Copper Streak Trail

by Eugene Manlove Rhodes

The hills send down a buttress to the north; against it the Susquehanna flows swift and straight for a little space, vainly chafing. Just where the high ridge breaks sharp and steep to the river's edge there is a grassy level, lulled by the sound of pleasant waters; there sleep the dead of Abingdon.

Here is a fair and noble prospect, which in Italy or in California had been world-famed; a beauty generous and gracious—valley, upland and hill and curving river. The hills are checkered to squares, cleared fields and green-black woods; inevitably the mind goes out to those who wrought here when the forest was unbroken, and so comes back to read on the headstones the names of the quiet dead: Hill, Barton, Clark, Green, Camp, Hunt, Catlin, Giles, Sherwood, Tracy, Jewett, Lane, Gibson, Holmes, Yates, Hopkins, Goodenow, Griswold, Steele. Something stirs at your hair-roots—these are the names of the English. A few sturdy Dutch names—Boyce, Steenburg, Van Lear—and a lonely French Mercereau; the rest are unmixed English.

Not unnaturally you look next for an Episcopalian Church, finding none in Abingdon; Abingdon is given over to fiery Dissenters—the Old-World word comes unbidden into your mouth. But you were not so far wrong; in prosperous Vesper, to westward, every one who pretends to be any one attends services at Saint Adalbert's, a church noted for its gracious and satisfying architecture. In Vesper the name of Henry VIII is revered and his example followed.

But the inquiring mind, seeking among the living bearers of these old names, suffers check and disillusion. There are no traditions. Their title deeds trace back to Coxe's Manor, Nichols Patent, the Barton Tract, the Flint Purchase, Boston Ten Townships; but in-dwellers of the land know nothing of who or why was Coxe, or where stood his Manor House; have no memory of the Bostonians.

In Vesper there are genealogists who might tell you such things; old records that might prove them; old families, enjoying wealth and distinction without perceptible cause, with others of the ruling caste who may have some knowledge of these matters. Such grants were not uncommon in the Duke of York, his Province. In that good duke's day, and later, following the pleasant fashion set by that Pope who divided his world equally between Spain and Portugal, valleys and mountains were tossed to supple courtiers by men named Charles, James, William, or George, kings by the grace of God; the goodly land, the common wealth and birth-right of the unborn, was granted in princedom parcels to king's favorites, king's minions, to favorites of king's minions, for services often enough unspecified.

The toilers of Abingdon—of other Abingdons, perhaps—know none of these things. Winter has pushed them hard, summer been all too brief; life has been crowded with a feverish instancy of work. There is a vague memory of the Sullivan Expedition; once a year the early settlers, as a community enterprise, had brought salt from Syracuse; the forest had been rafted down the river; the rest is silence.

Perhaps this good old English stock, familiar for a thousand years with oppression and gentility, wonted to immemorial fraud, schooled by generations of cheerful teachers to speak no evil of dignities, to see everything for the best in the best of possible worlds, found no injustice in the granting of these broad manors—or, at least, no novelty worthy of mention to their sons. There is no whisper of ancient wrong; no hint or rankling of any irrevocable injustice.

Doubtless some of these land grants were made, at a later day, to soldiers of the Revolution. But the children of the Revolution maintain a not unbecoming unreticence as to all things Revolutionary; from their silence in this regard, as from the name of Manor, we may make safe inference. Doubtless many of the royalist estates were confiscated at that time. Doubtless, again, our Government, to encourage settlement, sold land in such large parcels in early days. Incurious Abingdon cares for none of these things. Singular Abingdon! And yet are these folk, indeed, so singular among citizens? So unseeing a people? Consider that, within the memory of men living, the wisdom of America has made free gift to the railroads, to encourage their building, of so much land as goes to the making of New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; a notable encouragement!

History does not remark upon this little transaction, however. In some piecemeal fashion, a sentence here, a phrase elsewhere, with scores or hundreds of pages intervening, History does, indeed, make yawning allusion to some such trivial circumstance; refraining from comment in the most well-bred manner imaginable. It is only the ill-affected, the malcontents, who dwell upon such details. Is this not, indeed, a most beautiful world, and ours the land of opportunity, progress, education? Let our faces, then, be ever glad and shining. Let us tune ourselves with the Infinite; let a golden thread run through all our days; no frowns, no grouches, no scolding—no, no! No ingratitude for all the bounties of Providence. Let us, then, be up and doing.—Doing, certainly; but why not think a little too?

Why is thinking in such disfavor? Why is thinking, about subjects and things, the one crime never forgiven by respectability? We have given away our resources, what should have been our common wealth; we have squandered our land, wasted our forests. "Such trifles are not my business," interrupts History, rather feverish of manner; "my duty to record and magnify the affairs of the great."—Allow me, madam; we have given away our coal, the wealth of the past; our oil, the wealth of to-day; except we do presently think to some purpose, we shall give away our stored electricity, the wealth of the future—our water power which should, which must, remain ours and our children's. "Socialist!" shrieks History.