AT THE DIVIDING OF THE WAYS.
The military road, of which I have just spoken, was constructed by the United States Government to connect the military posts of the Far West with one another. Beginning at Fort Leavenworth, on the Missouri River, it passed through Fort Riley at the junction of the forks of the Kaw, and then, still keeping up the north side of the Republican Fork, went on to Fort Kearney, still farther west, then to Fort Laramie, which in those days was so far on the frontier of our country that few people ever saw it except military men and the emigrants to California. At the time of which I am writing, there had been a very heavy emigration to California, and companies of emigrants, bound to the Golden Land, still occasionally passed along the great military road.
Interlacing this highway were innumerable trails and wagon-tracks, the traces of the great migration to the Eldorado of the Pacific; and here and there were the narrow trails made by Indians on their hunting expeditions and warlike excursions. Roads, such as our emigrants had been accustomed to in 73 Illinois, there were none. First came the faint traces of human feet and of unshod horses and ponies; then the well-defined trail of hunters, trappers, and Indians; then the wagon-track of the military trains, which, in course of time, were smoothed and formed into the military road kept in repair by the United States Government.
Following this road, the Dixon emigrants came upon the broad, bright, and shallow stream of the Big Blue. Fording this, they drove into the rough, new settlement of Manhattan, lately built at the junction of the Blue and the Kaw rivers.
It was a beautiful May day when the travellers entered Manhattan. It was an active and a promising town. Some attempt at the laying out of streets had been made. A long, low building, occupied as a hotel, was actually painted, and on some of the shanties and rude huts of the newly arrived settlers were signs giving notice of hardware, groceries, and other commodities for sale within. On one structure, partly made of sawed boards and partly of canvas, was painted in sprawling letters, “Counsellor at Law.”
“You’ll find those fellows out in the Indian country,” grimly remarked one of the settlers, as the party surveyed this evidence of an advancing civilization.
There was a big steam saw-mill hard by the town, and the chief industry of Manhattan seemed to be the buying and selling of lumber and hardware, 74 and the surveying of land. Mounted men, carrying the tools and instruments of the surveyor, galloped about. Few wheeled vehicles except the ox-carts of emigrants were to be seen anywhere, and the general aspect of the place was that of feverish activity. Along the banks of the two streams were camped parties of the latest comers, many of whom had brought their wives and children with them. Parties made up of men only seldom came as far west as this. They pitched their tents nearer the Missouri, where the fight for freedom raged most hotly. A few companies of men did reach the westernmost edge of the new settlements, and the Manhattan Company was one of these.
The three boys from Illinois were absorbed with wonder as they strolled around the new town, taking in the novel sights, as they would if they had been in a great city, instead of a mushroom town that had arisen in a night. During their journey from Libertyville to Manhattan, the Dixon emigrants had lost sight of John Clark, of Woburn; he had hurried on ahead after his rough experience with the election guardians of Libertyville. The boys were wondering if he had reached Manhattan.
“Hullo! There he is now, with all his family around him,” said Charlie. “He’s got here before us, and can tell all about the lay of the land to the west of us, I dare say.”
“I have about made up my mind to squat on 75 Hunter’s Creek,” said Clark, when the boys had saluted him. “Pretty good land on Hunter’s, so I am told; no neighbors, and the land has been surveyed off by the Government surveyors. Hunter’s Creek? Well, that’s about six miles above the fort. It makes into the Republican, and, so they tell me, there’s plenty of wood along the creek, and a good lot of oak and hickory not far off. Timber is what we all want, you know.”
As for Bartlett, who had come out from New England with the Clarks, he was inclined to go to the lower side of the Republican Fork, taking to the Smoky Hill country. That was the destination of the Jenness party, who had passed the Dixon boys when they were camped after their upset in the creek, several days before. This would leave the Clarks––John and his wife and two children, and his brother Jotham, and Jotham’s boy, Pelatiah––to make a settlement by themselves on Hunter’s Creek.
Which way were the Dixon boys going? Charlie, the spokesman of the party because he was the eldest, did not know. His father and uncle were out prospecting among the campers now. Sandy was sure that they would go up the Republican Fork. His father had met one of the settlers from that region, and had been very favorably impressed with his report. This Republican Fork man was an Arkansas man, but “a good fellow,” so Sandy said. To be a good fellow, according to Sandy’s 76 way of putting things, was to be worthy of all confidence and esteem.
Mr. Bryant thought that as there were growing rumors of troublesome Indians, it would be better to take the southern or Smoky Hill route; the bulk of the settlers were going that way, and where there were large numbers there would be safety. While the lads were talking with the Clarks, Bryant and his brother-in-law came up, and, after greeting their former acquaintance and ascertaining whither he was bound, Mr. Howell told the boys that they had been discussing the advantages of the two routes with Younkins, the settler from Republican Fork, and had decided to go on to “the post,” as Fort Riley was generally called, and there decide which way they should go––to the right or to the left.
As to the Clarks, they were determined to take the trail for Hunter’s Creek that very day. Bartlett decided to go to the Smoky Hill country. He cast in his lot with a party of Western men, who had heard glowing reports of the fertility and beauty of the region lying along Solomon’s Fork, a tributary of the Smoky Hill. It was in this way that parties split up after they had entered the Promised Land.
Leaving the Clarks to hitch up their teams and part company with Bartlett, the Dixon party returned to their camp, left temporarily in the care of Younkins, who had come to Manhattan for a 77 few supplies, and who had offered to guide the others to a desirable place for settlement which he told them he had in mind for them. Younkins was a kindly and pleasant-faced man, simple in his speech and frontier-like in his manners. Sandy conceived a strong liking for him as soon as they met. The boy and the man were friends at once.
“Well, you see,” said Younkins, sitting down on the wagon-tongue, when the party had returned to their camp, “I have been thinking over-like the matter that we were talking about, and I have made up my mind-like that I sha’n’t move back to my claim on the south side of the Republican. I’m on the north side, you know, and my old claim on the south side will do just right for my brother Ben; he’s coming out in the fall. Now if you want to go up our way, you can have the cabin on that claim. There’s nobody living in it. It’s no great of a cabin, but it’s built of hewed timber, well chinked and comfortable-like. You can have it till Ben comes out, and I’m just a-keeping it for Ben, you know. P’raps he won’t want it, and if he doesn’t, why, then you and he can make some kind of a dicker-like, and you might stay on till you could do better.”
“That’s a very generous offer of Mr. Younkins’s, Charles,” said Mr. Howell to Bryant. “I don’t believe we could do better than take it up.”
“No, indeed,” burst in the impetuous Sandy. “Why, just think of it! A house already built!” 78
“Little boys should be seen, not heard,” said his elder brother, reprovingly. “Suppose you and I wait to see what the old folks have to say before we chip in with any remarks.”
“Oh, I know what Uncle Charlie will say,” replied the lad, undismayed. “He’ll say that the Smoky Hill road is the road to take. Say, Uncle Charlie, you see that Mr. Younkins here is willing to live all alone on the bank of the Republican Fork, without any neighbors at all. He isn’t afraid of Indians.”
Mr. Bryant smiled, and said that he was not afraid of Indians, but he thought that there might come a time when it would be desirable for a community to stand together as one man. “Are you a free-State man?” he asked Younkins. This was a home-thrust. Younkins came from a slave State; he was probably a pro-slavery man.
“I’m neither a free-State man nor yet a pro-slavery man,” he said, slowly, and with great deliberation. “I’m just for Younkins all the time. Fact is,” he continued, “where I came from most of us are pore whites. I never owned but one darky, and I had him from my grandfather. Ben and me, we sorter quarrelled-like over that darky. Ben, he thought he oughter had him, and I knowed my grandfather left him to me. So I sold him off, and the neighbors didn’t seem to like it. I don’t justly know why they didn’t like it; but they didn’t. Then Ben, he allowed that I had 79 better light out. So I lit out, and here I am. No, I’m no free-State man, and then ag’in, I’m no man for slavery. I’m just for Younkins. Solomon Younkins is my name.”
Bryant was very clearly prejudiced in favor of the settler from the Republican Fork by this speech; and yet he thought it best to move on to the fort that day and take the matter into consideration.
So he said that if Younkins would accept the hospitality of their tent, the Dixon party would be glad to have him pass the night with them. Younkins had a horse on which he had ridden down from his place, and with which he had intended to reach home that night. But, for the sake of inducing the new arrivals to go up into his part of the country, he was willing to stay.
“I should think you would be afraid to leave your wife and baby all alone there in the wilderness,” said Sandy, regarding his new friend with evident admiration. “No neighbor nearer than Hunter’s Creek, did you say? How far off is that?”
“Well, a matter of six miles-like,” replied Younkins. “It isn’t often that I do leave them alone over night; but then I have to once in a while. My old woman, she doesn’t mind it. She was sort of skeary-like when she first came into the country; but she’s got used to it. We don’t want any neighbors. If you folks come up to settle, you’ll 80 be on the other side of the river,” he said, with unsmiling candor. “That’s near enough––three or four miles, anyway.”
Fort Riley is about ten miles from Manhattan, at the forks of the Kaw. It was a long drive for one afternoon; but the settlers from Illinois camped on the edge of the military reservation that night. When the boys, curious to see what the fort was like, looked over the premises next morning, they were somewhat disappointed to find that the post was merely a quadrangle of buildings constructed of rough-hammered stone. A few frame houses were scattered about. One of these was the sutler’s store, just on the edge of the reservation. But, for the most part, the post consisted of two- or three-story buildings arranged in the form of a hollow square. These were barracks, officers’ quarters, and depots for the storage of military supplies and army equipments.
“Why, this is no fort!” said Oscar, contemptuously. “There isn’t even a stockade. What’s to prevent a band of Indians raiding through the whole place? I could take it myself, if I had men enough.”
His cousin Charlie laughed, and said: “Forts are not built out here nowadays to defend a garrison. The army men don’t propose to let the Indians get near enough to the post to threaten it. The fact is, I guess, this fort is only a depot-like, as our friend Younkins would say, for the 81 soldiers and for military stores. They don’t expect ever to be besieged here; but if there should happen to be trouble anywhere along the frontier, then the soldiers would be here, ready to fly out to the rescue, don’t you see?”
“Yes,” answered Sandy; “and when a part of the garrison had gone to the rescue, as you call it, another party of redskins would swoop down and gobble up the remnant left at the post.”
“If I were you, Master Sandy,” said his brother, “I wouldn’t worry about the soldiers. Uncle Sam built this fort, and there are lots of others like it. I don’t know for sure, but my impression is that Uncle Sam knows what is best for the use of the military and for the defence of the frontier. So let’s go and take a look at the sutler’s store. I want to buy some letter-paper.”
The sutler, in those days, was a very important person in the estimation of the soldiers of a frontier post. Under a license from the War Department of the Government, he kept a store in which was everything that the people at the post could possibly need. Crowded into the long building of the Fort Riley sutler were dry-goods, groceries, hardware, boots and shoes, window-glass, rope and twine, and even candy of a very poor sort. Hanging from the ceiling of this queer warehouse were sides of smoked meat, strings of onions, oilcloth suits, and other things that were designed for the comfort or convenience of the officers and 82 soldiers, and were not provided by the Government.
“I wonder what soldiers want of calico and ribbons,” whispered Sandy, with a suppressed giggle, as the three lads went prying about.
“Officers and soldiers have their wives and children here, you greeny,” said his brother, sharply. “Look out there and see ’em.”
And, sure enough, as Sandy’s eyes followed the direction of his brother’s, he saw two prettily dressed ladies and a group of children walking over the smooth turf that filled the square in the midst of the fort. It gave Sandy a homesick feeling, this sight of a home in the wilderness. Here were families of grown people and children, living apart from the rest of the world. They had been here long before the echo of civil strife in Kansas had reached the Eastern States, and before the first wave of emigration had touched the head-waters of the Kaw. Here they were, a community by themselves, uncaring, apparently, whether slavery was voted up or down. At least, some such thought as this flitted through Sandy’s mind as he looked out upon the leisurely life of the fort, just beginning to stir.
All along the outer margin of the reservation were grouped the camps of emigrants; not many of them, but enough to present a curious and picturesque sight. There were a few tents, but most of the emigrants slept in or under their 83 wagons. There were no women or children in these camps, and the hardy men had been so well seasoned by their past experiences, journeying to this far western part of the Territory, that they did not mind the exposure of sleeping on the ground and under the open skies. Soldiers from the fort, off duty and curious to hear the news from the outer world, came lounging around the camps and chatted with the emigrants in that cool, superior manner that marks the private soldier when he meets a civilian on equal footing, away from the haunts of men.
The boys regarded these uniformed military servants of the Government of the United States with great respect, and even with some awe. These, they thought to themselves, were the men who were there to fight Indians, to protect the border, and to keep back the rising tide of wild hostilities that might, if it were not for them, sweep down upon the feeble Territory and even inundate the whole Western country.
“Perhaps some of Black Hawk’s descendants are among the Indians on this very frontier,” said Oscar, impressively. “And these gold-laced chaps, with shoulder-straps on, are the Zack Taylors and the Robert Andersons who do the fighting,” added Charlie, with a laugh.
Making a few small purchases from the surly sutler of Fort Riley, and then canvassing with the emigrants around the reservation the question of 84 routes and locations, our friends passed the forenoon. The elders of the party had anxiously discussed the comparative merits of the Smoky Hill and the Republican Fork country and had finally yielded to the attractions of a cabin ready-built in Younkins’s neighborhood, with a garden patch attached, and had decided to go in that direction.
“This is simply bully!” said Sandy Howell, as the little caravan turned to the right and drove up the north bank of the Republican Fork.