 | Peter Pilgrim, or, A rambler's recollections |  |
THE
ARKANSAS EMIGRANTS.
1. CHAPTER I.
Fifty years ago, a philosopher sitting in
his closet constructing the political horoscope
of our new-born nation, proved most decidedly,
among other undeniable propositions,
that the Kentucky and Niagara lands, then
all the rage among emigrants, must continue
to be frontier lands for a century to
come, and deplored the infatuation of men
who—neglecting the unoccupied lands east
of the mountains, of which there were enough
and more than enough for the wants of many
generations—exiled themselves to such distant
places, where they must “never more hope to
see their parents, their brothers and sisters,
and other relations and friends whom they
left behind,” where, during all that coming
century, themselves, and their children after
them, must fight with desperate savages for
and where, worst of all, after the trouble
of fighting and reaping, they must, for lack
of a market, sell their wheat for tenpence a
bushel, to buy dollar-blankets at half a guinea
apiece.
To us, who in half a century have seen it
so signally falsified, the prediction appears
sufficiently ridiculous. The “wilderness contries”
now form the heart and centre of the
republic, and are, in the language of speculation,
an old country, whence new emigrants
daily depart for a new border; which, in its
turn, becomes, in a few years, a cordon of
sovereign states, sending out, in like manner,
their hosts of voluntary exiles.
And thus the work goes on—the building
up of a nation such as the world has never
yet seen, such as it has never yet imagined.
Croakers sit at home and prate of dangers
from abroad, of political corruption and social
disorganization, as heralds of coming
convulsion; but, all the while, the emigrant
is on the road, with his plough and ox, his
axe and rifle, his sons and daughters, to add
a new state to the confederacy, a new arm
to the Briareus of nations whom no Jupiter
can hurl from the seat of power, no ætna
rivers alive with steamboats: turn where you
will, you see no gap in the human billow,
which, rolling from the east like the bore of
a mighty river, the rushing mascaret of the
Amazon or the Ganges, sweeps over forest
and prairie, in its march to the Pacific Ocean.
When that has been gained, when the Oregon
boasts as many steamers as the Mississippi,
and the Chippewyans are as well pierced with
railroads as the Alleghanies, we may look
into the magician's glass for the fate of the
enormous empire—or rather for the fate of
other empires, its outstripped and overshadowed
rivals.
The rage of emigration, of which we need
not leave our homes to witness the effects,
one is almost tempted to consider a feature
peculiar to the American race. Pressed by no
actual necessity—no pinching poverty, such
as drives the poor Irishman from his moorland
cot, no galling oppression of tyrant and
bigot, only to be escaped by expatriation; yet
ever changing, ever on the march, seeking a
new home; it would really seem as if there
was something nomadic in our natures, a
principle of levity and restlessness, from which
the philosopher may, according to his mood,
the republic. I have sometimes, while rambling
among the long trains of emigrant
wagons filling a southern or western road,
asked myself whether the love of home—that
tender, and lovely, and soul-enriching sentiment,
so distinctive of the race from which
we boast to descend—was not a poetic fiction
in America. Those men of substance—
that Virginia planter with his hundred slaves,
journeying to the cotton-grounds of Alabama;
that comfortable farmer of Pennsylvania, with
his half a dozen wagons, and furniture in them
enough to furnish out a garrison, wending his
way to the distant Wisconsin;—do these
men remember with no regretful longings the
antique manor-house on the Rappahannock,
the old home-stead among the blue hills of
Susquehanna? The Virginian will tell you,
his lands are worn out, and that he left them
to save his “hands” from starvation, or the
market; the Pennsylvanian assures you, he
has seven sons to be made landholders at
his death. Ask that gallant New-Yorker
what carries him so far from home—he is
going to buy up the site of a county-town,
and convert five thousand dollars into a million:
that young lawyer from Maryland—he
to Congress: that bustling Yankee—he will be
a merchant, and make his fortune. In short,
you will learn any thing, except that the
adventurers regret the homes they have left
behind them. The love of novelty; the love of
freedom—that freedom which men feel upon
the boundless prairie, or in the measureless forest,
where the soul hath elbow-room, and is
not conscious of too many superiors—and the
love of wealth, have swallowed up the gentler
love of the place of birth.
Yet all are not thus insensible. Poverty,
defeated hopes, humbled pride, send also
their representatives to the border, among
whom one may sometimes see an eye turned
in tears to the blue horizon behind, and visages
full of the thoughts of home—of home
remembered as a lost paradise, dearer
than any thing to be gained in the land of
promise.
One evening, rambling upon a bluff on the
Mississippi, it was my chance to witness the
embarkation of a family of emigrants, whom
I had previously noticed descending to the
boat, which was to carry them across the
river to the dark frowning forests of Arkansas.
It was a spring evening, and the season and
Upon the bluff, groves of locust-trees shed a
delicious perfume; and the glories of sunset
lay upon the woods beyond the river. It
was at this pleasant hour, that the family,
consisting of five persons—the father, a man
declining into the vale of years; three sons,
one a mere urchin of six or seven years old,
the others youths of eighteen and twenty;
and a daughter of perhaps seventeen—descended
to the river. The daughter, with the
little boy, was packed away in a carriole—or
in western parlance, carry-all—of no very
distinguished appearance, driven by a gray-headed
old negro servant. The father and
second son rode on horseback; while the first-born,
with a second negro, trudged manfully
along on foot.
There was nothing, at first sight, very peculiar
in the appearance of the family; but, by
and by, the daughter getting out, to walk down
the hill with her eldest brother, I observed
her look wistfully backwards, until a jerk
from the brother—a fiery and impatient youth
compelled her to proceed. I fancied I could
perceive a quivering of her lip, as she turned
from the eastern sky; but, at all events, there
was something in her countenance, its beauty
her plain attire—indeed, the clothes
of all were of the plainest materials—
and the general look of poverty about the
little train, almost convinced me they had once
known their better days.
They reached the river; the carriole was
driven into the boat, which was pushed from
the shore. At that moment, an idle youth
who had strolled from the village near, and
taken his seat under a locust-tree on the edge
of the bluff, began to play upon a flute which
he had brought with him; and, as it happened,
his first tune was the tender and well
known melody, of “Home, sweet Home.”
The notes reached the departing family, and
what a world of memories seemed suddenly
to be conjured among them! The daughter
started up, and with a wild cry sprang towards
the shore; and, would, indeed, have fallen
into the river, but for the father who caught
her in his arms. For a moment, all was agitation
on board the little bark; the brothers
pressed to their sister's side, one, it seemed,
to reprove, the other to console and soothe,
but all expressing in their countenances a
world of longing regret for the home they
had left, never perhaps again to see.
How rapidly fancy, awakened by that thrilling
cry, read in the visages of the emigrants
—that gray old man, so stern yet sorrowing;
the daughter clinging to his neck, yet still
gazing wildly back to the receding shore; the
second son lifting his little brother into his
arms, and covering him with kisses; the first-born
looking so cold and haughty, yet unhappy—how
rapidly fancy traced the whole history
of the little family. You could not mistake
that old man, bearing himself, in his sorrow, so
loftily. He is a Virginian—an “old Virginian”—one
of the fine old race of past days
—a gentleman, but an unfortunate one. You
see him in his brave old house at home. It
is on the Potomac, perched upon a hill, over-shadowed
by oaks and pines, planted by a
grandsire some five or six generations removed:
his negro-quarters make a village; and
so do his stables; for truly he delights in his
horse-flesh, and looks with contempt on Congressmen.
He hath his friends about him, a
multitude of goodly people old and young,
cavaliers that know the points of a horse or
bottle of champagne; and dames and beaux
that devote the days to picnicking and the
nights to dancing. If a stranger passeth him
by, he sendeth, or goeth, out to entreat the
law and runs races, in preparation for the
legislature; his second has some thoughts of
doing the same, but is in no hurry, and, in the
meanwhile, squires his sister to and fro, and
writes verses for the young ladies; his sister
laughs her life away in the dance and on
horseback, and jeers at a despairing lover, for
whom she would at any serious moment jump
into the river; and the little boy spins his top
and twirls his marbles, or plays cockhorse with
Sambo or Jimbo, whom he trounces whenever
he tires of their assistance. All is joy and
jollity in the old gentleman's house; and when
he hears his neighbours complain of hard
times, or reads the melancholy croakings in
his county newspaper, he says, “men are
blockheads,” swears “the world turns round
to-day as it did the day before,” and orders
old Cæsar to bring him some fresh mint and
a bottle of brandy.
In the meanwhile, a storm is brewing:
crops fail, the races are run wrong; there are
some rascally mortgages that plague him,
and bonds and notes of hand have fallen due
at the most unexpected moment. He receives
letters from persons whom he calls
“pitiful fellows,” and others again throw him
who are agreeable at dinner, but throw him
into such a ferment before departing, that he
flings his son's law-books out the window,
swearing, “no son of his shall become a rascally
attorney.” Finally, the sheriff visits him,
and then he is—ruined. His horses gone—
his negroes, his lands, his father's house—all
departed from him, the proud old man turns
his face to the wilderness—to the furthest
wilderness—where he may, with less shame,
descend to the labour that is to repair his
broken fortunes.
And here he is, at last, upon the Mississippi,
his wilderness in sight, his eye turned
back like his childrens', his brain busy with
the old days, his heart—ay, all their hearts,
full of home and Virginia. You may read
his thoughts: he thinks of his proud domains,
the inheritance of his children, now in the
possession of a stranger; of the log-cabin, in
which he must bury the daughter of his pride
and affections; and his heart sickens at the
vision.
His sons remember their horses and
hounds, their balls and their barbecues, their
wealth and influence, their brilliant hopes and
towering prospects, and contrast them with
are hastening, never, perhaps, to emerge from
it. Their sister thinks—of what? Ah, yes,
of her lover! She hears his footstep on the
gravel-walk at home, the tramp of his horse
in the old avenue, his vows of affection are
still ringing in her ears—ringing, while the
rush of the Mississippi against his farther
bank, and the crash of falling trees, awake
her to a consciousness of separation.
The boat touches the strand: they are in
Arkansas; where fancy as readily pictures
the final history of the whole family. The
father will prosper; he will be again a wealthy
planter, with a hundred negroes around him;
and in ten years he will go to Congress; not
that he loves Congress any more than ever,
but that he may take a peep at Virginia, on
the way, and show “the knaves who ruined
him” how they have made his fortune; they
shall see him richer, and higher, and prouder,
than ever. His sons—alas, the second one
will die in a year, of fever; the first-born, so
fierce of aspect and temper, will, still earlier,
perhaps, perish in a brawl, the victim of a
bowie-knife. The boy, under the gentle influence
of his sister, will grow up less wild
and wayward, and in him the father will be
As for the daughter, so melancholy, yet so
beautiful, she will—marry and forget her
sorrows.
| Peter Pilgrim, or, A rambler's recollections | |