Part 12

I explained what I thought was the meaning of the lesson, but she shook her head.

I said, "Are you happy?"

"Not very. I feel lonesome here."

"But is not Christ here too?"

"Oh, yes; but it is not home."

"Well, I am glad you belong to Christ, and hope you will unite with us in fighting the common foe. Will you come to church, and bring the children to our Sabbath-school?"

"Well, we shall do that."

As I was leaving one of them said, "There is a new-comer across the street. She belongs to some church _outside_." By "outside" she meant the old, settled parts. "You better call on her."

I did so, and said that I was the home missionary. I asked her how she liked her new home?

"Not much. It is a dreadfully wicked place."

"Yes, that is true; and I hope you will lend a hand in the good work. You are a Christian, I believe?"

"Yes; but I don't belong to your church."

"What church are you now a member of?"

"Well, there is only one of my kind in the State that I know of."

"You must feel lonesome at times; but in what do you differ from us?"

"Well, we believe in being immersed three times in succession, face downwards. I intend doing what I can."

After giving her a cordial invitation to attend the church, I left the good woman, saying I hoped I could depend on her being at church. But, alas! trade became so brisk that the good sister had to work Sundays. She felt very sorry, she said, but it did seem as if it was impossible to live a Christian life in such a wicked place; and she had concluded not to give her letter to the church until she could get into a better community, where she would not have to work Sundays. I told her I was surprised that one who had been so thoroughly cleansed should have fallen away so quickly.

"Yes; but it is such a wicked place."

"I know; but you have only to be just a small Christian here to pass for a first-class saint!"

She smiled sadly, and said she guessed she would wait.

A man that must have a "New England element" to work in will feel depressed in such a field. But if, like Wesley, his field is the world, or, like Paul, he can say to the people, "called to be saints," then he can thrust in the sickle and begin harvesting. We must not only sow beside all waters, but reap too. Do not harvest the weeds and the darnel, nor reject the barley because it is not wheat. Often in the new settlements there are enough Christians to form the nucleus of one church; whereas, if we wait to have a church for each sect, it means waste of money and waste of men.

In one small town of less than three hundred people, where there were many denominations represented, the company that owned nearly all the land gave a lot and the lumber for a church. Most of the Christians united, and a minister was secured. Some, however, would not join with their brethren, but waited on the superintendent to get a lot for themselves. He said, "Yes, we will give you all a lot and help you build. Just as soon as this church becomes self-supporting we will give the next strongest a lot, and so on to the end."

This is level-headed Christian business. If we want to reap the harvest, we must "receive him that is weak in the faith." Hidden away in trunks are hundreds of church letters that should be coaxed out. Faithful preaching, teaching, and visiting, will bring a glorious "Harvest Home." A goodly sight it is to see, under one roof, all these different branches of the Lord's army worshipping the same Master, rejoicing in the same hope, and realizing in a small degree that there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, but that all are one in Christ Jesus.

XXX.

INJEANNY VS. HEAVEN.

The title to this chapter bears about the same relation to its contents as the name of one sermon does to the other twenty in a given volume. I gave it this title because it must have some heading; everything has a heading. Graves have headstones.

No greater variety of character exists on the frontier than elsewhere, but peculiar cases come to the surface oftener. Those women living in the woods, who belonged to the "Church of God," are good illustrations. They had some peculiar ideas about the Scriptures, but it was much more refreshing to the missionary to find _peculiar_ views than none at all. I often introduced myself to them with a text of Scripture, and tried hard to induce them to move into the next village for their children's sake. It was a much better place morally, although but a mile distant. But the influence of an organized church, with a good building and Sunday-school, made a greater difference than the distance would seem to warrant. One day, as I was passing their home, I shouted out, "Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city!" The next day I was off on my way to the other side of the State. As my journey well illustrates the difficulties of travel in a new country, I will describe it.

At my first change of cars, I found that my train was delayed by a fire along the track, so that I could not make my next connection with a cross-country train. This troubled me, as it was Friday, and the young minister whom I was about to visit was doing manual work on his church building, and would probably be ill-prepared to preach himself. I telegraphed him, and was just turning away when my eye caught sight of a map, and I noticed that the road I was on and the road he was on, although a hundred miles apart where I was then, gradually approached until within thirteen miles of each other, one hundred miles north. Remembering that a stage crossed at this point, I started on the late train, which, like a human being, seldom makes up for lost time, and was dropped into the pitch darkness about eleven P.M. The red lights of the train were soon lost in the black forest; I felt like Goldsmith's last man.

Two or three little lights twinkled from some log cabins. A small boy, with a dilapidated mail-bag and a dirty lantern, stood near me. I asked him if there was a hotel in town.

He said, "Yep."

Would he guide me to it?

"Yep."

I next inquired whether the stage made connections with the train on the other road.

"Wal, yes, it gineraley does."

"Why, does it not to-morrow?"

"Guess not."

"Why?"

"Cos' of the ternado."

"Tornado?"

"Yes; didn't ye know we had a ternado?"

"No."

"Well, we did, ye know; tore the trees up hullsale, and just played Ned. Rain cum down like suds."

"Well, can I get a buggy or wagon?"

"Guess not; both out in the woods; can't git home."

I felt sick at hearing this; for how to get across with two grips filled with books, theological books too, troubled me. I slept little. My room was bare; the rain pattering on the roof, the mosquitoes inside, and my own thoughts, routed me out early Saturday morning. I was pleased to find that the man had returned with the wagon, and after much persuasion, I engaged him for five dollars to take me across.

We started off with an axe. The old settlers laughed at our attempt, but we were young. Over the fallen trees we went bumping along; but, alas, we tried too big a maple, and out came the reach-pole and left us balanced on the tree. After a tiring walk through the "shin-tangles"--that is, ground hemlock--we reached the road, and mounted bareback. We met some commercial travellers cutting their way through, with a settler's help, passed a horse and buggy (minus a driver), with a bottle of whiskey in the bottom. We then had the good fortune to borrow a single wagon of a minister, who lived near on a farm. Our horses had to walk in the water by the edge of the lake, and the leeches fastened on them by the dozen. Finally we met the stage, and knew our way was clear. We were drenched with the rain, but it was clearing, and so we cheered up.

I asked the stage-driver whether I could catch the train.

He said, "Well, if ye _drive_, ye can."

The emphasis he put into the drive made us whip up. Presently the village could be seen, a half-mile away. The engine was on the turntable. How fast it went around! I was getting nervous. I asked the man to get my grips out, while I got my ticket; and rushing into the office, I snapped out, "Ticket for ----!"

The man turned his head with a jerk, and stared at me so intently that I thought something was wrong. So I said, "What time does the train start?"

"In about an hour."

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I felt like Sir Francis Drake, when his vessel seemed to be going over in the Thames. "What! have I sailed the ocean," said he, "to be drowned in a ditch?" So, I thought, "Have I come a hundred miles out of my way, to miss the train?"

I boarded the cars, cleaned my valises, and found the color running from my book-covers. My boots were like brown paper, so sodden were they. I dried myself by the stove; but my troubles were not over. The train-boy called out the station at the water-tank. The rain was pouring down; I was in for it again; so I walked down between the freight cars, went to the hotel and dried myself again, and, after dancing around the room on one foot to get my boots on, I started off to find my man.

He was out of town! Expected home with a funeral soon. I was foolish enough to make myself known as soon as he got off the cars, and he coaxed me into taking charge of the funeral. Then for the third time I was soaked, as we stood in the new cemetery, while a hymn of six verses was rendered. But what flattened me worse than all was that the young man had not received my second telegram, which I sent to relieve his supposed excited feelings, and had not been troubled in the least, but was going to make Fred. Robertson ("who being dead yet speaketh") do duty for him. Tired out, I flung myself on a bed, and slept in spite of--well never mind what. I had to change quarters next night, for I was not so sleepy.

I received a letter from the student who had taken my charge, saying, "----is burnt to the ground, and all north of the railway." In an instant there flashed on my mind the words of the woman: "Up, get you out," etc. The same words came home to the women as they saw their homes going up in smoke.

"What did the elder say?" said they to one another.

The excitement of the fire brought on brain fever in the case of the youngest child.

On my return, while trying to comfort the little one (who we thought was dying), and telling her about heaven, she cried out in her feebleness, "I don't want to go to heaven! I want to go to Injeanny."

And, sure enough, she got well, and did go to "Injeanny."

XXXI

THE LATEST FRONTIER--OKLAHOMA.

Collier, in his "Great Events of History," tells of a million warriors who, leaving their wives and children, crossed the Danube, and swore allegiance to Rome. Since that time a great many immigrations have taken place, but none on so large a scale. But, large or small, the settlements of the Indian Territory, now called Oklahoma, are the most unique.

It would have been hard to have devised a worse way to open a new country. Thousands of people--strong, weak, the poor settler, the speculator, the gambler--were all here, man and wife, and spinster on her own responsibility. All waited for weeks on the border-land. At last the time came, and the gun was fired, and in confusion wild as a Comanche raid, the great rush was made. Many sections being claimed by two and three parties, the occasion had its comic side, amid more that was tragic. Thousands went in on cattle-cars, and as many more filled common coaches inside and out, and clung to the cow-catcher of the engine. In places wire fences were on either side of the railway; and men in trying to get through them in a hurry, often reached their land minus a large part of their clothing.

In one case a portly woman, taking the tortoise plan of slow and steady, reached the best section, while the men still hung in the fence like victims of a butcher-bird. It is said of one young woman, who made the run on horseback, that reaching a town-site, her horse stumbled, and she was thrown violently to the ground and stunned. A passing man jumped off his horse, and sprinkled her face with water from his canteen; and as she revived, the first thing she said was, "This is my lot."

"No, you don't," said the man. But to settle it they went to law, and the court decided in favor of the woman, as she struck the ground first.

Among much that was brutal and barbarous, some cases of chivalry were noticed. In one case a young woman was caught in a wire fence, and two young men went back, helped her out, and allowed her to take her choice of a section. One man, in his eagerness, found himself many miles from water. As he was driving his stake, he noticed that his horse was dying; and realizing his awful situation, being nearly exhausted with thirst, he cut his horses throat, drank the blood, and saved his own life.

The work done in six years is simply marvellous. Imagine the prairie described by Loomis as the place where you could see day after to-morrow coming up over the horizon; at times covered with flowers fair as the garden of the Lord, or covered with snow, and nothing to break the fury of the wind. Seventy-five thousand Indians the only permanent residents in the morning; at night hundreds of thousands of whites--villages, towns, and cities started, in some of them a mayor chosen, a board of aldermen elected, and the staked-out streets under police control. The inhabitants were under tents for a few weeks, while sickness of all kinds attacked them. There were rattlesnakes of two varieties, tarantulas, two kinds of scorpions,--one, the most dangerous, a kind of lizard, which also stings with its tail, and with often deadly effect,--and centipedes that grow to six inches in length. One of the latter was inside a shirt which came home from the laundry, and planted his many feet on the breast of one of our minute-men, and caused it to swell so fearfully that he thought at one time he should die. He recovered, but still at times feels the effect of the wounds, which are as numerous as the feet. The pain caused is intense, and the parts wounded slough off.

Now imagine all this; and then six years after you visit this land, and find cities of ten thousand inhabitants, banks with polished granite pillars,--polished with three per cent per month interest,--great blocks, huge elevators, and fine hotels. And nowhere, even in Paris, will you find more style than among the well-to-do. And on the same streets where I saw all this, I also saw men picking kernels of corn out of an old cellar close by a second-hand store, where already the poor had given up and sold their furniture to get home.

I looked out of my hotel window one morning in "Old Oklahoma," and saw a lady walking past dressed in a lavender suit, a white hat with great ostrich feathers on it, by her side a gentleman as well groomed as any New York swell, an English greyhound ambled by their side, while in the rear were rough men with the ugly stiff hats usually worn by your frontier rough. Storekeepers were going to work in their shirt-sleeves. This was in a town of two thousand inhabitants, where there were four banks, four newspapers, eleven churches, and only three saloons.

While I was there a most brutal murder took place,--a woman shot her step-daughter, killing her instantly. The husband, the girl's father, swept the blood from the sidewalk, and went down to the jail that night and stayed with the woman, while a fiddler was sent down to cheer her. This man was her fifth husband.

In the two weeks I was in that vicinity seven persons were killed. Three men had shot down some train-robbers, and after they were dead had filled their bodies with bullets. This so incensed the friends of the dead men that a number of them went to the house where the men had fortified themselves. When they saw how large a force was against them, they surrendered, their wives in the meanwhile begging the men who had come not to molest their husbands. But the women were pushed rudely aside, and the men were carried to the hills and lynched. One murderer cost the Territory over fifteen thousand dollars. Banks have loaded pistols behind the wire windows, where they can be reached at a moment's notice.

Still, lawlessness is not the rule; and it has never been as bad as one city was farther north, where men were held up on the main street in broad daylight. Such facts may just as well be known, because there is a better time coming, and these things are but transitory.

In the old settled parts, peach orchards are already bearing; and if there is a moderate rainfall, and the people can get three good crops out of five, such is the richness of the soil, the people will be rich. But to me the western part of the Territory seems like an experiment as yet. There are many places in the same latitude farther north utterly deserted; and empty court-houses, schools, and churches stand on the dry prairie as lonesome as Persepolis without her grandeur.

But now let us go into "The Strip." ("The Strip" is the Cherokee Strip, the last but one opened; the Kickapoo being opened this May.) It has been settled about eighteen months. It is May, 1895. We leave the train, and start across the prairie in a buggy with splendid horses that can be bought for less than forty dollars each. We pass beautiful little ponies that you can buy for ten to twenty dollars. On either side we pass large herds of cattle and many horses. Few houses are in sight, as most of them are very small and hardly distinguishable from the ground, while some are under ground. Here and there a little log house, made from the "black jacks" that border the stream, which is often a dry ditch. The rivers, with banks a quarter of a mile apart at flood can be stepped over to-day.

Fifty miles of riding bring us to a county town. All the county towns in "The Strip" were located by the Government, and have large squares, or rather oblongs, in which the county buildings stand. It is the day before the Indians are paid. Here we find every one busy. Streets are being graded, and a fine court-house in process of erection. Stores are doing an immense business, one reaching over one hundred thousand dollars a year; another, larger still, being built. By their sides will be a peanut-stand, a sod store, another partly of wood and partly of canvas, and every conceivable kind of building for living in or trading. And here is a house with every modern convenience, up to a set of china for afternoon teas, and a club already formed for progressive euchre.

The Indian is not a terror to the settlers, as in early days; but he exasperates him, stalking by to get his money from the Government. He spends it like a child, on anything and everything to which he takes a notion. He lives on canned goods, and feasts for a time, then fasts until the Great Fathers send him more money. On the reservation, gamblers fleece him; but he does not seem to care, for he has a regular income and all the independence of a pauper.

It seemed very strange to look out of the car window, and see the tepees of the Indians, and on the other side of the car a lady in riding-habit with a gentleman escort--a pair who would have been in their place in Rotten Row.

Now we must turn westward for a hundred miles, and in all the long ride pass but one wheatfield that will pay for cutting; and that depends on rain, and must be cut with a header. Dire distress already stares the settler in the face; and even men, made desperate by hunger in Old Oklahoma, are sending their petitions to Guthrie for food. There are hundreds of families who have nothing but flour and milk, and some who have neither. When a cry goes up for help, it is soon followed by another, saying things are not so bad. This latter cry comes from those who hold property, and who would rather the people starve than that property should decrease.

I saw men who had cut wood, and hauled it sixteen miles, then split it, and carried it twelve miles to market, and after their three days' work the two men had a load for themselves and one dollar and a quarter left. And one man said, "Mine is a case of 'root hog or die,'" and so got fifty cents for his load of wood he had brought fourteen miles; while another man returned with his, after vainly offering it for forty cents. In one town I saw a horse,--a poor one, it is true,--but the man could not get another bid after it had reached one dollar and a half.

Of course there are thousands who are better off; but in the case of very many they were at the very last degree of poverty when they went in. Many of our minute-men preached the first Sunday. They were among the men who sat on the cow-catcher of the engine, and made the run for a church-lot and to win souls. They preached that first Sunday in a dust-storm so bad that you could scarcely see the color of your clothes. To those who never saw one, these dust-storms are past belief. Even when the doors and windows are closed, the room seems as if it were in a fog; for the fine particles of dust defy doors and windows. And should a window be left open, you can literally use a shovel to get the dust off the beds.

You may be riding along, as I was, the hot wind coming in puffs, the swifts gliding over the prairie by your side, the heat rising visibly on the horizon, when in a flash, a dust-storm from the north came tearing along, until you could not see your pony's head at times, drifts six inches deep on the wheat, and your teeth chattering with the cold at one P.M., when at eleven A.M. you were nearly exhausted with the heat.

Strange when you ask people whether it is not extremely hot in the Middle West, they say, "Yes; but we always have cool nights." And, as a rule, that is so; but now as I write, July 9, 1895, comes the news of intense heat,--thermometer a hundred and nine in the shade, and ninety-eight at midnight, followed by a storm that shot pebbles into the very brickwork of the houses.

Every man who can, has a cyclone cellar. Some are fitted up so that you could keep house in them. In one town where I went to speak, the meeting was abandoned on account of a storm which was but moderate; but such is the fear of the twister that nearly all the people were in their pits.

In the Baptist church, where they had a full house the night before, I found one woman and two men; and they were blowing out the lights. The telegrams kept coming, telling of a storm shaking buildings, and travelling forty miles an hour; but it was dissipated before it reached me, and I escaped. Yet I found a man who had lived over a quarter of a century in the West, and had never seen one.

It is a big country. A friend of mine in England wrote me that they feared for me as they read of our fearful cyclones. I was living near Boston, Mass. I wrote back, saying I felt bad for them in London when the Danube overflowed. I had to go over and explain it before they saw my joke.

The cyclone, however, is no joke. Nevertheless, it performs some queer antics. One cyclone struck a house, and left nothing but the floor and a tin cuspidore. The latter stood by a stove which weighed several hundredweight, and which was smashed to atoms.

In another house a heavy table was torn to pieces, while the piano-cover in the same room was left on the piano. In one house all had gone into the cellar, when they remembered the sleeping baby. A young girl sprang in, and got the baby; and just as she stepped off, the house went, and she floated into the cellar like a piece of thistle-down. A school-teacher was leaving school, when she was thrown to the ground, and every bit of clothing was stripped from her, leaving her without a scratch.