History of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, Part 27

Author: Curtiss-Wedge, Franklyn; Pierce, Eben Douglas
Publication date: 1917
Publisher: Chicago Winona : H.C. Cooper
Number of Pages: 1318

USA > Wisconsin > Trempealeau County > History of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin > Part 27

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It puzzles me how it was managed, but we never lacked comfort. Our homes, though plain, were always clean, our table provided with whole- some food, and our beds neat and inviting. I love to remember that snow- bound winter. Up in the attic you could hear the wind moan in the flue, and rattle the dead oak leaves. Then there were the lovely cracks of gold in the floor telling of father up hours before chore time, reading and study- ing by lamplight those precious books that never were left behind. Hugh Miller's "Old Red Sandstone" seems a part of him. It was the first book I noticed-from it I learned my letters. It gave one a fine intellectual feeling to read the A B C's from father's book, standing straight beside his chair, enunciating each letter with bravado. As far back as my memory reaches, he was taking the Atlantic Monthly. The first "piece" I spoke was a pre- lude to some lengthy article in it, taught me by father, and so like his own sayings-"It is not all in bringing up, Let folks say what they will, To silver scour a pewter cup, It will be pewter still." Housekeeping wasn't so complicated those days, and, in spite of its lack of conveniences, mother found many hours in which to help father teach us. She was an early Montessori.

The only real rushing business of this locality was horse stealing among the outlaws. And although a moral consciousness precluded father's adop- tion of the profession, he did quite innocently become possessed of one of their thefts, a black Morgan mare, balky to such a degree I doubt not her owner considered himself well rid of her-of which more later. Occa- sionally scraps of talk about these raids reached us, furnishing a little healthy excitement.

As the last snow was vanishing, father took the sack of cloverseed down from the rafters and sowed it upon the most favorable ground along the creek bank. Then the waiting and the watching through unseasonable heat, freezes and snow flurries. I am reminded of Old Goody Blake dowr on her knees blowing up the faint embers of the poor little fire she obtained by filching handfuls of Harry Gill's brushwood. During a dry spell, assisted by mother and every toddler that could carry a bucket, however small, I distinctly remember my part in it, and of sounding the depths of the creek coming up with the tip top of my new shaker plastered with mud-father kept the patch moist. He said the Sahara might be reclaimed if clover could be started upon it. It was his creed and he spread its gospel wher- ever he farmed. Nature couldn't turn a deaf ear to such prayers, it grew and flourished. That fall it was a great temptation to cut it for Bossie, but father had mowed some fine-bladed marsh grass while it was young and tender, dried it beneath the bleaching sheets, salted it down in the mow, and she performed as well or better than most cows of those days; that is, she didn't give milk during the five winter months, but kept in good con- dition and brought us twin heifer calves early the next spring.

Father was gone off and on most of the summer at work for the more prosperous farmers in the adjoining valleys. Once when mother was there with only us children, a band of Indians trailed by, the men sitting erect and dignified on their shaggy ponies, the squaws so humble and browbeaten, trudging afoot, loaded nearly double with great bundles at their backs,

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carried by means of broad leathern straps across the chest and forehead, little girls and boys innocent of clothes scampered along in the cloud of dust. Papooses dangled from every budget. Cur dogs with red lolling tongues darted out and in among them. As we stood at the gate one big fellow stopped, and thrusting his dirty fingers in our cat's fat sides, asked tersely, "How much ?" And for a minute we children held our breath, certain our lives were to be spared at the sacrifice of pussy's. Then, seeing the fowls, they wanted chickens, "You so much, me, one," they pleaded. But mother, knowing their tricks, was firm; one meant that many for every Indian able to beg. The long line of perhaps two or three hundred ended at last. They forded the creek and camped less than a half-mile distant in a grove of oaks. Toward evening one of the neighbors riding by cau- tioned mother to be on the lookout, the Indian had liquor. While she was not abashed at the nearness of Indians pure and simple, she knew there were good reasons to be afraid of the best of them, no matter how civilized, when mixed with firewater. So with all of us children hanging to her, her face to the foe, she set out to find the chief, who assured her most solemnly that she had nothing to fear, and pointed out a number of yelling braves tied to trees while they sobered off. We visited the camp several times and were unmolested except that they begged for everything in sight.

As before mentioned, it was here that father bought, unwittingly, the stolen mare, Doll. She was jet black with a blazing white star in her fore- head, an exact match for the colt obtained during our stay at Travis Valley. As father led Doll behind him in the barn, the very day of her purchase, she kicked out in play, hitting father a terrific blow in the side that laid him up for a long time. During the two and a half years of our sojourn here father had used all the barn fertilizer he could get from the horse dealers (?) and our own stable to enrich his ground. The patch of clover was now several acres, the corn and grain in splendid trim, when Mr. Mattison, of spirit rapping fame in Arcadia, passed by and fell in love with the place. Before he left he owned it and father received in exchange an eighty in (of course) Trempealeau County. In his anxiety to get back, the start was made before father was at all fit for even a short journey, mother driving the stallion and his mate on the wagon holding a few household articles and four little ones, father following in the buggy drawn by Doll, with the oldest, a child of eight, to watch over and care for him. All went well until we reached the foot of Waushara Hill, a hard, sandy climb enough to discourage any horse. Doll was completely overcome. She stopped short, letting one hip drop in a resting posture, her delicate ear radiating toward the rear to catch the verbal abuse her former owners had subjected her to. Except to chirrup a time or two, father said nothing. He was so sick nothing really mattered. He sat and waited, placing all the responsibility of action on Doll. Somehow, somewhere, while yet young he learned the value of patience, that attribute needed first and usually gained last. He was not a hustler; violence of any kind was foreign to his nature, but his tender, watchful endurance was godlike. It was his win- ning card in every game. Through his own remarkable self control, he governed others without visible effort. It seemed so cheerfully right to do

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anything father suggested. He never antagonized one. His influence was always soothing. It soothed and conquered Doll. With an indescribable gesture of exasperated patience that melted into puzzled incomprehension and crystallized into life lasting confidence, she gave father a long, studied look, then with a soft, blubbery sigh, pushed out gently on the bit, starting up the first of many, many long hills that in her life of over twenty years in our service she climbed with never an untrue move.

For years father was associated in business with that most canny Scotch horse dealer, James Low, of Baraboo, buying and selling largely and constantly, but never to find Doll's equal in intelligence or trustworthi- ness. To my knowledge no one outside the immediate family was ever allowed to drive her but once. It was threshing time with its accompanying hustle. In those days people did not grow enough grain to pay them to invest in high-priced threshers. They engaged a tramp horsepower ma- chine that passed from one setting of stacks to another. At our place one horse took sick and father, driven to it, put in Doll. The noise excited her, yet she did fairly well until the driver became loud and profane in his exhortations. Doll stopped and appeared to be recalling similar scenes. The driver let out a half-rod of whip lash that shot in sinuous, snakelike coils and cracked immediately over her sensitive ears. She not only hesi- tated now, she balked stiff with ears pinched flat, her distended nostrils blood red, a perfect fury. Had mother been struck it could not have incensed us children more. We popped up and down like mad Dervishes, and the yell of bloody murder passed down the line like water in a bucket brigade. Father was there before anything worse happened, and Doll was quickly and quietly led out of the traces and inside the barn. How the crew managed, I do not remember, we were too busy loving our outraged old bonnie to notice small matters. Once father drove her and a mate into Humbird, traded the mate for a great white Durham cow, Lily White, an imported animal that, refusing to breed, had been worked in the lumber camps with oxen, and came driving back with horse and cow hitched together. It must have been humiliating to Doll, but father required it of her, that was enough.

The Mattison home, to which we moved in 1872, adjoined the south side of the Arcadia burying ground, the house so near the line you could toss a pebble from the back door to the nearest graves. You could look through the window on the other side and occasionally see deer among the oak thickets of the barn yard. Once we shot a bear in the crotch of a tree over the path leading to the pasture, when we had discovered why the cows kept turning back at that point. At another time we saw Mrs. Bruin and two cubs taking their constitutional across a field, headed for Barn Bluff, upon whose sandy summit grew the earliest sweetest wind flowers. It was at this place we had a fearful siege of typhoid, every one being stricken except father and sister Kate, who maintains she underwent worse suffer- ing than the fever victims. No professional nurses on tap then. Dr. Lewis spent all his spare time assisting, but upon father fell the hardship of nursing night and day, napping occasionally in his chair between the rows of sufferers. Worn out at last he was persuaded to lie down while

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Mr. and Mrs. Conant watched. To his horror upon awakening he discovered that through a mistake in the bottles I, who lay at death's door, had been given a spoonful of turpentine. I established my reputation then and there of being contrary by mending at once. Father brought us all through, bald-headed skeletons, but alive, thanks to his untiring care.

Several families from the old Pennsylvania district came out and set- tled near. One woman brought a peck of peach pits. Father carefully cracked and planted his handful in boxes. Several sprouted and grew amazingly. He kept them in wooden tubs, moving them into the cellar the first two winters, when they became pot bound and were placed in the open ground. In the fall father dug up one side of the roots, weighted the trees to the ground, covering them with dirt, coarse litter and rails. After danger of frost in the spring they were straightened. In their fourth year they bore fruit. True, it had a decidedly vegetable flavor, but none the less home grown peaches. In much the same manner he grew our first grapes. He planted a small orchard of hardy apples, which thrived and bore when others thought it useless to try. His pear tree seemed always beckoning for succor. Like homesick women in a foreign land, it refused to bear. Its influence was so saddening that it was replaced by a more cheerful pioneer. We popped corn over its burning twigs, the only real, spirited, happy time of its existence.

Two new names for the census taker were added here.

We were moving less often now. We remained on the three hundred and sixty-acre Humbird farm, which now became our home, from 1877 to 1881, nearly five years, perhaps because it took that much longer to overcome the desecrations of man. Nature had been lavish in her bestowal of beauty, but man apparently had worked with extraordinary ingenuity to upset her plans. What a place! Dead cattle lying unburied in the barn- yard upon which great, gaunt, hairy hogs were eating, dead fowls under the perches, a new barn erected above the carcasses of several sheep, half the pickets fallen from the front fence, buildings unpainted, the windows of the big house stuffed with rags, worn out fields. Father put the full force of men and teams to clearing the premises. The dead were buried in a pit after covering them with lime. Tons and tons of fertilizer were hauled from the yards and stables to a worked-out forty, as level as the floor, but too poor to raise a row. He bought at a dollar a load all the manure at the Humbird livery stable, and how the neighbors laughed to see a man pay, actually pay, for manure. He grew a crop of clover knee deep on it and turned that back to the land. The neighbors shook their heads and called him crazy. You should have seen the crop of corn fol- lowing! Its like was never seen there before. On other depleted fields similarly treated the heavy-headed oats stood shoulder high. A lover of good stock he paid one hundred and fifty dollars for a Short-horn bull, an unheard of price in those days when cows and chickens were a much slighted side issue.

Fences were straightened, buildings painted, a great barn built with old-fashioned driveway between two immense mows. He flailed some grain with the jointed rod of long ago on that barn floor. And winter

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evenings, the horses and cattle watching from their stanchions, the sheep from their pens, we husked long ears of yellow corn there. Had I been gifted with the pen of a Whittier my snow bound might read as pregnant with life as his, I sensed it all in a dumb ecstasy.

Our land extending into two districts entitled us to entrance at both the town school at Humbird and the rural school at Houghtenberg. We took the full year of the former and the summer term of the latter, for father placed great faith in schooling. He helped us evenings. I cannot remember a home without its blackboard and night sessions. Father wished us to be teachers and ten of us fulfilled his desires.

The instant you crossed the long puncheon bridge to the east you were in a forest of pines, and upon a carpet of pigeon vines and winter green. If it were spring the vines were full of puffy red berries, and you could hear the drumming partridge from every direction. Once at the bridge's approach a neighbor came face to face with a great shambling bear, as large as a two-year-old heifer. We often saw them in the slash- ings, where we gathered blueberries with wooden box rakes, and buckets of juicy blackberries. At dusk from the open country to the west came the prairie chickens' boom, "Man's a fool!" with its peculiar up and down inflection. Such winters of snow! How the sleighbells jingled to and from school! Fences completely hidden! Doll and Dido, their breasts frost white, would come racing into the back yard from the clearing, the sled piled high with alder pole wood, icicles hanging to father's mustache, his nose white. Then mother would rush out with a pan of steaming dough- nuts to regale father while he rubbed the blood back into his nose and ears, and she stroked Doll's soft muzzle.

Often he engaged strolling bands of Indians to cut wood and clear land. When they came to the house to engage hay for their ponies, an armful at a time, if invited in, as they usually were, at the risk of our catching undesirable things, they squatted about the stove in stolid silence except to answer a direct question in short guttural notes ; so unlike the musical tones used in their own language, when their high-pitched voices rose and fell like the wailing wind in the pine tops. And of course they begged. One old half-frozen squaw, so wrinkled she looked less than human, asked for milk. She held her mouth full for a moment, then fumbling in the front of her dirty blouse drew out a very young puppy that placed to her lips avidly sucked out the warmed milk. A young squaw, evidently the belle, had earl lobes stretched nearly to her shoulder from the weight of ear ornaments made up of dimes, half dimes, and quarters, amounting to at least five dollars, connected by silver rings. A very tall straight young buck, when asked his name, replied promptly, "Paul, P-A-U-L," proud of his schooling, and stalking across the room to the organ drummed out with one hand, "Home, sweet home," a strange tune for a wandering Red man. At another time an old chief and his squaw arrived just as we had finished dinner. When asked they readily went to the table. Before seat- ing himself the chief reached the table's length to get a large dish of boiled Irish potatoes. He divided them with great exactness between his and the squaw's plates, adding first to one then to the other, then satisfied they

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were evenly filled, gave a grunt of contentment and finished the pile in no time. They seemed always like happy, irresponsible children. We destroyed an ideal existence when we took their lands.

A rather perplexing thing happened once. It was during an exceed- ingly cold spell, boards snapping, snow squeaking under foot, the pump almost freezing between trips to the kitchen with water, windows furred thick with frost, when just at dark an Indian and a young squaw nearly overcome with cold stopped for the night. They were exceptionally clean. We had a bed in the wood house attic kept purposely to accommodate the many looking for work who passed up and down the railroad track that cut our farm and lay a few rods from the house. Instead of sending them to the barn we let them sleep in this attic, which was warmer. In the morning something the Indian said about his squaw that didn't seem to apply to the one with him caused father to ask, motioning to the two, "You married ?" "By 'n bye," was the laconic answer, which left us to wonder about their ideas of white man morality.

Our next move in 1881 to the George Dewey place, across the road from his shrewd Yankee brother, Uncle Dan Dewey, at Arcadia, was father's last investment in Wisconsin land. The house of three stories was not too large, for, during those years at Humbird, we had prospered in more than wealth. The stork had blessed our home with four visits, two of them a half hour apart. One room on the third floor held long rows of rich yellow home made cheese, the rest were play rooms, where paper men and women and every description of animal, with some even beyond describ- ing, were manufactured as fast as the limited supply of scissors allowed. While we lived here farm institutes were held yearly in the old Mineral Springs Hotel. Father always attended, eager to get new ideas, admiring Governor Hoard, whether he talked dairying or broke the monotony of farm discussions by singing "Finnegan's Wake," or reciting the pathetic "Johnnie Kunkerpod." Most of the farmers took to dairying. Father did, and sold cream at so much an inch-a little more than enough to pay for the cows' salt now. You all remember how George Kelley used to fly around in the mud with his wild team gathering up cream for the creamery, and spilling it occasionally, too. Our place was rich and grew wonderful crops of corn and clover. We were near good schools. It was a pity to sell.

The thirteenth baby was born here, the thirteenth day of June, 1884. Counting cribbage style the figures in the year make two more thirteens- an awful assemblage of that most unlucky number. Whether that was responsible for father's ankle being broken twice that year, each time by stumbling mules, I can't say, but it did look as if bad luck had us by the collar to see father hobbling about on crutches the next March in a cold, drizzly rain, and Tom Barry pegging around on his wooden leg, using all his Irish wit to auction off the personal property. Mother, as usual doing her share, kept pots of boiling coffee and trays of ham sandwiches on hand to cheer the crowd. Yet every one felt it was a sad move. What wasn't sold was given away or packed in the freight car with the bees, Virgil's pup, the Shorthorn stock, the stallion Frank, old Doll's last grandchild and Doll, too, would have been there had not mother, misunderstanding father,

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caused her to be shot. Faithful old creature, it hurts yet to remember coming from school and rushing out to learn why she lay so still beside the fence, discover the bullet wound in the blood-stained star in her fore- head. I ought to think now, after all these years, that perhaps it was best, that it may have saved her a lingering, suffering death. I can't do it. I can't forgive the lack of gratitude for a dumb animal living for our comfort and profit, nor an unkindness to a child for whose being it is not responsible any more than my father could.

Leaving the two married girls in April of 1885, we made that most unfortunate move into the Ozarks, mother and the ten children by passen- ger train.

Space is too limited to tell you of the wild life there in the woods filled with flowers, nuts and fruits; the raids of the Bald Knobbers and our constant fear, father being a northern man, he should suffer the resent- ment of these ignorant people, still bitter over the Civil War; of a winter not as open as the natives vouched for, we with stock and no hay, how father kept some of the cattle alive by feeding them great lengths of pickled side pork; of little Frank traded for land, starved to death by his owner, and father unable to save him. No space left to picture the lives of these mountain children, often four generations living in a single miser- able hovel, of the little log school house with its broken windows, dropped chinking, backless puncheon benches, ruled over by an asthmatic old teacher, who spent the noon hour smoking his pipe and his asthma over a fire in a hole in the ground; of the precipitate move, amounting almost to flight, away from these degrading social conditions to the open prairies of South Dakota, with its droughts, hail storms, cyclones-every force of nature turned against success, just at the outbreak of the Rosebud Indian Agency in 1891.

Nor shall I offend my father's memory by dwelling with unnecessary words upon his last sad illness, the result of that Waushara injury, so patiently borne throughout the intense heat of the summer of 1901; the misunderstandings, apparently wrong medical treatments; his life need- lessly lost at the age of sixty-six. The big bays, the team he loved, carried him on the first relay back to the little cemetery at Arcadia in the beautiful Trempealeau Valley that had ever beckoned his return. In the lonely days that followed, how, by loving those creatures he had made his tender care, we tried to feel him near; not forgetting the King birds, that having built in the tool box of a cultivator, rather than cause them grief through the destruction of their home, he worked longer hours with one machine that the other might stand idle until the little birds could fly. Some comfort came at last, and I could feel, as he would wish, that he was but a little way ahead, beyond a turn in the road, at the summit of a hard climb, with dear faithful old Doll treking on.

Galesville University. It was a pleasant May morning that a child stepped across the threshold of the assembly room in the old court house at Galesville.

Rude wooden benches filled the main floor; the judge's desk was at the opposite end; connected with this was a long narrow desk, inclosing a

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square space, with an entrance, middle front; within the inclosure a pine table.

The few young people present sat at the long desk. Beside the table sat Samuel Fallows, a young man of brilliant promise, secured to take charge of instruction in the new institution.

School had commenced the day before. There was a recitation in Latin. The professor turned to the child repeating the questions he had just asked of the class. His kindly manner brought reply, for every word had been indelibly impressed.

He took the new books-National Fifth Reader, Davies' Arithmetic, Clark's English, and Andrew's and Stoddard's Latin Grammar-writing within her name and the date, May 18, 1859.

That Latin Grammar, solid and hard, was quite unlike the modern "Easy Lessons," but the children sang the declensions and conjugations about their play and received no permanent injury, wondering at the greater difficulty experienced by those older.

An accurate list of those attending the first term nas not been obtained. We have always recalled the number as sixteen. Of this number were Addie Marsh Kneeland and Geo. Gale, yet residing at Galesville.

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History of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, Part 27

Author: Curtiss-Wedge, Franklyn; Pierce, Eben Douglas Publication date: 1917 Publisher: Chicago Winona : H.C. Cooper Number of Pages: 1318

Author: Curtiss-Wedge, Franklyn; Pierce, Eben Douglas
Publication date: 1917
Publisher: Chicago Winona : H.C. Cooper
Number of Pages: 1318