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BORROWING A CHILD.

141

witness to swear that the house in question was 'twelve by fourteen,' when actually the only building upon the claim was one whittled out with a penknife, twelve inches by fourteen.

Some offices require that the house must have a glass window. While traveling in the interior, I stopped at a little slab cabin, where I noticed a window-sash without lights hanging upon a nail. As I had seen similar frames in other cabins, I asked the owner what it was for.

'To preempt with,' was the reply.

'How?'

'Why, don't you understand? To enable my witness to swear that there is a window in my house!"

Sometimes the same cabin is moved from claim to claim, until half a dozen different persons have preëmpted with it. In Nebraska a little frame house, like a country daguerrean car, was built for this purpose on wheels, and drawn by oxen. It enabled the preemptor to swear that he had a bona

fide residence upon his claim. It was let at five dollars a day, and scores of claims were proved up and preempted with it. The discovery of any such malpractice and perjury would invalidate the title. But I never knew of an instance where the preëmptor was deprived of his land after once receiving his title.

No woman can preempt unless she is a widow or the 'head of a family.' But sometimes an ambitious maiden who wishes to secure one hundred and sixty acres of land, borrows a child, signs papers of adoption, swears that she is the head of a family, and preempts her claim; then annuls the papers and returns her temPorary offspring to its parents with an appropriate gift.

During

an August excursion I was impressed for the hundredth

142

AN INGENIOUS RUNAWAY HUSBAND.

[1858. time with the surpassing beauty of a night in Kansas. Upon a soft background of pure sky, trees and foliage lay penciled with wonderful distinctness; the silent river was broken up into restless little waves that tossed hither and thither gleams of moonlight; and profoundest quiet rested upon wood and water, broken now and then by the cry of a whippowil or the far-off tinkle of cow-bells upon the prairie.

Kansas life had novel social features. A prisoner in Atchison county was held to bail for appearance at court on some minor criminal charge. Any one's bond would have been taken; but he resolutely refused to give bail. There was no jail wherein to confine him. There was no money in the treasury to hire a guard. The deputy-sheriff was obliged to take him into his personal custody; and the prisoner, improving his first opportunity, leisurely walked away.

William Arthur, a resident of Sumner, one day crossed the river in a skiff, with his wife and children. Near the Missouri shore was a long sand-bar, which the boat could not pass. Arthur secured it and left his family in it, remarking that he would swim the narrow arm of the stream, transact his business, and return in a few minutes. He was an excellent swimmer; so his wife of ferred no opposition, and he plunged in. For a few yards he swam rapidly and easily; but suddenly he threw up his arms and sank, his hat floating away. In a few seconds he rose to the surface, struggled wildly, then sank again, and was seen no more. The cries of the distracted woman brought several men in skiffs, who searched for two days but without success;-in the strong Missouri current bodies are seldom found near the place of drowning.

Arthur and his wife had sometimes quarreled, but the grief of the widow was very poignant. I shall never forget the shrieks and groans of the poor woman during the days and nights immediately after her bereavement. But Time the great healer calmed her; the estate was finally settled and the little property secured to herself and the children.

Sne afterward learnt that her husband sank intentionally, swam several rods under water, came up behind a log and breathed for a moment, then continued, still under water, to the shore, and gained the bank unperceived. There the ingenious scoundrel amused himself for a while by watching the search made for his

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A CLEVER STRATAGEM SPOILED.

143

corpse, then procured a hat and spent the night at the house of a confidential friend; traveled across Missouri and Illinois to Indiana, and there under an assumed name married again! When his wife heard this, she started in pursuit of her old husband and his new partner in a spirit illustrative of Congreve's aphorism:

'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.'

I never learned the result, but there must have been a 'wreck of matter' when she caught them.

About the same time the invalid wife of a Territorial officer was sent to New Orleans for her health. Her husband received several letters from her dated and postmarked at the Crescent City. But one day in St. Louis, while awaiting dinner in the reading-room of the Planters' House, he glanced at a weekly newspaper published in an obscure Indiana town. Suddenly his attention was arrested by an advertisement notifying him that his wife had applied for a divorce and that the case would be tried the following day. The truth flashed upon the thunderstruck husband. While sending her letters to New Orleans for mailing, his wife had resided in Indiana long enough to claim a residence under the peculiar divorce laws of that State. As the statute required, she had notified him by publication; relying upon the trivial circulation of the paper as a safeguard against its reaching him. Though one of the best laid schemes, it went 'a-gley.' Her distracted lord rushed upon a train of cars just leaving for the East, chartered a special locomotive from an Indiana junction to the county seat, and entered the court-room while the case was pending, just in time to prevent judgment against him by default. He found his wife under the protection of another prominent Kansas politician, who had been for some weeks ostensibly in New York. Proceedings were stopped, the trio returned home, and husband and wife resumed their old relations.

During night rides in winter, I often saw prairie fires blazing along the horizon. Though never dangerous to men or animals, as depicted in our school-geographies, they are always startling and grand. The sky is pierced with tall pyramids of flame, or covered with writhing, leaping, lurid serpents, or transformed into a broad ocean lit up by a blazing sunset. Now a whole avalanche of fire

144

FERTILITY OF THE HEMP REGION.

[1858. slides off into the prairie, and then opening its great, devouring jaws closes in upon the deadened grass.

One of my December trips was to St. Joseph. Crossing the Missouri my road led along rich bottomlands, from three to eight miles wide, densely wooded with noble trees, and prolific of fever and ague. Like the high Kansas prairies, which sometimes yield one hundred and twenty-five bushels to the acre, this damp jetblack soil produces corn in incredible abundance. If political economists are right, and the happiness of a people is in exact proportion to their rapidity of increase, Missouri must be the very home of the blessed; for at every cabin tow-headed boys and girls spring up and grow like weeds. They can hardly be more plentiful along the Nile, where it is said to cost only three dollars apiece to rear children to maturity.

Leaving this narrow valley, I entered the garden of Missouri. Instead of log-cabins plastered with mud, appeared generous frame and brick dwellings surrounded by natural parks of oak and elm. On all sides were fields of corn wheat and hemp. The latter requires rich soil; a Missouri proverb asserts that land which will raise hemp will produce any other crop. Here in fields of a hundred acres the hemp, already cut, was rotting upon the ground, or standing in stacks like wheat sheaves. The slaves were fat and comfortable-looking, but few in number; for recent mechanical improvements in cutting and breaking hemp were rapidly taking the place of manual labor-silent colporteurs spreading the gospel of freedom. Twenty years before, the farmers preëmpted their land at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre; now it was held at thirty and forty dollars. The settlers had grown rich by selling their products for the heavy overland-trade. This com、 merce built up successively Jefferson City, Booneville, Independence, Kansas City, Westport, Weston, St. Joseph, Leavenworth, Atchison and Omaha, as each in turn became the chief out fitting point for the emigration to California, Oregon, Colorado, Montana, and Idaho.

St. Joseph now contained five thousand inhabitants, was built mainly of brick, and pleasantly shaded. But wise ones prophe sied that it could never be a great city, as it stood on the east side of the river, while all important commercial towns on the frontier

1858.] REPUBLICAN VERSUS BLACK REPUBLICAN. 145

spring up on the western banks. On the way homeward, I encountered an Indiana family en-route for Kansas, in a covered wagon drawn by two horses. They had not slept under a roof for two months. The ground was covered with snow, and the mercury below zero; but the wife and little children all declared that they slept comfortably in their vehicle in the open air.

Reaching the Missouri again, I found the ice running so heavily, that it was impossible to cross. Two days passed before the winter bridge became firm enough for footmen and horses.

This autumn certain rash friends in Sumner had nominated me for the legislature. Upon election morning one of my Pro-slavery neighbors, an ex-Missourian, addressed me at the polls with great

earnestness:

'Mr. R, I heard your speech the other night, and I liked your sentiments. But I am told that after I came away you avowed yourself a black republican. I had concluded to vote for you, but I cannot vote for a black republican. Did you say it?'

'No. I know no political distinctions now except Free State and Pro-slavery. But I did say that whenever the Territory became a State, and the issue should arise between republicanism and democracy, I should be a republican.'

'Well!' (very earnestly,) you didn't say black republican, did you?'

'No, sir.'

'Then I shall vote for you, for I liked your speech; but I'll be d-d if I ever vote for a black republican!'

Several democrats labored long and patiently to convince him that the obnoxious adjective was inseparable from the inoffensive noun. He heard them patiently, but then replied:

He

'Gentlemen, I don't think Mr. R- is that kind of a man. don't act like it, he don't look like it, he don't talk like it; and I am bound to vote for him.'

And vote for me he did, to their great disgust.