1859.]

A REPORT OF JOHN BROWN.

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I had long been beyond the reach of mails and eagerly asked

'Old John Brown has just attempted to excite a slave insurrec tion at Harper's Ferry; several of his followers

are killed, and he is in jail awaiting trial. Our friends fear that his mad movement will defeat the republican ticket in the fall elections.'

I certainly shared in the fear. 'Heroism is very homely work in the doing,' and immortal deeds look prosaic and foolhardy to the moleeyed worldly wisdom of to-day.

Denver had developed wonderfully during the four months of my absence. Frame and brick edifices were displacing mud-roofed log-cabins. Two theaters were in full blast; and at first glance I could recognize only two buildings. When I left there was no uncoined gold in circulation; now it was the only currency-incontestable evidence that the mines were a fact. Upon every counter stood little scales, and whenever one made a purchase, whether to the amount of ten cents or a thousand dollars, he produced a buckskin pouch of gold dust and poured out the amount for weighing.

The population was improving, for more families had settled here, but gambling and dissipation were still universal. Nearly all liquors were 'doctored' and excited far more recklessness and malignity than pure whisky or brandy would have done.

The waggish superintendent of the overland mail caught an intoxicated emigrant riding away one of his mules; but instead of

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END OF SUMMER JOURNEYINGS.

[1859.

having him lynched, boarded the offender gratuitously for a day or two and turned him scot free, on the ground that the whisky sold in Denver would make any man steal.

'Praise the bridge which carries you safely over.' In spite of Kit Carson's incredulity, Liliput had brought me three hundred miles in seven and-a-half days' travel. He reached Denver with tender feet, galled back and a spot on each flank as large as my hand, made raw by the spur; for his many virtues were tempered by the vice of laziness. Still I disposed of steed and equipments at a sum which reduced the cost of the trip to precisely thirteen dollars. Liliput, placed in a ranch soon grew fat, and the next spring sold for a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

On the tenth of November I left Denver by express for Leavenworth. We started in warm weather, when coats were super-, fluous in the middle of the day; but twenty-four hours out, the thermometer suddenly dropped to two degrees below zero. Our conductor froze his face, our driver his ears, and during the night even mules were frozen upon the prairie. We rode until one o'clock, A. M., suffering much but constantly bestirring ourselves to guard against the last deadly stupor. At last we were relieved by reaching a station, where, with as many other wayfarers as could be packed into the little building, we slept until daylight.

The weather soon moderated, and on the sixteenth of November, after having journeyed twenty-five hundred miles in stages and on horseback since the seventeenth of August, I once more reached the metropolis of Kansas.

1860.]

A NIGHT WITH A SQUATTER.

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CHAPTER XXIV.

IN May, 1860, with my friend Thomas W. Knox, I returned to the border. First we made a pedestrian tour of two hundred miles through the interior of Kansas. In this initial experience of pioneer life, my comrade learned how truly 'the stomach is the great laboratory of disaffection whether in camp or capital.' The first evening, foot-sore and wayworn, we began to think of lodgings for the night. A neat little log-house, with well and orchard in front, and several improved farming implements beside it, allured us.

'This settler,' said I oracularly, 'is a gentleman of taste. These indications, to an old traveler, give unfailing promise of wholesome fare, agreeable society, and excellent accommodations. Here will we spend the night, and go forth on the morrow, refreshed, rejuvenated, and at peace with all the world.'

The squatter, a Missourian of the Methodist persuasion, whose great prairie of face was fringed with a dense, untrimmed forest of hair, received us kindly, and 'reckoned' he might accommodate us, could we put up with his indifferent fare. Here was modesty, the sure precursor of good things to come. The inevi table tow-headed children greeted us with their pleasant infant familiarities. The hostess, young and not uncomely, but of that unmistakably coarse fiber which a diet of pork and hominy imparts, retired to the kitchen to prepare supper. Time dragged, for the prairies had given us voracious appetites; but the long delay suggested proportionately splendid results. Just as the clock struck nine we crossed our legs under the festive cottonwood.

Alas, for human hopes! The coffee was like a pool of yellow

1

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KILLED IN THE DARKNESS.

[1860.

soap suds. The conglomerate substance by courtesy called butter was rank and smelled to heaven. The ham was strong enough to perform the labors of Hercules. The English language affords no vituperative epithet which can do justice to the corn bread. Despairingly, we called for sweet milk. Doubtless it had been sweet at some previous stage, but the period was far remote. Not a dish was palatable; the trail of the serpent was over them all. In utter disappointment we left the table, sat for a while in ominous silence, and went to bed, a morose and melancholy pair. But our sufferings had only begun. The couch was in the posses. sion of insectile inhabitants, who resented our invasion of their premises, in the most aggressive and bloodthirsty manner.

The

reader shall be spared the bristling terrors of that memorable night. It combined the horrors of a prize-fight with being buried alive.

In the morning we assisted at the farce of breakfast, disbursed nine shillings for what by a hideous satire was called our 'entertainment,' and departed with unspoken maledictions upon our host. Of all the Kansas frauds which had come within my knowl edge, he was the most glaring and aggravated.

Fifteen miles beyond, we dined at Franklin, where the tavern walls still contained scores of bullets received during its siege and capture in 1856. A friend, one of the attacking Free State men, while lying in the grass and firing his rifle spoke to a comrade immediately beside him. There was no answer. Putting out his hand in the darkness it struck a motionless head, the hair dripping with warm blood. His companion lying within two feet had uttered no sound when he received the death-wound, which was ghastly and gaping, for the spiral motion of the modern rifle bullet makes its aperture three times as large as the ball itself.

Near Grasshopper Falls one fine farm of six hundred acres and another of nine hundred showed us that the wilderness was already being subdued. At Holton we stopped to chat with an old proslavery settler whose cheek was enormously distended from a rifle shot, the result of an attempt by himself and several companions to break up a republican convention.

At the lonely log-cabin where we spent the night, in the winter of 1857-8, old John Brown with twelve fugitive slaves whom he

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was conducting to Canada had waited four days for the creek to fall. Stephens and Whipple were his only white companions. Six men from Lecompton came prowling suspiciously about, when Stephens went out and asked:

'Well gentlemen we have not got your negroes, but we have twelve others up at the house. Come and see them.'

This invitation was accompanied by the click of his cocking rifle. The Lecomptonites were armed to the teeth, but five wheeled their horses and fled while the sixth at whom the rifle was pointed tremblingly remained. Stephens made him dismount, give up his arms and follow him to the dwelling: