Читать книгу The Minute Man on the Frontier - William George Puddefoot - Страница 8

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It was in the spring of 1859 that I first saw the frontier. Our way was over the New York Central, very little of which had two tracks. I have a very vivid recollection of the worm fences, the log houses, and the great forests that we passed on our way to Upper Canada. I remember the hunters coming towards the train with their moccasons on and the bucks slung over their shoulders. I have since that time seen many men who were the first to cut a tree in this county or that town. There were about forty thousand miles of railway in the whole land at that date, against nearly two hundred thousand miles to-day. Cities which are now the capitals of States were the feeding-ground of buffalo; wolves and black bears had their dens where to-day we can see a greater miracle in stone than Cheops; i.e., a stone State House built inside the appropriation! Then six miles of travel on the new roads smashed more china than three thousand miles by sea and rail. The little towns were but openings in a forest that extended for hundreds of miles. The best house in the village without a cellar; roots were kept in pits. Houses could be rented for two dollars per month, where to-day they are twelve dollars. Pork was two dollars a hundred; beef by the quarter, two and one-half cents a pound; potatoes, fifteen cents a bushel. Men received seventy-five cents a day for working on the railroad. Cord-wood was two dollars a cord; and you could get it cut, split, and piled for fifty cents a cord. Men wore stogy boots, generally with one leg of the trousers outside and one in. Blue denham was the prevailing suit for workingmen. The shoemaker cut his shoes, and they were sent out to be bound by women. The women wore spring-heeled shoes, print dresses, and huge sunbonnets; and in the summer-time the settlers went barefooted. The roads were simply indescribable. When a tree fell, it was cut off within an inch of the ruts; the wagon would sink to the hubs, and need prying out with poles; harnesses were never cleaned, and boot-blacking had no sale. But the schoolhouse was in every township. In the older settlements could be seen the log hut in which the young couple started housekeeping, then a log house of more pretentious size; the frame-house which followed, and a fine brick house where the family now lived, showing the rapid progress made.

This was in western Canada. Toronto was separated from Yorkville, but was a busy, substantial city. I remember the stores being closed when Lincoln was buried, and black bunting hung along the principal streets. I remember, too, the men who were loudest in their curses at the government and against Lincoln, how the tears came to their eyes, and how that event brought them to their senses. Most of them were shoemakers from New England.

In 1873 I crossed into Michigan with my family. Even as late as that the greater part of northern Michigan, and especially the upper peninsula, was terra incognita to most of the people of that State. The railroads stopped at a long distance this side the Straits of Mackinaw. The lumbermen had but skimmed the best of the trees; and, with the exception of a few isolated settlements on the lakes and up the larger rivers, it was an unbroken wilderness, abounding in fish, deer, bears, wolves, and wild-cats; in fact, a hunter's paradise, as it is even to this day.

But with the extension of the railways to the Straits of Mackinaw, and the opening of new lines to the north into the iron mines of Menominee to the Gogebic range, the great copper mines of the Keweenaw peninsula, and the ever-increasing traffic of the lakes, the changes were simply marvellous. Some things I shall say will seem paradoxical, but they are nevertheless true to life.

The greater parts of southern Michigan and southern Wisconsin were settled by people from New York State; and long before the northern parts of Michigan and Wisconsin were opened up, new States had risen in the West, and the tide of immigration swept past towards new frontiers, leaving vast frontiers behind them. Sometimes a few stray men with money at their command would pierce the country and form a settlement, as in the case of Traverse City. Here for years the mail was brought by the Indians on dog-sledges in the winter. It took eight days to reach Grand Rapids on snow-shoes. It is four hundred miles by water to Chicago. Sometimes the winters were so long that the provisions had to be dealt out very sparingly; but all the time the little colony was growing, and when at last the railroads reached it, the traveller, after riding for miles through virgin forests, would come upon a little city of four thousand people, with good churches, fine schools, and one store that cost one hundred thousand dollars to build.

If it chanced to be summer-time he would see the tepees of the Indians along the bay, and two blocks back civilized homes with all the conveniences and luxuries of modern life. Here a huge canoe made of a single log, and there a mammoth steamer with all the elegances of an ocean-liner. Should he go on board of one of the steamers coasting around the lakes with supplies, he would pass great bays with lovely islands, and steam within a stone's throw of a comparatively rare bird, the great northern diver, and suddenly find himself near a wharf with a village in sight—a great saw-mill cutting its hundreds of thousands of feet of lumber a day; and near by, Indian graves with the food still fresh inside, and a tame deer with a collar and bell around its neck trotting around the streets.

INDIAN CAMP, GRAND TRAVERSE BAY, MICHIGAN. Page 16.

He can sit and fish for trout on his doorstep that borders the little stream, or he can get on the company's locomotive and run twenty miles back into the woods and see the coveys of partridges rising in clouds, and here and there a timid doe and her fawn, whose curiosity is greater than their fears, until the whistle blows, and they are off like a shot into the deep forest, near where the black bear is munching raspberries in a ten-thousand-acre patch, while millions of bushels of whortleberries will waste for lack of pickers. He can sit on a point of an inland lake and catch minnows on one side, and pull up black bass on the other; and if a "tenderfoot" he will bring home as much as he can carry, expecting to be praised for his skill. He is mortified at the request to please bury them. He will ride over ground that less than fifteen years ago could be bought for a song and to-day produces millions, and is dotted with towns and huge furnaces glowing night and day.

If in the older settled parts, he will ride through cornfields whose tassels are up to the car windows, where the original settler paddled his skiff and caught pickerel and the ague at the same time, and who is still alive to tell the story. He can talk with a man who knew every white man by name when he first went there, and remembers the Indian peeping in through his log-cabin window, but whose grandchildren have graduated from a university with twenty-seven hundred students, where he helped build the log schoolhouse; who remembers when he had to send miles for salt, and yet was living over a bed of it big enough to salt the world down.

He had nothing but York State pumpkins and wild cranberries for his Thanksgiving dinner, with salt pork for turkey; and he lives to-day in one of the great fruit belts of the world, and ships his turkeys by the ton to the East; and to-day in the North the same experience is going on. Places where the mention of an apple makes the teeth water, and where you can still see them come wrapped in tissue paper like oranges, and yet, paradoxical as it may seem, you can enter a lumber-camp and find the men regaled on roast chicken and eating cucumbers before the seed is sown in that part of the country.

Here are farms worth over eighty thousand dollars, which but a few years ago were entered by the homesteader who had to live on potatoes and salt, and cut wild hay in summer, and draw it to town on a cedar jumper, in order to get flour for his hungry children. Here on an island are men living who used to leave their farming to see the one steamer unload and load, or watch a schooner drawn up over the Rapids, and who now see sweeping by their farms a procession of craft whose tonnage is greater than all the ocean ports of the country.

I have sat on the deck of a little steamer and drawn pictures for the Indians, who took them and marched off with the smile of a schoolboy getting a prize chromo, and in less than five years from that time I have at the same place sat down in a hotel lighted with electricity, and a menu equal to any in the country, with a bronze portrait of General Grant embossed on the top. Within ten years I have preached, with an Indian chief for an interpreter, in a log house in which a half-brother of Riel of North-Western fame was a hearer, where to-day there are self-supporting churches and flourishing schools.

Less than sixteen years ago I stopped at the end of the Michigan Central Railway, northern division; every lot was filled with stumps. A school was being rapidly built, while the church had a lot only. The next time I visited the town it had fine churches and schools. The hotel had a beautiful conservatory filled with choice flowers. I could take my train, pass on over the Straits of Mackinaw, on by rail again, and clear to the Pacific, with sleeper and dining-car attached.

VIEW NEAR PETOSKEY, MICHIGAN. Page 20.

But once leave your railway, and soon you can get to settlements twenty years old which saw the first buggy last year come into the clearings. Here are deep forests where the preacher on his way home from church meets the panther and the wild-cat, and where as yet he must ford the rivers and build his church, the first in nine thousand square miles.