Winning the Wilderness

by Margaret Hill McCarter

Dear Mother of Christ, who motherhood blessed, All life in thy Son is complete. The length of a day, the century’s tale Of years do His purpose repeat. As wide as the world a sympathy comes To him who has kissed his own son, A tenderness deep as the depths of the sea, To motherhood mourning is won. No life is for naught. It was heaven’s own way That the baby who came should stay only a day.

Living by faith, which is the substance of things hoped for, is good for the spirit but reducing to the flesh. Yet it was much by faith that the frontier settlers lived through the winter after the grasshopper raid. Jim Shirley often declared in that time between crops that he could make three meals a day on Pryor Gaines’ smile. And Todd Stewart asserted that when the meat was all gone from their larder his family lived one whole week on John Jacobs’ belief in the future of their settlement. For the hardship of that winter was heavy. All the more heavy because the settlers were not stupid pauper-bred folk but young men and women of intelligence and culture, whose early lives had known luxuries as well as comforts. But the saving sense of humor, the saving power of belief in themselves, and the saving grace of brotherly love carried them through.

The winter was mercifully mild and the short grass of the prairies was nourishing to the stock that must 123 otherwise have perished. Late in February a rainfall began that lasted for days and Grass River, rising to its opportunity, drowned all the fords, so that the neighbors on widely separated claims were cut off from each other. No telephones relieved the loneliness of the country dwellers in those days, and each household had to rely on its own resources for all its needs. March came raging in like a lion. All the rain turned to snow and the wind to a polar blast as the one furious blizzard of that season fell upon the plains and for many hours threshed the snow-covered land.

On the night before the coming of the blizzard the light did not go out in the Aydelot cabin. And while the wind and rain without raved at door and window, a faint little cry within told that a new life had come to the world, a baby girl born in the midst of the storm. Morning brought no check to the furious elements. And Asher, who had fought in the front line at Antietam, had forced his way through a storm of Indian arrows out of a death-trap in the foothills of the Rockies, had ministered to men on the plains dying of the Asiatic plague, and had bound up the wounds of men who returned to the battle again, found a new form of heroism that morning in his own little cabin—the heroism of motherhood.

“You must go for help, Asher,” Virginia said, smiling bravely. “Leave the baby beside me here. We’ll wait till you come back. Little Sweetheart, you are welcome, if you did come with the storm, a little before you were expected.” The young mother looked fondly at the tiny face beside her.

“I can’t leave you alone, Virgie,” Asher insisted.

“But you must.” Virginia’s voice was full of courage. 124 “You can go as far as Pryor Gaines’ and send him on for you. Little daughter and I will be all right till you come back.”

So Asher left her.

Pryor Gaines was waterbound across Grass River. Of the three women living east of the stream one was sick abed, one was kept at home with a sick husband, and the third had gone with her husband to Wykerton for supplies and was stormstaid somewhere along the Sunflower Trail.

“I must go for Jim. Any neighborhood is blessed that has a few good-hearted unmarried folks in it,” Asher thought as he braced himself against the driving rain and hurried away.