1858.]

FEMININE SMOKERS OF TOBACCO.

131

CHAPTER XI.

I 'ASSISTED' at a rural celebration of the Fourth of July in the village of Monrovia, Atchison county. The adjacent settlers came thronging in on horseback, on foot, and in heavy ox-wagons, sitting upon rush-bottomed chairs. One family even rode triumphantly on a stone drag,-a broad plank dragged over the ground by two horses.

Speeches were made in the open air, and the young people entertained themselves by dancing most perseveringly from Friday night until Sunday morning.

In the midst of the assembly sat an elderly matron in decorous black, patiently listening and smoking a cigar. While traveling in Missouri, I have seen a mother and her little girl of ten years, smoking their pipes over the breakfast they were cooking. Once, stopping to spend the night with an intelligent young squatter from Tennessee, I found his wife a lovely blonde with liquid eyes and long drooping lashes; but alas! after serving tea, she drew from one of the smoky nooks of the chimney an old black pipe, and sat down to enjoy an evening whiff.

During this summer and fall, fever and ague visited almost every farm-house. The disease is inevitable wherever a rich soil is broken for the first time, loading the air with miasma. Fruit and fresh vegetables are good preventives; quinine the invariable remedy. With ordinary care blondes may avoid it, but brunettes, being of more bilious temperament, rarely escape. Before attacking it gives forewarning in blinding headaches and nauseous mouths. The ounce of prevention is cheap, the pound of cure costly; for if lodged in the system it clings tenaciously. An old settler in the Wabash valley of Indiana once told me that he had suffered from it every season for twenty-seven

132

FEVER AND AGUE EXPERIENCES.

[1858. years. Still he not only clung to his cot but thought the valley he loved, a very Eden. Nearly all western States cherish legends of remote villages where the church bells are rung every day at noon for the people to take their quinine. But though the traveler is often told that chills and fever abound in the next settlement, he never finds a section which the inhabitants admit to be an 'ague country.'

Kansas has no swamps and little bottomland. But most of the early settlers (Missourians) regarded this disease as a necessary evil. I remember a matron from Kentucky, pale and wan from years of its enervating and dispiriting attacks, who said:

'I have been chilling now for two months and I never seen a well day in Kansas. A freestone country is never so healthy as a limestone country, anyhow.'

The invalid favored me with this oracular utterance late in the evening while indulging in a hearty supper of hot corn bread and molasses, fat pork and strong coffee!

In Kansas one heard the slang and provincialisms of every section of the country, beside some indigenous to the soil. The importations were chiefly from Missouri, which had furnished more than half the entire population. Most readers have heard Ohioans spoken of as 'Buckeyes,' (from the buckeye tree,) Illinoians as 'Suckers,' Indianians as 'Hoosiers,' and Michiganders as Wolverines.' Early Californians christened as 'Pukes' the immigrants from Missouri, declaring that they had been vomited forth from that prolific State. And however shocking to ears polite, the appellation has adhered to them ever since. Missourians transplanted into Kansas many of their pet home-phrases. One morning at breakfast a squatter host of mine remarked:

These molasses is sweeter than any maple molasses I ever

seen.'

This unique use of the national saccharine only in the plural, not uncommon through the Southwest, originated in Pennsylvania. I heard another Missourian reply to inquiries touching his health: 'I had the shakes last week, but now I have got shut of them.' A third, asked concerning his crop of corn, responded: 'Yes, I raised a power of it. I have fed a heap to my cattle and got a right smart chance left.'

1858.]

PERPLEXING USAGES OF WORDS.

133

Still another with the prevalent contempt for small estates, told me with great merriment about a traveler from Ohio who had only thirty acres of land, and actually called that a farm! It was the one memorable jest in that Missourian's experience, and I am confident he never mentions it to this day without roars of laughter.

'Tolerable' is forced into universal service. Once in Missouri I asked a fellow traveler:

'Is it a good road from here to St. Joseph ?'

'Tolerable good, sir.'

It proved intolerably bad. Just afterward meeting a teamster, I changed the form of the question, thus:

‘A bad road from here to St. Joseph, is it not?'

"Tolerable bad, stranger.'

Next encountering a little darkey with staring white eyes, I inquired:

'Is it a straight road from here to St. Joseph ?'

'Tolerable straight massa,' replied young Ebony, displaying from ear to ear a row of ivory. The same evening, at a country inn, I heard a wayfarer ask :

'Can I get to stay with you to-night.

'I reckon,' answered Boniface, though we are right smart crowded.' And before our evening fire he spoke of a swelling upon his knee as 'a rising.'

A school girl in Kansas asked her playmates from Missouri,— 'Will you go a berrying with me?'

'A burying! Why who's dead?'

'Nobody: I mean, to gather blackberries.'

เ

Rural Missourians never carried burdens, but always 'packed' or toted' them. Among other provincialisms through the Southwest, the use of crapped' (a corruption of cropped,) is sometimes droll and startling. General Marcy tells of an Arkansan who, pointing to a little man with a huge wife, inquired:

'Cap, don't you reckon that that thar little man has a bit over crapped his self?'

The use of 'beef' as the singular of 'beeves,' obsolete through the East, is common-the western farmer usually saying, 'I have just sold a beef.'

134 MYSTERIOUS SLANG PHRASES INTERPRETED. [1858,

The New Englander shouts to a distant friend:

'Halloa, John!' The southerner or westerner cries: O-0-0-0, John !'

Immigrants from the East were very merry at the expense of their Missouri neighbors. In a street discussion a lounger was defending as correct, the rural southern phrases,-'We 'uns' and 'You 'uns.' One of the bystanders asked him:

'Are you a grammarian?'

'Which?' was his bewildered inquiry. 'Are you a grammarian?'

'Why, no, I'm a Missourian !'

But the fun is not all on

It was a distinction with a difference. one side. I remember an old Missourian who was brought in contact with many eastern men by the establishment of a new stage line through his neighborhood. Said he:

'I've lived on the frontier all my life. I know English and the sign-language, and have picked up a smattering of French, Spanish, Choctaw, and Delaware; but one language I can't understand, and that is this infernal New York language!'

One frequently heard the senseless phrase: 'Not by a dogon-d sight,' or 'I wanted to go dog-on-d badly '-meaning ‘a great sight' and 'very badly.' From Minnesota had been imported the mysterious term 'scull-duggery,' used to signify political or other trickery. One often heard, even from educated men remarks like this:

Do you see Smith and Brown whispering there in the corner? They are up to some scull-duggery.'

Another and more significant barbarism is 'the dead wood,'from the game of 'ten-pins,' in which a fallen pin sometimes lies in front of the standing ones so that the first ball striking it will sweep the alley. I have the dead wood on him' was used familiarly, meaning: 'I have him in my power.' 'I have him corraled,' originating in New Mexico and California from the Spanish corral or cattle-yard, bore exactly the same signification. 'Scooped was an importation from Wall Street. 'I am badly scooped' meant: 'I am used up' or 'defeated.' 'Bursted' sometimes appeared even in print as the past tense of 'burst.'

In his instructive Notes on the English Language, George P.

'

1858.] PEARLS AND RETURNING GOLD SEEKERS. 135 Marsh observes: 'In nó part of America do the natives confuse their v's and w's after the manner of the Weller family.' But he will find native Pennsylvanians who say 'werry' and ' wul. gar.' Even some graduates of leading universities habitually use 'oncet' and 'twicet.' Still our country has fewer provincialisms than any other, and the railways on their march of improvement are rapidly sweeping those away.

In August Kansas was stirred by two new excitements. One was the reported discovery of abundant pearls on the Verdigris river, near the uninhabited southern border. The settlers rushed from all directions to pick up handfuls of such a tempting crop; for human nature will not stay to dig potatoes and gather pumpkins when it is promised pearls. But these treasures proved to be worth about five dollars a bushel-solely for the magnesia they contained.

Simultaneously with this came a gold fever, caused by the return of several adventurers from the mountains. From earliest explorations by white men, the vast region of sand and alkalı, sage-brush, greasewood and cactus, extending from western Kansas to the Sierra Nevadas, and from the British Possessions to northern Mexico, was called the 'Great American Desert.' Its boundless wastes, often sweeping for hundreds of miles in dreary sand-hills and plains destitute of water, trees and grass, were peculiarly repulsive and believed to be utterly unproductive. But the Rocky Mountains, crossing this whole tract from north to south, in a series of ranges sometimes a thousand miles in width, were more alluring. Their deep solemn forests of pine and fir, their flashing streams and lovely vistas of greensward inclosed by vast walls of rock with snow-covered summits were a pleasant relief to the eye wearied by desert wastes. There were early traditions of gold and other treasures. A book published in Cincinnati fifty years ago, says:

'These mountains are supposed to contain minerals, precious stones and gold and silver ore. It is but late that they have taken the name Rocky Mountains; by all the old travelers they are called the Shining Mountains* from an infinite number of crys

* Idaho signifies the shining mountains,'-a fitting name; for some of its peaks glitter in the sunlight with unequaled brilliancy.