University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

WHATEVER is incredible in this story is true.

The tale I have to tell will seem strange to
those who know little of the social life of the West at the
beginning of this century. These sharp contrasts of corn-shuckings
and camp-meetings, of wild revels followed
by wild revivals; these contacts of highwayman and
preacher; this mélange of picturesque simplicity, grotesque
humor and savage ferocity, of abandoned wickedness
and austere piety, can hardly seem real to those
who know the country now. But the books of biography
and reminiscence which preserve the memory of that
time more than justify what is marvelous in these pages.

Living, in early boyhood, on the very ground where
my grandfather—brave old Indian-fighter!—had defended
his family in a block-house built in a wilderness
by his own hands, I grew up familiar with this strange
wild life. At the age when other children hear fables
and fairy stories, my childish fancy was filled with
traditions of battles with Indians and highwaymen.
Instead of imaginary giant-killers, children then heard
of real Indian-slayers; instead of Blue-Beards, we
had Murrell and his robbers; instead of Little Red
Riding Hood's wolf, we were regaled with the daring
adventures of the generation before us, in conflict with
wild beasts on the very road we traveled to school. In

many households the old customs still held sway; the
wool was carded, spun, dyed, woven, cut and made up in
the house: the corn-shucking, wood-chopping, quilting,
apple-peeling and country “hoe-down” had not yet
fallen into disuse.

In a true picture of this life neither the Indian nor
the hunter is the center-piece, but the circuit-rider.
More than any one else, the early circuit preachers
brought order out of this chaos. In no other class was
the real heroic element so finely displayed. How do I
remember the forms and weather-beaten visages of the
old preachers, whose constitutions had conquered starvation
and exposure—who had survived swamps, alligators,
Indians, highway robbers and bilious fevers! How
was my boyish soul tickled with their anecdotes of
rude experience—how was my imagination wrought upon
by the recital of their hair-breadth escapes! How was
my heart set afire by their contagious religious enthusiasm,
so that at eighteen years of age I bestrode the
saddle-bags myself and laid upon a feeble frame the
heavy burden of emulating their toils! Surely I have a
right to celebrate them, since they came so near being
the death of me.

It is not possible to write of this heroic race of men
without enthusiasm. But nothing has been further from
my mind than the glorifying of a sect. If I were capable
of sectarian pride, I should not come upon the platform
of Christian union[1] to display it. There are those,
indeed, whose sectarian pride will be offended that I
have frankly shown the rude as well as the heroic side of
early Methodism. I beg they will remember the solemn

obligations of a novelist to tell the truth. Lawyers and
even ministers are permitted to speak entirely on one
side. But no man is worthy to be called a novelist
who does not endeavor with his whole soul to produce
the higher form of history, by writing truly of men as
they are, and dispassionately of those forms of life
that come within his scope.

Much as I have laughed at every sort of grotesquerie,
I could not treat the early religious life of the West
otherwise than with the most cordial sympathy and
admiration. And yet this is not a “religious novel,”
one in which all the bad people are as bad as they can
be, and all the good people a little better than they
can be. I have not even asked myself what may be
the “moral.” The story of any true life is wholesome,
if only the writer will tell it simply, keeping impertinent
preachment of his own out of the way.

Doubtless I shall hopelessly damage myself with
some good people by confessing in the start that, from
the first chapter to the last, this is a love-story. But it
is not my fault. It is God who made love so universal
that no picture of human life can be complete where
love is left out.