From the West to the West

by Abigail Scott Duniway

The primitive cabin homes of the borderers of no Western settlement were large enough to hold the crowds that were invariably bidden to a neighborhood merrymaking. The ceremonies of this occasion, including a most sumptuous feast, were held on the sloping green beneath an overtopping elm, which, rising high above its fellows, made a noted landmark for a circumference of many miles.

People who live apart from markets, in fertile regions where the very forests drop richness, subsist literally on the fat of the land. Having no sale for their surplus products, they feast upon them in the most prodigal way. Although through gormandizing they beget malaria, not to say dyspepsia and rheumatic ails, they boast of “living well”; and the sympathy they bestow upon the city denizen who in his wanderings sometimes feasts at their hospitable boards, and praises without stint their prodigal display of viands, is often more sincere than wise.

The lands of the early settlers, with whom these chronicles have to deal, had been surrounded, as soon as possible after occupancy, with substantial rail fences, laid in zigzag fashion along dividing lines, marking the boundaries between neighbors who lived at peace with each other and with all the world. These fences, built to a sufficient height to discourage all attempts at trespass by man or beast, were securely staked at the corners, and weighted with heavy top rails, or “riders,” so stanchly placed that many miles of such enclosures remain to this day, long surviving the brawny hands that felled the trees and split the rails. In their mute eloquence they reveal the lasting qualities of the hardwood timber that abounded in the many and beautiful groves which flourished in the prairie States in the early part of the nineteenth century, when Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri comprised all that was generally known as the West.

Much of the primitive glory of these diversified landscapes departed long ago with the trees. The “Hook-and-Eye Dutch,” as the thrifty followers of ancient Ohm are called by their American neighbors (with whom they do not assimilate), are rapidly replacing the old-time maple and black walnut fences with the modern barbed-wire horror; they are selling off the historical rails, stakes and riders and all, to the equally thrifty and not a whit more sentimental timber-dealers of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids, to be manufactured into high-grade lumber, which is destined to find lodgment as costly furniture in the palatial homes, gilded churches, great club-houses, and mammoth modern hostelries that abound on the shores of Lake Michigan, Massachusetts Bay, Manhattan Island, and Long Island Sound. But no vandalism yet invented by man can wholly despoil the rolling lands of the middle West of their beauty, nor rob Mother Nature of her power to rehabilitate them with the living green of cultivated loveliness.

Original settlers of the border-lands had little time and less opportunity for the observation of the beautiful in art or nature. Their lives were spent in toil, which blunted many of the finer sensibilities of a more leisurely existence. The hardy huntsman who spent his only hours of relaxation in chasing the wild game, and the weary mother who scarcely ever left her wheel or loom and shuttle by the light of day, except to bake her brain before a great open fire while preparing food, or to nurse to sleep the future lawmakers of a coming world-round republic, were alike too busy to ponder deeply the far-reaching possibilities of the lives they led.

Such men of renown as Lincoln, Douglas, Baker, Grant, Logan, and Oglesby were evolved from environments similar to these, as were also the numerous adventurous borderers not known to fame (many of whom are yet living) who crossed the continent with ox teams, and whose patient and enduring wives nursed the future statesmen of a coming West in fear and trembling, as they protected their camps from the depredations of the wily Indian or the frenzy of the desert’s storms.

Rail-making in the middle West was long a diversion and an art. The destruction of the hardwood timber, which if spared till to-day would be almost priceless, could not have been prevented, even if this commercial fact had been foreseen. The urgent need of fuel, shelter, bridges, public buildings, and fences allowed no consideration for future values to intervene and save the trees.

In times of a temporary lull in a season’s activities, when, for a wonder, there were days together that the stroke of the woodman’s ax was not heard and the music of the cross-cut saw had ceased, the settler would take advantage of the interim to draw a bead with unerring aim upon the eye of a squirrel in a treetop, or bring down a wild turkey from its covert in the lower branches; or, if favored by a fall of virgin snow, it would be his delight to track the wild deer, and drag it home as a trophy of his marksmanship,—an earnest of the feast in which all his neighbors were invited to partake.

Then, too, there were the merrymakings of the border. What modern banquet can equal the festive board at which a genial hostess, in a homespun cotton or linsey-woolsey gown, presided over her own stuffed turkey, huge corn-pone, and wild paw-paw preserves? What array of glittering china, gleaming cut-glass, or burnished silver, can give the jaded appetite of the blasé reveller of to-day the enjoyment of a home-set table, laden with the best and sweetest “salt-rising” bread spread thick with golden butter, fresh from the old-fashioned churn? The freshest of meats and fish regularly graced the well-laden board, in localities where the modern chef was unknown, where ice-cream was unheard of, and terrapin sauce and lobster salad found no place. House-raisings, log-rollings, barn-raisings, quilting bees, weddings, christenings, and even funerals, were times of feasting, though these last were divested of the gayety, but not of the gossip, that at other times abounded; and the sympathetic aid of an entire neighborhood was always voluntarily extended to any house of mourning. There were few if any wage-earners, the accommodating method of exchanging work among neighbors being generally in vogue.