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THE CABIN ON THE PRAIRIE
by
DR. C. H. PEARSON
Author of "Scenes in the West," Etc.
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration: CAPTURE OF THE FAWN. Page 20]
Boston:
Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by
Lee And Shepard,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court
of the District of Massachusetts.
TO
MY SISTER,
WHOSE SPIRIT HAS JUST GONE FROM PRAIRIE-LIFE
TO THE HILLS OF PARADISE,
I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK.
C. H. PEARSON.
A FRONTIER PROPHET.
INTRODUCTORY.
"If you stay here long, you will become so Westernized that you will
lose all love for New England. That's my experience." So said a brawny
pioneer, a man of large mind, and generous heart, and a sledge-hammer
fist that never struck a coward's blow; but when swung in defence of
the right was like "the jaw-bone" of Samson to the Philistines. He had
emigrated from Maine twenty years before, and was one of the first
settlers I met on the prairie near the scene of my story. Was his
prediction fulfilled? Ah, how like sweetest music sounded the bells of
Salem (city of peace) the first Sunday of my return to the Old Bay
State! Besides, the frontiersman misrepresented himself. For, seated
by his ample clay-stick-and-stone fireplace, how his eye kindled, and
tones mellowed, as he treated us to reminiscences of his early days!
And what a grip he gave the hand of a freshly-arrived Yankee!
Then there were those east who said, "You will soon tire of the West."
They, also, were mistaken. An invalid, with shadowy form and trembling
limbs, when I left New England, I awakened to a new life in Minnesota.
"Take a gun on your shoulders, kill and eat the wild game of the
prairies," said my medical friends. I anticipated vicissitude and
deprivation in following such counsel; but these toughened my weak
frame, and added zest to frontier labors and pleasures; for I was soon
able to do a man's share of the former, and in threading forest and
prairie I was brought into delightful nearness to nature in its
beauty, freshness, and magnitude, and in visiting the lodge of the
Indian and the cabins of the settlers I met with plenty of adventure.
In writing this work, I have, with peculiar interest, lived over the
scenes and incidents of my varied frontier experience; have travelled
once more amid the waving grasses and beckoning flowers; heard again
the bark of the wolf, and the voices of birds; felt on my brow the
kiss of the health-giving breeze; worshipped anew in the log-cabin
sanctuary. Yes, East and West are both dear to me. One fittingly
supplements the other. Each holds the ashes of kindred. By a singular
providence, since this tale was completed, a much-loved relative, one
of the gentlest and most self-sacrificing whose presence ever
glorified the earth, has found a resting-place in the bosom of the
very prairie I had in mind while penning these pages. Sent west by
physicians to save her life, she reached that spot in time to die,
thus attaching my heart to that soil by another and sorrowful tie.
That East and West may be bound together by love, as well as by
national and commercial relations, and that this story may tend in its
humble way to so happy a result, is the earnest wish of
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Pioneer Family.--A Spirited Chase. 9
II. Shooting Double.--A Frontier Doctor. 23
III. Where Can He Be?--A Heart Revelation. 35
IV. A Brush With Indians.--A Black Heart. 47
V. Brother Smith and Quarter Stakes. 65
VI. Mrs. Jones's Story.--The Gray Wolf. 79
VII. A Sabbath on the Prairie. 93
VIII. Tom's Victory. 105
IX. A Surprise. 116
X. "No Whiskey at This Raising!" 126
XI. Old Mrs. Skinflint in Trouble.--Lost in the Woods. 142
XII. Fire and Flood. 158
XIII. The Indian Lodge. 170
XIV. The War-Song. 187
XV. The Massacre at Spirit Lake. 194
XVI. A Beleaguered Cabin. 210
XVII. The Mysterious Fire. 226
XVIII. The Boy in the Tree. 237
XIX. Bub's Broadside. 250
XX. Long Hair. 260
XXI. "Pull the String, Bub." 272
XXII. Tom and the Money-Lender. 285
XXIII. An Enchanting Scene.--The Parting. 295
THE CABIN ON THE PRAIRIE.
CHAPTER I.
THE PIONEER FAMILY.--A SPIRITED CHASE.
"There, the last hill is dug, and I'm glad!" and Tom Jones leaned on
his hoe, lost in thought.
He was a stout lad of sixteen, with frowzy brown hair, crowned by a
brimless straw hat, and his pants looked as if they had been turned
inside out and outside in, upside down and downside up, and darned and
patched and re-darned and patched again, until time, and labor, and
cloth enough, such as it was, had been used to fabricate a number of
pairs of pants. As for boots,--for his lower extremities were not
wholly destitute of protection,--they might have come down to him as
an heir-loom from a pauper of a preceding generation. But what
mattered it to him that his clothes were threadbare, many-hued, and
grotesque? or that his boots let the deep, rich soil in at sides and
toes? Was he not a "squatter sovereign," or the son of one, free in
his habits as the Indian that roamed the prairies of his frontier
home? He had not heard of "the latest fashion," and paid no attention
to the cut of his garments, although, it must be confessed, he
sometimes wished them a trifle more spruce and comfortable. His home,
as I have hinted, was on the prairie. Nevertheless, the family domain
was an unpretending one. Less than an acre, fenced in the rudest
manner, enclosed the "farm and farm buildings," the latter consisting
of a small log house and log pigsty, the cabin, at the time our sketch
opens, being, it is evident, at least two seasons old--a fact which
serves to show the more plainly the poverty and thriftlessness of the
inmates; for they have had time, certainly, to cultivate quite a tract
of the easily-tilled land, had they enterprise and industry. But they
belonged to a class not famous for these virtues--the restless,
ever-moving class that pioneer the way towards the setting sun. But
perhaps we are leaving the boy propped too long on his hoe. Let us
take a more critical look at him. "Fine feathers don't make fine
birds," observes the old proverb. Forgetting the dress, then, please
study his face. A clear, deep-blue eye, delicately-arched eyebrows,
regular features, mouth and chin indicating decision and native
refinement, and a well-developed forehead. Ah, here may be a diamond
in the rough! Who knows?
The squatter's son looked about him with a dissatisfied air. "I do
wish," he soliloquized, "that I could see something of the world, and
do something for myself. Here we've been changing around from one
place to another, doing nothing but raise a few potatoes and a little
corn, living in a miserable cabin, where there are no schools, and
scarcely any neighbors. It's too bad to spend all our days so. I
believe we were made for something better; and, as the minister told
us Sunday, we ought to try and be somebody, and not float along as the
stick on the stream. I'm sure it isn't, and never was, to mother's
mind; and, as to father--" And here he stopped and pondered, as if
trying to solve a mystery, and in a style that would have been
pronounced philosophic, had he been a college professor--scratched his
head. Then, with his ragged sleeve, he wiped the sweat from his brow,
leaving a streak of black that made that part of his face present
quite a different appearance from what it did, reader, when you and I
noticed it a moment ago. And going to the cabin, he returned with a
rickety basket, and, commencing at the lower end of the field, began
picking up the potatoes that had been left drying in the sun. A
goodly crop had the little patch produced; for the vegetable decays
and fertilizing rains and snows of centuries had covered the prairie
with a dressing with which art could not compete, and it was more
difficult not to get a harvest from the seed sown than to get one. The
rows of hills were covered with the bountiful returns brought up to
the light of day by Tom's well-used hoe. It was not, however, the
size, quality, or number of the potatoes that most interested Tom just
then. The fact that they were all out of the ground; that the corn was
cut and stacked, and the pumpkins ready to be housed; that the fall
work could be finished by that afternoon's sun-setting,--stirred him
strangely; for he had of late begun to question the future, to learn
what it had in store for him. He had come to realize, in a degree,
that that future would be very much what he chose to make it. And
serious dissatisfaction with the past and the present filled his heart
with disquiet.
Tom's memory had been active for a few days. How like yesterday it
seemed, when he was a little child, and his father, getting together
money enough, bought a horse and wagon, and, putting the family in the
vehicle, started out prospecting for a new home farther from the
advancing waves of civilization! How many similar expeditions had
they taken since, and how painfully had their experiences illustrated
the saying, "A rolling stone gathers no moss"! But roll Mr. Jones
would. Tom knew this too well. It was, indeed, viewed in one aspect,
an easy way to get on, this going in one's own conveyance from place
to place of Uncle Sam's unsettled lands; this living off the country,
gypsying in the woods and on the prairies; this two thirds savage and
one third civilized mode of putting a growing family through the
world; and if you were to see Mr. Jones seated in the emigrant wagon,
reins in hand and pipe in mouth, or with shouldered rifle on the track
of a deer, you would say that such a life was eminently agreeable to
him. Every man is made for something; and you would say that he was
cut out for a wandering frontier loafer, who gets his subsistence by
doing the least possible work in the easiest possible manner, and
hunting and fishing. A horse and wagon, or extemporized log cabin, for
a shelter; tools enough for the simplest tilling of the soil, and
furniture for the rudest housekeeping and clothing; the making over,
by the industrious wife, of clothes bought "some time back,"--such was
the way the Joneses lived. Putting up a small log house by the bank of
a river for the sake of the fish, and near a forest for the game, with
"a strip of clean prairie" for "garden sarce,"--there they might
remain for a year or two; then you would be quite sure to find the
immigrant friend looking discontented, and expressing a wish to "sell
his claim."
"It's growing so crowded with folks coming into the country, I can't
go three miles without stumbling against a shanty or a house; and cart
tracks are getting so plenty, I can't stand it. I must pull up stakes,
and go farther on to find a place to breathe in."
And, perchance, realizing a trifle for his claim and improvements,
Dobbin is hitched anew into the crazy old wagon. The broken crockery,
and leaky black tea-pot, and ancient cooking-stove--the pipe of the
latter running up through the wagon-top--are once more aboard, wife
and children packed in, and the uneasy frontiersman is pushing out
again towards solitude.
Tom had been reviewing this bit of family history more in detail, and
much more vividly than we have now done. The result was a feeling of
disgust, and a resolution to break away from such a life, and an
endeavor for something higher.
But what had brought the squatter's son to such a conclusion? The
condition of the family had for some time been unsatisfactory to Tom.
Though brought up in this roving, improvident way, his better nature
often revolted against it; not, however, so strongly and decisively
as now. Still, desires, and even longings, for something better had
flitted through his mind, only to make him moody and irritable.
Doubtless these aspirations were due, in no small measure, to his
mother--a woman much superior to her condition, but who, clinging to
her husband with a pure and changeless love, accepted the privations
of her lot without a murmur. Taken by her marriage from the comforts
and advantages of a good home, she had followed his fortunes "for
better or for worse," having much more of the latter, in a worldly
point of view, than the former. Not that Mr. Jones was a hard or a
dissipated man; but his roving habits, and the deprivations and
poverty they endured, had made her days sad and toil-worn.
Tom, in his tastes, was like his mother. But a new event had recently
occurred. A godly minister, in search of the lost sheep of the
heavenly fold, had made his way into the region, and, the Sabbath
previous to the opening of our sketch, had, in earnest, eloquent
words, preached the gospel to the settlers. The log cabin, in which
the services were held, was only a mile and a half distant, and Tom
and his father, with the neighbors generally, attended. How
differently the gospel message affects different persons! Some are
softened, others are hardened, by it. Some are stirred up to certain
duties, while, under the same sermon, others are incited to an
entirely different train of thought and course of action. The effect
on Tom of the sermons of the preacher was to incite his feelings to
revolt against his lot in life, and arouse him to the necessity of a
purpose in living. He did not look forward so much to the world to
come as to the "to come" of this world. The present in its relations
to life here--this was the point with him; and he revolved the
subject, viewing it in every possible light, until a decision was
reached.
"This preacher," said he, "is from a region of schools and privileges.
Why can I not seek such advantages, and be somebody, and accomplish
something? Why can I not go to the city to school this winter?" What
an idea for him! It almost took his breath to think of it. And, then,
how should he get there? Where was the money coming from to support
him while studying?
"I must work and earn it," he replied. "I can do anything honest; I
can, at least, work for my board."
Tom's mind had suffered from a famine of knowledge. He could read
passably well, write a little, was good at reckoning, and the little
he knew excited a craving for more. Public addresses had always moved
him deeply, and the living truths of the gospel, as presented by the
living preacher, had set the mental machinery in motion, until the
decision to go from home in search of an education, had been wrought
out; and it was this rising purpose that kept him so patiently at his
day's task of finishing up the fall work, that he might commence his
new career.
"I will finish getting in the crops by dark," said he, as he filled
the basket, "and then there will be nothing to keep me at home;" and
he was about raising the basket to his shoulder, when he was startled
from his reveries by a loud cry of,--
"Tom, Tom! come quick! I've caught a fawn, and he'll get away!" It was
twelve-year-old Charley from the hazel bushes that bordered the
potato-patch near the woods. Tom ran to assist his brother, but could
scarcely believe his eyes when he saw the little fellow had caught the
fawn by the tail, and was struggling to hold the agile creature,
forgetting how dexterously the deer can use his heels. Scarcely had
the elder brother mounted the fence, when, with a smart kick, the fawn
sent Charley over on his back, and leaped into the enclosure. At this
instant a bevy of flaxen-haired urchins, hatless, bonnetless,--Tom's
brothers and sisters,--came whooping from the cabin, and joined the
chase. In a moment Tom had forgotten all his gloomy thoughts and high
resolves, and was as eager as any of them, as they tried to secure the
nimble prize. A lively time it was, too; fear and speed against
numbers, noise, and strategy. A good force were the pursuers; the
"olive plants" of the Joneses grew very naturally in regular
gradations, like the steps of a flight of stairs. Tom, Eliza, Charley,
Bob, Sarah, Bill, and Bub, the four-year-old, were all active with
hands, legs, and lungs, while the mother stood in the doorway,
surveying the scene, with baby in her arms.
"Fix up the fence where the deer jumped in!" cried Tom to Charley; and
the latter hastened to repair the breach, for the brush had been
broken down at that point.
From corner to corner and side to side bounded the deer, slipping
through the fingers of one and another of the youngsters; but they
gave him no rest.
"Stop him, 'Lize! Hold him, Bob! Head him off. Say! Get out of the
way, Bub! There! why didn't you catch him, Charley? Mother, can't you
put down baby, and help us? He'll get away! There! he's going over the
fence! No, he isn't!" Amid such vociferations the children rushed on,
pell-mell, till out of breath. Luckily, the brush fence was so thick
and high, being made of dead trees piled upon each other, that the
animal could find no point to push through or scale, especially while
kept in "running order" by his pursuers. Although thus imprisoned, he
was baffling their efforts, refusing to be captured, when Tom said to
the children,--
"We can't catch him this way. But if you will all do as I tell you, I
guess we can." The fawn was standing in the further corner of the
field, as if waiting to see what they would do next. And Tom, ranging
his force in line, himself at the head, gave the word to advance
towards the deer.
"Steady, steady," said he, as they neared the animal. They had
succeeded in approaching within a few yards, and Tom, with outspread
arms and eagle eye, advanced slowly, watching to seize him if he
should attempt to spring away, when little Bub, who had been sent into
the cabin by Tom, having gone around unobserved on the outside of the
garden behind the deer, suddenly ran a sharp stick through the brush
into the creature's back, saying,--
"I make 'im wun!"
Frantically jumped the deer at this--a _denouement_ so unexpected to
his assailants, that the line became broken, the little soldiers were
tumbled together, with Tom on top of them, and the deer stood almost
at the same instant at the other end of the patch, the whole being
accomplished with marvellous quickness.
"Get off my head!" screamed Sarah from under the heap.
"O, dear, you'll break my arm!" cried Eliza.
"What did you fall on me for?" angrily demanded Bob of Charley, as he
spit the dirt from his mouth. "You did it on purpose--you know you
did!"
"No, I didn't!"
"Yes, you did!"
"I should a thought Tom might a held the deer, an' not fell on us so
heavy," sobbed Sarah, rubbing her eyes with her begrimed gown.
But while they fretted, the fawn had been critically examining the
fence to find egress, seeing which the children dried their tears, and
made for him again; and at length the graceful creature, bewildered by
the din, and foiled by numbers, was forced to surrender himself after
another vigorous scramble, in which the basket of potatoes was
overturned, and the corn scattered in delightful disorder, and was
borne by Tom in triumph to the cabin, accompanied by the excited
group.
"We've got him, marm--we've got him!" they shouted in chorus as they
followed their leader into the house.
"And where will you keep him to-night?" she inquired.
"He tan seep with me!" promptly answered Bub, at which there was much
merriment.
"No," replied Tom, shaking his head at the mischief-maker, "you will
stick a stick into his back, and 'make 'im wun' again."
After much deliberation it was decided that the fawn be tied to a
bed-post, while a pen was built for his accommodation near the cabin.
This was soon accomplished, and the fawn placed in it.
When Tom returned to his work, the day was far gone. He gazed around
with regret as he saw that not only was it now too late to finish
getting in the crops, but that the chase of the deer, in which he had
engaged with so much ardor, had made him no little extra labor. What a
task it would be to find all the potatoes, scattered and trampled into
the rich earth as they were! and the bundles of corn had been broken
from their bindings, and must be gathered together and refastened. To
find and carry in the potatoes consumed the time till supper; and
then, at his mother's call, he went in depressed and unhappy, and
after bringing in the wood for the breakfast fire, and feeding the
pigs, he went up the rude ladder to his straw bed on the floor.
It was scanty fare that the Jones family had. You could see that by
their looks. It is true that they were healthy and strong; but they
lacked the fair, plump development that plenty of food of a suitable
variety gives to childhood and youth. Of vegetables they were not
destitute; potatoes, corn, beans, and pumpkins they had in abundance
since fall set in, if not before. Bread, milk, and meat were usually
scarce with them. For the latter they depended principally on the
father's rifle; but as he was apt to take wide and eccentric tramps
over the prairies, there would be long intervals when but little game
from his gun made savory the family cooking.
Mr. Jones had been away for some days now, and his patient wife had
really suffered for food. Vegetables of the same kind, served up
pretty much in the same way, with little to give relish to them, a big
crying infant the while tugging at her breast, and the house-work to
do, it is not strange that while the children, fresh from romping in
the bracing prairie air, were favored with a ravenous appetite, she
had little. Tom understood all this; for, constituted like her, he,
too, felt the deprivations of the table, although in a less degree,
and much did he worry about her meagre diet.
"Ah," he thought, as he lay down for the night, "when I am away and
earning, won't I send the good things to mother!"