Vandemark's Folly Part 12

"Go on," said he, "and I'll make it right with you. Camp somewhere west of town. I'll come along to-night or to-morrow. I'll make it right with you."

"I don't see through this," I said, with my usual indecision as to doing something I did not understand. "I thought I'd look around Dubuque a little."

"For G.o.d's sake," said the woman from the bed, "take me on--take me on!"

Her tones were so pleading, she seemed in such an agony of terror, that I suddenly made up my mind in her favor. Surely there would be no harm in carrying her on as she wished.

"All right," I said to her, but looking at him, "I'll take you on! You can count on me." And then to him, "I'll drive on until I find a good camping-place late this afternoon. You'll have to find us the best way you can."

He thanked me, and I gave him a list of the things I wanted. Then he went on up the street ahead of us, walking calmly, and looking about him as any stranger might have done. We stood for some time, waiting for the jam of teams to clear, and I gee-upped and whoa-hawed on along the street, until we came to a building on which was a big sign, "Post-Office." There was a queue of people waiting for their mail, extending out at the door, and far down the sidewalk. In this string of emigrants stood our friend, the black-bearded man. Just as we pa.s.sed, a rather thin, stooped man, walking along on the other side of the street, rushed across, right in front of my lead team, and drawing a pistol, aimed at the black-bearded man, who in turn stepped out of line and drew his own weapon.

"I call upon you all to witness," said the black-bearded man, "that I act in self-defense."

A bystander seized the thin man's pistol hand, and yelled at him not to shoot or he might kill some one--of course he meant some one he did not aim at, but it sounded a little funny, and I laughed. Several joined in the laugh, and there was a good deal of confusion. At last I heard the black-bearded man say, "I'm here alone. He's accused his wife of being too thick with a dozen men. He's insanely jealous, gentlemen. I suppose his wife may have left him, but I'm here alone. I just crossed the river alone, and I'm going west. If he's got a warrant, he's welcome to have it served if he finds his wife with me. Come on, gentlemen--but take the fool's pistol away from him."

As I drove on I saw that the woman had thrown off the quilt, and was peeping out at the opening in the cover at the back, watching the black-bearded and the thin man moving off in a group of fellows, one of whom held the black-bearded man by the arm a good deal as a deputy sheriff might have done.

The roads leading west out of Dubuque were horrible, then, being steep stony trails coming down the hollows and washed like watercourses at every rain. Teams were stalled, sometimes three and four span of animals were used to get one load to the top, and we were a good deal delayed. I was so busy trying to keep from upsetting when I drove around stalled outfits and abandoned wagons, and so occupied in finding places where I might stop and breathe my team, that I paid little attention to my queer-acting pa.s.senger; but once when we were standing I noticed that she was covered up again, and seemed to be crying. As we topped the bluffs, and drew out into the open, she sat up and began to rearrange her hair. After a few miles, we reached a point from which I could see the Iowa prairie sweeping away as far as the eye could see. I drew out by the roadside to look at it, as a man appraises one with whom he must live--as a friend or an enemy.

I shall never forget the sight. It was like a great green sea. The old growth had been burned the fall before, and the spring gra.s.s scarcely concealed the brown sod on the uplands; but all the swales were coated thick with an emerald growth full-bite high, and in the deeper, wetter hollows grew cowslips, already showing their glossy, golden flowers. The hillsides were thick with the woolly possblummies[5] in their furry spring coats protecting them against the frost and chill, showing purple-violet on the outside of a cup filled with golden stamens, the first fruits of the prairie flowers; on the warmer southern slopes a few of the splendid bird's-foot violets of the prairie were showing the azure color which would soon make some of the hillsides as blue as the sky; and standing higher than the peering gra.s.s rose the rough-leafed stalks of green which would soon show us the yellow pucc.o.o.ns and sweet-williams and scarlet lilies and shooting stars, and later the yellow rosin-weeds, Indian dye-flower and goldenrod. The keen northwest wind swept before it a flock of white clouds; and under the clouds went their shadows, walking over the lovely hills like dark s.h.i.+ps over an emerald sea.

[5] "Paas-bloeme" one suspects is the Rondout Valley origin of this term applied to a flower, possibly seen by the author on this occasion for the first time--the American pasque-flower, the Iowa prairie type of which is _Anemone patens_: the knightliest little flower of the Iowa uplands.--G.v.d.M.

The wild-fowl were clamoring north for the summer's campaign of nesting.

Everywhere the sky was harrowed by the wedged wild geese, their voices as sweet as organ tones; and ducks quacked, whistled and whirred overhead, a true rain of birds beating up against the wind. Over every slew, on all sides, thousands of ducks of many kinds, and several sorts of geese hovered, settled, or burst up in eruptions of birds, their back-feathers s.h.i.+ning like bronze as they turned so as to reflect the sunlight to my eyes; while so far up that they looked like specks, away above the wind it seemed, so quietly did they circle and sail, floated huge flocks of cranes--the sand-hill cranes in their slaty-gray, and the whooping cranes, white as snow with black heads and feet, each bird with a ten-foot spread of wing, piping their wild cries which fell down to me as if from another world.

It was sublime! Bird, flower, gra.s.s, cloud, wind, and the immense expanse of sunny prairie, swelling up into undulations like a woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s turgid with milk for a hungry race. I forgot myself and my position in the world, my loneliness, my strange pa.s.senger, the problems of my life; my heart swelled, and my throat filled. I sat looking at it, with the tears trickling from my eyes, the uplift of my soul more than I could bear. It was not the thought of my mother that brought the tears to my eyes, but my happiness in finding the newest, strangest, most delightful, sternest, most wonderful thing in the world--the Iowa prairie--that made me think of my mother. If I only could have found her alive! If I only could have had her with me! And as I thought of this I realized that the woman of the ferry had climbed over the back of the spring-seat and was sitting beside me.

"I don't wonder," said she, "that you cry. Gos.h.!.+ It scares me to death!"

CHAPTER VII

ADVENTURE ON THE OLD RIDGE ROAD

Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p and Monterey County, as any one may see by looking at the map of Iowa, had to be reached from Wisconsin by crossing the Mississippi at Dubuque and then fetching across the prairie to the journey's end; and in 1855 a traveler making that trip naturally fell in with a good many of his future neighbors and fellow-citizens pressing westward with him to the new lands.

Some were merely hunting country, and were ready to be whiffled off toward any neck of the woods which might be puffed up by a wayside acquaintance as ignorant about it as he. Some were headed toward what was called "the Fort Dodge country," which was anywhere west of the Des Moines River. Some had been out and made locations the year before and were coming on with their stuff; some were joining friends already on the ground; some had a list of Gardens of Eden in mind, and meant to look them over one after the other until a land was found flowing with milk and honey, and inhabited by roast pigs with forks sticking in their backs and carving knives between their teeth.

Very few of the tillers of the soil had farms already marked down, bought and paid for as I had; and I sometimes talked in such a way as to show that I was a little on my high heels; but they were freer to tack, go about, and run before the wind than I; for some one was sure to stick to each of them like a bur and steer him to some definite place, where he could squat and afterward take advantage of the right of preemption, while I was forced to ferret out a particular square mile of this boundless prairie, and there settle down, no matter how far it might be from water, neighbors, timber or market; and fight out my battle just as things might happen. If the woman in the wagon was "scared to death" at the sight of the prairie, I surely had cause to be afraid; but I was not. I was uplifted. I felt the same sense of freedom, and the greatness of things, that came over me when I first found myself able to take in a real eyeful in driving my ca.n.a.l-boat through the Montezuma Marsh, or when I first saw big waters at Buffalo. I was made for the open, I guess.

There were wagon trails in every westerly direction from all the Mississippi ferries and landings; and the roads branched from Dubuque southwestward to Marion, and on to the Mormon trail, and northwestward toward Elkader and West Union; but I had to follow the Old Ridge Road west through Dubuque, Delaware, Buchanan and Blackhawk Counties, and westward. It was called the Ridge Road because it followed the knolls and hog-backs, and thus, as far as might be, kept out of the slews.

The last bit of it so far as I know was plowed up in 1877 in the northeastern part of Grundy County. I saw this last mile of the old road on a trip I made to Waterloo, and remember it. This part of it had been established by a couple of Hardin County pioneers who got lost in the forty-mile prairie between the Iowa and Cedar Rivers about three years before I came in and showed their fitness for citizens.h.i.+p by filling their wagon with stakes on the way back and driving them on every sightly place as guides for others--an Iowa Llano Estacado was Grundy Prairie.

This last bit of it ran across a school section that had been left in prairie sod till then. The past came rolling back upon me as I stopped my horses and looked at it, a wonderful road, that never was a highway in law, curving about the side of a knoll, the comb between the tracks carrying its plume of tall spear gra.s.s, its barbed shafts just ripe for boys to play Indian with, which bent over the two tracks, washed deep by the rains, and blown out by the winds; and where the trail had crossed a wet place, the gra.s.s and weeds still showed the effects of the plowing and puddling of the thousands of wheels and hoofs which had poached up the black soil into bubbly mud as the road spread out into a bulb of traffic where the pioneering drivers sought for tough sod which would bear up their wheels. A plow had already begun its work on this last piece of the Old Ridge Road, and as I stood there, the farmer who was breaking it up came by with his big plow and four horses, and stopped to talk with me.

"What made that old road?" I asked.

"Vell," said he, "dot's more as I know. Somebody, I dank."

And yet, the history of Vandemark Towns.h.i.+p was in that old road that he complained of because he couldn't do a good job of breaking across it--he was one of those German settlers, or the son of one, who invaded the state after the rest of us had opened it up.

The Old Ridge Road went through Dyersville, Manchester, Independence, Waterloo, and on to Fort Dodge--but beyond there both the road and--so far as I know--the country itself, was a vague and undefined thing. So also was the road itself beyond the Iowa River, and for that matter it got to be less and less a beaten track all the way as the wagons spread out fanwise to the various fords and ferries and as the movers stopped and settled like nesting cranes. Of course there was a fringe of well-established settlements a hundred miles or so beyond Fort Dodge, of people who, most of them, came up the Missouri River.

Our Iowa wilderness did not settle up in any uniform way, but was inundated as a field is overspread by a flood; only it was a flood which set up-stream. First the Mississippi had its old town, away off south of Iowa, near its mouth; then the people worked up to the mouth of the Missouri and made another town; then the human flood crept up the Mississippi and the Missouri, and Iowa was reached; then the Iowa valleys were occupied by the river immigration, and the tide of settlement rose until it broke over the hills on such routes as the Old Ridge Road; but these cross-country streams here and there met other trickles of population which had come up the belts of forest on the streams. I was steering right into the wilderness; but there were far islands of occupation--the heft of the earliest settlements strongly southern in character--on each of the Iowa streams which I was to cross, snuggled down in the wooded bottom lands on the Missouri, and even away beyond at Salt Lake, and farther off in Oregon and California where the folk-freshet broke on the Pacific--a wave of humanity das.h.i.+ng against a reef of water.

Of course, I knew very little of these things as I sat there, ignorant as I was, looking out over the gra.s.sy sea, in my prairie schooner, my four cows panting from the climb, and with the yellow-haired young woman beside me, who had been wished on me by the black-bearded man on leaving the Illinois sh.o.r.e. Most of it I still had to spell out through age and experience, and some reading. I only knew that I had been told that the Ridge Road would take me to Monterey County, if the weather wasn't too wet, and I didn't get drowned in a freshet at a ferry or slewed down and permanently stuck fast somewhere with all my goods.

"Gee-up," I shouted to my cows, and cracked my blacksnake over their backs; and they strained slowly into the yoke. The wagon began chuck-chucking along into the unknown.

"Stop!" said my pa.s.senger. "I've got to wait here for my--for my husband."

"I can't stop," said I, "till I get to timber and water."

"But I must wait," she pleaded. "He can't help but find us here, because it's the only way to come; but if we go on we may miss him--and--and-- I've just got to stop. Let me out, if you won't stop."

I whoaed up and she made as if to climb out.

"He may not get out of Dubuque to-day," I said. "He said so. And for you to wait here alone, with all these movers going by, and with no place to stay to-night will be a pretty pokerish thing to do."

Finally we agreed that I should drive on to water and timber, unless the road should fork; in which case we were to wait at the forks no matter what sort of camp it might be.

The Ridge Road followed pretty closely the route afterward taken by the Illinois Central Railroad; but the railroad takes the easiest grades, while the Ridge Road kept to the high ground; so that at some places it lay a long way north or south of the railway route on which trains were running as far as Manchester within about two years. It veered off toward the head waters of White Water Creek on that first day's journey; and near a new farm, where they kept a tavern, we stopped because there was water in the well, and hay and firewood for sale. It was still early. The yellow-haired woman, whose name I did not know, alighted, and when I found that they would keep her for the night, went toward the farm-house without thanking me--but she was too much worried about something to think of that, I guess; but she turned and came back.

"Which way is Monterey Centre?" she asked.

"Away off to the westward," I answered.

"Is it far?"

"A long ways," I said.

"Is it on this awful prairie?" she inquired.

"Yes," said I, "I guess it is. It's farther away from timber than this I calculate."

"My lord," she burst out. "I'll simply die of the horrors!"

She looked over the trail toward Dubuque, and then slowly went into the house.

So, then, these two with all their strange actions were going to Monterey County! They would be neighbors of mine, maybe; but probably not. They looked like town people; and I knew already the distance that separated farmers from the dwellers in the towns--a difference that as I read history, runs away back through all the past. They were far removed from what I should be--something that I realized more and more all through my life--the difference between those who live on the farms and those who live on the farmers.

There was a two-seated covered carriage standing before the house, and across the road were two mover-wagons, with a nice camp-fire blazing, and half a dozen men and women and a lot of children about it cooking a meal of victuals. I pulled over near them and turned my cows out, tied down head and foot so they could bait and not stray too far. I noticed that their cows, which were driven after the wagon, had found too fast for them the pace set by the horse teams, had got very foot-sore, and were lying down and not feeding--for I drove them up to see what was the matter with them.