Winning the Wilderness

“Well?” Champers queried urgently.

The plains life made men patient and deliberate of speech, and Asher did not hasten his words for all the bluster.

“I say I am not using my influence to keep any man here or push him out of here. I speak only for the family at the Sunflower Inn. I know ’danged well’ I am not going to leave the Grass River country this fall. Further, I know your hand before you play it, and I know that if you can play it against Todd Stewart and Jim Shirley and Cyrus Bennington and the rest of them, I haven’t taken their measure right. I know, again, that I am not afraid of you, nor can any threat you make have an influence on my action. And, lastly, as to what I see.”

Asher turned toward the west where the hot air quivered between the iron earth and a sky of brass.

“I see a land fair as the garden of Eden, with grazing herds on broad meadows, and fields on fields of wheat, and groves and little lakes and rivers, a land of comfortable homes and schools and churches – and no saloons nor breweries.”

“I see a danged fool,” Darley Champers cried, springing up.

“Come down here in twenty-five years and make a hunt for me, then,” Asher said with a smile, but Champers had already plunged inside the schoolhouse.

The council following was a brief one. Three or four Grass River settlers agreed to give up the equity on their claims of one hundred and sixty acres for enough money to transport themselves and their families to their former homes east of the Mississippi River. This decision left only one child of all the little ones there, Todd Stewart, a stubby little fellow, as much of a Scotchman as his fair-haired father, who wound one arm about his father’s neck, and whispered:

“They can’t budge us, can they, dad?”

When the matter was concluded, Darley Champers rose to his feet.

“I want to say one thing,” he began doggedly. “I give you the chance. Don’t never blame me because you are too green to know what’s good for you. You are the only green things here, though. And don’t forget, there ain’t a man of you can get out of here on your own income or on your own savin’s. Not a one. You’re all locked into this valley an’ the key’s in purgatory. An’ I’d see you all with the key before I’d ever lift a finger to help one of you, and not a one of you can help yourselves.”

With these words Champers left the company and rode away up the trail toward civilization and safety.

In the silence that followed, Pryor Gaines said:

“Friends, let us not forget that this is the Sabbath day on the prairie as in the crowded city. Let us not leave until we ask for His blessing in whose sight no sparrow falls unnoticed.”

And together the little band of resolute men and women offered prayer to Him whose is the earth and the fulness, or the emptiness, thereof.

Four days and nights went by. On the fifth morning at daybreak the cool breeze that sweeps the prairies in the early dawn flowed caressingly along the Grass River valley. The settlers rose early. This was the best part of the day, and they made use of it.

“You poor Juno!” Virginia Aydelot said, as she leaned against the corral post in the morning twilight, and patted the mare gently.

“You and I are ’plains-broke’ for certain. We don’t care for hot winds, nor cold winds, nor prairie fire, nor even a hailstorm, if it would only come. Never mind, old Juno, Asher has the greenest fields of all the valley because he hasn’t stopped plowing. That’s why you must keep on working. Maybe it will rain today, and you’ll get to rest. Rain and rest!”

She looked toward the shadowy purple west, and then away to the east, decked in the barbaric magnificence of a plains sunrise.

“It may rain today, but it won’t rain rain. It will be hot air and trouble. The sod shack is cool, anyhow, Juno. Not so cool, though, as that little glen in the mountains where the clear spring bubbles and babbles all day long.” She brushed her hair back from her forehead and, squeezing Juno’s mane, she added, “We don’t want to go back yet, though. Not yet, do we, Juno, even if it rains trouble instead of rain? Inherited pride and the will to do as we please make us defy the plains, still.”

The day was exceedingly hot, but by noon a cloud seemed rising in the northwest; not a glorious, black thunder-cloud that means cool wind and sharp lightning and a shower of longed-for rain. A yellow-gray cloud with no deeper nor shallower tints to it, rising steadily, moving swiftly, shut off the noonday glare. The shadows deepened below this strange un-cloud-like cloud, not dark, but dense. The few chickens in the settlement mistook the clock and went to roost. At every settler’s house, wondering eyes watched the unheard-of phenomenon, so like, yet utterly unlike, the sun’s eclipse.

“Listen, Asher,” Virginia exclaimed, as the two stood on the low swell behind the house. “Listen to the roar, but there’s no wind nor thunder.”

“Hear that rasping edge to the rumble. It isn’t like anything I ever knew,” Asher said, watching the coming cloud intently.

From their height they could see it sweeping far across the land, not high in the air, but beclouding the prairie like a fog. Only this thing was dry and carried no cool breath with it. Nearer it came, and the sun above looked wanly through it, as surging, whipping, shimmering with silver splinters of light, roaring with the whir of grating wings, countless millions of grasshoppers filled the earth below and the air above.

“The plague of Egypt,” Asher cried, and he and Virginia retreated hastily before its force.

But they were not swift enough. The mosquito netting across the open windows was eaten through and the hopping, wriggling, flying pest surged inside. They smeared greasily on the floor; they gnawed ravenously at every bit of linen or cotton fabric; they fell into every open vessel.

Truly, life may be made miserable in many ways, but in the Kansas homes in that memorable grasshopper year of 1874 life was wretchedly uncomfortable. Out of doors the cloud was a disaster. Nor flood, nor raging wind nor prairie fire, nor unbroken drouth could claim greater measure of havoc in its wake than this billion-footed, billion-winged creature, an appetite grown measureless, a hunger vitalized, and individualized, and endowed with power of motion. No living shred of grass, or weed, or stalk of corn, or straw of stubble or tiniest garden growth; no leaf or bit of tender bark of tree, or shrub, escaped this many-mouthed monster.

In the little peach orchard where there were a few half-ripe peaches, the very first fruits of the orchards in this untamed land, the hard peach stones, from which the meat was eaten away, hung on their stems among the leafless branches. The weed-grown bed of Grass River was swept as by a prairie fire. And for the labor of the fields, nothing remained. The cottonwood trees and wild plum bushes belonged to a mid-winter landscape, and of the many young catalpa groves, only stubby sticks stood up, making a darker spot on the face of the bare plains.

For three days the Saint Bartholomew of vegetation continued. Then the pest, still hungry, rose and passed to the southeast, leaving behind it only a honey-combed soil where eggs were deposited for future hatching, and a famine-breeding desolation.

In days of great calamity or sorrow, sometimes little things annoy strangely, and it is not until after the grief has passed that the memory recalls and the mind wonders why trifles should have had such power amid such vastly important things. While the grasshopper was a burden, one loss wore heavily on Virginia Aydelot’s mind. She had given up hope for vines and daintier flowers in the early summer, but one clump of coarse sunflowers she had tended and watered and loved.

“It is our flower,” she said to Asher, who laughed at her care. “I won’t give them up. I can get along without the other blooms this year, but my sunflowers are my treasure here – the only gold till the wheat turns yellow for us.”

“You are a sentimental sister,” Asher declared. But he patiently carried water from the dwindling well supply to keep the drouth from searing them. When they fell before the ravenous grasshoppers, foolish as it was, Virginia mourned their loss above the loss of crops – so scanty were the joys of these women state builders.

The day after the pests left was the Sabbath. When Asher Aydelot read the morning lesson in the Sunday school, his voice was deep and unfaltering. He had chosen the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, with its sublime promises to a wilderness-locked people.

Then Pryor Gaines offered prayer.

“Although the figtree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines” – the old, old chant of Habakkuk on Mount Shigionoth – “the labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hind’s feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.”

So the scholarly man, crippled and held to the land, prayed; and comfort came with his words.

Then Jim Shirley stood up to sing.

“I’m no preacher,” he said, holding the song book open a moment, “but I do believe the Lord loves the fellow who can laugh at his own hard luck. We weren’t so green as Darley Champers tried to have us believe, because the hoppers didn’t bite at us when they took every other green and growing thing, and we have life enough in us to keep on growing. Furthermore, we aren’t the only people that have been pest-ridden. It’s even worse up on Big Wolf Creek, where Wyker’s short on corn to feed his brewery this fall. I’m going to ask everyone who is still glad he’s in the Grass River settlement in Kansas to stand up and sing just like he meant it. It’s the old Portuguese hymn. Asher and I learned it back on Clover Creek in Ohio.

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,Is laid for your faith – in His excellent word!”

Every man and woman rose at once.

“The ‘ayes’ have it,” Jim declared.

Then strong and sweet the song floated out across the desolate drouth-ridden, pest-despoiled prairie. The same song was sung that day, no doubt, where many worshipers were met together. The same song, sung in country chapel and city church; in mining villages, and in lonely lumber camps; on vessels far out at sea, and in the missionary service of distant heathen lands; by sick beds in humble homes, and beneath the groined arches of the Old World cathedrals.

But nowhere above the good green sod of Christendom did it rise in braver, truer worship from trustful and unconquered hearts than it rose that day in the little sod schoolhouse on the Kansas prairie, pouring its melody down the wide spaces of the Grass River Valley.

CHAPTER VII

The Last Bridge Burned

…Scores of better men had died.I could reach the township living, but – He knew what terrors tore me —But I didn’t! But I didn’t! I went down the other side.– The Explorer.

Pryor Gaines never preached a better sermon than the one that followed the singing of that old Portuguese hymn; and there were no doleful faces in that little company when the service closed. The men stopped long enough to discuss the best crops to put in for the fall, and how and where they might get seeds for the same; to consider ways for destroying the eggs left by the grasshoppers in the honey-combed ground, and to trade help in the wheat-breaking to begin the next day. The women lingered to plan a picnic dinner for the coming Saturday. Jim Shirley hummed an old love tune as he helped Pryor Gaines to close the windows and door for the week. Only little Todd Stewart, with sober face, scratched thoughtfully at the hard earth with his hard little toes.

“Can’t there be no more little children where there’s grasshoppers and Darley Champerses?” he asked his mother.

“Yes, yes, Todd. You won’t be lonesome long,” his mother assured him. “Some time when you are a man you can say, ‘I was the only little boy the grasshoppers and Darley Champers didn’t get.’ You stout little Trojan!”

And then Todd, too, caught the spirit of the day and went singing blithely away. Across the bare hollow of Grass River, and beyond the sand dunes into the brown wastes that had been grassy prairies, his young voice came trailing back still singing, as he rode behind his father, following the long hot trail toward their home. And the other settlers went their ways, each with courage renewed, for the new week’s work.

Yet, they were lonesomely few in number, and the prairies were vast; they were poverty-stricken, with little means by which to sustain life through the coming season; on every hand the desolate plains lay robbed of every green growth, and to this land they were nailed hand and foot as to a cross of crucifixion. But they were young. They believed in the West and in themselves. Their faces were set toward the future. They had voted themselves into holding on, and, except for the Aydelots, no one family had more resource than another. The Aydelots could leave the West if they chose. But they did not choose. So together they laughed at hardship; they made the most of their meager possessions; they helped each other as one family – and they trusted to Providence for the future. And Providence, albeit she shows a seamy side to poverty, still loves the man who laughs at hard luck. The seasons following were not unkind. The late summer rains, the long autumn, and the mild winter were blessings. But withal, there were days on days of real hunger. Stock died for lack of encouragement to live without food. And the grim while of waiting for seed time and signs of prosperity was lived through with that old Anglo-Saxon tenacity that has led the English speaking peoples to fight and colonize to the ends of the earth.

“Virginia,” Asher said one noontime, as the two sat at their spare meal, “the folks are coming up tonight to hold a council. I saw Bennington this morning and he had heard from the men over Todd Stewart’s way. Dust the piano, polish up the chandelier, and decorate with – smiles,” he added, as he saw the shadow on his wife’s face.

“I’ll have the maid put the reception room in order,” Virginia replied, with an attempt at merriment.

Then through the long afternoon she fought to a finish with the yearning for the things she missed daily. At supper time, however, she was the same cheery woman who had laughed at loss and lack so often that she wondered sometimes if abundance might not really make her sad.

In the evening the men sat on the ground about the door of the Sunflower Inn. Their wives had not come with them. One woman was sick at home; little Todd Stewart was at the beginning of a fever, and the other women were taking turns at nursing. Virginia’s turn had been the night before. She was weary now and she sat in the doorway listening to the men, and remembering how on just such a moonlit September night she and Asher had sat together under the Sign of the Sunflower and planned a future of wealth and comfort.

“The case is desperate,” Cyrus Bennington was saying. “Sickness and starvation and the horses failing every day and the need for all the plowing and getting winter fuel. Something must be done.”

Others agreed, citing additional needs no less pressing.

“There are supplies and money coming from the East right now,” Jim Shirley declared. “A hunting party crossed south two days ago. I was down on lower Plum Creek searching for firewood, and I met them. They said we might get help from Wykerton if we went up right away.”

“Well, you are Mr. Swift, Jim,” one of the men exclaimed. “If you knew it two days ago, why in thunder didn’t you report. We’d have made a wooden horse gallop to Wykerton before night.”

“How’d I round up the neighborhood? I didn’t get home till nearly noon today. And, besides, they said Darley Champers has the distributing of the supplies and money, and he’s putting it where it will do the most good, not giving to everybody alike, he says.”

A sudden blankness fell upon each face, as each recalled the last words of Champers when he left them on the Sabbath day in August.

“Well, you said a wooden horse could have galloped up to Wykerton.” Jim Shirley tried to speak cheerfully. “A horse of iron might, too, but who’s got a critter in Grass River Valley right now that could make a trip like that? Mine couldn’t. It took me two days and a half to haul up a load of stuff, mostly sunflower stalks, that I gathered down south.”

“Aydelot’s black mare could do it if anything could,” Pryor Gaines declared, trying to speak cheerfully, yet he was the least able to meet the hardships of that season.

“Yes, maybe,” Shirley commented. “She’s a thoroughbred, and they finally win, you know. But knowing what you do, who of you wants to face Darley Champers?”

Again a hopeless despair filled the hearts of the little company. Todd Stewart clinched his hands together. The husband of the sick woman set his jaws like iron. Pryor Gaines turned his face away and offered no further word. Asher Aydelot sat looking out across the prairie, touched to silvery beauty by the pitying moonlight, and Jim Shirley bowed his head and said nothing.

“I will go to Wykerton,” Virginia Aydelot’s soft voice broke the silence. “I’ll take Juno and go tomorrow morning. If Darley Champers refuses me, he would do the same to you.”

“Oh, Mrs. Aydelot, will you go? Can you try it? Do you think you could do it?” The questions came from the eager settlers.

“We’ll try it, Juno and I,” Virginia replied.

“Thoroughbreds, both of ’em,” Jim Shirley murmured under his breath, and Pryor Gaines’ face expressed the things he could not say.

“I believe that is the best thing to do,” Asher Aydelot declared.

Then the settlers said good night, and sought their homes.

As Virginia Aydelot rode away in the early morning, the cool breeze came surging to her out of the west. The plains were more barren than she had ever seen them before, but the sky above them had lost nothing of its beauty. No color had faded from the eastern horizon line, no magnificence had slipped away from the sunset.

“‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’” Virginia said to herself. “Has He forgotten the earth which is His also?”

She turned at the little swell to the northward to wave good-by to Asher, standing with arms folded beside a corral post, looking after her.

“Is he thinking of Cloverdale and the big cool farmhouse and the well-kept farm, and the many people coming and going along that old National pike road? He gave it all up for me – all his inheritance for me and this.”

She looked back once more at the long slope of colorless land and the solitary figure watching her in the midst of it all.

“I’ll tell him tonight I’m ready to go back East. We can go to Ohio, and Asher can live where his boyhood days were spent. My Virginia can never be as it was in my childhood, but Asher can have some of the pleasures of his eastern home.” She pushed back the sunbonnet from her face, and let the west breeze sweep across it.

“I used to wear a veil and was somewhat acquainted with cold cream, and my hands were really white and soft. They are hard and brown now. When I get home I’ll put it straight to Asher about going back to civilization, even if there are only a few dollars waiting to take us there, and nothing waiting for us to do.”

With a sigh, half of anticipation and half of regret, she rode away toward the little town of Wykerton in the Big Wolf Creek settlement.

There were few differences between the new county seat and Carey’s Crossing, except that there were a few more houses, and over by the creek bank the brewery, by which Hans Wyker proposed to save the West. There was, however, one difference between the vanished Carey’s Crossing and this place, the difference between the community whose business leaders have ideals of citizenship, and the community wherein commerce is advanced by the degradation of its citizens. Wykerton had no Dr. Carey nor John Jacobs to control it. The loafers stared boldly at Virginia Aydelot as she rode up before the livery stable and slipped from her saddle. Not because a woman in a calico dress and sunbonnet, a tanned, brown-handed woman, was a novelty there, but because the license of the place was one of impudence and disrespect.

The saloon was on one side of the livery stable and the postoffice was on the other side. Darley Champers’ office stood next to the postoffice, a dingy little shack with much show of maps and real estate information. Behind the office was a large barren yard where one little lilac bush languished above the hard earth. The Wyker hotel and store were across the street.

Virginia had been intrusted with small sums for sundry purchases for the settlement, especially for the staple medicines and household needs – camphor and turpentine, quinine and certain cough syrups for the winter; castor oil, some old and tried ointment, and brand of painkiller; thread and needles and pins – especially pins – and buttons for everybody’s clothes. One settler had ridden back at midnight to ask for the purchase of a pair of shoes for his wife. It was a precious commission that Virginia Aydelot bore that day, although to the shopper in a Kansas city today, the sum of money would have seemed pitifully small.

In the postoffice, printed rulings and directions regarding the supplies were posted on the wall, and Virginia read them carefully. Then with many misgivings and a prayer for success, she crossed the street to Darley Champers’ place of business.

In spite of her plain dress, Virginia Aydelot was every inch a lady, and Darley Champers, dull as he was in certain lines, felt the difference her presence made in the atmosphere of his office when she entered there.

“I understood, Mr. Champers, that you have charge here of the supplies sent into the state for the relief of those who suffered from the grasshoppers,” she said, when she was seated in the dingy little room.

“Yes, mom!” Champers replied.

“I am Mrs. Asher Aydelot, and I represent the Grass River settlement. I have come to ask for a share of this relief fund, and as I must start back as soon as possible after dinner, perhaps we can make all arrangements now.”

She never knew how near her gentle manner and pleasant voice came to winning the day at once. Champers’ first impulse was to grant her anything she asked for; his second was to refuse everything; his third, his ruling principle always, was to negotiate to his own advantage. He dropped his eyes and began to play for time.

“I don’t know as I can help you at all, madam,” he said, half sympathetically. “The supplies and money is about gone, except what’s promised, and, well – you ought to have come sooner. I’d a been glad to help you, but I thought you Grass River folks had about everything you needed for the winter.”

“Oh, Mr. Champers,” Virginia cried, “you know that nobody could foretell the coming of the plague. We were as well off as hundreds of other settlers this dry summer before the grasshoppers came.”

“Yes, yes, madam, but the supplies is gone, about.”

“And you cannot promise that any more will be coming soon?” The pathos of the woman’s voice was appealing.

“If you could only understand how poor and how brave those settlers are!”

“I thought your man had some little means to get you and him away, if he’d use it that way.”

The sorrow of failure here and the suffering that must follow it made Virginia sick at heart. A homesick longing suddenly possessed her; a wish to get away from the country and forget it altogether. And Champers was cunning enough to understand.

“You’d just like to get away from it, now, wouldn’t you?” he asked persuasively.

“I surely would, when I think of the suffering there will be,” Virginia replied. “Our staying won’t help matters any.”

“Not a bit! Not a bit,” Champers asserted. “It’s too bad you can’t go.”

Virginia looked up wonderingly.

“Madam, I haven’t no supplies. They’re all gone, I think. But if you’ll come in right after dinner, I’ll see if I can’t do something. I’m a humane man.”

“I’ll be here at one o’clock,” she replied.

It was the last hope, and anything was better than utter failure in her errand.

When she registered her name at the hotel for dinner, Virginia’s eye was caught by the two names on the page. Both belonged to strangers, but it was the sharp contrast of the writing that made her read them. One recorded in a cramped little hand the name of Thomas Smith, Wilmington, Delaware. The other in big, even, backward slanting letters spelled out the name of John Jacobs, Cincinnati, Ohio.