The old man shouldered his rifle, and inviting me to "drop into his cabin, up the creek," bid me "good morning, stranger."
Reader, such was the scene presented to my eye the day I first looked upon the piece of wild land upon which I finally settled and improved. I had just arrived from an eastern village, where I was born, and "brought up," as the phrase is. A somewhat broken fortune and breaking health had driven me from it, with a moderate family, to seek a spot elsewhere; and I resolved to try the Great West, that paradise (if the word of people who never saw it is to be taken) where the surplus population of a portion of the world have found a home.
The change was great. But great as it was, I resolved to endure it. So, at it I went. I procured "help," girdled the trees, put a breaking team of twelve yoke of cattle on the ground, tore it up, fenced the land, raised a log-house, and in the fall I had a crop of wheat growing, the withered oak trees standing guard over it. My family, consisting of a wife and three children, a boy of eight, and two girls of twelve and ten, were removed to their new quarters, and I had thus fairly begun the world again, and all things were as new about me as if I had just been born into it.
During the summer, I had an opportunity of studying the general character of the inhabitants of Puddleford, and its surrounding country population. Like most western settlements, it was made up of all kinds of materials, all sorts of folks, holding every opinion. More than a dozen states had contributed to make up its people. Society was exceedingly miscellaneous. The keen Yankee, the obstinate Pennsylvanian, and the reckless Southerner were there. Each one of these persons had brought along with him his early habits and associations – his own views of business, law, and religion. When thrown together on public questions, this composition boiled up like a mixture of salts and soda. Factions, of course, were formed among those whose early education and habits were congenial; divisions were created, and a war of prejudice and opinion went on from month to month, and year to year. The New England Yankee stood about ten years ahead of the Pennsylvania German in all his ideas of progress, while the latter stood back, dogged and sullen, attached to the customs of his fathers. Another general feature consisted in this, that there was no permanency to society. The inhabitants were constantly changing, pouring out and in, like the waters of a river, so that a complete revolution took place every four or five years. Everybody who remained in Puddleford expected to remove somewhere else very soon. They were merely sojourners, not residents. There was no attachment to, or veneration for, the past of Puddleford, because Puddleford had no past. The ties of memory reached to older states. There stood the church that sheltered the infant years of Puddleford's population, and there swung the bell that tolled their fathers and fathers' fathers to the tomb. There was the long line of graves, running back a hundred years, where the sister of yesterday, and the ancestor whose virtues were only known through tradition, were buried. There tottered the old homestead which had passed through the family for generations, filled with heirlooms that had become sacred. The school-house was there, where the village boys shouted together. Looking back from a new country, where all is confusion, to an old one, where figures have the stability of a painting, objects which were once trivial start out upon the canvas in bolder relief. The venerable, gray-headed pastor, who appeared regularly in the village pulpit for half a century, to impart the word of life, rises in the memory, and stands fixed there, like a statue. The quaint cut of his coat, the neat tie of his neckcloth, the spectacles resting on the tip of his nose, his hums and haws, his eye of reproof, his gestures of vengeance, are now living things – are preaching still. We see again the changing crowd, that year after year went in and out of that holy place; the spot where the old deacon sat, his head resting on a pillar, his tranquil face turned upward, his mouth open, enjoying a doze as he listened to the sermon. We recollect the gay bridal, the solemn funeral, the buoyant face of the one, the still, cold one of the other. We even remember the lame old sexton, who rang the bell and went limping up to the burying-ground, with a spade upon his shoulder. Even he, of no consequence when seen every day, is transformed by distance, and mellowed by memory, into a real being. And then there are the hills, and streams, and waterfalls, that shed their music through our boyish souls, until they became a part of our very existence. No man ever lived who entirely forgot these things, suppressed though they might be by the cares and anxieties of maturer years. And no circumstance so likely to bring them all up, glowing afresh, as a removal to a new country. Of course, no one was attached to Puddleford, as a locality, any more than the wandering Arab is attached to the particular spot where he pitches his tent and feeds his camels.
Another general feature seemed to be the strange character of a large part of the population. Puddleford was filled with bankrupts, who had fled from their eastern creditors, anxious for peace of mind and bread enough to eat. Like decayed vessels, that had been tempest-tossed and finally condemned, these hulks seemed to be lying up in ordinary in the wilderness. Puddleford was to that class a kind of hospital. This man, upon inquiry, I found had rolled in luxury, but a turn in flour one day blew him sky-high. Another failed on a land speculation. Another bought more goods than he paid for. Another had been mixed up in a fraud. Another had been actually guilty of crime. The farming community were generally free from these charges; but Puddleford proper was not.
The "Colonel," as we called him, was a fair specimen of the bankrupt class. He was one of those unfortunate beings who was well enough started in the world; but after having been tossed and buffeted around by his own extravagance, he was finally driven into the forest. He was educated, polished, proud, and poor. He had sunk two or three fortunes, earned by somebody else, chasing pleasure around the world. His reputation having become soiled, and his pockets emptied, he concluded – to use his own language – to "hide himself from his enemies and die a kind of civil death." "Men," said the Colonel, "are naturally robbers, and it is safer to run than fight with them." I have heard him declare, in a jocose way, that he was the most "injured man living; for the whole human family," he said, "set to and picked his pockets, and now the public ought to support him." He said, "he couldn't see why the government didn't pass laws for the relief of cases like his; for a government is good for nothing that fails to support its people. Starvation in a republic would be a disgrace, and ought not to be permitted." The Colonel said "there was no use in fighting destiny – no one man can do it – and it was his destiny to be poor." He said he "had no place to remove to, and that he couldn't get there if he had;" that he was "like an old pump that needs a pail of water thrown in every time it is used to set it a-going."
The Colonel resided in the village of Puddleford. His family was composed of a wife and two daughters, a couple of dashing girls, who looked like birds of fine plumage that had been driven by a storm beyond their latitude. His household furniture was made up of the fag-ends of this and that, which had somehow escaped a half a dozen sheriff's sales. His family wardrobe had been rescued in the same way, and contained all the fashions of the last twenty-five years. Here and there were scattered some plain articles of western manufacture, by way of contrast. Three shilling chairs stood on a faded Brussels carpet; an unpainted white-wood table supported a silver tea-set; thus, the faded splendor of the past contrasted with the rustic simplicity of the present. One thing I must not overlook: the Colonel had an old tattered carriage that had followed him through good and evil report, his ups and downs of life. I have often been amused to see it roll along with a melancholy air of superiority, putting on the face of a good man in affliction. It was drawn by two diminutive Indian ponies, who would turn and look wildly at the antiquated thing, as if apprehensive of danger.
The Colonel kept an office, and pretended to act as a kind of land agent, and agent for insurance companies, and so on. He was never known to pay a debt; it being against his principles, as he used to say: besides, he said "his note would last a man ten times as long as the money; and they were not very uncurrent neither; for the justice of the peace at Puddleford had taken a very great many of them, and passed his judgment upon them for their full face."
But I will not go into particulars with the Puddlefordians at present. During the summer my acquaintance with Venison Styles had ripened into a deeper affection for the old hunter. I accepted his