By Trotwood.
Every citizen of this great republic should travel over his own country.
He will be amazed at its greatness, and his prejudices and local
conceits, if he have any breadth at all, will grow fewer the further he
goes, and learns that the world cares nothing for the petty environments
and embroilments of his own bailiwick.
The most attractive country in the Northwest is the great prairies of
the Dakotas. I thought I had some idea of their immensity, of their
greatness, until for one solid day and night I raced across them by fast
express, and saw by day the pillar of their cloud of smokestacks—for it
was harvest time—on each side, as far as the boundless horizon, and each
cloud a thresher from whose funnel poured the wheat of the nation.
There is something in mere land to me—any kind of land—soil, you may call
it—dirt—I care not what. But I love it just as I hate brick walls and
city pavements. There is something about it, from the rocks and hills to
the level, plowed valleys, that is clean and good. It means independence
and honesty and clean living. It may not mean shrewdness and polish and
that smart education which comes from living by one’s wits in a great
walled-in home of wits, but it means independence and the rest that made
Shakespeare.
When I saw the Dakotas, I wondered how the white man had stayed away
from them as long as he had. Perhaps it were better for the staying,
starving, striving quality of our forefathers that this grand garden
spot of the Northwest lay hid between the mountains and the sea, instead
of stretching up and down the coast. It were better for their children
that fathers should toil in sand and flint. It puts flint into the
children—steel—gameness—the spirit to do.
One generation of striving poverty makes flint; two, steel; three, well,
you have heard of Andrew Jackson, of Lincoln, perhaps. Study the poverty
of their pedigrees, for it takes poverty to make a pedigree.
The first immigrants to our shores came solely for gold, it is said. What
kind of a republic would we have to-day if they had landed on the Pacific
slope of gold instead of the Atlantic slope of rocks?
And yet, America is run over with people to-day who think that gold is
everything. They think it so hard that the land is filled with trusts
and steals and the things which breed greed and guilt. They should
learn—they must learn—that, as the making of money is the lowest of all
human talents—the talent of self first, which is the lowest instinct of
all life—so is its talent for getting the lowest, meanest of all talents.
“All my life,” says Edison, “I have been trying to keep away from mean
people who make money.”
Fargo I found to be a beautiful and prosperous city, and the soil of the
country around it, as it had been for two hundred miles, truly a glory
and an inspiration. If this land had the climate of the South it could
feed the world. As it is, Nature, who adjusts herself to environments,
acts quickly here, and I was surprised at the stories of its
productiveness in the short season it had. Nay, mine own eye beheld it,
for never had I seen such wheat, barley and small grain, such cabbage,
beets, turnips, vegetables of all kinds.
There was a greatness and vastness everywhere. As far as the eye could
see, even beyond the rim of the horizon, it was vast—vast. And that
always affects me peculiarly. After I have seen as far as the eye will
reach, I become homesick. I have a sacred, sad longing to see and go
farther and uplift the veil.
I rejoiced in the fact that there were no trees, no high hills, nothing
to break the great canvas of vastness—a bivouac of eternity dotted with
millions of camps of wheat shocks, fringed with the splendor of a vast,
pure sky, and framed in the purpling splendor of a horizon of blue and
gold. The little ten acre lots of dwarf trees the Government has forced
the settlers to plant, I liked them not. They were warts, merely, on the
brow of Eternity. The great, rich, boundless, beautiful prairies were
there as God had Intended them to be—Nature’s handiwork, with splendid
harmony in its whole.
No picture ever painted has equalled it—for Nature never makes a mistake
in her pictures. She never sticks a bunch of dwarf trees where the great,
grand prairies should roll away.
There is but little difference between the Dakota prairies and the ocean.
The difference is that only between the imagination and the fact. And
looking over them, standing in them, seeing the ceaseless waves rippling
across the seas of wheat or the white caps come spinning from the
uplifted heads of them, again and again I caught myself repeating Byron’s
lines:
“Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form
Glasses itself in tempests, in all time,
Calm or convulsed, in breeze or gale or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark heaving;—boundless, endless and sublime—
The image of Eternity—the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread fathomless, alone.”
Lisbon is a beautiful little town, and one comes upon it so suddenly it
is a surprise. For hours nothing but the grand, great prairies, billowed
in wheat waves, smoke-plumed with thresher stacks. Then down you go into
a beautiful valley—the valley of the Cheyenne, and nestling on its banks
clean, church-spired, sits this up-to-date town.
I landed in good luck there, for I had anticipated the pleasure of
meeting old friends and relatives—a cousin whom my mother had reared and
who to me had always been a sister—but I had the additional good luck
to fall into the hands of Mr. Geo. W. Ferguson, the county treasurer,
and the owner of Raymond S. by Montevideo, the handsomest young trotting
sire it has been my good fortune to see in any State. And I found the
blooded stock interest alive and growing in all that section, and surely
no place under the skies has a better license to rear them. In the hands
of Mr. Ferguson and Mr. W. B. Stone, the county game-warden, I realized
one of the dreams of my life—a prairie chicken shoot. If you have never
indulged in one, go a thousand miles to Dakota—and every year will find
you wanting to go again. It was a bright, crisp morning in September, and
Mr. Stone’s beautiful setter bitch was good and fit. I had been out early
to see some threshers at work in the wheat, and a little shower coming up
I had gotten wet. This in the South would have meant two hours’ dampness,
and a cold, but imagine my surprise, in a short while, to find the ground
dry and myself with it, very dry! In the rarefied air of this great
country I do not believe one can get wet unless he is foolish enough to
drink water.
Mr. Ferguson met me later with his surrey and two spanking red-sorrel
trotting mares, as well bred as Raymond S, and away we went across the
prairie after the chickens. The ride itself was pleasure enough—forever
going through that beautiful black loam, as tempting to the eye of the
man who loves the soil as a cobwebbed bottle or a fat capon to the
stomach of a priest. For it was bespangled with red berries, ripe heads
of flax, golden stubbles of wheat and oats and barley, red grasses finer
than ever bluegrass grows to be and richer than all tame blades.
My first covey is pictured forever in my mind. The bitch came to a
staunch stand near a low, marshy place, where the grass was blue green
and studded with fall flowers. On all sides were shocks of wheat, and
away in the distance the interminable smokestacks of busy threshers. I
walked up and took it all in—I stamped the picture forever on my mind. I
wanted it there that I might always see it—the very clouds, the distant
horizon, the golden stubble-blades, the very silence that hangs like a
benediction over the land. And all over it and above everything that
beautiful Llewellyn bitch, frozen in living marble before me.
“Is it possible,” I thought, “that nothing is between these birds and
me but the air?” No pines of Alabama and Mississippi, no thickets on
the creeks of Louisiana, no wooded lots and big hills of Tennessee, no
barb-wire fence with hideous signs stuck up warning me that some hog
lived there on posted land? All my life I had shot quail under those
conditions. Now—now—nothing but me and the pure, clear air and the
boundless, rolling prairies and that dog of marble waiting for the word,
to flush a dozen prairie hens squatting in the stubble ready to rise
with a cyclone’s rush on wings of thunder. I stood frozen—like the dog.
I could not move. My heart beat like a race-horse in the back stretch,
making me take long breaths and swallow hard as I came to the hunter’s
attention. Then!—
Never arose before mortal man so thrilling a sight. They sucked me
forward like the gust of a passing express, like the roar of a wind
storm, like the burst of sun from a cloud, thunder-lined. The earth of
stubble quivered to their wings of thunder and the air pulsed like a
man-of-war when the big guns bellow to port.
But I did not forget to fire—oh, no! Man is a killing animal by instinct,
and a hog by nature, and neither poetry nor romance nor the wild glory
of the great fields can stop him from killing when his killing blood is
up and his stomach is at stake. Yes, I fired—once—twice—and I shot to
kill. Two beautiful ones I picked with lightning glance from the splendid
covey—two glorious ones that fairly split the air in the wild joy of
escape, only suddenly to—
Well, “the rest is silence,” as Shakespeare said, when Hamlet died, and
it is the same death that will come to you and me—the end will be just as
sudden, whether we fall in the mid-day of life or fall to the slow fever
of age. They fell but ten feet apart and I walked up and looked down on
them—the proud, beautiful creatures now limp and lifeless.
I took them up and fondled them—I wanted to kiss them, they were so quiet
now and warm, still splendid in death.
Mr. Stone had killed his brace also, but being more experienced, had shot
them farther off.
“You killed yours too close,” he said, as I stood fondling the limp and
beautiful birds. “You should have waited up to fifty yards or seventy.”
“Yes,” I said, “you see it is my quail hunting instinct. I had my first
lesson in shooting quail in the pine woods of Alabama, and let me tell
you, I laughed, it may be wrong, but it’s dead easy killing those big,
beautiful hens. Honestly, except for their lightning flight I thought I
was shooting at Tennessee guineas.”
Mr. Stone laughed: “You wait and see,” he said.
“Why, if you want to know what real shooting is,” I went on, “you just
get up a covey of piny wood quail, where every mother’s chick of them is
taught from his pipping moment to place a pine tree between him and a
load of shot, and do it in the first twenty feet. You have got to shoot
quick.”
We had walked away across the stubble to where they had gone down,
scattered. Suddenly—
“There they are,” said my companion. As we came on the bitch frozen again.
“Now, you first,” said Mr. Stone, kindly, “it’s a single bird.”
Up went the bird with his thunder of wings. I don’t know how it
happened—I can’t see how it happened to this day. I think I was thinking
of Alabama quail or Tennessee “patterges,” as Old Wash calls them, but
when I fired and the great game cock went on about his business, I got
busy seeing what ailed my gun, and wondering why we always fall down
about the time we think we are mounted on as many legs as a centipede.
Mr. Stone was too polite to refer to my previous remarks, and I watched
the big fellow sail away with more respect for the sport.
A little further on the Llewellyn again stood, and this time it was my
companion’s first shot. And here is where I did a shameless thing—but I
couldn’t help it, to save my life.
Up went the bird, and I saw the old hunter throw up his gun. I
listened for the report, but on sailed the bird, fairly eating
space—on—on—fifty—sixty—seventy yards.
My fingers itched, my arms jerked upward, my gun jumped to my shoulder.
“Great heavens,” I thought, “the bird is gone! His gun won’t fire”—
The report of my gun and the collapse of the bird came just a second
before his.
He looked around astonished. “Pray forgive me,” I said. “I have acted the
hog, but I was sure something was the matter with your gun.”
He laughed: “I was just waiting for it to get a little farther away.”
After that I shot them farther off, and by noon we had eleven beauties,
filling up the front of our surrey, upon which my eye feasted in delight.
We decided we had enough, and towards evening we drove across the
cooling, sweet grasses to a group of pretty little lakes or ponds in the
hollow depression of the land. These we found literally covered with
Spoonbills, Teal, Mallard and Red-heads, and then we had sport royal and
of another kind. They were wary, though, very; and we had to crawl on
our stomach for a quarter of a mile to get to them, Mr. Stone on the far
side, to fire first and send them over me. And when his gun sounded once,
twice, here they came toward me, I lying flat in the grass. I picked
two big ones leading the flock, knowing if I didn’t get the kings I’d
get the knights and pawns behind them. I didn’t get the king, but down
tumbled a Red-head, a Mallard—one—two—three—four! Good heaven! Did I kill
all of them? I saw smoke drifting across my left. Mr. Stone had turned
his old Winchester repeater on them, also, and so I gave him credit for
everything but the redhead, for I shot at him. This was our sport—from
one lake to another, until we had shot enough, and the ride home across
the starlit prairies and under the cool, bracing air of that boundless,
glorious country.
Can you not see how two days of that kind of sport is worth all drunken
yacht trips, and all the heart-breaking, dust-killing automobile rides in
the world? You feel it bodily and spiritually for years, and remember it
with pleasure all your life.
So here’s to the grand Dakotas and their hospitable people and their
splendid birds!
* * * * *
The Philosopher reasons and says it cannot be done. The Doer tries and
does.