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John Muir. Frederick Turner
Читать онлайн.Название John Muir
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782114314
Автор произведения Frederick Turner
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
So they kept their way through the oak openings, skirting the streams with their heavy thickets. Until a few years earlier, this portion of the country had been all but unknown to whites, but now a few settlements gave some cheer to anxious travelers—though probably the Muir boys were delighted by the areas they passed through that seemed most untouched. A man named Hyland had recently broken a wagon road from Watertown north to the center of Dodge County and had settled on the prairie there. Others had followed so that houses and barns now dotted the prairie, and all the quarter sections along Hyland’s road had been taken. At Beaver Dam there was another small settlement and a sawmill in operation.
They went on through the sedgy meadows of southeastern Columbia County, then prairie and oak openings with the country beginning to roll now into knolls and hills, until at last they arrived at Kingston, hardly more than a huddle of houses with an inn at the crossroads. Alexander Gray, a bluff, hearty Scots settler near Kingston, readily agreed to help Daniel Muir locate on a suitable piece of land. Gray’s farm was on a section road and he knew the lines of the immediate locale and the qualities of the soil. While their father was off on this business, John and David plunged into their own business of establishing childhood’s intimacy with their new surroundings. Still in the fiction of America as a wild and wonderful playground, they explored the Grays’ whitewashed farmhouse, the barn and outbuildings, the creek that ran behind—smooth and brown-watered with black snags on which snapping turtles sunned and drowsed. They played in the sandy road shaded by bur oaks, white oaks, and shagbark hickories. At the edges of the road ran remnant lines of the big blue stem flower that had once ruled the open lands of the whole Midwest. Meanwhile, Sarah was introduced to reality as Mrs. Gray gave her beginning lessons in the life drudgeries of a farm woman.
Gray and Daniel Muir picked out eighty acres of open woodland about six miles to the northwest on a knoll that sloped westward down through a glacial meadow laced with brooks to a small lake. On the brow of the knoll, Gray, Muir, and some neighbors joined in the quick construction of a bur-oak shanty that would serve as shelter for Daniel and the three children while a more substantial house was framed for the rest of the family.
In the meantime, life was a glorious and innocent exploration for the two immigrant boys from a Scots fishing village. They raced through the meadow, prying into tufts of grass and bushes in search of nests and burrows; climbed trees to inspect the birds’ nests they had spied; poked along the brooks, marveling at the profusion of snakes, frogs, and turtles. Muir recalled, “This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—”
how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we were still at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness!
In that spring of 1849, no white settler lived within a four-mile radius of the Muirs, nor was there a single man-made road in the vicinity other than the old Indian trail that ran through the marshy lands along the Fox River to the town of Portage. To children accustomed to the countryside of the Lammermuirs with its old farms and stone-walled fields, this new landscape must have appeared shaggy indeed, a true wilderness. Strange and wild-seeming birds like nighthawks and partridges bellowed and drummed in the woods. Fireflies spangled the unbroken fields at dusk. And on the far side of the long, narrow lake an occasional drift of wood smoke marked the encampment of some wandering Indian hunter: there were yet some Winnebagoes to be seen passing on their disconsolate ways through what had lately been their homeland. But the Muirs had not settled in the midst of a wilderness but instead on the edge of a rapidly advancing civilization, one that in Wisconsin was tearing into the landscape and transforming it into a recognizable, functioning part of an increasingly industrialized republic. In this year the line of white settlement had moved considerably west of where the Muirs now were, though to be sure north and northwest of their homestead was still Indian territory.
In the two hundred years since Jean Nicolet had met the Winnebagoes in 1634—wearing his Chinese damask to be prepared for oriental potentates—Wisconsin had remained terra incognita to white America. Throughout much of this time the Winnebago, Menominee, Ojibwa, and Sac and Fox tribes had hunted, fished, gathered grain, planted corn, and buried their dead in ancestral lands, largely undisturbed by all but the advance men of civilization: stray white hunters, fur traders, and voyageurs, singing as they flashed their canoe paddles through the waters at forty strokes to the minute.
Nearly two centuries after Nicolet arrived, a census of the territory found little more than 3,000 whites among about 24,000 Indians. All this changed and rapidly so after the Black Hawk War in 1832. The old chiefs people, the Sac and Fox, the Winnebago, and other tribes who were marginally implicated in the doomed resistance effort, were all severely punished. The decisive and bloody conclusion to the war and the subsequent tours on which Black Hawk was taken as a prisoner of war advertised the openness of new lands and the availability of titles to them.
By the following year, the forced land cessions of the tribes had opened all the territory south of a slanting line from Green Bay to Prairie du Chien to survey and settlement, and the Wisconsin land rush was on. Just as “Ohio Fever” had once threatened the depopulation of Connecticut, so now this newest contagion threatened to draw off not only the best of Ohio but even more migrants from the old northeast and western New York State. Organized as a territory in 1836 with a white population of 11,000, Wisconsin had 31,000 by 1840. By 1850 it had 305,000, and by the end of that decade it would have more than doubled this figure—a growth rate unchallenged anywhere except in California.
The transmogrification of the state from the year of John Muir’s birth to his arrival there is an even more striking illustration of the multiform process that was changing the face and character of a continent. Black Hawk had died in the year Muir was born (and had been buried in the alien regalia of his conquerors), and in that same year one William Smith, a Philadelphia gentleman, published an account of his recent travels through the new territory. He mentioned the wild fecundity of the place, the herds of deer, the flocks of prairie hens that would start up under the hooves of the horses, the huge, luscious strawberries of the prairies, and the abundance of agricultural and mineral wealth just waiting to be tapped by enterprising settlers who were unafraid to plant themselves beyond the fringe of settlement.
Sketching the bright prospects of these new lands, Smith said the settler’s land was
purchased at the government price of one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre: land of the richest soil in the world. His prairie ground awaits immediate cultivation. His crops yield him from thirty-five to fifty bushels of fall wheat per acre, and from twenty to thirty bushels of spring wheat is calculated on as a sure crop; barley will yield from forty to sixty bushels, and oats from fifty to seventy-five bushels ….
This utopia lay in the future, however, for when Smith made his tour Wisconsin was indeed beyond the fringe, and only the lead-mining region of its southwestern corner had anything that could be said to be a dense population. Milwaukee was only a small village, the huge pineries of the north woods were all but unknown, and lumber for downstate construction was actually imported. Fort Winnebago (built under the supervision of U.S. Army Lieutenant Jefferson Davis) was the northernmost outpost of white civilization.
By the time Fredrika Bremer arrived in 1849 the changes were astonishing. Milwaukee was now a populous port of 20,000, and Bremer found immigrant groups scattered throughout the lower half of the state. They were thinly scattered, to be sure, and the state’s roads were rough to the point of threatening bodily injury to stagecoach travelers, but Bremer also observed that it was “remarkable that in all directions throughout this young country, along these rough roads, which are no roads at all, run these electric [telegraph] wires from tree to tree, from post to post, along the prairie land, and bring towns and villages into communication.” Milwaukeee was thus connected to Chicago and to the eastern seaboard.
To some the telegraph seemed an expensive toy, but its presence