USA > Nebraska > Seward County > History of Seward County, Nebraska, and reminiscenses of territorial history > Part 16
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Stooped to their waters o'er the mossy bank."-Whittier.
Though years have passed since our last visit to the old homestead, visions come to us of the woods and valleys by the sparkling waters of the beautiful Blue.
The river winds its crooked way through the valley with many a curve, forming broad acres of woodland which were a perfect paradise to us during the whole year. There in the spring time, the green grass and violets formed a beautiful carpet for our feet, while around us the alder and . wild plum blossoms made fragrant the air with their sweet scented odor.
Down the garden path bordered with moss roses and morning glories, we would speed away to the river, bait our hooks for fish, and cross the foot log and follow the path through the woods to the schoolhouse. That little rough board shanty, sodded all around, and the home-made, knife- marked desks have given place to new and better ones. The children upon the playground are strange to us, but the same games of "blind man's buff," and "drop the handker- chief" are played by them as we played them long years since.
The grape-vine swing must not be forgotten, for there, with choicest flowers, was crowned the queen of May, and also, in childish sport, were wedded two schoolmates, just twenty years ago.
Under the welcome shade of the old walnut tree by the ford, we studied our Sunday-school lessons, and were often lulled to sleep by the merry song of the wild birds.
During the long summer days, wading around the sand- bars and gathering shells afforded us a delightful pastime, and as the sun was seeking the western horizon, we would mount old Ned, the family horse, ford the river, and go to the farther pasture after the cows.
Each land hath its shadows, and each home hath its
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ghosts, and ours was not an exception. The "Big grove" was the most beautiful of all the "bends," on account of the heavy timber and dense foliage. There the sugar maple trees abounded, and there grew the most berries, the latter being very important, for many a new dress and coat were bought with the profits realized from their sale.
One evening at dusk something large and white, resem- bling a great bear, was seen to come out of these woods, and although we afterward learned that it was only a neighbor boy with a bed-tick over his head, we never ventured again into that grove without company.
When the autumn sun changed the foliage and ripened the fruits, then was our harvest. It would be difficult to de- cide who worked the harder to store away the winter's sup- ply of walnuts and acorns, we children or the squirrels. Perhaps we tired of the labor more quickly than our little forest friends, for frequently the restful shade of the great oaks would be too tempting, and we seated ourselves by their roots and wove wreathes of the brilliant-hued leaves, while the autumn winds sighed and rustled the branches overhead, making a beautiful accompaniment to our fancies. But when winter came with its hoary frosts and covered the earth with its blanket of snow, and the cold winds whistled through the barren timber, then, like all the children of the woods, the most comfortable place for us was home. That little log cabin, with its great fireplace and clay-chinked walls, is the most cherished of all places. The dove-cote upon its roof, the cave behind it, the box-alder and cotton- wood trees, and the old fashioned well will always be re- membered.
It seems but yesterday that father brought in the huge back-log and built a brilliant fire in front of it, then popped the corn for our first Christmas eve in our new home. . He took us children on his knee and told us of Santa Claus, and how he would come down the huge chimney and fill our stockings, if we would hurry off to bed. Mother tucked the covers carefully about us and resumed her knitting, while father read aloud, by the light of the blazing brushwood, the latest news of the rebellion, which was then raging with all its horrors.
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We watched the shadows cast by the flickering light of the burning embers upon the hearth until we fell asleep. dreaming, as all children do, of Kris Kringle and his won- derful sleigh full of toys. In the morning, when the sun's first rays peeped through the curtains of the one window in the cabin, with a bright Christmas greeting, we hastened to our stockings, to find them overflowing with popcorn and doughnuts. Away down in the toe we found a stick of can- dy, and a pair of lovely red mittens with little snowflakes all over them. We were a happy little band, and although many Christmases have come and gone, and Santa Claus has filled our stocking with a far more lavish hand, yet none will have the same place in our memory as the one of '64.
But now, far removed from those loved scenes of child- hood, and looking out upon the broad expanse of prairie and corn land, our minds will naturally wander back to the old homestead, and decide that, though home is home where'er it may be, yet that halo cannot be taken away from our father's hearthstone.
The author of the above beautiful pen picture was born at Nebraska City, August 6, 1861. and with her parents she had all the experiences of a child life in the wilderness. She was but three years old when her parents made settlement on the homestead. She had her first lessons at the home hearthstone, where she learned to read before she was four years old. At six she commenced her school days in the old log schoolhouse. She commenced her career as teacher in the spring before she was fifteen, and completed her first term in what was known as the Anderson district before she was fifteen. She earned her diploma in the Seward high school in 1880, but never received it on account of the small pox scare which broke out in the school. She had a very honorable career as teacher in various parts of the county and in the city schools. She took a great interest in chautauqua work, and although she was never permitted to meet with a circle, she was graduated from the course and received the white seal for proficiency in the work. She was a great reader and a most careful student. She married Frank P. Pingree. The family removed to Kansas and set-
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tled at Colby in Thomas county, and helped develop that wild region. One son was born to them, Logan W. In 1891 they removed to Washington, D. C., where Mrs. Pingree died January, 1892. She was the second daughter of the author.
FROM MEMORY'S WALLS
MARGARET E. THOMPSON
Our good friend, the author, with no uncertain tone and mien, bids me write something for the pages of his volume. Remembering the awe which he inspired in barefooted child- hood, the respect which supplanted it as the milestones could no longer be written in a single digit, and the "cup 'o kind- ness" so often poured around the family hearthstones, I com- ply. And yet, not for these memories alone or primarily do I write, but because of the memory of a sunnyhaired, sunny- faced, sunnyhearted childhood's friend of mine,* whose com- radeship made glad the years even to the time when she left her Kansas home to dwell in that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Were she with us her pen would sketch pictures of childhood's happy hours,- - and could she speak to us from behind the veil, how deaf would be all ears to every page but hers. But she, like David's child, can- not come back, and the memories of the days that are no more, grow richer and sweeter with the years that lie be- tween.
Memories of childhood! How haloed do they become! How impossible-undesirable-to separate between fact and fancy in regard to them!
My earliest memories have to do with life in and about the Walnut Creek ranch, and a veritable wonderland has it long since become. I could not now find its equal though I searched from coast to coast. The long gently rising hill in front of the ranch over which the sun rose so tardily in win- ter, and the shorter, steeper one in the rear, behind which he disappeared all too soon on any day; the valley widening southward; the creek, sometimes a mere thread of water,
Mrs. Nettie M. Cox Pingree. - Author.
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again a rushing torrent crossed with difficulty in the wagon- bed ferry, and yet again a swelling flood rising higher and higher until it entered, unwelcomed but not unannounced, the ranch house itself, driving the family into what, by courtesy, was called "up stairs;" the trees skirting the creek, one of which gained a deep pathos because in its shadows was laid to rest the body of our little sister-thus Sorrow, life's great teacher, gave us our first lesson, emphasizing it with what no child forgets, the first memory of his mother's tears. All these things rise before my mind at the mention of the Walnut Creek ranch. Then the freight trains, some- times long enough, with their big wagons and many mules or oxen, to reach from hilltop to hilltop and cut us off for many anxious minutes from the house if perchance we were playing in the barnyard across the road. The times when the freighters camped at the ranch, and, if the night was cold, filled the big "Pilgrim Room" full to overflowing as they warmed and smoked and told the stories of the plains before the roaring fireplace, on which occasion we children were not even expected "to be seen but not heard."
How well I remember the early night hours made un- forgettable by the calling and answering down the valley and over. the hills of the deep-chested gray wolves and the sharp-voiced coyotes as they sat upon the section corner mounds and howled gloriously. I do not know how this music may have impressed our elders, but to us children it was entrancing and even now the howls of the wolves in Lincoln and Central Parks cast over me a stronger spell than strains from Inness Band or the Chicago Orchestra, for with them rise again compellingly the awe, the wonder, the charm and the magic of the universe in the days when the heart and the mind were young.
And the later hours of the night when, from time to time we were awakened by the ominous bawling of the cattle and we heard father and the men hurrying out with their guns to kill, if possible, the wolf or wolves that had attacked an animal, usually a well grown calf, and thus terrorized the enringed and ineffectually bawling herd. How distinct in memory is one sunset hour when our favor- ite cow and calf did not return with the other cattle and we
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with mother went up the long hill but got no trace of them until when near its top we began to hear the pained, contin- uous bawling of the calf and the hoarse, enraged, feverish bawling of the cow. When we reached the hilltop we could see further on in the dying light the calf raised on its fore feet in agonized effort to escape, the while a big gray wolf, having cut its hamstrings, was feasting on its hindquarters while the companion wolf was holding the maddened cow at bay as she circled round and round in vain attempt to de- fend her offspring. My mother called pitying words to the cow and calf but dared not go near them and finally before the end of the tragedy she led us away down the hill in the fal- ling twilight trying in vain to sooth our sobs with the assur - ance that father would give us another calf in the morning.
How free the life of the frontier child! When the near- est neighbor lives seven miles away and the next to the nearest fifteen, one's liberties are not seriously circum- scribed. Out in all weathers and usually from morning un- til night with only occasional returns to the house in bread and butter interests, for denim dresses seldom tore and na- ture's shoestrings never became untied, it is not strange that a doctor was to us almost an unknown quantity. Our chief delight centered in our horses (mine was always a pony) and we spent most of our waking hours on their backs. My sister attained more than local fame for being a fine, fearless rider and there were few horses on the ranch which she could not control. I seldom now see the comparatively hedged-about life of children even in our smaller towns with- out being devoutly grateful that our childhood was spent out under the open sky as free as were the winds (and we had winds and winds in those days,) and the birds (how few they were,) and the squirrels.
Life under these conditions is quite another story for grown people, especially women, with its social and relig- ious privations and its hard work, but for children it is a long dream of unmixed bliss. How to secure for children this desirable and unrestricted firsthand contact with nature dur- ing their plastic years and to spare their parents the severe and often vital separation from the influences which feed both the mind and soul is, and always has been, the problem of
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the frontier. The present generation little realizes even here in our own county at what a cost to many men and women the splendid prairies have been transformed into what are recognized as some of the richest and most desir- able farms in this proverbially rich-soiled state. Perhaps one of the best results of this volume shall be to cause us to think upon and comprehend more adequately these things.
What an entrancing spectacle to the child was the bounding, roaring, racing prairie fire of pioneer days and how, even when he was carried out in the night with other household goods for safety and deposited in the middle of a plowed field, he felt only the joy of a new sensation-the magic spell of the beauty and granduer of one of nature's most magnificent and now almost impossible spectacles.
Little need has the child of the frontier for fairy stories, for "Alice in Wonderlands,"- for life to him is one continu- ons book of the fairies and his land is a more wondrous land than all the imaginings of Lewis Carroll's fertile brain could portray.
The word "Indian" held no terrors for ns children for were not some of our happiest hours spent in and about the wigwams of the Pawnees during their regular winter camp, but a short distance up the Creek, and were not our most frequent and most valued playmates from among the chil- dren of their chiefs? We were not given the calm joy of wheeling our neighbors' babies in ornate parasolled baby bug- gies along asphalted streets-but perhaps that was compen- sated for by the thrill of a dash about the ranch and across the creek with a chubby cheeked, searching-eyed papoose strapped to a board and bumping against our backs, the squaw mother pursning us in the meantime in finely suppres- sed glee. Here, too, my sister was an expert and the squaws had an eye to her. It was only when the word Sionx was used in connection with the word Indian that we realized from the apprehensive faces of om elders that there were some- thing to be feared. One occasion when the word Sioux loomed large is written ineffaceably among my early memo- ries. One afternoon a ranchman from the further west came dashing into the yard with the message the Sioux were com- ing down upon us and that we must fly at once. In the dusk
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of the evening two covered wagons drove out of the ranch- yard containing the family and ranchmen with guns, ammu- nition and provisions, and other easily portable possessions, leaving the cattle, house and crop to the mercy of the red- men. All I remember further is the child sobbing herself to sleep with her head in her mother's lap, the continuous rain, rain, rain, which fell as we journeyed farther and farther from home, and the return to the ranch after a few days, find- ing everything much as it had been left, the Sioux that time having committed their depredations along the Little rather than the West Blue. Some rain-stained books in the family bookcase call up even yet the gruesomeness of that experi- ence our first little journey into a world greater than our Walnut Creek world.
Sunday at the ranch was always a longed-for day from the child's standpoint, not because it was our dress up occa- sion-that we submitted to under protest --- but from the fact that it was different from other days and hence satisfied to a degree the child's craving for variety. Naturally much work had to be done on Sunday-for not even in these later days have our friends who profess to ignore the material, been able to demonstrate the possibility of evolving cows that do not have to be milked and humans and cattle that do not have to be fed upon the first as upon other days but with us as little was done as was possible. We children felt much cirenm- scribed in our liberties by our clean clothes and shoes and from the fact that we were not allowed to sing secular songs, and whistling, horseback riding and tree climbing were ta- booed utterly-but all this was compensated for by the extra time that mother was able to give us, usually spent in study- ing and repeating from memory Bible verses, singing and telling stories- Bible stories, or in strolling out under the skies and talking of the marvels of creation-mother usually repeating some favorite Psalm on these occasions. If by chance we had opportunity to attend a church service held either in our own or some neighbor's house by some travel- ing missionary, it was an event to reckon time from for weeks and weeks. We all recall vividly the first Sunday School, held on what is now our home place, to which we drove in great state in a hayrack-strawrides are not the joy
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of recent years alone-calling for some of our neighbors who lived along the intervening miles. Later when a church was organized with a well attended Sunday School in con- nection we felt indeed metropolitan.
The school, as well as the church, problem on the fron- tier is always a serious one especially when, as with us, there are too few settlers within a given area to warrant the form- ing of a public school. This my parents met by having a most excellent young woman, Miss Agnes Henderson, whose family had recently moved to Nebraska from Wisconsin, come into the home as teacher and companion. This arrangement proved a great joy to both children and parents and we have always since counted among the friends who belong to that inner circle our honored and beloved first teacher. My only woes of those school days, as I recall them, were my in- ability to remember the letter "H,"and my grief because I failed to win the prize offered to the one who should make the greatest progress in studies. How soon, alas! one learns to regard with philosophic calmness his ability to learn greater lessons than that of remembering the letter "H," and how early in life he appreciates the difficulty of realiz- ing Paul's injunction "So run that ye may obtain." Later when the vicinity became sufficiently settled to warrant the organization of a public school, Miss Henderson was chosen as its teacher and my sister and brother and I walked three and one-half miles, and some other children even further, to attend it. It was thought by our parents wise for us to be accompanied by a big dog in order to protect us from the ever possible but never realized attack of the gray wolves.
Thus passed those faraway school days, rude and crude in many ways no doubt, limited and circumscribed as com- pared with the schools today attended by the children who live and thrive on those same broad acres, but for all that, rich in very much of good and very much of joy. James A. Gar- field's conception of an ideal college was to have President Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and himself on the other. There were no James A. Garfields and no Mark Hopkinses in our district school in those years, but the difference may have been not so much in kind as in degree. True it is that equipments and appliances, desirable as they are, cannot
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make a good school unless there be a teacher who can teach, and boys and girls of healthy body and mind with the earn- est desire to learn, and if these latter be present the absence of the former cannot preclude the inevitableness of a good school.
The transition from school girl to teacher, even in these days when the teacher of less than a score of years is excep- tionally young, is speedy. In former years when teachers were fewer than they are now it was no unfamiliar sight to see the girl-teacher of fifteen wending her way along country roads to and from her-usually first-school. The present condition in this, as in some other things, is a decided im- provement over the past, for there is nothing harder than imparting to others the knowledge which we have not yet acquired. As the Chinaman says, "No havee, how canee!" It is with the memory of the first school of one of these un- ripe and callow school ma'ams that I close this chapter of reminiscences.
The possibilities arising from the conjunction of the county examination and the offer of a country school among good friends proved too compelling to be withstood and the third day following found a trembling but triumphant, short- dressed individual installed behind a pine-board desk with thirteen freshly starched and polished children ranging in age from pinafored to downy mustached days. They were arranged around the sides of the not-too-large-for-them room behind desks corresponding to the teacher's in material and workmanship. The house was a combination sod and dug- out with its doors and windows opening, both literally and figuratively, towards Jerusalem. The back wall had grown unsteady and a plank was placed against it supported by a pole which extended far out into the room. A small black- board further adorned this wall. The floor was as nature had left it minus the grass and had been worn by a few large and many small feet into depressions and eminences which necessitated one to look well to the order of his going. This floor afforded us endless delight when the rain ran in beneath the door and covered it sufficiently for us to recognize and name the chief mountain chains, continents, capes, peninsu- las, oceans, rivers and bays of our geographies. I was never
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in subsequent teaching able to make the study of geography at once so popular and practical. Thus we lived day after day through that summer near to nature's heart, playing to- gether at noon and recesses and not living an over strenuous -- it now seems to me -- life during other hours, but happy and unburdened, with no anxious thought for the morrow, for those blessed days preceded with us the day of the writ- ten examination.
I can see them all now, those thirteen, as though the sod walls, the unpainted benches and the mother-earth floor were re-created in reality instead of in the imagination, and I know what I have known long since that nothing I can ever be or do will seem to me more abundantly worth while than did those days while they were yet written in the present tense. Of the hundreds of boys and girls who have been my pupils and friends in the years which lie between, none are more affectionately recalled than are these, the first fruits of my pedagogue days. I take myself to task because I was not able to do much more for each of them but especially for the gifted little artist whose marvelous -- to me now as to all of us then-pencil sketches from life and from that greater realm of the imagination, held us spellbound through many a showery recess and noon hour. The teacher-friend with the seeing eye who could have counselled with her parents and helped to plan her future -in all likelihood that of a master portrait or animal painter-was denied her and there- in lies a great loss to the world-perhaps the tragedy of a life. What a truly awful thought, the possibility of imposing limitations upon our fellowmen because of our own limitations, the power which each one has to thwart to so great an ex- tent the plan of the Creator, not only in his own life but in the life of another. How could we endure this responsibility were it not for the redeeming fact that the ability to limit and thwart but argues the ability to enlarge, to enrich, to assist, to encourage, to develop? And is not the ability to be helpful after all what makes life so abundantly worth the living?
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INDIAN SCARES
MRS. SARAH F. ANDERSON
At the time of the great Indian scare of 1864, my fath- er's family was one of the families which the Nebraska City people had heard were killed. It had been rumored through- out the little settlement that there were bands of hostile Indians approaching, and that they were committing great depredations as they went.
On Sunday morning my uncle and Thomas Shields started down the river on a scouting expedition. After an all-day search, just at nightfall they came suddenly upon an Indian camp. The men thought their time had come, but the red-skins were equally scared. There was no chance to back out, and they resolved to know whether the Indians were friendly or hostile. As they bravely approached the camp, the Indians began to halloo, "Heap good Omaha." The men then concluded to camp over night with them, and they partook of a square Indian supper. The next morning they went home satisfied that there were no hostiles in the country.
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