USA > Iowa > Report of the organization and first reunion of the Tri-State Old Settlers' Association of Illinois, Missouri and Iowa, 1884 > Part 27
USA > Illinois > Report of the organization and first reunion of the Tri-State Old Settlers' Association of Illinois, Missouri and Iowa, 1884 > Part 27
USA > Missouri > Report of the organization and first reunion of the Tri-State Old Settlers' Association of Illinois, Missouri and Iowa, 1884 > Part 27
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I now have the pleasure of introducing to you a repre- sentative of that great sister State on the South, the Hon. John F. Phillips, of Kansas City, Missouri :
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen . It is with mingled emotions that I stand in this presence and proclaim myself an " Old Settler." Human nature never outlives its vanity. To be deemed younger than we are, is not alone a weakness of the fairer sex. It is almost the universal passion of mankind.
When I look upon this pleasing panorama of breathing beauty, instinct with youth, and lured by the possible glories of the unfolding future, it is difficult to repress the sad refrain " would I were a boy again !" But this longing loses something of its melancholy when I look into the sturdy faces and constant eyes of the Western Pioneers, on whose heads are reflected the exploits of conflict with savage, tangled marsh and dense forest, and take their brawny hands, and say : Our fathers drove out the red man, felled the forest, let in the sunlight and laid the foundation stones of this imposing edifice of western civilization.
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Equally proud am I to stand on this, for the day, neutral ground, and proclaim myself a native Missourian, whose sire saw the Indian council fires blaze and the wig- wams smoke, where now waves the harvest and stands the city.
And if I have not waxed mighty and strong, I here to- day gratefully acknowledge, that from the simplicity of habits, the austere honesty, the bold and frank spirit and self reliance of her primitive people, I have drawn the inspiration of every manly endeavor, and the incentive to. whatever I may have achieved for good.
To me, there are sacred memories, thick and bright as the stars in a summer sky, clustering about her name. As one loves the house he has builded for a home ; as with his own hands he has dug and fashioned the foundation stones from the quarry -- hewn out the timbers from the trees in God's forest ; as the weary ploughman, who casts the seed in tears, laughs in his heart to see the tasseled corn nodding like knightly plumes, and the bearded wheat waive like golden banners in the sunlight ; as the mother rejoices in the image of the loved husband reproduced in the blue eyed babe borne in pain-how natural it is for us to love the State that gave us birth ; and especially so when we have seen it in the rude wilderness, and step by step rise like the morning sun from behind the misty hill top, filling the world with the glory of its light.
This, after all, is the old field from which comes all this new corn of our social life. It is the genial soil whence comes, too, the much bruited, and often misunderstood, sentiment of local self-government. It springs from the innate sense of attachment to place of birth. It is the instinct of infancy to lean on the breast that nourishes it ; the impulse of childhood to love its playground,-of man- hood to rely on the shield and buckler, and of old age to return to the shadow of the oak that sheltered in youth.
It is a sentiment which no national pride can extinguish. no human legislation interdict. It is the true inspiration of patriotism-and the nursery of manhood. It will perish in the human heart only when it ceases to pant for freedom. I have been much struck with the deep-rooted prevalence of this sentiment in reading over the speeches made at these reunions. Sometimes it takes on the form of a little exag-
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geration. So much so, that one might not unreasonably conclude that these occasions had been transformed some- what into a game of brag between the representatives of the three States ; and the winner in these contests was to be the veriest Muchausen either state could put to the front.
Each State has the largest crop of intelligence and piety, - the largest yield of corn, wheat, potatoes, hogs, cattle and horses, the bravest men and the fairest women. The soil of each possesses such power of propagation that one of these real, way back, old settlers, will tell " the marines " of using a hollow tree for a pump in a cistern on his farm ; when the stump took root, and the tree grew one hundred feet high, furnishing a roosting perch for all his chickens and turkeys, and a shade for all his horses, cows and children.
Some of the stories told at these reunions of the marvels of productive energy of the soil of Iowa, for instance, re- called to my mind the ante-bellum days when I was Secre- tary of the Agricultural fair of Pettis county, down in Missouri. A premium was offered for the largest yield per acre of corn. The committee on measurement reported the largest yield to be one hundred and fifty-six bushels to the acre ; and it was not a very good season either. Afterwards, on a visit to Kentucky, I was boasting of this to a group of Kentuckians of the famed " Blue grass" region. On one of them manifesting some increduality, I sought to clinch the matter by stating, that I had in my possession at home the sworn certificate of the President and Secretary of the asso- ciation to the fact.
Whereat he cavalierly observed : That only proves that your county has produced two of the biggest liars in Amer- ica. After taking a casual survey of that six foot Kentuckian, I took a nonsuit, without even intimating that I was the Secretary. Being younger than now I was anxious about the appearance of my face.
It is a suggestive fact that this sentiment of local attach- ment, and its corrolary, self-importance, was more marked in the carlier settlers than in their offspring. When I was a mere lad there came to the neighborhood a tall, lank, cadaverous man, with dilapidated hat and cotton umbrella, a veritable Capt. Wrag. He applied to the board of direct- ors for employment to teach a district school. Impressed. doubtless from a local disregard of the King's English,
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with some needed attention to correct speaking, the Presi- dent of the board asked the pedagogue, if he was a grammarian ? Straightening himself to an altitude of six feet, and with all the suddenly aroused pride of his nativity, he scornfully replied : "No, sir, be g-d I'm a Missourian."
All my childhood and boyhood I had to hear an old man preach. To this day I have a horror of the old log "meeting house," akin to that the fellow felt for human teeth, who married a woman on account of her beautiful ivories, and afterwards witnessed her before retiring take them out and lay them on the dresser. The benches of that old church rose in teirs like circus seats, until it almost required an acrobat to surmount the rearmost one. When I sat in one of them my feet swung several cubits from the floor.
All the children brought up under that dispensation had big feet ; for every drop of blood in the body, before the end of the hour and a quarter sermon, ran into the pedal extremities. That old gospeller preached about Moses in the wilderness longer than the great leader kept the Israel- ites there. Like Moses he may have had a glimpse of the Promised Land, but it must have been just before he died- a sort of revelation vouchsafed in articule mortis ; but when I last heard him he had not in his exposition of the script- ures reached as far down as the crucifixion. Yet, my father would not have left him to hear Apollos or Baxter, for he was an Old Settler, and had rambled in a veritable wilderness.
This sentiment of local attachment, too often now spoken of ad invidium, among our fathers had a deep significance. The very perils, hardships, privations and struggles, which wrought out of a dense wilderness and the untamed earth a livelihood, and constructed a State by the slow and weary process of peopling a distant territory, not only made the pioneer sturdy, bold and self assertive, but it begot an attachment, akin to devotion, for every cranny and nook where life was so hardly lived. It was a clinging as to one's own creation. Instinctively he loved the government that stood as a sentry at the rude door ; that bent in protection over his. cradle ; that inspired his youth ; gave him the acquisitions of his manhood, while it sheltered his old age. There is another characteristic of the Old Settler, which tended more than all else to make him as tender as he was
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brave, and his heart a flowing spring of generosity, simpli- city, truth, honor and virtue.
It was the love of home.
The home is where men are bred, States are upbuilded and nations glorified. Around it cluster the joys and glad- ness of childhood. There is the well-remembered old log house, with "the moss covered bucket that hung in the well," where we were born. We can yet see the narrow window where the moon beams stole in and played on our locks while we slept the sweet sleep of youth. There are the meadows with " dew on the grass and stars on the dew," where we chased the many tinted butterfly, and plucked the cow-slip and the daisies.
There is where the old fashioned mother, who knew no book better than the old fashioned Bible-King James translation-and no better counselor than her honest, pious preacher, tenderly held our little hands between hers, and taught us our first prayer, and sowed the seeds of the rever- ence for religion, which the razure of time, and the vitriol of modern philosophy have never effaced. We yet recall the face, that scarce lost its color when she heard the Indian's yell and the panther's scream, which beamed as a benison and benediction on her household. The last rose petal had already dropped from the cheeks ; the lustre of her maiden eyes was fading ; the "brightest feather of the raven's wing had fallen from her hair" and old time had run many decp furrows in her once smooth face. But she was queenly.
She did not want to vote, nor make stump speeches, nor " hire a hall and howl, " nor care to be a justice of the peace. But at the vestal fires of her lofty spirit embryo genius kindled ; and there went out, as a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, a hallowed influence to lead the people. With an intuitive philosophy, that despises not "the day of small things, " she knew that the rill makes the river, the minutest organic cells develop either into human beings, or monsters and that mere atoms of dust form " the everlasting hills." She, therefore, wisely felt that she best guided and controlled the State by marking, guarding and stimulating every discernible quality in her child that ennobles man hood and qualifies citizenship. There is nothing in all the mad, rushing innovations of the seething day in which we
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live, so at war with the philosophy of the life of our fathers and mothers, as the increasing clamor to take out of the home our dear women and clothe them with the habiliments and office of men. It strikes with gleaming dagger at the very heart of our social life and happiness. It shatters the vase in which are stored the richest domestic jewels. It puts out the vestal fires on the hearthstone ; pulls down the swinging censer which scatters its sweet perfumes through our homes. It plows up the flower gardens, and sows them with rankest weeds. It gives us pebbles for rubies and poppies for diamonds. It gives us social Bacchantes, and literary Madusas.
Instead of the splendid girl, such as I have seen on many a Missouri farm, who could milk a cow and play on the piano, ride a wild colt, and "love harder than a mule can kick," with the very freshness of the mountain on her checks, and scattering the valley's bounty from her hands ; " known by the lights that herald her fair presence, the peaceful virtues that attend her path, and the long blaze of glory that lingers in her train ;" our vaunted civilization would give us law makers for wives, lawyers and doctors for sweethearts. It gives us the overblown rose of the hot bed, cite moturum, cite putridum, soon ripe, soon rotten. We have hungry eyed maidens gazing on the " amber drooping hair" of some idiot like Oscar Wilde-longing to "die of a rose in aromatic pain, " because they are intercepted in an attempt to run off with the carriage driver, or to wed some sublimated dude of the " watery eye and educated whisker." whose chief aspiration is to await with impatience the taking off of " the old man, " that he may squander his hard earned estate in cigarettes, perfumes, neck-ties and base ball.
Display and expediency are fast rotting out conscience. and strangling that nobler quality in character which holds society in its true orbit, and does and suffers all things for that simple excellence which puts heaven in our homes.
The home was the old settler's rendezvous and sanctuary. To him it was indeed his castle. It may have been covered with coon skins, the rains have descended through its thatched roof, or the winds howled through its cracks ; but woe unto him who entered across it's threshold to feast upon its chastity. . In the primitive condition of society there were few enticements to lure him from home. His social
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pleasures were mainly around his own hearthstone. There was but one eye that shone in ecstacy upon him.
To the prattling children thronging around him, with emulous hands to please, listening to his stories of heroic conflicts with savage, wild boar and bear, or his chase after the nimble footed deer, he was their only hero and bright exemplar.
" This is the life, which those who fret in guilt, And guilty cities never know; the life, Led by primeval ages, uncorrupt,' When angels dwelt, and God Himself, with man."
There were then no Chicagos, with the depot outcry : "Twenty minutes for lunch and divorces." No lawyers with placards : "Divorces obtained, without delay or asking questions, and at reduced rates."
I was twenty years old before I ever heard of the " old man" running off with the cook, or his neighbor's wife. Your preacher might hold his camp meeting without the deacons employing the police to keep him from running off with the prettiest convert. And you could, if possessed of a large estate, lie down and die in peace without the dread of your children going to law to prove in public that you was a lunatic, or your pall-bearer proposing to your widow on the way from the funeral.
Often did I see, when'a boy, the sheriff of some distant county stop over the night at my father's house, on his way to the State Capital, with the revenues collected from his county in saddle bags, and all in hard money. He would set his valuable baggage down at random, and its contents would be known to the colored man who cared for his horse. He would stop on the road-side at noon, and while his horse grazed he would sleep soundly, with no care for his treasure. But now the poor, unfortunate tramp- "out of a job "-would rifle his saddle-bags and steal the gold plugs out of his teeth without waking him.
I would by no means undervalue or depreciate the work of civilization throughout. . We appreciate wherein it is beneficent. We recognize what science and the mechanic arts have wrought ; how universal education and clemosy- nary charity have alieviated human condition, and lessened life's burdens. We know the sky has lost nothing of its azure, while the world has gained much by the subjection
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to man's use of electricity. We even recognize the value of the telephone, although we have to wait sometimes a half hour before we can call the doctor while some chewing gum fellow makes an engagement with his girl for the next german to come off a month hence. And the railroads, with all their imputed faults, we love them still. But for the railroad we could not have been here to-day to enjoy this hearty occasion ; and but for it you would have escaped the infliction of this speech. It is only the excesses-the vices, of our modern' civilization I would exercise-it is its mock heroics I would bring into deserved contempt.
The greatness and advancement of a people are not to gauged alone by the multiplication of railroads, factories, reapers and mowing machines, bank clearings, palatial homes, nor the census tables. Our civilization should be measured by the character of the people. Are we breeding and rearing a better and nobler class of men and women ? Is virtue, public and private, keeping pace with our smart- ness and craft, which are often but moderate terms for successful rogucry ? Are official integrity and political methods improving ? Is there less of greed, fewer grasping, selfish and time serving spirits than fifty years ago ? These are the ethical problems to be solved by the social philoso- pher, and answered by the historian.
Sometime when I recur to the placid life, the simple faith, the unaffected hospitality, the honor and moral courage of the men in homespun and buckskin, with all their rude- ness of manners and austerity of living ; and then look at the world around me, seething with energized craft and duplicity ; the people surging, jostling and panting for money-getting, sensuous and sensual gratification-the lustful feast of the eye ; with every nerve strung and every faculty strained in the sharp encounter of trade ; with shoddyism rampant ; our stock exchanges veritable mad houses ; commercial centers gambling hells ; the news- papers reeking with criminal recitals, social garbage and domestic infelicity ; every other man saying : am I'my brother's keeper; with our food adulterated and drugs poisoned ; our social flunkeyism and cant, our venality and charlatanism in politics ; I feel, like the old Norseman said, when offered his choice of heaven with the new generation. or hell with the old: " I prefer to be with my ancestors."
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At least it is calculated to make us a little lenient to- wards the old frontiersman, who, when asked where is your home, answered : "I live in the woods, sleep on the gov- ernment purchase, eat raw bear and wild turkey, and drink out of the Mississippi." He then added : "It is getting too thick with folks about here. You're the second man I have seen within the last month ; and I hear there's a whole family come in about fifty miles down the river. I'm going to put out into the woods again."
It was, Mr. President, a happy conception which led to the formation of this Old Settlers' Association, composed of the three leading States of the valley of the Mississippi. It is well to recall our ancestral and historic renown ; and thus to be reminded that we have a common share in their deeds, and that we are cohiers in the results of their achievements for good.
The ancient Greeks by their battle celebrations preserved . their martial spirit, and national pride and vigor. To them it was but a narrow isthmus between the living and the dead. They would on such occasions bring forth the bones of the departed heroes in chests of cypress, and an empty bier, with a pall over it, representing the missing.
After laying the memorial offerings and relics at the monuments erected to the fallen, the best orator " graced the noble fervor of the hour" by enconiums on the deeds and valor of the heroic dead, and by glowing tributes to the cause in which they gave up their lives. In this way the glorified exploits at Marathon, Salamis and Platca have come down to us, across the weary march of centuries, embalmed in classic eloquence.
There is something as pathetic as it is melancholy in the fate of the discoverers of the Mississippi river and these valleys. There is not a single monument or rude stone to mark their final resting place. Hernando de Soto, whose eyes first looked upon the inland sea flowing by this city, at dead hour of night, with the stars for mourners, and with whispered chant of the burial service, was stealthuly buried in the waters of the great river he discovered, and the cur- rents swept on, heedless alike of his daring and his glory. Marquette, who came of a race of warriors, who first pene- trated the sources of this river, died miserably on the desert coast of Lake Michigan. Loved by the poor Indians, they
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disinterred his bones and gave them sepulchre in the mis- sion church at Mackinaw. But fire and desolation swept away the churches, and his bones mouldered in an unmark- ed spot. And poor Joliet, the companion in perils and honor with Marquette, sunk into obscurity, and when he died and where he was buried history bears no record. Illinois has named a town after him, but it is known most as the Jolict Penitentiary. And Laclede the founder of St. Louis, was quietly buried at the mouth of the Arkansas river, and his bones were soon washed into the Mississippi, where, it were a beautiful thought to suppose, they went with the currents to join the bones of the great discoverer.
For them, as we celebrate along the banks of this river, we, too, should have the empty bier, with the pall of mourning over it. And so of the great multitude of pioneers, who opened up a western empire, with as much of the spirit of adventure as De Soto and Marquette, with all the courage of the noblest Paladin that ever quaffed wine at the table of Charlemagne, and as rugged, yet truc, in chivalry, as any Knight that ever set spurred boot beneath the Round Table of King Arthur, who of them has a memorial slab ?
But as the tourist who visits the magnificent Cathedral of St. Paul in London, and finds no commemorative monu- ment to Wren, the architect of this wonder of art, is bid, by an inscription chiseled above the portal, to behold the Cathedral itself as his fittest monument ; so the children of the adventurers and pioneers find in the greatness and splendor of these States the noblest monument to their ancestors' labors, courage, self-denial, and wise forecast.
The greater weight of glory is with the Old Settler. The inspiring motive of Juan Ponce de Leon and Hernando de Soto was dazzling visions of gold and the youth giving properties of fancy bubbling springs hid away in the un- touched bosom of the Western Continent. With princely pomp and gay retinue they came, and
"Saw the fair land' of the orange and vine. Where the flowers ever blossomed, the beams ever shine , Where the tints of the earth and the hues of the sky. In color though varied, in beanty may vic."
But they founded no settlement, opened no farm, nor erected one family altar. While the men and women, of . common clay, fashioned after nature, who founded these
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States, recognized the stern decree : In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread. So they came not to delve for gold, that in a day and night they might become a Croesus, nor in quest of some shady Helicon, with sparkling foun- tains and sweet singing birds, where life might be an Endymion dream of perpetual youth. But they came with rifle and shot pouch, cross cut saw, hammer and auger, axe, plow, wheel and distaff and loom, and Bible and song book. They cut out of the dense forest and tangled brush a place for a home. They pleaded with the carth, as a generous mother, for her increase. They stuck their rude plough- shares into the unbroken glebe, cast in the seed, and trusted to the sacred mystery of reproductive growth. Theirs is " the long pedigree of toil-the nobility of labor." The dust of their rude temples of worship has gone and mingled with that of the builders ; their family altars have crumbled ; and the fires on the clay hearths have been extinguished, as the light of their eyes, " which the sun shall nevermore re- kindle." But the glory of their deeds and virtues, as these currents of the Mississippi go on and go out to the great ocean, will go singing down the stream of time to swell in the chorus of the eternity beyond.
I came not here to laud my own State, to the disparage- ment of her sisters. We be one family. Missouri needs no exaggerated eulogium, and no defence: There she is across the line. Her magnificence is imposing. Conscious of her greatness she is not seeking applause. In all the elements of strength, moral, intellectual and physical, in area, fertili- ty, climate, picturesqueness, mineral wealth, and water power she is a noble largess of nature. In her brave men she is royal, and in her fair women she is imperial. It has been much the fashion, either from malignancy or ignorance, for newspapers from without and within to libel her fair name. But onward she has gone in the march of empire.
If you would know of her progress, in material wealth and the arts of civilized life, look into the last census Would you learn of her orderly life, and test her unaffected hospitality ? Come over and visit us, and know i Would you know of her friendships, get closer to her big heart, and hear it beat ? Would you have proof of her martial spirit ? Read recent history. Her people were so brim full of light, during the late " unpleasantness," that for four the
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war might prove only "a scrimmage " we furnished 107,000 soldiers to the Union army, and about 60,000 to the other side, so as to make sure there would be big fighting.
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