The party on arrival had plenty of guns, swords and ammunition but their treasury held but sixty cents.
The family settlement were living in tents around which the chill autumn winds were howling. The poor crops they had raised had not been harvested. The men were ill and discouraged. There was little meat, except game and that was difficult to kill. Their only bread was made from corn meal ground at a hand-turned mill two miles away.
Brown's sons, who had preceded him, had lost all vigor. The old man was not slow to see the way out.
The situation called for Action. He determined to get it. He immediately plunged into Free Soil Politics without pausing to build his first shanty against the coming rains and snows of a terrible winter.
CHAPTER XIV
The race for the lands of the new Territories of Kansas and Nebraska was on to the finish. Nebraska was far North. Kansas only interested the Southerner. The frontiersmen were crossing the boundary lines years before Congress formally opened them for settlement.
After a brief stop in West Tennessee the Doyles had succeeded in reaching Miami County, just beyond the Missouri border, in 1853. They had settled on a fertile quarter section on the Pottawattomie Creek in a small group of people of Southern feeling.
The sun of a new world had begun to shine at last for the humble but ambitious woman who had borne five strong children to be the athletic sons and daughters of a free country. Her soul rose in a triumphant song that made her little home the holy of holies of a new religion. Her husband was the lord of a domain of fertile land. His fields were green with wheat. She loved to look over its acres of velvet carpet. In June her man and three stalwart boys, now twenty, eighteen and fourteen years of age, would swing the reaper into that field and harvest the waving gold without the aid of a hired laborer. She and her little girls would help and sing while they toiled.
There was no debt on their books. They had horses, cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, ducks, turkeys. Their crib was bulging with corn. The bins in their barn were filled with grain.
Their house was still the humble cottage of the prairie pioneer, but her men had made it snug and warm against the winds and snows of winter. Their farm had plenty of timber on the Pottawattomie Creek which flowed through the center of the tract. They had wood for their fires and logs with which to construct their stable and outhouses.