The Minute Man on the Frontier

by William George Puddefoot

To illustrate how much more valuable life is than gold, a minister relates this anecdote of a California miner who, to save a young girl in a shipwreck, threw his belt of gold away and saved her life. After the meeting was over a matronly woman came up to him and said, "Sir, I was the young girl the miner saved." Or he enters a log house, and finds a beautiful woman and her no less beautiful daughter, and soon learns that, a few years before, they were moving among the brilliant throng that surround royalty in Europe; and in that little room the mother has the dress and some of the jewels in which she was presented to Queen Victoria. He finds them in the little log house, apparently contented; but there is a romance and a mystery here that many would like to unravel. Or, maybe, he enters the neat frame house of a broken-down Wall-street stockbroker, who with the remnants of his fortune hopes to retrieve himself upon his one hundred and sixty acre homestead, and who, with his refined and cultured family, makes an oasis in the desert for the tired missionary.

In the winter he sometimes rides a hundred miles to Conference, and time and again is upset as he attempts to pass through the immense drifts. His harness gives way when he is miles from a house; and he must patch it up as best he can from the other harness, and lead one horse. He must learn to ride a tricking broncho, to sleep out on the prairie, to cover himself with a snowdrift to keep from freezing, and in case of extremity to kill his horse and crawl inside, perhaps barely to escape with his life as the warm body changes into a refrigerator. If he lives in a sod house, he must often put the sheets above his head to keep away the lizards that crawl out as the weather becomes warm, and an occasional rattler waking up from his torpid winter sleep. At times the rains thaw his roof out, and it drops too; and then he must reshingle with sod.

Often he is called to go forty and fifty miles to visit the sick, to sit up with the dying, and to cheer their last moments. He can and does do more useful work when attending the poor and sickly than in any other way. Many a family has been won through the devotion of the minute-man to some poor little sufferer.

One day he meets a man hauling wood with a pair of wretched mules. The man is dressed in blue denim, the trousers are stuffed into boots that are full of holes. A great sombrero hat is on his head. By his side is a beautiful young woman. She is the wife. He finds on inquiry that the man has been a brilliant preacher, writer, and lecturer; yet here, two thousand miles from his Eastern home, he is hauling railway ties for a living.

I once visited a family living in a house so small that the kitchen would barely hold more than one person at a time. There was a sick man there, whom I used to call upon two and three times a week. In order to turn himself, he had a leather strap hung from the rafters. The woman of the house was of a cruel disposition. She was the second wife of the sick man's brother, and had a daughter who was about thirteen years of age, but who was large for her years. I used to find this child working about in her bare feet and singing, "I'm so glad that my Father in heaven." And I felt quite encouraged, as the child had a bad reputation.

One day this girl came to the parsonage and brought a silver napkin-ring, saying it was a New Year's gift, and that her mother was sorry she could not have engraved upon it "For my dear pasture." My wife said we ought not to take it; but I replied,—

"Yes; these people get fair wages, and would feel offended."

So we kept it. Some days after, as two men were felling a large pine-tree which was hollow at the base, they were surprised to see albums, bracelets, napkin-rings, combs, spoons, and other articles falling out. About this time a saleswoman had been missing just such things from her counter; and it was soon discovered that my youthful convert was a first-class kleptomaniac, equal to any city thief of the same class. Her mode of operation was to call the woman's attention to something on the shelf behind her; then taking anything within reach, and with an "Oh, how pretty!" she would decamp.

I met the mother on my way to visit the sick man. "O Elder!" she said, "I am in a peck of trouble. That gal of mine has cleared off on a raft with a lumberman, and she has been stealing too. What shall I do?"

As I knew that the woman had tied the girl's tongue with whip-cord, and beaten it with birch bark until it bled, to cure her of lying, I said, "You had better send her to the Reform School." It appeared afterward that the man who had run off with the girl was a minister's son; and he said in court he had taken pity on the girl, and wanted to save her from the cruelty of her mother. The girl was sent to the Reform School at Adrian, but not before she had given the sheriff the slip, and taken another girl with her, getting as far as Rochester, N. Y., before she was recaptured.