Although he had kept it from his family all along, Mr. Curwood at last told them one night in the dead of winter. He had made the down payment on a farm down in Ohio, located near the villages of Vermillion, Joppa and Florence in Erie County.
It was to be a new life for them and since business had slacked off to such a point that he could barely make a decent living, both Mr. and Mrs. Curwood felt that he had made a good investment.
The next day Mrs. Curwood, Jimmie, his sister Cora and brother Edward began preparing to leave their old home. With what money he had received from the sale of his shop, Mr. Curwood paid all of his debts and at last had all of his business interests straightened out. Even though he was left with very little to begin his new life, he paid every bill which the family owed in Owosso.
A few days later the family began its pilgrimage to the new land of Ohio.
The little backwood’s town of Owosso thought a great deal of James Moran and Abigail Griffen Curwood and sorely hated to see them depart, despite the fact that they were taking with them one of the town’s biggest trouble makers. Still, regardless of what their outward appearances were toward Jimmie, deep within their hearts the neighbors and all who knew him, loved him.
The move from Michigan into Ohio was later to prove the most important change in all of young Jim Curwood’s life. Many things were to happen, many events to take place within the next five years that none of the Curwood family ever dreamed would happen.
When the family of five arrived at their little farm located not far from the cross-roads village of Joppa, it was in deep winter and their forty acres were covered with snow. The head of the family was highly elated over the prospects of his “sight-unseen” purchase and at once began making plans for it.
It was not until the arrival of spring, when the snows had cleared away, that Jimmie’s father found that he had purchased something which more closely resembled a stone quarry than a farm. As far as one could see there were nothing but stones and boulders all over the forty acres of his land.
One can easily imagine the thoughts that came into the elderly Mr. Curwood’s mind as he gazed out upon what he thought was to be his salvation. Instead of rich, fertile farmland, he had purchased a practically worthless land of stones.
One night at the supper table Mr. Curwood called upon his children to help him more than he had expected them to. The stones must be picked up and stacked in piles and the work of doing so must be left to the two young sons, monotonous, laborious and endless as it must have seemed to them.
Jimmie hated his daily task of picking up rocks from sunup to sundown, but he had enough foresight to realize that he had a job to do that must be done. So together, day in and day out, Jimmie and Ed picked up stones. Picked them up so their father could plough the fields and till the soil.
Life now was drab for Jimmie. Gone were the glorious, carefree days along the banks of the Shiawassee. In their place had come the ceaseless task of picking up stones and rolling huge boulders out of the way. No longer had he the ambition to ride astride Kate Russell’s huge bustle, nor to own a whole stock of bananas. Just as any young boy of seven years would feel, Jimmie hated and dreaded work, and especially this type. It seemed that the more stones he and his brother Ed would pick up, the more there were. For with every furrow that their father’s plough would turn over, there would always appear a fresh supply of rocks, both large and small.
The two boys piled stones into great stacks higher than their heads; they constructed stone fences and they piled rocks until there were stacks actually higher than the farmhouse itself. There were great heaps of stones all over the forty acres of land. As a matter of fact there was hardly enough room left to break up the ground anew and plant crops. It was rapidly and most assuredly developing into a serious situation. Then, suddenly, relief came from an unexpected source.
The highway department of Erie county came to their rescue and took 3,000 loads of the stones at ten cents a load. For at that time the county needed stones for road repair and for numerous other repair jobs.
With the arrival of summer came long hard months of hot, back-breaking toil. Jimmie and Ed wore thick, hard callouses upon their hands, their backs seemed as if they were about to break, and the sun bronzed them until they began to look like Indians. Many times during the long three summer months Jimmie became overheated by the sun and fell in his tracks in that summer of ’85. But work had to be done if success in their new venture of farming was to be accomplished. There was little grumbling from anyone now with the realization that they must work and save if they were to live during the coming winter.
Directly across the road from the Curwood farm stood the home of Hiram Fisher, a kindly old farmer, who had developed a beautiful homesite and whose yard was filled with maple and pine trees.
The Fisher family was not as large as the Curwood’s, for there was but one child, a very lovely daughter named Jeanne who was young Jimmie’s superior by five years. Perhaps her outstanding characteristic was the beautiful brown hair which fell in glossy waves down to her trim and fragile shoulders. It was the most lovely head of hair that Jimmie or his family had ever set eyes upon. It is indeed odd that a boy as young as he was should take much notice of a girl’s hair, but its bewitching beauty made him secretly admire it.
She would always part it in the middle and let it flow down to her shoulders in long flowing tresses. She was gloriously beautiful for her age.
As time went on and Jeanne and Jimmie became better acquainted, he adopted a nickname for her that was to remain with her all the days of her life. He affectionately called her “Whistling Jeanne,” because of the beautiful tunes she whistled almost constantly.
She alone was the inspiration which helped Jimmie to hold his head high when he felt blue or useless. For Jeanne offered him companionship, untiring encouragement and wonderful guidance. She inspired him to greater things in life. Jimmie often was heard to make that remark both as a child and later as a grown man.
It was about the time that Jeanne was nearing her twelfth birthday and Jimmie his seventh, that this thought came to him:
“No matter how hard the work is, and no matter what it might be, I shall always do my task thoroughly.”
The stones that he had picked up all spring and summer finally set Jimmie to serious thinking. Every now and then after he had worked an hour or two, he would walk over to a shade tree nearby and sit down to mop the grime and perspiration from his brow. Then he would look out over the long, fertile fields that were once not so fertile and resolve that he could do anything that he should set out to do, if only he would adjust and drive himself toward it. The look in his young eyes denoted that of an adventurer. The eyes for thrills and dangers of the unknown. Even at the age of seven years, young James Oliver Curwood had begun to wonder what lay just over the brink of the next ridge.
Then, as if no such thoughts had even come to him, he would return to his task of piling stones; but as he worked he would experience a thrill, a feeling such as he had never known before as he stooped down to pick up the fragments of boulders. True, it was monotonous there in the hot broiling sun, but to Jimmie, there now was something creative in that piling up of rocks—something of which he was justly proud.
“I experienced a greater thrill when I had done three piles than I did when I had but accomplished two.”
With the arrival of fall and early winter, James Curwood saw that the work his sons and he had done had been a success. His crops had all turned out good and his farm was now a thing of beauty instead of a stone quarry. It was quite obvious that the hard labor and toil his sons and he had administered had not been in vain. Mr. Curwood being an honest and God-fearing man, thanked his Maker for his family’s salvation.
Each afternoon that winter after a hard day’s work, “the three men of the family” would trudge up to the small, white house to be greeted by the good mother and a meal of wholesome,