RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WEST IN THE FORTIES

By James Burton Pond

In the autumn of 1843 I was four years old and living in a log house in the town of Hector, Tompkins (now Schuyler) County, New York. One of my earliest recollections is of a conversation between my father and mother regarding the expected visit of an uncle and his family, who were coming to bid us good-by before moving to Illinois. My uncle had the "Illinois fever"; he had just returned from a "land-looking" in Illinois, where he had preËmpted a new farm. I remember listening to my uncle's glowing description of the new country out in the far West beyond the Great Lakes, where he was going to make a new home. When he had gone my father talked constantly of Illinois, and the neighbors said he had Illinois fever.

We passed the long winter in our log house adjoining my grandfather's farm. All the clothing and bedding people had in those days was home-made, and every household had its loom. In our home, in the single room on the first floor were father's and mother's bed, the trundle-bed, where four of us children slept (lying crosswise), the loom, the spinning-wheel for wool and tow, the flax-wheel, the swifts, reeling-bars, and the quill-wheel, besides the table and chairs. We had two rooms in the attic, one a spare room and the other for the hired help. Frequently during the long evenings my grandmother and other neighbors would come in with their knitting and their tow-cards, and either knit or card tow or heckle flax, talking about Illinois, where my uncle had gone. That mysterious word was unfathomable to me. It was finally decided that we should go there too, and all our furniture, with bedding, spinning-wheels, loom, and crockery, was packed up, and on Monday morning, March 20, 1844, we started for the new country. At Ithaca our goods were put on board a canal-boat, and the next morning I awoke to find myself on Cayuga Lake, in tow of a steamer. For days we traveled slowly on the Erie Canal, with no memorable incidents except an occasional "low bridge," one of which swept our provision-chest nearly the length of the deck.

One evening my uncle, he of the Illinois fever, met us with his horses and farm-wagon. Father hired another team, and we started for my uncle's new home near Libertyville, Lake County, Illinois, where we arrived the following morning. The house was a log hut with one room and an attic. We found my aunt sick with fever and ague. She was wrapped in thick shawls and blankets, sitting by the fireplace, and shaking like a leaf. Before supper was over, mother had a chill and a shake which lasted nearly half the night. The next day it rained hard, and we all had chills, and my father and uncle went to town, two miles, for some medicine. They returned with a large bundle of thoroughwort weed, or boneset, a tea made from which was the order of the day. It was very bitter, and I used to feel more like taking the consequences of the ague than the remedy.

It was too late for father to secure a farm during that first summer in Illinois, and he obtained work in the blacksmith's shop in Libertyville, hiring two rooms for his family in the frame court-house, a half-finished building on a high spot of ground. It was neither plastered nor sided, only rough boards being nailed on the frame, and when it rained and the wind blew we might as well have been out of doors. Here our first summer and winter in Illinois were spent.

As father had a shake every other day, he could work only half the time, and we were very poor. The ague was in the entire family, my sister and I invariably shaking at the same hour every alternate day, and my mother's and father's shakes coming at about the same time. I have known the whole family to shake together; nor did the neighbors escape. There were few comfortable homes and few well people. Boneset tea was a fixture on every stove fireplace. When my morning to shake arrived, I used to lie down on the floor behind the cook-stove and almost hug the old salamander, even on the warmest summer days, my sister on the opposite side, my younger brothers snuggling up close to me, and my mother sitting as near the fire as she could get, all of us with our teeth chattering together.

So the long, dreary, rainy, ague summer passed away, to be followed by a wet and open winter. Father's scanty earnings were our only support, and my uncle and his family, who were on a new farm two miles away, were even poorer; for my father occasionally had a few dollars in money, while uncle had nothing but what a farm of "new breaking" produced the first year, and with no market for even the slightest product. My aunt, who was broken down and discouraged, would occasionally walk the two miles to see us, and my mother and she would talk about the false hopes and glittering inducements that had led their husbands to become victims to the Illinois fever.

The spring came early, and father rented a farm with ten acres already plowed and a log house, about three miles east of the village, and there we moved. He had the use of a yoke of oxen, farm-utensils, one cow, seed-grain, and he was to work the farm for half of all it could be made to produce. He filled in odd moments by splitting rails and fencing the ten acres with a seven-railstaked and ridered fence.

The farm was in the heavy woods near the shores of Lake Michigan. A stream of water ran through a deep gully near the house, and there father caught an abundance of fish, while there was plenty of game in the woods. One day he came in and said he had found a deer-lick, and that night he prepared a bundle of hickory bark for a torchlight, and with that and his rifle he left us for the night, and came in early in the morning with a deer. It was the first venison I had ever eaten, and the best. My father's gun supplied our table with venison, wild duck, and squirrel in abundance. Mother, who had brought a collection of garden seeds from the East, managed the garden, and we had corn, beans, cucumbers, and pease, while tomatoes we raised as ornamental plants and called "love-apples." They were then considered poisonous, and it was some years later before we found out that they were a wholesome table delicacy.

We spent only one summer in this place, and then my father rented a farm on the prairie, in the township of Brooklyn, Lake County, about five miles west of Little Fort (now Waukegan, Illinois), and we went there early in the autumn of 1845. It was a happy day for my mother when we moved from our ague-stricken gully, for she prophesied that out on the prairie, where there was pure air, we might possibly escape fever and ague. Only two years before, mother had come from a refined home in western New York, and she had been shut up in these dreary woods in a log house all summer, living on game and boneset tea.

We were up early, and started at sunrise for the eight-mile ride to our new home. Father had come the day before with two teams and a hired man. The chickens had been caught and put into coops that were fastened on the rear end of the wagon, the "garden sauce" was gathered, and two pigs were put into one of the packing-boxes originally brought from the East. The new home was another log house, but a good one, built of hewn logs, and a story and a half high. The owner had built a tavern and was not going to work his farm any longer, so he rented it to father and kept his tavern across the way.

The minister from Little Fort called, and arrangements were made for a church home, and we used to drive five miles every Sunday to "meeting." There was a school for the children, and surrounded as we were by intelligent and thrifty neighbors, my mother began to wear a cheerful look. At this time the family consisted of six children, of whom I was the second, and the eldest son.

Here father began to utilize me, and I saved him many steps; for he seemed to have something for me to do all the time, both when he was at work and when he was resting. On Mondays I was allowed to stay about the place and help mother, pounding clothes, tending baby, and bringing wood and water. I was able to carry only about a third of the pail of water, but my young legs were expected to make frequent journeys to and from the spring, which was over in the cow-pasture, about thirty rods from the house. It was protected from encroachment of cattle and hogs by a three-cornered rail fence, which I had to climb and lift my pail over every time I went for water.

My brother Homer was my constant companion, and he used to help me with my work. Once I had lifted him over the fence to dip up water for me, when he lost his balance, and fell into the spring. The water was about up to his chin, and very cold. He screamed, and mother ran to help him out, dripping with water and dreadfully frightened. We got into the house as father came in to dinner. I was so sorry and frightened over what had happened that I was already severely punished; but father began to scold, and then decided to give me a whipping. He went out to the pasture near the spring and cut some willow switches, and after giving me a severe talking to, began laying the switches on my back and legs. I feared my father ever afterward. Nothing that I could do to please him was left undone, but it was always through fear.

EMIGRANTS.

We lived on a public thoroughfare where hundreds, and I may say thousands, passed on their way to take up new homes in Wisconsin, then the extreme outskirt of civilization in the Northwest. There was not a day in which several wagon-loads of emigrants did not pass our door, and the road was a cloud of dust as far as one could see over the level prairie country. The usual emigrant wagon contained an entire family, with all its earthly possessions, and in some of them families had lived for many weeks. Occasionally a length of stovepipe protruded through the canvas cover, and it was known that this wagon belonged to an aristocratic family, such a one usually having two wagons, one being used as a living-room. Nearly every family had from one to four cows, a coop of chickens attached to the tail-gate, from two to five pigs traveling under the wagon, and occasionally a drove of sheep and a loose colt near by. There was sometimes a rich caravan, or association of families, which had entered a large tract of land and was moving in a body, with horse-teams, droves of cattle, and horses.

As we lived near the road, people usually stopped at our house, either for a drink of fresh spring-water (a scarcity in those days), or to purchase milk, butter, garden-stuff, or anything that we could spare. These were the pioneers of Wisconsin, and were mostly from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. They were the second generation of pioneers of their native States. In asking where they were from we generally asked, "What are you?" If from New York, it was "Empire State"; if from Pennsylvania, "Keystones"; if from Ohio, "Buckeyes." Many more Illinois pioneers moved on to Wisconsin in those days than remained, owing to the dread of fever and ague. In this endless train of "movers" it was not uncommon for my mother to meet people whose families she had known in western New York.

THE LAND-LOOKER.

The land-looker was as much an occupant of the road as the emigrant. He was the advance-picket who had preceded on foot every family that passed, and had located his quarter-section, built his preËmption shanty, and inhabited it three days, which allowed him to hold it one year, while he could return for his family. These men were passing daily, winter and summer, and the tavern near us was crowded nightly with them and with emigrants. Our house, too, was a shelter for many. Father saw the enterprising home-seekers daily, and heard the accounts of those who were returning from their prospective homes after having located; and their glowing descriptions of the country, the climate, and its freedom from ague, gave him the "Wisconsin fever." Mother, however, looked distrustfully on the favorable reports brought back daily, and she pitied the people moving north.

Father had provided a fair living for his large family—sumptuous, indeed, compared with that of our first year in the West. We had friends and neighbors and schools. The owner of the farm wished my father to hire it for two years more, but father would argue that this was his chance to get a home, and here was an opportunity for his boys; he could make nothing on rented land, and he had only been able to keep his family alive for three years. Mother said: "Supposing we do preËmpt, it is only for a year or two, and then the land must be entered and paid for at one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre. Where is the money coming from?" Father told her that many of the emigrants who had no money got friends or speculators to furnish it for half the land. Mother was not enthusiastic, but she finally consented to go if father could get his sister in Connecticut to enter the land for him when due, and to hold it in her name until father could, at some future time, pay for it.

My aunt consented to this, and in February there came a letter from her inclosing a draft for one hundred dollars, with which to buy a yoke of oxen and a wagon with which to work the farm.

So my father was fitted out as a land-looker, and mother worked all day and all night to make his knapsack.

Father had been gone three weeks when a letter came telling us that he had located a farm in the town of Alto, the southwest-corner township in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin; that it had a log house on it, twelve by fourteen, which he had bought; that ten acres had already been broken by the man of whom he had bought the claim, and that he would return at once with his wagon and oxen for the family.

In March, 1847, we started for the new home.

We were soon in the long line of dust, making our proportion of what we had been accustomed to see for two years. I was to help drive the cows and pigs. Whoever has attempted to drive a hog knows the discouragements with which I met. Whoever has never attempted it can never know. It seemed that if we had wanted them to go the other way it would have been all right. They scattered in different directions several times, and some of them succeeded in getting back home. My chagrin was increased by passing or meeting other emigrant boys whose pigs and cattle kept quietly near the wagons and walked gently along.

It took all day to go about six miles. We stopped overnight near a farm-house, and father, after getting the cattle and pigs in the barn, built a fire by the roadside and prepared our supper. He made tea, and with the cold chicken and bread and butter which mother had given us for the journey, we fared sumptuously. Father brought an armful of hay from the barn near by, and with plenty of coverlets he made up a bed under the wagon, where we slept soundly. This was my first camping out.

At Fort Atkinson we met the first band of Indians I had ever seen. There was a chief and three or four young buck Indians, as many squaws, and a number of children, all of the Black Hawk tribe. They were on ponies, riding in single file into the town as we were going out. I was so frightened that I cried, and as the chief kept putting his hand to his mouth, saying, "Bread—hungry—bread—hungry," father gave him a loaf of bread. It was not enough, but it was all father would let him have. Homer and I were in favor of giving him everything we had if he would only move on.

After leaving Watertown we came out on what is known as rolling prairie—for miles in every direction a green, wavy sheet of land. No ornamental gardener could make so lovely and charming a lawn, gently rolling, and sloping just enough to relieve the monotony of the flatness of the long stretches of prairie and openings we had passed through. Father told us that these great prairies would always be pasture-land for herds of cattle, as the farmers could not live where there was no timber. To-day the finest farms I know of in America are on these great prairie-lands, but at that time the prospectors avoided such claims and preËmpted only the quarter-sections skirting the prairies, where the oak openings supplied timber for log houses, fences, and fuel.

Trails were now branching in every direction, and after five days of this travel it seemed as though we had been wandering for months without a home. That day we had started at sunrise, resting for three hours at noon, the usual custom at that time. It was ten o'clock when we reached our home.

We were in another log cabin, twelve by fourteen feet square, with hewn log floor, one door, and one window containing the sash with its four panes of glass which father had brought on his journey.

We boys slept in the low garret, climbing a ladder to go to bed. Owing to the exhaustion and excitement of the night before, we were allowed to rest undisturbed, and the sun was well up and shining through the chink-holes in our garret when we awoke. Father had gone with the team to a spring a mile west for a barrel of water. There was no water on our claim, and we were obliged to haul it on a "crotch," a vehicle built from the crotch of a tree, about six by eight inches thick and six feet long, on which a cross-rail is laid, where a barrel can be fastened. The oxen were hitched to it, and they dragged it to and from the spring.

Two beds were fitted across one side of the single downstairs room in our cabin, and father had to shorten the rails of one bedstead to get it into place. Under it was the trundle-bed on which the babies slept, and when this was pulled out, and with the cook-stove, table, four chairs, wood-box, and the ladder in place, there was very little spare room. By father's order, the lower round of the ladder was always my seat.

THE FIRST SCHOOL AT ALTO.

There were neighbors from a half mile to three and five miles away, and they called and offered their assistance to contribute to our comfort. It was found that there were seventeen children within a radius of five miles, and the subject of starting a school was discussed.

The school-house was a log shanty six logs high, with holes for a window and a door, which had been removed and were now a part of Mr. Boardman's new house. Trees were cut down and the trunks split open and holes bored in the ends of each half of the log; legs were put in, and then they were hewed as smooth as an ax could make them, and placed on the ground for benches. Four of these "puncheon" benches were made, and at half-past nine the teacher took her place on a chair, which had been brought especially for her, and called the school to order.

The first thing to do was to get an idea of what books the pupils had. Mother had sent all her children had ever owned, and so had others, and there were Cobb's Spelling-book, Dayball's Arithmetic, Parley's Geography, McGuffey's Reader, Saunders's Spelling-book, Ray's Arithmetic, Spencer's Spelling-book, Adams's Arithmetic, and Saunders's Reader, gathered from all parts of America. There were no duplicates. The school opened with a prayer by Mr. Wilbur.

We were not long in wearing a well-beaten path between our house and the school, which for a number of years was a thoroughfare for pedestrians.

My chief duty after school was to hunt up the cows and drive them home in time for milking, and I came to know every foot of country within a radius of ten miles. No boy's country life can be complete without having hunted cows. "Old Red" wore the bell. Every neighbor in the country had a bell-cow and a cow-bell, and my friend Matt Wood and I always arranged that our cattle should herd together, and they were invariably driven to the same range in the morning. Each of us boys owned dogs, and we knew not only every cow-bell, but every woodchuck-hole and every gopher-hole, and many a time, I fear, father used to milk after dark because our dog had found a deep gopher-hole, and that gopher must be had, milk or no milk, supper or no supper.

The first summer father planted and raised two acres of potatoes, with some cabbages, onions, beets, carrots, and five acres of corn, and he succeeded in splitting rails and putting a fence around ten acres of land. I was trained to all branches of usefulness on a new farm. Once in two weeks I went for the mail to the nearest village, eleven miles away, often returning to tell father that there was a letter in the office with sixpence postage to pay. In those days there was no compulsory prepayment on letters, and it was sometimes months before a turn of any kind would bring the money to get the letter out of the post-office. The New York Weekly Tribune was always a member of our family, and our copy was read by everybody in the settlement. For three years I walked to the village every week for that paper. We children had to listen to my father read it every Sunday afternoon, as it was wicked to play out of doors, and we had only morning church to attend.

A PIONEER CHRISTMAS.

Father came home from Milwaukee at Christmas-time, bringing the flour of a few bushels of wheat, a pair of shoes for my brother and me, a new pair of boots for himself, and some unbleached muslin. Weren't we happy! It was a day of rejoicing. I remember father's going to the woodpile and in a few moments cutting a pile of wood, which gave us the first hot fire of the season. That afternoon mother made bread, and we had salt, pepper, tea, and fresh meat, for father had bought a quarter of beef.

A NEW LIFE.

We lived in Alto until 1853, and then the farm was abandoned, and my parents, with all the children except myself, moved to the neighboring city of Fond du Lac, where father could work by the day and earn enough to support the family. I was left to work for a neighbor; but I grew so homesick after a lonely Sabbath in a household where there were no children and it was considered wrong to take a walk on Sunday afternoon, that on Monday I took my other shirt from the clothes-line and started for Fond du Lac. I knew the stage-driver, and he gave me a lift.

As we approached the city the driver made me get down, and he told me to follow the sidewalk along the main street until I came to a foundry, next to which was father's house. I followed close behind the stage, keeping in the middle of the road. Soon I found myself in the city, where there were houses and stores on each side of the street, and board walks for pedestrians. I feared to walk on the sidewalks, for I was barefooted, and my feet were muddy and the sidewalks very clean. The people seemed to be dressed up as if for Sunday, and all the boys wore shoes, which excited my pity, for I knew how hot their poor feet must be.

As I groped my way along Main Street I noticed a sign that stretched nearly across the entire building over three stores. In large wooden letters, at least six feet long, were the words "Darling's block." It was the largest building I had ever seen, three stories high, and I ventured to step on to the sidewalk; and while gazing in awe upon the mighty structure my attention was attracted by a noise inside. I walked in and found myself in a printing-office.

As I was taking in the wonderful scene the pressman spoke to me in a gruff voice, asking me what I wanted. "Nothing," I said, trembling, and starting for the door. "Don't you want to learn the trade?" he shouted. "The editor wants an apprentice."

Just then the editor appeared in the doorway of his sanctum. He was a pleasant-faced man, and he asked me in a kindly tone whose boy I was and where I belonged.

"Why, your father is one of my subscribers. I want an apprentice to learn the printer's trade. I can give you twenty-five dollars for the first year, thirty for the second, and fifty dollars and the carrier's address for the third year, with your board and washing."

"All right." In less time than it takes to write it I was behind the press, and in five minutes I was covered with printer's ink from head to foot.

My pioneer days were over.