The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
J >> John Muir >> The Story of My Boyhood and YouthAt first, wheat, corn, and potatoes were the principal crops we
raised; wheat especially. But in four or five years the soil was so
exhausted that only five or six bushels an acre, even in the better
fields, was obtained, although when first ploughed twenty and
twenty-five bushels was about the ordinary yield. More attention was
then paid to corn, but without fertilizers the corn-crop also became
very meagre. At last it was discovered that English clover would grow
on even the exhausted fields, and that when ploughed under and planted
with corn, or even wheat, wonderful crops were raised. This caused a
complete change in farming methods; the farmers raised fertilizing
clover, planted corn, and fed the crop to cattle and hogs.
But no crop raised in our wilderness was so surprisingly rich and
sweet and purely generous to us boys and, indeed, to everybody as the
watermelons and muskmelons. We planted a large patch on a sunny
hill-slope the very first spring, and it seemed miraculous that a few
handfuls of little flat seeds should in a few months send up a hundred
wagon-loads of crisp, sumptuous, red-hearted and yellow-hearted fruits
covering all the hill. We soon learned to know when they were in their
prime, and when over-ripe and mealy. Also that if a second crop was
taken from the same ground without fertilizing it, the melons would be
small and what we called soapy; that is, soft and smooth, utterly
uncrisp, and without a trace of the lively freshness and sweetness of
those raised on virgin soil. Coming in from the farm work at noon, the
half-dozen or so of melons we had placed in our cold spring were a
glorious luxury that only weary barefooted farm boys can ever know.
Spring was not very trying as to temperature, and refreshing rains
fell at short intervals. The work of ploughing commenced as soon as
the frost was out of the ground. Corn-and potato-planting and the
sowing of spring wheat was comparatively light work, while the nesting
birds sang cheerily, grass and flowers covered the marshes and meadows
and all the wild, uncleared parts of the farm, and the trees put forth
their new leaves, those of the oaks forming beautiful purple masses as
if every leaf were a petal; and with all this we enjoyed the mild
soothing winds, the humming of innumerable small insects and hylas,
and the freshness and fragrance of everything. Then, too, came the
wonderful passenger pigeons streaming from the south, and flocks of
geese and cranes, filling all the sky with whistling wings.
The summer work, on the contrary, was deadly heavy, especially
harvesting and corn-hoeing. All the ground had to be hoed over for
the first few years, before father bought cultivators or small
weed-covering ploughs, and we were not allowed a moment's rest. The
hoes had to be kept working up and down as steadily as if they were
moved by machinery. Ploughing for winter wheat was comparatively easy,
when we walked barefooted in the furrows, while the fine autumn tints
kindled in the woods, and the hillsides were covered with golden
pumpkins.
In summer the chores were grinding scythes, feeding the animals,
chopping stove-wood, and carrying water up the hill from the spring on
the edge of the meadow, etc. Then breakfast, and to the harvest or
hay-field. I was foolishly ambitious to be first in mowing and
cradling, and by the time I was sixteen led all the hired men. An hour
was allowed at noon for dinner and more chores. We stayed in the field
until dark, then supper, and still more chores, family worship, and to
bed; making altogether a hard, sweaty day of about sixteen or
seventeen hours. Think of that, ye blessed eight-hour-day laborers!
In winter father came to the foot of the stairs and called us at six
o'clock to feed the horses and cattle, grind axes, bring in wood, and
do any other chores required, then breakfast, and out to work in the
mealy, frosty snow by daybreak, chopping, fencing, etc. So in general
our winter work was about as restless and trying as that of the
long-day summer. No matter what the weather, there was always
something to do. During heavy rains or snowstorms we worked in the
barn, shelling corn, fanning wheat, thrashing with the flail, making
axe-handles or ox-yokes, mending things, or sprouting and sorting
potatoes in the cellar.
No pains were taken to diminish or in any way soften the natural
hardships of this pioneer farm life; nor did any of the Europeans seem
to know how to find reasonable ease and comfort if they would. The
very best oak and hickory fuel was embarrassingly abundant and cost
nothing but cutting and common sense; but instead of hauling great
heart-cheering loads of it for wide, open, all-welcoming,
climate-changing, beauty-making, Godlike ingle-fires, it was hauled
with weary heart-breaking industry into fences and waste places to get
it out of the way of the plough, and out of the way of doing good. The
only fire for the whole house was the kitchen stove, with a fire-box
about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep,--scant
space for three or four small sticks, around which in hard zero
weather all the family of ten persons shivered, and beneath which in
the morning we found our socks and coarse, soggy boots frozen solid.
We were not allowed to start even this despicable little fire in its
black box to thaw them. No, we had to squeeze our throbbing, aching,
chilblained feet into them, causing greater pain than toothache, and
hurry out to chores. Fortunately the miserable chilblain pain began to
abate as soon as the temperature of our feet approached the
freezing-point, enabling us in spite of hard work and hard frost to
enjoy the winter beauty,--the wonderful radiance of the snow when it
was starry with crystals, and the dawns and the sunsets and white
noons, and the cheery, enlivening company of the brave chickadees and
nuthatches.
The winter stars far surpassed those of our stormy Scotland in
brightness, and we gazed and gazed as though we had never seen stars
before. Oftentimes the heavens were made still more glorious by
auroras, the long lance rays, called "Merry Dancers" in Scotland,
streaming with startling tremulous motion to the zenith. Usually the
electric auroral light is white or pale yellow, but in the third or
fourth of our Wisconsin winters there was a magnificently colored
aurora that was seen and admired over nearly all the continent. The
whole sky was draped in graceful purple and crimson folds glorious
beyond description. Father called us out into the yard in front of the
house where we had a wide view, crying, "Come! Come, mother! Come,
bairns! and see the glory of God. All the sky is clad in a robe of red
light. Look straight up to the crown where the folds are gathered.
Hush and wonder and adore, for surely this is the clothing of the Lord
Himself, and perhaps He will even now appear looking down from his
high heaven." This celestial show was far more glorious than anything
we had ever yet beheld, and throughout that wonderful winter hardly
anything else was spoken of.
We even enjoyed the snowstorms, the thronging crystals, like daisies,
coming down separate and distinct, were very different from the tufted
flakes we enjoyed so much in Scotland, when we ran into the midst of
the slow-falling feathery throng shouting with enthusiasm: "Jennie's
plucking her doos! Jennie's plucking her doos (doves)!"
Nature has many ways of thinning and pruning and trimming her
forests,--lightning-strokes, heavy snow, and storm-winds to shatter
and blow down whole trees here and there or break off branches as
required. The results of these methods I have observed in different
forests, but only once have I seen pruning by rain. The rain froze on
the trees as it fell and grew so thick and heavy that many of them
lost a third or more of their branches. The view of the woods after
the storm had passed and the sun shone forth was something never to be
forgotten. Every twig and branch and rugged trunk was encased in pure
crystal ice, and each oak and hickory and willow became a fairy
crystal palace. Such dazzling brilliance, such effects of white light
and irised light glowing and flashing I had never seen before, nor
have I since. This sudden change of the leafless woods to glowing
silver was, like the great aurora, spoken of for years, and is one of
the most beautiful of the many pictures that enriches my life. And
besides the great shows there were thousands of others even in the
coldest weather manifesting the utmost fineness and tenderness of
beauty and affording noble compensation for hardship and pain.
One of the most striking of the winter sounds was the loud roaring and
rumbling of the ice on our lake, from its shrinking and expanding
with the changes of the weather. The fishermen who were catching
pickerel said that they had no luck when this roaring was going on
above the fish. I remember how frightened we boys were when on one of
our New Year holidays we were taking a walk on the ice and heard for
the first time the sudden rumbling roar beneath our feet and running
on ahead of us, creaking and whooping as if all the ice eighteen or
twenty inches thick was breaking.
In the neighborhood of our Wisconsin farm there were extensive swamps
consisting in great part of a thick sod of very tough carex roots
covering thin, watery lakes of mud. They originated in glacier lakes
that were gradually overgrown. This sod was so tough that oxen with
loaded wagons could be driven over it without cutting down through it,
although it was afloat. The carpenters who came to build our frame
house, noticing how the sedges sunk beneath their feet, said that if
they should break through, they would probably be well on their way
to California before touching bottom. On the contrary, all these
lake-basins are shallow as compared with their width. When we went
into the Wisconsin woods there was not a single wheel-track or
cattle-track. The only man-made road was an Indian trail along the Fox
River between Portage and Packwauckee Lake. Of course the deer, foxes,
badgers, coons, skunks, and even the squirrels had well-beaten tracks
from their dens and hiding-places in thickets, hollow trees, and the
ground, but they did not reach far, and but little noise was made by
the soft-footed travelers in passing over them, only a slight rustling
and swishing among fallen leaves and grass.
Corduroying the swamps formed the principal part of road-making among
the early settlers for many a day. At these annual road-making
gatherings opportunity was offered for discussion of the news,
politics, religion, war, the state of the crops, comparative
advantages of the new country over the old, and so forth, but the
principal opportunities, recurring every week, were the hours after
Sunday church services. I remember hearing long talks on the wonderful
beauty of the Indian corn; the wonderful melons, so wondrous fine for
"sloken a body on hot days"; their contempt for tomatoes, so fine to
look at with their sunny colors and so disappointing in taste; the
miserable cucumbers the "Yankee bodies" ate, though tasteless as
rushes; the character of the Yankees, etcetera. Then there were long
discussions about the Russian war, news of which was eagerly gleaned
from Greeley's "New York Tribune"; the great battles of the Alma, the
charges at Balaklava and Inkerman; the siege of Sebastopol; the
military genius of Todleben; the character of Nicholas; the character
of the Russian soldier, his stubborn bravery, who for the first time
in history withstood the British bayonet charges; the probable outcome
of the terrible war; the fate of Turkey, and so forth.
Very few of our old-country neighbors gave much heed to what are
called spirit-rappings. On the contrary, they were regarded as a sort
of sleight-of-hand humbug. Some of these spirits seem to be stout
able-bodied fellows, judging by the weights they lift and the heavy
furniture they bang about. But they do no good work that I know of;
never saw wood, grind corn, cook, feed the hungry, or go to the help
of poor anxious mothers at the bedsides of their sick children. I
noticed when I was a boy that it was not the strongest characters who
followed so-called mediums. When a rapping-storm was at its height in
Wisconsin, one of our neighbors, an old Scotchman, remarked, "Thay
puir silly medium-bodies may gang to the deil wi' their rappin'
speerits, for they dae nae gude, and I think the deil's their
fayther."
Although in the spring of 1849 there was no other settler within a
radius of four miles of our Fountain Lake farm, in three or four years
almost every quarter-section of government land was taken up, mostly
by enthusiastic homeseekers from Great Britain, with only here and
there Yankee families from adjacent states, who had come drifting
indefinitely westward in covered wagons, seeking their fortunes like
winged seeds; all alike striking root and gripping the glacial drift
soil as naturally as oak and hickory trees; happy and hopeful,
establishing homes and making wider and wider fields in the hospitable
wilderness. The axe and plough were kept very busy; cattle, horses,
sheep, and pigs multiplied; barns and corn-cribs were filled up, and
man and beast were well fed; a schoolhouse was built, which was used
also for a church; and in a very short time the new country began to
look like an old one.
Comparatively few of the first settlers suffered from serious
accidents. One of our neighbors had a finger shot off, and on a
bitter, frosty night had to be taken to a surgeon in Portage, in a
sled drawn by slow, plodding oxen, to have the shattered stump
dressed. Another fell from his wagon and was killed by the wheel
passing over his body. An acre of ground was reserved and fenced for
graves, and soon consumption came to fill it. One of the saddest
instances was that of a Scotch family from Edinburgh, consisting of a
father, son, and daughter, who settled on eighty acres of land within
half a mile of our place. The daughter died of consumption the third
year after their arrival, the son one or two years later, and at last
the father followed his two children. Thus sadly ended bright hopes
and dreams of a happy home in rich and free America.
Another neighbor, I remember, after a lingering illness died of the
same disease in midwinter, and his funeral was attended by the
neighbors in sleighs during a driving snowstorm when the thermometer
was fifteen or twenty degrees below zero. The great white plague
carried off another of our near neighbors, a fine Scotchman, the
father of eight promising boys, when he was only about forty-five
years of age. Most of those who suffered from this disease seemed
hopeful and cheerful up to a very short time before their death, but
Mr. Reid, I remember, on one of his last visits to our house, said
with brave resignation: "I know that never more in this world can I
be well, but I must just submit. I must just submit."
One of the saddest deaths from other causes than consumption was that
of a poor feeble-minded man whose brother, a sturdy, devout, severe
puritan, was a very hard taskmaster. Poor half-witted Charlie was kept
steadily at work,--although he was not able to do much, for his body
was about as feeble as his mind. He never could be taught the right
use of an axe, and when he was set to chopping down trees for firewood
he feebly hacked and chipped round and round them, sometimes spending
several days in nibbling down a tree that a beaver might have gnawed
down in half the time. Occasionally when he had an extra large tree to
chop, he would go home and report that the tree was too tough and
strong for him and that he could never make it fall. Then his brother,
calling him a useless creature, would fell it with a few well-directed
strokes, and leave Charlie to nibble away at it for weeks trying to
make it into stove-wood.
His guardian brother, delighting in hard work and able for anything,
was as remarkable for strength of body and mind as poor Charlie for
childishness. All the neighbors pitied Charlie, especially the women,
who never missed an opportunity to give him kind words, cookies, and
pie; above all, they bestowed natural sympathy on the poor imbecile as
if he were an unfortunate motherless child. In particular, his nearest
neighbors, Scotch Highlanders, warmly welcomed him to their home and
never wearied in doing everything that tender sympathy could suggest.
To those friends he ran gladly at every opportunity. But after years
of suffering from overwork and illness his feeble health failed, and
he told his Scotch friends one day that he was not able to work any
more or do anything that his brother wanted him to do, that he was
tired of life, and that he had come to thank them for their kindness
and to bid them good-bye, for he was going to drown himself in Muir's
lake. "Oh, Charlie! Charlie!" they cried, "you mustn't talk that way.
Cheer up! You will soon be stronger. We all love you. Cheer up! Cheer
up! And always come here whenever you need anything."
"Oh, no! my friends," he pathetically replied, "I know you love me,
but I can't cheer up any more. My heart's gone, and I want to die."
Next day, when Mr. Anderson, a carpenter whose house was on the west
shore of our lake, was going to a spring he saw a man wade out through
the rushes and lily-pads and throw himself forward into deep water.
This was poor Charlie. Fortunately, Mr. Anderson had a skiff close by,
and as the distance was not great he reached the broken-hearted
imbecile in time to save his life, and after trying to cheer him took
him home to his brother. But even this terrible proof of despair
failed to soften his brother. He seemed to regard the attempt at
suicide simply as a crime calculated to bring harm to religion. Though
snatched from the lake to his bed, poor Charlie lived only a few days
longer. A physician who was called when his health first became
seriously impaired reported that he was suffering from Bright's
disease. After all was over, the stoical brother walked over to the
neighbor who had saved Charlie from drowning, and, after talking on
ordinary affairs, crops, the weather, etc., said in a careless tone:
"I have a little job of carpenter work for you, Mr. Anderson." "What
is it, Mr. ----?" "I want you to make a coffin." "A coffin!" said the
startled carpenter. "Who is dead?" "Charlie," he coolly replied. All
the neighbors were in tears over the poor child man's fate. But,
strange to say, the brother who had faithfully cared for him
controlled and concealed all his natural affection as incompatible
with sound faith.
The mixed lot of settlers around us offered a favorable field for
observation of the different kinds of people of our own race. We were
swift to note the way they behaved, the differences in their religion
and morals, and in their ways of drawing a living from the same kind
of soil under the same general conditions; how they protected
themselves from the weather; how they were influenced by new doctrines
and old ones seen in new lights in preaching, lecturing, debating,
bringing up their children, etc., and how they regarded the Indians,
those first settlers and owners of the ground that was being made into
farms.
I well remember my father's discussing with a Scotch neighbor, a Mr.
George Mair, the Indian question as to the rightful ownership of the
soil. Mr. Mair remarked one day that it was pitiful to see how the
unfortunate Indians, children of Nature, living on the natural
products of the soil, hunting, fishing, and even cultivating small
corn-fields on the most fertile spots, were now being robbed of their
lands and pushed ruthlessly back into narrower and narrower limits by
alien races who were cutting off their means of livelihood. Father
replied that surely it could never have been the intention of God to
allow Indians to rove and hunt over so fertile a country and hold it
forever in unproductive wildness, while Scotch and Irish and English
farmers could put it to so much better use. Where an Indian required
thousands of acres for his family, these acres in the hands of
industrious, God-fearing farmers would support ten or a hundred times
more people in a far worthier manner, while at the same time helping
to spread the gospel.
Mr. Mair urged that such farming as our first immigrants were
practicing was in many ways rude and full of the mistakes of
ignorance, yet, rude as it was, and ill-tilled as were most of our
Wisconsin farms by unskillful, inexperienced settlers who had been
merchants and mechanics and servants in the old countries, how should
we like to have specially trained and educated farmers drive us out of
our homes and farms, such as they were, making use of the same
argument, that God could never have intended such ignorant,
unprofitable, devastating farmers as we were to occupy land upon which
scientific farmers could raise five or ten times as much on each acre
as we did? And I well remember thinking that Mr. Mair had the better
side of the argument. It then seemed to me that, whatever the final
outcome might be, it was at this stage of the fight only an example of
the rule of might with but little or no thought for the right or
welfare of the other fellow if he were the weaker; that "they should
take who had the power, and they should keep who can," as Wordsworth
makes the marauding Scottish Highlanders say.
Many of our old neighbors toiled and sweated and grubbed themselves
into their graves years before their natural dying days, in getting a
living on a quarter-section of land and vaguely trying to get rich,
while bread and raiment might have been serenely won on less than a
fourth of this land, and time gained to get better acquainted with
God.
I was put to the plough at the age of twelve, when my head reached but
little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater
part of the ploughing. It was hard work for so small a boy;
nevertheless, as good ploughing was exacted from me as if I were a
man, and very soon I had to become a good ploughman, or rather
ploughboy. None could draw a straighter furrow. For the first few
years the work was particularly hard on account of the tree-stumps
that had to be dodged. Later the stumps were all dug and chopped out
to make way for the McCormick reaper, and because I proved to be the
best chopper and stump-digger I had nearly all of it to myself. It was
dull, hard work leaning over on my knees all day, chopping out those
tough oak and hickory stumps, deep down below the crowns of the big
roots. Some, though fortunately not many, were two feet or more in
diameter.
And as I was the eldest boy, the greater part of all the other hard
work of the farm quite naturally fell on me. I had to split rails for
long lines of zigzag fences. The trees that were tall enough and
straight enough to afford one or two logs ten feet long were used for
rails, the others, too knotty or cross-grained, were disposed of in
log and cordwood fences. Making rails was hard work and required no
little skill. I used to cut and split a hundred a day from our short,
knotty oak timber, swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore
hands, from early morning to night. Father was not successful as a
rail-splitter. After trying the work with me a day or two, he in
despair left it all to me. I rather liked it, for I was proud of my
skill, and tried to believe that I was as tough as the timber I
mauled, though this and other heavy jobs stopped my growth and earned
for me the title "Runt of the family."
In those early days, long before the great labor-saving machines came
to our help, almost everything connected with wheat-raising abounded
in trying work,--cradling in the long, sweaty dog-days, raking and
binding, stacking, thrashing,--and it often seemed to me that our
fierce, over-industrious way of getting the grain from the ground was
too closely connected with grave-digging. The staff of life, naturally
beautiful, oftentimes suggested the grave-digger's spade. Men and
boys, and in those days even women and girls, were cut down while
cutting the wheat. The fat folk grew lean and the lean leaner, while
the rosy cheeks brought from Scotland and other cool countries across
the sea faded to yellow like the wheat. We were all made slaves
through the vice of over-industry. The same was in great part true in
making hay to keep the cattle and horses through the long winters. We
were called in the morning at four o'clock and seldom got to bed
before nine, making a broiling, seething day seventeen hours long
loaded with heavy work, while I was only a small stunted boy; and a
few years later my brothers David and Daniel and my older sisters had
to endure about as much as I did. In the harvest dog-days and
dog-nights and dog-mornings, when we arose from our clammy beds, our
cotton shirts clung to our backs as wet with sweat as the
bathing-suits of swimmers, and remained so all the long, sweltering
days. In mowing and cradling, the most exhausting of all the farm
work, I made matters worse by foolish ambition in keeping ahead of the
hired men. Never a warning word was spoken of the dangers of
over-work. On the contrary, even when sick we were held to our tasks
as long as we could stand. Once in harvest-time I had the mumps and
was unable to swallow any food except milk, but this was not allowed
to make any difference, while I staggered with weakness and sometimes
fell headlong among the sheaves. Only once was I allowed to leave the
harvest-field--when I was stricken down with pneumonia. I lay gasping
for weeks, but the Scotch are hard to kill and I pulled through. No
physician was called, for father was an enthusiast, and always said
and believed that God and hard work were by far the best doctors.