Part 9 (1/2)
”One day we saw her holding an open letter in her hand and looking pale and as if she were about to faint. We gathered about her knees and gazed with wondering eyes, silently into her sad and care-worn face, for even then we had been schooled to recognize and respect the sorrows of a mother. Two weeks before that time, a battle had been fought in which father had been severely wounded. The slow mail of those days had only just brought this sad intelligence. As we stood beside her she bent and clasped us to her heart, striving to hide the great tears that coursed down her wasted cheeks.
”We begged her not to cry and tried to comfort her with our infantile caresses. At length we saw her close her eyes and utter a low prayer. Ere her lips had ceased to intercede with the Father of mercies, a knock was heard at the door and one of the neighboring settlers entered. He had just returned from the army and had come several miles on foot from his home, expressly to tell us that father was rapidly recovering from his wounds. It seemed as if he were a messenger sent from heaven in direct answer to the silent prayers of a mother, and all was joy and brightness in the house.”
The patriot father returned to his family at the close of the war with the rank of Captain, which he had n.o.bly won by his bravery in the battle's van.
The sons grew up and became useful and honored citizens of a Republic which their father had helped to make free; and ever during their lives they fondly cherished the memory of the mother who had taught them so many examples of brave self-denial and pious devotion.
And still as we scan the pages of Revolutionary history, or revive the oral evidence of family tradition, the names and deeds of these brave and good women fill the eye and multiply in the memory. Through the fires, the frosts, the rains, the suns of one hundred years, they come back to us _now_, in the midst of our great national jubilee, vivid as with the life of yesterday. That era, which they helped to make glorious, is ”with the years that are beyond the flood.”
”Another race shall be, and other palms are won,”
but never, while our nation or our language endures, shall the memory of those names and deeds pa.s.s away. In every succeeding year that registers the history of the Republic which they contributed to build, brighter and brighter shall grow the record of the Patriot Women of the Revolution.
CHAPTER VII.
MOVING WEST--PERILS OF THE JOURNEY
In regarding or in enjoying an end already accomplished by others, we are too apt to pa.s.s by the means through which that end was reached. America of to-day represents a grand result. We see that our land is great, rich, and powerful; we see that the flag waves from ocean to ocean, over a people furnished with all the appliances of civilization, and happy in their enjoyment; we are conscious that all this has come from the toils and the sufferings of many men and of many women who have lived and loved before us, and pa.s.sed away, leaving behind them their country growing greater and richer, happier and more powerful, for what they have borne and done. But our views of the means by which that mighty end was reached are apt to be altogether too vague and general. While we are enjoying what others have worked to attain, let us not selfishly and forgetfully pa.s.s by the toils, the struggles, the firm endurance of those who went before us and accomplished this vast aggregate of results.
Each stage in the process by which these results were wrought out, had its peculiar trials, its special service. Looking back to that far-off past, and in the light of our own knowledge and conceptions, we find it almost impossible to decide which stage was encompa.s.sed with the deadliest dangers, the severest labors, the keenest sorrows, the largest list of discomforts. But certainly to woman, the breaking up of her eastern home, and the removal to the far west, was not the least burdensome and trying.
No characteristic of woman is more remarkable than the strength of her local a.s.sociations and attachments. In making the home she learns to love it, and this feeling seems to be often strongest when the surroundings are the bleakest, the rudest, and the most comfortless. The Highlander and the Switzer pine amid the luxuriant scenes of tropical life, when their thoughts revert to the smoky s.h.i.+eling or to the rock-encompa.s.sed _chalet_ of their far-off mountains. Such, too, doubtless, was the clinging fondness with which, the women regarded their rude cabins on the frontier of the Atlantic States. They had toiled and fought to make these rude abodes the homes for those dearest to them; here children, the first-born of the Republic, had been nurtured; here, too, were the graves of the first fathers and mothers of America. Humble and comfortless as those dwelling-places would have seemed to the men and women of to-day, they were dear to the wives and mothers of colonial times.
Comprehending, as we may, this feeling, and knowing the peculiar difficulties of long journeys in those days, into a wild and hostile country, we can understand why the westward march of emigration and settlement was so slow during the first one hundred and fifty or sixty years of our history. New England had, it is true, been largely subjugated and reclaimed; a considerable body of emigrants, wedge-like, were driving slowly up through the Mohawk Valley towards Niagara; a weak, thin line, was straggling with difficulty across the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, towards the Ohio, and a more compact and confident battalion in Virginia, was pus.h.i.+ng into Kentucky. But how scattered and feeble that picket-line compared to the army which was soon to follow it.
For a season, and while the British were trying to force their yoke on the reluctant colonists, the westward movement had a check. The danger was in the rear. His old home in the east was threatened, and the pioneer turned about and faced the rising sun, until the danger was past and he could pursue his journey.
The close of the Revolutionary struggle gave a new impulse to the westward march of the American people, which had been arrested for the time being by the War of Independence.
The patriot soldiers found themselves, upon the advent of peace, impoverished in fortune; but with high hopes and stout hearts they immediately set about repairing the ravages of the long war. Nurtured in the rugged school of danger and hards.h.i.+p, they had ceased to regard the West with dread. Curiosity, blended with the hope of bettering their condition, turned their faces to that ”fresh, unbounded, magnificent wilderness.” Accustomed to camp life and scenes of exciting interest, the humdrum days at the old homestead became distasteful. The West was the hunter's paradise. The toil held beneath it the potency of harvests of extraordinary richness, and the soldier who had faced the disciplined battalions of Great Britain recked little of the prowling red man.
During the Revolution, the women, left alone by their husbands and fathers, who were with the army, were more than ever thrown on their own resources.
They tilled the farm, reared their swarthy and nimble broods of children, and sent the boys in blue and buff all they could spare from their slender store. During all this trying period they were fitting themselves for that new life in the western wilds which had been marked out for them by the hand of an overruling Providence.
And yet, hard and lonely as the lives of these devoted women must have been in their eastern homes, and bright as their imaginations may have pictured the richness of the West, it must have given them many a pang when the husband and father told them that the whole family must be removed at once from their beloved homestead, which they or their fathers had redeemed from the wilderness after so many years of toil. We may imagine the resolution that was required to break up the old attachments which bind women to their homes and firesides.
It must have required a heroic courage to do this for the purpose of seeking a new home, not only among strangers, but among wild beasts and savages. But the fathers and mothers a hundred years ago possessed a spirit which rose above the perils of their times. They went forward, unhesitatingly, in their long and toilsome journeys westward, driving their slow-footed oxen and lumbering-wagons hundreds of miles, over ground where no road was; through woods infested with bears and wolves, panthers and warlike tribes of Indians; settling in the midst of those dangerous enemies, and conquering them all.
The army of pioneers, like the skirmishers who had preceded them, moved forward in three columns; the northernmost pa.s.sed through New York State; the middle column moved westward through Pennsylvania; the southernmost marched through Virginia. Within ten years after the treaty of Versailles, the three columns had met in Ohio and Kentucky, and spreading out over that beautiful region, were fighting with nature and savage men to subjugate both and bring them within the bounds of civilization. No more sublime spectacle has ever greeted the eye of the historian than the march of that army. Twenty or thirty thousand men and women, bearing, like the Israelites of old, their ark across the desert and waste places--that ark which bore the blessings of civilization and religion within its holy shrine! Aged matrons, nursing mothers, prattling infants, h.o.a.ry patriarchs, and strong veterans fresh from the fields of their country's glory, marching to form a mighty empire in the wilderness!
In this present age of rapid and easy transition from place to place, it is difficult to form a just conception of the tediousness, hards.h.i.+ps, and duration of those early emigrations to the West. The difference in conveyance is that between a train of cars drawn by a forty-ton locomotive and a two-horse wagon, without springs, and of the most lumbering and primitive construction. This latter was the best conveyance that the emigrant could command. A few were so fortunately situated on the banks of rivers that they could float down with the current in flat-boats, while their cattle were being driven along the sh.o.r.e; or, if it was necessary to ascend toward the head-waters of a river, they could work their way up-stream with setting-poles. But most of the emigrants traveled with teams. Some of those who went part of the way in boats had to begin or end their journey in wagons. The vehicles which they provided on such occasions for land carriage were curiosities of wheel-craft--I speak of the Jersey wagons.
The old-fas.h.i.+oned Jersey wagon has, years ago, given place to more showy and flexible vehicles; but long before such were invented the Jersey wagon was an established inst.i.tution, and was handed down, with the family name, from father to son. It was the great original of the modern emigrant wagon of the West; but as I have elsewhere pictured its appearance upon the arrival of a band of pioneers at their final destination, it is unnecessary to enter here upon any further description.
The spring of the year was the season usually selected for moving, and during many weeks previous to the appointed time, the emigrants had been actively providing against the accidents and discomforts of the road. When all was ready, the wagon was loaded, the oxen yoked and hooked to the neap; the women and children took their places on the summit of the huge load, the baby in its mother's lap, the youngest boy at his grandmother's feet, and off they started. The largest boy walked beside and drove the team, the other boys drove the cows, the men trudged behind or ahead, and the whole cavalcade pa.s.sed out of the great gate, the grandmother peering through her spectacles, and the mother smiling through her tears and looking back more than once at the home which she had made but was now to leave for ever.
In this manner the earlier emigrants went forward, driving their heavily laden wagon by day and sleeping at night by the camp. After they had pa.s.sed the region of roads and bridges they had to literally hew their way; cutting down bushes, prying their wagon out of bog-holes, building bridges or poling themselves across streams on rafts. But, in defiance of every obstacle, they pressed forward.
Neither rivers nor mountains stayed the course of the emigrant. Guiding his course by the sun, and ever facing the West, he went slowly on. When that luminary set, his parting rays lit the faces of the pioneer family, and when it rose it threw their long shadows before them on the soft, spongy turf of the forest glades. Sweating through the undergrowth; climbing over fallen trees; sinking knee-deep in marshes; at noon they halted to take a rest in the shade of the primeval forest, beside a brook, and there eat their mid-day meal of fried pork and corn cakes, which the women prepared; then on again, till the shadows stretched far back toward their old homes.
Sometimes a storm burst upon them, and the women and children huddled beneath the cart as the thunderbolts fell, s.h.i.+vering the huge trunks of the forest monarchs; and the lightning crimsoned the faces of the forlorn party with its glare. Then the heavens cleared; the sun came out; and the ox-cart went rumbling and creaking onward. No doubt the first days of that weary tramp had in them something of pleasurable excitement; the breezes of spring fanned the brows of the wayfarers, and told of the health and freedom of woodland life; the magnificence of the forest, the summits of the mountains, tinged with blue, the sparkling waters of lake and stream, must have given joy to even the most stolid of those households. But emotions of this description soon became strangers to their souls.