A Kansan at Large. I
I
THE wretched drama of one spring day in Kansas overshadows all else in my early recollections. I, a very little boy, sat in our spring wagon and held the lines. A hay-frame, loaded with jarring, clattering farm implements, passed slowly out of the gate. A load of household goods followed; then came another, piled very high, the legs of dining-room chairs sticking up, and a recalcitrant yellow cow trudging along behind. As the last load of goods left the porch of our comfortable, neatly painted house, trundled between the flower-beds where petunias grew, on past our fine young orchard, and then turned into the big road, my mother came out, took the seat beside me, and, lift ing the lines, spoke to the horses.
At that moment the grim meaning of these unusual proceedings, which had been affording me so much amusement, suddenly flooded my little brain, 'Oh, mother,’ I wailed, ‘I don’t want to go.’
Her kind, tired, handsome face twitched painfully; then without a word she jerked the lines nervously, and the old team walked slowly away in wake of the straddling, tugging cow, out to the road, past the shade trees, and on and on, until I, who kept looking and looking back, could no longer see the barn, or even the big tree that stood on the hill above the bridge, where the crippled rabbit lived.
Seven lean years followed. Your renter of the Middle West is not to be classed with the one-horse cotton tenant who gives an advancing merchant a lien on his all every year, and scarce allows himself to hope to own land. The weather-beaten Western helot is full of what the college boys call ' pep.’ He proposes to get on top of the pile, and to have and to hold with his heirs and assigns forever.’
We were down, but we proposed to get up. To accomplish this, we chose the only course open to the generality of mankind. A few can make money by shrewd trading, or by improving some unusual opportunity, but the majority of men can hope to amass wealth only by self-denial and hard, persistent toil. ‘Me and my wife,’ said an aged farmer, ‘got ahead by working hard and getting along without everything we just naturally had to have.’ The royal roads to wealth are few and too narrow for very many to walk in.
Five miles northeast of Topeka we found a hundred and sixty acres of land, most of which was capable of producing pretty good corn. The farm was in a sorry plight. Many of the rotting fence-posts had fallen over so that the two rusty barbed wires sagged and swung in the dusty winds of spring. Erosion was intrenching his forces on every slope. The fields were foul with countless weeds. A few trees, that bore either apples or little leather-covered peaches, still stood staggering in one corner of the place. There was no barn. The two little cribs with the buggyshed between leaned more than the tower of Pisa; but one of the sturdy old cottonwood trees held the whole building from falling. The house had never been painted or plastered. It consisted of but two rooms and a shedkitchen. There was no chimney, and the roof leaked badly, especially where the stove-pipe escaped from the dark, sooty loft.
We found that the water in the well was positively too nasty to use. To dig anot her well near the house was useless, for the water in it would be of the same soapstone flavor; so we had to fetch in barrels all the water we used, from a well which wre made in the swale nearly half a mile away. We dug in that place because a neighbor assured us that an excellent well had once been there.
After the first rain we asked the landlord to furnish us a bunch of shingles with which to patch the roof; but he replied that he could not do it. This landlord was a preacher who lived in Cincinnati, Ohio. Like us, he was a victim of progress.
About 1870 the community had been ‘developed' by ‘enterprising real-estate men,’ — to borrow the phraseology of obituaries and wedding write-ups; and two of these bringers-of-thingsto-pass had persuaded the Reverend Dr. And is to invest his meagre patrimony in Kansas land. Later, his holiness found that the farm, even as the widow’s cruse of oil, had been sold for much. The promised rise in value did not come; the rent he received could not cope with the mortgage; and so, while he pointed men to heaven in Cincinnati. things went to destruction in Kansas. He could not afford to improve the place and neither could we, for by the laws of the state any improvements put on the farm belonged to the landlord. However, we bought two bundles of shingles, and that fall stretched our Presbyterianism enough to take a few bushels of his com with which to square the account.
With the little money that th'ey had saved while in the employ of the Utah silver mines, my brothers bought several good horses and a few' necessary tools. All summer long wc worked and anxiously watched the clouds. There was rain enough, and in the fall we had grain to sell and to keep.
So far so good; but winter was coming, and shelter must be provided for the horse and cows, and for the pigs which we bought to eat the corn. With small elm-poles, a rude rectangular pen was constructed; inside of this we built another, leaving a two-foot space between. By filling this space with old grass and corn-fodder, blizzard-proof walls were made. The roof was of slough grass, of course. When these were done, we knew that snow and cold could not harm our stock.
That winter I looked at the pictures of straw huts in my school geography and, utterly forgetting to look at home, marveled that any people would make such grotesque shelters.
Heaven rest the bones of the inventor of wall-paper! When his memorial is erected, may I be allowed to contribute a part. Our stock was provided for, but the walls that must protect us from the galloping winter storms were less than an inch in thickness, and here and there were cracks. We plugged the cracks, put on one thickness of heavy brown paper, and then covered all with wall-paper. Marauding blizzards from Dakota screamed and whined about the house that winter; but paper is a nonconductor, and while the little ‘Samson’ heater had corn-cobs and coal in his red belly we were comfortable.
We were well nourished. I have since sat at meat with many a financial king and dined to the music of many an orchestra, but the best meals I ever ate were the ones that mother served. The Southern cotton tenant may live on fried pork and heavy corn-bread because his wife must work in the fields and never learn the household arts, such as cooking and preserving. Not so with the Middle-Western farmer — his dame docs not help cultivate the money-crop, but in summer she raises in her garden beans, tomatoes, peas, beets, onions, et cetera ad infinitum, and in winter her cave is full of potatoes, meat, apple-butter, peach-butter, jelly, pickles, preserves, and incomparable canned fruit. The ebullient energy of Kansas grows in its gardens and hibernates in its caves. I challenge the world on that statement.
Sundays excepted, we worked practically every day in the year from before sun-up until after dark. The more our herds increased and the more we prospered, the more brain and muscle it took to carry on operations. For the most part the labor-problem was solved by our speeding ourselves up and, at the same time, often increasing the hours from twelve to fourteen or more. But finally we had to have help, especially in summer. Various hands came and went before the advent of George — and now, I beg you to notice George.
He was a true representative of a type made exclusively in America, which, like the cowboy and the itinerant preacher, seems to be going off the stage. Unlike the town boys we were sometimes forced to employ, George knew how to do farm-work. He would kill weeds with a cultivator; there was no danger of his ruining the team that he used, and all in all he was pretty satisfactory help. He was twenty-four years old, genial, had part of a ‘common-school education,’ and was not bad-looking. His wages were fourteen dollars a month and the keep of his driving horse — George could trade any horse for any other and make a few dollars by so doing. He was always more or less regarded as company at our house — that is, at table we always passed things to him first, and he was exempted from all domestic altercations. His cheeks and lips were tanned and burned, but his hands were soft and white, for he always wore gloves when in the field. He never worked on holidays and special occasions. Saturday evenings he quit work a little early, repaired to the stable with a wash-tub, and bathed. Then he dressed in his Sunday clothes and, with a red ribbon fluttering on his buggy-whip, drove off to town, or to take some neighbor girl for a ride.
‘When I start,’ he used to say, ‘I am going to start for the high dollar.’ As years ran on, most of us tacitly concluded that he never would start; but, finally, one day he inadvertently married our pretty schoolma’am and then he had to start. He traded for a team of little jack-rabbit mules, farmed a year, went West, kept on trading, and is to-day making a fair living and raising his share of future presidents.
II
The last, winter that the family spent together was a happy one. Instead of getting mail once a week when someone went to town, we could now have a daily paper, for the Rural Free Delivery had come. We read the Topeka Mail, with Tom McNeill’s readable, worthwhile editorials, and a magazine club offer gave us Success, the Cosmopolitan, and turgid Talmage’s Christian Herald. Moreover, now that we did not have to milk cows and care for livestock after supper, we sent the following order to Sears, Roebuck & Company: —
One set complete works of Flavius Josephus; Chambers’s Universal Encyclopædia, in twenty neatly bound volumes; Pictorial History of the World in two volumes, large and handsome; and, that we and these authors might understand each other better, we added Webster’s American Dictionary, ‘ leather, only $2.45.’
All winter long we read far into the nights; and although the Encyclopcedia proved to be coeval with the ‘Crime of ’73,’ I gained from it a store of information that has served me well these many years.
I spent a great deal of time studying what to do next. Land was high and rising, so ownership seemed impossible. Moreover, I wanted to get beyond the little thirty-mile horizon which had always rimmed me in, and see such things as Josephus and the Encyclopædia told about. I thought long and seriously of enlisting in the regular army, as neighbor boys had done. Each year a few fine regiments marched by from Fort Leavenworth; and in the post-office there hung a picture of a firm, but friendly-looking general writing under a palm tree, while a private, on-a fine horse, eagerly waited to carry that message o'er bloodless fields of living green.
But this path of glory was not to be mine, for the next whiff of fortune left me a squatter on a claim in Caddo County, southwestern Oklahoma, where the old American pioneer movement, if I may use Othello’s phrase, finally reached its butt, bowed, and went off the stage forever.
As soon as word came that my sister had got a farm in a government opening of Indian lands, I went south to stay with her, for the law required t hat, she live on it a certain number of months.
I transferred at Chickasha. The wind was blowing simooms of sand and dirt among the rude new buildings. There had been a shooting the day before, and the rough-looking, sun-parched men who were walking about with guns made me long for the flesh-pots of Kansas. The little accommodation train finally jiggled away up the new branch road. The two old coaches were full of farm-folks from Missouri and environs, most of them young and obviously poor. Men talked loudly, while dusty, half-roasting babies fretted and howled.
My sister, elated and sunburned, met me at the station, and together we rode away from the dozen unpainted shacks that made up the new town, followed the trail across the open prairie, forded the deep, narrow Washita, and reached her homestead a little after dark.
Her house was one room, eight by twelve feet. In one corner was a homemade table, in another a bed, in the third pine shelves for food and dishes, and in the other a little monkey stove with a drum oven. ‘Where am I to sleep?’ I asked. She pointed to some planks laid across overhead, and on scrambling up I found a comfortable bed immediately under the board roof.
Next morning, when she began frying bacon for breakfast, I rose and made haste to come down, for the heat quickly became unendurable. Outside I saw an expanse of rolling prairie, broken only by a drift of oak timber. Here and there were other tiny, unpainted shacks, each with its curling queue of breakfast smoke. Black strips here and there showed that the sod-plough was already busy. New wire fences stretched away, and yonder, three or four hundred paces off, lay the emaciated carcass of an Indian pony that had died ere new grass could come. Wolves had gnawed a great hole in the paunch. The soil was sandy and the grass grew in bunches about two feet in diameter.
Suddenly an old Apache, sitting very straight on a little yellow pony, rode out of the woods and cantered along the ridge where the prairie chickens were congregating and courting. I was still looking when the lady of the house announced breakfast. On the table were bread, bacon, fried potatoes, watergravy, canned peaches, coffee, sugar, and a can of condensed milk. I was amused — but the amusement gradually wore off in the weeks that followed.
Very few settlers brought any milch cows, and most of those they did bring soon became dry from want of proper feeding; fever ticks killed the rest. Eggs were lacking, for the coyotes had quickly caught the few chickens that had been carried in. Water-gravy soon drove me to gardening assiduously on a plot of new-turned sod where snakes abounded.
That summer we gathered and canned a good supply of wild berries and plums. In a small wolf-proof inclosure we raised chickens that we hatched in a rude but ingenious incubator, which was made for us by Brother Culver, the rock on whom the Lord had decided to build his church in this new community.
Of course, we organized a Sunday school. Phidippides may go to Athens, and Phidippides may come back from Athens; higher critics and patent eucharists may write and rant, but the rural districts will still be the home of dogmatism and orthodoxy, when Egypt’s pyramids are crumbled and forgotten. However eat-drink-and-sufficient-unto-the-day the city pleb, with his hustling work and moving-picture recreation, may be, the countryman, driving his [slow team afield, or scattering bug-dust on his potato-vines, has ample time for what Carlyle called ‘silence.’
The basis of all religion is mystery, and all about yon isolated farm toiler is the mystery growth. Above his head the great sun, a disk of flaming brass, rolls up and down the lonely heavens, and, like the judgment eye of God, glares down at him. But yesterday that sky was loud with fire, — ripped thunder-clouds, — and the man who faces all this is religious, and will be, though for him there be no God but Jehovah and Calvin be his prophet.
At Brother Culver’s suggestion, we met in the one big floorless room that was the home of a neighbor’s family, and organized a Sunday school. When the schoolhouse was finally built, the Reverend Mr. Davy came to help the local workers hold a protracted meeting. He was an ignorant man, but recently converted and full of the belief that he was called of the Lord to preach. He first announced his plan of campaign: ‘First, to arrest you, that is, to arrest your attention; second, to convict you, and then, third, to “git” you pardoned.’
With the mental stock that years of Sunday-schooling and listening to doctrinal sermons had given me, the meetings soon made me feel like a convict; so I sought pardon. The local workers gathered round, expressing their joy and promising help, and finally I trotted home, whimpering and half hysterical, and alone in the cabin prayed fervently, while a pack of skulking wolves yelped and howled outside in the light of the cold, distant, yellow moon.
At the close of the meeting a church was organized. A few days later Brother Culver made a trip to our cabin to see how I was getting on. I told him that, while I felt a good deal better, I must confess that I had not yet entertained any angels, nor had I gone through as deep an experience as testifying meetings had led me to anticipate.
He diagnosed me with a few questions. ‘ What you need,’ he said, ‘ is the Second Blessing.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked; ‘I never heard of it before.’
He explained at length. I grew puzzled and uncomfortable. I felt that I had been tricked — as a country boy feels, when he pays to get into the fair ground, and then finds that he must pay again, to see the performances.
‘Brother Culver,’ I said, recalcitrantly, ‘my folks teas all good Presbyterians and I never heard of your Second Blessing, and — I don’t believe in it.’
He took his red-letter rule-book from his pocket and proved to me that St. Paul taught it. I ran Chambers’s Complete Encyclopcedia through my mind in ten seconds, but it was no use. It afforded nothing with which to combat the logic of this quick-eyed, fat-bellied laborer in the Vineyard. By inquiry and discussion I found that not more than half of our community believed in the Second Blessing, and so our newborn church, a true child of Protestanism, was like to die of internal trouble before the silver nitrate was well out of its eyes.
Nor was there any delay in the organization of a day school. These young couples who had left friends and native haunts to create homes on this niggardly sand-sod were determined that their children should have an ‘education,’ although they had no well-defined ideas of what education is or of what it should do for one, except make an easier livelihood possible. The teacher they employed grew weary of the locality and left before we had the schoolhouse quite completed, so I was asked to try teaching, and was offered four months’ work at thirty dollars per month, provided I would take most of my pay in scrip. The four-foot encyclopaedia in my head gave me about three feet and eleven inches more of general information than the country teacher can generally boast; but in arithmetic, grammar, and the other humdrum branches, it. is needless to say that I taught up to the very edge of what I knew.
The community pronounced the school a success, and since I was too young to take government land, and too poor to buy the necessary equipment for farming, I decided to ‘go off ’ to school. There was very little money in the new country, so I went to Kansas and worked as a farmhand, saved practically every dollar of my wages, sold my mule and my four cattle, and prepared to ‘go off.’
Then I found that the wise men who make school systems all live in town. Kansas is an agricultural state, pure and simple; yet when I, a typical rural product, a boy of eighteen who had grown up like a weed, finally awoke to the need of an education, I found that no provision had been made for'me. I must go to the Topeka graded schools, among children, a year or two before I could get into the high school; then the high school took four years and college four more—total, ten years! Who at eighteen would have had the courage to undertake it, even if he had had a tenth of the money it would require?
In those days there still remained one narrow and already closing avenue of escape for a full-grown man with an awakened and hungry mind which could sop up instruction at no ordinary rate. The State Normal School at Emporia then offered a ‘sub-normal course,’ which allowed one to enter the school proper as soon as one could master the sub-work — and hope rekindled with the knowledge that a normal graduate could finish the State University in two years. Thanks to this arrangement, which professional, perfecting educators have long since abolished, I am to-day a college graduate.
III
A normal school is a teacher-factory surrounded by widows. Each widow has one or two more or less impossible daughters whom she wishes to ‘graduate’ in the ‘regular certificate course.’ If a daughter is especially gifted, a way may also be found for her to ‘take voice.’ In order to finance all this, the mother runs a club, that is, a meagre boarding-house. Each of these establishments needs a flunky, whose duties are numerous and varied — to collect board weekly, to chase after the icewagon, new mealers, and absconding board-bills; to fetch fuel, turn the freezer, and to do whatsoever else her hands find for his to do. This flunky is called a steward. For these services he gets his board. I soon had one of these jobs, and it surely helped, for the board-bill is the poor student’s biggest problem.
With another student I lived in a little upstairs room; and while we studied Methods of Teaching, Rhetoric, and so forth, the girl who ‘took voice’ sat in a room below us and shouted, ‘Oh-0-0-0-0-0,’ or sang about the rain being on the river. Afterward she appeared in a chorus, made good, and married the manager; and the last I heard of her, she was making her costumes into baby dresses. After long trying, for competition was sharp, I got enough other menial labor, such as sweeping classrooms, to enable me to subsist.
Most of the students were girls. Their ages ranged from sixteen to forty or more. It. was rather unusual for a student to attend three or four years consecutively, without dropping out to earn money. For these reasons, if a young man of any ability attended regularly for any considerable time, he had greatness thrust upon him. He would be president of a literary society, captain of a team, toastmaster at a banquet, and be asked to accept a place on the staff of the school paper. In short, he would be urged into all that a student in an Eastern college works hard indeed to win. Moreover, most of the teachers were women.
These noble, overworked, unmarried dames trudged alone the thankless road of pedagogy, a strange combination of erudition, schoolgirl sentiment, and dormant mother-love. Each informally (or, rather, inadvertently) adopted some of the struggling young men whom she taught. In joy, in discouragement, in perplexity, they turned to her as naturally as the heliant hits turns to the sun. Fortune gave me five of these fostermothers, and if she had given me even more of ’em, I’d probably be a better man to-day. ' But like wine, song, and all other good things, women are not an unmixed blessing.
Because I could write fair verses, I was a poet; because I helped win a debate, I was destined to go high. My beautiful wavy auburn hair also helped me. And when the Livingstone-Damien propensities that are in almost every young man developed in me, it was promptly conceded that with me a surgeon in Central China, John Calvin could quickly vanquish sage Confucius, great Mohammed, and also the gentle Buddha. There was probably more good than bad in all this, for the hopes it kindled gave one courage to fight on against odds that might well have appalled an archangel. The inordinate conceit and vapid egoism that it all created, however, caused me misery enough when the non-sentimental East got me in the hopper of its efficiency machine.
(To be concluded)