Song of Years, page 19
The door opened and they came in. Ma almost fell in, so that Pa caught her with his arm.
“Well, she’s pulled through,” Jeremiah said cheerfully. “The rattle in her throat’s stopped and she’s sleepin’ natural.”
Sarah said nothing. Her little thin face was pinched and gray, her reddish hair stringing down at each side.
“Girls, get Ma to bed,” Pa said tersely. “You let her lay all day, too.”
Sarah dropped down wearily on a lean-to chair, with Emily and Phoebe Lou unfastening her shawl and pulling off her hood gently, and Celia tugging at the felt boots. Jeanie brought a pan of warm water and washed the pinched gray face and bloodshot eyes.
For ten minutes, perhaps, Sarah sat with her hands in her lap, a drooping little figure. Then suddenly she jumped up, almost scattering her attendants. “Good land!” she said. “I’m all right. Such a fuss! How’s the housework come on? Pa’s goin’ to butcher. We got lots to do. You girls have to hump yourselves. Now scoot!”
* * *
Winter lessened its grasp for a few days as a wild animal loosens its hold on its prey, but even then it did not fool the settlers. They knew it would play with them a few weeks longer, releasing them only to hold them tightly again in its cruel paw. The men folks of the neighborhood all took time to get to Sturgis Falls or Prairie Rapids for supplies, while the stores there took advantage of the mildness to send wagons to Dubuque or Cedar Rapids for replenishing their goods. The stages came in with delayed passengers and mail. People came out of their cabins and went on necessary journeys as the wild things of the forest scurry about after hibernation.
On one of those first milder days two young men came across the north prairies in a sled and stopped at Wayne Lockwood’s cabin. They were personable young fellows who had driven down from the far-off Spirit Lake region and were en route to Prairie Rapids for supplies. Learning they were hungry as bears after a winter’s sleep, Wayne made corn cakes and chopped off large slabs of his frozen side meat, insisted on their eating as much as they could, keeping it to himself that unless he got out and restocked his own larder he would soon be in the same predicament they were.
He enjoyed the young fellows’ stay, their talk of the region in which they lived, their light-hearted manner in the face of the hard trip through the snows made because of their constantly diminishing supplies. In fact, he liked them so well that he rode horseback along with them to Prairie Rapids in order to have their company while he purchased his own goods.
When he left them there, they promised to stop to see him again en route back.
Two days later he was in the Martin yard, sitting his horse, just ready to leave for home, but chatting a last minute with Phineas, when he saw the team and sled of his newly found friends coming up the river road. He waved his hand and called to them and they turned at once into the Martin yard. But now there was a third person with them, whom Wayne and Phineas recognized at once as a young fellow who had been working in the grist-mill at Prairie Rapids.
The five men talked there in the snow, Phineas at the well curb, the three young fellows standing in the sleigh, and Wayne on Blackbird who stepped about in the crusted snow as though impatient to stop this foolishness and be off.
The young man from the grist-mill was returning to the Spirit Lake region with the others. There was still plenty of government land up there, he said, but here there was no longer any way for a fellow to get ahead, with the last acreage in the county preempted these eighteen months. Presented with glowing pictures by the two as they were at the mill, he had given up his job at once and was off to the land of the Sioux, somewhere around Spirit Lake or Okoboji. He was enthusiastic about it, looked forward to settling in the lake region, explained that something in him responded to the call of the blue lakes. He said that all at once when the two settlers of that region were describing them, the sparkle on their blue expanse in the summer, the hunting and fishing, and the fertile lands between the big waters, he could not think of staying longer in the Valley with only its Red Cedar River and its little creeks and sloughs. So here he was off to the more attractive place. And what was more, he was all urgent that Wayne join him. All the four miles out of Prairie Rapids, they had been planning that Wayne go, too, right along now with them. It was too early for field work. He was to get some one to care for the stock, go along with them now and choose lands, then come back and sell.
When Wayne told them that he was of no mind to locate away from here since his trip out to the Missouri River, they changed tactics and teased him to go there just for the sight-seeing—Phineas too, they said. So much the merrier with five of them. They knew a place near the Big Woods where you could get a jug of “Cedar River Water,” laughing loudly at their name for it. But Wayne would not do that either, although the youthful adventure was tempting.
As they were talking, two of the Martin girls came around the corner of the cabin so that the young travelers were all interest.
Jeanie, seeing so much strange masculinity in the yard, had wanted in the worst way to make some excuse to get closer to the source of excitement. All the girls peeping out had been piqued with curiosity, but only Jeanie had dared think up a plan to satisfy it, and only Celia could be prevailed upon to accompany her.
Now, with their best capes on, and their dresses drawn up over their shoes to reveal shapely ankles while they stepped high and gingerly through the crusted snow, they came around the corner of the house, conversing vivaciously and so utterly unconscious of any one within half a mile of their presence that they were frightened into gay squealing when they suddenly saw so many young men before them.
“Oh . . . my goodness, Phineas, how you scared us!”
“We didn’t know any one was here.”
In their fright they even forgot to lower their dresses until they caught Phineas’ brotherly glare, when they dropped them in complete and blushing confusion.
Now that they were here, they lingered, because the young men in the sleigh were all laughter and wit, talking no longer of government requirements and the Mendota treaty whereby the Sioux had promised never to lay any more claim to the Iowa land, but only paying attention to Jeanie and Celia, quite as Jeanie and Celia wished.
The strangers joked the girls, asked Celia if the bees made her hair which had tumbled (with a bit of aid) out of her cape’s hood, and wanted to know which two of the three of them might hope to take the young ladies to a dance in Overman Hall when next they came down this way.
Jeanie rolled her eyes merrily and suggested drawing straws, and Celia, who had so recently been judged by a power above her too young to go to a town dance, tossed her yellow head and said she guessed they’d all be too late to ask her by the time they next got away down here in this part of the country.
Only Phineas, leaning on the well curb, looked a little disgusted over the give-and-take conversation, and Wayne, sitting his horse so perfectly as she stepped about restlessly in the snow, grinned in complete comprehension of the little scene and winked openly at Suzanne in the window.
“Maybe you’ve got another sister?” one suggested hopefully.
The girls burst into gay laughter at that. “Sister! We’ve got enough to dance with you and all your friends,” Celia said daringly.
“We’re the two homeliest!” Jeanie rolled her merry eyes, knowing that they would all deny the possibility of the statement, as they immediately did.
And then one jumped out of the sleigh, saying that he must get closer to Celia’s hair in order to see whether they were really little curls there or yellow shavings from a piece of pine board which she had pinned on under her cape’s hood. Coming close, he touched a curl lightly, and before Celia could realize what he was up to, he had snipped off an end of one with his concealed jack-knife, so that she squealed this time without pretense, and called to Phineas and Wayne to protect her.
And now the three young men were leaving the daring one holding up the piece of yellow curl over his own ear with pantomime of twisting it like a primping girl. They rode laughingly out of the yard, saying they would be back in a few weeks, calling out saucy things as gay and light-hearted as though they were on the way now to that Overman Hall dance instead of to the snow-locked lake region where the blue waters were still frozen and the warrior chief Inkpaduta and his band of Sioux were creeping in from the southwest to pitch camp on the bank of Lake Okoboji and crouch there in the bitter cold while the drums beat in weird steady rhythm.
CHAPTER 17
The cold around the lake region was not more bitter than the hatred in old Chief Inkpaduta’s heart. The snows had long lain deep on the north prairies and in the timberlands, and Inkpaduta’s people were cold and hungry.
Six times had the seasons come and gone since the white man had made them give up their hunting-ground. The white man said the lands were his. The white man had raised food on those lands by the shores of the lake sacred to the Great Spirit. For the length of two moons now Inkpaduta had been taking food away from the palefaces and frightening them.
Camped on the eastern shore of Lake Okoboji with the drums beating their weird steady rhythm, something was getting into the blood of this outlaw band which neither the white man nor red called friend.
All night the drums beat. All that night of March seventh in 1857 the drums beat on the eastern bank of the lake of Okoboji. The drums beat and the shadows crouched low. The drums beat and the shadows took on form and substance, became livid figures that sent forth piercing war-cries.
On the eastern shore of Lake Okoboji the drums beat. Not far from the shore of the lake sacred to the Great Spirit the drums beat.
All night the drums beat.
The drums beat . . .
The drums . . .
* * *
The Martin family was assembling for the noon meal. Hearing a horse’s hoofs splashing through the mushlike snow, and thinking that only Ed Armitage tore into the yard so fast, they were all expecting to see him. But it was not Ed. It was Wayne Lockwood, his face curiously strained looking, as though he were holding himself steady rather by force of will than natural poise.
So definitely did they all sense something was wrong that Jeremiah’s quip about him smelling their pork and beans clear up the lane road died in the making.
“Bad news,” Wayne said in the doorway, surveying them all with that strained expression on his face, the muscles under the skin moving jerkily. “I just came from town. The Sioux have been on the war-path up around Okojobi.”
Jeremiah began, “Oh, now . . . I’ve heard that rumor so many . . .” and broke off.
“It’s no rumor this time,” Wayne said crisply. “Fifty people at least are dead. Those three young fellows who stopped here . . .” he turned involuntarily toward Jeanie and Celia, swallowed as though he could not bring out the words . . . “are dead.”
“Dead?” Jeanie said in a whisper.
Celia gave a little cry and put her hand up to her hair as though to feel for the end of a curl.
Then Wayne turned and left for home, his horse splashing through the melting snow of the yard.
Yes, all the white settlers in the Okoboji vicinity were dead but the little fourteen-year-old Gardner girl, whose story every Iowa school child came in time to know—how Inkpaduta and his band crept into her home, demanding food and guns, how the child saw her father shot through the heart, her mother clubbed to death, and the other children’s brains dashed out against the walls, how the young prisoner, after a long time of cruel treatment and weary marching on the snow carrying a heavy pack, came near a band of friendly Sioux whose chief purchased the girl for horses, blankets, powder, and guns, and sent her to the white missionary.
All of this and much more the Valley people came to know in time, but just now they knew no details excepting that the lake settlers, about fifty in all, were killed and that three light-hearted young men who had planned to come back and dance with Celia and Jeanie would never come.
* * *
Spring came on with the screaming wild winds dying down in the timberland and the honking wild geese settling into the slough, with the grass green and lush on the prairies, and the meadow-larks spilling liquid notes from the stake-and-rider fences.
By May the Dubuque and Pacific Railroad, with no bonded indebtedness on the part of Judge Hubbard’s county, had laid thirty miles of track west of Dubuque to the little town of Dyersville. That began to look like real progress. Everything would build right up now, every one predicted, even though the only other railroad in the state was that little Y-shaped strip between Davenport, Muscatine, and Iowa City.
Summer came on with the corn hurrying to be “knee-high by the Fourth of July” and Aunt Harriet’s box arriving.
Celia said there might just as well be no box as far as she was concerned if there proved to be no hoops. You could starch a skirt so stiff it would stand alone, but what of it? It didn’t look any more like the stylish ones over hoops than the man in the moon.
The opening took place with customary ceremony. Already Sabina, married over two years and having as good things as any one in Sturgis Falls, was more or less disinterested over its advent. Suzanne, thinking how Sabina was once so enthusiastic over its coming, told herself that never as long as she lived could she outgrow the excitement over The Box’s arrival.
They all gathered around the table in the lean-to while Pa pried off the top and went through that exasperating ceremony of bending every nail straight and taking out his share of the donation, the newspapers, pressing them carefully for future reading. The Chicago papers would tell a lot about the new Democratic President Buchanan. If they were critical of him, Pa would chuckle and enjoy himself immensely, calling all the women folks to come and hear this. If they were laudatory, he would fume and fuss, maybe walk the floor snapping the paper against his knee and argue into the air that any one who could see good in a Democrat wasn’t worth listening to.
There were two full-skirted dresses, one wine-colored with black bands, and the other the most luscious of anything that had ever been sent out here. It was richly golden in hue and too nearly new to have been worn much. Only when Emily was looking it over did she discover the badly scorched panel which was without doubt the cause of its sending.
“It’s not sensible.” Sarah was disgusted. “What do they think we could do with it out here but color it dark with walnut bark?”
“Oh, it would be a shame to color it,” every one said.
“I could make it over without the scorched piece.” Emily surveyed it with a practical eye. “Somebody ought to get married now, to wear it.”
“Oh, I will,” Jeanie volunteered, and they all laughed at her readiness to lay herself on the sacrificial altar in order to be the beneficiary.
There were flannel nightgowns, a dark gray cape, a brown straw bonnet with eight glassy red cherries on it, some black silk mitts, and a pair of stays. There were no hoops.
Celia going up into the loft to hide her disappointment caused Jeremiah with unaccustomed masculine insight and sympathy to go slyly to town and return with a contraption from the new tinsmith’s, a series of narrow tin bands soldered together in spiral formation which caused the girls all to have a good laugh and Celia to praise Pa to the skies for his Yankee ingenuity.
The summer was hot and dry. The Indians camped up by the Turkey Foot—where the Red Cedar, West Fork, and Shell Rock come together like a wild turkey’s toes—said the beavers had all disappeared, that there would be dry weather until they came back and went to work.
More and more as the summer went by was it apparent that times were getting hard, the boom balloon gradually deflating. Money was scarce, wildcat bank paper as thick as leaves in the timber. Financial troubles in the east by a sort of creeping paralysis came into the new west. Weekly trips for merchandise were dropped by the general stores. Construction upon the railroad which was to have come through from Dubuque with such promptness had been stopped at Dyersville before it even left that country. Phineas, coming through with a team and an unusually small load of purchases, said the ties were piled there beside the grading, a forlorn-looking sight, and that maybe, after all, the line to Muscatine and Iowa City was the only railroad Iowa would ever have.
Jeremiah was intensely disappointed, felt a personal loss in the cessation of work, as though something had gone out of his own life. He had gloated so much over at town about the Dubuque and Pacific finally coming through (without the county’s indebtedness) to connect the Valley and the east coast that he grew almost apologetic whenever any one asked him if it were true work had been stopped. He would explain it all with excuses, as though he himself had been derelict in his duty.
One thing in the state though, he usually included optimistically in his conversation, was going along quite as planned. The new capitol was under construction in spite of the panic, even though it had been uphill work for those men to finance it. All the records were to be moved over there to Fort Des Moines as soon as the building was finished this fall. Hold on a minute, he’d told that wrong. It wasn’t Fort Des Moines any more—the “Fort” was dropped. It would be a big town some day there at the fork of the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers. That was a forward step for the state, he told every one, taking the personal attitude he always assumed about civic questions, as though he must choose sides and pull for which side he thought right.
There were a few other improvements of local type, even though times were noticeably hard, wildcat money abroad, and crops not any too good that summer. A bridge was built across the river at Sturgis Falls, the posts from native elms cut in the Big Woods, and hewn by hand. No longer would one have to ford the Red Cedar in low-water times, ferry over it when the flow was too deep, or “sled” across it in the depths of Iowa’s cold winters. And a steamboat came up the river from Cedar Rapids to Prairie Rapids to make twenty-two trips altogether. That looked as though the country was coming on, Jeremiah bragged.
