Chapter 28

I never could learn to play cards. Destiny forbade it, and always stepped in promptly to stop all such proceedings. One night Sandford and friends sat down to teach me poker, when _bang_, _bang_, went a revolver outside, and a bullet buried itself in the door close by me. A riotous, evil-minded darkey, who attended to my washing, had got into a fight, and was forthwith conveyed to the Bull-pen, or military prison. I was afraid lest I might lose my shirts, and so "visited him" next day and found him in irons, but reading a newspaper at his ease. From him I learned the address of "the coloured lady" who had my underclothing.

The Bull-pen was a picturesque place--a large log enclosure, full of strange inmates, such as wild guerillas in moccasins, grey-back Confederates and blue-coat Federals guilty of many a murder, arson, and much horse-stealing, desolate deserters, often deserving pity--the _debris_ of a four years' war, the crumbs of the great loaf fallen to the dirt.

Warm weather came on, and I sent to Philadelphia for a summer suit of clothes. It came, and it was of a _light grey colour_. At that time Oxford "dittos," or a suit _pareil partout_, were unknown in West Virginia. I was dressed from head to foot in Confederate grey. Such a daring defiance of public opinion, coupled with my mysterious stealing into the rebel country, made me an object of awe and suspicion--a kind of Sir Grey Steal!

There was at that time in Charleston a German artillery regiment which really held the town--that is to say, the height which commanded it. I had become acquainted with its officers. All at once they gave me the cold shoulder and cut me. My friend Sandford was very intimate with them. One evening he asked their Colonel why they scorned me. The Colonel replied--

"Pecause he's a tamned repel. Aferypody knows it."

Sandford at once explained that I was even known at Washington as a good Union man, and had, moreover, translated Heine, adding other details.

"Gott verdammich--_heiss_!" cried the Colonel in amazement. "Is dot der Karl Leland vot dranslate de _Reisebilder_? Herr je! I hafe got dat very pook here on mein table! Look at it. Bei Gott! here's his name! _Dot_ is der crate Leland vot edit de _Continental Magazine_! Dot moost pe a fery deep man. Und I dink _he_ vas a repel!"

The next morning early the Colonel sent his ambulance or army waggon to my hotel with a request that I would come and take breakfast with him. It was a bit of Heidelberg life over again. We punished Rheinwein and lager- beer in quantities. There were old German students among the officers, and I was received like a brother.

At last Sandford and I determined to return to the East. There was in the hotel a coloured waiter named Harrison. He had been a slave, but "a gentleman's gentleman," was rather dignified, and allowed no ordinary white man to joke with him. On the evening before my departure I said to him--

"Well, Harrison, I hope that you haven't quite so bad an opinion of me as the other people here seem to have."

He manifested at once a really violent emotion. Dashing something to the ground, he cried--

"Mr. Leland, you _never_ did anything contrary to a gentleman. I always maintained it. Now please tell me the truth. Is it true that you're a great friend of Jeff Davis?"

"Damn Jeff Davis!" I replied.

"And you ain't a major in the Confederate service?"

"I'm a clear-down Abolitionist, and was born one."

"And you ain't had no goings on with the rebels up the river to bring back the Confederacy here?"

"Devil a dealing."

And therewith I explained how it was that I went unharmed up into the rebels' country, and great was the joy of Harrison, who, as I found, had taken my part valiantly against those who suspected me.

There was a droll comedy the next day on board the steamboat on which I departed. A certain Mr. H., who had been a rebel and recanted at the eleventh hour and become a Federal official, requested everybody on board not to notice me. Sandford learned it all, and chuckled over it. But the captain and mate and crew were all still rebels at heart. Great was my amazement at being privately informed by the steward that the captain requested as a favour that I would sit by him at dinner and share a bottle of wine. I did so, and while I remained on board was treated as an honoured guest.

And now I would here distinctly declare that, apart from my political principles, from which I never swerved, I always found the rebels--that is, Southern and Western men with whom I had had intimate dealings--without one exception _personally_ the most congenial and agreeable people whom I had ever met. There was not to be found among them what in England is known as a prig. They were natural and gentlemanly, even down to the poorest and most uneducated.

One day Sam Fox came to me and asked me to use my influence with the Cannelton Company to get him employment at their works.

"Sam," I replied, "I can't do it. It is only three weeks now, when you were employed at another place, that you tried to stuff the overseer into the furnace, and if the men had not prevented, you would have burned him up alive."

"Yes," replied Sam, "but he had called me a -- son --- of ---."

"Very good," I answered; "and if he had called me _that_, I should have done the same. But I don't think, if I _had_ done it, I should ever have expected to be employed again on another furnace. You see, Samuel, my son, that these Northern men have very queer notions--_very_."

Sam was quite convinced.

At Cincinnati a trifling but droll incident occurred. I do not set myself up for a judge of wines, but I have naturally a delicate sense of smell or _flair_, though not the extraordinary degree in which my brother possessed it, who never drank wine at all. He was the first person who ever, in printed articles or in lectures, insisted that South New Jersey was suitable for wine-growing. At the hotel Sandford asked me if I could tell any wine by the taste. I replied No, but I would try; so they gave me a glass of some kind, and I said that honestly I could only declare that I should say it was Portugal common country wine, but I must be wrong. Then Sandford showed the bottle, and the label declared it to be grown in Ohio. The next day he came to me and said, "I believe that after all you know a great deal about wine. I told the landlord what you said, and he laughed, arid said, 'I had not the American wine which you called for, and so I gave you a cheap but unusual Portuguese wine.'" This wine is neither white nor red, and tastes like sherry and Burgundy mixed.

At Cincinnati, Sandford proposed that we should return by way of Detroit and Niagara. I objected to the expense, but he, who knew every route and rate by heart, explained to me that, owing to the competition in railway rates, it would only cost me six shillings ($1.50) more, _plus_ $2.50 (ten shillings) from New York to Philadelphia. So we departed. In Detroit I called on my cousin, Benjamin Stimson (the S. of "Two Years before the Mast"), and found him a prominent citizen. So, skirting along southern Canada, we got to Niagara, and thence to Albany and down the Hudson to New York, and so on to Philadelphia.

It seems to me now that at this time all trace of my former life and self had vanished. I seemed to be only prompt to the saddle, canoe-paddle, revolver, steamboat, and railroad. My wife said that after this and other periods of Western travel I was always for three weeks as wild as an Indian, and so I most truly and unaffectedly was. I did not _act_ in a foolish or disorderly manner at all, but Tennessee and Elk River were in me. Robert Hunt and Sam Fox and many more had expressed their amazement at the amount of extremely familiar and congenial nature which they had found in me, and they were quite right. Sam and Goshorn declared that I was the only Northern man whom they had ever known who ever learned to paddle a dug-out _correctly_; but as I was obliged to do this sometimes for fifteen hours a day _nolens volens_, it is not remarkable that I became an expert.

As regards the real unaffected feeling of wildness born to savage nature, life, and association, it is absolutely as different from all civilised feeling whatever as bird from fish; and it very rarely happens that an educated man ever knows what it is. What there is of it in me which Indians recognise is, I believe, entirely due to hereditary endowment.

"Zum Wald, zum Wald, steht mir mein Sinn. So einzig, ach! so einzig hin. Dort lebt man freundlich, lebt man froh, Und nirgends, nirgends lebt man so."

It does not come from reading or culture--it comes of itself by nature, or not at all; nor has it over-much to do with thought. Only in something like superstition can it find expression, but that must be childlike and sweet and sincere, and without the giggling with which such subjects are invariably received by ladies in society.

I went with my wife and her mother and sister to pass some time at Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania, which we did very pleasantly at a country inn. It is a very interesting town, where a peculiar German dialect is generally spoken. There was a very respectable wealthy middle-aged lady, a Pennsylvanian by birth, who avoided meeting us at table because she could not speak English. And when I was introduced to her, I made matters worse by speaking to her naturally in broad South German, whereupon she informed me that she spoke _Hoch_-Deutsch! But I made myself popular among the natives with my German, and our landlord was immensely proud of me. I wasn't "one of dem city fellers dat shames demselfs of de Dutch," not I. "Vy, I dells you vot, mein Gott! he's _proud_ of it!"

I ended the summer at beautiful Lenox, in Massachusetts, in the charming country immortalised in "Elsie Venner"; of which work, and my letter on it to Dr. Holmes, and my conversation with him thereanent, I might fill a chapter. But "let us not talk about them but pass on." I returned to Philadelphia and to my father's house, where I remained one year.

I had for a long time, at intervals, been at work on a book to be entitled the "Origin of American Popular Phrases." I had scissored from newspapers, collected from negro minstrels and Western rustics, and innumerable New England friends, as well as books and old songs and comic almanacs and the like, a vast amount of valuable material. This work, which had cost me altogether a full year's labour, had been accepted by a New York publisher, and was in the printer's hands. I never awaited anything with such painful anxiety as I did this publication, for I had never been in such straits nor needed money so much, and it seemed as if the more earnestly I sought for employment the more it evaded me. And then almost as soon as my manuscript was in the printer's hands his office was burned, and the work perished, for I had not kept a copy.

It was a great loss, but from the instant when I heard of it to this day I never had five minutes' trouble over it, and more probably not one. I had done my _very best_ to make a good book and some money, and could do no more. When I was a very small boy I was deeply impressed with the story in the "Arabian Nights" of the prisoner who knew that he was going to be set free because a rat had run away with his dinner. So I, at the age of seven, announced to my father that I believed that whenever a man had bad luck, good was sure to follow, which opinion he did not accept. And to this day I hold it, because, reckoning up the chances of life, it is true for most people. At any rate, I derived some comfort from the fact that the accident was reported in all the newspapers all over the Union.

About the 1st of July, 1866, we left my father's house to go to Cape May, where we remained for two months. In September we went to a very good boarding-house in Philadelphia, kept by Mrs. Sandgren. She possessed and showed me Tegner's original manuscript of "Anna and Axel." I confess that I never cared over-much for Tegner, and that I infinitely prefer the original Icelandic Saga of Frithiof to his sago-gruel imitation of strong soup.

VI. LIFE ON THE PRESS. 1866-1869.

I become managing editor of John W. Forney's _Press_--Warwick the King- maker--The dead duck--A trip to Kansas in the old buffalo days--Miss Susan Blow, of St. Louis--The Iron Mountain of Missouri--A strange dream--Rattlesnakes--Kaw Indians--I am adopted into the tribe--Grand war- dance and ceremonies--Open-air lodgings--Prairie fires--In a dangerous country--Indian victims--H. M. Stanley--Lieutenant Hesselberger--I shoot a buffalo--Wild riding--In a herd--Indian white men--Ringing for the carriage with a rifle--Brigham the driver--General and Mrs. Custer--Three thousand miles in a railway car--How "Hans Breitmann's" ballads came to be published--The publisher thinks that he cannot sell more than a thousand of the book--I establish a weekly newspaper--Great success--Election rioting--Oratory and revolvers--How the meek and lowly Republicans revolvered the Democrats--The dead duck and what befell him who bore it--I make two thousand German votes by giving Forney a lesson in their language--_Freiheit und Gleichheit_--The Winnebago Indian chief--Horace Greeley--Maretzek the Bohemian--Fanny Janauschek and the Czech language--A narrow escape from death on the Switchback--Death of my father--Another Western railway excursion--A quaint old darkey--Chicago--I threaten to raise the rent--General influence of Chicago--St. Paul, Minnesota--A seven days' journey through the wilderness--The Canadian--Smudges--Indians--A foot journey through the woods--Indian pack- bearers--Mayor Stewart--I rifle a grave of silver ornaments--Isle Royale--My brother, Henry Perry Leland--The press--John Forney carries Grant's election, and declares that I really did the work--The weekly press and George Francis Train--Grant's appointments--My sixth introduction to the General--Garibaldi's dagger.

We had not lived at Mrs. Sandgren's more than a week when George Boker, knowing my need, spoke to Colonel John Forney, who was at that time not only Secretary of the Senate of the United States, but the proprietor of the _Chronicle_ newspaper in Washington, of the _Press_ in Philadelphia, "both daily," as the Colonel once said, which very simple and commonplace expression became a popular by-word. Colonel Forney wanted a managing editor for the _Press_, and, as I found in due time, not so much a man of enterprise and a leader--that _he_ supplied--nor yet one to practically run the journal--that his son John, a young man of eighteen, supplied--so much as a steady, trustworthy, honest _pivot_ on which the compass could turn during his absences--and that _I_ supplied. I must, to explain the situation, add gently that John, who could not help it considering his experiences, was, to put it mildly, a little irregular, rendering a steady manager absolutely necessary. It was a great pity, for John the junior was extremely clever as a practical managing editor, remembering everything, and knowing--what I never did or could--all the little tricks, games, and wiles of all the reporters and others employed.

Colonel Forney was such a remarkable character, and had such a great influence for many years in American politics, that as I had a great deal to do with him--very much more than was generally known--at a time when he struck his greatest political _coup_, in which, as he said, I greatly aided him, I will here dwell on him a space. Before I knew him I called him Warwick the King-maker, for it was generally admitted that it was to his intense hatred of Buchanan, added to his speech-making, editing, and tremendously vigorous and not always over-scrupulous intriguing, that "Ten-cent Jimmy" owed his defeat. At this time, in all presidential elections, Pennsylvania turned the scale, and John Forney could and did turn Pennsylvania like a Titan; and he frankly admitted that he owed the success of his last turn to me, as I shall in time relate.

Forney's antipathies were always remarkably well placed. He hated Buchanan; also, for certain personal reasons, he hated Simon Cameron; and finally it came to pass that he hated Andrew Johnson with a hatred of twenty-four carats--an _aquafortis_ detestation--and for a most singular cause.

One night when this "President by the pistol, and smallest potato in the American garden of liberty," was making one of his ribald speeches, after having laid out Horace Greeley, some one in the crowd cried--

"Now give us _John Forney_!"

With an air of infinite contempt the President exclaimed--

"I don't waste _my_ powder on dead ducks."

He had better have left that word unsaid, for it ruined him. It woke Colonel John Forney up to the very highest pitch of his fighting "Injun," or, as they say in Pennsylvania, his "Dutch." He had always been to that hour a genial man, like most politicians, a little too much given to the social glass. But from that date of the dead duck he became "total abstinence," and concentrated all his faculties and found all his excitement in vengeance hot and strong, without a grain of sugar. In which I gladly sympathised and aided, for I detested Johnson as a renegade Copperhead, or rather venomous toad to the South, who wished with all his soul to undo Lincoln's work and bring in the Confederacy. And I believe, on my life and soul, that if John Forney had not defeated him, we should have had such disasters as are now inconceivable, the least of them being a renewal of the war. Johnson had renegaded from the Confederacy because, being only a tailor, he had ranked as a "low white," or something despised even by "quality" negroes. The Southern aristocracy humbugged him by promising that if he would betray the Union he should be regarded as one of themselves, by which very shallow cheat he was--as a snob would be--easily caught, and in due time cast off.

I had been but a few weeks on the _Press_, and all was going on well, when one morning the Colonel abruptly asked me if I could start in the morning for Fort Riley, of which all I knew was that it constituted an extreme frontier station in Kansas. There was to be a Kansas Pacific railway laid out, and a large party of railroad men intended to go as far as the last surveyor's camp. Of course, a few editors had been invited to write up the road, and these in turn sent some one in their place. I knew at once that I should have something like the last year's wild life over again, and I was delighted. I borrowed John Forney's revolver, provided an agate-point and "manifold paper" for duplicate letters to our "two papers, both daily," and at the appointed hour was at the railway station. There had been provided for us the director's car, a very large and extremely comfortable vehicle, with abundance of velvet "settees" or divan sofas, with an immense stock of lobster-salad, cold croquettes, game, with "wines of every fineness," and excellent waiters. The excursion, indeed, cost 1,000 pounds; but it was made to pay, and that to great profit.

We were all a very genial, congenial party of easy-going geniuses. There was Hassard, the "day editor" of the _New York Tribune_, who had been with me on the _Cyclopaedia_, and to whom I was much attached, for he was a gentlemanly scholar, and withal had seen enough of life on the _Tribune_ to hold his own with any man; and Captain William Colton, who had been with me in Tennessee; Robert Lamborn, who had studied science in Germany, and was now a railroad man, and many more who are recorded in my pamphlet, "Three Thousand Miles in a Railway Car," and my old associate, Caspar Souder, of the _Bulletin_. This excursion was destined, in connection with this pamphlet, to have a marvellous effect on my future life.

In every town where we paused--and our pauses were frequent, as we travelled very much on the "go-as-you-please" plan--we were received by the authorities with honour and speeches and invited to dinners or drinks. Our conductors were courtesy itself. One afternoon one of them on a rough bit of road said, "Gentlemen, whenever you wish to open a bottle of champagne, please to pull the cord and stop the train. You can then drink without spilling your wine."

So we went to Chicago and St. Louis, where we were entertained by Mr. Blow, and where I became acquainted with his daughter Susan. She was then a beautiful blonde, and, as I soon found, very intelligent and cultured. She was long years afterwards busy in founding philanthropic schools in St. Petersburg, Russia, when I was there--a singularly noble woman. However, at this time neither of us dreamed of the school-keeping which we were to experience in later years. At this soiree, and indeed for the excursion the next day, we had as a guest Mr. Walter, of the London _Times_.

The next day we had a special train and an excursion of ladies and gentlemen to visit the marvellous Knob or Iron Mountain. This is an immense conical hill with a deep surrounding dale, beyond which rise other hills all of nearly solid iron. Returning that evening in the train, a very strange event took place. There was with us a genial, pleasant, larky young fellow, one of the famous family of the MacCooks. When the war came on he was at college--went into the army, fought hard--rose to be captain, and then after the peace went back to the college and finished his studies. This was the "event." We were telling stories of dreams; when it came to my turn I said:--

"In 1860 I had never been in Ohio, nor did I know anything about it. One night--it was at Reading, Pennsylvania--I fell asleep, I dreamed that I _woke up_, rose from the bed, went to the match-box, struck a light, and while it burned observed the room, which was just the same as when I had retired. The match went out. I lit another, when what was my amazement to observe that _everything in the room had changed its colour to a rich brown_! Looking about me, I saw on a kind of _etagere_ scores of half- burned candles in candlesticks, as if there had been a ball. I lighted nearly all of them. Hearing a sound as of sweeping and the knocking of a broom-handle without, I went into the next room, which was the hall where the dance had been held. A very stupid fellow was sweeping it out. I asked him where I was. He could not reply intelligently. There came into the hall a bustling, pleasant woman, rather small, who I saw at a glance was the housekeeper. She said something to the man as to the room's being dark. I remarked that there was light enough in my room, for I had lit all the candles. She cried, laughing, 'What extravagance!' I answered, 'My dear little woman, what does a candle or two signify to you? Now please tell me where I am. Last night I went to sleep in Reading, Pennsylvania. Where am I now?' She replied (and of this word I was not sure), 'In _Columbus_, Ohio.' I asked if there was any prominent man in the place who was acquainted with Philadelphia, and who might aid me to return. She reflected, and said that Judge _Duer_ and his two daughters (of whom I had never heard) had just returned from the East."

Here MacCook interrupted me eagerly: "You were not in Columbus, but in _Dayton_, Ohio. And it was not Judge Duer, but Judge _Duey_, with his two daughters, who was that summer in the East." I went on:--

"I left the room and went into the hall. I came to the front door. Far down below me I saw a winding river and a steamboat."

Here MacCook spoke again: "That was _surely_ Dayton. I know the house and the view. But it could not have been Columbus." I went on:--