Woman on the American Frontier Part 33

Education in the older states of the Union is organized in the district and high school, in the academy and the college, and is maintained by large taxation of the town, city, or state. Here are wealth, aggregations of intelligence, and a surplus of the educated labor cla.s.s. Commodious and often beautiful edifices shelter the bright tribes whom the morning bell calls together beneath the eye of cultured teachers. Stately halls and quaint chapels are the seats where the higher learning is inculcated; the paraphernalia of education is splendid, the appliances are adequate, and the whole machinery by which knowledge is diffused among the young, works with a smooth regularity that makes it almost automatic.

Contrast this system which prevails to-day, and in the more settled conditions of American society, with that which prevailed in earlier years in a thinly and newly-inhabited country, and which now obtains on our frontier line, and how striking is the difference!

Indeed, how could we look for any such organism where small settlements were separated from each other by long s.p.a.ces and bad roads, and where single cabins were so completely isolated, as in the New England and the Middle and Southern States a century and a half ago, or as in the earlier settled States of the West seventy years ago, or as in the newly-settled States of the West within the present generation, or as on the frontier proper to-day? Under such conditions even the district school was impracticable or inaccessible. To supply its place, each household where there were children was a training school, of which the mother was the head.

The process, under her eyes and hand, of forming the mind and character, is very slow, but it is healthy and natural. It is conducted in the short interval of severe toil. She reverts to first principles, and teaches by objects rather than by lessons. It is the character that she forms more than the mind.

She has about her a band of silent but powerful coadjutors. The suns.h.i.+ne and free air of the wilderness are poured around the little stranger, which soon grows into a handsome, largely-developed, vigorous nursling.

The air of the wilderness, too, is the native air of freedom: this, and the ample s.p.a.ce wherein the young plant flourishes, makes it large in frame and broad in mind and character.

Transplant a cypress from a garden in a populous community to the deep black mould of the west, and it grows to be a forest monarch. It is Hazlitt who says "the heart reposes in greater security on the immensity of nature's works, expatiates freely there and finds elbow room and breathing s.p.a.ce."

In the log-cabin there is perhaps but a single room: there is a bed, a table, blocks of wood for chairs, and a few wretched cooking utensils.

Thank G.o.d! The life of the pioneer woman is not "cribbed and confined" to this hovel. The forest, the prairie, the mountain-side are free to her as the vital air, and the canopy of heaven is her familiar covering. A life out doors is a necessary part of both the moral and the physical education of her children.

Riding through one of the prairies of the far West, some years since, we arrived just at dusk in front of a cabin where a mother was sitting with her four young children and teaching them lessons from the great book of nature. She had shown them the sun as it set in glory, and told them of its rising and of its going down; of the clouds and of the winds, and how G.o.d made the gra.s.s and trees, and the stars, which came trooping out before their eyes. She taught them, she said, little as yet from books. She had but a Bible, a catechism, an almanac. The Bible was the only Reader in her little school. Already she had whispered in their ears the story of Jesus'

life and death, and charged their infant memories with the wise and beautiful teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.

What a practical training was that which children had in that outdoor knowledge which had been useful to their mother! The chemistry of common life learned from the processes wrought out by the air and suns.h.i.+ne; astronomy from the great luminaries which are the clocks of the wilderness, and the science of the weather from the phenomena of the sky. There was no "cramming" in that home-school; each item of knowledge was well absorbed and a.s.similated, for the mother's toils made the intervals long between the lessons. So much the better for the young heart and mind, which grows, swells, and gathers force unlaced and unfettered by scholastic pedantry and repression.

It is from the mother, too, that the boy or girl must take their first lessons in the tillage of the soil, which are most readily learned in the garden, for the women are the gardeners of the frontier. Gardening is a labor of patience and virtue, and is excellent discipline for the character. A child's true life is in the fields, and should be early familiarized with the forms of vegetable life. No small part of the education of a child may be carried on by the care and a.s.siduous contemplation of plants and flowers. Observation, experience, reflection, and reasoning, would all come of it. A flower is a whole world, pure, innocent, peacemaking.

Woman's natural fitness for the work of an educator of the human plant is seen in the readiness and zeal with which she enters into this work of tending and training the plants in a vegetable or flower garden, and the garden is one of the outdoor schools where her little ones gain their most useful instruction. The difference between plants, the variegation of colors, their relations to the air, the suns.h.i.+ne, the dew, the rain; the habits of plants, some erect, some creeping, some climbing, the seasons of flowering, fruitage, and seed, are impressed with ease upon the plastic mind of childhood.

From the garden it is but one step to the meadow and the forest. Here the boy and girl sees nature unaided by man working out similar processes on a grander scale. There is heroic force and valor in the trees and gra.s.ses, and the child is early brought into antagonism with these strong forms of wild nature, and learns that he and his parents live by subjugating or converting them to their use. This is the lesson of contention in carrying through a useful purpose. The native sward is to be overturned and a new growth implanted; bushes are to be torn up root and branch so that the cattle may have pasture; the trees must be hewn down and cut into beams and boards.

Thus, too, is learned the great lesson of labor. There is no rest for the mother. The stove, the broom, the needle, the hoe, and the axe are ever the familiar implements of her household husbandry. The cows and poultry are her _proteges_. Her brown arms and sunburned face are seen among the mowers and reapers. Endowed with the practical faculty for small things, she reaches into details which escape the blunter senses of the stronger s.e.x. The necessities and contingencies of frontier life make her variously accomplished in the useful arts. She becomes a "jack at all trades,"

carding, spinning, weaving, cobbling shoes, fitting moccasins, mending harness, dressing leather, making clothes, serving as cook, dairy-maid, laundress, gardener, and nurse. From example and from precept the children learn the lesson of labor from the mother.

The girls of course remain longer than their brothers under her tutelage.

Theirs is a lofty destiny--lofty because as wives and mothers they are to carry the shrine of civilization into the wilderness, and build upon the desert and waste places the structure of a new civil and social state.

Serving as a duty and a pleasure is woman's vocation. The great German poet and philosopher has finely amplified this idea:

"Early let woman learn to serve, for that is her calling, For by serving alone she attains to ruling; To the well-deserved power which is hers in the household.

The sister serves her brother while young; and serves her parents, And her life is still a continual going and coming, A carrying ever and bringing, a making and shaping for others.

Well for her if she learns to think no road a foul one, To make the hours of the night the same as the hours of the day; To think no labor too trifling, and never too fine the needle; To forget herself altogether, and live in others alone.

And lastly, as mother, in truth, she will need every one of the virtues."

A French traveler in the course of his wanderings through, the western wilds of our country, came to a single cabin in one of the remotest and most inaccessible of our mountain territories. The only inmates in that lonely home were a middle-aged woman and four girls, ranging from eight to fifteen. The father was a miner, who spent a large part of the time in digging or "prospecting" for precious ores, as yet with only moderate success. The matron did the work of both man and woman. The cabin was a museum of household mechanisms and implements. Independent of the clothier, the merchant, and the grocer, their dress was the furry covering of the mountain beasts; their tea was a decoction of herbs; their sugar was boiled from the sap of the maple; the necessaries of life were all of their own culture and manufacture. Yet, thanks to the unwearied toils of the good woman and her little help-meets, there was warmth, comfort, and abundance, for love and labor were inhabitants of those rocks.

The girls had already been taught all that their mother knew, and she had sent out to fight their own battle, three sons, strong, brave, and versed in border-lore.

It was my mother, said the matron, that taught me all that I know, forty years ago in the forests of Michigan, and I am trying to bring up my girls so that they shall know everything that their grandmother taught me. They could read, and write, and cypher. They were little farmers, and gardeners, and seamstresses, and housewives. Nor had their religious and moral training been neglected. The good Book lay well thumbed and dogeared on the kitchen shelf. The sound of the "church-going bell" had never been heard by those children, but every Sunday the mother gathered them about her, and they read together from the New Testament. "It is ten years," said the matron, "since I have seen a church. I remember the last time I visited San Francisco, awaking Sunday morning and hearing the sound of the bell which called us to meeting. It was sweeter than heavenly music to my ears, and I burst into tears." What a suggestion was that, pointing to the unsatisfied craving of that lonely heart for the consolation of the promises uttered by consecrated lips! Right and fitting it is that woman, G.o.d-beloved in old Jerusalem, that she, the last at the cross and the first at the sepulcher, though far from the Sabbath that smiles upon eastern homes, should keep alive in the hearts of her children the remembrance of the Saviour and of the Lord's day.

Rove wherever they may, the sons and daughters of the wilderness will find amid the stormiest lives a safe anchorage in the holy keeping of the Christian Sabbath, and in the word of G.o.d, for these are the best and surest legacies of a pious mother's precepts. A civilization in which the early lispings of childhood are of G.o.d and Christ, cannot become altogether corrupt and degenerate, for woman here is the depository and transmitter of religious faith.

From the earliest times to a comparatively recent period, a large proportion of the distinguished men of our country have necessarily pa.s.sed their first years in remote settlements, if not on the extreme border of civilization. The lives of those men who have risen to eminence as generals, statesmen, professional men, and authors, and date their success from the lessons received from woman's lips in the early homes of their childhood, would fill volumes. We pa.s.s by the first generations of these pupils, and come to the men of that period from which to-day we date the birth of the Republic.

The heroic age of American statesmans.h.i.+p commenced in 1776. Of all those ill.u.s.trious men who signed the immortal Declaration, or framed the Const.i.tution of the United States, a considerable number pa.s.sed their childhood and youth in secluded and remote settlements. They were the sons of "Women on the American Frontier." They drew in with their mother's milk the intellectual and moral traits, and gathered from their mother's lips those lessons which prepared them in after years to guide the councils of their country in the most trying period of its history.

Let us commence the list with the deathless name of Was.h.i.+ngton. Born in a secluded and primitive farm-house at Bridge's Creek, Virginia, he was left by the death of his father to the care and guardians.h.i.+p of his mother.

"She," says his biographer, "proved herself worthy of the trust. Endowed with plain, direct good sense, thorough conscientiousness, and prompt decision, she governed her family strictly, but kindly, exacting deference while she inspired affection. George, being her eldest son, was thought to be her favorite, yet she never gave him undue preference, and the implicit deference exacted from him in childhood continued to be habitually observed by him to the day of her death. He inherited from her a high temper and a spirit of command, but her early precepts and example taught him to restrain and govern that temper, and to square his conduct on the exact principles of equity and justice. Tradition gives an interesting picture of the widow, with her little flock gathered round her, as was her wont, reading to them lessons of religion and morality out of some standard work.

Her favorite volume was Sir Mathew Hale's Contemplations, moral and divine.

The admirable maxims therein contained, for outward action as well as self government, sank deep into the mind of George, and doubtless had a great influence in forming his character. They certainly were exemplified in his conduct throughout life. His mother's manual, bearing his mother's name, Mary Was.h.i.+ngton, written with her own hand, was ever preserved by him with filial care, and may still be seen in the archives of Mount Vernon. A precious doc.u.ment! Let those who wish to know the moral foundation of his character, consult its pages."

Among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, the author of that immortal doc.u.ment; George Wythe, afterwards Chancellor of Virginia; Francis Hopkinson, the poet and patriot Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Huntington, Edward Rutledge, and many others, have left upon record testimonials of their great obligations to their mother's care and teachings.

In the second era of American statesmans.h.i.+p, a large number of those most eminent for public services were also born and nurtured on the frontier. A cursory examination of the biographies of those distinguished men will show how largely they were indebted to the early training which they received from their mothers.

Incidents drawn from the early life of the seventh President of the United States, will prove with striking clearness the lasting influence of a mother's teachings.

During one of the darkest periods of the Revolution, and after the ma.s.sacre at Warsaw by the bloodthirsty Tarleton, when the British prison-pens in South Carolina were crowded with wounded captive patriots, an elderly woman, with the strongly marked physiognomy which characterizes the Scotch-Irish race, could have been seen moving among the hapless prisoners, relieving their wants and alleviating their sufferings. She had come the great distance, alone and on foot, through swamps and forests, and across rivers, from a border settlement, on this errand of compa.s.sion.

After her work of charity and mercy had been finished, she set out alone and on foot, as before, upon her journey home. She sped on, thinking doubtless of her sons, and most of all of the youngest, a bright and manly little fellow whom she had watched over and trained with all of a mother's care and tenderness. The way was long and difficult, the unbridged streams were cold, the forest was dark and tangled. Wandering from her course, weary and worn with her labors of love and pity, she sank down at last and died.

That woman who gave her life to her country and humanity was the mother of Andrew Jackson, and that youngest son, her especial pupil, was the seventh president of the United States. He had lost his father when an infant, and his early training devolved upon that patriot mother, from whom he also inherited some of those marked and high traits of character for which he was afterwards so conspicuous. She was an earnest and devoted Christian woman, and strove, like the mother of Was.h.i.+ngton, to glorify G.o.d as much in the rearing of her children as in the performance of any other duty. She taught Andrew the leading doctrines of the Bible, in the form of question and answer, from the Westminster catechism: and these lessons he never forgot. In a conversation with him some years since, says a writer, "General Jackson spoke of his mother in a manner that convinced me that she never ceased to exert a secret power over him, until his heart was brought into reconciliation with G.o.d." Just before his death, which occurred in June, 1855, he said to a clergyman, "My lamp is nearly out, and the last glimmer is come, I am ready to depart when called. The Bible is true. Upon that sacred volume I rest my hopes of eternal salvation, through the merits and blood of our blessed Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ."

If departed spirits, the saintly and ascended, are permitted to look from their high habitation, upon the scene of earth, with what holy transport must the mother of Andrew Jackson have beheld the death-bed triumph of her son. The lad whom she sent to an academy at the Warsaw meeting-house, hoping to fit him for the ministry, had become a man, had filled the highest elective office in the world, and was now an old man, able in his last earthly hour, _by the grace of G.o.d attending his early pious instruction_, to challenge death for his sting and to shout "victory"

over his opening grave.

It is a faculty of the female mind to penetrate with singular facility into the true character of the young. Every intelligent mother quickly, and by intuition, discerns the native bent of her child and measures his endowments. Evidences of latent talent in any particular direction are scrutinized with maternal shrewdness, and encouraged by applause and caresses. The lonelier the cabin, the more secluded the settlement, the sharper seem to grow the mother's eyes, and the more profound this intuitive faculty. It is the mother who first discerns the native bent and endowments of her child, and she too is the quickest to encourage and draw them out. How many eminent and useful men whose childhood was pa.s.sed in the outlying settlements have been able to trace their success to a mother's insight into their capabilities.

In one of the forest homes on the skirts of civilization in Pennsylvania, Benjamin West, the greatest historical painter of the last century, showed first to his mother's eyes the efforts of his infant genius. The picture of a smiling babe made on a summer's day, when the little painter was but a child of seven, caught his mother's delighted eyes, and she covered him with her kisses. Years after, when Benjamin West was the guest of kings and emperors, that immortal artist was wont to recall those electric caresses and say "my mother's kiss made me a painter."

Daniel Webster's childhood home was in a log-cabin on the banks of the Merrimac, in a sequestered portion of New Hamps.h.i.+re. Here he pa.s.sed his boyhood and youth, and received from his admirable mother those lessons which formed his mind and character, and fitted him for that great part which he was to play in public life. She recognized the scope of his genius when she gave him the copy of the const.i.tution on a pocket handkerchief.

She pinched every household resource that he might go to Exeter Academy, and to Dartmouth College, as if she had had a prophetic vision that he would come to be called the defender of those inst.i.tutions which his father fought to obtain. And when in after years he had grown gray in honors and usefulness, he was wont to refer with tears to the efforts and sacrifices of this mother who discerned his great capacity and was determined that he should enjoy the advantages of a college education.

It is the affectionate and n.o.ble ambition of many other pioneer mothers besides Mrs. Webster which has secured to their sons the benefits of a thorough academical training.

The next step from the home-school is the district-school. The cabin which shelters a single family is generally placed with shrewd eyes to its being the point around which a settlement shall grow up. Wood and water are contiguous: the soil is rich: not many seasons roll away before other cabins send up their smoke hard by: children multiply, for these matrons of the border are fecund: out of the common want rises the schoolhouse, built of logs, with its rude benches: here the school teacher is a woman--the grown-up daughter, or the maiden sister of the pioneer.

How many of our greatest men have learned their first rudiments from the lips of "school marms," in their primitive school-houses on the frontier!

Population increases by production and accession. There is soon a dearth of teachers; all along the frontier the cry is sent up to the east, come and teach us! Woman again comes to the front; the schools of the border settlements have been largely taught by the faithful and devoted female, missionaries in the cause of education from the east. These pioneer school mistresses bore the discomforts of remote western life patiently, and did their duties cheerfully. Most of them afterwards became wives and mothers, and have in both these relations done much towards building up the settlements where they made their homes. Others have enrolled their names among the missionary martyrs. The toils, hards.h.i.+ps, and privations incident to a newly settled country have often proved too heavy for the delicate frames reared amid the comforts and luxuries of eastern homes, and they have fallen victims to their n.o.ble ambition, giving their lives to the cause they sought to promote.

One of these martyrs was Miss M. She was one of that band of lady-teachers, numbering several hundred who, nearly thirty years ago, went out to the then far west under the auspices of Governor Slade and Miss Catharine Beecher, to supply the crying need of teachers which then existed in that section of our country.

This, it should be remembered, was before railroads had brought that region within easy access from the east. That wild, primeval garden had been, as yet, redeemed from nature only in plots and patches. On the boundless prairies of Illinois the cabins of the settlers were like solitary vessels moored in a waste of waters, and between them rolled in green billows, under the wind, the tall, coa.r.s.e gra.s.s. The settlers themselves were of the most adventurous and often of the roughest cla.s.s. Society presented to the cultured eye a rude and almost barbarous aspect.

Man, while grappling, almost unaided, with untamed nature, and seeking to subdue her, seems to gravitate away from civilization and approach his primitive state. Everything is taken in the rough; the arts and the graces of a more settled condition of society are cultivated but little, because they are non-essentials. The physical qualities are prized more than mental culture, and the sentiments and sensibilities are in abeyance during the reign of the more robust emotions.

During the onset which the pioneer makes upon the wilderness he and his entire family bear the rugged impress which such a life stamps upon them.

The wife, in the practice of the sterner virtues of courage, self-denial, and fort.i.tude, may become hardened against the access of the quick sensibilities and tender emotions of her more delicately reared sisters.

The children, bright-eyed, strong, and nimble, run like squirrels through the woods, and leap like fawns on the plain. The mother's tutelage has done much, but more remains to be done in the schooling to be had from books.

After the first victory has been won over the forest and the soil, and the pioneer reposes for a season upon his laurels, in comparative ease, he discerns the needs of his flock, and craves the offices of one who can supply the place of the weary mother in schooling the children.

Out of the void that exists the appliances of education must be created; the nurslings of the plain must be brought together and taught to subject themselves to the regular discipline of the district school; and who but woman can best supply such a discipline!