1857.]

FALLACY OF HUMAN TESTIMONY.

75

At this perturbed and expectant moment, late one Saturday night, à breathless messenger reached Osawkee. He asserted, with minutest particulars, that he was just from Lawrence, which Walker's troops had begun to bombard, and that he left the city wrapped in flames. What did I in the North when I should serve my employer in the South? With several friends I started for the new seat of war, thirty miles away, expecting to find the town in ashes.

After a hard night's ride, we came in sight of it, just as the sun was rising. It was very unlike smoldering ruins. Not a gun had been fired, a building disturbed, or a man arrested. There stood the city in the light of that Sabbath morning, calm and peaceful as any hamlet in the world. A mile west, on the prairie, gleamed white tents of the encamped soldiers, with sentinels pacing to and fro; and that was the sole foundation for the story. Our messenger had somewhere heard the rumor which he repeated as a fact of his own observation. To me it was a valuable lesson. Again, and again, during the great civil war, that experience saved me from being misled. All army correspondents learned sooner or later that strong excitements breed rumors as great swamps breed mosquitoes; that most human testimony is utterly untrustworthy; that one can believe only the evidence of his own senses, and those persons in whose truthfulness he places absolute confidence. Every day, in courts of justice, honest and intelligent sworn witnesses contradict each others' statements in the most positive manner. In a company of a dozen, it is an interesting experiment to whisper the details of some simple bit of news in fifty words to one's next neighbor. Thus let it pass around the circle; then request the last recipient to repeat it; and the innocent little morsel that was sent forth on its tour, will scarcely retain an infinitesimal part of its identity.

Governor Walker's blunder was more fatal than a crime. There was nobody to arrest, for no overt act had been committed; and there was nobody to fight, for nobody had taken up arms. The Kansas people who held Federal governors their natural enemies, enjoyed the rupture amazingly. According to Emerson's test, they were the best orators, for they could call the most nicknames. The two or three feeble Border Ruffian papers yet surviving,

76

GOVERNOR EXTINGUISHED BY RIDICULE. [1857.

made faint and doubtful essays in favor of their weak champion. The Free State journals flushed with new-born strength, abounded in droll chronicles of 'the siege of Lawrence,' and the great 'isothermal war.' Wags issued solemn burlesque proclamations declaring it high treason, punishable with death, to grade streets or remove dead cats from the gutters. In a public meeting, the people resolved to receive no communication from the governor, unless made through their newly elected mayor. sown dragons' teeth, and he reaped armed men. communities, which had never thought of it before, (one embracing the very land upon which the troops were encamped,) immediately imitated Lawrence, and elected municipal officers. A committee from one of these towns consulted the governor upon their movement. He replied:

Walker had Half a dozen

'Go on gentlemen-if you wish to fight the entire army of the United States.'

The entire army of the United States is strong, but not strong enough to defend a man against ridicule. Destiny in the form of the Lawrence Yankees was too much for his excellency. Tired of an unequal contest which had made him the laughing-stock alike of the Territory and the entire North, he imitated the his toric Charles who,

'With twenty thousand men,

Marched up a hill, and then-marched down again.

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18571

WILD FRUITS OF THE PRAIRIES.

CHAPTER VI.

IN August I became a squatter, and made a claim.' This is the frontier term for the one hundred and sixty acres which the real or constructive settler 'improves' and claims for his future home. Only after preëmption and a perfect title from the Government, is it called his farm.

With several companions whose eyes were dazzled by visions of landed proprietorship, I started from Quindaro on a tour through the unsettled county of Johnson, one of the fairest and richest regions of Kansas. In the belt of deep woods eight or ten miles wide along the Missouri, the summer tints were of wonderful beauty and variety. Purple wild plums of delicate flavor, half the size of apples, abounded; from tree and bush hung vines heavy with ripening grapes, not larger than peas, but plump, palatable, and much used in cooking; wild cherries and crab apples grew in profusion; and the thickets bent under heavy loads of elder-berries, of which a bushel could be gathered in a few minutes. They lack pungency, but in the absence of other fruits frontier housewives convert them into tasteless preserves and insipid pies.

Crossing the Kansas, we reached the prairies and left the woods behind. Here and there were scattered trees along the far-apart streams; but they were like angel visits. This lack of timber was the most serious drawback of pioneers; yet the farmer would far better settle where he must go twenty-five miles for house and fence lumber and firewood, than where he must clear away for ests to make room for his corn and grass fields. The latter is the work of one or two generations; but in this rich Kansas soil the locust grows like Jonah's gourd, and the cottonwood attains a trunk-diameter of five or six inches in six years. Its feathery

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AN EMIGRANT FAMILY IN CAMP. [1857.

seed floats on the wind and takes root in plowed fields miles away from the mother tree.

Toward evening we passed several parties of immigrants, chiefly from Missouri. Come to this encampment, and see how

kindly frontier families take to a roving life. The long, heavy wagon, its roof covered with white cotton cloth, stands a few yards from the road. It is packed with provisions and household utensils; and two or three pots and kettles are suspended from the hind axle. The tired oxen graze upon the neighboring prairie. The white-haired children are playing hard by-five or six in number, for these new countries are marvelously prolific. The husband is milking the patient cows, the wife is preparing a supper of griddle-cakes bacon and coffee in the open air, at the camp stove, the hens are cackling socially from their coop, while the old family dog wags his tail approvingly, but watches with solicitous care the baby creeping about the wagon.

1867.] RAIN INCREASING WITH CIVILIZATION.

79

When crossing the great deserts to Utah or California they toil wearily along from twelve to twenty miles per day. The longbearded, shaggy drivers, tanned to the hue of Arapahoes, look like animated pillars of earth, and seem under the perpetual sentence: 'Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.' Each keeps his trusty rifle or shot-gun within grasp; and at night the wagons are parked in a circle, and the cattle driven into the extemporized yard which they inclose, as a protection against Indian surprises. Eternal vigilance is the price of travel. The children of the immigrants revel in dirt and novelty, but their mothers cast eager longing eyes toward their new homes. There is profound truth in the remark that 'plains-travel and frontier life are peculiarly severe upon women and oxen.'

We found the prairies robed in emerald green, and lit up with the gorgeous flowers of late summer. The wealth of the soil appeared inexhaustible. Where the spring streams had cut into it for thirty feet, the ravines displayed rich alluvium, black as jet, down to the bottom. It seemed as if no soundings could penetrate beneath it. It is like those rich bottom-lands along the Muskingum and Miami rivers of Ohio, which without the application of any fertilizing substance, have produced corn every season for half a century, and still yield fifty or sixty bushels to the acre. The grass was a miniature forest. In some of the wet lowlands it rose above our heads and completely hid us from each other, when a few yards apart, though we were mounted on tall steeds.

There is a curious logical connection between civilization and rain. All along the frontier, Indians declare that the white man. brings rain with him. Thirty years ago, Missourians living on the opposite bank of the river thought the soil of Kansas good for nothing on account of its rainless climate. Since the young State was settled, it has suffered only twice from dry seasons, and of late good crops and increasing rains have dispelled all apprehensions.

Now, however, we found the weather intensely hot, and the high prairies parched with drowth. Hour after hour we journeyed under the scorching sun, discovering neither shade nor water. Several of my comrades suffered intensely from thirst.