[Written for the Christian Luminary.]
OCENA P. O., Atchison Co.,
Kansas Ter., May, 1858.
Having myself had a very full experience of the advantages and disadvantages, the trials, pleasures and perils of a pioneer life, I propose to write a series of essays on the matter of emigrating to the West.
While a grave necessity demands that many shall emigrate to the West, it is not to be denied that it is an enterprise fraught with many dangers to the moral and spiritual well-being of the emigrant. We have here men from the four quarters of the civilized world, and have thus congregated together all the vices found in Europe and America. The semi-barbarism of the Irish Catholicism of Tipperary and Clare is now fairly inaugurated in Leavenworth city. All the horses of the livery stables are hired to attend an Irish funeral, and as the mourners take a "wee bit of a dhrap" before starting, they are lucky if they get the corpse well under ground without a fight. By this time, having become over-joyful, they raise a shout, and with a whoop and hurrah they start for home, and the man that has the fastest horse gets into the city first. The unlucky traveler, whose horse gets mixed up with theirs in this stampede, and who thus involuntarily becomes one of the company at an Irish wake, has need to be a good rider.
German infidelity has been nurtured in Germany by a thousand years of priestly domination and oppression, and is now translated into our Kansas towns by Germans, who have no Lord's day in their week. Corresponding with our Lord's day, they have a holiday—a day to hunt, to fish, to do up odd jobs, to congregate together and listen to fine music, dance, sing, feast, drink lager beer, and have a good time generally. Under the best regimen it is hard for men to keep their hearts from evil; but here, it is a fearful thing for young men, released from all the restraints of their native land, to find the house of revelry and dancing so near the house of God, and the gates of hell, alluring by all the fascinating and seductive attractions of harmonious sounds, so near the gate of heaven.
I am appalled at the amount of drinking and gambling that has existed in Kansas, especially in the Missouri River towns, for the last three years, Under the shade of every green tree, on the streets, in every shop, store, grocery and hotel, it has seemed as if the chief business of the people was to gamble and drink.
There are other causes full of evil, and fearfully potent to work apostasy and ruin in the West. Men come here, not to plead the cause of a suffering and dying Saviour; not to give to the people a more pure and self-denying morality, and a higher civilization; but to get rich. They have had a dream, and are come to realize that dream. They have dreamed of one thousand acres of land, bought at one dollar and a quarter per acre, that by the magic growth of some Western town becomes worth fifty thousand dollars. They have dreamed of money invested in mythical towns, which towns are to rival in their growth Toledo, Chicago or St. Louis. The dream is to do nothing and get rich. Land sharks, speculators, usurers and politicians who aspire to a notoriety they will never win—a station they will never occupy—swarm over the West thicker than frogs in Egypt, and more intrusive than were these squatting, crawling, jumping pests, when evoked from the river's slime by the rod of Moses.
Some men are too old when they come to the West. They are like a vine whose tendrils are rudely torn from a branch around which they have wound themselves, and are so hardened by time that they can not entwine themselves around another support. Such men forever worship, looking to the East. They form no new friendships; engage in no new enterprises; they care for nobody, and nobody cares for them. They live and die alone.
But there are more sad and gentle notes of sorrow that fall upon our ears. The children mourn for the peach tree and the apple tree, with their luscious fruit. The mother-wife asks who will watch the little grave, or tend the rose tree growing at its head, or who will train the woodbine, or care for the pinks and violets? Then sadly she sings of home—"Home, sweet home!" The father, too, remembers his pasture for his pigs, his calves, and sheep, and cows. He remembers that on one poor forty acres of land he had a house, a barn, an orchard, woodland, maple trees for making maple sugar, a meadow, room for corn, wheat, oats and potatoes, besides pasture for one horse, two oxen, three cows, together with a number of sheep and pigs, Then there was the three months' school in winter, and four months in summer. There was the Sunday-school and the church, where serious and honest men uttered manly and religious counsel to sincere hearts, which nurtured good and holy purposes. All this he has bartered away for the privilege of being rich—of having more land than he knows what to do with; more corn than he can tend, and pigs till they are a pest to him.
Having glanced at some of the evils attendant on Western life, I must hasten to indicate what class of men should come to the West. The poor of our cities, whose poverty becomes the more haggard by being placed in immediate proximity to measureless profusion, luxury and extravagance—respectable people, whose whole life is a lifelong struggle to keep up appearances, and in whom the securing of affluence is like putting on a corpse the frippery and finery of the ball-room; young men with brave hearts and willing hands—these are the classes that may come, and should come, to the West. And if Adam, realizing that the world is all before him, where to choose, looks to the West to find his Eden, I would respectfully suggest that he has an infirmity in his left side, and that his best security against the perils of a pioneer life is to take to himself the rib that is wanting.