Part 21 (2/2)
One day Sam Fox came to me and asked me to use my influence with the Cannelton Company to get him employment at their works.
”Sam,” I replied, ”I can't do it. It is only three weeks now, when you were employed at another place, that you tried to stuff the overseer into the furnace, and if the men had not prevented, you would have burned him up alive.”
”Yes,” replied Sam, ”but he had called me a -- son --- of ---.”
”Very good,” I answered; ”and if he had called me _that_, I should have done the same. But I don't think, if I _had_ done it, I should ever have expected to be employed again on another furnace. You see, Samuel, my son, that these Northern men have very queer notions--_very_.”
Sam was quite convinced.
At Cincinnati a trifling but droll incident occurred. I do not set myself up for a judge of wines, but I have naturally a delicate sense of smell or _flair_, though not the extraordinary degree in which my brother possessed it, who never drank wine at all. He was the first person who ever, in printed articles or in lectures, insisted that South New Jersey was suitable for wine-growing. At the hotel Sandford asked me if I could tell any wine by the taste. I replied No, but I would try; so they gave me a gla.s.s of some kind, and I said that honestly I could only declare that I should say it was Portugal common country wine, but I must be wrong. Then Sandford showed the bottle, and the label declared it to be grown in Ohio. The next day he came to me and said, ”I believe that after all you know a great deal about wine. I told the landlord what you said, and he laughed, arid said, 'I had not the American wine which you called for, and so I gave you a cheap but unusual Portuguese wine.'” This wine is neither white nor red, and tastes like sherry and Burgundy mixed.
At Cincinnati, Sandford proposed that we should return by way of Detroit and Niagara. I objected to the expense, but he, who knew every route and rate by heart, explained to me that, owing to the compet.i.tion in railway rates, it would only cost me six s.h.i.+llings ($1.50) more, _plus_ $2.50 (ten s.h.i.+llings) from New York to Philadelphia. So we departed. In Detroit I called on my cousin, Benjamin Stimson (the S. of ”Two Years before the Mast”), and found him a prominent citizen. So, skirting along southern Canada, we got to Niagara, and thence to Albany and down the Hudson to New York, and so on to Philadelphia.
It seems to me now that at this time all trace of my former life and self had vanished. I seemed to be only prompt to the saddle, canoe-paddle, revolver, steamboat, and railroad. My wife said that after this and other periods of Western travel I was always for three weeks as wild as an Indian, and so I most truly and unaffectedly was. I did not _act_ in a foolish or disorderly manner at all, but Tennessee and Elk River were in me. Robert Hunt and Sam Fox and many more had expressed their amazement at the amount of extremely familiar and congenial nature which they had found in me, and they were quite right. Sam and Goshorn declared that I was the only Northern man whom they had ever known who ever learned to paddle a dug-out _correctly_; but as I was obliged to do this sometimes for fifteen hours a day _nolens volens_, it is not remarkable that I became an expert.
As regards the real unaffected feeling of wildness born to savage nature, life, and a.s.sociation, it is absolutely as different from all civilised feeling whatever as bird from fish; and it very rarely happens that an educated man ever knows what it is. What there is of it in me which Indians recognise is, I believe, entirely due to hereditary endowment.
”Zum Wald, zum Wald, steht mir mein Sinn.
So einzig, ach! so einzig hin.
Dort lebt man freundlich, lebt man froh, Und nirgends, nirgends lebt man so.”
It does not come from reading or culture--it comes of itself by nature, or not at all; nor has it over-much to do with thought. Only in something like superst.i.tion can it find expression, but that must be childlike and sweet and sincere, and without the giggling with which such subjects are invariably received by ladies in society.
I went with my wife and her mother and sister to pa.s.s some time at Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania, which we did very pleasantly at a country inn. It is a very interesting town, where a peculiar German dialect is generally spoken. There was a very respectable wealthy middle-aged lady, a Pennsylvanian by birth, who avoided meeting us at table because she could not speak English. And when I was introduced to her, I made matters worse by speaking to her naturally in broad South German, whereupon she informed me that she spoke _Hoch_-Deutsch! But I made myself popular among the natives with my German, and our landlord was immensely proud of me. I wasn't ”one of dem city fellers dat shames demselfs of de Dutch,” not I. ”Vy, I dells you vot, mein Gott! he's _proud_ of it!”
I ended the summer at beautiful Lenox, in Ma.s.sachusetts, in the charming country immortalised in ”Elsie Venner”; of which work, and my letter on it to Dr. Holmes, and my conversation with him thereanent, I might fill a chapter. But ”let us not talk about them but pa.s.s on.” I returned to Philadelphia and to my father's house, where I remained one year.
I had for a long time, at intervals, been at work on a book to be ent.i.tled the ”Origin of American Popular Phrases.” I had scissored from newspapers, collected from negro minstrels and Western rustics, and innumerable New England friends, as well as books and old songs and comic almanacs and the like, a vast amount of valuable material. This work, which had cost me altogether a full year's labour, had been accepted by a New York publisher, and was in the printer's hands. I never awaited anything with such painful anxiety as I did this publication, for I had never been in such straits nor needed money so much, and it seemed as if the more earnestly I sought for employment the more it evaded me. And then almost as soon as my ma.n.u.script was in the printer's hands his office was burned, and the work perished, for I had not kept a copy.
It was a great loss, but from the instant when I heard of it to this day I never had five minutes' trouble over it, and more probably not one. I had done my _very best_ to make a good book and some money, and could do no more. When I was a very small boy I was deeply impressed with the story in the ”Arabian Nights” of the prisoner who knew that he was going to be set free because a rat had run away with his dinner. So I, at the age of seven, announced to my father that I believed that whenever a man had bad luck, good was sure to follow, which opinion he did not accept.
And to this day I hold it, because, reckoning up the chances of life, it is true for most people. At any rate, I derived some comfort from the fact that the accident was reported in all the newspapers all over the Union.
About the 1st of July, 1866, we left my father's house to go to Cape May, where we remained for two months. In September we went to a very good boarding-house in Philadelphia, kept by Mrs. Sandgren. She possessed and showed me Tegner's original ma.n.u.script of ”Anna and Axel.” I confess that I never cared over-much for Tegner, and that I infinitely prefer the original Icelandic Saga of Frithiof to his sago-gruel imitation of strong soup.
VI. LIFE ON THE PRESS. 1866-1869.
I become managing editor of John W. Forney's _Press_--Warwick the King- maker--The dead duck--A trip to Kansas in the old buffalo days--Miss Susan Blow, of St. Louis--The Iron Mountain of Missouri--A strange dream--Rattlesnakes--Kaw Indians--I am adopted into the tribe--Grand war- dance and ceremonies--Open-air lodgings--Prairie fires--In a dangerous country--Indian victims--H. M. Stanley--Lieutenant Hesselberger--I shoot a buffalo--Wild riding--In a herd--Indian white men--Ringing for the carriage with a rifle--Brigham the driver--General and Mrs. Custer--Three thousand miles in a railway car--How ”Hans Breitmann's” ballads came to be published--The publisher thinks that he cannot sell more than a thousand of the book--I establish a weekly newspaper--Great success--Election rioting--Oratory and revolvers--How the meek and lowly Republicans revolvered the Democrats--The dead duck and what befell him who bore it--I make two thousand German votes by giving Forney a lesson in their language--_Freiheit und Gleichheit_--The Winnebago Indian chief--Horace Greeley--Maretzek the Bohemian--f.a.n.n.y Janauschek and the Czech language--A narrow escape from death on the Switchback--Death of my father--Another Western railway excursion--A quaint old darkey--Chicago--I threaten to raise the rent--General influence of Chicago--St. Paul, Minnesota--A seven days' journey through the wilderness--The Canadian--Smudges--Indians--A foot journey through the woods--Indian pack- bearers--Mayor Stewart--I rifle a grave of silver ornaments--Isle Royale--My brother, Henry Perry Leland--The press--John Forney carries Grant's election, and declares that I really did the work--The weekly press and George Francis Train--Grant's appointments--My sixth introduction to the General--Garibaldi's dagger.
We had not lived at Mrs. Sandgren's more than a week when George Boker, knowing my need, spoke to Colonel John Forney, who was at that time not only Secretary of the Senate of the United States, but the proprietor of the _Chronicle_ newspaper in Was.h.i.+ngton, of the _Press_ in Philadelphia, ”both daily,” as the Colonel once said, which very simple and commonplace expression became a popular by-word. Colonel Forney wanted a managing editor for the _Press_, and, as I found in due time, not so much a man of enterprise and a leader--that _he_ supplied--nor yet one to practically run the journal--that his son John, a young man of eighteen, supplied--so much as a steady, trustworthy, honest _pivot_ on which the compa.s.s could turn during his absences--and that _I_ supplied. I must, to explain the situation, add gently that John, who could not help it considering his experiences, was, to put it mildly, a little irregular, rendering a steady manager absolutely necessary. It was a great pity, for John the junior was extremely clever as a practical managing editor, remembering everything, and knowing--what I never did or could--all the little tricks, games, and wiles of all the reporters and others employed.
Colonel Forney was such a remarkable character, and had such a great influence for many years in American politics, that as I had a great deal to do with him--very much more than was generally known--at a time when he struck his greatest political _coup_, in which, as he said, I greatly aided him, I will here dwell on him a s.p.a.ce. Before I knew him I called him Warwick the King-maker, for it was generally admitted that it was to his intense hatred of Buchanan, added to his speech-making, editing, and tremendously vigorous and not always over-scrupulous intriguing, that ”Ten-cent Jimmy” owed his defeat. At this time, in all presidential elections, Pennsylvania turned the scale, and John Forney could and did turn Pennsylvania like a t.i.tan; and he frankly admitted that he owed the success of his last turn to me, as I shall in time relate.
Forney's antipathies were always remarkably well placed. He hated Buchanan; also, for certain personal reasons, he hated Simon Cameron; and finally it came to pa.s.s that he hated Andrew Johnson with a hatred of twenty-four carats--an _aquafortis_ detestation--and for a most singular cause.
<script>