The Minute Man on the Frontier. William George Puddefoot
upon a little city of four thousand people, with good churches, fine schools, and one store that cost one hundred thousand dollars to build.
If it chanced to be summer-time he would see the tepees of the Indians along the bay, and two blocks back civilized homes with all the conveniences and luxuries of modern life. Here a huge canoe made of a single log, and there a mammoth steamer with all the elegances of an ocean-liner. Should he go on board of one of the steamers coasting around the lakes with supplies, he would pass great bays with lovely islands, and steam within a stone's throw of a comparatively rare bird, the great northern diver, and suddenly find himself near a wharf with a village in sight—a great saw-mill cutting its hundreds of thousands of feet of lumber a day; and near by, Indian graves with the food still fresh inside, and a tame deer with a collar and bell around its neck trotting around the streets.
He can sit and fish for trout on his doorstep that borders the little stream, or he can get on the company's locomotive and run twenty miles back into the woods and see the coveys of partridges rising in clouds, and here and there a timid doe and her fawn, whose curiosity is greater than their fears, until the whistle blows, and they are off like a shot into the deep forest, near where the black bear is munching raspberries in a ten-thousand-acre patch, while millions of bushels of whortleberries will waste for lack of pickers. He can sit on a point of an inland lake and catch minnows on one side, and pull up black bass on the other; and if a "tenderfoot" he will bring home as much as he can carry, expecting to be praised for his skill. He is mortified at the request to please bury them. He will ride over ground that less than fifteen years ago could be bought for a song and to-day produces millions, and is dotted with towns and huge furnaces glowing night and day.
If in the older settled parts, he will ride through cornfields whose tassels are up to the car windows, where the original settler paddled his skiff and caught pickerel and the ague at the same time, and who is still alive to tell the story. He can talk with a man who knew every white man by name when he first went there, and remembers the Indian peeping in through his log-cabin window, but whose grandchildren have graduated from a university with twenty-seven hundred students, where he helped build the log schoolhouse; who remembers when he had to send miles for salt, and yet was living over a bed of it big enough to salt the world down.
He had nothing but York State pumpkins and wild cranberries for his Thanksgiving dinner, with salt pork for turkey; and he lives to-day in one of the great fruit belts of the world, and ships his turkeys by the ton to the East; and to-day in the North the same experience is going on. Places where the mention of an apple makes the teeth water, and where you can still see them come wrapped in tissue paper like oranges, and yet, paradoxical as it may seem, you can enter a lumber-camp and find the men regaled on roast chicken and eating cucumbers before the seed is sown in that part of the country.
Here are farms worth over eighty thousand dollars, which but a few years ago were entered by the homesteader who had to live on potatoes and salt, and cut wild hay in summer, and draw it to town on a cedar jumper, in order to get flour for his hungry children. Here on an island are men living who used to leave their farming to see the one steamer unload and load, or watch a schooner drawn up over the Rapids, and who now see sweeping by their farms a procession of craft whose tonnage is greater than all the ocean ports of the country.
I have sat on the deck of a little steamer and drawn pictures for the Indians, who took them and marched off with the smile of a schoolboy getting a prize chromo, and in less than five years from that time I have at the same place sat down in a hotel lighted with electricity, and a menu equal to any in the country, with a bronze portrait of General Grant embossed on the top. Within ten years I have preached, with an Indian chief for an interpreter, in a log house in which a half-brother of Riel of North-Western fame was a hearer, where to-day there are self-supporting churches and flourishing schools.
Less than sixteen years ago I stopped at the end of the Michigan Central Railway, northern division; every lot was filled with stumps. A school was being rapidly built, while the church had a lot only. The next time I visited the town it had fine churches and schools. The hotel had a beautiful conservatory filled with choice flowers. I could take my train, pass on over the Straits of Mackinaw, on by rail again, and clear to the Pacific, with sleeper and dining-car attached.
But once leave your railway, and soon you can get to settlements twenty years old which saw the first buggy last year come into the clearings. Here are deep forests where the preacher on his way home from church meets the panther and the wild-cat, and where as yet he must ford the rivers and build his church, the first in nine thousand square miles.
III.
THE MINUTE-MAN ON THE FRONTIER.
The minute-men at the front are the nation's cheapest policemen; and strange as it may seem, these men stand in vital relations to all the great cities of the country from which they are so far removed. It is a well-known fact that every city owes its life and increase to the fresh infusion of country blood, and it depends largely on the purity of that blood as to what the moral condition of the city shall be. Therefore it is of the utmost importance that Zion's watchmen shall lift up their voices day and night, until not only the wilderness shall be glad because of them, but that the city's walls may be named Salvation and her gates Praise.
Let us make the rounds among our minute-men to see how they live and what they do. Our road leads along the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railway. All day long we have been flitting past new towns, and toward night we plunge into the dense forests with only here and there an opening. The fresh perfume of the balsam invades the cars, the clear trout-streams pass and repass under the track, a herd of deer scurry yonder, and once we see a huge black bear swaying between two giant hemlocks.
At eleven P.M. we leave the train. There is a drizzling rain through which we see a half-dozen twinkling lights. As the train turns a curve we lose sight of its red lights, and feel we have lost our best friend. A little boy, the sole human being in sight, is carrying a diminutive mail-bag. The sidewalk is only about thirty-six feet long. Then among the stumps we wind our slippery way, and at last reach the only frame house for miles. To the north and east we see a wilderness, with here and there a hardy settler's hut, sometimes a wagon with a cover and the stump of a stove-pipe sticking through the top.
After climbing the stairs, which are destitute of a balustrade, we enter our room. It is carpeted with a horse-blanket. Starting out with a lumber wagon next morning, with axes and whip-saw, we hew our way through the forest to another line of railway, and returning, are asked by the people in the settlement, "Will it ever be settled?" "Could a man raise apples?" "Snow too deep?" "Mice girdle all the trees, eh?" etc.
Five years later, on a sleeping-car, we open our eyes in the morning, and what a change! The little solitary stations that we passed before are surrounded with houses. White puffs of steam come snapping out from factories. A weekly paper, a New York and Boston store, and the five- and ten-cent counter store are among the developments. Our train sweeps onward, miles beyond our first stop; and instead of the lonely lodging-house, palatial hotels invite us, bands of music are playing, the bay is a scene of magic, here a little naphtha launch, and there a steam yacht, and then a mighty steamer that makes the dock cringe its whole length as she slowly ties up to it.
Night comes on, but the woods are as light as day with electric lights. Rustic houses of artistic design are on every hand. Here, where it was thought apples could not be raised because of mice and deep snow, is a great