Soon after we settled in Los Angeles I was very sick, due, I fear, to the hasty swallowing of half-chewed raisins when my foraging expedition to the pantry was menaced by an approaching mother. She did not know for several hours about my disobedience of her law against “swiping” food between meals,—if I were really hungry I would be glad to eat dry bread without butter or jam,—but the punishment for sin was as sure as it was in the Sunday school books. I sat for a long, long time screwed up in a little aching knot in front of the Franklin stove before I was ready to admit an excruciating pain. I think now-a-days it would have been called appendicitis.
The doctor took heroic measures: caster oil, tiny black stinking pills, steaming flannels wrung out of boiling vinegar and applied to my shrinking abdomen; awful, thick, nasty, white, sweetish cod-liver-oil. I survived.
I was only seven, and not used to staying in bed for a month at a time, so papa, sorry for me, day by day, told me the story of his life. He told me about his home, the brick farm house at Norridgewock on the Kennebec, the same river that I had seen when I was in Maine.
When he was a little boy there were no matches and no kitchen stoves, so that his mother had to cook before an open fireplace, and the clothes for all the family were made at home. His mother spun wool from their sheep and wove it into cloth and dyed it in the great indigo pot that stood when she was not using it just inside the shed door. When they killed a cow for beef they saved the hide, and then in the fall a traveling shoemaker came to the house and made boots for them, right there where they could watch him.
When papa was six he secretly learned to milk one of the cows and then with great joy exhibited his prowess, only to be informed that thereafter it was to be his daily chore. Another duty that fell to him about this time was to take care at night of each two year-old whenever its place in the cradle was taken by a new baby. Somehow the oldest child in the family, Francina, managed to escape the usual fate of an oldest daughter, that of secondary mother.
The most wonderful hat that papa ever had was made by cutting down a white beaver of his father’s—possibly a “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign hat. Once when it was worn on a berrying expedition he hung it on the limb of a tree for safe-keeping—and then could never find the tree and precious hat again, a tragedy of youth.
Papa drew an amusing picture of himself at ten years of age in his “Sunday-go-to-meeting” clothes. His trousers came half way between knee and ankle, his jacket was short and round, his collar so high he could not turn his head, although he could rest his neck during the long service by using his ears as hooks over the top of the collar. A stove-pipe hat completed the outfit.
During those evening stories while I was convalescing I learned many things about the boy’s life in the far-away Maine, of his many cousins, of his schooling, and why he elected astronomy in place of French at Bloomfield Academy; of the years when he taught school or worked on a farm and then of his decision to go to California. He told me of the sea voyage and the stay in Panama, of San Francisco, and of the life in Volcano, the little mining town; of the return to Maine and of the journey west across the plains, driving sheep and cattle. He told me the story in detail until he reached Salt Lake City, and then one evening something intervened, I was well again and the absorbing tale was postponed and then again and again, never to be taken up.
Three years later, Uncle Ben, one of the travelers across the plains, died; in a few years more father was gone, and I suddenly realized how little I really knew of the venturesome expedition of the young men. So I wrote to Dr. Flint, the survivor, asking that he tell me something of their pioneer experience. He replied that he had kept diaries on both journeys and that I was welcome to see them at any time. But before the opportunity came he too had died, I was in the thick of a very busy life, and his letter was forgotten. Twenty years later I found it and immediately asked his son to see the journals, but their existence was not known. A holiday devoted to a search among old papers was rewarded by the discovery of the valuable documents.
And so, while I cannot recall all the detail of the charming tale my father told me, I am able, because of these records, to give an accurate report of how the cousins came to California and brought across plains, mountains, and deserts to this Pacific Coast some of the first American sheep, and thus were instrumental in developing an industry that for many years was of great importance.