The Boy Settlers: A Story of Early Times in Kansas. Noah Brooks
last stage of our journey, suppose we stop for dinner at Indian John’s, Aleck? It will be a change from camp-fare, and they say that John keeps a good table.”
To the delight of the lads, it was agreed that they should make the halt as suggested, and noon found them at a very large and comfortable “double cabin,” as these peculiar structures are called. Two log-cabins are built, end to end, with one roof covering the two. The passage between them is floored over, and affords an open shelter from rain and sun, and in hot weather is the pleasantest place about the establishment. Indian John’s cabin was built of hewn logs, nicely chinked in with slivers, and daubed with clay to keep out the wintry blasts. As is the manner of the country, one of the cabins was used for the rooms of the family, while the dining-room and kitchen were in the other end of the structure. Indian John regularly furnished dinner to the stage passengers going westward from Quindaro; for a public conveyance, a “mud-wagon,” as it was called, had been put on this part of the road.
“What a tuck-out I had!” said Sandy, after a very bountiful and well-cooked dinner had been disposed of by the party. “And who would have supposed we should ever sit down to an Indian’s table and eat fried chicken, ham and eggs, and corn-dodger, from a regular set of blue-and-white plates, and drink good coffee from crockery cups? It just beats Father Dixon’s Indian stories all to pieces.”
Oscar and Charlie, however, were disposed to think very lightly of this sort of Indian civilization. Oscar said: “If these red men were either one thing or the other, I wouldn’t mind it. But they have shed the gaudy trappings of the wild Indian, and their new clothes do not fit very well. As Grandfather Bryant used to say, they are neither fish nor flesh, nor good red herring. They are a mighty uninteresting lot.”
“Well, they are on the way to a better state of things than they have known, anyhow,” said Charlie. “The next generation will see them higher up, I guess. But I must say that these farms don’t look very thrifty, somehow. Indians are a lazy lot; they don’t like work. Did you notice how all those big fellows at dinner sat down with us and the stage passengers, and the poor women had to wait on everybody? That’s Indian.”
Uncle Charlie laughed, and said that the boys had expected to find civilized Indians waiting on the table, decked out with paint and feathers, and wearing deerskin leggings and such like.
“Wait until we get out on the frontier,” said he, “and then you will see wild Indians, perhaps, or ‘blanket Indians,’ anyhow.”
“Blanket Indians?” said Sandy, with an interrogation point in his face.
“Yes; that’s what the roving and unsettled bands are called by white folks. Those that are on reservations and earning their own living, or a part of it,–for the Government helps them out considerably,–are called town Indians; those that live in wigwams, or tepees, and rove from place to place, subsisting on what they can catch, are blanket Indians. They tell me that there are wild Indians out on the western frontier. But they are not hostile; at least, they were not, at last accounts. The Cheyennes have been rather uneasy, they say, since the white settlers began to pour into the country. Just now I am more concerned about the white Missourians than I am about the red aborigines.”
They were still on the Delaware reservation when they camped that evening, and the boys went into the woods to gather fuel for their fire.
They had not gone far, when Sandy gave a wild whoop of alarm, jumping about six feet backward as he yelled, “A rattlesnake!” Sure enough, an immense snake was sliding out from under a mass of brush that the boy had disturbed as he gathered an armful of dry branches and twigs. Dropping his burden, Sandy shouted, “Kill him! Kill him, quick!”
The reptile was about five feet long, very thick, and of a dark mottled color. Instantly, each lad had armed himself with a big stick and had attacked him. The snake, stopped in his attempt to get away, turned, and opening his ugly-looking mouth, made a curious blowing noise, half a hiss and half a cough, as Charlie afterward described it.
“Take care, Sandy! He’ll spring at you, and bite you in the face! See! He’s getting ready to spring!”
And, indeed, the creature, frightened, and surrounded by the agile, jumping boys, each armed with a club, seemed ready to defend his life with the best weapons at his command. The boys, excited and alarmed, were afraid to come near the snake, and were dancing about, waiting for a chance to strike, when they were startled by a shot from behind them, and the snake, making one more effort to turn on himself, shuddered and fell dead.
Mr. Howell, hearing the shouting of the boys, had run out of the camp, and with a well-directed rifle shot had laid low the reptile.
“It’s only a blow-snake,” he said, taking the creature by the tail and holding it up to view. “He’s harmless. Well! Of course a dead snake is harmless, but when he was alive he was not the sort of critter to be afraid of. I thought you had encountered a bear, at the very least, by the racket you made.”
“He’s a big fellow, anyhow,” said Oscar, giving the snake a kick, “and Sandy said he was a rattlesnake. I saw a rattler once when we lived in Dixon. Billy Everett and I found him down on the bluff below the railroad; and he was spotted all over. Besides, this fellow hasn’t any rattles.”
“The boys have been having a lesson in natural history, Charlie,” said Mr. Howell to his brother-in-law, as they returned with him to camp, loaded with firewood; Sandy, boy-like, dragging the dead blow-snake after him.
CHAPTER V.
TIDINGS FROM THE FRONT
Supper was over, a camp-fire built (for the emigrants did their cooking by a small camp-stove, and sat by the light of a fire on the ground), when out of the darkness came sounds of advancing teams. Oscar was playing his violin, trying to pick out a tune for the better singing of Whittier’s song of the Kansas Emigrants. His father raised his hand to command silence. “That’s a Yankee teamster, I’ll be bound,” he said, as the “Woh-hysh! Woh-haw!” of the coming party fell on his ear. “No Missourian ever talks to his cattle like that.”
As he spoke, a long, low emigrant wagon, or “prairie schooner,” drawn by three yoke of dun-colored oxen, toiled up the road. In the wagon was a faded-looking woman with two small children clinging to her. Odds and ends of household furniture showed themselves over her head from within the wagon, and strapped on behind was a coop of fowls, from which came a melancholy cackle, as if the hens and chickens were weary of their long journey. A man dressed in butternut-colored homespun drove the oxen, and a boy about ten years old trudged behind the driver. In the darkness behind these tramped a small herd of cows and oxen driven by two other men, and a lad about the age of Oscar Bryant. The new arrivals paused in the road, surveyed our friends from Illinois, stopped the herd of cattle, and then the man who was driving the wagon said, with an unmistakable New England twang, “Friends?”
“Friends, most assuredly,” said Mr. Bryant, with a smile. “I guess you have been having hard luck, you appear to be so suspicious.”
“Well, we have, and that’s a fact. But we’re main glad to be able to camp among friends. Jotham, unyoke the cattle after you have driven them into the timber a piece.” He assisted the woman and children to get down from the wagon, and one of the cattle-drivers coming up, drove the team into the woods a short distance, and the tired oxen were soon lying down among the underbrush.
“Well, yes, we have had a pretty hard time getting here. We are the last free-State men allowed over the ferry at Parkville. Where be you from?”
“We are from Lee County, Illinois,” replied Mr. Bryant. “We came in by the way of Parkville, too, a day or two ago; but we stopped at Quindaro. Did you come direct from Parkville?”
“Yes,” replied the man. “We came up the river in the first place, on the steamboat ‘Black Eagle,’ and when we got to Leavenworth, a big crowd of Borderers, seeing us and another lot of free-State men on the boat, refused to let us land. We had to go down the river again. The captain of the boat kicked up a great fuss about it, and wanted to put us ashore on the other side of the river; but the Missouri men wouldn’t have it. They put a ‘committee,’ as they called the two men, on board the