One day Sam Fox came to me and asked me to use my influence with the Cannelton Company to get him employment at their works.
“Sam,” I replied, “I can’t do it. It is only three weeks now, when you were employed at another place, that you tried to stuff the overseer into the furnace, and if the men had not prevented, you would have burned him up alive.”
“Yes,” replied Sam, “but he had called me a -- son --- of ---.”
“Very good,” I answered; “and if he had called me that, I should have done the same. But I don’t think, if I had done it, I should ever have expected to be employed again on another furnace. You see, Samuel, my son, that these Northern men have very queer notions—very.”
Sam was quite convinced.
At Cincinnati a trifling but droll incident occurred. I do not set myself up for a judge of wines, but I have naturally a delicate sense of smell or flair, though not the extraordinary degree in which my brother possessed it, who never drank wine at all. He was the first person who ever, in printed articles or in lectures, insisted that South New Jersey was suitable for wine-growing. At the hotel Sandford asked me if I could tell any wine by the taste. I replied No, but I would try; so they gave me a glass of some kind, and I said that honestly I could only declare that I should say it was Portugal common country wine, but I must be wrong. Then Sandford showed the bottle, and the label declared it to be grown in Ohio. The next day he came to me and said, “I believe that after all you know a great deal about wine. I told the landlord what you said, and he laughed, arid said, ‘I had not the American wine which you called for, and so I
gave you a cheap but unusual Portuguese wine.’” This wine is neither white nor red, and tastes like sherry and Burgundy mixed.
At Cincinnati, Sandford proposed that we should return by way of Detroit and Niagara. I objected to the expense, but he, who knew every route and rate by heart, explained to me that, owing to the competition in railway rates, it would only cost me six shillings ($1.50) more, plus $2.50 (ten shillings) from New York to Philadelphia. So we departed. In Detroit I called on my cousin, Benjamin Stimson (the S. of “Two Years before the Mast”), and found him a prominent citizen. So, skirting along southern Canada, we got to Niagara, and thence to Albany and down the Hudson to New York, and so on to Philadelphia.
It seems to me now that at this time all trace of my former life and self had vanished. I seemed to be only prompt to the saddle, canoe-paddle, revolver, steamboat, and railroad. My wife said that after this and other periods of Western travel I was always for three weeks as wild as an Indian, and so I most truly and unaffectedly was. I did not act in a foolish or disorderly manner at all, but Tennessee and Elk River were in me. Robert Hunt and Sam Fox and many more had expressed their amazement at the amount of extremely familiar and congenial nature which they had found in me, and they were quite right. Sam and Goshorn declared that I was the only Northern man whom they had ever known who ever learned to paddle a dug-out correctly; but as I was obliged to do this sometimes for fifteen hours a day nolens volens, it is not remarkable that I became an expert.
As regards the real unaffected feeling of wildness born to savage nature, life, and association, it is absolutely as different from all civilised feeling whatever as bird from fish; and it very rarely happens that an educated man ever knows what it is. What there is of it in me which Indians recognise is, I believe, entirely due to hereditary endowment.