There was some splendid birch and sassafras beer made in many families, and though there was a good deal of whiskey used, numbers of the best men frowned on habitual drinking.
One of the great amusements on Saturday afternoon was horse racing. This had to be outside the town. It created immense enthusiasm. Several of the young Indians owned fine horses and were proud enough of them. Dan entered his beautiful Chita, and after some training and several attempts she won a race, to his great delight. We had gone out, and I must say my inmost heart was stirred at the sight, but I had not thought the laurel wreath would descend to us. It was a perfect ovation. And that night he came home much the worse for drinking, and he and father had quite a desperate quarrel.
"I should like to shoot the mare!" declared father.
"He'd move heaven and earth to get another," and mother put her arm over father's shoulder. "Dan is a pretty good boy in the main, and I'm hoping he will get a wife some day to steady him."
"Polly Morrison!" flung out father scornfully.
"No, I hope it won't be Polly Morrison."
Polly was a slim, lithe slip of a girl that no two people ever agreed about. Her skin was of lily fairness no matter what she did. Her eyes were large, and although glorious does not seem the proper adjective, that is what they were. Brown, with golden lights that could flash and laugh and turn so tender, you were sure they were in tears. She had a rather wide mouth, full of curves and dimples. The one thing that laid her open to criticism was her hair. Somehow red hair was not in high favor, and though her admirers quarrelled about it, red it surely was, the deep rich sort of mahogany red, with a gloss as if the sun shone upon it. There were great waves from the white parting to the coil which covered the back of her head. Occasionally she shook it down, and it was a glistening cloud about her, looking like something alive. She was a harum-scarum sort of a girl, could row equal to a man, ride bareback, run races, dance like a creature bewitched, go to church on Sunday and look as demure as a saint.
That summer Chicago was all astir. It didn't matter to anybody whether Martin Van Buren was President or not. There were processions of grain coming in, ox loads, precursors of trains that no one dreamed of then, bringing it in sheets and blankets, begged of the housewives when bags were filled, and there was the crude elevator, the grain hoisted by hand with block and tackle, and dumped into the hold of the big Osceola. Twenty-nine hundred bushels to be sent to Black Rock, New York State, the beginning of the mighty contribution that was to enrich not only the city, but the east as well, and in future times to stand between the world and starvation.
Crowds went to see it. How proud everybody was. John Gaynor rubbed his hands in glee.
"What did I tell you!" he kept saying in triumph. "This will sometime be the great city of the world, and those blasted fools at Washington can't see that we need anything, not even to have the canal finished. Well, we will surprise them yet."