The Price of the Prairie: A Story of Kansas

by Margaret Hill McCarter

  CHAPTER I

  SPRINGVALE BY THE NEOSHO

  Sweeter to me than the salt sea spray, the fragrance of summer rains; Nearer my heart than the mighty hills are the wind-swept Kansas plains. Dearer the sight of a shy wild rose by the road-side's dusty way, Than all the splendor of poppy-fields ablaze in the sun of May. Gay as the bold poinsettia is, and the burden of pepper trees, The sunflower, tawny and gold and brown, is richer to me than these; And rising ever above the song of the hoarse, insistent sea, The voice of the prairie calling, calling me.

  --ESTHER M. CLARKE.

  Whenever I think of these broad Kansas plains I think also of Marjie. Icannot now remember the time when I did not care for her, but the daywhen O'mie first found it out is as clear to me as yesterday, althoughthat was more than forty years ago. O'mie was the reddest-haired,best-hearted boy that ever laughed in the face of Fortune and madefriends with Fate against the hardest odds. His real name was O'Meara,Thomas O'Meara, but we forgot that years ago.

  "If O'mie were set down in the middle of the Sahara Desert," my AuntCandace used to say, "there'd be an oasis a mile across by the next daynoon, with never failing water and green trees right in the middle ofit, and O'mie sitting under them drinking the water like it was Irishrum."

  O'mie would always grin at this saying and reply that, "by the nixt daynoon follerin' that, the rascally gover'mint at Washin'ton would comealong an' kick him out into the rid san', claimin' that that particularoasis was an Injun riservation, specially craayted by Providence fur thedirthy Osages,--the bastes!"

  O'mie hated the Indians, but he was a friend to all the rest of mankind.Indeed if it had not been for him I should not have had that limp in myright foot, for both of my feet would have been mouldering these manyyears under the curly mesquite of the Southwest plains. But that comeslater.

  We were all out on the prairie hunting for our cows that evening--theone when O'mie guessed my secret. Marjie's pony was heading straight tothe west, flying over the ground. The big red sun was slipping down aflame-wreathed sky, touching with fire the ragged pennons of ablue-black storm cloud hanging sullenly to the northward, and making anindescribable splendor in the far southwest.

  Riding hard after Marjie, coming at an angle from the bluff above thedraw, was an Osage Indian, huge as a giant, and frenzied with whiskey. Imust have turned a white despairing face toward my comrades, and I wasglad afterward that I was against the background of that flaming sunsetso that my features were in the shadow. It was then that O'mie, who wasnearest me, looking steadily in my eyes said in a low voice:

  "Bedad, Phil! so that's how it is wid ye, is it? Then we've got to killthat Injun jist fur grandeur."

  I knew O'mie for many years, and I never saw him show a quiver of fear,not even in those long weary days when, white and hollow-cheeked, hewaited for his last enemy, Death,--whom he vanquished, looking up intomy face with eyes of inexpressible peace, and murmuring softly,

  "Safe in the arms of Jasus."

  Old men are prone to ramble in their stories, and I am not old. To provethat, I must not jiggle with these heads and tails of Time, but I mustbegin earlier and follow down these eventful years as if I were a realnovel-writer with consecutive chapters to set down.

  Springvale by the Neosho was a favorite point for early settlers. Itnestled under the sheltered bluff on the west. There were never-failingsprings in the rocky outcrop. A magnificent grove of huge oak trees,most rare in the plains country, lined the river's banks and covered thefertile lowlands. It made a landmark of the spot, this beautiful naturalforest, and gave it a place on the map as a meeting-ground for the wildtribes long before the days of civilized occupation. The height abovethe valley commands all that wide prairie that ripples in treelessfertility from as far as even an Indian can see until it breaks off withthat cliff that walls the Neosho bottom lands up and down for many amile. To the southwest the open black lowlands along Fingal's Creekbeckoned as temptingly to the settler as did the Neosho Valley itself.The divide between the two, the river and its tributary, coming downfrom the northwest makes a high promontory. Its eastern side is therocky ledge of the bluff. On the west it slopes off to the fertile drawsof Fingal's Creek, and the sunset prairies that swell up and awaybeyond them.

  Just where the little stream joins the bigger one Springvale took rootand flourished amazingly. It was an Indian village site andtrading-point since tradition can remember. The old tepee rings showstill up in the prairie cornfield where even the plough, that greatweapon of civilization and obliteration, has not quite made a dead levelof the landmarks of the past. I've bumped across those rings many a timein the days when we went from Springvale up to the Red Range schoolhousein the broken country where Fingal's Creek has its source. It was thehollow beyond the tepee ring that caused his pony to stumble that nightwhen Jean Pahusca, the big Osage, was riding like fury between me andthat blood-red sky.

  The early Indians always built on the uplands although the valleys ranclose beneath them. They had only arrows and speed to protect them fromtheir foes. It was not until they had the white man's firearms that theydared to make their homes in the lowlands. Black Kettle in the shelteredWashita Valley might never have fallen before General Custer had theCheyennes kept to the high places after the custom of their fathers. Butthe early white settlers had firearms and skill in buildingblock-houses, so they took to the valleys near wood and water.

  On the day that Kansas became a Territory, my father, John Baronet, withall his household effects started from Rockport, Massachusetts, to beginlife anew in the wild unknown West. He was not a poor man, heaven blesshis memory! He never knew want except the pinch of pioneer life whenmoney is of no avail because the necessities are out of reach. In theEast he had been a successful lawyer and his success followed him. Theywill tell you in Springvale to-day that "if Judge Baronet were alive andon the bench things would go vastly better," and much more to likeeffect.

  My mother was young and beautiful, and to her the world was full ofbeauty. Especially did she love the sea. All her life was spent besideit, and it was ever her delight. It must have been from her that my ownlove of nature came as a heritage to me, giving me capacity to take andkeep those prairie scenes of idyllic beauty that fill my memory now.

  In the Summer of 1853 my father's maiden sister Candace had come to livewith us. Candace Baronet was the living refutation of all the unkindcriticism ever heaped upon old maids. She was a strong, comely,unselfish woman who lived where the best thoughts grow.

  One day in late October, a sudden squall drove landward, capsizing thedory in which my mother was returning from a visit to old friends on anisland off the Rockport coast. She was in sight of home when thatfurious gust of wind and rain swept across her path. The next morningthe little waves rippled musically against the beach whither they hadborne my dead mother and left her without one mark of cruel usage.Neither was there any sign of terror on her face, white and peacefulunder her damp dark hair.

  I know now that my father and his sister tried hard to suppress theirsorrow for my sake, but the curtains on the seaward side of the housewere always lowered now and my father's face looked more and more to thewestward. The sea became an unbearable thing to him. Yet he was a brave,unselfish man and in all the years following that one Winter he livedcheerfully and nobly--a sunshiny life.

  In the early Spring he gave up his law practice in Rockport.

  "The place for me is on the frontier," he said to my Aunt Candace oneday. "I'm sick of the sight of that water. I want to try the prairiesand I want to be in the struggle that is beginning beyond the Missouri.I want to do one man's part in the making of the West."

  Aunt Candace looked steadily into her brother's face.

  "I am sick of the sea, too, John," she said. "Will the prairies bekinder to us, I wonder."

  I did not know till long afterward, when the Kansas blue-grass hadcovered both their graves, that the blue Atlantic had in its keeping theform of the one love of my aunt's life. Rich
am I, Philip Baronet, tohave had such a father and such a mother-hearted aunt. They made lifefull and happy for me with never from that day any doleful grieving overthe portion Providence had given them. And the blessed prairie did bringthem peace. Its spell was like a benediction on their lives who lived tobless many lives.

  It was late June when our covered wagon and tired ox-team stopped on theeast bluff above the Neosho just outside of Springvale. The sun wasdropping behind the prairie far across the river valley when anotherwagon and ox-team with pioneers like ourselves joined us. They wereIrving Whately and his wife and little daughter, Marjory. I was onlyseven and I have forgotten many things of these later years, but I'llnever forget Marjie as I first saw her. She was stiff from long sittingin the big covered wagon, and she stretched her pudgy little legs to getthe cramp out of them, as she took in the scene. Her pink sun-bonnet hadfallen back and she was holding it by both strings in one hand. Herrough brown hair was all in little blowsy ringlets round her face andthe two braids hanging in front of her shoulders ended each in a bigblowsy curl. Her eyes were as brown as her hair. But what I noted thenand many a time afterward was the exceeding whiteness of her face. FromSt. Louis I had seen nothing but dark-skinned Mexicans, tannedMissourians, and Indian, Creole, and French Canadian, all coppery orbronze brown, in this land of glaring sunshine. Marjie made me think ofRockport and the pink-cheeked children of the country lanes about thetown. But most of all she called my mother back, white and beautiful asshe looked in her last peaceful sleep, the day the sea gave her to usagain. "Star Face," Jean Pahusca used to call Marjie, for even in theKansas heat and browning winds she never lost the pink tint no miniaturepainting on ivory could exaggerate.

  We stood looking at one another in the purple twilight.

  "What's your name?"

  "Marjory Whately. What's yours?"

  "Phil Baronet, and I'm seven years old." This, a shade boastingly.

  "I'm six," Marjory said. "Are you afraid of Indians?"

  "No," I declared. "I won't let the Indians hurt you. Let's run a race,"pointing toward where the Neosho lay glistening in the last light ofday, a gap in the bluff letting the reflection from great golden cloudsillumine its wave-crumpled surface.

  We took hold of hands and started down the long slope together, but ourparents called us back. "Playmates already," I heard them saying.

  In the gathering evening shadows we all lumbered down the slope to therock-bottomed ford and up into the little hamlet of Springvale.

  That night when I said my prayers to Aunt Candace I cried softly on hershoulder. "Marjie makes me homesick," I sobbed, and Aunt Candaceunderstood then and always afterward.

  The very air about Springvale was full of tradition. The town had beenfrom the earliest times a landmark of the old Santa Fe trail. When thefreighters and plainsmen left the village and climbed to the top of theslope and set their faces to the west there lay before them only thewilderness wastes. Here Nature, grown miserly, offered not even a stickof timber to mend a broken cart-pole in all the thousand miles betweenthe Neosho and the Spanish settlement of New Mexico.

  Here the Indians came with their furs and beaded garments to exchangefor firearms and fire-water. People fastened their doors at night for apurpose. No curfew bell was needed to call in the children. The woodedNeosho Valley grew dark before the evening lights had left the prairiesbeyond the west bluff, and the waters that sang all day a song of cheeras they rippled over the rocky river bed seemed always after nightfallto gurgle murderously as they went their way down the black-shadowedvalley.

  The main street was as broad as an Eastern boulevard. Space counted fornothing in planning towns in a land made up of distances. At the end ofthis street stood the "Last Chance" general store, the outpost ofcivilization. What the freighter failed to get here he would do withoutuntil he stood inside the brown adobe walls of the old city of Santa Fe.Tell Mapleson, the proprietor of the "Last Chance," was a tall, slight,restless man, quick-witted, with somewhat polished manners and a giftof persuasion in his speech.

  Near this store was Conlow's blacksmith shop, where the low-browed,black-eyed Conlow family have shod horses and mended wagons sinceanybody can remember. They were the kind of people one instinctivelydoes not trust, and yet nobody could find a true bill against them. Theshop had thick stone walls. High up under the eaves on the north side along narrow slit, where a stone was missing, let out a bar of sullen redlight. Old Conlow did not know about that chink for years, for it wasonly from the bluff above the town that the light could be seen.

  Our advent in Springvale was just at the time of its transition from aplains trading-post to a Territorial town with ambition for settlementand civilization. I can see now that John Baronet deserved the place hecame to hold in that frontier community, for he was a State-builder.

  "I should feel more dacent fur all etarnity jist to be buried in thesame cimet'ry wid Judge Bar'net," O'mie once declared. "I should walkinto kingdom-come, dignified and head up, saying to the kaper av thepearly gates, kind o' careless-like, 'I'm from that little Kansas townav Springvale an' ye'll check up my mortial remains over in thecimet'ry, be my neighbor, Judge Bar'net, if ye plaze.'"

  It was O'mie's way of saying what most persons of the community felttoward my father from the time he drove into Springvale in the purpletwilight of that June evening in 1854.

  Irving Whately's stock of merchandise was installed in the big stonebuilding on the main corner of the village, where the straggling Indiantrails from the south and the trail from the new settlement out onFingal's Creek converged on the broad Santa Fe trail. Amos Judson, ayoung settler, became his clerk and general helper. In the front roomover this store was John Baronet's law office, and his sign swingingabove Whately's seemed always to link those two names together.

  Opposite this building was the village tavern. It was a wide two-storystructure, also of stone, set well back from the street, with a doubleveranda along the front and the north side. A huge oak tree grew beforeit, and a flagstone walk led up to the veranda steps. In big blacklettering its inscription over the door told the wayfarer on the oldtrail that this was

  THE CAMBRIDGE HOUSE. C. C. GENTRY, PROP.

  Cam Gentry (his real name was Cambridge, christened from the littleIndiana town of Cambridge City) was a good-souled, easy-going man,handicapped for life by a shortness of vision no spectacle lens couldovercome. It might have been disfiguring to any other man, but Cam'sclear eye at close range, and his comical squint and tilt of the head tostudy out what lay farther away, were good-natured and unique. He was inKansas for the fun of it, while his wife, Dollie, kept tavern from purelove of cooking more good things to eat than opportunity afforded in ahome. She was a Martha whose kitchen was "dukedom large enough."Whatever motive, fine or coarse, whatever love of spoils or love ofliberty, brought other men hither, Cam had come to see the joke--and hesaw it. While as to Dollie, "Lord knows," she used to say, "there'splenty of good cooks in old Wayne County, Indiany; but if they can getanything to eat out here they need somebody to cook it for 'em, and cookit right."

  Doing chores about the tavern for his board and keep was the littleorphan boy, Thomas O'Meara, whose story I did not know for many years.We called him O'mie. That was all. Marjie and O'mie and Mary Gentry, Camand Dollie's only child, were my first Kansas playmates. Together wewaded barefoot in the shallow ripples of the Neosho, and little bylittle we began to explore that wide, sweet prairie land to the west.There was just one tree standing up against the horizon; far away to usit seemed, a huge cottonwood, that kept sentinel guard over the plainsfrom the highest level of the divide.

  Whately built a home a block or more beyond that of his young clerk,Amos Judson. It was farther up the slope than any other house inSpringvale except my father's. That was on the very crest of the westbluff, overlooking the Neosho Valley. It fronted the east, and acrossthe wide street before it the bluff broke precipitously four hundredfeet to the level floor of the valley below. Sometimes the shelvingrocks furnishe
d a footing where one could clamber down half way and walkalong the narrow ledge. Here were cunning hiding-places, deep crevices,and vine-covered heaps of jagged stone outcrop invisible from the heightabove or the valley below. It was a bit of rugged, untamable cliffrarely found in the plains country; and it broke so suddenly from thelevel promontory sloping down to the south and away to the west, that astranger sitting by our east windows would never have guessed that theseeming bushes peering up across the street were really the tops of talltrees with their roots in the side of the bluff not half way to thebottom.

  From our west window the green glory of the plains spread out to thebaths of sunset. No wonder this Kansas land is life of my life. The seais to me a wavering treachery, but these firm prairies are the joy of mymemory.

  Our house was of stone with every corner rounded like a turret wall. Itwas securely built against the winter winds that swept that bluff whenthe Kansas blizzard unchained its fury, for it stood where it caught thefull wrath of the elements. It caught, too, the splendor of all thesunrise beyond the mist-filled valley, and the full moon in the leveleast above the oak treetops made a dream of chastened glory like thesilver twilight gleams in Paradise.

  "I want to watch the world coming and going," my father said when hishouse was finished; "and it is coming down that Santa Fe trail. It isState-making that is begun here. The East doesn't understand it yet,outside of New England. And these Missourians, Lord pity them! theythink they can kill human freedom with a bullet, like thrusting daggersinto the body of Julius Caesar to destroy the Roman Empire. What do theyknow of the old Puritan blood, and the strength of the grip of aMassachusetts man? Heaven knows where they came from, these Missouriruffians; but," he added, "the devil has it arranged where they will goto."

  "Oh, John, be careful," exclaimed Aunt Candace.

  "Are you afraid of them, Candace?"

  "Well, no, I don't believe I am," replied my aunt.

  She was not one of those blustering north-northwest women. She squaredher life by the admonition of Isaiah, "In quietness and in confidenceshall be your strength." But she was a Baronet, and although they havetheir short-comings, fear seems to have been left out of their make-up.