History of Bradford County, Pennsylvania, with biographical selections, Part 6

Author: Bradsby, H. C. (Henry C.)
Publication date: 1891
Publisher: Chicago, S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1340

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The roar of resounding arms-the harsh tocsin of war drove out the people from the fair and happy valleys of the upper Susquehanna, and armed men in serried columns cut highways through these forests, where were only the few and small deadenings and blind paths before. The people fled for their lives to the forts in the older and heavier settlements, the men as best they could conveying their families to

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

places of comparative safety for the time, having, when they left their backwoods cabins, left crops and kine behind them and departed at a moment's notice often ; and, as soon as the general rendezvous was reached, they would shoulder their rifles and join the army, and go forth with their lives in their hands-the long and indescribable cruel- ties and sufferings of war, invasion, rapine, "hired Hessians" murdering for lucre, and painted savages for even less compensation, the miserable instinct of cruelty confronting these men-pickets in the fore of civilization, and behind them were their wives and babes and the dark, uncertain hope that hung only as a deep pall above them. For seven long years Bradford county was again the gloomy, silent wilderness, with no sign of life save that of the fierce growl of fighting wild beasts, the war-whoops of fiercer men, or the crack of the long black rifle, as some enemy of mankind bit the dust and laid his bones to bleach on the hill-side. The women and children to the forts, the men to war and the rare Tory to Canada, and the upper Susquehanna was again a lonely desert. On the heels of the fugitive pioneers came the Indian marauders, headed by Englishmen, determined to stamp out forever all rebellion against the "sacred King"-wash it out in blood and burn it up with fire, and behind these pitiless woods' people was the great English Empire-the bloody Anglo-Saxon, turning in inappeasable wrath upon his own kith and kin, unleashing the dogs of cruel, horrid war. The forts were besieged and overpowered, and the bloodiest border massacres of the Revolution were enacted along the banks of the beautiful blue Susquehanna, when finally Washington sent Gen. Sullivan's expedition, and then the heavy heel of the Son of Man came with one fell crushing blow upon the head of the serpent. Gen. Sullivan cleared the beautiful valley of these devils incarnate, killing the men as fast as he could reach them, and then destroying their villages, driving off their stock and destroying the last vestiges of their crops-a very lesson of destruction both to the savages and their white allies. Then again the white man began to venture on these grounds ; hunt out the little spot where stood the cabin, now gone in smoke and a scattered handful of ashes, and the unconquerable pioneer, undaunted, set about the work of re-making his wilderness home. Nothing can be more tiresome than that dyspeptic sentiment- alism that is now possible at rare intervals among American writers, who carp at what they call Sullivan's cruelty to "Lo, the poor Indian," on the occasion of his expedition. Red or white, he struck to kill, as was his high and holy duty, and these hysterical outgivings-carpings that he came with real soldiers, instead of praying missionary women, to appease with gifts and burning aromatic incense these children of Satan-is a travesty upon common sense.

Hardly was the ink dry on the parchment that contained the treaty of peace when the eager Susquehanna settlers were again ready to pour into the valley and build anew their cabins on the little spot of ashes that was the only remains of their former homes. This border- land for more than seven years had been the scene of the march of sol- diers and the stealthy, prowling men in moccasins and their white con- querers. These had crossed and recrossed each other's tracks -- the white

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

man most often in hot pursuit of some band fleeing from the lower settle- ments where they had swooped down in the darkness and committed some horrid slaughter and stolen the horses and cattle of their poor vic- tims ; many of their acts of refined cruelty were in stealing the children of the whites and carrying them away and keeping them in captivity, leaving a poor mother to waste the remaining years of her life in the pursuit or vain hope of recovering their precious babes. A little girl child was stolen and carried up the Susquehanna and adopted into the tribe, and was never again found by friends until long after she was a woman and the wife or squaw of an Indian. She refused at that late day to return to friends and civilization.

Much additional particulars will be given of these pioneers in the respective chapters relating to the thirty-seven townships that consti- tute Bradford county. It is enough to say here that the development of the county was slow indeed -- the people came in a little stream and never in swarms or colonies, as has been the case in some of the Far- West new territories. They encountered many obstacles then that are known not of in this age. For fifty years the advance was so slow that it was hardly more than perceptible; the dark old woods melted away reluctantly, and easy or rapid transportation was unknown to them. The children of even the most favored or wealthy, while they had nearly everything they wanted, were ignorant even of luxuries such as our present children demand as common necessities. Many a young man of that day was big and old enough to go " a-sparking " - that is what they called love-making in those simple, honest days, before he had become the happy possessor of a pair of boots. The young man of to-day breathes nearly a different atmosphere to that of the boys or young men of fifty years ago. One of these old-time boys, whose head is now white with many winters, recently recounted some- thing of his boyhood to his interested listeners. He was born in Bradford county of parents of more than the average advantages of wealth. Heremembers every process of raising the flax and clipping the wool, and from that to the home-made clothes that dressed the en- tire family; how the ox was slaughtered in the fall, and the younger cattle in the spring and summer, and the hides were carried to the tannery and returned home; and then the annual visit of the shoe- maker shod all around, the big and little in footwear that was worn with infinite pride, but each pair must last a whole year; how when he was large enough he hired ont and rode one of the neighbor's plow horses while the man plowed his crop of corn, and three days the boy thus endured the sharp bare back; and when the man settled up he paid him two ten-cent silver coins-a picayune a day, and how, while he pocketed his wages in silence, as he trudged his way home, he took the coins out of his pocket and threw them into the brush by the wayside and hated the man most cordially all his life for his mean- ness. This man could draw a vivid picture of his boy life in this then comparatively new country, especially in the long walks the chil- dren often took to the log cabin school house, and while it was before the day of free schools, yet a large family of children then cost their parents less outlay of cash to educate them than each average child

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

now costs. This venerable man can tell you that in his young manhood he commenced life for himself, without capital or even the backing of strong friends, and opened a store, and at one time sold more goods every week from his store in Towanda than is now sold in the same length of time from all the many stores in the borough. While the boys of to-day will hear of the boys of fifty years ago, and pity them, yet it is a fact that the young man of to-day is under very many disadvantages in the comparison of then and now. Now, unless the young man has inherited capital, he must seek employ- ment as a rule from others, and it is very much more difficult to become an employer of others than it was at one time. Capital and society have been recast. Capital has been aggregating, and the small beginners are smothered out; the country store, with its limited stock of goods, is more nearly in direct competition with the great city stores than formerly ; and so of every other branch of business. The avenues to success are being slowly but surely closed up-fewer employers, and the army of employes constantly growing and expanding. In such surroundings the struggle for life, with all those who must struggle at all, will grow harder and harder. To use a phrase that is not exact- national wealth will more rapidly increase in these conditions, but so will the numbers of the poor and, alas, too, the numbers of those out of employment and seeking it. While stagnation is death, yet all change is not improvement. It is easy for us to say our society is now better- the nearest perfect the world has seen ; that we have those things that contribute to our happiness in the highest degree; that our schools and churches and the laws are better than ever known to the world before. There are pros and cons to all this self-laudation. We have better food, clothing, houses and drainage, and the average of life is longer than it was when our ancestors were first struggling here ; but we have more penal institutions, asylums, feeble-minded homes, soup houses and actual starvation ; crimes wholly unknown and a class of criminals that our.grandfathers never heard of; and one feature that is wholly new, and that is the bequest or gift outright by one individual of the enor- mous sum of six million dollars to the church and school, and hundreds of others giving nearly similar amounts, and yet the State has taken charge of educating our children, and from free schools and endowed universities and colleges laws are being passed to compel parents to send their children to school. And, amid it all, the demand exceeds the supply on every hand, except on the evil side.

Honest simplicity is never an ungainly thing-it may call for a smile of pity, but never a tear. Phenomenal school children, cunning and tricky street Arabs of the city may know many things that George Washington never learned. The dullard boy of to-day knows more of fast living than did the brightest boy a hundred years ago; but does he live longer or enjoy it more ?

A Boy and Leather Breeches .- At the beginning of this century one of the sore needs of the people was wool with which to make clothing. The scarcity of this article was the mother of the idea of dressing deer-skins and making clothing. They were soon able to dress these skins, and they were soft and pliable, and the art of giving

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

them a slight buff color was learned, and when made into trousers they resembled modern nankeen, and to this was soon added a bright color for the fringe around the deer-skin hunting shirts-these were soon worn with as much pride as a militiaman once strolled under his waving rooster feathers. "Doeskin " pants, as these leather trousers were sometimes called, were no doubt in their time quite dudish.

The pioneers had their own amusements, and had more time to be amused than have our modern get-rich-quick people. They had far greater wealth then than now, in the way of dogs and many children; and if in the family was a rat-tailed spotted horse, the big boys of that fortun- ate household were, not only rich, but happy. Fifteen children and forty- two grandchildren, to say nothing of the great-grandchildren, reveled in all the needed prospective wealth of the eldest male Monte Cristo, in the "old man's" long squirrel gun, and the short, slim-tailed spotted horse, that in the course of nature would come to the expectant and hopeful heirs. It is a portentous fact that these peculiar guns and horses were far rarer in those good old times than are railroads and millionaire bondholders now; and the prospective heir was far more happy, as well he might be; and we know that great and splendid wealth is wholly in the variety of the dower, and not in any intrinsic values. For instance, our modern idiots dote on diamonds and similar miserable and useless trash, all not only worthless, but worse than bubbles. Compare these with cur dogs, sixteen children and a rat-tailed spotted horse and a flint-lock, long-barreled squirrel gun, and then please exploit yourself "a ass" in the stupid faith that the new order may smile in contemptuous pity upon the great past. Poverty then and riches now, no sir! It is base diamond-crowned delusion now, and it was the gun and pony then-real substantial wealth versus a lunatic's dream. A glint of sunlight is worth more than all the diamonds and rubies the whole world has ever contained- and a dog, flint-lock and a calico pony, granting him a fair share of pole-evil and string-halt, is a solid, intrinsic reality ; a real wealth to dower fifteen towsley brats, and make them lords and ladies all.

Then, too, the pioneers and their " brats " had amusements far better than anything we now know. Sugar-making camps in the early spring, when the sweet sap from the maple flows, when the whole neighborhood would go to the woods and camp and make sugar and that dark and delicious syrup. Why our effete youngsters know not enough to dream in their lifeless way of real fun-life in its highest and best form. One hundred vears ago the people knew how to really live-live for all that healthy, bounding life is worth. The woods were full of game and the streams of fish, and hunting, trapping and fishing commenced as soon as children could toddle, and continued with no game laws interfering, as long as old age could again toddle. The nightly concerts of the wolves and panthers would literally knock silly our make-believe tragic operas ; two gew-gawed " lumaxes singing out their mad duel, fought with paper swords, and another fellow stabbing himself with a bar of soft soap, accompanying the act with such boss bullfrog croaking as of itself ought to kill the lunatic as well as the audience. The pioneers had great hunting frolics, log

V.O. Pallet

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

rollings, and real courting that was give-and-take like the strokes from a blind mule's hind quarters compared to this modern dude-lolling. Towanda creek especially was noted for the number of its rattle- snakes, and nearly every year hunting parties were organized, and at the meet divided off under captains, and contest as to which party could kill the greatest number of rattlers. Our modern men hunt snakes, but the kind that is corked up in bottles, whose bite is so intoxicating that men seek them out and actually pay so much a nip. And other things have changed as much as ancient and modern snake hunting.

One of the old-time boys, so old that he remembers an incident in his life that occurred eighty years ago, relates the following: He was promised that if he would for the next month be a real good boy -that is, work to the utmost limit of endurance-then he might go afoot five miles to the shop and see the man pound hot iron. His imagination was fired at the very thought-was ever a boy so rich in anticipation-a real blacksmith and pounding hot iron and the sparks fly- ing in every direction and they never burned up the smithy,-a sure enough king of fire, and his parents had promised him an afternoon holiday to go and see all this for himself! Time with that boy now lingered, loitered and fooled away his gallop along the way incom- parably slower than it now does with the hard-up young man who knows the " old man " has made his will and there's millions in it for him, except the old man is awful healthy-has neither manners nor regards for his only hopeful and chip-of-the-old-block son; if the lov- ing son only had energy enough he would poison the old duffer. But this is wandering from the boy that, if the slow-coach time ever did get around, was going to see the hot iron pounded. His mother and sis- ters realized that the boy must have different clothes-must be dressed well, as well as all over, to go on that great expedition ; he had a pair of "doeskin" trousers and roundabout of the same, and on a pinch could wear his father's moccasins, but he had no cap; a solemn coun- cil convened, and as a result of its deliberations a cat was killed, the skin dressed with the tail left hanging down his back for a queue. The great day did arrive and the boy went, and as good luck would have it the smithy was not too drunk to work, and his visions were more than realized. The smithy, with a tooth for enjoyment, took in the situation when the gawking boy was looking on so intently as he worked the bellows and slyly spat on the anvil and jerked out the white heated metal and struck it a tremendous blow, and the loud explosion nearly frightened the lad to death, and he confesses that he was a married man and had children before he had any other thought but that the anvil, the hammer and the smithy had all exploded at the same time-a veritable cataclysm to him, and that the creature was supernatural was evidenced that it could not kill him, as he pounded away right merrily.

When that boy returned he was the hero of all the children for many miles around-all of them went to church, or meeting rather, the following Sunday to see him. The nods, frowns and thumb-jerking of the old folks could not control them-the good divine thundered his

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

thirty-seventhly louder, but in vain; the children for once did not quake when he, a last resort with the good Shepherd when all else failed to interest the people, as he called it, would " lift the leds of hell and show them the fires," the children, the boys especially, had heard that before, but had never before known a boy that had been up to see hot iron pounded, and the poor preacher, parents, pickled rods, etc., were unheeded, and they gathered about the real hero of the day, who told them all he saw ; that is all that he had words to express. Happily, children can make themselves understood to children, and there was never a boy at meeting that day but who went home with the high resolve that, come what might, some day he too would go and see the blacksmith pound hot iron-utterly reckless of consequences, some day when he had a pair of "doeskin " trousers, like those his big brother always wore when he went a-courting, he would go and his mother and sisters could not scare him out of it, especially if he could get his hair roached, and look big and not afraid ; hadn't he already gone clear out to the wood-pile one night, and although he heard a screech-owl he held onto his armful of wood and landed it, with a good deal of clatter, it is true, on the floor by the chimney corner-and then foolish girls talk to him about being afraid of pounded hot iron, even if everything and smithy too did burst, what of it ?- go he would !

Simply as a matter of relish of life can you imagine anything, any- where of modern days, that in the least compares with this instance in pioneer life ? All true life is in the mind's excitation, the mental exul- tation in expectancy that fills the cup to the brim and it overflows. It is but one in every pioneer family of the land, where things were pure and primitive-when neither children nor grown persons died of ennui-when children had hardly anything as toys or luxuries that could be called " boughten." Why is it that the children who never had a doll, except rag ones of their own making, remember their child- hood with so infinite a zest that it is beyond all comprehension of the modern child that is loaded and even oppressed with its multitude of elaborate and expensive toys ? Luxuries, expensive and valuable lux- uries, costing great sums of money, and that are beautiful and fragile, are not what the child wants, unless the little one is first trained out of all natural sweet childhood. The boy that gets some person to bend a pin for him, and provides his own string and fish-pole, for his first fishing in the shallow puddle, has incomparably more delight in fish- ing than is ever known to the coddled child of wealth who when he is nearly grown is allowed to go with a groom and fish with one of these expensive tackles that can be purchased at the sporting store. It is the boy fourteen years old who looks forward to the day when his father will buy a new cap or hat, and give him the old one to dress up in and go to meeting, who will remember longest his triumphs and joys in the acquisition of new clothes, or anything and everything that comes to him in his callow days. The modern boy and man for that matter looks back upon the pioneer times and shud- ders at their primitive simplicity, because he is ignorant of the fact in the premises ; he gratifies every appetite, and they in succession cloy and he gets drunk, if he has the energy, or might commit suicide, and

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

has but the one consolation-that he didn't live before they had rail- roads and uniformed servants and waiters on every hand, and he may have looked forward to the one glory of death, of being buried in a suit cut and made in Paris. Expensive and artificial life is not a bound- less joy-rather it is the keen earnestness of simplicity-gratified rarely, but always intensely.

CHAPTER VI. THE LOG CABIN.

THE FIRST BRUSH CABINS-THE IMPROVED ONES-ETC.

TI THE log cabins of the pioneers were the powerful lever that L pressed the Indians that skirted along the Atlantic shore back toward the Alleghanies, and then across the mountains and on to the Mississippi river, and across that and then to the Rocky mountains, and eventually across these snow-clad ranges and down the slope and finally to the Pacific ocean. Nearly three hundred years were consumed in these long and often bloody journeyings of the two peo- ples so distinct in color, race and instincts. They were antagonistic races that could not well exist together. The Indian's supreme im- pulse was that of absolute freedom-liberty in its fullest extent, where there was no law other than that of physical strength and courage, might was right, and from that the weak had no appeal save that of the stoic's divine right to death. The Indian's death-song was there- fore a part of his deep-seated philosophy, and whether cooped up on the tall cliff-Starved Rock-and slowly starved to death, slain in battle, or dying of disease, his last and supreme act was to chant his weird death-song. Death then was not his one dreaded, invisible foe. When he could fight and kill no more, then it was his friend-the angel with outstretched wings in his extremity, tenderly carrying him away from his enemy and his pain. His ideal was that animal life typified in the screaming eagle of the crags, or the spring of the striped tiger, whose soft foot had carried it in reach of its unsuspecting prey.

The rugged and weather-beaten pioneer, he or his ancestors had fled from tyranny and religious persecutions, severely austere toward his own real or imaginary faults, welcoming any inflection that would only purify, as by fire, his soul, and fleeing from the persecutor of the body, he erected his altars to a God that was simply inappeasable, not only for his own sins, but for the yielding to temptation of the first mother of the human race, and this he unfalteringly believed " brought death into the world and all our woe." This creature of curious con- tradictions, while over-exacting toward himself, and welcoming any

HISTORY OF BRADFORD COUNTY.

and all self-inflicted strifes, slept on his arms for anything mortal that dared to intimate an approach on his religious rights or beliefs-yield- ing all to his God, he would yield nothing to anyone or anything else. He would put a padlock on his mouth, that it might not speak evil, and his very thoughts in the stocks, that he might not think evil- silence and dreams of the glories of heaven alternating with the groans and outcries of the damned, and eyes closed to all earthly things, he even tried to control the strong impulses of his heart in its love for wife or children in the fear that God would be jealous and might blast forever his soul with a frown. And from the depths of his troubled life he would cry out that he could do nothing to please God-that he was utterly unworthy and totally wicked; that his whole inheritance, through a thousand ancestors, was sin, and it would be but a supreme mercy in his Maker to cast him out forever. He invented his own penance, inflicted his own judgments, clothed himself in sackcloth and ashes, and finally consigned himself as the only mercy he deserved to the endless tortures of hell.

This was the fugitive, the waif cast upon the troubled waters, that came from the Old to the New in the hunt of religious liberty and a home. Unkempt and unwashed, rough and storm-beaten, with long, bushy hair, and in his leather jerkin, this apparition stood before the savages of the valley of the Susquehanna, rifle in hand, one foot thrown before the other, braced, erect, his keen eye directed straight into the wild man's soul; there he had put his heavy foot down, and the quick instinct of the savage told him never to take it up again. The wild man struck like the coiled snake; the crack of the white man's rifle echoed through the old forest trees and stilled the serpent's rattle forever.

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History of Bradford County, Pennsylvania, with biographical selections, Part 6

Author: Bradsby, H. C. (Henry C.) Publication date: 1891 Publisher: Chicago, S. B. Nelson Number of Pages: 1340

Author: Bradsby, H. C. (Henry C.)
Publication date: 1891
Publisher: Chicago, S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1340