Part 32 (2/2)

She gladly accompanied the lady on her route the following morning, and ever remained her attached _protege_.

Montana is one of the newest and wildest of our territories. Its position so far to the north and the peculiarly rugged face of the country, make it the fitting abode for the genius of the storms. Gathering their battalions the tempests sweep the summits and whirling round the flanks of the mountains, roar through the deep, lonely gorges with a sound louder than the ocean surges in a hurricane. The snows fill the ravines in drifts one hundred feet in depth, and such are the rigors of winter that the women who live in the fur-trading posts on that section of our northern border, are often carried across the mountains into Oregon or Was.h.i.+ngton territory, to s.h.i.+eld them from the severities of the inclement season.

Late in the fall of 1868, a party consisting of thirty soldiers, while faring on through the mountains of that territory, were overtaken by one of these fearful snowstorms. The wind blew from the north directly in their faces, and the snow was soon piled in drifts which put a thorough embargo upon their further progress. Selecting the fittest place that could be found they pitched their tents on the snow, but hardly had they fastened the tent ropes when a blast lifted the tents in a moment, and whirled them into the sky. After a night of great suffering they found in the morning that all their mules were missing. They had probably strayed or been driven by the fury of the blast into a deep ravine south of the camp, where they had been buried beneath the enormous drifts.

The storm raged and the snow fell nearly all day. The rations were all gone, and progress against the wind and through the drifts was impossible.

Another night of such bitter cold and exposure would in all probability be their last.

They shouted in unison, but their shouts were drowned in the shrieks of the tempest. Towards night the storm lulled and again they shouted, but no sound came back but the sigh of the blast. Help! help! they cried. Unhappy men, could help come to them except from on high! What was left to them but to wind their martial cloaks around them and die like soldiers in the path of duty!

But what G.o.d-sent messenger is this coming through the drifts to meet them?

Not a woman! Yes, a poor, weak woman has heard their despairing cry and has hastened to succor them. Drenched and s.h.i.+vering with the storm she told them to follow her, and conducted them to a recess in the crags, where beneath an overhanging ledge and between projecting cliffs, a s.p.a.cious shelter was afforded them. They crowded in and warmed their numbed limbs before a great fire, while their preserver brought out her stores of food for the wayfarers.

But how could a woman be there in the heart of the mountains in the wintry weather, with only the storm to speak to her?

Her husband was a miner and she a brave and self-reliant woman. He had left her two weeks before to carry his treasure of gold dust to the nearest settlement She was all _alone! Alone_ in that rock-encompa.s.sed cabin in the realms of desolation, and still the heroine-guardian who had s.n.a.t.c.hed thirty fellow beings from the jaws of death.

Solitude is the theatre where untold thousands of devoted women--the brave, the good, the loving--for ages past have acted their unviewed and unrecorded dramas in the great battle of frontier life. Warriors and statesmen have their need of praise, and crowds surround them to throw the wreath of laurel or of bay upon their fainting brows, or to follow their plumed hea.r.s.e to the mausoleum which a grateful people has raised to their memory.

”Yet it may be a higher courage dwells In one meek heart which braves an adverse fate, Than his whose ardent soul indignant swells Warmed by the fight or cheered through high debate, The soldier dies _surrounded_, could he live _Alone_ to suffer and alone to strive?”

CHAPTER XXI.

WOMAN AS AN EDUCATOR ON THE FRONTIER

”Within the house, within the family the woman is all: she is the inspiring, moulding, embellis.h.i.+ng, and controlling power.” This terse description of woman's influence in the household applies with double force and significance to the position of the pioneer wife and mother. Her life in that position was one long battle, one long labor, one long trial, one long sorrow. Out of this varied, searching, continuous educational process came discipline of the body, of the mind, and of the whole moral nature. Adversity, her

”Stern, ragged nurse, whose rigid lore, With patience, many a year, she bore,”

taught her the practice of the heroic as well as of the gentler virtues; courage, labor, fort.i.tude, plain living, charity, sobriety, pity. In that school these virtues became habitual to her mind; because their practice was enforced by the stress of circ.u.mstances. Daily and nightly, in those homes on the frontier, there is some danger to be faced, some work to be done, some suffering to be borne or some self-denial to be exercised, some sufferer to be relieved or some sympathy to be extended.

There is a two-fold result from this educational process: first, the transmission, by the law of hereditary descent, of marked traits of character to her children, who show, in a greater or less degree, their mother's nature as developed in this severe school; second, woman becomes fitted to mould the character and instruct the mind of her children in the light of her own experience and discipline. Woman is the great educator of the frontier.

Within the first half of the 18th century, in that narrow belt of thinly settled country which follows the indentation of the Atlantic ocean, in lonely cabins in the forest, or on the, hill-slope, or by the unvisited sea, most of the representative men of our Revolutionary Era first saw the light, and were pillowed on the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the frontier mothers.

The biographical records of our country are bright with the names of men--the brave, the wise, the good--who were born of pioneer women, and who inherited from them those traits which, in after life, made them great and ill.u.s.trious in the learned professions, in the camp, and in the councils of their native country. Who can doubt that the daughters, too, of those strong women, and the sisters of those eminent men, inheriting similar traits, exercised in their sphere as potent though silent an influence as did their brothers in the high stations to which they were called.

As by a strain of blood, inherited traits come down to succeeding generations, and, as from the breast of the mother the first elements of bodily strength are received, so from her lips are obtained those first principles of good and incentives of greatness which the sterner features and blunter feelings of the father are rarely sufficient to inculcate.

On parent knees, or later, in intervals of work or play, the soldier who fought to make us a free republic, and the statesman who laid deep and wide the foundations of our const.i.tution, acquired from their mothers' lips those lessons of virtue and duty which made their after careers so useful to their country and memorable in history.

We have said that woman was the great _educator_ on the frontier. She was something more than an _educator_, as the term is usually applied.

The teaching of the rudiments of school-learning was a fraction in the sum-total of her training and influence.

The means of moulding and guiding the minds of the young upon the border are very different from what they are in more settled states of society.

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