THE LUCK OF ABEL STEADMAN.
A few months ago I made a collecting tour for Wirt and Company through that stretch of country watered by the Ohio. Thirty years ago I had spent a summer there, and the change bewildered me: not that the rough buckeye and hemlock woods and mountain creeks had been railwayed, canalled, bored for coal, and derricked for oil; I looked for that; but the people had cropped out into a new phase of life.
They were lazy, smoky old towns,—those upper Virginia and Kentucky villages,—when I was a young man; something of the solitude of "the dark and bloody hunting-grounds" hanging about them yet; the old forts still standing which had been the terror of the Indians; the grandchildren of the pioneers holding baronial tracts of land under grant from Washington: mule-raisers, most of them, droning out their lives in great rambling stone houses, card-playing, Champagne-drinking, waited on by a few slaves, and carrying in their own tawny skins, high cheekbones, and beetling eyebrows, hints that the blood of these same pioneers had mixed too freely, perhaps, with that of their savage foes and allies.
By this time, however, the drowsy, sunshiny burghs have swelled, like the frog in the fable, and burst out into jaunty modern cities, with mills belching soot and oily smoke down into the muddy streets; the pavements are crowded with Uncle Sam's boys in their light blue coats; the shops are stocked by Northern capital; the hard-headed, taciturn Western man, with his broad common-sense, has set his solid foot down on the ground, and begins to dominate over both the sloth of the natives and the keen Yankee speculators. The women of the old-country families look out sullenly, talk a great deal of "shoddy"; are loyal, certainly, but say nothing of "Jack" or "Ned" who hold commissions under Lee or Hood.
However, this is not what I meant to tell you. While I was passing through one of the border towns, I accidentally met again the traces of a curious old character, well known through all that region, who, if fate had but placed her in the compressed action of a court, instead of the loose, inconsequent hurly-burly of a republic, would have made herself a footing in history before now. She deserves a more thorough record than this mere sketch must be.
But I must go back to my own first journey to that country. It was the fulfilment of an old, boyish plan. My father had been a land-surveyor, and had hunted and trapped, in those early days, from the fat river-bottoms of the Monongahela and Cross-Creek valleys up to the great Cheat Mountains. He was a contemporary of the pioneers Wetzel, the Leets, M'Cullochs, etc., and when I was a boy, used to fill up the winter evenings with wild stories of border Indian warfare, bear-hunting, and the like. I formed a hotter resolve, each new time of hearing, to make a pilgrimage, as soon as I was a man, to his old camping-ground, ("the Ohio" we called it then,) to hunt out and open the mounds left by the Creeks and Delawares, and to find the forts where these battles of his had been won and lost. It always pleased my father that I entered into his old stories with such zest.
"I hope I'll live to go with you, Zack," he would say, nodding his gray head. "We'd hunt out Mrs. C ——, if we came within a hundred miles of her. She could give you the history of every inch of ground from Blennerhassets Island up to Fort Du Quesne,—that is, if she were so minded. She had a sharp, suspicious eye of her own when she was a girl, and age would not sweeten her temper. But there's no better authority for old legends of that time,—none. She was a cousin of M'Culloch, who made that leap from the mountain to escape the Indian arrows, you remember? and was in the fort when Polly Scott went out to the gate-house for powder, bringing it in her apron across the field, a target for hundreds of the red devils. But I doubt if the old lady's living yet; she was married when I was a stout young beau, dancing Virginia reels out yonder: Shepler was her first husband."
The older my father grew, the more the idea haunted him of going with "Zack" out to the banks of the Ohio, until, as second childhood crept on him, it became a ruling whim. But crossing the Alleghany range was no light task for even a young man in those days of wagons and stage-coaches, and he never was gratified. When he was gone, I reproached myself bitterly that it had not been accomplished: it seemed so easy and natural a thing to do, now that it was too late. My old plan grew, therefore, to have a morbid interest for me. I fancied that to go over his old hunting-paths would bring my father back to me, and that, wherever he might be now, he would choose to be so brought back.
About the time I was thirty, then, having no employment except an opening which Fordyce offered me in New York, I chose, instead of accepting it, to start alone on my voyage of discovery. One August morning, the air full of a gentle languor, the heavy clouds of bituminous smoke vanishing beyond the horizon in swells of intense purple and orange, which I never had seen in our pale sky, I took a boat at Pittsburg, and dropped lazily down the shining Ohio, through thick-wooded hills, and dotting little islands that thrust themselves out of the water to support only a clump of showery green willows, or an old rock, may-be, draped with delicate trailing mosses. Chance favored me.