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My father's ancestors were the Shaws of
Rothiemurchus, in Scotland, and the ruins of their castle may still be
seen on the island of Loch-an-Eilan, in the northern Highlands. It was
never the picturesque castle of song and story, this home of the
fighting Shaws, but an austere fortress, probably built in Roman times;
and even to-day the crumbling walls which alone are left of it show
traces of the relentless assaults upon them. Of these the last and the
most successful were made in the seventeenth century by the Grants and
Rob Roy; and it was into the hands of the Grants that the Shaw fortress
finally fell, about 1700, after almost a hundred years of ceaseless
warfare. It gives me no pleasure to read the grisly details of their
struggles, but I confess to a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that
my ancestors made a good showing in the defense of what was theirs.
Beyond doubt they were brave fighters and strong men. There were other
sides to their natures, however, which the high lights of history throw
up less appealingly. As an instance, we have in the family chronicles
the blood-stained page of Allen Shaw, the oldest son of the last Lady
Shaw who lived in the fortress. It appears that when the father of this
young man died, about 1560, his mother married again, to the intense
disapproval of her son. For some time after the marriage he made no
open revolt against the new-comer in the domestic circle; but finally,
on the pretext that his dog had been attacked by his stepfather, he
forced a quarrel with the older man and the two fought a duel with
swords, after which the victorious Allen showed a sad lack of chivalry.
He not only killed his stepfather, but he cut off that gentleman's head
and bore it to his mother in her bed-chamber--an action which was
considered, even in that tolerant age, to be carrying filial resentment
too far.
Probably Allen regretted it. Certainly he
paid a high penalty for it, and his clan suffered with him. He was
outlawed and fled, only to be hunted down for months, and finally
captured and executed by one of the Grants, who, in further virtuous
disapproval of Allen's act, seized and held the Shaw stronghold. The
other Shaws of the clan fought long and ably for its recovery, but
though they were helped by their kinsmen, the Mackintoshes, and though
good Scotch blood dyed the gray walls of the fortress for many
generations, the castle never again came into the hands of the Shaws.
It still entails certain obligations for the Grants, however, and one of
these is to give the King of England a snowball whenever he visits
Loch-an-Eilan!
As the years passed the Shaw clan scattered.
Many Shaws are still to be found in the Mackintosh country and
throughout southern Scotland. Others went to England, and it was from
this latter branch that my father sprang. His name was Thomas Shaw, and
he was the younger son of a gentleman--a word which in those days seemed
to define a man who devoted his time largely to gambling and horse-
racing. My grandfather, like his father before him, was true to the
traditions of his time and class. Quite naturally and simply he
squandered all he had, and died abruptly, leaving his wife and two sons
penniless. They were not, however, a helpless band. They, too, had
their traditions, handed down by the fighting Shaws. Peter, the older
son, became a soldier, and died bravely in the Crimean War. My father,
through some outside influence, turned his attention to trade, learning
to stain and emboss wall- paper by hand, and developing this work until
he became the recognized expert in his field. Indeed, he progressed
until he himself checked his rise by inventing a machine that made his
handwork unnecessary. His employer at once claimed and utilized this
invention, to which, by the laws of those days, he was entitled, and
thus the cornerstone on which my father had expected to build a fortune
proved the rock on which his career was wrecked. But that was years
later, in America, and many other things had happened first. For one, he
had temporarily dropped his trade and gone into the flour-and-grain
business; and, for another, he had married my mother. She was the
daughter of a Scotch couple who had come to England and settled in
Alnwick, in Northumberland County. Her father, James Stott, was the
driver of the royal-mail stage between Alnwick and Newcastle, and his
accidental death while he was still a young man left my grandmother and
her eight children almost destitute. She was immediately given a
position in the castle of the Duke of Northumberland, and her sons were
educated in the duke's school, while her daughters were entered in the
school of the duchess.
My thoughts dwell lovingly on this
grandmother, Nicolas Grant Stott, for she was a remarkable woman, with a
dauntless soul and progressive ideas far in advance of her time. She
was one of the first Unitarians in England, and years before any thought
of woman suffrage entered the minds of her country-women she refused to
pay tithes to the support of the Church of England--an action which
precipitated a long-drawn-out conflict between her and the law. In those
days it was customary to assess tithes on every pane of glass in a
window, and a portion of the money thus collected went to the support of
the Church. Year after year my intrepid grandmother refused to pay
these assessments, and year after year she sat pensively upon her
door-step, watching articles of her furniture being sold for money to
pay her tithes. It must have been an impressive picture, and it was one
with which the community became thoroughly familiar, as the determined
old lady never won her fight and never abandoned it. She had at least
the comfort of public sympathy, for she was by far the most popular
woman in the countryside. Her neighbors admired her courage; perhaps
they appreciated still more what she did for them, for she spent all her
leisure in the homes of the very poor, mending their clothing and
teaching them to sew. Also, she left behind her a path of cleanliness
as definite as the line of foam that follows a ship; for it soon became
known among her protegees that Nicolas Stott was as much opposed to dirt
as she was to the payment of tithes.
She kept her children in the schools of the
duke and duchess until they had completed the entire course open to
them. A hundred times, and among many new scenes and strange people, I
have heard my mother describe her own experiences as a pupil. All the
children of the dependents of the castle were expected to leave school
at fourteen years of age. During their course they were not allowed to
study geography, because, in the sage opinion of their elders, knowledge
of foreign lands might make them discontented and inclined to wander.
Neither was composition encouraged--that might lead to the writing of
love-notes! But they were permitted to absorb all the reading and
arithmetic their little brains could hold, while the art of sewing was
not only encouraged, but proficiency in it was stimulated by the award
of prizes. My mother, being a rather precocious young person, graduated
at thirteen and carried off the first prize. The garment she made was a
linen chemise for the duchess, and the little needlewoman had
embroidered on it, with her own hair, the august lady's coat of arms.
The offering must have been appreciated, for my mother's story always
ended with the same words, uttered with the same air of gentle pride,
``And the duchess gave me with her own hands my Bible and my mug of
beer!'' She never saw anything amusing in this association of gifts, and
I always stood behind her when she told the incident, that she might not
see the disrespectful mirth it aroused in me.
My father and mother met in Alnwick, and
were married in February, 1835. Ten years after his marriage father was
forced into bankruptcy by the passage of the corn law, and to meet the
obligations attending his failure he and my mother sold practically
everything they possessed--their home, even their furniture. Their
little sons, who were away at school, were brought home, and the family
expenses were cut down to the barest margin; but all these sacrifices
paid only part of the debts. My mother, finding that her early gift had
a market value, took in sewing. Father went to work on a small salary,
and both my parents saved every penny they could lay aside, with the
desperate determination to pay their remaining debts. It was a long
struggle and a painful one, but they finally won it. Before they had
done so, however, and during their bleakest days, their baby died, and
my mother, like her mother before her, paid the penalty of being outside
the fold of the Church of England. She, too, was a Unitarian, and her
baby, therefore, could not be laid in any consecrated burial-ground in
her neighborhood. She had either to bury it in the Potter's Field, with
criminals, suicides, and paupers, or to take it by stage-coach to
Alnwick, twenty miles away, and leave it in the little Unitarian
churchyard where, after her strenuous life, Nicolas Stott now lay in
peace. She made the dreary journey alone, with the dear burden across
her lap. In 1846, my parents went to London. There they did not linger
long, for the big, indifferent city had nothing to offer them. They
moved to Newcastle-on-Tyne, and here I was born, on the fourteenth day
of February, in 1847. Three boys and two girls had preceded me in the
family circle, and when I was two years old my younger sister came. We
were little better off in Newcastle than in London, and now my father
began to dream the great dream of those days. He would go to America.
Surely, he felt, in that land of infinite promise all would be well with
him and his. He waited for the final payment of his debts and for my
younger sister's birth. Then he bade us good-by and sailed away to make
an American home for us; and in the spring of 1851 my mother followed
him with her six children, starting from Liverpool in a sailing-vessel,
the John Jacob Westervelt. I was then little more than four years old,
and the first vivid memory I have is that of being on shipboard and
having a mighty wave roll over me. I was lying on what seemed to be an
enormous red box under a hatchway, and the water poured from above,
almost drowning me. This was the beginning of a storm which raged for
days, and I still have of it a confused memory, a sort of nightmare, in
which strange horrors figure, and which to this day haunts me at
intervals when I am on the sea. The thing that stands out most strongly
during that period is the white face of my mother, ill in her berth. We
were with five hundred emigrants on the lowest deck of the ship but one,
and as the storm grew wilder an unreasoning terror filled our
fellow-passengers. Too ill to protect her helpless brood, my mother saw
us carried away from her for hours at a time, on the crests of waves of
panic that sometimes approached her and sometimes receded, as they swept
through the black hole in which we found ourselves when the hatches were
nailed down. No madhouse, I am sure, could throw more hideous pictures
on the screen of life than those which met our childish eyes during the
appalling three days of the storm. Our one comfort was the knowledge
that our mother was not afraid. She was desperately ill, but when we
were able to reach her, to cling close to her for a blessed interval,
she was still the sure refuge she had always been.
On the second day the masts went down, and
on the third day the disabled ship, which now had sprung a leak and was
rolling helplessly in the trough of the sea, was rescued by another ship
and towed back to Queenstown, the nearest port. The passengers,
relieved of their anxieties, went from their extreme of fear to an equal
extreme of drunken celebration. They laughed, sang, and danced, but
when we reached the shore many of them returned to the homes they had
left, declaring that they had had enough of the ocean. We, however,
remained on the ship until she was repaired, and then sailed on her
again. We were too poor to return home; indeed, we had no home to which
we could return. We were even too poor to live ashore. But we made some
penny excursions in the little boats that plied back and forth, and to
us children at least the weeks of waiting were not without interest.
Among other places we visited Spike Island, where the convicts were, and
for hours we watched the dreary shuttle of labor swing back and forth as
the convicts carried pails of water from one side of the island, only to
empty them into the sea at the other side. It was merely ``busy work,''
to keep them occupied at hard labor; but even then I must have felt some
dim sense of the irony of it, for I have remembered it vividly all these
years.
Our second voyage on the John Jacob
Westervelt was a very different experience from the first. By day a
glorious sun shone overhead; by night we had the moon and stars, as well
as the racing waves we never wearied of watching. For some reason,
probably because of my intense admiration for them, which I showed with
unmaidenly frankness, I became the special pet of the sailors. They
taught me to sing their songs as they hauled on their ropes, and I
recall, as if I had learned it yesterday, one pleasing ditty:
Haul on the bow-line,
Kitty is my darling,
Haul on the bow-line,
The bow-line--HAUL!
When I sang ``haul'' all the sailors pulled
their hardest, and I had an exhilarating sense of sharing in their
labors. As a return for my service of song the men kept my little apron
full of ship sugar--very black stuff and probably very bad for me; but I
ate an astonishing amount of it during that voyage, and, so far as I
remember, felt no ill effects. The next thing I recall is being
seriously scalded. I was at the foot of a ladder up which a sailor was
carrying a great pot of hot coffee. He slipped, and the boiling liquid
poured down on me. I must have had some bad days after that, for I was
terribly burned, but they are mercifully vague. My next vivid
impression is of seeing land, which we sighted at sunset, and I remember
very distinctly just how it looked. It has never looked the same
since. The western sky was a mass of crimson and gold clouds, which
took on the shapes of strange and beautiful things. To me it seemed
that we were entering heaven. I remember also the doctors coming on
board to examine us, and I can still see a line of big Irishmen standing
very straight and holding out their tongues for inspection. To a little
girl only four years old their huge, open mouths looked appalling.
On landing a grievous disappointment awaited
us; my father did not meet us. He was in New Bedford, Massachusetts,
nursing his grief and preparing to return to England, for he had been
told that the John Jacob Westervelt had been lost at sea with every soul
on board. One of the missionaries who met the ship took us under his
wing and conducted us to a little hotel, where we remained until father
had received his incredible news and rushed to New York. He could
hardly believe that we were really restored to him; and even now,
through the mists of more than half a century, I can still see the
expression in his wet eyes as he picked me up and tossed me into the
air. I can see, too, the toys he brought me--a little saw and a hatchet,
which became the dearest treasures of my childish days. They were
fatidical gifts, that saw and hatchet; in the years ahead of me I was to
use tools as well as my brothers did, as I proved when I helped to build
our frontier home.
We went to New Bedford with father, who had
found work there at his old trade; and here I laid the foundations of my
first childhood friendship, not with another child, but with my
next-door neighbor, a ship-builder. Morning after morning this man
swung me on his big shoulder and took me to his shipyard, where my
hatchet and saw had violent exercise as I imitated the workers around
me. Discovering that my tiny petticoats were in my way, my new friend
had a little boy's suit made for me; and thus emancipated, at this
tender age, I worked unwearyingly at his side all day long and day after
day. No doubt it was due to him that I did not casually saw off a few
of my toes and fingers. Certainly I smashed them often enough with
blows of my dull but active hatchet. I was very, very busy; and I have
always maintained that I began to earn my share of the family's living
at the age of five--for in return for the delights of my society, which
seemed never to pall upon him, my new friend allowed my brothers to
carry home from the shipyard all the wood my mother could use.
We remained in New Bedford less than a year,
for in the spring of 1852 my father made another change, taking his
family to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where we lived until 1859. The years
in Lawrence were interesting and formative ones. At the tender age of
nine and ten I became interested in the Abolition movement. We were
Unitarians, and General Oliver and many of the prominent citizens of
Lawrence belonged to the Unitarian Church. We knew Robert Shaw, who led
the first negro regiment, and Judge Storrow, one of the leading New
England judges of his time, as well as the Cabots and George A. Walton,
who was the author of Walton's Arithmetic and head of the Lawrence
schools. Outbursts of war talk thrilled me, and occasionally I had a
little adventure of my own, as when one day, in visiting our cellar, I
heard a noise in the coal-bin. I investigated and discovered a negro
woman concealed there. I had been reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, as well as
listening to the conversation of my elders, so I was vastly stirred over
the negro question. I raced up-stairs in a condition of awe-struck and
quivering excitement, which my mother promptly suppressed by sending me
to bed. No doubt she questioned my youthful discretion, for she almost
convinced me that I had seen nothing at all--almost, but not quite; and
she wisely kept me close to her for several days, until the escaped
slave my father was hiding was safely out of the house and away.
Discovery of this serious offense might have borne grave results for
him. It was in Lawrence, too, that I received and spent my first
twenty-five cents. I used an entire day in doing this, and the occasion
was one of the most delightful and memorable of my life. It was the
Fourth of July, and I was dressed in white and rode in a procession. My
sister Mary, who also graced the procession, had also been given
twenty-five cents; and during the parade, when, for obvious reasons, we
were unable to break ranks and spend our wealth, the consciousness of it
lay heavily upon us. When we finally began our shopping the first place
we visited was a candy store, and I recall distinctly that we forced the
weary proprietor to take down and show us every jar in the place before
we spent one penny. The first banana I ever ate was purchased that day,
and I hesitated over it a long time. Its cost was five cents, and in
view of that large expenditure, the eating of the fruit, I was afraid,
would be too brief a joy. I bought it, however, and the experience
developed into a tragedy, for, not knowing enough to peel the banana, I
bit through skin and pulp alike, as if I were eating an apple, and then
burst into ears of disappointment. The beautiful conduct of my sister
Mary shines down through the years. She, wise child, had taken no
chances with the unknown; but now, moved by my despair, she bought half
of my banana, and we divided the fruit, the loss, and the lesson. Fate,
moreover, had another turn of the screw for us, for, after Mary had
taken a bite of it, we gave what was left of the banana to a boy who
stood near us and who knew how to eat it; and not even the large amount
of candy in our sticky hands enabled us to regard with calmness the
subsequent happiness of that little boy.
Another experience with fruit in Lawrence
illustrates the ideas of my mother and the character of the training she
gave her children. Our neighbors, the Cabots, were one day giving a
great garden party, and my sister was helping to pick strawberries for
the occasion. When I was going home from school I passed the
berry-patches and stopped to speak to my sister, who at once presented
me with two strawberries. She said Mrs. Cabot had told her to eat all
she wanted, but that she would eat two less than she wanted and give
those two to me. To my mind, the suggestion was generous and proper; in
my life strawberries were rare. I ate one berry, and then, overcome by
an ambition to be generous also, took the other berry home to my mother,
telling her how I had got it. To my chagrin, mother was deeply
shocked. She told me that the transaction was all wrong, and she made
me take back the berry and explain the matter to Mrs. Cabot. By the time
I reached that generous lady the berry was the worse for its journey,
and so was I. I was only nine years old and very sensitive. It was
clear to me that I could hardly live through the humiliation of the
confession, and it was indeed a bitter experience the worst, I think, in
my young life, though Mrs. Cabot was both sympathetic and
understanding. She kissed me, and sent a quart of strawberries to my
mother; but for a long time afterward I could not meet her kind eyes,
for I believed that in her heart she thought me a thief.
My second friendship, and one which had a
strong influence on my after-life, was formed in Lawrence. I was not
more than ten years old when I met this new friend, but the memory of
her in after-years, and the impression she had made on my susceptible
young mind, led me first into the ministry, next into medicine, and
finally into suffrage-work. Living next door to us, on Prospect Hill,
was a beautiful and mysterious woman. All we children knew of her was
that she was a vivid and romantic figure, who seemed to have no friends
and of whom our elders spoke in whispers or not at all. To me she was a
princess in a fairy-tale, for she rode a white horse and wore a blue
velvet riding-habit with a blue velvet hat and a picturesquely drooping
white plume. I soon learned at what hours she went forth to ride, and I
used to hover around our gate for the joy of seeing her mount and gallop
away. I realized that there was something unusual about her house, and I
had an idea that the prince was waiting for her somewhere in the far
distance, and that for the time at least she had escaped the ogre in the
castle she left behind. I was wrong about the prince, but right about
the ogre. It was only when my unhappy lady left her castle that she was
free.
Very soon she noticed me. Possibly she saw
the adoration in my childish eyes. She began to nod and smile at me,
and then to speak to me, but at first I was almost afraid to answer
her. There were stories now among the children that the house was
haunted, and that by night a ghost walked there and in the grounds. I
felt an extraordinary interest in the ghost, and I spent hours peering
through our picket fence, trying to catch a glimpse of it; but I
hesitated to be on terms of neighborly intimacy with one who dwelt with
ghosts.
One day the mysterious lady bent and kissed
me. Then, straightening up, she looked at me queerly and said: ``Go and
tell your mother I did that.'' There was something very compelling in
her manner. I knew at once that I must tell my mother what she had done,
and I ran into our house and did so. While my mother was considering the
problem the situation presented, for she knew the character of the house
next door, a note was handed in to her--a very pathetic little note from
my mysterious lady, asking my mother to let me come and see her. Long
afterward mother showed it to me. It ended with the words: ``She will
see no one but me. No harm shall come to her. Trust me.''
That night my parents talked the matter over
and decided to let me go. Probably they felt that the slave next door
was as much to be pitied as the escaped-negro slaves they so often
harbored in our home. I made my visit, which was the first of many, and
a strange friendship began and developed between the woman of the town
and the little girl she loved. Some of those visits I remember as
vividly as if I had made them yesterday. There was never the slightest
suggestion during any of them of things I should not see or hear, for
while I was with her my hostess became a child again, and we played
together like children. She had wonderful toys for me, and pictures and
books; but the thing I loved best of all and played with for hours was a
little stuffed hen which she told me had been her dearest treasure when
she was a child at home. She had also a stuffed puppy, and she once
mentioned that those two things alone were left of her life as a little
girl. Besides the toys and books and pictures, she gave me ice-cream
and cake, and told me fairy-tales. She had a wonderful understanding of
what a child likes. There were half a dozen women in the house with
her, but I saw none of them nor any of the men who came.
Once, when we had become very good friends
indeed and my early shyness had departed, I found courage to ask her
where the ghost was--the ghost that haunted her house. I can still see
the look in her eyes as they met mine. She told me the ghost lived in
her heart, and that she did not like to talk about it, and that we must
not speak of it again. After that I never mentioned it, but I was more
deeply interested than ever, for a ghost that lived in a heart was a new
kind of ghost to me at that time, though I have met many of them since
then. During all our intercourse my mother never entered the house next
door, nor did my mysterious lady enter our home; but she constantly sent
my mother secret gifts for the poor and the sick of the neighborhood,
and she was always the first to offer help for those who were in
trouble.
Many years afterward mother told me she was
the most generous woman she had ever known, and that she had a rarely
beautiful nature. Our departure for Michigan broke up the friendship,
but I have never forgotten her; and whenever, in my later work as
minister, physician, and suffragist, I have been able to help women of
the class to which she belonged, I have mentally offered that help for
credit in the tragic ledger of her life, in which the clean and the
blotted pages were so strange a contrast.
One more incident of Lawrence I must
describe before I leave that city behind me, as we left it for ever in
1859. While we were still there a number of Lawrence men decided to go
West, and amid great public excitement they departed in a body for
Kansas, where they founded the town of Lawrence in that state. I recall
distinctly the public interest which attended their going, and the
feeling every one seemed to have that they were passing forever out of
the civilized world. Their farewells to their friends were eternal; no
one expected to see them again, and my small brain grew dizzy as I tried
to imagine a place so remote as their destination. It was, I finally
decided, at the uttermost ends of the earth, and it seemed quite
possible that the brave adventurers who reached it might then drop off
into space. Fifty years later I was talking to a California girl who
complained lightly of the monotony of a climate where the sun shone and
the flowers bloomed all the year around. ``But I had a delightful
change last year,'' she added, with animation. ``I went East for the
winter.'' ``To New York?'' I asked. ``No,'' corrected the California
girl, easily, ``to Lawrence, Kansas.'' Nothing, I think, has ever made
me feel quite so old as that remark. That in my life, not yet, to me at
least, a long one, I should see such an arc described seemed actually
oppressive until I realized that, after all, the arc was merely a
rainbow of time showing how gloriously realized were the hopes of the
Lawrence pioneers.
The move to Michigan meant a complete
upheaval in our lives. In Lawrence we had around us the fine flower of
New England civilization. We children went to school; our parents,
though they were in very humble circumstances, were associated with the
leading spirits and the big movements of the day. When we went to
Michigan we went to the wilderness, to the wild pioneer life of those
times, and we were all old enough to keenly feel the change. My father
was one of a number of Englishmen who took up tracts in the northern
forests of Michigan, with the old dream of establishing a colony there.
None of these men had the least practical knowledge of farming. They
were city men or followers of trades which had no connection with farm
life. They went straight into the thick timber-land, instead of going to
the rich and waiting prairies, and they crowned this initial mistake by
cutting down the splendid timber instead of letting it stand. Thus
bird's-eye maple and other beautiful woods were used as fire-wood and in
the construction of rude cabins, and the greatest asset of the pioneers
was ignored.
Father preceded us to the Michigan woods,
and there, with his oldest son, James, took up a claim. They cleared a
space in the wilderness just large enough for a log cabin, and put up
the bare walls of the cabin itself. Then father returned to Lawrence
and his work, leaving James behind. A few months later (this was in
1859), my mother, my two sisters, Eleanor and Mary, my youngest brother,
Henry, eight years of age, and I, then twelve, went to Michigan to work
on and hold down the claim while father, for eighteen months longer,
stayed on in Lawrence, sending us such remittances as he could. His
second and third sons, John and Thomas, remained in the East with him.
Every detail of our journey through the
wilderness is clear in my mind. At that time the railroad terminated at
Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we covered the remaining distance--about one
hundred miles--by wagon, riding through a dense and often trackless
forest. My brother James met us at Grand Rapids with what, in those
days, was called a lumber-wagon, but which had a horrible resemblance to
a vehicle from the health department. My sisters and I gave it one cold
look and turned from it; we were so pained by its appearance that we
refused to ride in it through the town. Instead, we started off on
foot, trying to look as if we had no association with it, and we climbed
into the unwieldy vehicle only when the city streets were far behind
us. Every available inch of space in the wagon was filled with bedding
and provisions. As yet we had no furniture; we were to make that for
ourselves when we reached our cabin; and there was so little room for us
to ride that we children walked by turns, while James, from the
beginning of the journey to its end, seven days later, led our weary
horses.
To my mother, who was never strong, the
whole experience must have been a nightmare of suffering and stoical
endurance. For us children there were compensations. The expedition
took on the character of a high adventure, in which we sometimes had
shelter and sometimes failed to find it, sometimes were fed, but often
went hungry. We forded innumerable streams, the wheels of the heavy
wagon sinking so deeply into the stream-beds that we often had to empty
our load before we could get them out again. Fallen trees lay across
our paths, rivers caused long detours, while again and again we lost our
way or were turned aside by impenetrable forest tangles.
Our first day's journey covered less than
eight miles, and that night we stopped at a farm-house which was the
last bit of civilization we saw. Early the next morning we were off
again, making the slow progress due to the rough roads and our heavy
load. At night we stopped at a place called Thomas's Inn, only to be
told by the woman who kept it that there was nothing in the house to
eat. Her husband, she said, had gone ``outside'' (to Grand Rapids) to
get some flour, and had not returned--but she added that we could spend
the night, if we chose, and enjoy shelter, if not food. We had
provisions in our wagon, so we wearily entered, after my brother had got
out some of our pork and opened a barrel of flour. With this help the
woman made some biscuits, which were so green that my poor mother could
not eat them. She had admitted to us that the one thing she had in the
house was saleratus, and she had used this ingredient with an unsparing
hand. When the meal was eaten she broke the further news that there
were no beds. ``The old woman can sleep with me,'' she suggested, ``and
the girls can sleep on the floor. The boys will have to go to the
barn.'' She and her bed were not especially attractive, and mother
decided to lie on the floor with us. We had taken our bedding from the
wagon, and we slept very well; but though she was usually superior to
small annoyances, I think my mother resented being called an ``old
woman.'' She must have felt like one that night, but she was only about
forty-eight years of age.
At dawn the next morning we resumed our
journey, and every day after that we were able to cover the distance
demanded by the schedule arranged before we started. This meant that
some sort of shelter usually awaited us at night. But one day we knew
there would be no houses between the place we left in the morning and
that where we were to sleep. The distance was about twenty miles, and
when twilight fell we had not made it. In the back of the wagon my
mother had a box of little pigs, and during the afternoon these had
broken loose and escaped into the woods. We had lost much time in
finding them, and we were so exhausted that when we came to a hut made
of twigs and boughs we decided to camp in it for the night, though we
knew nothing about it. My brother had unharnessed the horses, and my
mother and sister were cooking dough-god--a mixture of flour, water, and
soda, fried in a pan-when two men rode up on horseback and called my
brother to one side. Immediately after the talk which followed James
harnessed his horses again and forced us to go on, though by that time
darkness had fallen. He told mother, but did not tell us children until
long afterward, that a man had been murdered in the hut only the night
before. The murderer was still at large in the woods, and the
new-comers were members of a posse who were searching for him. My
brother needed no urging to put as many miles as he could between us and
the sinister spot. In that fashion we made our way to our new home. The
last day, like the first, we traveled only eight miles, but we spent the
night in a house I shall never forget. It was beautifully clean, and
for our evening meal its mistress brought out loaves of bread which were
the largest we had ever seen. She cut great slices of this bread for us
and spread maple sugar on them, and it seemed to us that never before
had anything tasted so good.
The next morning we made the last stage of
our journey, our hearts filled with the joy of nearing our new home. We
all had an idea that we were going to a farm, and we expected some
resemblance at least to the prosperous farms we had seen in New
England. My mother's mental picture was, naturally, of an English
farm. Possibly she had visions of red barns and deep meadows, sunny
skies and daisies. What we found awaiting us were the four walls and
the roof of a good-sized log-house, standing in a small cleared strip of
the wilderness, its doors and windows represented by square holes, its
floor also a thing of the future, its whole effect achingly forlorn and
desolate. It was late in the afternoon when we drove up to the opening
that was its front entrance, and I shall never forget the look my mother
turned upon the place. Without a word she crossed its threshold, and,
standing very still, looked slowly around her. Then something within
her seemed to give way, and she sank upon the ground. She could not
realize even then, I think, that this was really the place father had
prepared for us, that here he expected us to live. When she finally
took it in she buried her face in her hands, and in that way she sat for
hours without moving or speaking. For the first time in her life she
had forgotten us; and we, for our part, dared not speak to her. We
stood around her in a frightened group, talking to one another in
whispers. Our little world had crumbled under our feet. Never before
had we seen our mother give way to despair.
Night began to fall. The woods became alive
with night creatures, and the most harmless made the most noise. The
owls began to hoot, and soon we heard the wildcat, whose cry--a screech
like that of a lost and panic-stricken child--is one of the most
appalling sounds of the forest. Later the wolves added their howls to
the uproar, but though darkness came and we children whimpered around
her, our mother still sat in her strange lethargy. At last my brother
brought the horses close to the cabin and built fires to protect them
and us. He was only twenty, but he showed himself a man during those
early pioneer days. While he was picketing the horses and building his
protecting fires my mother came to herself, but her face when she raised
it was worse than her silence had been. She seemed to have died and to
have returned to us from the grave, and I am sure she felt that she had
done so. From that moment she took up again the burden of her life, a
burden she did not lay down until she passed away; but her face never
lost the deep lines those first hours of her pioneer life had cut upon
it.
That night we slept on boughs spread on the
earth inside the cabin walls, and we put blankets before the holes which
represented our doors and windows, and kept our watch-fires burning.
Soon the other children fell asleep, but there was no sleep for me. I
was only twelve years old, but my mind was full of fancies. Behind our
blankets, swaying in the night wind, I thought I saw the heads and
pushing shoulders of animals and heard their padded footfalls. Later
years brought familiarity with wild things, and with worse things than
they. But to-night that which I most feared was within, not outside of,
the cabin. In some way which I did not understand the one sure refuge
in our new world had been taken from us. I hardly knew the silent woman
who lay near me, tossing from side to side and staring into the
darkness; I felt that we had lost our mother. |
