WHICH DESCRIBES THE JOURNEY OF SAMSON HENRY TRAYLOR AND HIS WIFE AND
THEIR TWO CHILDREN AND THEIR DOG SAMBO THROUGH THE ADIRONDACK WILDERNESS
IN 1831 ON THEIR WAY TO THE LAND OF PLENTY, AND ESPECIALLY THEIR
ADVENTURES IN BEAR VALLEY AND NO SANTA CLAUS LAND. FURTHERMORE, IT
DESCRIBES THE SOAPING OF THE BRIMSTEADS AND THE CAPTURE OF THE VEILED
BEAR.
In the early summer of 1831 Samson Traylor and his wife, Sarah, and two
children left their old home near the village of Vergennes, Vermont, and
began their travels toward the setting sun with four chairs, a bread
board and rolling-pin, a feather bed and blankets, a small looking-glass,
a skillet, an axe, a pack basket with a pad of sole leather on the same,
a water pail, a box of dishes, a tub of salt pork, a rifle, a teapot, a
sack of meal, sundry small provisions and a violin, in a double wagon
drawn by oxen. It is a pleasure to note that they had a violin and were
not disposed to part with it. The reader must not overlook its full
historic significance. The stern, uncompromising spirit of the Puritan
had left the house of the Yankee before a violin could enter it. Humor
and the love of play had preceded and cleared a way for it. Where there
was a fiddle there were cheerful hearts. A young black shepherd dog with
tawny points and the name of Sambo followed the wagon or explored the
fields and woods it passed.
If we had been at the Congregational Church on Sunday we might have heard
the minister saying to Samson, after the service, that it was hard to
understand why the happiest family in the parish and the most beloved
should be leaving its ancestral home to go to a far, new country of which
little was known. We might also have heard Samson answer:
"It's awful easy to be happy here. We slide along in the same old groove,
that our fathers traveled, from Vergennes to Paradise. We work and play
and go to meetin' and put a shin plaster in the box and grow old and
narrow and stingy and mean and go up to glory and are turned into saints
and angels. Maybe that's the best thing that could happen to us, but
Sarah and I kind o' thought we'd try a new starting place and another
route to Heaven."
Then we might have seen the countenance of the minister assume a grave
and troubled look. "Samson, you must not pull down the pillars of this
temple," he said.
"No, it has done too much for me. I love its faults even. But we have
been called and must go. A great empire is growing up in the West. We
want to see it; we want to help build it."
The minister had acquired a sense of humor among those Yankees. Years
later in his autobiography he tells how deeply the words of Samson had
impressed him. He had answered:
"Think of us. I don't know what we shall do without your fun and the
music of your laugh at the pleasure parties. In addition to being the
best wrestler in the parish you are also its most able and sonorous
laugher."
"Yes, Sarah and I have got the laughing habit. I guess we need a touch
of misery to hold us down. But you will have other laughers. The seed has
been planted here and the soil is favorable."
Samson knew many funny stories and could tell them well. His heart was as
merry as _The Fisher's Hornpipe_. He used to say that he got the violin
to help him laugh, as he found his voice failing under the strain.
Sarah and Samson had been raised on adjoining farms just out of the
village. He had had little schooling, but his mind was active and well
inclined. Sarah had prosperous relatives in Boston and had had the
advantage of a year's schooling in that city. She was a comely girl of
a taste and refinement unusual in the place and time of her birth. Many
well favored youths had sought her hand, but, better than others, she
liked the big, masterful, good-natured, humorous Samson, crude as he was.
Naturally in her hands his timber had undergone some planing and
smoothing and his thought had been gently led into new and pleasant
ways. Sarah's Uncle Rogers in Boston had kept them supplied with some of
the best books and magazines of the time. These they had read aloud with
keen enjoyment. Moreover, they remembered what they read and cherished
and thought about it.
Let us take a look at them as they slowly leave the village of their
birth. The wagon is covered with tent cloth drawn over hickory arches.
They are sitting on a seat overlooking the oxen in the wagon front. Tears
are streaming down the face of the woman. The man's head is bent. His
elbows are resting on his knees; the hickory handle of his ox whip lies
across his lap, the lash at his feet. He seems to be looking down at his
boots, into the tops of which his trousers have been folded. He is a
rugged, blond, bearded man with kindly blue eyes and a rather prominent
nose. There is a striking expression of power in the head and shoulders
of Samson Traylor. The breadth of his back, the size of his wrists and
hands, the color of his face betoken a man of great strength. This
thoughtful, sorrowful attitude is the only evidence of emotion which he
betrays. In a few minutes he begins to whistle a lively tune.
The boy Josiah--familiarly called Joe--sits beside his mother. He is a
slender, sweet-faced lad. He is looking up wistfully at his mother. The
little girl Betsey sits between him and her father. That evening they
stopped at the house of an old friend some miles up the dusty road to
the north. "Here we are--goin' west," Samson shouted to the man at the
door-step.
He alighted and helped his family out of the wagon. "You go right
in--I'll take care o' the oxen," said the man.
Samson started for the house with the girl under one arm and the boy
under the other. A pleasant-faced woman greeted them with a hearty
welcome at the door.
"You poor man! Come right in," she said.
"Poor! I'm the richest man in the world," said he. "Look at the gold on
that girl's head--curly, fine gold, too--the best there is. She's
Betsey--my little toy woman--half past seven years old--blue eyes--helps
her mother get tired every day. Here's my toy man Josiah--yes, brown hair
and brown eyes like Sarah--heart o' gold--helps his mother, too--six
times one year old."
"What pretty faces!" said the woman as she stooped and kissed them.
"Yes, ma'am. Got 'em from the fairies," Samson went on. "They have all
kinds o' heads for little folks, an' I guess they color 'em up with the
blood o' roses an' the gold o' buttercups an' the blue o' violets. Here's
this wife o' mine. She's richer'n I am. She owns all of us. We're her
slaves."
"Looks as young as she did the day she was married--nine years ago," said
the woman.
"Exactly!" Samson exclaimed. "Straight as an arrow and proud! I don't
blame her. She's got enough to make her proud I say. I fall in love again
every time I look into her big, brown eyes."
The talk and laughter brought the dog into the house.
"There's Sambo, our camp follower," said Samson. "He likes us, one and
all, but he often feels sorry for us because we can not feel the joy that
lies in buried bones and the smell of a liberty pole or a gate post."
They had a joyous evening and a restful night with these old friends and
resumed their journey soon after daylight. They ferried across the lake
at Burlington and fared away over the mountains and through the deep
forest on the Chateaugay trail.
Since the Pilgrims landed between the measureless waters and the pathless
wilderness they and their descendants had been surrounded by the lure of
mysteries. It filled the imagination of the young with gleams of golden
promise. The love of adventure, the desire to explore the dark, infested
and beautiful forest, the dream of fruitful sunny lands cut with water
courses, shored with silver and strewn with gold beyond it--these were
the only heritage of their sons and daughters save the strength and
courage of the pioneer. How true was this dream of theirs gathering
detail and allurement as it passed from sire to son! On distant plains to
the west were lands more lovely and fruitful than any of their vision; in
mountains far beyond was gold enough to gild the dome of the heavens, as
the sun was wont to do at eventide, and silver enough to put a fairly
respectable moon in it. Yet for generations their eyes were not to see,
their hands were not to touch these things. They were only to push their
frontier a little farther to the west and hold the dream and pass it on
to their children.
Those early years of the nineteenth century held the first days of
fulfillment. Samson and Sarah Traylor had the old dream in their hearts
when they first turned their faces to the West. For years Sarah had
resisted it, thinking of the hardships and perils in the way of the
mover. Samson, a man of twenty-nine when he set out from his old home,
was said to be "always chasing the bird in the bush." He was never
content with the thing in hand. There were certain of their friends who
promised to come and join them when, at last, they should have found the
land of plenty. But most of the group that bade them good-by thought it
a foolish enterprise and spoke lightly of Samson when they were gone.
America has undervalued the brave souls who went west in wagons, without
whose sublime courage and endurance the plains would still be an unplowed
wilderness. Often we hear them set down as seedy, shiftless dreamers who
could not make a living at home. They were mostly the best blood of the
world and the noblest of God's missionaries. Who does not honor them
above the thrifty, comfort loving men and women who preferred to stay at
home, where risks were few, the supply of food sure and sufficient and
the consolations of friendship and religion always at hand. Samson and
Sarah preferred to enlist and take their places in the front battle line
of Civilization. They had read a little book called _The Country of the
Sangamon_. The latter was a word of the Pottawatomies meaning land of
plenty. It was the name of a river in Illinois draining "boundless,
flowery meadows of unexampled beauty and fertility, belted with timber,
blessed with shady groves, covered with game and mostly level, without a
stick or a stone to vex the plowman." Thither they were bound to take up
a section of government land.
They stopped for a visit with Elisha Howard and his wife, old friends
of theirs, who lived in the village of Malone, which was in Franklin
County, New York. There they traded their oxen for a team of horses. They
were large gray horses named Pete and Colonel. The latter was fat and
good-natured. His chief interest in life was food. Pete was always
looking for food and perils. Colonel was the near horse. Now and then
Samson threw a sheepskin over his back and put the boy on it and tramped
along within arm's reach of Joe's left leg. This was a great delight to
the little lad.
They proceeded at a better pace to the Black River country, toward which,
in the village of Canton, they tarried again for a visit with Captain
Moody and Silas Wright, both of whom had taught school in the town of
Vergennes.
They proceeded through DeKalb, Richville and Gouverneur and Antwerp and
on to the Sand Plains. They had gone far out of their way for a look at
these old friends of theirs.
Every day the children would ask many questions, as they rode along,
mainly about the beasts and birds in the dark shadows of the forest
through which they passed. These were answered patiently by their father
and mother and every answer led to other queries.
"You're a funny pair," said their father one day. "You have to turn over
every word we say to see what's under it. I used to be just like ye, used
to go out in the lot and tip over every stick and stone I could lift to
see the bugs and crickets run. You're always hopin' to see a bear or a
panther or a fairy run out from under my remarks."
"Wonder why we don't see no bears?" Joe asked. "'Cause they always see us
first or hear us comin'," said his father. "If you're goin' to see ol'
Uncle Bear ye got to pay the price of admission."
"What's that?" Joe asked.
"Got to go still and careful so you'll see him first. If this old wagon
didn't talk so loud and would kind o' go on its tiptoes maybe we'd see
him. He don't like to be seen. Seems so he was kind o' shamed of himself,
an' I wouldn't wonder if be was. He's done a lot o' things to be 'shamed
of."
"What's he done?" Joe asked.
"Ketched sheep and pigs and fawns and run off with 'em."
"What does he do with 'em?"
"Eats 'em up. Now you quit. Here's a lot o' rocks and mud and I got to
'tend to business. You tackle yer mother and chase her up and down the
hills a while and let me get my breath."
Samson's diary tells how, at the top of the long, steep hills he used to
cut a small tree by the roadside and tie its butt to the rear axle and
hang on to its branches while his wife drove the team. This held their
load, making an effective brake.
Traveling through the forest, as they had been doing for weeks, while the
day waned, they looked for a brookside on which they could pass the night
with water handy. Samson tethered, fed and watered their horses, and
while Sarah and the children built a fire and made tea and biscuits, he
was getting bait and catching fish in the stream.
"In a few minutes from the time I wet my hook a mess of trout would be
dressed and sizzling, with a piece of salt pork, in the pan, or it was a
bad day for fishing," he writes.
After supper the wagon was partly unloaded, the feather bed laid upon the
planks under the wagon roof and spread with blankets. Then Samson sang
songs and told stories or played upon the violin to amuse the family. The
violin invariably woke the birds in the tree-tops, and some, probably
thrushes or warblers or white throated sparrows, began twittering. Now
and then one would express his view of the disturbance with a little
phrase of song. Often the player paused to hear these musical whispers
"up in the gallery," as he was wont to call it.
Often if the others were weary and depressed he would dance merrily
around the fire, playing a lively tune, with Sambo glad to lend a helping
foot and much noise to the program. If mosquitos and flies were
troublesome Samson built smudges, filling their camp with the smoky
incense of dead leaves, in which often the flavor of pine and balsam was
mingled. By and by the violin was put away and all knelt by the fire
while Sarah prayed aloud for protection through the night. So it will be
seen that they carried with them their own little theater, church and
hotel.
Soon after darkness fell, Sarah and the children lay down for the night,
while Samson stretched out with his blankets by the fire in good weather,
the loaded musket and the dog Sambo lying beside him. Often the howling
of wolves in the distant forest kept them awake, and the dog muttering
and barking for hours.
Samson woke the camp at daylight and a merry song was his reveille while
he led the horses to their drink.
"Have a good night?" Sarah would ask.
"Perfect!" he was wont to answer. "But when the smudges went out the
mosquiters got to peckin' my face."
"Mine feels like a pincushion," Sarah would often answer. "Will you heat
up a little water for us to wash with?"
"You better believe I will. Two more hedge hogs last night, but Samba let
'em alone."
Sambo had got his mouth sored by hedge hogs some time before and had
learned better than to have any fuss with them.
When they set out in the morning Samson was wont to say to the little
lad, who generally sat beside him: "Well, my boy, what's the good word
this morning?" Whereupon Joe would say, parrot like:
"God help us all and make His face to shine upon us."
"Well said!" his father would answer, and so the day's journey began.
Often, near its end, they came to some lonely farmhouse. Always Samson
would stop and go to the door to ask about the roads, followed by little
Joe and Betsey with secret hopes. One of these hopes was related to
cookies and maple sugar and buttered bread and had been cherished since
an hour of good fortune early in the trip and encouraged by sundry
good-hearted women along the road. Another was the hope of seeing a
baby--mainly, it should be said, the hope of Betsey. Joe's interest was
merely an echo of hers. He regarded babies with an open mind, as it were,
for the opinions of his sister still had some weight with him, she being
a year and a half older than he, but babies invariably disappointed him,
their capabilities being so restricted. To be sure, they could make quite
a noise, and the painter was said to imitate it, but since Joe had
learned that they couldn't bite he had begun to lose respect for them.
Still, not knowing what might happen, he always took a look at every
baby.
The children were lifted out of the wagon to stretch their legs at
sloughs and houses. They were sure to be close behind the legs of their
father when he stood at a stranger's door. Then, the night being near,
they were always invited to put their horses in the barn and tarry until
next morning. This was due in part to the kindly look and voice of
Samson, but mostly to the wistful faces of the little children--a fact
unsuspected by their parents. What motherly heart could resist the silent
appeal of children's faces or fail to understand it? Those were memorable
nights for Sarah and Joe and Betsey. In a letter to her brother the woman
said:
"You don't know how good it seemed to see a woman and talk to her, and we
talked and talked until midnight, after all the rest were asleep. She let
me hold the baby in my lap until it was put to bed. How good it felt to
have a little warm body in my arms again and feel it breathing! In all my
life I never saw a prettier baby. It felt good to be in a real house and
sleep in a soft, warm bed and to eat jelly and cookies and fresh meat and
potatoes and bread and butter. Samson played for them and kept them
laughing with his stories until bedtime. They wouldn't take a cent and
gave us a dozen eggs in a basket and a piece of venison when we went
away. Their name is Sanford and I have promised to write to them. They
are good Christian folks and they say that maybe they will join us in the
land of plenty if we find it all we expect."
They had two rainy, cold days, with a northeast wind blowing and deep mud
in the roads. The children complained of the cold. After a few miles'
travel they stopped at an old hunter's camp facing a great mossy rock
near the road.
"Guess we'll stop here for a visit," said Samson.
"Who we goin' to visit?" Joe asked.
"The trees and the fairies," said his father. "Don't ye hear 'em askin'
us to stop? They say the wind is blowin' bad an' that we'd better stop
an' make some good weather. They offer us a house and a roof to cover it
and some wood to burn. I guess we'll be able to make our own sunshine in
a few minutes."
Samson peeled some bark and repaired the roof and, with his flint and
tinder and some fat pine, built a roaring fire against the rock and soon
had his family sitting, in its warm glow, under shelter. Near by was
another rude framework of poles set in crotches partly covered with bark
which, with a little repairing, made a sufficient shelter for Pete and
Colonel. Down by a little brook a few rods away he cut some balsams and
returned presently with his arms full of the fragrant boughs. These he
dried in the heat of the fire and spread in a thick mat on the ground
under the lean-to. It was now warm with heat, reflected from the side of
the great rock it faced. The light of the leaping flames fell upon the
travelers.
"Ye see ye can make yer own weather and fill it with sunshine if ye only
know how," said Samson, as he sat down and brushed a coal out of the
ashes and swiftly picked it up with his fingers and put it into the bowl
of his clay pipe. "Mother and I read in a book that the wood was full o'
sunlight all stored up and ready for us to use. Ye just set it afire and
out comes the warm sunlight for days like this. God takes pretty good
care of us--don't He?"
The heat of other fires had eaten away a few inches of the base of the
rock. Under its overhang some one had written with a black coal the words
"Bear Valley Camp." On this suggestion the children called for a bear
story, and lying back on the green mat of boughs, Samson told them of the
great bear of Camel's Hump which his father had slain, and many other
tales of the wilderness.
They lived two days in this fragrant, delightful shelter until the storm
had passed and the last of their corn meal had been fed to the horses.
They were never to forget the comfort and the grateful odors of their
camp in Bear Valley.
On a warm, bright day in the sand country after the storm they came to a
crude, half finished, frame house at the edge of a wide clearing. The
sand lay in drifts on one side of the road. It had evidently moved in the
last wind. A sickly vegetation covered the field. A ragged, barefooted
man and three scrawny, ill clad children stood in the dooryard. It was
noon-time. A mongrel dog, with a bit of the hound in him, came bounding
and barking toward the wagon and pitched upon Sambo and quickly got the
worst of it. Sambo, after much experience in self-defense, had learned
that the best way out of such trouble was to seize a leg and hang on.
This he did. The mongrel began to yelp. Samson lifted both dogs by the
backs of their necks, broke the hold of Sambo and tossed aside the
mongrel, who ran away whining.
"That reminds me of a bull that tackled a man over in Vermont," said he.
"The man had a club in his hand. He dodged and grabbed the bull's tail
and beat him all over the lot. As the bull roared, the man hollered:
'I'd like to know who began this fuss anyway.'"
The stranger laughed.
"Is that your house?" Samson asked.
The man stepped nearer and answered in a low, confidential tone:
"Say, mister, this is a combination poorhouse and idiot asylum. I am the
idiot. These are the poor."
He pointed to the children.
"You don't talk like an idiot," said Samson.
The man looked around and leaned over the wheel as if about to impart a
secret.
"Say, I'll tell ye," he said in a low tone. "A real, first-class idiot
never does. You ought to see my actions."
"This land is an indication that you're right," Samson laughed.
"It proves it," the stranger whispered.
"Have you any water here?" Samson asked.
The stranger leaned nearer and said in his most confidential tone: "Say,
mister, it's about the best in the United States. Right over yonder in
the edge o' the woods--a spring-cold as ice--Simon-pure water. 'Bout the
only thing this land'll raise is water."
"This land looks to me about as valuable as so much sheet lightnin' and
I guess it can move just about as quick," said Samson.
The stranger answered in a low tone: "Say, I'll tell ye, it's a wild
cow--don't stand still long 'nough to give ye time to git anything out of
it. I've toiled and prayed, but it's hard to get much out of it."
"Praying won't do this land any good," Samson answered. "What it needs
is manure and plenty of it. You can't raise anything here but fleas. It
isn't decent to expect God to help run a flea farm. He knows too much for
that, and if you keep it up He'll lose all respect for ye. If you were to
buy another farm and bring it here and put it down on top o' this one,
you could probably make a living. I wouldn't like to live where the wind
could dig my potatoes."
Again the stranger leaned toward Samson and said in a half-whisper: "Say,
mister, I wouldn't want you to mention it, but talkin' o' fleas, I'm like
a dog with so many of 'em that he don't have time to eat. Somebody has
got to soap him or he'll die. You see, I traded my farm over in Vermont
for five hundred acres o' this sheet lightnin', unsight an' unseen. We
was all crazy to go West an' here we are. If it wasn't for the deer an'
the fish I guess we'd 'a' starved to death long ago."
"Where did ye come from?"
"Orwell, Vermont."
"What's yer name?"
"Henry Brimstead," the stranger whispered.
"Son of Elijah Brimstead?"
"Yes, sir."
Samson took his hand and shook it warmly. "Well, I declare!" he
exclaimed. "Elijah Brimstead was a friend o' my father."
"Who are you?" Brimstead asked.
"I'm one o' the Traylors o' Vergennes."
"My father used to buy cattle of Henry Traylor."
"Henry was my father. Haven't you let 'em know about your bad luck?"
The man resumed his tone of confidence. "Say, I'll tell ye," he answered.
"A man that's as big a fool as I am ought not to advertise it. A brain
that has treated its owner as shameful as mine has treated me should be
compelled to do its own thinkin' er die. I've invented some things that
may sell. I've been hopin' my luck would turn."
"It'll turn when you turn it," Samson assured him.
Brimstead thoughtfully scuffed the sand with his bare foot. In half a
moment he stepped to the wheel and imparted this secret: "Say, mister, if
you've any more doubt o' my mental condition, I'm goin' to tell ye that
they've discovered valuable ore in my land two miles back o' this road,
an' I'm hopin' to make a fortune. Don't that prove my case?"
"Any man that puts his faith in the bowels of the earth can have my
vote," said Samson.
Brimstead leaned close to Samson's ear and said in a tone scarcely
audible:
"My brother Robert has his own idiot asylum. It's a real handsome one an'
he has made it pay, but I wouldn't swap with him."
Samson smiled, remembering that Robert had a liquor store. "Look here,
Henry Brimstead, we're hungry," he said. "If ye furnish the water, we'll
skirmish around for bread and give ye as good a dinner as ye ever had in
yer life."
Henry took the horses to his barn and watered and fed them. Then he
brought two pails of water from the spring. Meanwhile Samson started
a fire in a grove of small poplars by the roadside and began broiling
venison, and Sarah got out the bread board and the flour and the
rolling-pin and the teapot. As she waited for the water she called the
three strange children to her side. The oldest was a girl of thirteen,
with a face uncommonly refined and attractive. In spite of her threadbare
clothes, she had a neat and cleanly look and gentle manners. The youngest
was a boy of four. They were a pathetic trio.
Joe had been telling them about Santa Claus and showing them a jack-knife
which had come down the chimney in his pack at Christmas time and
describing a dress of his mother's that had gold and silver buttons
on it. The little six-year-old girl had asked him many questions about
his mother and had stood for some moments looking up into Sarah's face.
The girl timidly felt the dress and hair of the woman and touched her
wedding ring.
"Come and wash your faces and hands," Joe demanded as soon as the water
came.
This they did while he poured from a dipper.
"Nice people always wash before they eat," he reminded them.
Then he showed them his bear stick, with the assurance that it had killed
a hedge hog, omitting the unimportant fact that his father had wielded
it. The ferocity of hedge hogs was a subject on which he had large
information. He told how one of their party had come near getting his
skin sewed on a barn door. A hedge hog had come and asked Sambo if he
would have some needles. Sambo had never seen a hedge hog, so he said
that he guessed he would.
Then the hedge hog said: "Help yourself."
Sambo went to take some and just got his face full of 'em so it looked
like a head o' barley. They had to be took out with a pinchers or they'd
'a' sewed his skin on to a barn door. That was their game. They tried to
sew everybody's skin on a barn door.
Every night the hedge hog came around and said: "Needles, needles,
anybody want some needles."
Now Sambo always answered: "No thank you, I've had enough."
"Where's your mother?" Sarah asked of the ten-year-old girl.
"Dead. Died when my little brother was born."
"Who takes care of you?"
"Father and--God. Father says God does most of it."
"Oh dear!" Sarah exclaimed, with a look of pity.
They had a good dinner of fresh biscuit and honey and venison and eggs
and tea. While they were eating Samson told Brimstead of the land of
plenty.
After dinner, while Brimstead was bringing the team, one of his children,
the blonde, pale, tattered little girl of six, climbed into the wagon
seat and sat holding a small rag doll, which Sarah had given her. When
they were ready to go she stubbornly refused to get down.
"I'm goin' away," she said. "I'm goin' aw-a-ay off to find my mother. I
don't like this place. There ain't no Santa Claus here. I'm goin' away."
She clung to the wagon seat and cried loudly when her father took her
down.
"Ain't that enough to break a man's heart?" he said with a sorrowful
look.
Then Samson turned to Brimstead and asked:
"Look here, Henry Brimstead, are you a drinking man? Honor bright now."
"Never drink a thing but water and tea."
"Do you know of anybody who'll give ye anything for what you own here?"
"There's a man in the next town who offered me three hundred and fifty
dollars for my interest."
"How far is it?"
"Three miles."
"Come along with us and get the money if you can. I'll help ye fit up and
go where ye can earn a living."
"I'd like to, but my horse is lame and I can't leave the children."
"Put 'em right in this wagon and come on. If there's a livery in the
place, I'll send ye home."
So the children rode in the wagon and Samson and Brimstead walked, while
Sarah drove the team to the next village. There the good woman bought new
clothes for the whole Brimstead family and Brimstead sold his interest in
the sand plains and bought a good pair of horses, with harness and some
cloth for a wagon cover, and had fifty dollars in his pocket and a new
look in his face. He put his children on the backs of the horses and led
them to his old home, with a sack of provisions on his shoulder. He was
to take the track of the Traylors next day and begin his journey to the
shores of the Sangamon.
Samson had asked about him in the village and learned that he was an
honest man who had suffered bad luck. A neighbor's wife had taken his
children for two years, but bad health had compelled her to give them up.
"God does the most of it," Sarah quoted from the young girl, as they rode
on. "I guess He's saved 'em from the poorhouse to-day. I hope they'll
ketch up with us. I'd like to look after those children a little. They
need a mother so."
"They'll ketch up all right," said Samson. "We're loaded heavier than
they'll be and goin' purty slow. They'll be leavin' No Santa Claus Land
to-morrow mornin'. Seems so God spoke to me when that girl said there
wa'n't no Santa Claus there."
"No Santa Claus Land is a good name for it," said Sarah.
They got into a bad swale that afternoon and Samson had to cut some
corduroy to make a footing for team and wagon and do much prying with the
end of a heavy pole under the front axle. By and by the horses pulled
them out.
"When ol' Colonel bends his neck things have to move, even if he is up to
his belly in the mud," said Samson.
As the day waned they came to a river in the deep woods. It was an
exquisite bit of forest with the bells of a hermit thrush ringing in one
of its towers. Their call and the low song of the river were the only
sounds in the silence. The glow of the setting sun which lighted the
western windows of the forest had a color like that of the music-golden.
Long shafts of it fell through the tree columns upon the road here and
there. Our weary travelers stopped on the rude plank bridge that crossed
the river. Odors of balsam and pine and tamarack came in a light, cool
breeze up the river valley.
"It smells like Bear Valley," said Sarah.
"What was that poetry you learned for the church party?" Samson asked.
"I guess the part of it you're thinking of is:
'And west winds with musky wing
Down the cedarn alleys fling
'Nard and Cassia's balmy smells.'"
"That's it," said Samson. "I guess we'll stop at this tavern till
to-morrow."
Joe was asleep and they laid him on the blankets until supper was ready.
Soon after supper Samson shot a deer which had waded into the rapids.
Fortunately, it made the opposite shore before it fell. All hands spent
that evening dressing the deer and jerking the best of the meat. This
they did by cutting the meat into strips about the size of a man's hand
and salting and laying it on a rack, some two feet above a slow fire, and
covering it with green boughs. The heat and smoke dried the meat in the
course of two or three hours and gave it a fine flavor. Delicious beyond
any kind of meat is venison treated in this manner. If kept dry, it will
retain its flavor and its sweetness for a month or more.
Samson was busy with this process long after the others had gone to bed.
When it was nearly finished he left the meat on the rack, the fire
beneath it having burned low, crossed the river to the wagon, got his
blanket, reloaded his gun and lay down to sleep with the dog beside him.
Some hours later he was awakened by "a kind of a bull beller," as he
described it. The dog ran barking across the river. Samson seized the gun
and followed him. The first dim light of the morning showed through the
tree-tops. Some big animal was growling and roaring and rolling over and
over in a clump of bushes near the meat rack. In half a moment it rolled
out upon the open ground near Samson. The latter could now see that it
was a large black bear engaged in a desperate struggle with the pack
basket. The bear had forced his great head into the top of it and its
hoop had got a firm hold on his neck. He was sniffing and growling and
shaking his head and striking with both fore paws to free himself. Sambo
had laid hold of his stub tail and the bear was trying in vain to reach
him, with the dog dodging as he held on. The movements of both were so
lively that Samson had to step like a dancer to keep clear of them. The
bear, in sore trouble, leaped toward him and the swaying basket touched
the side of the man. Back into the bushes and out again they struggled,
Sambo keeping his hold. A more curious and ludicrous sight never
gladdened the eye of a hunter. Samson had found it hard to get a chance
to shoot at the noisy, swift torrent of fur. Suddenly the bear rose on
his hind legs and let out an angry woof and gave the basket a terrific
shaking. In this brief pause a ball from the rifle went to his heart and
he fell. Samson jumped forward, seized the dog's collar and pulled him
away while the bear struggled in his death throes. Then the man started
for camp, while his great laugh woke distant echoes in the forest.
"Bear steak for dinner!" he shouted to Sarah and the children, who stood
shivering with fright on the bridge.
Again his laughter filled the woods with sound.
"Gracious Peter! What in the world was it?" Sarah asked.
"Well, ye see, ol' Uncle Bear came to steal our bacon an' the bacon kind
o' stole him," said Samson, between peals of laughter, the infection of
which went to the heart and lips of every member of the family. "Shoved
his head into the pack basket and the pack basket wouldn't let go. It
said: 'This is the first time I ever swallered a bear, an' if you don't
mind I'll stay on the outside. I kind o' like you.' But the bear did
mind. He didn't want to be et up by a basket. He'd always done the
swallerin' himself an' he hollered an' swore at the basket an' tried to
scare it off. Oh, I tell ye he was awful sassy and impudent to that old
thing, but it hung on and the way he flounced around, with Sambo clingin'
to his tail, and the bear thinkin' that he was bein' swallered at both
ends, was awful. Come an' see him."
They went to the bear, now dead. Sambo ran ahead of them and laid hold of
the bear's stump of a tail and shook it savagely, as if inclined to take
too much credit upon himself. The hoop of the pack basket had so tight a
hold upon the bear's neck that it took a strong pull to get it back over
his head. One side of the basket had been protected from the bear's claws
by a pad of sole leather--the side which, when the basket was in use,
rested on the back of its carrier. His claws had cut nearly through it
and torn a carrying strap into shreds.
"I guess he'd 'a' tore off his veil if the dog had give him a little more
time," said Samson. "Ol' Uncle Bear had trouble at both ends and didn't
know which way to turn."
A good-sized piece of bacon still, lay in the bottom of the basket.
"I wouldn't wonder if that would taste pretty beary now," said Samson, as
he surveyed the bacon. "It's been sneezed at and growled on so much.
Betsey, you take that down to the shore o' the river there and wash the
bear out of it. I'll skin him while yer mother is gettin' breakfast.
There's plenty o' live coals under the venison rack, I guess."
They set out rather late that morning. As usual, Joe stood by the head of
Colonel while the latter lapped brown sugar from the timid palm of the
boy. Then the horse was wont to touch the face of Joe with his big, hairy
lips as a tribute to his generosity. Colonel had seemed to acquire a
singular attachment for the boy and the dog, while Pete distrusted both
of them. He had never a moment's leisure, anyhow, being always busy with
his work or the flies. A few breaks in the pack basket had been repaired
with green withes. It creaked with its load of jerked venison when put
aboard. The meat of the bear was nicely wrapped in his hide and placed
beside it. They sold meat and hide and bounty rights in the next village
they reached for thirty long shillings.
"That cheers up the ol' weasel," Samson declared, as they went on.
"He got a hard knock after we met the Brimsteads," said Sarah.
"Yes, ma'am! and I'm not sorry either. He's got to come out of his hole
once in a while. I tell ye God kind o' spoke to us back there in No Santa
Claus Land. He kind o' spoke to us."
After a little silence, Sarah said: "I guess He's apt to speak in the
voices of little children."
His weasel was a dried pig's bladder of unusual size in which he carried
his money. Samson had brought with him a fairly good quantity of money
for those days. In a smaller bladder he carried his tobacco.
Farther on the boy got a sore throat. Sarah bound a slice of pork around
it and Samson built a camp by the roadside, in which, after a good fire
was started, they gave him a hemlock sweat. This they did by steeping
hemlock in pails of hot water and, while the patient sat in a chair by
the fireside, a blanket was spread about him and pinned close to his
neck. Under the blanket they put the pails of steaming hemlock tea. After
his sweat and a day and night in bed, with a warm fire burning in front
of the shanty, Joe was able to resume his seat in the wagon. They spoke
of the Brimsteads and thought it strange that they had not come along.
On the twenty-ninth day after their journey began they came in sight of
the beautiful green valley of the Mohawk. As they looked from the hills
they saw the roof of the forest dipping down to the river shores and
stretching far to the east and west and broken, here and there, by small
clearings. Soon they could see the smoke and spires of the thriving
village of Utica.