proposed that we should return by way of Detroit
and Niagara. I objected to the expense, but he, who knew every route and
rate by heart, explained to me that, owing to the competition in railway
rates, it would only cost me six shillings ($1.50) more, _plus_ $2.50
(ten shillings) from New York to Philadelphia. So we departed. In
Detroit I called on my cousin, Benjamin Stimson (the S. of "Two Years
before the Mast"), and found him a prominent citizen. So, skirting along
southern Canada, we got to Niagara, and thence to Albany and down the
Hudson to New York, and so on to Philadelphia.
It seems to me now that at this time all trace of my former life and self
had vanished. I seemed to be only prompt to the saddle, canoe-paddle,
revolver, steamboat, and railroad. My wife said that after this and
other periods of Western travel I was always for three weeks as wild as
an Indian, and so I most truly and unaffectedly was. I did not _act_ in
a foolish or disorderly manner at all, but Tennessee and Elk River were
in me. Robert Hunt and Sam Fox and many more had expressed their
amazement at the amount of extremely familiar and congenial nature which
they had found in me, and they were quite right. Sam and Goshorn
declared that I was the only Northern man whom they had ever known who
ever learned to paddle a dug-out _correctly_; but as I was obliged to do
this sometimes for fifteen hours a day _nolens volens_, it is not
remarkable that I became an expert.
As regards the real unaffected feeling of wildness born to savage nature,
life, and association, it is absolutely as different from all civilised
feeling whatever as bird from fish; and it very rarely happens that an
educated man ever knows what it is. What there is of it in me which
Indians recognise is, I believe, entirely due to hereditary endowment.
"Zum Wald, zum Wald, steht mir mein Sinn.
So einzig, ach! so einzig hin.
Dort lebt man freundlich, lebt man froh,
Und nirgends, nirgends lebt man so."
It does not come from reading or culture--it comes of itself by nature,
or not at all; nor has it over-much to do with thought. Only in
something like superstition can it find expression, but that must be
childlike and sweet and sincere, and without the giggling with which such
subjects are invariably received by ladies in society.
I went with my wife and her mother and sister to pass some time at
Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania, which we did very pleasantly at a country
inn. It is a very interesting town, where a peculiar German dialect is
generally spoken. There was a very respectable wealthy middle-aged lady,
a Pennsylvanian by birth, who avoided meeting us at table because she
could not speak English. And when I was introduced to her, I made
matters worse by speaking to her naturally in broad South German,
whereupon she informed me that she spoke _Hoch_-Deutsch! But I made
myself popular among the natives with my German, and our landlord was
immensely proud of me. I wasn't "one of dem city fellers dat shames
demselfs of de Dutch," not I. "Vy, I dells you vot, mein Gott! he's
_proud_ of it!"
I ended the summer at beautiful Lenox, in Massachusetts, in the charming
country immortalised in "Elsie Venner"; of which work, and my letter on
it to Dr. Holmes, and my conversation with him thereanent, I might fill a
chapter. But "let us not talk about them but pass on." I returned to
Philadelphia and to my father's house, where I remained one year.
I had for a long time, at intervals, been at work on a book to be
entitled the "Origin of American Popular Phrases." I had scissored from
newspapers, collected from negro minstrels and Western rustics, and
innumerable New England friends, as well as books and old songs and comic
almanacs and the like, a vast amount of valuable material. This work,
which had cost me altogether a full year's labour, had been accepted by a
New York publisher, and was in the printer's hands. I never awaited
anything with such painful anxiety as I did this publication, for I had
never been in such straits nor needed money so much, and it seemed as if
the more earnestly I sought for employment the more it evaded me. And
then almost as soon as my manuscript was in the printer's hands his
office was burned, and the work perished, for I had not kept a copy.
It was a great loss, but from the instant when I heard of it to this day
I never had five minutes' trouble over it, and more probably not one. I
had done my _very best_ to make a good book and some money, and could do
no more. When I was a very small boy I was deeply impressed with the
story in the "Arabian Nights" of the prisoner who knew that he was going
to be set free because a rat had run away with his dinner. So I, at the
age of seven, announced to my father that I believed that whenever a man
had bad luck, good was sure to follow, which opinion he did not accept.
And to this day I hold it, because, reckoning up the chances of life, it
is true for most people. At any rate, I derived some comfort from the
fact that the accident was reported in all the newspapers all over the
Union.
About the 1st of July, 1866, we left my father's house to go to Cape May,
where we remained for two months. In September we went to a very good
boarding-house in Philadelphia, kept by Mrs. Sandgren. She possessed and
showed me Tegner's original manuscript of "Anna and Axel." I confess
that I never cared over-much for Tegner, and that I infinitely prefer the
original Icelandic Saga of Frithiof to his sago-gruel imitation of strong
soup.