The place which woman, as an educator, now fills, and so long has filled upon the frontier, is not bounded, however, by the home-school, nor by the district school, in both of which she is the teacher of the young. She is the educator of the man. She moulds and guides society.
The home where she rules is the center and focus from which wells out an influence as light wells out from the sun. The glow of the fireside where the mother sits, is a beacon whose light stretches far out to guide and guard.
The word "home," as used among the old races of Northern Europe, contains in its true signification something mystic and religious. The female patriarch of the household was regarded with superstitious veneration. Her sayings were wise and good, and the warrior sat at her feet on the eve of battle and gathered from her as from an oracle, the confidence and courage which nerved him for the fight; and today the picture of an aged mother sitting by the hearth, and the recollection of her counsels, is a source of comfort and strength to many a son who is far away fighting the battle of life. The home and mother is the polar-star of absent sons and daughters. She who sat by the cradled bed of childhood, "the first, the last, the faithfulest of friends," she, the guardian of infancy, is the loving and never to be forgotten guide of riper years. As far as thought can run upon this earthly sphere, or memory fondly send back its gaze, so far can the influence of a mother reach to cheer, to sustain, to elevate, and to keep the mind and heart from swerving away from the true and the right.
One who received his early training from a mother's lips in a frontier State, and afterward attained to wealth and influence in one of our mountain republics, lately told the writer that he kept the picture of his mother hanging up in his chamber, where it was the last object which his eyes lighted on before retiring, and the first upon rising; and whenever he was about to adopt any new course, or commence any new enterprise into which the question of right or wrong entered, he always asked himself, "what will my mother say if I do thus and thus?" That mother's influence was upon him though a thousand miles away from her, and the thought of her in the crises of his life was the load-star of his strong heart and mind.
We may well imagine those hardy sons who are now building up our empire in the Rocky Mountains, as finding in a mother's portrait a tie which binds them fast to the counsels and the love of their earliest guardian, and that as they gaze on the "counterfeit presentment" of those endeared features, they might long to hear again the faithful counsels which guided their youth, exclaiming with the poet,
"O, that those lips had language! life has passed
With me but roughly since I saw thee last."
We have elsewhere spoken of the refining and humanizing influence of woman, amid the rude and almost barbarous atmosphere of frontier life. The mother moulds and trains the child, the wife moulds and trains the husband, the sister moulds and trains the brother, the daughters mould and train the father. We speak now of moulding and of training in a broader sense than they are embraced in the curriculum of books. The influence exerted is subtle, but not the less potent. Woman is the civilizer par excellence. Society in its narrower meaning exists by her and through her. That state of man which is best ordered and safest, is only where woman's membership is most truly recognized.
Man alone gravitates naturally towards the savage state. Communities of men, such as exist in some of our most remote territories, are mere clubs of barbarians. They may be strong, energetic, and brave, but their very virtues are such as those which savages possess.
Into one of the loneliest valleys in the Rocky Mountains, some years since, fifty men, attracted by the golden sands which were rolled down by the torrents, built their huts and gave the settlement a name. There were cabins, a tavern, and a bar-room. There were men toiling and spending their gain in gambling and rioting. There was rugged strength and hardihood. There was food and shelter, and yet there was no basis for civil and social organism, as those terms are properly understood, because no wife, no mother, no home was there.
Those strong and hardy men clove the rock and sifted the soil, and chained the cataract, but their law was force and cunning, and the only tie they recognized was a partnership in gain. What civilization or true citizenship could there be in a society in which the family circle and its kindred outgrowth—the school and the church—were unknown! The denizens of that mountain camp slid, by an irresistible law of gravitation, away from civil order, from social beneficence, and from humanity. They gorged themselves, and swore, and wrangled, and fought, and like the "dragons of the prime," they tore each other in their selfish greed for that which was their only care.