Chapter Three.
My family history—My father, once a captain in the British army, comes to America and marries Uncle Jeff’s sister—He settles on a farm in Ohio—Clarice and I are born—My grandfather’s farm destroyed by a flood—The next year our farm is burnt—My father resolves to migrate to the west—We set off in waggons with an emigrant train—Prosperous commencement of journey—Provisions run short—I witness a buffalo hunt—The emigrants suffer from cholera—My mother dies—Many of the emigrants turn back—My father perseveres—Fiercely attacked by Indians—We keep them at bay—Again attacked, when a stranger comes to our assistance—Clarice gives him a book—He promises to read it—We continue our journey, and reach Fort Kearney—Remain there for some months—My father, though still suffering, insists on setting out again—He soon becomes worse, and dies—I am digging his grave, when an emigrant train comes by—Uncle Jeff is the leader, and we accompany him to Roaring Water.
But the readers of my Journal, if so I may venture to call it, would like to know how Clarice and I came to be at Uncle Jeff’s farm. To do so, I must give a little bit of my family history, which probably would not otherwise interest them.
My father, Captain Middlemore, had been an officer in the English army, but sold out and came to America. Being, I suspect, of a roving disposition, he had travelled through most of the Eastern States without finding any spot where he could make up his mind to settle. At length he bent his steps to Ohio; in the western part of which he had one night to seek shelter from a storm at the farm of a substantial settler, a Mr Ralph Crockett (the father of Uncle Jeff). Mr Crockett treated the English stranger with a hospitality which the farmers of Ohio never failed to show to their guests. He had several sons, but he spoke of one who seemed to have a warm place in his heart, and who had gone away some years before, and was leading a wild hunter’s life on the prairies.
“I should like to fall in with him,” said my father. “It is the sort of life I have a fancy for leading,—hunting the buffalo and fighting the Red Indian.”
“Better stay and settle down among us, stranger,” said Mr Crockett. “In a few years, if you turn to with a will, and have some little money to begin with, you will be a wealthy man, with broad acres of your own, and able to supply the Eastern States with thousands of bushels of wheat. It is a proud thing to feel that we feed, not only the people of our own land, but many who would be starving, if it were not for us, in that tax-burdened country of yours.”
My father laughed at the way in which the Ohio farmer spoke of Old England; but notwithstanding that, he thought the matter over seriously. He was influenced not a little, too, I have an idea, by the admiration he felt for the farmer’s only daughter, Mary Crockett.
My father had the price of his commission still almost intact; and it was looked upon as almost a princely fortune to begin with in that part of the world. So, as he received no hint to go,—indeed, he was warmly pressed to stay whenever he spoke of moving,—he stayed, and stayed on. At last he asked Mary Crockett to become his wife, and promised to settle down on the nearest farm her father could obtain for him.
Mr Crockett applauded his resolution; and he purchased a farm which happened to be for sale only a few miles off, and gave him his daughter for a wife. She had gone to school in Philadelphia, where she had gained sufficient accomplishments to satisfy my father’s fastidious taste; and she was, besides being very pretty, a Christian young woman.
She often spoke of her brother Jeff with warm affection, for he, when at home, had ever showed himself to be a loving, kind brother; indeed, Mary was his pet, and if anybody could have induced him to lead a settled life, she might have done it. He had had, somehow or other, a quarrel with her one day,—little more than a tiff,—so off he went into the woods and across the prairies; and, as it turned out, he never came back. She was not the cause of his going, for he had been thinking about it for a long time before, but this tiff just set the ball rolling.