COLONEL SHAYS
I dare say when you studied American history you read about Shays’ Rebellion, in Massachusetts, and duly learned that it was put down, and the instigators punished. But I am sure that you never knew, and never wondered, what became of Colonel Shays himself, of whom the history books say succinctly, “the leader himself, escaped.”
I have never seen in print anything about the latter part of his life beyond one or two scanty and inaccurate references in one or two out-of-date books of reference; but all the older people in our town were brought up on stories about him, for it was to the valley just over the mountain from us that he fled after his last defeat. And later on, as an old man, he lived for some years in our town, in a house still standing, and told many people what I am going to set down here.
At the time when he made his escape from the officers of the State in Massachusetts, Vermont was, quaintly enough, an independent republic, all by itself, and hence a sufficient refuge for men fleeing from the officers of any State in the Union. Furthermore it was still rather wild, sparsely settled, none too respectful of any authority, and distinctly sympathetic to strangers who came from the east, south, or west over the mountains on the run, with the manner of men escaping from sheriffs. Sheriffs were not popular persons in Vermont in 1787.
But all this did not seem to make it a safe enough refuge to the man with a price set on his head, the man who had risked everything on the boldest of enterprises, and had lost everything. He passed by the rough scattered little hamlets and went into a remote, narrow, dark, high valley, which is to this day a place where a man might hide for years and never be seen. Colonel Shays, traveling at night, on foot, through the forests, came down into the Sandgate valley through the Beartown notch, over the mountains, and not a soul knew that he had come.
He made his first camp, which was also his permanent and last one, since he was never disturbed, high up on a shoulder of the mountain, overlooking the trail for a great distance, and densely surrounded with a thick growth of pine trees. Very cautiously, making no noise, using the ax and knife which were his only tools, he put up a rough shelter, and building a fire only at night in a hollow where rocks masked its flame, began cooking some of the game he caught. He lived in this way, all alone for years and years. Game was abundant; like most men of that time he was an adroit trapper, a good pioneer, and knew how to smoke and preserve the flesh of animals and to save their skins. For the first year he did not dare to let any one know that a man was living there, and literally saw not one soul.
Then one day about a year after he began this life, a little boy going fishing saw a tall, strong, black-haired stranger standing in the trail and holding a large packet of furs. He told the child to take the packet and ask his father for a bushel of seed-corn and a bag of salt. He specified that the man who brought it was to leave it just where they then stood and go away without waiting.
The child’s father was a rough, half-civilized, good-natured trapper, who had had troubles of his own with unreasonable officers of the law in York State. When the child told his story, the father laughed knowingly, took the skins, got the seed-corn and the salt, left them in the place indicated, and kept a neighborly shut mouth. He could not read or write, had never heard of Shays’ Rebellion, and supposed the man in hiding to be in the same situation as himself. Living as he did, it seemed no awful fate to make one’s living out of the woods, and he thought little of the fact that he had a new neighbor.
After this, Colonel Shays began a little cultivation of the ground, in scattered places, hidden behind screens of thick trees, in a few natural clearings in the forest. He used to say that life was infinitely more tolerable to him after the addition to his diet of salt and cereals. After some months he risked a little more, and, buying them with furs worth forty times their value, he secured a few tools and some gunpowder. The transactions were always carried on through the child, the only one to see the fugitive.
Nothing has come down to me of what this terrible dead halt in mid-career, and this grim isolation from the world meant to the active, intelligent, ambitious man at the height of his powers. None of the old people who heard him talk seem to have asked him about this, or to have had any curiosity on the subject. Only the bare facts are known, that he lived thus for many years, till the little boy grew up, till his own hair turned gray and then white, till the few families in that valley were quite used to the knowledge that a queer, harmless old man was living up in the woods near the northern pass of the mountains, miles from any neighbor. Once in a great while, now, some one saw him—a boy fishing, a hunter far on the trail of a deer, or a group of women picking berries. He occasionally exchanged a few words with his neighbors at such times, but he had almost forgotten how to speak aloud. All the stories about him mention the rough, deep, hoarseness of his unused voice.
One day his nearest neighbor, meaning to do him a kindness, told him with a rough good-will that he might as well quit hiding now, “Whatever ’tis you done, ’tis so long past now! And up here ... nobody from your part of the country, wherever ’tis, would ever be coming up here. And if they did they wouldn’t know you. Why, your own mother wouldn’t know you in them clothes, and with that white beard.”
It is said that Colonel Shays on hearing this, drew back and looked down at himself with a strange air of astonishment.
Apparently the advice stuck in his mind, for, some weeks after this, he decided to risk it, and to make the trip to Cambridge, the nearest town to those mountain settlements. Early one morning the people of the Sandgate valley were astonished to see the old man going down the trail of the valley which led into the State road going to Cambridge. Well, that was something to talk about! He was going to town at last like anybody else.
Now, this happened a good many years after Shays’ Rebellion had failed, and the bitterness of the feeling about it had died down. Although Colonel Shays could not know this, most people had even forgotten all about him, and as for looking for him to arrest him, nobody would have dreamed of doing it. There were many other things in the world to think of by that time and although to himself Colonel Shays was still the dramatically hunted fugitive with every man’s hand against him, to other people he had begun to sink into the history-book paragraph, which he has since remained. His family and friends in Massachusetts had waited till the occasion seemed favorable, and then petitioned for his pardon, on the ground that he must be, if still living, an old man now, quite harmless, and that it would be only decent to let him come back to spend his last days in his own home; and if he were dead, his pardon would clear his family name, and straighten out certain complications about his property. At first they had not succeeded. People still remembered too vividly the treasonable attempt to overturn the authority of the State, only just established and none too strong. But by and by, the pertinacity of the petitioners wore out the fading hostility to his name. He was proclaimed pardoned, and notices were sent to all American newspapers informing him that he could now return. This had happened a year before Colonel Shays had started down to Cambridge, but you may be sure that at that period no newspapers found their way to the Sandgate valley.
After a year had gone by, and no sign came from the fugitive, people generally thought him dead. But a fellow-townsman who had known him well by sight and who, some years after his flight, had married his youngest sister, volunteered to try to spread the news more widely than by newspaper. There had been a faint notion among his kinspeople that he had fled to Vermont, although they had taken care to keep this to themselves as long as he was an outlaw, and had now almost forgotten about it. Acting on this notion, Shays’ brother-in-law took the long journey on horseback up into Vermont. He entered the state at Bennington and slowly worked his way north, branching off at every practicable road. But nowhere did he find any one who had ever heard of any such man as his wife’s brother. Colonel Shays had hidden himself only too well.
The Massachusetts man began to think his errand a futile one, and prepared to turn back. But on a chance he rode down to Cambridge, just over the New York line. Cambridge was the nearest town to a number of small valley settlements in Vermont. He would ask there if any one had seen or heard of the man he was seeking. He knew that men from the remote outlying settlements came to Cambridge to do their trading. He arrived rather late one evening and as he was no longer young, and very much tired by his long and fruitless journey, he slept that night in the Cambridge Inn.
For the rest of the story there are plenty of details, for Colonel Shays told over and over exactly what happened and just how he felt, and why he acted as he did. It seared deep into him, and to the end of his days, he always showed a consuming agitation in speaking of it.
He walked along the road, the first road he had seen since the night so many years ago when he had fled along the roads in Massachusetts. It seemed like iron to his buckskin-shod feet. He walked slowly for this and other reasons. Every house which came into view along the road brought him up short with a jerk like a frightened horse. The instinct to hide, to trust himself in no man’s sight, had deformed his whole nature so that the bold leader of men halted, trembling and white-faced, at the sight of an ordinary farm-house. He forced himself to go on, to pass those sleeping homes, but after he had passed each one with his silent, stealthy wood-dweller’s tread, he quickened his pace and looked fearfully over his shoulder, expecting to see men run out after him with warrants for his arrest.
By the time he approached Cambridge, the nervous strain was telling on him. He was wet with sweat, and as tired as though he had been four times over the mountains. Only a few people were abroad as it was the breakfast hour. Partly from the old fear of years, partly from the mere habit of total isolation, every strange face was startling to him. He felt his knees weak under him and sat down on a bench in front of the kitchen door of the Cambridge Inn to get his breath. He had been a man of powerful will and strong self-control or he never could have lived through those terrible years of being buried alive, and he now angrily told himself there was nothing to fear in this remote little hamlet, where everybody was used to the sight of men in buckskins coming down to trade their furs for gunpowder and salt. At the sight of all those human faces taking him back to the days of his human life, a deep yearning had come upon him to get back into the world of living men. He could have wept aloud and taken them into his arms like brothers. He was determined to master his tense nerves, to learn to move about among his fellow-men once more. In a moment, just a moment, he decided he would stand up and move casually over to the general store across the street where a lad was then unlocking the door. He would go in and make a purchase—the first in so many years!
He turned his head to glance into the kitchen of the Inn, and as he did so, the door opened, and a man came in, a traveler with a face familiar to him in spite of gray hair and wrinkles, a man he had known in Massachusetts, who knew him, and no friend of his, a man who had been on the other side in the Rebellion.
Colonel Shays’ heart gave a staggering leap. He caught at the door-jamb and shrank out of sight. He heard the other voice say, “I stepped in to ask if any of you know whether Colonel Shays was ever heard of in this....”
And then the old man, running madly for his life, fled back to his den in the woods.
A whole decade passed after this, before he happened to learn in a conversation overheard between two trappers, that for eleven priceless, irreplaceable years, he had been a free man.