It taught a great moral lesson and set a great example to the world, not merely of bravery and self-denial—that other nations have shown and are showing now—it showed to the world the greatest example of speedy reconciliation after the war. Had Lincoln lived through the painful days of reconstruction, the bitterness and hatred caused by the war would have vanished even sooner. But even with the Great Captain passed away, the best men North and South set earnestly to work, as soon as the war was over, to bind up and heal the nation’s wounds.
A few years ago the Veterans in Blue and the Veterans in Grey met in a friendly reunion on the once blood-drenched field of Gettysburg. It was the greatest example of reconciliation the world has ever seen, an example, a living sermon, which a war-torn world will sadly need in the near future.
Barker and his boys did not remain long in Vicksburg. As Jacob of old was persuaded by his sons to travel to distant Egypt, so old Seth Ferguson was led by his sons to the balmy fertile prairies of the Sky-tinted River.
In peace and happy reunion the Ferguson family with Barker and Tatanka as guides, traveled up the Mississippi River by steamboat, and the boys never tired of pointing out to their parents the spots where they had camped and the cliffs and bluffs they had climbed.
In the bottoms of the upper river, great masses of asters fringed the brown sandbars. When the party reached Fort Ridgely, the Minnesota prairie was ablaze with goldenrod, sunflowers, and purple stars, and the blackbirds were gathering in great flocks on the marshes in anticipation of feasting on the crops of wild rice, for which they have a great liking.
After having spent almost a year on the Great River, the lads found their weather-beaten shanty spared by the furors of war, but the wild prairie had already begun to reclaim its own, as if impatient of human intrusion.
In the boys’ garden patch, concealed by great rag-weeds and rich-scented milkweeds, a woodchuck had dug his den. A jungle of velvet-leaved false sunflowers almost barred the way to the cabin door. In a corner under the boys’ bunk, a family of chipmunks had established themselves and with mumpsy-looking cheeks were racing back and forth laying in a store of wild hazelnuts and long rice-like grains of speargrass.
“You are lucky,” Tatanka remarked, “that Manka, the skunk, has not made his tunnels under your house. He would be hard to move.”
Seth Ferguson filed on the claim on which the boys had lived.
The woodchuck was allowed possession of the garden-patch until next spring, but Bill and Tim harvested an abundant crop of the wild fruit of the land—butternuts, hazelnuts, wild grapes, chokeberries and rich sweet plums.