Also Indians from the Kickapoo reservation, while harmless enough at the time, had a habit of prowling about over the country, and a band of them nearly scared the wits out of my mother one hot summer day. She saw the blanketed red skins, on ponies, coming down the road, single-file. Gathering her youngsters, much as a hen gathers her brood the approach of danger—and much as my mother had once before taken her children under her protecting arms and saved their lives, as you shall see presently—she hid in the cornfield until the rovers had left our farm.
And now another prairie fire. If there could be any question about the youngster having retained with photographic accuracy the horrors of the one earlier mentioned, there can be no doubt about this later one, which, whipped by the ever-present wind, stole in upon us in the night, My father’s much prized rail fence was laid low, and only by heroic efforts was the house saved. These dreaded prairie fires and other subjected frights incident to the new country seemed to place a mark upon my mother.
“William,” she said one day to my father, “we might as well have remained in Tennessee and taken our chances on being killed by guerillas as to come all the way out to this God-for-saken country only to be burned to death by prairie fires, or shaken to pieces by earthquakes, or frightened to death by Indians.” And I am sure that if the Kansas cyclone had then enjoyed the widespread reputation that it does in this year of grace, my mother would have included that also.
In Tennessee, my father was a shoemaker and tanner by trade. And, by the grace of a kind Providence—and some quick shooting—he was a live Union “sympathizer” in a Rebel stronghold. The great conflict—the Civil War—between the North and the South was then on. My father had not, at this time, joined the fighting forces on either side. He was content to ply his trade, make leather and shoes, both of which were very much needed at the time. But my father made the almost fatal mistake of “exercising his rights as a free-born citizen,” in having his say.
The South was not quite solid for Confederacy. Sometimes even families were divided. In my mother’s family two of her brothers favored the North and two were for the South—”rank rebels,” my mother said. None of them went to war. They worked in a powder mill—more dangerous, by far. Twice the mill blew up, and each time one of my Uncles was blown into fragments. Also one of my mother’s acquired relatives hid in a cave for the duration of the war.
The guerilla element was composed of Southerners, not in colors — and they made life miserable for any o ne who dared to express an opinion, on the aspects of the war, contrary to their views.
The hush of a November night lay upon the forest, in the thick of which was located my father’s home, his tan-yard, his shoeshop. The night’s stillness was broken by a volley of bullets from the guerilla guns crashing through the windows and doors of the log house.
My mother—herself only a girl in her teens—took her two babies and crept under the bed, which, luckily, had been moved to another part of the house that very day. And that shift of the bed saved the family from the death-dealing bullets poured into the house with that first onslaught.
My father had only a muzzle-loading, double-barrel shotgun, with two charges in the gun—and no more ammunition — with which to defend himself and his little family against that mob of armed men. The main body of guerillas, on horseback, were in the front yard. The house stood upon the bank of a deep gully, with little or no backyard. A wide plank served as a walk across the gully. Beyond that was heavy timber.
Believing that his family would be safer with him out of the house, my father, only partly dressed, grabbed his shotgun and flung open the back door. He quickly emptied both barrels of his gun into the two men who were guarding the back door. The revolver in the hands of the first man in line, standing on the plank, was being brought down on him when the charge from father’s shotgun cut off the crook of the man’s arm at the elbow and entered his body, killing him instantly. The bullet from the guerilla’s revolver plowed through my father’s hat. And that was the revolver my father shot squirrels with in Kansas. It was retrieved by Federal soldiers and presented to him.