The Boy Settlers: A Story of Early Times in Kansas

CHAPTER XI.
AN INDIAN TRAIL

The next day was Sunday, and, true to their New England training, the settlers refrained from labor on the day of rest. Mr. Bryant took his pocket Bible and wandered off into the wild waste of lands somewhere. The others lounged about the cabin, indoors and out, a trifle sore and stiff from the effects of work so much harder than that to which they had been accustomed, and glad of an opportunity to rest their limbs. The younger of the boy settlers complained that they had worn their legs out with punching holes in the sod while planting corn. The soles of their feet were sore with the pressure needed to jam the dibble through the tough turf. In the afternoon, they all wandered off through the sweet and silent wilderness of rolling prairie into the woods in which they proposed to lay off another claim for pre-emption. At a short distance above their present home, cutting sharply through the sod, and crossing the Republican Fork a mile or so above their own ford, was an old Indian trail, which the boys had before noticed but could not understand. As Charlie and Oscar, pressing on ahead of their elders, came upon the old trail, they loitered about until the rest of the party came up, and then they asked what could have cut that narrow track in the turf, so deep and so narrow.

“That’s an Injun trail,” said Younkins, who, with an uncomfortably new suit of Sunday clothes and a smooth-shaven face, had come over to visit his new neighbors. “Didn’t you ever see an Injun trail before?” he asked, noting the look of eager curiosity on the faces of the boys. They assured him that they never had, and he continued: “This yere trail has been here for years and years, long and long before any white folks came into the country. Up north and east of yer, on the head-waters of the Big Blue, the Cheyennes used to live,”–Younkins pronounced it Shyans,–“and as soon as the grass began to start in the spring, so as to give feed to their ponies and to the buffalo, they would come down this yere way for game. They crossed the Fork just above yere-like, and then they struck down to the head-waters of the Smoky Hill and so off to the westwards. Big game was plenty in those days, and now the Injuns off to the north of yere come down in just the same way–hunting for game.”

The boys got down on their knees and scanned the trail with new interest. It was not more than nine or ten inches across, and was so worn down that it made a narrow trench, as it were, in the deep sod, its lower surface being as smooth as a rolled wagon-track. Over this well-worn track, for ages past, the hurrying feet of wild tribes had passed so many times that even the wiry grass-roots had been killed down.

“Did war parties ever go out on this trail, do you suppose?” asked Sandy, sitting up in the grass.

“Sakes alive, yes!” replied Younkins. “Why, the Cheyennes and the Comanches used to roam over all these plains, in the old times, and they were mostly at war.”

“Where are the Cheyennes and the Comanches now, Mr. Younkins?” asked Uncle Aleck.

“I reckon the Comanches are off to the south-like somewhere. It appears to me that I heard they were down off the Texas border, somewheres; the Cheyennes are to the westwards, somewhere near Fort Laramie.”

“And what Indians are there who use this trail now?” inquired Oscar, whose eyes were sparkling with excitement as he studied the well-worn path of the Indian tribes.

Younkins explained that the Pottawottomies and the Pawnees, now located to the north, were the only ones who used the trail. “Blanket Indians,” he said they were, peaceable creatures enough, but not good neighbors; he did not want any Indians of any sort near him. When one of the boys asked what blanket Indians were, Younkins explained,–

“There’s three kinds of Injuns, none on ’em good,–town Injuns, blanket Injuns, and wild Injuns. You saw some of the town Injuns when you came up through the Delaware reserve–great lazy fellows, lyin’ round the house all day and lettin’ the squaws do all the work. Then there’s the blankets; they live out in the woods and on the prairie, in teepees, or lodges, of skins and canvas-like, moving round from place to place, hunting over the plains in summer, and living off’n the Gov’ment in winter. They are mostly at peace with the whites, but they will steal whenever they get a chance. The other kind, and the worst, is the wild ones. They have nothing to do with the Government, and they make war on the whites whenever they feel like it. Just now, I don’t know of any wild Injuns that are at war with Uncle Sam; but the Arapahoes, Comanches, and Cheyennes are all likely to break loose any time. I give ’m all a plenty of elbow room.”

As the boys reluctantly ceased contemplating the fascinating Indian trail, and moved on behind the rest of the party, Charlie said: “I suppose we must make allowance for Younkins’s prejudices. He is like most of the border men, who believe that all the good Indians are dead. If the Cheyennes and the Comanches could only tell their story in the books and newspapers, we might hear the other side.”

The idea of a wild Indian’s writing a book or a letter to the newspapers tickled Sandy so much that he laughed loud and long.

Some two miles above the point where the settlers’ ford crossed the Republican Fork, the stream swept around a bluffy promontory, and on a curve just above this was the tract of timber land which they now proposed to enter upon for their second claim. The trees were oak, hickory, and beech, with a slight undergrowth of young cottonwoods and hazel. The land lay prettily, the stream at this point flowing in a southerly direction, with the timber claim on its northwesterly bank. The sunny exposure of the grove, the open glades that diversified its dense growth, and the babbling brook that wound its way through it to the river, all combined to make it very desirable for a timber claim. At a short distance from the river the land rose gradually to a high ridge, and on the top of this grew a thick wood of spruce and fir.

“That’s what you want for your next cabin,” said Younkins, pointing his finger in the direction of the pines. “Best kind of stuff for building there is in these parts.” Then he explained to the boys the process of cutting down the trees, splitting them up into shakes, or into lengths suitable for cabin-building, and he gave them an entertaining account of all the ways and means of finishing up a log-cabin,–a process, by the way, which they found then more entertaining in description than they afterward found it in the reality.

That night when Sandy lay down to refreshing sleep it was to dream of picturesque Indian fights, witnessed at a safe distance from afar. Accordingly, he was not very much surprised next morning, while he was helping Charlie to get ready the breakfast, when Oscar ran in breathless, with the one word, “Indians!”

“Come out on the hill back of the cabin,” panted Oscar. “There’s a lot of ’em coming out on the trail we saw yesterday, all in Indian file. Hurry up!” and away he darted, Sandy hastening with him to see the wonderful sight.

Sure enough, there they were, twenty-five or thirty Indians,–blanket Indians, as Younkins would have said,–strung along in the narrow trail, all in Indian file. It amazed the lads to see how the little Indian ponies managed to keep their feet in the narrow path. But they seemed to trot leisurely along with one foot before the other, just as the Indians did. Behind the mounted men were men and boys on foot, nearly as many as had passed on horseback. These kept up with the others, silently but swiftly maintaining the same pace that the mounted fellows did. It was a picturesque and novel sight to the young settlers. The Indians were dressed in the true frontier style, with hunting-shirt and leggings of dressed deerskin, a blanket slung loosely over the shoulder, all bareheaded, and with coarse black hair flowing in the morning breeze, except for the loose knot in which it was twisted behind. Some of them carried their guns slung on their backs; and others of them had the weapons in their hands, ready for firing on the instant.

“There they go, over the divide,” said Oscar, as the little cavalcade reached the last roll of the prairie, and began to disappear on the other side. Not one of the party deigned even to look in the direction of the wondering boys; and if they saw them, as they probably did, they made no sign.

“There they go, hunting buffalo, I suppose,” said Sandy, with a sigh, as the last Indian of the file disappeared down the horizon. “Dear me! don’t I wish I was going out after buffalo, instead of having to dibble corn into the sod all day! Waugh! Don’t I hate it!” And the boy turned disconsolately back to the cabin. But he rallied with his natural good-humor when he had his tale to tell at the breakfast-table. He eagerly told how they had seen the Indians passing over the old trail, and had gazed on the redskins as they went “on the warpath.”

“Warpath, indeed!” laughed Charlie. “Pot-hunters, that’s what they are. All the warfare they are up to is waged on the poor innocent buffalo that Younkins says they are killing off and making scarcer every year.”

“If nobody but Indians killed buffalo,” said Mr. Bryant, “there would be no danger of their ever being all killed off. But, in course of time, I suppose this country will all be settled up, and then there will be railroads, and after that the buffalo will have to go. Just now, any white man that can’t saddle his horse and go out and kill a buffalo before breakfast thinks they are getting scarce. But I have heard some of the soldiers say that away up north of here, a little later in the season, the settlers cannot keep their crops, the buffalo roam all over everything so.”

“For my part,” put in Charlie, “I am not in the least afraid that the buffalo will be so plenty around these parts that they will hurt our crops; and I’d just like to see a herd come within shooting distance.” And here he raised his arms, and took aim along an imaginary rifle.

Later in the forenoon, when the two younger boys had reached the end of the two rows in which they had been planting, Sandy straightened himself up with an effort, and said, “This is leg-weary work, isn’t it, Oscar? I hate work, anyhow,” he added, discontentedly, leaning on the top of his dibble, and looking off over the wide and green prairie that stretched toward the setting sun. “I wish I was an Indian.”

Oscar burst into a laugh, and said, “Wish you were an Indian!–so you could go hunting when you like, and not have any work to do? Why, Sandy, I didn’t think that of you.”

Sandy colored faintly, and said, “Well, I do hate work, honestly; and it is only because I know that I ought, and that father expects me to do my share, that I do it, and never grumble about it. Say, I never do grumble, do I, Oscar?” he asked earnestly.

“Only once in a while, when you can’t help it, Sandy. I don’t like work any better than you do; but it’s no use talking about it, we’ve got to do it.”

“I always feel so in the spring,” said Sandy, very gravely and with a little sigh, as he went pegging away down another furrow.

Forty acres of land was all that the settlers intended to plant with corn, for the first year. Forty acres does not seem a very large tract of land to speak of, but when one sees the area marked out with a black furrow, and realizes that every foot of it must be covered with the corn-planter, it looks formidable. The boys thought it was a very big piece of land when they regarded it in that way. But the days soon flew by; and even while the young workers were stumping over the field, they consoled themselves with visions of gigantic ripe watermelons and mammoth pumpkins and squashes that would regale their eyes before long. For, following the example of most Kansas farmers, they had stuck into many of the furrows with the corn the seeds of these easily grown vines.

“Keep the melons a good way from the pumpkins, and the squashes a good way from both, if you don’t want a bad mixture,” said Uncle Aleck to the boy settlers. Then he explained that if the pollen of the squash-blossoms should happen to fall on the melon-blossoms, the fruit would be neither good melon nor yet good squash, but a poor mixture of both. This piece of practical farming was not lost on Charlie; and when he undertook the planting of the garden spot which they found near the cabin, he took pains to separate the cucumber-beds as far as possible from the hills in which he planted his cantaloupe seeds. The boys were learning while they worked, even if they did grumble occasionally over their tasks.

CHAPTER XII.
HOUSE-BUILDING

There was a change in the programme of daily labor, when the corn was in the ground. At odd times the settlers had gone over to the wood-lot and had laid out their plans for the future home on that claim. There was more variety to be expected in house-building than in planting, and the boys had looked forward with impatience to the beginning of that part of their enterprise. Logs for the house were cut from the pines and firs of the hill beyond the river bluff. From these, too, were to be riven, or split, the “shakes” for the roof-covering and for the odd jobs of work to be done about the premises.

Now, for the first time, the boys learned the use of some of the strange tools that they had brought with them. They had wondered over the frow, an iron instrument about fourteen inches long, for splitting logs. At right angles with the blade, and fixed in an eye at one end, was a handle of hard-wood. A section of wood was stood up endwise on a firm foundation of some sort, and the thin end of the frow was hammered down into the grain of the wood, making a lengthwise split.

In the same way, the section of wood so riven was split again and again until each split was thin enough. The final result was called a “shake.” Shakes were used for shingles, and even–when nailed on frames–for doors. Sawed lumber was very dear; and, except the sashes in the windows, every bit of the log-cabin must be got out of the primitive forest.

The boys were proud of the ample supply which their elders had brought with them; for even the knowing Younkins, scrutinizing the tools for woodcraft with a critical eye, remarked, “That’s a good outfit, for a party of green settlers.” Six stout wedges of chilled iron, and a heavy maul to hammer them with, were to be used for the splitting up of the big trees into smaller sections. Wooden wedges met the wants of many people in those primitive parts, at times, and the man who had a good set of iron wedges and a powerful maul was regarded with envy.

“What are these clumsy rings for?” Oscar had asked when he saw the maul-rings taken out of the wagon on their arrival and unloading.

His uncle smiled, and said, “You will find out what these are for, my lad, when you undertake to swing the maul. Did you never hear of splitting rails? Well, these are to split rails and such things from the log. We chop off a length of a tree, about eight inches thick, taking the toughest and densest wood we can find. Trim off the bark from a bit of the trunk, which must be twelve or fourteen inches long; drive your rings on each end of the block to keep it from splitting; fit a handle to one end, or into one side of the block; and there you have your maul.”

“Why, that’s only a beetle, after all,” cried Sandy, who, sitting on a stump near by, had been a deeply interested listener to his father’s description of the maul.

“Certainly, my son; a maul is what people in the Eastern States would call a beetle; but you ask Younkins, some day, if he has a beetle over at his place. He, I am sure, would never use the name beetle.”

Log-cabin building was great fun to the boys, although they did not find it easy work. There was a certain novelty about the raising of the structure that was to be a home, and an interest in learning the use of rude tools that lasted until the cabin was finished. The maul and the wedges, the frow and the little maul intended for it, and all the other means and appliances of the building, were all new and strange to these bright lads.

First, the size of the cabin, twelve feet wide and twenty feet long, was marked out on the site on which it was to rise, and four logs were laid to define the foundation. These were the sills of the new house. At each end of every log two notches were cut, one on the under side and one on the upper, to fit into similar notches cut in the log below, and in that which was to be placed on top. So each corner was formed by these interlacing and overlapping ends. The logs were piled up, one above another, just as children build “cob-houses,” from odds and ends of playthings. Cabin-builders do not say that a cabin is a certain number of feet high; they usually say that it is ten logs high, or twelve logs high, as the case may be. When the structure is as high as the eaves are intended to be, the top logs are bound together, from side to side, with smaller logs fitted upon the upper logs of each side and laid across as if they were to be the supports of a floor for another story. Then the gable-ends are built up of logs, shorter and shorter as the peak of the gable is approached, and kept in place by other small logs laid across, endwise of the cabin, and locked into the end of each log in the gable until all are in place. On these transverse logs, or rafters, the roof is laid. Holes are cut or sawed through the logs for the door and windows, and the house begins to look habitable.

The settlers on the Republican Fork cut the holes for doors and windows before they put on the roof, and when the layer of split shakes that made the roof was in place, and the boys bounded inside to see how things looked, they were greatly amused to notice how light it was. The spaces between the logs were almost wide enough to crawl through, Oscar said. But they had studied log-cabin building enough to know that these wide cracks were to be “chinked” with thin strips of wood, the refuse of shakes, driven in tightly, and then daubed over with clay, a fine bed of which was fortunately near at hand. The provident Younkins had laid away in his own cabin the sashes and glass for two small windows; and these he had agreed to sell to the newcomers. Partly hewn logs for floor-joists were placed upon the ground inside the cabin, previously levelled off for the purpose. On these were laid thick slabs of oak and hickory, riven out of logs drawn from the grove near by. These slabs of hard-wood were “puncheons,” and fortunate as was the man who could have a floor of sawed lumber to his cabin, he who was obliged to use puncheons was better off than those with whom timber was so scarce that the natural surface on the ground was their only floor.

“My! how it rattles!” was Sandy’s remark when he had first taken a few steps on the new puncheon floor of their cabin. “It sounds like a tread-mill going its rounds. Can’t you nail these down, daddy?”

His father explained that the unseasoned lumber of the puncheons would so shrink in the drying that no fastening could hold them. They must lie loosely on the floor-joists until they were thoroughly seasoned; then they might be fastened down with wooden pins driven through holes bored for that purpose; nails and spikes cost too much to be wasted on a puncheon floor. In fact, very little hardware was wasted on any part of that cabin. Even the door was made by fastening with wooden pegs a number of short pieces of shakes to a frame fitted to the doorway cut in the side of the cabin. The hinges were strong bits of leather, the soles of the boots whose legs had been used for corn-droppers. The clumsy wooden latch was hung inside to a wooden pin driven into one of the crosspieces of the door, and it played in a loop of deerskin at the other end. A string of deerskin fastened to the end of the latch-bar nearest the jamb of the doorway was passed outside through a hole cut in the door, serving to lift the latch from without when a visitor would enter.

“Our latch-string hangs out!” exclaimed Charlie, triumphantly, when this piece of work was done. “I must say I never knew before what it meant to have the ‘latch-string hanging out’ for all comers. See, Oscar, when we shut up the house for the night, all we have to do is to pull in the latch-string, and the door is barred.”

“Likewise, when you have dropped your jackknife through a crack in the floor into the cellar beneath, all you have to do is to turn over a puncheon or two and get down and find it,” said Sandy, coolly, as he took up two slabs and hunted for his knife. The boys soon found that although their home was rude and not very elegant as to its furniture, it had many conveniences that more elaborate and handsomer houses did not have. There were no floors to wash, hardly to sweep. As their surroundings were simple, their wants were few. It was a free and easy life that they were gradually drifting into, here in the wilderness.

Charlie declared that the cabin ought to have a name. As yet, the land on which they had settled had no name except that of the river by which it lay. The boys thought it would give some sort of distinction to their home if they gave it a title. “Liberty Hall,” they thought would be a good name to put on the roof of their log-cabin. Something out of Cooper’s novels, Oscar proposed, would be the best for the locality.

“‘Hog-and-hominy,’ how would that suit?” asked Sandy, with a laugh. “Unless we get some buffalo or antelope meat pretty soon, it will be hog and hominy to the end of the chapter.”

“Why not call it the John G. Whittier cabin?” said Uncle Aleck, looking up from his work of shaping an ox-yoke.

“The very thing, daddy!” shouted Sandy, clapping his hands. “Only don’t you think that’s a very long name to say in a hurry? Whittier would be shorter, you know. But, then,” he added, doubtfully, “it isn’t everybody that would know which Whittier was meant by that, would they?”

“Sandy seems to think that the entire population of Kansas will be coming here, some day, to read that name, if we ever have it. We have been here two months now, and no living soul but ourselves and Younkins has ever been in these diggings; not one. Oh, I say, let’s put up just nothing but ‘Whittier’ over the door there. We’ll know what that means, and if anybody comes in the course of time, I’ll warrant he’ll soon find out which Whittier it means.” This was Oscar’s view of the case.

“Good for you, Oscar!” said his uncle. “Whittier let it be.”

Before sundown, that day, a straight-grained shake of pine, free from knot or blemish, had been well smoothed down with the draw-shave, and on its fair surface, writ large, was the beloved name of the New England poet, thus: WHITTIER.

This was fastened securely over the entrance of the new log-cabin, and the Boy Settlers, satisfied with their work, stood off at a little distance and gave it three cheers. The new home was named.