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Red Cross Relief Steamer, “Josh V. Throop,”

off Shawneetown, Illinois,

Ohio River, March 18, 1884,

Mr. M.E. Camp, Editor of the Erie Dispatch:

At length, I have the happiness to inform you that I have placed the contribution of the brave Little Six to my own satisfaction, and, as I believe, to the satisfaction of the little donors and the friends interested in them as well. Your letter inclosing the touching article describing their pretty thought and act, and the check for the sum donated by them to the sufferers from the floods, came during the early days of hurry and confused activity. The entire matter was too beautiful and withal unique, to meet only a common fate in its results. I could not, for a moment, think to mingle the gift of the little dramatists with the common fund for general distribution, and sought through all these weeks for a fitting disposition to make of it, where it would all go in some special manner to relieve some special necessity. I wanted it to benefit some children who had “wept on the banks” of the river which in its madness had devoured their home. I watched carefully all the way down on this trip, and tried, last Sunday, at Smithland on our return to make a little “foundation” for a children’s help and instruction at that town which had suffered so terribly; but I could not satisfy myself, and after telling the pretty story to the best people of the town assembled on our boat, I still declined to leave the appropriation, waiting in confidence for the real opportunity to present and which we have met in the last hour. As we neared that picturesque spot on the Illinois side of the Ohio, known as “Cave-in-Rock,” we were hailed by a woman and her young daughter. The boat “rounded to” and made the landing and they came on board—a tall, thin worn woman in a tattered suit, with a good, but inexpressibly sad face, who wished to tell us that a package which we had left for her at the town on our way down had never reached her. She was a widow—Mrs. Plew—whose husband, a good river pilot, had died from overwork on a hard trip to New Orleans in the floods of the Mississippi two years before, leaving her with six children dependent upon her, the eldest a lad in his “teens,” the youngest a little baby girl. They owned their home, just on the brink of the river, a little “farm” of two or three acres, two horses, three cows, thirty hogs and a half hundred fowls, and in spite of the bereavement they had gone on bravely, winning the esteem and commendation of all who knew them for thrift and honest endeavor. Last year the floods came heavily upon them, driving them from their home, and the two horses were lost. Next the cholera came among the hogs and all but three died. Still they worked on and held the home. This spring came the third flood. The water climbed up the bank, crept in at the door and filled the lower story of the house. They had nowhere to remove their household goods, and stored them in the garret carefully packed and went out to find a shelter in an old log house near by, used for a corn crib. Day by day they watched the house, hailed passing boats for the news of the rise and fall of the water above, always trusting the house would stand—“and it would,” the mother said “(for it was a good, strong house), but for the storm.” The wind came and the terrible gale that swept the valley like a tornado, with the water at its height, leveling whole towns, descended and beat upon that house and it fell. In the morning there was no house there and the waves in their fury rushed madly on. Then these little children “stood and wept on the banks of the river,” and the desolation and fear in the careful mother’s heart, none but herself and her God can know.

They lived in the corn-crib, and it was from it they came to hail us as we passed to-day. Something had been told us of them on our downward trip, and a package had been left them at “Cave-in-Rock,” which they had not received. We went over shoe-tops in mud to their rude home, to find it one room of logs, an old stone chimney, with a cheerful fire of drift-wood and a clean hearth, two wrecks of beds, a table, and two chairs, which some kind neighbor had loaned. The Government boats had left them rations. There was an air of thrift, even in their desolation, a plank walk was laid about the door, the floor was cleanly swept, and the twenty-five surviving hens, for an equal number was lost in the storm, clucked and craiked comfortably about the door, and there were two and a half dozen fresh eggs to sell us at a higher rate than paid in town. We stood, as we had done so many scores of times during the last few weeks, and looked this pitiful scene in the face. There was misfortune, poverty, sorrow, want, loneliness, dread of future, but fortitude, courage, integrity and honest thrift.

“Would she like to return to the childhood home in Indiana?” we asked the mother, for we would help them go.

“No,” she said tenderly. “My husband lived and died here. He was buried here, and I would not like to go away and leave him alone. It won’t be very long, and it is a comfort to the children to be able to visit his grave. No, I reckon we will stay here, and out of the wreck of the old house which sticks up out of the mud, we will put another little hut, higher up in the bank out of the way of the floods, and if it is only a hut, it will be a home for us and we will get into it.”

There were no dry eyes, but very still hearts, while we listened to this sorrowful but brave little speech, made with a voice full of tears.

Our thoughtful field agent, Dr. Hubbell, was the first to speak.

“Here are six children,” he said with an inquiring glance at me.

No response was needed. The thing was done. We told the mother the story of the “Little Six” of Waterford, and asked her if that money with enough more to make up one hundred dollars would help her to get up her house? It was her turn to be speechless. At length with a struggling, choking voice she managed to say—“God knows how much it would be to me. Yes, with my good boys I can do it, and do it well.”

We put in her hands a check for this sum, and directed from the boat clean boxes of clothing and bedding, to help restore the household, when the house shall have been completed.

Before we left her, we asked if she would name her house when it would be done. She thought a second and caught the idea.

“Yes,” she replied quickly, with a really winsome smile on that worn and weary face, “yes, I shall name it ‘The Little Six.’”

And so, dear Mr. Camp, will you kindly tell those brave little philanthropic dramatists, that they are to have a house down on the banks of the great rolling river, and that one day, I think, will come a letter to tell them that another six children are nightly praying God to bless them for the home that will shelter them from the floods and the storms.

Sincerely and cordially yours,

Clara Barton.

In reply the following letters were received:

Waterford, Pa., March 25, 1884.

M.E. Camp, Editor of Erie Dispatch:

Dear Sir: The “Little Six” met yesterday and wrote the accompanying letter, which they would like to have you forward to Miss Clara Barton. They wish me to thank you for sending them copies of your paper containing Miss Barton’s beautiful letter to them. If you or Miss Barton ever had any doubts in regard to a child’s appreciation of favors shown, I wish you could have seen those bright, happy faces as they gave three cheers for “ye editor” and three times three for Miss Clara Barton and the “Home of the Little Six” on the banks of the Ohio.

Mrs. Loyd Benson, Committee.

Waterford, March 24, 1884.

Dear Miss Barton:

We read your nice letter in the Dispatch, and we would like very much to see that house called “The Little Six,” and we are so glad we little six helped six other little children, and we thank you for going to so much trouble in putting our money just where we would have put it ourselves.

Sometime again when you want money to help you in your good work, call on the “Little Six.”

Joe Farrar, twelve years old.

Florence Howe, eleven years old.

Mary Barton, eleven years old.

Reed White, eleven years old.

Bertie Ensworth, ten years old.

Lloyd Barton, seven years old.

It could not fail to have been a satisfaction to me to know that I had done my work as they would have “done it themselves.”

As long as we remained on the river this family was occasionally visited by our boat. On one occasion a strong flagstaff twenty feet in length was taken and firmly set upon the bank near where they would place their house. Its well-lettered cross board at the top showed “Little Six Red Cross Landing,” and this point has remained a landing on the Ohio River probably unto this day.

During this trip on the upper Ohio, which was even yet scarcely safe for running at night, we had, after a hard day’s work, found a cove and tied our boat for the night. It was a rather sequestered spot, and the appearance of a full-size river steamer, halting for the night on one of its banks, attracted the attention of the few people residing there, and at dusk a body of five or six men came to the boat to ask if we were in trouble that we stopped there, and if there were anything they could do for us. We quieted their kindly apprehensions and invited them on board. The lights revealed a condition of personal poverty which should have more naturally asked help than offered it. On the entire trip with its thousands of miles, among white and black, we had never seen such evidences of destitution. They scarcely could have decently gone among civilized people, and yet as they spoke, there was no lack of sense. On the contrary, they seemed in many ways to be men of the world. Their language, while provincial, had nothing uncommon in it, and altogether they were a study to us. We gave them some supper, and while eating, learned the facts of their lives.

Either by blood or marriage, they were all relatives, consisting of six families, making in all about thirty people. They all lived together—such living as it was—and there seemed to be among them a perfectly good understanding. They had always lived on the river banks, probably more on the river than off of it. They were not farmers, never planted or raised anything, subsisting mainly upon fish and the floating drift to be picked up. Thus, they clung to the river like the muskrat and beaver, and were washed out with every flood. Sixteen of them at that time were living under some slanting boards.

After supper our men quietly invited them to the clothing department on the stern of the ship, and exchanged their garments.

Thus we got hold of these people, clothed, fed, encouraged and advised them, got them into houses, furnished them, formed them into a little colony, put up a landing named, at their own request, “Red Cross Big Six,” and took care of the women and children. Every man foreswore his drink, his cards and his betting, and went to work for the first time in his life.

We found a faithful merchant to stand by, advise them and report to us. From year to year we have helped to keep them clothed. The children immediately went to school, and the next year for the first time they planted land and raised their own food; and the growing thrift and strange prosperity of this body of heretofore vagrants began after a time to excite the envy of its neighbors, who thought they were getting on better than themselves, and their merchant friend had to repel it.

Only one or two of them could write a little, but they made good use of their accomplishment as far as possessed. One day I received a letter from one of their savants, Charley Hunter, out of which among much that was encouraging, with considerable labor, I deciphered the following: “We are all doing well. We don’t drink or play cards no more. I got the flannel undershirts and drawers and the medicine you sent me. My rhumatis is better. I know now I have got two friends; one is you and the other is God.”

I was sorry he named me first; I do not think he intended it. I might add that two years later these people had united with the church; that the children were all in school, and that one daughter was being educated for a teacher.

On the lower Ohio one of the villages most wrecked by the waters and the cyclone was Smithland, an old aristocratic borough on the Kentucky side. They had no coal, and we supplied them as we went down. On our return we lowered steam and threw out our landing prow opposite the town. The whistle of the “Throop” was as welcome to their ears as the flag to their eyes.

It was a bright, clear, spring morning and Sunday. In an hour the entire little hamlet of people stood on our decks; only four, they said, were left at home, and these sick and infirm. They had selected their lawyer to speak their thanks, and they had chosen well. No words will ever do justice to the volume of native eloquence which seemed to roll unbidden from his lips. We listened in mute surprise until he finished with these sentences:

At noon on that day we were in the blackness of despair. The whole village in the power of the demon of waters, hemmed in by sleet and ice, without fire enough to cook its little food. When the bell struck nine that night, there were seventy-five families on their knees before their blazing grates, thanking God for fire and light, and praying blessings on the phantom ship with the unknown device that had come as silently as the snow, they knew not whence, and gone, they knew not whither.

A few days later we finished the voyage of relief, having covered the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Cairo and back twice, and the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans and return, occupying four months’ time on the rivers, in our own chartered boats, finishing at Pittsburg and taking rail for Washington on the first of July, having traveled over eight thousand miles, and distributed in relief, of money and estimated material, $175,000.

The government had expended an appropriation from the treasury on the same waters of $150,000 in money, and distributed it well. The difference was that ours was not appropriated; we gathered it as we used it.