CHAPTER XXXI
THE McCRALINES
AS before mentioned, I was given largely to observation and to reading and was fairly well posted on current events. I was always a lover of success and nothing interested me more after a day's work in the field than spending my evening hours in reading. What I liked best was some good story with a moral. I enjoyed reading stories by Maude Radford Warren, largely because her stories were so very practical and true to life. Having traveled and seen much of the country, while running as a porter for the P——n Company, I could follow much of her writings, having been over the ground covered by the scenes of many of her stories. Another feature of her writings which pleased me was the fact that many of the characters, unlike the central figures in many stories, who all become fabulously wealthy, were often only fairly successful and gained only a measure of wealth and happiness, that did not reach prohibitive proportions.
Perhaps I should not have become so set against stories whose heroes invariably became multi-millionaires, had it not been for the fact that many of the younger members of my race, with whom I had made acquaintance in my trips to Chicago and other parts of the country, always appeared to intimate in their conversation, that a person should have riches thrust upon them if they sacrificed all their "good times," as they termed it, to go out west. Of course the easterner, in most stories, conquers and becomes rich, that is, after so much sacrifice. The truth is, in real life only about one in ten of the eastern people make good at ranching or homesteading, and that one is usually well supplied with capital in the beginning, though of course there are exceptions. Colored people are much unlike the people of other races. For instance, all around me in my home in Dakota were foreigners of practically all nations, except Italians and Jews, among them being Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Assyrians from Jerusalem, many Austrians, some Hungarians, and lots of Germans and Irish, these last being mostly American born, and also many Russians. The greater part of these people are good farmers and were growing prosperous on the Little Crow, and seeing this, I worked the harder to keep abreast of them, if not a little ahead. This was my fifth year and still there had not been a colored person on my land. Many more settlers had some and Tipp county was filling up, but still no colored people. My white neighbors had many visitors from their old homes and but few but had visitors at some time to see them and see what they were doing.
During my visit to Kansas the spring previous, I had found many prosperous colored families, most of whom had settled in Kansas in the seventies and eighties and were mostly ex-slaves, but were not like the people of southern Illinois, contented and happy to eke a living from the farm they pretended to cultivate, but made their farms pay by careful methods. The farms they owned had from a hundred and sixty acres to six hundred and forty acres, and one colored man there at that time owned eleven hundred acres with twelve thousand dollars in the bank.
Wherever I had been, however, I had always found a certain class in large and small towns alike whose object in life was obviously nothing, but who dressed up and aped the white people.
After Miss Rooks had married I was again in the condition of the previous year, but during the summer I had written to a young lady who had been teaching in M—boro and whom I had met while visiting Miss Rooks. Her name was Orlean McCraline, and her father was a minister and had been the pastor of our church in M—pls when I was a baby, but for the past seventeen years had been acting as presiding elder over the southern Illinois district. Miss McCraline had answered my letters and during the summer we had been very agreeable correspondents, and when in September I contracted for three relinquishments of homestead filings, I decided to ask her to marry me but to come and file on a Tipp county claim first.
To get the money for the purchase of the relinquishments, I had mortgaged my three hundred and twenty acres for seven thousand, six hundred dollars, the relinquishments costing in the neighborhood of six thousand, four hundred dollars. October was the time when the land would be open to homestead filing, and Miss McCraline had written that she would like to homestead. After sending my sister and grandmother the money to come to Dakota, I went to Chicago, where I arrived one Saturday morning. I had, since being in the west, stopped at the home of a maiden lady about thirty-five years of age, and in talking with her I had occasion to speak of the family. Evidently she did not know I had come to see Orlean, or that I was even acquainted with the family. I spoke of the Rev. McCraline and asked her if she knew him.