START MICROFILMED 1985 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - BERKELEY GENERAL LIBRARY BERKELEY, CA 94720 COOPERATIVE PRESERVATION MICROFILMING PROJECT THE RESEARCH LIBRARIES GROUP, INC. Funded by THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION Reproductions may not be made without permission. THE PRINTING MASTER FROM WHICH THIS REPRODUCTION WAS MADE IS HELD BY THE MAIN LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, CA 94720 FOR ADDITIONAL REPRODUCTION REQUEST MASTER NEGATIVE NUMBER ¢45-8£19 AUTHOR: Crane George Belden. 1806-1999 - TITLE= A life history oo PLACE: San Jose DATE % [88C VOLUME 60 Fg S- CALL ¢qq942A3 MASTER NO. © NEG. NO. $79 ye { F860 1] C194243 X cop. | Crane, George Belden, 1806-1898. A lifé history, consisting of incidents and experiences in the life of George B. Crane, with comments on a variety of topics. Written by himself for the information and entertainment of his family and descendants. San Jose, Mercury Print, 1836. xiii, 243 p. 20cm. A photographic portrait is mounted at the front and signed by the author. / j Le) Howes C860; Cowan p. 149. | P 03 7 1. Physicians - California. 2. Physicians - Correspondence reminiscences, etc. 3. Napa Valley, Calif. - Description and travel, , ) CU-B 13 oxox 28 B21 FILMED AND PROCESSED BY LIBRARY PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICE | UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA REDUCTION RATIO |7 DOCUMENT Ol THE BANCROFT LIBRARY = flzs [22 oO Ek —_— kK = Ew = P wo [Jae ll 2.0 0 Eo = fo ° Bibs JL2s lis fie MICROCOPY RESOLUTION TEST CHART NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS-1963-A EEE EERE EE 2 3 4 5 6 STERLING > Bl: ol 5: i) S|! °| | A i | ? ‘| ° Ee within anlin andi anh mili anlon inling mm mihi anh mim anh mn mm mln PAGINATION INCORRECT pp [06- 1/3 | J gl EY N § } DNR 37 rn - \ 7 4 1H Pe W. / 1 Pe Le o hs [Ph] N 4 F/R [ Ig <8 A RN ) : > iN RN \ om i. , NN BS oe ‘CIRCE IN Nn - E— I" Ee TI ESE — ” _— 3 * I K : mm — g bd i / i? [] c iz » Je) F Ph EC 0 i X H tl 3 . 1 . E 4) ATE JN}: 3! 4 — — ) ‘ 5 eg : g > = ha by S > BCG XT ny PARES BANCROFT LIBRARY WARREN GREGORY, a native Californian, received the A.B. degree at the University of California with the Class of 1887. He was graduated from Hastings College of the Law in 1890, and for 37 years practiced law in San Francisco. He served as president of the Alumni Association and as a Regent of the University of Cali- fornia from 1919 to 1922. This book was purchased from the income of a memorial fund established by his family. ARR : TERE Ea aa a le fap SE . — ’ acini bic . _ A LIFE HISTORY CONSISTING OF INCIDENTS AND EXPERIENCES IN THE LIFE OF “EORGE B. CRANE WITH Comments on a Variety of Topics. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF " For THE [NFORsLAEION AND ENTERTAINMENT oF His FAMILY AND DESCENDANTS. \ SAN JOSE, MERCURY p Y PRINT, 1886. A in tml i 1 | Retake of Preceding Frame ' CONSISTING OF INCIDENTS AND EXPERIENCES IN THE LIFE OF Comments on a Variety of Topics. WRITTEN BY H IMSELF ot Yo. roN For THLE I NFO R sts or His FAMILY AND DESCENDANTS. SAN JOSE, MERCURY PRINT, 1886. GEORGE B. CRANE, | AnD ENTERTAINMENT | | | Retake of Preceding Epistle Dedicatory. To My (GRANDCHILDREN: I do not include your parents in this address, because the time has gone by when counsel, however valu- able, could be made practically useful to them. This is true in part, with some of you. My concern is for the young whose character is not already formed-—or but par- tially so. On character depends all your hopes in life, and if you should be so unfortunate as not to enjoy, or deserve a good one in early manhood, your life thereafter will, most likely, prove a failure. | As my opportunity to serve, by instructing you during my life time, and while you were most susceptible and receptive of impressions—mental and moral—was unfortu- nately very limited, I indulge the hope that as your minds ripen and expand, you will see what you have lost, and endeavor to retrieve the same by thoughtful study of the lessons I have prepared for your good, when I can no longer talk with you. You will probably feel, as you read, that I have been unmercifully severe on all who indulge the social vices, especially those of untruthfulness and liquor drinking, but when you consider that almost all the evils from which 9 Fo a TLR 3.0 BR Te EES ya A LE Fh 2 A ry ow rE A Se & [ore { pop iv. MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. individuals, families, and society generally suffer, result directly or indirectly from these causes, and how easy it is to avoid both, you will not only excuse, but remember me with gratitude for calling your attention to dangers, on which depend the question whether, like your "e rnd fathers, you will lead a life of respectability, and enjoy in your old age the ‘‘glorious privilege of being indepen- dent,” or lead the life of ‘“‘tramps” and conngilionils p till the weight of years makes you helpless, if you corinne to live so long, and when nothing will be left for you but charitable provisions for the poor and worthless, and pau- pers graves. | 1 do not intend to insinuate by the above, or anything you will find in your book, that I do not consider that hae reasonably good grandchildren now; but knowing from lon g experience the danger of being led astray, to which youth 18 constantly exposed, I have studiously endeavored to show that a first step in a wrong direction will lead to additional inclination to go farther astray. “Vice i EE a Yet seen too oft, familiar with the face We first endure, then pity, then embrace ’’ You will find more real pleasure in so deporting your- selves In early life as to command the respect of good citizens, than can be found in any departure from the strictest propriety of conduct. (GRANDPA. Pioneeer Vineyard, August, 1885. PREFACE. Aware that preliminaries are often overlooked, I publish this prefatory explanation, with the earnest request that no one will read a page of the book without previously giving careful attention to the Dedicatory letter and the page of Errata. Obscurities will then be better understood and mistakes corrected. Although the little volume has been written, more espe- cially for the instruction, edification and benefit of my own descendants, I do not object to its being owned and used by collateral relatives, and consequently have reason to expect it will incidentally fall into the hands of strangers though not a copy is intended for sale. | It will be seen that I have given very little attention to chronological arrangement. I wrote in my journal, from which this book is in part compiled and condensed, current events, reflections, reminiscences, etc., as they occurred to my mind, with little regard to consecutiveness, and with carelessness about cognate subjects only being grouped in the same chapter or section. ~My object in preserving the same in book form will be clearly seen by reading it, but I shall here premise, for the purpose of preparing the first generation of my successors to understand that what, at first sight, may appear like personal reproofs, and be regarded as the offspring of splenetic feelings, that have grown out of a disappointed life, should be considered in a general way. MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. Few old men who have children and grandchildren escape the pain of witnessing more or less frowardness in some of them, and experience but too painfully attest that the most discreet and virtuous of parents may have their hopes in life destroyed by a son, who will deliberately or impulsively make up his mind to be a scamp, or fall un- conciously into bad habits, or a daughter disregard parental wishes to her own destruction. In the hope of averting such calamities I have indulged in the use of strong language, which, by a strained con- struction, may appear of more restricted application than I intended. But I appeal to the experience of any intel- ligent man for proof that I am right in the main in claim- ing, that after deducting the pain we suffer, by witnessing the affliction of children who are filially mindful of what is due to parents at all times, and in old age especially, and the mortification of seeing a son or a daughter despised and the soul chilling horror of having one convicted of capital or any crime, or worst of all, the living death of one being an habitual drunkard, that when the balance is struck between the pleasure and pain incident to parentage, the equipoise will fall on the side of Solon in his discussion with Thales as to the relative happiness of bachelors and parents. I am sensitive on this subject of parental claims on their children for reasons referred to on page 76 and elsewhere which, however, but partly excuse my course towards my parents. Their error in failing to so train, as to prepare me for a respectable pursuit through life, and leaving its battles to chance, does not make me feel satisfied with my own conduct towards them, since experience has taught me the value of sympathy and the society of kindred when most needed, during the setting sun of a long life’s history, We can never repay parental care and fidelity however misdirected. (See page 16). PREFACE. Vii. R Se Tr PE" NO ESaat Tei a mgs «4 | I have assigned as a reason for noting the manners and customs, the social, domestic and economic details and usages of the times of my boyhood, that they will not be found in Standard History. A recent historic work, and Thurlow Weed’s Autobiography, however, show my mistake, but my lineal successors will regard his own experience by their ancestor of special interest, neverthe- less, and the Crane, Young and McPike geneology which otherwise would be lost, will be esteemed as priceless by generations to come, if they prove worthy of their an- cestors. Mr. Young’s agency in repealing oppressive Ecclesias- tical laws, reflects credit on all his decendants, as also does his zeal in the temperance cause. I may hope my estimate of human character as pictured on page 36, will not be regarded as an index to my own, though I confess, that as a general rule, we should be mindful of the sacred text, ‘‘Judge not lest ye be judged.” I am aware, too, that the gloominess which marks my narrative generally will create a suspicion that I have met with overwhelming disappointments which may have soured my temper, warped my judgment and disqualified me for enjoyments that have generally been within my reach. “Put yourself in his place,” has become a saying. Men in the eighth decade of life, who have seen mostly the dark side of humanity, cannot be expected to write cheerfully, while reviewing the misery they have witnessed during their own thorny journey from the cradle to the grave, which last they feel themselves so near, and realizing that they have reached a longevity that not one in a hundred of their associates of early or later life has passed, feeling meantime that the impairment of their physical activities deprives them of the power of seeking companionship abroad, and that their enforced seclusion cuts them oft viii. MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. from the society of the young who find more congenial passtime with their fellows. Even though Dr. Johnson is right, in Rasselas, in claim- ing that ¢‘shame and grief in the decline of life are of short duration,” because the subject bears easily what he has borne long, and that ‘he knows the hand of death is about to end his afflictions,” it does not follow that the young and middle-aged are released thereby from obligations that nature ordained. My sympathy for the old and infirm, which will be so plainly seen in the following pages, may have been emphasized by a fellow feeling to which I was a comparative stranger in early life, and consequently I hold that we cannot begin too soon to impress our children with a proper sense of any and all duties that tend to the relief of the evils common to humanity, and especially the mournful ones incident to the closing period of an afflictive life. I know all this may give rise to a belief that my demeanor towards the young has been cold and repellant, but I can- not be mistaken when I say I have continued to act and feel as indicated on page 157, and recently a man who has reached honorable distinction in this State, reminded me of his vivid recollection of my habit when he was a youth of entertaining and instructing the youngsters. My religion has been what Wesley taught: ‘Do as much good and practice as little evil as possible.” I am also aware that my treatment of the slave, Theologi- cal, Spiritual and other questions will, by prejucided men, of more discrimination or less discrimination between right and wrong than myself, subject my memory to uncharita- ble criticism, but the facts in relation to all I have re- corded, I know to be true, and the unfoldments of Science and }:nowledge which characterize the present era, will, in time, test the accuracy, and vindicate the conclusions to which I was led by those facts. PREFACE. ix. — Kgotistical as the above may appear, censoriously as I have dealt with the short-comings of people generally, it will be found that my own delinquencies have not been concealed. And I hold it as remarkable that in retracing my history, my mistakes and errors are constantly looming conspicuously up, and like Banquo’s Ghost will not ‘““down at my bidding; while it costs an effort to recall the numberless sleepless nights and stormy rides I have en- dured, and charities I have practiced, "when hope or expectation of reward, or even gratitude, was out of the question. It must he consoling to a conscientious man who is staggering under the weight of years, whose nights are made sleepless by the pains, aches and infirmities of age, and who is consequently cut off from enjoyments he can well remember, which he knows are never to return, while mortality lasts, to be able to feel that at his final departure to traverse the dark valley of the shadow of death, he will leave behind him children, grand-children and friends who, instead of seeking to “‘Draw his frailties from their dread abode,’ will strive to remember only his virtuous and amiable qualities, and ascribe his faults to weakness rather than wickedness, and—in the language of a beautiful writer-— ‘““blot them out with Angels’ tears.” While 1 see in reviewing my book that I have done sim- ple justice to the liar, his consort and co-worker in hidden villainy—the slanderer—has partly escaped me. Against such ‘‘snakes in the grass” we have no immediate defense. The best of men may temporarily suffer from his cankered breath and lying tongue; but persistent rectitude of con- duct will, in due time, cause his slanders to recoil upon his own head, provided reasonable time remain to the suf- ferer. I so qualify, because, to the discredit of human nature, there are creatures in the shape of men, who some- EE I MEMOIRS OF G B. CRANE. X. how mysteriously acquire a passable reputation, while their real character is so malignant and cold-blooded, that for fancied or mistaken belief in a wrong, they will ‘damn with faint praise,” or direct mendacity, the memory of their benefactors, whose lives have been blameless, and whose proximity to the ‘‘home of all flech,” or whose feebleness secures the maligner immunity from chastise- ment. For such there ought to be brought in requisition Dr. Franklin’s remedy for the license of the Press, i.e.— a ‘license of the club;”’ but in default of this we have nothing left but the rebuke of the Bard of Avon: ‘Good name—in man and woman, dear, my lord, Is the immediate jewels of their souls. Who steals my purse, steal trash! ’tis something, nothing. 'Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands. But he that filches from me my good name, Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed.” In conclusion of this Preface, I will say, if any grum- bling, fault-finding or hypercriticism of my own, and the conduct of others, shall serve to so seriously impress any one youth of good natural parts, as to make him a good citizen when, without the lessons he has gathered from my book he would have been a drone or a nuisance in society, my labor and expense in preparing it will be amply repaid. GEORGE B. CRANE. St. Helena, Napa Co., Cal., Dec., 1885. CONTENTS: CHAPTER I. PAGE Am I Sufficiently Well Preserved at Three-Score-and-Twelve to Write or Edit a Book?—Memory.— Ancestry Direct and Col- lateral.— Youthful Surroundings.—Manners and Customs.— My Father’s Enterprise. —War of 1812 CHAPTER II. My Father’s Uncles and Brothers —My Mother's Family. —Jud Crane.—DeWitt re Wy - CHAPTER III. Misleading History.—Schools in my Boyhood.—First Cooking Stoves.— ‘Pancakes and Sop.’ —Amusements.—Agriculture. — Brother Charles a Soldier.— My Return to College.—First Passenger Railroad in America.—Came West.—Chicago.— Father Young.—Ohio Canal. —Salt-boiling Boys Become Gov- ernors of Ohio,—Corn. —Dan Young as a Statesman CHAPTER IV. Anecdote of Bishop Chase’s Father —A Dream (note) —My Mar- riage.—We go to Alabama CHAPTER V. Slavery North and South.—Two sides considered CHAPTER VI. Domestic Economy in New York.—Primitive Hardships.---Note by a Schoolfellow.—Duty to Parents.—Exodus from Ala- bama.—Pike County, Mo. —Distinguished Men.—Climate.— CHAPTER VII. ‘San Francisco Direct.”’—Spiritualism..—We arrive in San Francisco.--J. B. Wells.—H. H. Haight CHAPTER VIII. San Jose.-—Careful Economy. — Daughter goes to Atlantic States. The Consequences CHAPTER IX. San Joaquin.—Napa Cit —What is a Life’s Failure?— Grand-children y ailure?—My MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. ii. | INDEX. CHAPTER X. ! CHAPTER XXI. Human Vinity.—Mary’s Return from New York } Pale Concluding Winter of Old Age.—Vicarious Atonement.— Picture of a Well Spent Life CHAPTER XI. Pacheco Pass.—Mustangs..—Mirage.—Union Party.—San Fran- Precepts cisco Hotels.—Napa Railroad ...... ................... oe Review—Supplemental, etc CHAPTER XII. A Tragedy Iustinct.—My Infirmities.—Inspiration, What?—St. Helena a Slate Writing Schools and Churches.— Ingersoll 1 Morality of Grape Culture CHAPTER XIII. Caiclt Political Prohibition Procrastination—One Hundred Years Ago.—Grand Parents —New Constitution.—Monopoly. —Grange : 1 Temperance Lecture CHAPTER XIV. Patrons of Husbandry My Birth-day—Eighth Decade—Commodore Faragut,—My Boys. —Peccadillos.—Second Marriage CHAPTER XV. Family Record. —Moon Philosophy.—Sell Out.—Perspicuity.— | WH Pau ret ren prints sh tir barns : ] Professions Sharp Practice CHAPTER XVI. i Ethical Phenomenal Weather.—Does Death End All?—Golden Rule.— - Tin Wedding “To See Ourselves,’’ etc. Divine Laws Self Executing.— . Titular Deity.-—Sacramento.—The Legislature.—Cold Wea- Pike Co. Letter ther.—Vineyards.—How Changed since 1860?—Phenominal ] Political Rain.—Retrospections and Reflections CHAPTER XVII. Hiatus.—Hard Destiny.—Rejuvenation.—Queen Elizabeth CHAPTER XVIII. Camp Meeting in 1820.—Primitive Methodist. —Cromwell’s Wart — Thoughts on Death Troubles Omitted. —Pre Natal Influence.—Phrenology.— | «Death’’ A Misnomer.—St. Paul CHAPTER XIX. My Chronic Error.—An Honest Man.—Judge Miller.—St. Belena’s ] | Conclusion. .........covvevuirversnns 342 sisnsy srs sann rinse : Growth.—I would Saerifice $50,000 to cure Drunkenness... 157 - 3 Lost Opportunities The Glorious Fourth July 23d Retrospection A Fault Finder CHAPTER XX. Honesty Best Policy.—Sectarian Harmony.—Criticising Ortho- doxy.—A Japanese Noble.—Checkered Life.—Politics Es- chewed 160 ERRATA. PAGE. 12 30 38 42 49 51 54 55 59 61 76 90 91 98 For ‘‘earned’’ read learned. For ‘‘paternal’’ read parental, For ‘had’ read have. For “‘written’’ read edited. For ‘‘defective’’ read defeative. For ‘‘believe’’ read believed. For ¢*1835°’’ read 1836. For ‘“Mayersville’’ read Marysville. For ‘“meet’’ read met. For “Cornwall’”’ read Cromwell. For ‘thirty’ read thirty-sie. For ‘“in St. Helena’ read near St. Helena. For ‘‘paternal’’ read parental. For *‘as well’’ read as well as boots. For ‘‘though’’ read through. For **Six five’’ read Sixty-five. For *‘would not buy’’ read would buy. For ‘‘commendary’’ read commentary. For “Ark Story’’ read ‘Ark Story as a historic occurrence. For ‘‘ef’’ read of. For “‘Satired’’ read Satirized. For ‘heart’ read breast. Memoirs of G. b. brane, St. HerLena, Can., April, 1878. Die the greatest portion of my life after reach- ing the age of manhood, when not too hard pressed with business or domestic duties, I have been in the habit of making daily entries in account books, writing social or business letters, newspaper communications or penning miscellaneous matter of a kind which involved the exercise of a greater or less degree of reflection; but I am not aware that I ever approached a subject in which I found so much difficulty in making a beginning satisfactory to myself, as I feel at present. Whether this is owing to the delicacy of the theme on which I purpose to write—a consciousness of the pos- sible influence of what I may say, on my grand-children, and later posterity—or a sort of an apprehension that my mind is beginning to partake of the waning which I but too plainly feel the weight of years has compelled my physical organism to acknowledge, I cannot ‘decide, but I do know it is not easy to concentrate my thoughts, just now. This, however, is but an ordinary occasional condition with all men, at all ages, but the question with me is, has age impaired or weakened my understanding ? While it is easy for me to detect in myself a growing carelessness and inattentiveness to unimportant duties or 4 MEMOIRS OF G B. CRANE things, / cannot perceive that my discriminating power has become more obtuse or defective, and I cannot learn from those with whom my social relations are most inti- mate, that they regard my judgment less trustworthy than formerly. I was selected by my neighbors as pre. siding officer of the ‘¢ Subordinate Grange” (society of Patrons of Husbandry) at its organization, President of the Tilden Club at the last Presidential Election, and my political and other essays are appreciated by editors and their readers. These facts and my mental condition gener- ally, as I perceive it, encourage me to believe it: probable that I can write my own history, with comments and reflec- tions that may be made useful to those I leave behind me, and will be, provided the law of hereditary transmission of qualities, moral and mental, proves ordinarily operative with my descendants. I have always been accredited with an unusually reten- tive memory, but I am quite sure that such is not really the case. If I have appeared to remember better than others it is generally ascribable to the fact that whenever I hear, or read anything I regard as worth keeping for future use, I manage, by associating the idea or fact with some- thing with which I am already familiar, or by a persistent arbitrary effort, or both—to retain it. Some of the main features connected with the histori- cal matters I wish to preserve for the benefit of my poster- ity will be found in old records which I have kept, and will be designated and referred to as I proceed in this book. These records, journals, and much I intend to write from memory and from oral tradition which was not re- corded in my early days, as it should have been, may be studied with interest by my immediate posterity, and their descendants, possibly a century hence. A conception of this last named possibility arises from a regret I often feel that I did not improve my opportunity IN MY CWN BEHALF, 5 when, say fifteen or seventeen years old, while my father’s uncles were living and my mother’s brothers and sisters, also, some of whom, especially Judge J ohn Crane and his brother Elijah, who were contemporaneous with General Washington in their boyhood, may have been personal acquaintances, and were soldiers during the Revolutionary War, but it would be unusual for a boy to have such fore- sight. The Judge, a man of remarkable memory and historic knowledge, could have given a correct account of his father and grandfather; the last named, so far as I have been able to learn, or his father, was an emigrant from England, and the females of the family also. Whether any of my six grandsons will inherit the very natural curiosity to know what ‘manner of men” their ancestors’ lineal were, remains to be seen, but I have the satisfaction of knowing at this time that every one of them promises fair to make respectable men. Of their maternal ancestors I can give them some reliable history back to their great, great grandmother. But I should have added in that connection, what will be made apparent in the sequel, that neither my own ex- traction nor anything I have personally achieved is such as to impeach me with the charge of vanity in desiring that my posterity should know my history. It may be useful, nevertheless, for them to know that one whose constitution of body and mind must have been in early life much the same as their own, succeeded with but a tithe of the paren- tal or any other extraneous advantages which have ever been at their command, in maintaining through life a re- spectable position in society,—far more so than a large majority of the companions of his boyhood, whose oppor- tunities were better than his. And they will be able to gather, as they proceed with my narrative, the causes which have made me a reasongbly 6 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. successful man in spite of the lets and hindrances in my way, which have been sufficient to utterly discourage men of less determined perseverance. For the principal of those discouragements and ob- stacles to success in the world, I will refer at once to my journals beginning with the oldest that has been preserved. It is a large, well-bound manuscript Record. Much of it is professional and consequently not suit- able for boys to read, but I trust my daughter and grand- daughter will keep it specially under their charge and make a discreet use of it till the boys have families of their own. There are three other Record books resembling exter- nally the above, that have been used mainly fer journals of business, statistics of weather and miscellaneous matter generally, with little regard to system or method. They will show how devoid I am, and ever have been, of order— this I take it is in part attributable to temperament, but mainly caused by the necessities that have ever controlled my time, especially when I was a practicing physician. There are some more Record books and one with the binding removed, taken off very unwisely to reduce weight or to take up less room in trunk when I left Bowling Green, Mo., for California. It has long and narrow pages, and another of similar style well bound that was used as an account book and journal in San Jose in 1856. It will be interesting for Californians to compare the statistics of the weather in the Missouri journal with those I have reported in California. Those manuscript books generally will show me—often perhaps in an unamiable light—that I have had troubles well calculated to sour my temper, if not to warp my judgment, but I trust they will be thought worthy of preservation, and if those most interested in my character should see evidence of great defects in it, in any thing I have written, they should bear in mind the impossibility of IN MY OWN BEHALF. ? understanding at this distance of time all the causes which may have given a coloring to what is recorded, or knowing the facts that caused the reflections and comments. For many years past I have been hoping that a time would come which would enable me to devote leisure hours to a careful compilation of the contents of those old MSS and condense them in one connected work, omitting all particulars that do not contribute pointedly to the main objects; and now when my property is leased out, no personal concern beyond a very general supervision Ot farm, vineyard and wine cellar, with no family but wife and one servant, one would think my opportunity good; but for weeks, ah, months at a time, my physical strength has been at fault and my head not in a good condition to endure continuous thought. I have so far made very discouraging progress with this undertaking, from sheer weakness of mind and body; but staying at McPike’s, my daughter’s home near my own, in his absence, harvesting six thousand acres of wheat and fifteen hundred of barley on his ranches on San Joaquin, his wife, daughter, and Eddie—youngest child, now in New York—and Rev. J. Avery Shepherd of the Episcopal Church and his wife who keeps house for them—this week in city—wife and I have been there mainly during Dr. S.’s absence. Now June 14, 1878. * x * * * ¥ * But I find it difficult to get through with what should be regarded as the «Introductory,” and as I desire to help my posterity to understand more about their ancestors than I do about mine, and to tell them much that is not recorded in the books referred to, I will now proceed to write from memory, beginning with my earliest recollec- tions, giving the names and residence of my own imme- 8 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRAJVE. diate ancestors and their relations, so far as I know them personally or from information. I read a beautiful essay by Washington Irving long, long ago, on that trait of human character which exhibits itself in the old man about to leave or terminate his earthly pilgrimage. He said: ““ Human nature was such that men about to die in a land distant from that which gave them birth, always had a longing desire to revisit the place of their nativity before leaving the earth forever.” Walter Scott wrote: Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own My Native Land.” I know that I fill the condition referred to by Irving, and visit the scenes which surrounded me in childhood, in imagination, and expect to feel a melancholy pleasure while describing them, thinking meantime, with a lively zest, of the events of boyhood. “How many long, lost hours I mourn, Never, never to return ” The very first impressions made upon my infant mind which have remained indelibly fixed, are of the water run- ning through our back yard and seeing the ‘‘silver eels” that met obstructions there in running down from the ‘‘pond,” as we called a beautiful sheet of water one mile long and half as wide. This was a small stream diverted from the main out- let of the pond which carried the overshot wheel of our grist-mill. The pond, since known as Lake Gilead, extended south to within a quarter of a mile of the family residence, and bounded the north and northwest portion of the farm. The main outlet, after running the mill near the house, passed on about a fourth of a mile further into the west fork of the Croton river. From the house we looked down the valley a mile and a THE OROTON RIVER. 9 half to the confluence of this fork with the main stream, near where the middle fork entered. At that time and for twenty or thirty years after the wildest imagination had not conceived the idea that that stream which emptied into the Hudson some thirty miles north of New York would ever be diverted from its chan- nel and made to enter the city, Our place was sixty miles about due north of that city. The head of the west branch of the Croton not more than eight or ten miles northwesterly of us. The prin- cipal stream of the Croton is about equal to both the main branches, and east of both. Its source is in a little swamp about seventy or eighty miles north of New York, near the line between Putman and Dutchess county, and north ii Bh first time I remember going from home, my parents took me to my grandfather's, two miles east of us, and within about six to eight of the Connecticut line near Danbury. ; On our return after dark in a skirt of woods the music of an insect called the ¢katy-did” excited the curiosity of my sister next older than I, and our parents amused oy by saying the little things on the trees said “Katy did,” and others contradicted ¢‘Katy didn’t.” : Two of the branches of the Croton have recently been dammed into reservoirs, the middle one now about to be flooding much of the land with which I was most familiar outh. r hese accumulations of water are wisely provided for the million plus of consumers of water in the great city in the event of unusual dry seasons. | The great reservoir in Central Park in the city was once thought to be a sufficient precaution against dry Summers and unusually cold. Winters, that would solidify the sources of the Croton. MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. When I used to visit the city in my boyhood I would find wooden pumps in the streets from which a drink could be obtained of brackish water. It is remarkable that the population of that city grew to hundreds of thou- sands while most of their drinking water was of this char- acter. And here we have an example of the willingness of people to endure hardships rather than adopt new and ex- pensive improvements; but this tardiness to adopt new discoveries and make practical new inventions was more obstructive of progress in former than at the present time. Now the eagerness to practice anything new is as’ remark- able as was the unwillingness of men a hundred or less years ago to innovate. For example—I can remember when De Witt Clinton’s grand conception of uniting ‘ Hudson’s Tide with Erie’s Side” by the ‘“ Grand Canal” injured or impaired the confidence of respectable men in him as a statesman. Fulton’s steamboat projects were ridiculed, and after he had proved that vessels could be propelled by steam old sailors preferred the capricious wind. At an earlier day it is said no physician older than forty years could be convinced that Dr. Harvey’s new theory of the circulation of the blood was true, and so of Dr. Jenner’s discovery of the efficacy of vaccination as a pro- phylactic against smallpox. And while these were hardly parallel cases with the reluctance with which the people of New York engaged in the enterprise of supplying the city with wholesome and abundant water, that reluctance was the result of the same trait of human character and motives of economy, or grew out of it, at least. When far-seeing men proposed to conduct the Croton into New York the old fogy authorities were astonished at their extravagance, and the impracticability of the enter- prise was urged also as an objection. But they were will- THE CROTON RIVER. 11 ing the city should incur the expense of AIG Bronx, a little stream that runs into the Harlem nver, igh the city. The Bronx belongs to Westchester county. : e water companies managed to get the bill, Ol ew to supply the city with water, passed by the Logis a Ne with the words ‘‘And other Streams” appended to Bronx. : It was supposed by those who opposed the Croton Beoect that ¢‘Other Streams” meant some brooks in the south en of Westchester, and were not a little astonished to ae the ruling of the Courts opened the door as wide as the companies chose to have 1t, to find waster. | ] So about the year 1840, I believe 1t was, the great dam of the Croton, some 40 miles north of the city, was made, reat aqueduct begun. bi I iy is a digression; I was aiming to make all who may wish, ten or a hundred years hence, to understand what were the manners and customs of the people forty and seventy miles north of the great fr mercial metropolis of this Nation (if the U. S. on 2 properly called a Nation), while I was a youth, and also : know the influences, inherent and otherwise, that forme er. ha priv to have my immediate posterity aspire a feel that they ought to aspire to a position on the Vor wide stage as much higher than I have reached > t i advantages are superior to those which were mine when a es. i have noted, in speaking of the Croton,.by vey of showing that as old as was that part of the country, be timber was not exhausted, for we had a saw-mi which was run by the water of the West Croton fork. : That stream would get so low in Summer that the mill had to be idle. The timber cut was mainly oak; chestnut and butternut was also sawed. ; | The fish of the stream were to me of more importance 12 MEMOIRS OF G B.CRANE than all else, and it is remarkable what much greater amount and variety were found at all seasons of the year in all kinds of waters in New York than we find equally near the ocean on this western coast of the Continent. To return to my earliest remembrances: The apple orchard, not a grafted tree in it, but fruit of moderate size and good relish; no names for the varieties except what their size, color, shape and qualities would suggest. They appeared like old trees then; say, in 1810 to 1820. None of the fruit was ever taken to market, What was not needed for family use was made into cider or went to the hogs. Cider was the family beverage, especially in Winter, and much of it was distilled into ‘Apple Jack or whisky.” To “warm the stomach” a “mug” of ‘hard cider” with red pepper pods broken into it, warmed and drank preparatory to going out in cold weather or to ‘‘warm up” on coming in, was customary. Men who ¢¢ loved rum,” in the absence of it would get drunkish on cider, but I never knew habits of intemper- ance to be contracted on cider alone. Rum was the chief intoxicant. Our vinegar was always made of cider. By about 1824 men had earned how to ¢ rectify” cider and bottle it for sale, and by that time I began to see grafting of fruit trees. Peaches were fine and plenty. When I was ten years old our orchard furnished such an abundance that they were taken to the ‘¢ still” to make ¢ peach brandy.” I visited the ground on which that orchard stood in 1868-9 and not a tree was left, although I ate a peach from a tree on our southeast place, where I lived after I was twelve years old, two miles east of my native home. Peaches still grow in western New York, but are uncertain. Cherries, too, are abundant, growing by the roadside, as if the people about the time of the Revolution were sufficiently BOYHOOD REMINESCENCES, 13 saving of their land to plant trees on the road margin or for ornament. In 1869 the apple trees were almost as extinct on that native home farm as the peaches. No pains had been taken to cultivate the fruit. Indeed, fruit throughout New York State ¢¢ did not pay.” And I should have said above, that we used to gather apples, in 1810--1820, and haul to cider mills for six and a fourth (61) cents per bushel. We called it ‘¢ six-pence.” We had coin of that value which went by different names in different sections of the Union. <¢ Six-pence” in New York; ‘ picayune ” in the South; ““fip” in the West, etc. But fortunately the time has come at last when our beautiful decimal currency is recognized everywhere. But to return to fruits. Blackberries, straw- berries, ‘“ huckleberries,” as we used to call the whortle- berries of different kinds, were plentiful. The first grow- ing on old wornout land, the second in meadows and pas- tures, the third in woods. I remember vividly going ¢¢ blackberrying,” on my eleventh birthday, July 81, 1817, and found an abun- dance of them ripe on the south side of ‘ Pond Hill,” a portion of the farm on which my life began, but which had then been exchanged for the adjoining one on the east, and through which the main road from Pough- keepsie to New York, thirty miles south of the first named and sixty north of New York; at least those are the dis- tances as understood from 1812 to 1818. While we owned that farm the Poughkeepsie Fournal (our only newspaper) was brought to us once a week by a man on horseback. My father had run a large business for those days at the mill farm, in the way of grist milling, saw-mill, carding machine, fulling mill, edge-tool making and blacksmith- ing. He run what they call a trip hammer in the scythe- ‘making business, a great neighborhood curiosity at that time. 14 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE. And here I will relate appropriately what even at this day is but little understood by ¢‘ fulling mill.” Our mothers and sisters, after the wool was carded into «« rolls,” the carding machine having taken the place of hand cards, would spin it into yarn on a ‘‘ big wheel,” which you can see described in a book in our library en- titled ‘¢ Eighty Years Progress From 1781 to 1861.” This yarn would be woven into cloth usually a yard wide by some woman, sometimes by a man, by a hand loom in the neighborhood, then taken to the fulling mill which was run by water power and subjected to a pounding process in the water till it would be greatly shortened in width and length, consequently thicker. This fulled cloth passes to another factory (the name of which I have forgotten) col- ored and dressed, the fuzz sheared off and made to resemble the fine ¢‘ broadcloth ” which some could afford to buy at stores for wedding suits. Then the boys would go to the store, buy ‘‘ buckram ” and trimmings, which the tailor would direct, get ‘“ measured,” have the clothes cut by the tailor and sometimes made by him, but most generally the sewing part would be dene by mothers and sisters. Dressed up in this home-made suit and a hat made by the village hatter, we at eighteen ‘‘felt big.” At an earlier age our cloth would be colored with butternut bark or some other home-made dye, and cost less. About November, our shoes would be ready—made by the neighborhood shoemaker of leather we had tanned from skins of our beeves and cattle that had perished in our terrible Winters, before ‘‘cow houses” came into general use, and we would start for school. We had mainly been barefoot since Spring, and children of twelve and younger had attended Summer school. It is hardly credible now, but nevertheless true, that cattle were left exposed day and night to the pelting of the IN MY OWN BEHALF. 15 pitiless storms and the most freezing weather; and we claimed to be a Christian people. I was the youngest of the family and had a better chance for schooling than my brothers. When in my six- teenth year I was sent to a boarding school, but before this I was obliged to stay at home to work, for my father had become poor from excess of generosity in ‘going security,” etc., and traded the mill farm for a cheaper one when I was six years old, and six years later sold it in Carmel above named, and purchased a still cheaper one in South East, that name suggested by its being the S. E. portion of old Duchess county. About 1810, and as I can remember the time (it was probably a year or two later, as I was then but four years old), this “town” (as we called townships), with three or four others, were cut off from Dutchess and called Putman county. In 1812-13 there was a great deal of stir and excite- ment among the young men of our neighborhood about the draft. My brother Charles had to join the army for the de- fense of New York City. The army was stationed on ‘Brooklyn Hights.” The British made no attempt to land or bombard the City, as was long feared and expected. Brooklyn was then a mere village. I should here state, for the encouragement of the boys, that if their father grows poor—a very possible event —an education will stand them in good stead when they approach manhood and after, and if they will profit by my example, they will be glad of it in after-life and old age. In my fourteenth and fifteenth Summers I had to stay at home, hoe corn, potatoes, the garden, ete., etc.,, but rainy days and idle hours found book in hand. About all the geography, arithmetic, history and much of my gram- mar I learned without a teacher. As stated above, when in 10 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRAJVE. my sixteent!? year, early in it, I left home for an academy, now I believe called ‘High School.” In April, about four months before I was seventeen years old, I obtained a certificate of qualification from the Board of Examiners of the town of North Salem in West- chester county, N. Y., and taught a District School of thirty or forty pupils six months. I then returned to the select schcol—one noted for preparing young men to teach. I taught afterwards, and when twenty years old, took it into my head to make a doctor of medicine of myself. I taught part of the time during the three years and attended one college course meantime, which the law cf New York required preparatory to examination for a Licentiate of Medicine. While I feel that I can justly claim the credit of hav- ing done more by unaided exertion to acquire an education that qualified me to engage in the study of a profession than is usual with youths, it is due to my brother-in-law, Philip Smith, and my oldest sister (his wife) that I should award them the credit of giving me the first encourage- ment to aspire to a position apparently beyond my ability to reach. They invited me to make their house my home, and generously afforded me much assistance while receiv- ing instructions from Dr. Williams, their family physician. And their influence, as they were highly respected, was very useful to me after I engaged in practice a few miles from their family residence in Tompkins counuy, New York. They have gone to the Higher Life, carry- ing the blessings of those who knew them best. Were all as considerate of their less fortunate and younger kin, our Earth’s history would be more happy; but it must be confessed, to the discredit of human nature, that there is a most serious drawback to the exercise of those generous impulses, found in the base ingratitude so often observed in the unkindness and neglect known to BOYHOOD BEMINESCENCES. 17 be practiced towards benefactors. Human nature 1s a complicated affair, and like the fabled serpent too often stings the breast that warmed it into life. Notwithstand- ing all this, the aphorism of Franklin, “God helps them that help themselves,” generally proves true. The young man who shows that he understands the value of minutes, that time is money, and is as careful to practice truth and justice towards others as to exact it from them, will be very certain to be recognized and encouraged by superior men. To return to my boyhood: In 1810-11, yes and 20- 25, but my earliest memory were the first dates, when my father would take a wagon load of flour and other products, and some seasons of the year several loads at once, as in ‘hog killing” time, go to Peekskill, eighteen miles, wagons would be brought home and he, with the goods, go on the “sloop,” as we then called what is now I believe known as a schooner. A sloop left twice a week, and if the wind was fair they would get to the city by morning, leaving always in afternoon or night, as tide would permit. The round trip would be made in from five to six or seven days, depending on the wind and tide. ““Market wagons” had their regular days to go-—twice a week from the interior of the country—as far as thirty miles back from the river (Hudson), taking the small freights of the neighborhood, such as poultry, eggs, butter, cheese, lambs, calves; and what interested the boys more than all, was the partridge and quail we would ‘‘trap” or shoot when we ‘got big enough;” yes, and rabbits. ‘‘Fish- in” too, was great pastime for us, either with hook and line or spear, the latter often used by torchlight in night, especially in the spawning season, and eeling with a ¢‘bob” of a mass of angli>-worms in the night. Occasionally a few shad would stray off as high or above the forks of the Croton. 18 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. But the dams and aqueducts have changed all this from Nature’s design. After the Harlem Railroad was made, people from fifty to seventy miles north of New York would breakfast at home, leave with their small marketing as above, reach the city, sell out, shop for awhile, make social calls, and return home to supper. But my aim is to write my history and something of that of my ancestors. FUDGE CRANE. CHAPTER II. The Judge heretofore mentioned, I well remember. He was Judge of the great County of Dutchess; used to walk thirty miles to the county seat. I have even, in late years, read anecdotes of him, how (for example) a tavern keeper's wife at the county seat (Poughkeepsie), mistaking him for what we now calla ¢“ tramp,” set him to churning in her kitchen, and was soon astonished to find by the defer- ence of the lawyers who had arrived and hunted him out, that it was the popular though eccentric Judge Crane. When about 1818 (vide history of De Witt Clinton), my father was in great fear that D. D. Tompkins had out- run Clinton for Governor, the opposition of the river counties to Clinton, on account of his being the canal prc- jector, giving a large majority to Tompkins. Judge Crane came to our house dressed as usual, silk stockings and breeches buckled above his knees and ending there, silver shoe-buckles and large-brimmed, fine fur hat. He. was “a gentleman of the old school,” and such fashions went out with the old men of his time. On this occasion, I remember as though it were but yesterday, he said to father, “Now, Belden, don’t worry yourself about Mr. Clinton; in two or three weeks we shall have returns from the great Western District that will over- come all these majorities for Gov. Tompkins.” “Two or three weeks!” and now the result of an election in that great State will be known in twelve hours after the close of polls. My grandfather, next I believe younger than the Judge, was much the same sort of a man in appearance, ——_— pm RG 20 MEMOIRS OF G B. CRANE. dress and native talents. Have heard my father speak of his Uncle Samuel Crane, who he said would address a Court and Jury with extraordinary grace and eloquence, so he must have been a lawyer. My grandfather (Zebulon Crane) died of typhus fever in 1814. I remember my mother’s report of his last words to his wife (a second wife, not the mother of my father). Her maiden name was Wood. Among other things he said to her: ‘Your loss will be my gain. I am going to try the realities of Eternity.” He and the Judge were Presbyterians. His first wife (my grandmother) was a Holmes. My great uncle (her brother) David Holmes used to visit us from Bedford—a large, very fine-looking man, corpulent, and it 1s rather strange that such constitutions did not appear in our fam- ily. My father’s two own brothers, Samuel and David, were like him, spare, muscular men. Men in those days attracted attention and were made popular by ex- celling in athletic sports and feats of physical strength. It was said when grandfather was young he would jump out of a headless hogshead standing on end without the aid of his hands. That was considered a great feat. We: - now call hogsheads pipes. By the second wife, grandfather reared Zebulon, Lewis, Amzi and Elijah (the latter and last died some three years ago), and two daughters. It is proper, and I should name the fact, that while I never heard that my grandfather was ever inclined to be a hard drinker, and he trained his sons religiously, every one of them (his sons) was given to drinking spirits rather freely, though not one ever passed for a drunkard. This weakness ran in the family of Mr. William McPike, paternal grandfather of my grandchildren, to a large extent. Even Capt. Abe, his_son, told me in 1868-9 it- requred resolution to resist his natural propensity for MY GRANDFATHER, 2 liquor. I name these things to show my boys the need of care and abstinence, for habitual temperate drinking is about certain to lead to intemperate. If each one will firmly resolve that he will drink nothing that will intoxicate, as I did when young, he is safe. There is no safety with such inheritances short of total abstinence. My maternal grandfather was David Paddock. My Aunt Mary Richards, the only one of his children then living, and she was ninety-nine years old at the time she gave me a history of her father’s family in Winter of 1867-8, less a few months, and her memory at that awful age of 99-100 of a century, of her early history, was clear as ever. I had known and been a pet of hers from my infancy, living but a few miles apart. I regret painfully that I had not remained longer with and interviewed her at intervals and taken copious notes of her earliest rem- iniscences, especially of my and her grandparents. I noted the following names of her father’s family— intending soon to see her again, but at my next visit from the City where I was attending to my wine business, she had gone to Heaven; no one more richly deserved the boon. David Paddock, my grandfather, had brothers by the names of Foster and Nathan and Isaac. His children were Elizabeth, the oldest, married Paddock, Benjamin, Peter, James, Debora (married James Crosby); Mary (or Mollie) Richards, the aunt of 99 years; Esther, my mother, born 1771; Aaron, Horace, Isaac, Sarah (died at 19 years of age); Daniel Belden, Nathan, Rhoda, wife of Elias Benjamin; David, whom I saw last in bed dying of con- sumption about 1818. By comparing this record with the one I will copy near the close of this volume, taken from Uncle Nathan’s Bible, subsequently, we shall wonder at the accuracy of the venerable lady's memory. The names of Grandfather Paddock’s children indicate a Puritanic ancestry. None of their grandchildren with 22 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE whom I was acquainted in boyhcod are now living except my brother and sister, Orrin and David Belden Richards, sons of my Uncle Moses Richards, who lived and died on the farm once owned by my Grandfather Paddock, in Southeast, Putnam county, New York. D. B. Richards still owns a portion of the old homestead. Most of the family emigrated to the ‘Lake Country,” central New York, about the beginning of the present century. Aunt Debora Crosby died and all her children while I was young —a few miles north of her birthplace. Uncle Peter disappeared mysteriously. His son James left female children, and Isaac who died of consumption at Uncle Richards’ when I was a little boy. Uncle James has a grand-daughter at San Jose, Cali- fornia, wife of J. J. Owen, editor of San Jose Mercury. Uncle Nathan has a grandson in St. Helena, Napa county—Henry Steves. But the descendants of both my grandfathers, to the best of my knowledge, are literally “few and far between” at this late day. : My own parents have not one grandson to perpetuate the name of Crane. My oldest sister leaves two sons, Belden C. and Alex- ander Smith. My sister Arminda, now 83 years old (born 1795) had no children. My brother Charles, born 1793, had none; died 1877. Brother Elisha, born 1799, leaves grandchildren by the name of Coryell in Kane county, Illinois, and elsewhere. Sister Mary born in Carmel, New York, 1803, never was a mother; died 1871 near Mecklenburg, New York-- wife of John Smith. I have six grandsons—sons of my only surviving child—all promising boys, the oldest, Henry C. McPike, twenty-one years old June 25th, last week. One grand-daughter in her 20th year, now with her mother spending the Summer and last Spring in Missouri with NAA IA . DOMESTIC LIFE AND CUSTOMS. 23 McPike’s relations and farther East with mine, and other friends. Wonder where she will celebrate the “Glorious” second 4th of July of the second century of our Republic. The last letter from my daughter Mary was written at the widow’s of my brother Charles a dozen miles north of the head of Cayuga Lake, where he had lived since 1815. His farm was two miles north of Trumansburg, New York. CHAPTER III. I have already written something, rather incidentally, of the manners and customs of the people in New York State from 65 down to 40 years ago. I shall now devote some time to a more particular or more minute detail which may be of service in correcting what may or may not appear in books a half century hence, in relation to the small details of domestic life, and customs and con- ditions generally. I have already seen published what will go down to future generation as true history, what I know from per- sonal observation to be erroneous. For example—I saw in a great Methodist periodical a biography of a Wall-street millionaire, Daniel Drew, giving him the character of a saint, when I know that the one thousand dollar capital on which his colossal fortune com- menced was virtually stolen from my sister, Arminda Pearce, and he never returned it, even when he was worth from fifteen to twenty millions. True, he has become bankrupt since, but that biogra- phy may yet get incorporated into an elaborate history of the Methodist Church in spite of his recent bankruptcy in business and also of character. 24 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. I will give a description of the common school system in Southern New York from 1810 to 1825. The first I ever attended was in Carmel, New York, two miles about north of Westchester county, in a school- house about eighteen feet square. A large fireplace in one side, windows and a door in the other sides, writing tables, a row of wide boards sloping from two sides; and backless benches. In that sort of a house children were taught their A, B, (’s and on through the spelling lessons. When they could spell over and pronounce the long syllables, they would be put into the reading lessons of the same book, - i. e., Webster's Speller, Noah Webster. The first of these lessons began: ‘No man may put off the law of God.” Then came the Child’s Instructor, American Preceptor, Columbian Orator, Morse’s Geography, Old and New Tes- tament. I never saw the Psalter that I remember in school, but heard grown people talk of having used it. Then came writing and arithmetic. Every writing pupil had to bring his goose quills, and much of the teach- er’s time was spent in making and mending pens. Little system or classifying existed—necessarily so from variety of books. “Grading” of classes as now was unknown. Daball’s arithmetic crowded out the old Dil- worth about 1818. The fifteen or sixteen year old boy would boast that he had learned to cipher far as the ‘Single rule of Three,” the first Winter. Few of the girls ‘‘ciphered” at all. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen years old grammar books began to appear in district schools. District I say, for I believe it was about then that districts were first organized and a public fund provided by the State for the support of schools. Teachers usually ‘boarded round;” they would stay, STOVES. | 25 say one week, with the family that sent one or two schol- ars, a longer time with those who had large families of children and comfortable quarters, leaving out the very poor families altogether. de The wood was hauled to the schoolhouse in like pro- portion. The big boys would ‘‘take turns” in chopping it. By 1818 or 1820 “Franklin stoves” were introduced. These saved more than half of the wood, though an open front, and the whole room was kept comfortable, and chil- dren’s feet ceased to get frozen in the house, as occasion- ally occurred in fireplace times. About this time I saw the first «cook stove.” It was called a ‘Ten plate” —oven the whole size, save the little space partitioned off in the back part for the smoke to pass up, then come forward between the flat top and a plate nearly as large, two inches below, forming the top of the oven, the smoke escaping through a pipe at the front end of the top plate. The rest of the stove was the fire- place under the whole oven, and the legs, and the door, The top of that oval box, three feet or 2% long and 13% wide in the middle, about three feet from bottom or floor to the top plate above the oven, and that top or upper plate could be made hot enough to bake ‘‘pancakes’ on. « Pancakes’ were made of buckwheat flour, the cheapest cereal that could be grown on the land in South- eastern New York or the North river counties. The usual way of cooking these cakes had been on a griddle, or round plate of cast iron from 12 to 20 inches in diameter, hung by a trammel over a wood fire in the kitchen fireplace, or the family room. The trammel of iron suspended in the chimney by a ¢‘cross stick” five or six feet above the hearth. The wood rested on “andirons;” the bale of the grid- dle was an upright semi-circle, giving room to ‘‘turn” over the four or six ‘‘pancakes” made at a time. The ‘‘batter” had been mixed the night before and got to fermenting, 20 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. made “light” by standing near the covered coals in the fireplace. | Covered coals, I say. We had to keep plenty of ashes to cover the fire through the night, to kindle in the morn- ing. In Summer fire would sometimes ‘¢ go out” in the night ; then some lazy boy or * gal,” if perchance all the children had remained in bed till some of the larger ones had «“ got up,” were called and sent to neighbors for fire. Some people kept tinder boxes, but they were incon- venient. Matches had not been dreamed of. The kitchen, with many well-off families, often served for a family sit- ting and dining room. So universal was the pancake bread in cold weather, that in the poorer families no other would be seen. A boyish anecdote will illustrate that this kind of ¢‘ batter- cake ’’ was in no sense a luxury, though I should state that it was preferred to the cold rye bread and shortcake, 7. e., biscuit that was used in its absence; and when dressed with butter and molasses, honey or sugar, it was, as now, a delicacy. The ordinary way of eating it by children and servants was with fried pickled pork, the pork fried so that the “i fat” of it had mainly liquified, and this served as a sub- stitute for butter or molasses. A mouthful at a time was dipped into the ‘‘ sop »__the same, I suppose, as we read of in the New Testament. But to the anecdote: Boys then, as now, would use obscene words, and by way of rebuke when a nasty ”’ word escaped, one would say to the chap who used it, « What did you have in your mouth last ?’ This was addressed to a negro slave boy--for be it known I can remember back as far as to the days of slavery in New York—when he seriously replied, not understanding that kind of figure of speech, ‘“ pancake and sop.” “Sop” was the name for gravy, and pancake and sop,” with PUTNAM COUNTY. 27 ‘« pudding and milk "— Indian meal,” as corn meal was called, made the pudding--was the style of the diet for the laboring classes and children for supper ; and all labored in those good old days. The kind of education and train- ing which boys and girls then received made men and women —education which tended to usefulness—made the country rich and people strong, durable. Yes, I have known young men to work every day in the week, and frolic at the neighborhood gatherings of young folks every night, sleeping not two hours in the twenty-four on an average, keeping in good health, ready for a foot-race, wrestling, or hopping and jumping any time after the day’s work was done. These ¢* gatherings” were most common in the Fall of the year. Some twenty or thirty of the young people would meet at a neighbor’s, peel and quarter apples and peaches--before peach trees died out, apples alone after- wards, for two or three hours, then in for a dance or ““ play ” of some kind. The girls, like the boys, would be astir betimes next morning, cows to be milked by both sexes, girls to skim the previous day’s milk, churn the butter--boys feed and take care of things, i. e., do ‘up chores,” then yoke the oxen or harness the horses and ¢ go to work.” And now about the land: It had been cultivated from the first settlement of ‘‘ New Amsterdam,” first by the Dutch, but after New Amsterdam became New York the English predominated in Westchester and Dutchess coun- ‘ties, and all along the Hudson. In my early days the rivalry between the descendants of the Dutch and earliest English settlers had not died out. An anecdote will illustrate: A Dutchman boasted that his race had most of the “ flats,” or level land. ‘And I will tell you how they got it,” replied an Anglo-Saxon descendant. When the 28 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. devil offered the Savior all the kingdoms of the world if he would worship him, he refused, you know; buta Dutch- man stood by and took the offer in quick time.” Dutchess, as before stated, originally embraced Putman county. The lands were exhausted by long cultivation; no other than barnyard and stable manures, and these would do for only a small portion of the farm. Compost ” I do not remember to have heard of. By far the largest por- tion of the land was not worth plowing. Guano not known; nor plaster. | Subsoiling was unknown. I am writing about the first two decades of this century. ‘¢ Plaster,” as they called gypsum, was introduced. On the lands on which little else grew but the sorrels, bers, strawberries and blackberries, it was found that red-top clover sowed in Winter, after rye sowed in the Fall, would take root and grow. Then in the Spring this ground plaster sowed or scatteredjover the ground would bring up a good growth of clover, and by the next season reach a luxuriant growth, and the third year the ground would be covered thickly with fallen clover. This was then turned under by the plow, and a good soil was the result. < Bill Fow- ler,” the largest farmer in Carmel, owning several hundred acres, said to my father in about 1820: ‘If I had owned as much land when plaster first came into use as I now do, I should have been a rich man to-day.” Ten thousand dollars made one “rich” in those days. Land in Putnam was worth, so near as I remember, in 1812 to 20, from twenty to thirty dollars per acre. I do remember the price at which our last farm was sold in Putnam, for I negotiated for the sale of it, myself, with Reuben Baldwin, an old companion, in the year of 1831-2, while I was attending my last course of lectures. My aged parents—I thought sixty-one or two then very old—- were left alone by their children and I induced them to go PUTNAM COUNTY, 20 west to Tompkins county where they would be near their children, Charles and Clara. That land then was sold for considerable below thirty dollars per acre. All that region of country has been made rich land and devoted to the dairy business, and that makes the owners rich. I believe the land before the present shrink- age of prices of everything from the present prevailing commercial crisis was selling for from four to six times as many dollars per acre as in 1820-25. When I say all, I mean all that is sufficiently level for cultivation, for a very large portion, if not a full half of Putnam county, is hilly, rocky surface, covered with oak, maples, chestnut, hickory, elm, and with underbrush of hazel, laurel, whortelberry, ete., ete. The fencing is mainly stone walls, many of ;which are very thick, four to six feet, to clear the land of stones. The education, under the disadvantages above enum- erated, was necessarily far less thorough than our present public school system enables the rising generation to acquire. And yet the system or mode of obtaining prac- tical knowledge in those days must certainly be regarded as valuable, judging from results. Results, I say, for we cannot deny that it produced a race of men whose know- ledge of everything necessary to make that kind of citizen that builds up the wealth of a Nation—the statesmen and officers and soldiers, the farmers, mechanics and inventors who made up our population from 1812 to 1830 compare most advantageously with soldiers and public men gen- erally since the last dates. Have written the above and indeed all the preceding in a weak, tremulous condition. My mind, meantime, has appeared to me, with occasional exceptions, 1n a fair healthy condition. I write from half a page to two or three pages a day. Sometimes my head will tire and the effort to recall inci- 30 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE. dents and facts, and especially to select suitable words and arrange them to make my meaning clear, seems to exhaust speedily my powers of intellection; but I trust I shall make myself generally understood, though I do not aim at as correct a style of composition as I usually do when writing a newspaper essay. When it is remembered that IT now want less than one month of seventy-two years old, and that my whole life has not only been one of unusual hardship—but that disease when about thirty-three or four, brought me to death’s door and caused a permanent structural change in the calibre of my colon (see Record A), it will be thought extraordinary that I have lived to the present age and retained my mental power so well as even this book will attest. But I inherit a remarkable tenacity of life. My family inheritances, or, should say, the longevity of both paternal families, was beyond an average duration of life. My father lived six years longer than I have, and my mother was older still at the time of her death. My grandfather Crane was a very old, grey-headed man, but I have no record of his age. Shall try to learn. The ‘ Old Judge,” from what I have heard of his personal knowledge of General Washington in the Revo- lution, must have been ‘born about the time he was, and died after the war of 1812. This I remember distinctly; for while they were daily expecting an attack on New York by the British, the Judge said to my father, “I am every day expecting to hear the terrible noise in New York.” I noticed this remark in particular, because I feared my oldest brother Charles, who was a soldier in the army there might get killed. That must have been in 1813 or 4, and he (the Judge) lived some years longer. Several of my Uncles Paddock lived to and over four score years. I have already stated that my Aunt Molly Richards RETURN TC COLLEGE. 31 ——— —e oo t— ————— lived one hundred years, less nearly one. My sister Clarinda and brother Charles were over four score, and sister Arminda, still living, is eighty-three, and brother Elisha seventy-eight. For several months past I have realized more clearly what is meant by the ¢ weight of years » than ever before. It is a sensation distinctly different from the lassitude resulting from disease or functional derangement of physiological machinery, in the vigor of life, or fatigue. When I sleep and eat well IT still fecl a disagreeable sensation of exhaustion. Tonics and stimulants act unkindly, while fecation and defecation are most healthily performed; digestion tolerably good meantime. Those words fe, and defecation I use in a physiological and perhaps questionable sense. | I have stated, I believe, that in the Fall of 1831 I sold my interest in Mecklenburg, Tompkins county,” New York, because I felt that I did not do justice to the sick for want of a sufficient knowledge of the principles of my profession, although no medical man stood higher in pub- lic estimation in that community than I did. My practice was really large, but I was sure that I should consider my- self more worthy of the confidence that people were dis- posed to award me after devoting my time longer to study. I went to New York City, attended another course of instructions in the Medical Department of the State University, Hospital, Eye and Ear Infirmary, then traveled West, like many other young men, to ‘“ seek my fortune.” At Albany, with my father and mother, we took railroad to Schenectady, sixteen miles. The rails were flat strips of iron, like wagon tire, spiked on to timbers run- ning four feet apart, lengthwise of the road, instead of cross-ties. These timbers rested on cross-timbers buried in the ground or some other supports, but they must have been tied some way. 32 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. The boiler and engine were not one-fourth as large as those used at present. While stopping for something a railroad coach hauled by one white horse overtook us with passengers. | This was about if not the very first transportation of passengers by rail in America. At Schenectady we took canal boat—a ‘‘line” or packet ran day and night, relays of horses, two to a line and three to a packet, each relay running I believe about ten miles, the packets carrying only passengers, going eighty or ninety miles in twenty-four hours, the lines taking goods and passengers reaching fifty to sixty. The freight boats, with thirty to fifty tons lading, would make about thirty miles a day, running only by daylight, and all the way through with one pair of horses. At Cayuga my parents left the boat and went to my brother Charles’ some thirty miles up the lake, south, near Throgs or ‘Frog Point.” I proceeded on West—1I pros- pecting (to use a word not then in use in its modern sense) to Buffalo, with a view to location. It bid fair, as I thought, to remain a small place, and I knew it would be a cold, bleak one. I had suffered so much from cold weather that I determined to get farther south. By steamer I went to Cleveland; that was a small place and had plenty of physicians. I was told that a new town had been started near the head of Lake Michigan called Chicago. Some people said ‘‘they” believed it would become a ‘considerable of a place in time,” and advised me to go there and grow up with the town, The canal to the Ohio river from Cleveland was nav- igable to Chillicothe. I heard that a new town called Massilon was rapidly growing on it. I went there on a canal boat. There I made the acquaintance of Dr. Wm. Underhill, who was distinguished somewhat as a writer INFLUENCE OF CHANCE. 33 against Christianity. A few years later he became a traveling lecturer on mesmerism and possessed extraordi- nary mesmeric power. Since spiritualism came into notice in 1848 he has been an active worker in the cause. He and his brother younger than he discouraged me from settling there. The hotel clerk told the captain of a canal boat going south, that a young man was at the house, still in bed one morning who was talking of going south. The captain waited with his boat and passengers for me to get up and eat my breakfast. And here comes in the controling influence of acci- dent, chance, luck or whatever we may please to term the fortuitous events which give shape and direction to our life’s history for weal or for woe: Had the boat arrived earlier it would not have delayed for me; later, and I might have determined to settle in Massilon; but arriving at the particular conjuncture, as the following pages will show, fixed my destiny for all time. «There is a Divinity which Shapes our end Rough hew them as we will.” I took passage, found among the passengers a splendid- - looking gentleman, apparently fifty years old, who made himself most agreeably familiar with me. Desirous that he should feel I was worthy of his con- fidence, I showed him my professional and other creden- tials—license from a medical society in the State of New York, diploma from college of physicians and surgeons of that State, certificate of attendance on hospital, eye and ear infirmary, commission as surgeon in New York cavalry, letters, etc., but nothing pleased him more than finding I was a member of the first temperance society organized in Western New York, or at least among the first. With these evidences of character, professional and social, together with what most people regarded as agree- 34 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. able manners and ‘becoming behavior, he did not hesitate to introduce me to his family. That consisted of a large, dignified lady whom I learned was a recently-married second wife. He, with his daughter, a fine-looking young lady by name of Flora, had been to New Hampshire after her and her family, which consisted of two sous and four daughters, the boys nearly young men and two of the girls young women. Their deceased father was a Mr. Clough (pronounced Kluff). The gentleman in question was Rev. Dan Young of the rather primitive Methodist church, a great admirer of John and Samuel Wesley. I made a traveling acquaintance also with Dr. Colby, a brother-in-law of the then promising young lawyer, Salmon P. Chase, whom his younger sister—Miss Emily Chase, one of the passengers—spoke of with pride as a very promising brother. He became highly distinguished as a jurist and statesman. Prominent among the passengers was a dignified lady, with whom I became acquainted, by name of Monroe. She was a sister of United States Senator Lewis Cass, then of Michigan. Her husband, a plain, farmer-looking man who said but little. Approaching, or within a few miles of Chillicothe, all eyes were directed to a wheat field waving like the ocean—nine hundred acres, we were told. I said to Mr. Monroe, ‘Do you know who owns that?” It’s mine,” he modestly replied, and soon they left us. I believe Lewis Cass was then or about that time Secretary of War. The lady, Mrs. Monroe, was a highly intelligent and cultured woman, but had the darkest skin and most brilliantly black hair I ever saw owned by a person con- fessedly of Caucasian blood unadulterated. At Chillicothe Mr. Young hired carriages to take them on home, about fifty miles. He cordially invited me to visit them; said his place was a suitable location for me; that he had men and families enough in his employ alone WILLIAM ALLEN. 35 OL qness: that his iron furnaces to give me a remunerative business; that his iron fu : were making three hundred dollars’ worth of 1ron per day; 10 I 18 1 is neighbor vere that the Ohio river bottoms in his a W families; tha op large iron thickly settled with good families; that oe a a carvice and above all he needec furnaces would need my service, and above a a od a physician there because the one on whom the commualby u x Brel cs] depended, a very worthy member of the profession, had "9 v become dissipated. on ila bs I remained a few days in Chillicothe at tae Madeira Tyr 3 4, r xr 6 House. Prominent among the guests was a tall, very slim young man, who was constantly in political EN 0 oO : : = onde eu 3 His hair resembled well-dressed flax ready to be spun. Hi name was William Allen. pi 1 Hr Qe “ho f ne Fe 1¢ Was This was in June, 1832. The following I i 1 yn Clonotess acalnst vernor Democratic candidate for Cougress against : : ot 3 vote e subse- Duncan McArthur, and elected by one vote. il quently became United States Senator, and a few years since was Governor of Ohio, and is still living and wust be over seventy-eight years old. Vv : TO) oe , ; 3 wt ig From Chillicothe I went by stage to t ortsmouth, forty flos the river a4 little steamboat sixteen 3; yee up the river ou a hittie s wien Hone Y Daring his absence Bast a physi miles to Mr. Youngs. wing, is gheenes SRR BR . “ gE = g CN ‘ rg cian had settled al the little town called Concord, s:X ules » B! 3 men Inbavasiing . Y avr Fai: 7? . HT 4 Yel e Wid 2 below, and nine above Porismoitl, Afr oo ! a wi “ Ce Wiehiv dha sooioby of his visit at Mr. Youags, enjoying highly the soe : : .i i . mY erly Ya LY ~ nord bor- accompished family apd relations living in uc uignb wo recrebiing the necessity, 1 resolved to hood, aud deeply regretting tHe necessity, J look elsewhere for a location. Fi st—For the reason that the population was too few, 1 te annors more thon ons physician. poor aal scattered to support More Jair on phynemn, Qecond—Dr. Keudal seemed io have the rigny Oi Hor He mvsel “ble to °F aramp precedence; Wuxi poor, tke myself, unable ai i hat int cod me to avoid interfer- another plac, and what nfluenced me to avold i 3 for ith bi Aine elo was a sense of ence with him more than anyiiamg ©.e was a L 3. gif 1 the party for him to commit political suicide, ete. To all this he obstinately answered with an emphatic «“No!” He insisted that one religious denomination was: quite as much entitled to the protection of law as another, and no religion should be supported that does not suffi- ciently appeal to the consciences and understanding of men to make their support voluntary. «« Have no fear,” said he to his anxious friends, “ for the ultimate result of this agitation. I have justice and right on my side, and what is more, I have the example of the Lord Jesus and his apostles, who never asked Cesar or the Jewish authorities for secular assistance. * ®, «« Mankind are so constituted that a long habit o regarding a thing or a usage as not wrong, begets a belief that it is positively right. It is so in this case. From our infancy we have grown up in the belief, or at least with the acceptance of the custom of taxing Quakers, Baptists, Methodists and Infidels for the maintenance of the Con- gregational clergy and building their meeting houses. We have seen pitifully poor men’s only cows sold by the Con- | | 44 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. stable to pay a church tax, but we have had enough of this. We are only to let the people see the injustice of the existing laws of Church and State, and their traditional and inherent ideas in favor of the present system of church support will become changed into indignation and disgust with themselves that they have endured the oppression SO long. No, sirs; I intend to push this thing, let the conse- quences to me be what they may, and trust to God for the result.” He told me he argued the question with all the ability he could bring to bear—had his speeches published at his own expense, scattered them broadcast over the State, and when the vote was taken but one solitary member of the Senate voted with him. Then the endeavor to get him to withdraw his “Bill for the Repeal of Religion,” as it was popularly called, was renewed. “See,” said they, ‘‘how discouraging; but one man voted with you.” ‘‘That,” interrupted Mr. Young, ‘‘made the result double my expectations; I expected no vote but my own for the bill.” At the next session he had gathered statistics of the condition of religious societies in the Middle States, where churches were supported only by voluntary contributions —compared their relative membership to population there and in New England; showed as well as statistics of crime in New York and New England would enable him, the influence of preaching on morality, etc., etc., and received then a vote so considerable as to arouse the fears of all who believed religion would die out unaided by the secular arm. At the next election the line of demarkation between the old political parties was ignored, an entire new issue had arisen. It was ‘‘Church and State or no Church and State,” and in spite of the thorough organization of the DAN YOUNG. 45 Church party—in spite of the zeal on the part of the Con- gregational clergy, who felt that their bread was at stake, and many of them unable to see, through the glamor of traditional usage, that their institutions could be main- tained without secular help—the no Church and State party triumphed. | The Bill passed the Senate, and Mr. Young, having achieved the object for which he entered political life, resigned his seat, knowing, as he told me, that his Bill would meet little opposition 1n the Lower House, and began to make preparations to form a colony to emigrate to Ohio. IV. And this, I hold, was a great event in the history of New England, and yet I have never in any published history seen the credit of it awarded to Mr. Young. Indeed I have never seen any history that gives a par- ticular account of the manner of release of the New Englanders from the old Puritanic Laws that punished men for non-observance of what the early sumptuary laws of those eolonies prescribed as religious duties. But this was beyond question the beginning of the reform which speedily embraced all New England States. That every word I have related in regard to Mr. Young is true, there can be no manner of doubt, for if he had been capable of falsehood he had no motive for claim- ing distinction to which he was not entitled, as he studiously avoided political life after he came to Ohio, till in quite old agé he consented to serve the pedple of Scioto county, Ohio, one term in the Legislature. 46 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE. To say, however, that every word is true, after the awful lapse of forty years since I conversed with him upon the subject may be putting it too strong, but there can be no essential error. My memory of events of my early mar- ried life, and some years preceding, appears to me more clear by far than the occurrences of the years last past. Among the anecdotes he used to relate is a little item of legislation illustrative of his care in saving expense to the public. A bill was offered proposing to pay a certain premium for erow scalps to save the planted corn. Mr. Young killed it by saying, ‘“ a few cents’ worth of refuse corn to the acre, scattered over the field, would satisfy the crows.” The father of the celebrated Bishop Chase visited the New Hampshire Legislature to lobby a bill fixing the line on disputed territory. Mr. Chase exhibited a map, and what he claimed for the true line between New Hampshire and Vermont. He warmed in his speech, which he was allowed to make in joint session, and broke out in the extravaganza: ‘I wish there was a wall on that line, with its foundation at the center of gravity, and with a hight that would reach the throne of God, to compel the Vermont tax-gatherers to remain on their own side.” That Mr. Young was a ian of mark, one whose brief course of public life created high expectations, is attested by a remark of Daniel Webster, who knew him personally, and knew of the reputation he made as a legislator. ‘1 expected,” said Mr. W. to Mr. Young’s brother John, ‘to see him in the front ranks of public life before this time.” That was about 1834 or ’585, in Cincinnati. Mr. Young resigned his seat in the Senate of New Hampshire, and formed a company to plant a colony in the West. Some dozen or so of families took such an outfit as they expected to need, in what was then the far West, and in 1820 reached Olean Point, on the Alleghany river. DAN YOUNG. 47 There they bought suitable boats, embarked their teams, wagons, etc., and floated down the Ohio, stopping some ten miles above the mouth of the Great Scioto river.” Here Mr. Young built a cotton factory, and his brother went to the Tennessee river, sold goods and bought raw cotton for the factory. Finding that iron ore abounded in the hills back of the river bottoms, he had a company incorporated by the * And here, episodically. I will relate an event thatoccurrel while floating down the Alleghany, which Mr. Young has repeatedly narrated to me and which he most religiously regarded as one of those warnings in dreams that play so conspicuous a part in Bible history. My wife, then ten and a half years old, retained to the end of her life a vivid recol- lection of the occurrence as her tather used to narrate it. Ordering one morning the boats to be got under way, he returned to his bed and immediately tell asleep. In a few moments he ran excitedly to the door and ordered the men to stop untying the boats and to remain there till after breakfast, then told his family that he saw In his dream two men with rifles and clothed in (what he afterwards learned was called) hunter's shirts, coming down the bank of the river. The men said, “If you go down this side of the island,” opposite to the head of which they were lying, “a snake a mile or so below here will swallow every boat.” “But,” said Mr. Young, “we can’t get round to the other side now for the current.” «If you have a canoe and ropes, we will cordel you round the head,’ was the reply. While eating breakfast on the upper deck, “Bless me,” exclaimed Mr. Young, ‘there come the very men I saw in my dream.” The stran- gers expressed their gratification at having arrived in time, told them that at the present stage of the water every boat would be wrecked in the rapids below, showed how, and assisted in cordelling the crafts past the head of the island, and all floated down in safety, and for this salvation the whole company believed they were indebted to the interposition of Divine Providence. Warnings in dreams and otherwise seem to have been common with Mr. Young’s ancestors, and it appears to be inherent in the Young family, for not one death of a near relative of my wife ever occurred after we left Ohio without her having notified me of the fact in advance of the mail. Such electro-magnetic constitutions, since the advent of modern Spiritualis:n, are called “medinmistic,” and we have additional evidence of its transmissability to posterity in my wife’s descendants. Why the reverend gentlemen, Mr. Strickland, prevented the above and other similar matter furnished by Mr. Young from appearing in his published biography, can only be explained by the fact that the clergy made common cause in those days of withholding from the public everything corroborative of the truths of Spiritualism. 48 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. Legislature called the ‘¢ Ohio Iron Company,” of which he was President. At one of their furnaces, near the river, the family resided at the time of my first visit. It was called Frank- lin Furnace, and sixteen miles up the Ohio river from Portsmouth. Although my location in 1832, on the Scioto, was over twenty miles from Mr. Young's, they used to send for me when serious sickness occurred in the large family. This led to an intimacy with the young people. The family relations were numerous in the neighborhood, and the people generally a very differant class from that I lived among on the Scioto. Dr. Kendall expressed to me his intention to leave Wheelersburg, and in the beginning of 1833 I located there. I found the dissipated Dr. Belknap was not so badly dissipated that he would not be a most for- midable rival if I settled at Franklin Furnace, within four miles of him. He was an excellent physician, and to me a valuable friend, but ultimately killed himself by liquor drinking. And this brings me near the great, the most important event in the life of man or woman; I mean the selection of a partner in a partnership that gives to life joys and sorrows; makes for the parties a heaven or hell. And this may be the case however worthy of each other, however faultless each may prove; domestic suffering is unavoidable. My professional experience for thirty years was large; i, e., from 1829 to 1860. My care of an afflicted wife of my own, and the occasional care of hundreds and thousands of husbands, wives and children professionally, meantime, familiarized me with the dark side of human history. The word “hell,” in a former paragraph, I am thinking is not clearly expressive of the idea in my mind. It is usually associated with guilt in some way, or moral wrong; but I'use it in a mere antithetic sense. ON MARRIAGE. 49 Pain can be even delightfully associated with the richest pleasure a generous, sympathizing nature 1s capable of enjoying. The sleeplessness and muscular exhaustion, painful, protracted and oft-repeated vigils necessitated by an invalid wife, husband or child, while they make us misera- ble with anxiety, in once sense add to our enjoyment. But we are no way ceatain that physical infirmities in this kind of permanent companionship will be the worst danger to encounter. However faultless the candidate may appear, no matter how blameless a life has given to the party a spotless reputation, the intimacy of the domestic relations may soon discover in each, or one, what will betray want of principle, and for that there is no remedy. Love cools where respect is lost. If one of the parties finds, post-nuptial, that some concealment has been practiced by the other that would have been fatal to, or defective of, the marriage consumina- tion, if known, confidence is forever gone. But I venture to say that in a great majority of cases one party cannot discover in the other a greater amount of imperfections than he or she by a careful examination of self will find on the other side, for, “To err is human, to forgive, Divine,” consequently a system of mutual for- bearance, and mutual forgiveness, and mutual voluntary blindness to each other's defects and shortcomings, will add immensely to connubial pleasures; indeed, such is the weakness of human nature, that without the practice of the above virtues, both parties will be in Hell before they die. But my object is not to advise those who have already taken the fearful leap so much as to dissuade others not to take it at all rather than take avoidable risks. Feeble constitutions or feeble health, for example, are usually avoidable risks. MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. There is as much to be considered in what the jockeys call “blood” in men as in horses. The offspring of a scrub may have the appearances and qualities occasionally of a blooded horse, but his offspring will almost invariably be of the family to which he belongs in appearance and quality. Exceptions in this as in other things do not disturb the rule. If we desire posterity that will be an improvement to society and a credit to ourselves, we should marry with reference to the laws of hereditary transmission of qual- ities, physical, mental and moral. And the inheritance of predisposition to disease is of the most vital importance to consider, disease of body or mind, or any marked defect in either. So well is this understood that life insurance companies enquire care- fully whether collateral branches of the family have been the subjects of insanity, dementia, consumption, gout, ete., as well as the antecedent health of the applicant. The great, grand error of my life was being blinded by the superior mental and moral perfections of the lady who subsequently became my wife, to such a degree that I could not see her constitutional predisposition to disease. Had I forseen the misery to which I was leading her, by persuading her to marry, I ought to have been willing to make any sacrifice of feeling or interest to induce her to remain unmarried. I knew she was unusually susceptible to influences that would derange health. She had been my patient when she confidently expected to become the wife of another, the engagement having been conclusively made—as the parties believed. I thought I knew all her infirmities. I had occasion, as the family physician, to spend many long, sleepless nights in the professional care of some of its members, and she constantly on hand, night and day, as the most trust- worthy nurse, and in this capacity she evinced such extra- ON MARRIAGE, ordinary goodness and intelligence as well as endurance that itis not strange that I became deeply interested in her. I say above that if I had known the suffering. marriage would have entailed on her I ought to have been willing, ete. But would I have done it? Alas! for those whose moral sentiments, whose sense of prudence, whose general welfare through life are all or in part held in abevance by passion. And here comes in another grand error which is common to humanity. We easily believe what we wish to believe; we believe without evidence, nay against evidence, where our feelings are deeply enlisted, and in nothing so much as in that of sexual love. I believe, in the face of science, the orandmotherish stories that ‘‘feeble girls generally make vigorous wives,” not only in the face of science but of three or four years of professional experience. At an earlier date I was blinded—failed for a tine to see the infirmities of a young and estimable lady whose friends had laid traps for me—her fortune was the chief blinding influence, but I was prudent enough to wait till the cough told the fatal story, at least to me, and I endured the wrath resulting from disappointed expectations, rather than ‘marry a fortune,” for I was made to sec that the money for some time prevented me from hearing the cough or regarding it as only a ‘slight cold.” The man who mar- ries a woman with a fortune, who would not have married her, as Addison told his niece, «egtark naked”’-—provided he was in a condition for both of them to get a respectable living, ought to be damned, and those who do it invariably find life but an endurance. There is but a very meager, if any record, of our history during the first three years of our married life—except the record of the birth of our first child, now the other of 52 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. the McPike children, though there may be more of it some- where than I now recollect. While it is not at all probable that my descendants will ever be interested in anything pertaining to the business affairs of Scioto county, Ohio, some may feel a curiosity, as to her surroundings, when their mother and grandmother— if she ever becomes one—first saw the light. During those three years we lived in Wheelersburg, one-third as populous as St. Helena now 1s (1878). Ports- mouth, nine miles down the Ohio, then was about equal to Napa City. A belt of land from one to two miles wide, called “French Grant,” extended some ten to sixteen miles up the river from Wheelersburg to Hanging Rock, near the river bank. This was well settled, and scattering farms were among the iron hills back from the river. At each furnace, I judge, one hundred or more men, women and children were employed. There were seven or eight of these furnaces within, say, twenty miles of me. Of the Ohio Iron Company, Mr. Young and Jefferson W. (+lidden, his son-in-law, owned a controlling interest of the stock: Mr. Young, President. He had built a * meet- ing house,” and preached to the furnace people and far- mers about the country free of expense. He did much 1n the way of temperance; would allow no strong drink in the neighborhood, for the company owned a large region of the back country and a portion of -the river bottom. But adversity came; a commercial crisis much like the present, only ‘‘ more 80.” The old Franklin burned. The Franklin Junior stack cave way. A steamboat belonging to the company had been burned. After the furnaces had been rebuilt, iron would not sell, although they made from ten to twenty tons of pig iron each twenty-four hours. The company became bankrupt. Mr. Young had a moderate individual property left, and a large family. | MR. YOUNG'S FAMILY. 53 cmon——oraa —p——————— 1 ——_—_—. S72 ot Mp7 FS ——— And here I will name my daughter's nearest relations at her birth, and Mr. Young's immediate family. Of himself I have said about enough. His first wife, my daughter's orandmother, is said to have been one of the most accomplished of New England women. She left of children: my wife Maria, Flora, Jesse, Charles G., Electa, Dan, Martin Rutter, John, Eliza and Augustus. Catherine I omitted in the proper place, next to Flora. She had married her cousin, J. W. Glidden, when very young. Elisa also married a cousin. Charles, under my tuition and with my help, became distinguished. First, in Alabama, as a physician, and then in Louisiana and Texas as a railroad President; was killed by an accident on railroad, leaving a large family. Martin bid fair to become a great lawyer, and died early in Shrevesport, La. John now resides in Homer, Claiborne Parish, La.., Hes * (+eneral” and member of the present Legislature, and was a Colonel in the war of the Confederacy. Jesse lives In Portsmouth, Ohio. Augustus died young, of consumption. KElecta, wife of Dr. Pryor, in Missouri. Eliza, widow of her cousin, Joseph Glidden, at Portsmouth, Ohio. Father Young married a third time, raised halt a dozen more children before he died. I have never seen but one of them. They are in Illinois. And this is the snrprising change that time and circumstances have made with almost the largest and most cultured family I had ever seen. : Then in addition to Mr. Young’s own family, there was his second wife (widow Clough, sister to his first), her two sons and four daughters. One of those sons still lives, and three of the daughters. Onc (Mary) is Jesse Young's wife. It is proper to add and deprecate the fact that Mr. Young, with all his learning and experience, in his—what 54 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE. I would call superstitious regard for everything in the Bible --could not be made to see that intermarriage of cousins german is violative of natural law and damaging to the physical and mental conditions of the fruits of iy marriages. After a few vears of rich enjoyment of their wealth, Sister Kate —as we used aftectionally to call Catherine— fell 4 victim to that opprobium medicorum, consumption. Jefferson, whose father died my patient, of consumpion, soon followed, from the same fell destroyer. Their children, offspring of cousins, had consequently but weak tenacity of life. They were numerous and scrofulous in consequence of parental blood relationship. Most of them died in childhood. Three boys survived their parents. The oldest lived over forty years and died of consumption, but the first- born died in infancy. The second survivor, John, soon lost his splendid inheritance, but is now a lawyer of talent and Ligh distinction in Cincinnati. The third son, George, is of a feeble constitution—I do not know whether he is intellectual —and lives with the one surviving daughter, wife of Mr. Houts, in Texas. She is physically a repetition of her mother, and I predict inherits her consumption. EE NOT Srl hi pe mele, After three years of living in Wheelersburg—that is, from November, 1833 to November, 1835—wife suffering every Winter with lung disease, for which I treated her by inunction of iodides, counter-irritants, inhalations, ete., ete, and I enduring the hardship of riding over the moun- tains to the furnaces and scattering farms, up and down the long stretches of the river, we resolved to try the efficacy of a warmer climate on her weak lungs. . TENNESSEE. She had traveled overland in formar years, as a health- ful exercise, to advantage, and thought her strength was such as to justify the attempt to cross Kentucky and Ten- nessee into Alabama. A friend who had traveled that road discouraged us from going that way because he said, seriously, ‘that we could find no good liquor on the whole route,” but we were of temperance principles and needed none, good or bad. With a pair of good horses and an easy carriage, we traveled via Mayosville, Paris, Harrodsburg, Lexington, on through Nashville and to Florence. The roads became so muddy that we resolved to remain there till Spring. The doctors were in the habit of having me called in consultation, and before Spring I had a professional repu- tation—was strongly solicited to settle in a rich cotton- growing region in the great bend of the Tennessee, eight or nine miles west of Hlorence, called Colbert's Reserve. I bought a little farm of eighty acres in a central place to business and soon was in a lucrative practice. Our child then, when we left Ohio, was about two years old. We left her in the charge of a friend, and Charles G. Young, my brother-in-law, who had been living with us, went to Cincinnati to the medical college. He, by the way, was about the most promising young man, in point of talent and ability to conquer difficulties in scien- tific study, I ever met. The next Spring (1837) he settled my business 1n Ohio, shipped our household goods, took our little Mary on a steamer, stopped at Louisville, bought, among other things for us, the identical record book to which I have several times referred as ‘Book A’-—that has traveled far with me, as will be seen before this narrative is brought to a close. MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. CHAPTER V. And as the great slavery question which agitated our country so long, and was finally settled by a stupendous national convulsion, will be a subject -of conversation and dispute as to its character, its cruelty or humanity, its effect on the negro race, its justice or injustice, I will leave something of my observation and experience in regard to the practical workings of the institution, as a legacy to my posterity. I do not intend to write an essay on the subject of the en- slavement of -the African race, either in its condemnation or in its defence. My purpose is to record my own obser- vations and the impressions made by what I have witnessed as the result of legalizing, virtually, absolute control by one of the genus homo over another in the civil and do- mestic relations. very one who has studied human nature, even su- perficially, has observed the propensity in man to abuse his power, and he will conclude ‘a priori” that it is unsafe to intrust mankind generally with despotic control over their fellow man, with the expectation that while under such government he will be. treated with the same justice and humanity that is within his reach as a freeman. But in view of an important fact that should enter as a factor into the enquiry whether the Caucasian is justi- fiable in enslaving the African in a civilized and Christian country, we are to take into account the antecedent condi. tion of the American slave. He, or his immediate ancestors, were the slaves of, or to, their own countrymen—where no law but the absolute will of the master restrained from even butchering him. NEGRO SLAVERY. Then is to be considered the intellectual inferiority of the negro race as evinced by the failure of nearly all Africa to develope a civilization, and the dark pall of barbarism hanging over the benighted Continent that had not grown appreciably lighter from the day of Herodotus to that of the pious St. Louis, who, aside from all selfishness, en- couraged the slave trade as the only possible way to make the savage negro adopt aivilization and Christianity. The first negro slavery I ever saw was when too young to think about its consistency with moral right or economic expediency. I remember hearing of a law having been made that the slaves of New York should be free in a few years, and all under age, when twenty-one. or I remember Jake,” a playfellow, a mulatto, when about fifteen, was traded for a horse and taken to a slave State and sold. How much boot was paid I do not remember, if I ever knew, but the horse could hardly have been worth as much as Jake's prospective service for five Or’ SIX years. Slavery evidently had” ceased to be a paying invest- ment in New York or it would not have died out, or in other words the Legislature would not have felt that the Act of Emancipation would be sustained by the public sentiment of the State. Many slaves had been set free by their masters, volun- tarily. T remember several families of such who were quiet, harmless people, still feeling their inferiority to the whites, and depending on them for employment. Others, 4s with the white men, were less respectable, less orderly and well behaved. The first hanging of a man I ever knew, was that of a negro by the name of Amos Adams-— hung in Danbury, Connecticut, for the crime of rape. That caused as much neighborhood" talk, twelve miles west of Danbury, in New York State, as the burning of the City would now. 58 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. I must have been over twelve years old at the time. My memory of the name of the culprit, without ever hav- ing seen it since, together with my recollection of noticing when T heard it read in the pamphlet that reported the crime, trial and execution, the queer name of the court that convicted and sentenced the man, shows the tenacity of memory in boyhood. The Court was “ Oyer and Ter- miner,” and in the sentence the word dead ran thus: till you are dead, dead, dead, and may God Almighty have meicy on vour soul.” Whether the laws of Connecticut, at that time, made rape a capital offence with a white man, I doubt. Old Jacob’s stories I used to listen to about Guinea. He was kidnapped from that coast when a young man. He said the cargo of slaves was landed in New York and sold as purchasers could be found. While waiting to be sold the interpreter told him if any negro who could not talk Guinea language said anything to him his answer must be in these words: ¢ Kiss my -——.” Well, an Americanized negro soon approached and said: ¢¢ How do you do, my countryman?” And Jake, intending to be very civil, replied in the words as directed, and,” said Jacob, ‘he knocked me off my seat by a blow of his fist. 1 jumped up, got a knife, and if I could a found him he would a been a dead nigger quick, I tell you.” Jacob firmly believed that when he died he would go back to Guinea. I remember, as he went to bed one night feeling badly sick, he said to my mother: - D.P — a 60 MEMOIRS OF G. B.CRANE. great trouble with such was to get rid of it. It would not be prudent for manumitted slaves to reside with bond slaves, and free States of the North legislated against the introduction of negroes from the slave States. « We inherited these negroes,” they would say, <“ and we feel it a duty to protect them. We feel very certain that they will enjoy life under our care better than in any other condition within their reach if set free, even with any assistance we could afford them. Like children, they need a sort of patriarchial government. Their mental capacity is not equal to ours naturally. This is proved by the fact of their race in Africa remaining naked savages to this day, never having invented anything analogous to an alphabet, invented a plow, or domesticated a wild animal for useful purposes.” While this kind of reasoning and Scripture authority tended to quiet the consciences of zealous church members, who professed ‘to do unto others as they would that others should do unto them,” it was plain that the great mass of slave-owners did not trouble themsleves about any moral considerations involved. They acted, as the creature man, with exceptions too rare to disturb the rule, has always acted—that is, on the assumption that «might makes right.” It was in their power to make money by the negro’s sweat and their ‘natural increase,” and they acted in the matter as men everywhere do with their capital, or their superior skill in bargaining, to oppress the weaker, to make money out of the necessi- ties of the poor and unfortunate. The slave-driver was more brutal, apparently, than the shirt or calico maker, merely because he had 1t in his power to be so. The one drove the nigger with the lash, the other operates through the stomach, the hunger of mortals, to extort their sweat without returning an equivalent. I had lived in Alabama about three years, enjoying in ABOLITIONISTS. 61 the main reasonably good health, and my wife had been a gainer on that score, (see record book A), when, while la- boriously engaged with the sick, I first discovered the in- termittent pulse, etc., there narrated. During those three years I had seen much of slavery in its best and worse features, then I visited the North as my health had failed, heard the rantings of Abolitionists and Methodist preachers, about the abominations and wickedness of slavery, found how terribly ignorant the masses of the Northern people were of everything per- taining to the institution, how unscrupulously all who envied the slave-holder would lie about him-—became con- vinced that the real spirit that actuated the Abolitionist generally, was hatred of the owner and envy rather than love or pity for the slave, just as Macaulay says of the Puritanic opposition to bear-bating in Cornwell’s time, it was not so much their humanity as their, austerity; they opposed it, not because it caused the bear to suffer, but on account of the pleasure it afforded the spectators. * * * * * * * I was constantly plied with questions about negro slavery. The ignorance of the people of the institution’s manage- ment is indicated by the fact of a physician at Mecklenburg, New York, inquiring of me ‘‘how many men it took to pull a plow ?” He supposed that slaves did the work of mules and horses. I told him he was a fool to suppose planters would use a team costing ten thousand dollars, even if it could do the work of a pair of mules, when the latter would cost only three hundred dollars. A Presbyterian deacon threw up_to me the fact of mulatto children growing out of slavery, in reply to my saying that the increase (natural) proved that the slaves were kept in good physical condition by wholesome food. 62 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. I could endure no longer without retaliation. ‘To this charge,” said I, “I plead guilty, for bastardy 1s as common among slaves in the South as with white people in the North.” His settled preacher had just absconded for sedu- cing his ward, who lived in his family, placed there by her parents to attend school and enjoy the religious in- struction of his reverence, meantime. The deacon changed the subject. However, in fidelity to the truth of history, I should here say that abolitionism at that date was not popular among the masses, but it was caused to increase by the ill- judged measures of Southern statesmen and people, and rapidly spread from that time on, till it culminated in the war of the Confederacy. This great struggle has passed into history, and while I expect the verdict of posterity will justly accord to the leading Abolitionists of our country the honor we now pay the memory of Wilberforce and Clarkson, my own deliber- ate, and, I believe, unprejudiced opinion has ever been, that a very large proportion of the Northern people who con- cerned themselves about the South, cared precious little for the welfare of the negro. They opposed slavery not be- cause it injured the black, but because they supposed it benefited the white man, and for political reasons. But I know that excellent men and women, and very many of thom, were influenced to use their endeavors to free the slave by the best sympathies of human nature. They were such men as Cassius M. Clay and Thomas Jefferson represent-—men who not only deplore the cruelty that des- potic control of man over man occasions; but they foresaw the inevitable result to which the continuously increasing slave population in the cotton States would lead. I have often heard planters jocosely express a real truth illustrative of the above. That is: ¢ We make cotton THE FINAL RESULT. ————————————————-————— ————————e————— —t ————————. 1 — ——_— —— e———— er ——— conan a to buy niggers, and buy niggers to make cotton.” And the inevitable tendency of that routine economy was to diminish the number of white families in proportion to the increase of slaves. This I saw verified in my old Alabama neighborhood. I left it for Missouri in 1840, and before 1850 the farms were so aggregated together—the larger planters buying out the smaller—that IT missed but too many of my old friends when I revisited my old home. And so it would have gone on till no whites but overseers remained, and in a few years longer the negroes would have preponderated so overwhelmingly in number that some Touissaint, Christophe or Nat Turner would have arisen and re-enacted the San Domingo tragedy. This, Mr. Jefferson wrote, would be the end of American slavery, provided a sense of moral duty on the part of the white, did not effect the emancipation of the black race. I think Macaulay says that moral influences brought about the abolition of British slavery. If he is right in that, it must be regarded as the greatest triumph of justice over selfishness that history records. Macaulay does not seem to be mindful of the fact that West India emancipation did not result from the legislation of the planters there, the party directly interested in the question—the ««Mother Country”’--could legislate its colonies out of their slave property and still enjoy their commerce. But my main object in recording my experience in the practical workings of negro slavery 1s to enable my grand- children and great grandchildren to be able to say in controversies that will arise fifty or more years hence, that they know slavery was or was not what it may at that remote time be represented to have been, and if I here and at this time, when all I write is fresh in my memory, 64 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. with no object or motive to warp my judgment, alike friendly, and alike related to Abolitionists (primitive) and to pro slaverists, I say I want those, my descendants, to have confidence in the truthfulness of what I write, that they will feel and know that slavery, like about all other human institutions, was a mixture of good and evil, and when considered (I mean American slavery) in all its bear- ings as hinted at in this book, it is not easy to decide which predominated. I can give the most convincing proof of its being a system of unmixed injustice and cruelty by recording extreme examples, omitting redeeming ones, as incendiary Abolitionists did ininflaming the indignation of benevolent and just men against slave-owners, and by omitting the cruelty and injustice towards the helpless negro, that I have witnessed, can make it appear a Divine institution. I intend to write some extreme cases of both. And first I will say in general terms that hard masters and indulgent ones alike were ever ready to summon me to visit their sick negroes. There was value at stake. I sometimes thought they were quite as anxious to see their servants well cared for when sick as their children or selves. When I found, occasionally, my slave patient neglected I would demand the nursing and care I would prescribe as a condition of my continuing in charge of the case. ‘omical incidents would occur. W. O. P. returned from Florence, drunk. He owned three hundred negroes ——only son of the richest man, it was said, in Tennessee-- I told him Jim, who had bilious pneumonia, must be moved into a cabin that the wind would not blow through. “I have it,” said he, “will, hic, take him into my sleeping room, where I can see to him myself, hie.” That was just what I did not want, but would try it. On the way with him to the splendid mansion of which Mr. P was the sole occupant (his wife having ‘been SOUTHERN SLAVERY. 65 recently killed by his giving her poison while drunk, by mistake, and his children off at boarding school), a negro woman whispered to me, «I beg, Doctor, that you will see that that old blanket is sent back, I have nothing else to keep my baby warm.” A hundred dollars worth of blankets and a big mat- tress were placed on the floor near the drunk’s bed, and a ocood nurse (servant), ordered to stay and wait on Jim, ander orders from ¢Master.” I was able to have it mainly my own way by help of good intelligent servants and an Overseer, for a few days P— remaining too drunk to meddle much. But finally he resolved to boss this case, at least in my absence. ««Well, Doctor,” said he when I arrived, ‘Jim was dy- ing and I gave him a dose of onion juice and brandy, and made old Cass (a negro woman) pray for him, and it hope him a heap.” | The negroes told me that he had actually kept the old woman down on her knees praying for Jim. This man was a spreeing drunkard, but a courteous gentleman generally, well educated, and took pretty good care-of his slaves. I do not give this as an extreme case, i. e. of intentional severity or severity incident to the sys. tem through brutal ignorance and want of feeling like the following : A negro hearing I was at the house left the plow, came to the Overseer, and told him in my presence, that his ¢bustness’”’ hurt him so he could not plow, and “I come to see the Doctor.”” The Overseer without speaking to me, took down his blacksnake, and said, ‘Come out here, I’ll cure you.” I interfered and found the negro had strangulated hernia. My presence saved his life, not that the whipping would have endangered him, only as it would - "bave caused him to return to the field and work until the bowel would have mortified. MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. ““ Where 1s Sam?” I inquired of an overseer, as I looked into the cabin for a patient I had attended several days. ““O, I have cured iim, ’’ was the reply. j That negro of one hundred and eighty pounds I was treating for bilious fever. For several days his pulse ran as high as one hundred and ten to one hundred and twenty. : The brutal overseer had laid one hundred lashes on his bare back, which created such a revulsion as to break the fever. At least, I so expected, as I saw no more of him though continuing to visit others in that negro quarter. A lusty negro split open an overseer with an axe—no other white person on the plantation. Negroes ran to ad- joining plantations and made it known. Soon some armed men rode to the scene of the tragedy. They were met at the gate by the murderer. ¢¢ Gentlemen, ” said he, «I knows who you is after; you no need them guns. I killed our overseer, but I don’t want to hurt nobody else. He ’buse my wife so I couldn’t stan’ it. I kill anybody 'buse her like he did. I’se ready to go to jail with you.” He was regularly tried and hung in Florence, Alabama, 1837 or 1838. j A young married man, with an interesting twenty-year- old wife, took the position of the dead overseer. Maternity first blessed her there, and with such surroundings, 7. e at least one hundred and fifty blacks, men, wate and children, and no white person within near a mile. I often saw her and babe; no fear evinced. Mr. M. (her husband) was a rigid disciplinarian. He kept the fifty or so field hands under good control. Indulgence, indeed, was fatal to subordination; have often heard humane masters express regret that severity was indispensable. The rule with reasonable masters was to feed and clothe well and exact rigid compliance with orders, under penalty of the lash. It was hardly safe on the part of a master to overrule his overseer in a matter of NEGRO SLAVERY, 67 punishment, lest he lose that officer on whom so much depended in the way of making a good crop. General Coffee’s plantation may be regarded as a type of the best regulated family cf slaves. That gentleman had died before I became their family physician. The family-—both white and black-—was large, and I had occa- sion to be there a great deal, night and day. (See Book A, manuscript.) : A story will illustrate the customs and usages on what I regard as the humane and religiously conducted planta- tions. Soon after Gen. Coffee returned from the Creek War, the overseer, in going his usual bedtime round in the «« quarters,” or village of negro cabins, found an unusual number of darkies in one cabin. He listened out- side and looked in the window. He found that N ed—Gen- Coffee’s body servant in the campaign—was giving an account of the battle of the ‘¢ Horse Shoe.” He drew a diagram on the floor, showing the course of the river and the barricades the Indians had thrown across the neck or nar- rowest part of the ¢ Shoe.” He said: ¢ We all, and soldiers, had heen making ladders all day, an’ at night Gen. Jackson an’ Gen. Coffee an’ all de officers tell their body servants dey might hab guns in de mornin’ and go fight de Indians, jess like soldiers. We all feel mity gran’, an’ in de mornin’ all march down de ribber till ebery one start on a run wid ladder an’ gun. De fus’ soldier wot got on top of de fence up de ladder was shot dead, an’ fell off close to we darkies. Den ebery one jes’ run his best way back to de camp, an’ I jes’ knew den dere was no fight in a nigger.” The overseer concluded to let the darkies choose their own bedtime that night. : When any of these negroes were sick, Mrs. Coffee would go round the quarters with me and carefully see 68 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. that my prescriptions were attended to. On Sunday every one, old and young, would be thoroughly washed, combed, and clean clothes donned; and a large portion, if not all who were large enough, off to meeting, mainly on horse or mule back. The slaves were quite as much inclined to become pious as the white people; more so, I think, if sincerity is the test of piety. But I used to query at that time, before I as clearly understood the difference between the religion of Jesus Christ and modern sectarian religion as I do, whether Heaven was symbolized by the distinction that was made in ‘meeting houses and otherwise between the white and black brethren—negroes in a side or corner of the ‘‘ House of God,” by themselves, and separately called to the com- munion table, waiting till ** white folks had got through. There were organized societies of negro professors of religion of different denominations—Methodists predomi- nating —so far as I was acquainted. I have seen half an acre of them at the water baptizing by immersion, one of their number being the preacher. He strained to use big ecclesiastical words and phrases, and made comical blunders by doing so. In catching, for example, at the incomprehensible word ‘* triune,” he used ‘¢ utrine.” When riding with that slave preacher, both, as was most common, on horseback, I invited him to come along- side, and I analyzed him in regard to his ideas of moral and religious right. | «If you had driven your master a hundred miles from home, and he should give you a ° pass’ and money to take you back alone; you lose both, and know, if found withouta ¢ pass,’ you would be putin jail, would you think it sinful to steal food to enable you to get home?” ¢ Yes; de stealin’ would be a sin, but den I believes God would forgive me.” Pretty well, thought I, for a human that can’t read. - A PIOUS MISTRTRESS. 69 A venerable man asked my opinion of the curability of a sick negro. ‘No possible chance,” said I. I saw tears voll down his cheeks. By-and-by he broke silence: ¢«« Tom and I were children together, play-fellows; he has always been with me; the prospect of parting pains me.” He knew the death of that old negro would reduce the expenses of the plantation’ a little. All his slaves were cared for like his cwn children, so far as physical comfort was concerned. Capt. W. I regarded as a Christian though no member of a Church. ‘« Have you been down through the ¢ quarter? ” said a lady patient to me. ¢¢ Ever since I have been confined to the house I have been troubled for fear the little niggers will be neglected.” At a great Methodist meeting in honor of some event in the life of John Wesley, I saw a wealthly lady contrib- ute, ostentatiously, a United States bank bill of one hundred dollars for the ¢¢ Foreign Missionary Cause.” The next day I visited her plantation that was conducted by her son to see a negro woman who had been left at their ¢ quarter” by a relative who was taking a gang of slaves South. She was alone in a cabin, not a thing in it but a goods box made into a chest, and a sack of corn shucks and a blanket for a bad. Her cough had stopped her further travel —dying of consumption. «« What do you have to eat?” I inquired. *° I keeps my vituals in de chest.” I found a ¢‘ corn pone” in it and nothing else. ‘Are you alone all the time ?” ¢ Oh, no Massa Doctor; when de black folks get through work at night dey brings beds in here and sleeps wid me, and dey brings me suthin’ to eat, when I wants it, for supper.” ‘Not a complaint or murmur about neglect. By touching a bell, the old lady that I heard shout so loud twenty-four ‘hours before, could have stepped into her carriage and been set down at the cabin as a ‘‘ missionary” to one, if 70 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. not ‘‘ heathen,” a human being who nceded some such ser- vice as her great Master was wont to render. And, by the way, I found my patient belonged to the same church, going to the same Heaven, as they taught, with the mistress. The woman, a mulatto, had more sense and a better heart than the owner of some hundreds of her like, and was, of course, a thousand times more of a Christian. The great Board of Equalization will regulate these inequalities in the Great Beyond. An excellent servant of my own was profuse in ex- pressions and actions of gratitude for my faithful care of her, in an ugly and dangerous typhoid fever. Such was her devotion to my wife and self, that I don’t believe she ever suspected that a feeling of selfishness stimulated my acts of kindness and humanity. TI instance this as an authoritative proof that sick slaves were not always cared for as well as whites, through feelings of unmixed humanity and duty. One more case and I will dismiss the slave question with some general remarks. A gentleman had assisted me the livelong night in working, like fighting fire, with a powerful negro man, in awful convulsions. When I pronounced him safe, ‘Thank God,” said the master, ‘‘he is the best nigger on my plan- tation. I would not take $1,500 for him.” But I have omitted to name a standing and car- dinal charge which anti-slaverists urged against the Institution. I mean the disintegration or sundering the domestic relations of negro families by the sale of portions of the family—husband, wife or children. It must be confessed that that point, as the Legislators say, was well taken—provided we concede (what has been clearly proved untrue), that the ‘natural affections,” domestic sympathies and the relations generally pertain- AFRICAN SLAVERY. 71 ing to the institution of marriage are as delicate, strong and permanent with the African as with the Caucasian race. The breaking up of families of slaves was an unavoid- able incident of the institution, and made more cruel than necessary by the cupidity of unfeeling masters. 1 have known a fine, strong-minded, valuable negro man to be taken from Alabama to Texas, by a very respectable master, when that master could have made that slave, his wife and children, unspeakably happy by paying fifty dol- lars more than he believed they were worth. But we are naturally prone to find excuses in extenua- tion of the wrongs which circumstances make it difficult for us to avoid committing, to say nothing of wrong which bad men practice intentionally. It may be urged that if the ancestors of the slaves in question had remained in Africa, their descendants would have been under a more despotic control, and a thousand times more ignorant than American slaves. There can be no question, if we can believe such African explorers as Mungo Park, the Landers and others, that the 4,000,000 of American slaves knew more of what be- longs to civilization, and had in the aggregate more mental development, more intelligence, than all of their race in Africa. This intelligence and civilization was, and is, the result of their enslavement by a superior race. | Capt. Landers says he paid an old jacket fora stalwart naked, savage negro, while surrounded by acres of similar creatures, and he could have cut him in pieces without one of the thousands of the fellow negroes present raising a protest. The Captain and his brother wanted him to help row their boats on the Niger. Going down that river, one of his fémale slaves cried when passing the place of her childhood. That, he says, was the only emotion he ever witnessed in Africa at leaving 72 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. home and kin. A woman would sell her babe or give it away without the least manifestation of feeling. If such is a true picture of African native character, it would seem that sympathy for our slaves should have been directed to the amelioration of the evils, such as I have narrated, in- stead of pursuing a course towards the South which caused the terrible political cataclysm or convulsion that has so demoralized our country. Yes, black slavery is wiped out, and we bid fair, by the aggregation of capital in the hands of the few, at the ex- pense of the many, to have white slavery substituted under another name, and in the North more oppressive than in the Sduth. CHAPTER VI. I have been running my eyes cursorily over the pre- ceding pages and find that age is telling on me, not only physically but in the power of concentrating thought and continuing mental labor as formerly. And it is suitable for me to add here, that I write so irregularly, in such different conditions of mind, health, bodily strength, fatigue, ete., that a liberal interpretation will be needful to acquit me of inability to write in any manner approaching a more scholarly style. But Iam not writing this book so much to show my posterity my scholarship as to exhibit to them what I am, and have been in all the relations of life, and the minute and commonplace manners and customs of my age that will escape the attention of historians who will write the history of the first six decades of the present century, writers who will think it vulgar in them to describe a har- row, teeth and all made of wood, or write ‘‘ pancake and sop.” TALLOW CANDLES. 73 And when I was narrating how the boys and girls per- formed their industries and enjoyed amusements, I ought to have gone more into detail to show the broad contrast in everything pertaining to domestic life at that time and the present date. Then, we studied or worked after dark by the light of tallow candles that required frequent snuffing with a little instrument made for the purpose, to make two of them give half the light we now get from a coal oil lamp. Lamps were somewhat in use, giving a feeble licht, but coal oil or gaslight had not been dreamed of. To weigh flour in our mill, or a hundred weight of anything, 56 pound weights of iron, 112 making a ‘‘hund- red weight,” would be put on a platform four or five feet square which was suspended to a balance iron beam by ropes from each corner, and the material to be weighed placed on the one at the other end, fractions of a hundred supplied by smaller weights, and this bungling method was in use until about fifty years ago Mr. Fairbank’s im- mortalized himself by inventing the platform scales. The close economy of living in those days will be understood by the fact of sugar and cream in tea only being used when respectable farmers or mechanics had visitors, and indeed it was usually milk instead of cream. Coffee seldom seen. I had a good opportunity to learn this in ‘‘boarding round” when an 18 to 20 years old peda- gogue. In building a house or barn the frame work would be pinned together on the ground and all the men in the neighborhood invited to the ¢‘ raising,” and with their united strength, and hand poles with iron points, lift a broadside or end at a time to its position. A feast was usually prepared at evening for the company at ‘‘ stone frolics ” and *¢ raisings,” and men w ould be made merry on 74 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. milk punch and egg nog. Rum was used ;—whisky un- fashionable. Brakes on wagons were not known. Light loads were held back on down hill by the horses’ breeching behind like a breast strap before, and heavy loads by chaining a wheel. Meeting-houses were without fire-place or stoves. Worshipers would shiver with cold through a thirdly, fourthly and lastly” hour-and-a-half sermon. Women would bring to church a tin box of coals to keep their feet warm. About 1820 the Presbyterians in my native town were shocked by a proposal to assist the singing in church with a bass viol, but finally the members assented to it against the remonstrance of their settled conservative preacher. That functionary was so disgusted that in giv- ing out the hymn the next Sunday he astonished the con- gregation by saying, ¢ the choir will sing and fiddle the 49th hymn.” Boys from 16 to 18 years old felt proud if they could hire to farmers for six or seven dollars a month during the Summer season and then be boarded for deing ‘¢ chores” night and morning and every other Saturday, while going to school the balance of the year. The young man who got ten dollars a month the year round soon became very respectable. I knew several such who were rich men at fifty. I should have added that in those days nothing was ever said about how many hours made a day’s work on farms. Some of the hardest employers demanded their men should be in the field while stars remained visible in the sky, and not quit work at night ’till they reappeared. It was claimed that school teachers’ wages should be as low as farm The following is an extract from a letter written by a school fellow of my early boyhood, son of one of the large farmers in that section of the «Empire State,” and received by me while reading the proof sheets of this work—an interesting coincidence. He ought to have added to his summary of small things, thatwhen our fathers ‘ went to York” they OLDEN CUSTOMS. 75 hands, in spite of the cost of their education, because of their confinement in the school room being limited to six hours a day, and that but five days in one week and six the next, alternately. * x * * * * x Tt would be curious to see the first young ladies of the township from which my daughter last wrote me in New York, who lived three or four generations ago, in their then fashionable dress, ‘‘ a petticoat and short gown,” contrasted with ladies now, not half as good as they, in their trains. % % ¥ & % would pay a barber there a sixpence (six-and-a-fourth cents), for a “shave,” and a “shilling,” twice as much, to have their ‘hair cut. Also, it they wanted a “dram,” a “half gill” of “rum,” would cost at a way- side “tavern” three cents. « No railroads, telegraphs, ocean steamers; no reapers, mowers, threshers; no sewing machines, or knitting machines; no daguerreoty pes; no illustrated books or papers, no steam printing presses, no friction matches, and as to household affairs, a single room in many families nad to answer the purpose of Kitchen, dining and sitting room, and more than this, the little or big spinning wheel must have a place there a large portion of the time, to spin the yarn for the different fabrics for family wear, and when these had passed through the hands of the weaver and fuller, the tailoress and dressmaker must have a portion of this room assigned them for a season; and finally the shoemaker with his “kit” must occupy a niche there to make up the shoes—not boots—- tor the Winter. As to the temperature of this room in Winter, it de- pended much on the portion of it you occupied, for among other things we had not, were cooking and heating stoves. If you sat near the broad stone fire-place with its “pack-log” and ‘‘fore-stick,” on which was piled a quantity of smaller green wood, you would stand a fair chance to ‘roast your shins,” provided the fire had received sufficient encour- agement from the bellows which hung in the “chimney corner,” while your back might have sufficient cause of complaint. Pleasure carriages, _ few and far between, and still eliptic springs unknown. The lumber wagon with its wooden spring seat, and kitchen chairs added according to demand, usually took the family to church. The “living room” was destitute of carpet, and also the «ped rooms,” except, perhaps, the pai lor bedroom. On the parlor floor you would find a home-made striped carpet, and its furniture consisted of a large dining table, a large mirror, a set of flag-bottomed chairs with the seats nicely painted, and the family bureau. Anything worthy the name of family library was al- most unknown, and school books were few indeed, and the one for the more advanced scholars was the English Reader.” 76 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. Seventy-two years and six days have glided into the past eternity since my parents were blessed with a seventh child, a third son, and which my mother always distin- ouished as her ¢ baby,” because her last. She was then thirty years and four months old;—my father six months older. Blessed, I say? Happy delusion ! We anticipate happiness that imagination pictures in the future from our children, when we but too often realize the reverse. My youngest sister proved a real blessing to our parents. They saw her first, she saw their last of life, and was faithful to them during the intermediate years. My journals will explain why I was unable to be faithful, but they do not show how often nor how much they were made to rejoice by my testimonies of affection and acts of filial duty in the way of pecuniary contributions. But all of this by the way. I now return to my exodus from Alabama, where I should have remained permanently but for the failure of my health. [See book A, p. 210.] My prosperity and social enjoyment there were eminently” satisfactory till my health failed. I had returned from New York to Ohio where my wife had been during my stay in the former State, because I feared to take her farther north in the Spring lest her health would not endure the journey, and it was determined that she remain in Ohio while I went to Alabama to settle my business. Prominent men of Flor- ence persuaded me to remain there and confine my busi- ness to the city. In the Spring father Young brought my wife down, but I had again become so unwell that we re- solved to go north. We visited her sister, Flora, who had married Rev. John F. Gray, and emigrated to Auburn, Lincoln county, Missouri. We visited a mineral spring in Pike county with such advantage to our health that I de- termined to settle in Bowling Green, county seat of Pike. HARDSHIPS. 77 I engaged in merchandise with Rev. J. W. Campbell. This did not work well. In about one year my health was such as to warrant my re-engaging in my profession. 1 sold my interest in the store to my partner and soon had a large practice. The old manuscript books and journals which I have preserved, together with a great number of articles which I wrote for various newspapers, while living in Pike, from June, 1840, till the Fall of 1852,—preserved by my first wife and arranged in a scrap book by my present one— will make my grandchildren familiar with some of my his- tory during those years, and with the terrible suffering of their grandmother most of that time. And she did not suffer alone. My anxiety and care of her; the necessity which compelled me to expose myself and overtax my strength in my profession; the losses I sustained by in- vesting in mercantile business before I was well enough to resume the practice of medicine; and the occasional bilious attacks consequent on the malarious character of the climate and frequent colds caused by exposure to at- mospheric inclemencies, and heated rooms at home; the impossibility, most of the time, of seeking more comforta- ble or healthful quarters on account of my wife’s infirmi- ties, together with our unwillingness to leave for Califor- nia soon as we might have done, from a desire to have our daughter sufficiently educated to make a respectable figure in the world; all, and other indefinable causes, conspired to make the twelve central years of my life a season of hardship. The memory of those years—I hardly know what I should say about them ;—the social pleasure, the numerous friends, the plenty and cheapness of good. living, the great number of people who so highly valued my professional services and were so respectful to me, all conspired to make me contented with my situation, but for the terrible 78 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE. drawbacks, among which the climate came in for a large share. We use to say the weather was the coldest and the hotest, the wetest and the dryest, and we might add, the windyest, in the world. As a valued friend said, ‘‘it was the battle ground of the elements.” Wind from the south would seem for a few days to pile up as it were in the north, then come back in a rush. I have, actually, when riding over the bleak prairie from the south with a stiff, west wind, had the tears freeze as they rolled down the left side of my nose, while the leeward side would escape freez- ing. A ten mile ride at midnight, the mercury at zero, was earning one’s money, not literally ‘by the sweat of the face.” With mercury at 85 or 90, heat was more pros- trating than it is here at 105 degrees, from, I presume, the greater humidity of air in the valley of the Mississippi. But whether we can say that is not a good climate—as good as this—I think should depend, not so much on the physical comfort either admits of, as upon the kind of physical and mental constitutions they develop. The little town of Bowling Green, for example, has been the nursery in which several eminent men have taken their start. John B. Henderson grew up in that county (Pike), a fatherless child; first a school master, next a law student, next State Legislator early in life. He became United States Senator, and last, the banner bearer of his party (Republican), as candidate for Governor. At his first election to the Legislature, about 1848, the Whigs had put me in nomination for Legislator, but 1 felt it would be so humiliating to have a mere boy for competitor, as J. B. H. appeared at that time, and I would not accept the nomination. He was then a Democrat. James O. Broadhead, who has achieved national dis- tinction, began his legal practice in Bowling Green. So did A. H. Buckner, now Member of Congress from Mis- sourl. CLIMATE. 79 Gilchrist Porter, ex-Member of Congress, and for many years since Circuit Judge; Pat. Dyer, also ex-Mem- ber of Congress and U. S. Attorney, began there; as also did my brother-in-law, he, as a law student, now a General and Member of Louisiana Legislature; and several others of less distinction. But my test, and I claim it as original, of what consti- tutes good climate, should not be restricted to a locality. By comparing New England with Louisiana or Missisippi, Scotland with France and Italy, we shall see that rugged climates are ‘good climates;” in the most valuable sense of the idea, they make superior men. We can easily understand why men who are compelled : to battle with the elements to make them yield the bread they eat,” should become more inventive than those who lazily bask beneath a tropical sun, subsisting on Route ously produced fruits, fish and game. ‘Necessity is the invention.” ie desirable it may be to become intellec- tually great or physically strong, I must confess I would sooner take my chances for life’s greatest enjoyment in such a climate as this, if it were certain I would attain to neither, than suffer a long life time in the Mississippl yal ley. Thad enough of it, and as soon as my daughter's educational advantages had been sufficient to justify bs 2 taking her from school, (for we did not expect to find i op in California even in 1853,) we sold out our few hundreds of acres of Pike county and left for the Pacific shore. MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. CHAPTER VII. In New York City I learned what was meant by ¢San Francisco direct.” It was to sail around the Horn without one stopping place. On the 6th of January 1853, we, (wife, daughter and self) took passage on board the clip- per ship Eagle, 1,300 tons burden, and sailed towards Africa. But my journal, which I have always been endeavoring _ to find time and strength to transcribe and put in a more readable condition, will be sufficient to show that I regis- tered temperature of air and water from New York to near the Island of Saint Paul, then in a southwest direction to and through the Straits of Le Maire, doubling the Horn, then sailed northwesterly until we had passed San Fran- cisco a hundred miles, tacked, ran back and anchored in its harbor on the last day of April and landed next morn- ing, May 1st, 1853. Here I am reminded of the verification, substantially, of a singular prediction. With our few passengers, be- sides Capt. John S. Farren, his wife, son and two daugh- ters, we had an English military officer, who had spent ten vears in India. He was the first confirmed Spiritualist I ever knew. We had been two or three days becalmed, seven hundred miles southwest of San Francisco. Captain Farren had just been telling me that on his last voyage he was detained ‘off the Heads” for ten days or more by the fogs, and should not be surprised if we now, between the ‘‘doldrums” or belt of variable winds and calms in which we lay, failed to reach San Francisco for weeks, when Lieut. Casement emerged from his stateroom, in which he had been shut for days, fasting meantime. PREDICTION. 81 «Ladies and gentlemen,” said he ‘I have the pleasure of announcing to you that we are to reach San Francisco next Saturday.” «Who told you ?” asked the Captain, jocosely. «My mother,” was the reply. A good laugh of the company (we were at the breakfast table) ensued. He had often spoken of his mother’s death which occurred five years previously. | "1 followed him to the quarter-deck, and with partially assumed sincerity enquired how his mother imparted to him the information, and the philosophy of the process. It was something analogous to what is now known as auto- matic writing. «“But,” said I, ‘to-day is Wednesday, and we can’t sail seven hundred miles, even with a good wind, by Saturday.” : «That is quite nonsense,” he testily replied. ‘Ihave this from higher authority than mere flesh and blood. 1 don’t pretend to explain how spirits in the higher life know more of the laws of meteorology than we do, but they evidently do, and we shall be in San Francisco before nine o'clock Saturday night if we live, and we are sure to live.” : ‘Strangely enough, almost while we were talking on the subject a ‘‘norwester” struck us and the good ship flew off literally ‘‘on the wings of the wind.” I suggested to Mr. C , to put down the laugh— by obtaining other particulars in relation to our arrival, ‘as the fulfillment of one prediction alone would be made to pass as a coincidence. | «This,” said he, ‘I should be afraid to attempt. It would be irreverent to evoke information not spontane- ously offered.” Ly ‘Hours later he approached me enthusiastically. “1 was impressed to sit again. She told me my father did not 82 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. go to to Australia as I expected he had, as you have heard me often say, and also that my brother is now in San Francisco, and that we will be there early enough Satur- day for me to see him.” On Saturday morning Captain Farren and Mr. Bailey, (the first officer) were busy in examining their log, and comparing reckonings and determined that they were too far north—tacked ship and ran southeast. Soon ‘‘Land, ho I” was cried from the mast-head, and anon the Farra- lones were in sight. The Pilot boat met us, bringing newspapers, told us of the organization of the Cabinet of the new administration, etc. For four months, less six days, we had not seen a hu- man being outside of our vessel but once, then we spoke a ship, nor seen land except Terra del Fuego and Staten Land, separated from it by the Straits of Le Maire, seem- ingly but a few hundred yards wide, and through which we sailed in ‘‘doubling the Cape.” Between the ‘‘Gate’ aud the city, the Pilot, to whom the Captain had given charge of the ship, dropped anchor, because, as he said, he could get a better berth in the morning. At this our “prophet” was furious, said it was a contrivance of the Captain to defeat the promise that we should be in San Francisco on Saturday. Geographically, I suppose we were in San Francisco. But he (the Lieu- tenant), was to be there in time to see his brother that evening. True, he had time to go ashore, before dark by a row of two or three miles, but that, he thought, did not meet the fulfillment of his prophecy, Sunday morning we anchored near the wharf and Mr. C. went ashore and returned with his brother whom he found, he said by being ‘‘impressed” to turn into an ob- scure street, where he unexpectedly met him and learned that their father had remained in London instead of leav- ing January 1st for Australia, as he had intended. FUDGE WELLS, 83 I simply relate the facts, and add that Mr. Casement wrote them out and they were published in the Alta Cali- Jornia. Spiritualism has since attained to large proportions Few among the learned or unlearned who have been able to divest themselves of the glamor of traditional precon- ceptions and examine dispassionately the phenomena on which it is based, have failed to become convinced that they afford evidence stronger than Holy Writ, that death is but the development of a higher life and that the end of this is but the beginning of an existence not percepti- ble to ordinary vision—but far more desirable, especially if this has been a well spent life. Walking out into the town I was accosted by Joseph B. Wells, Esq., who took me to Page & Bacon’s Bank, in- troduced me to the officers and to his law partner, H. H. Haight, who, then a mere boy in appearance, I little ex- pected to see fill the Executive Chair of this State. But I did. The kind reception with which I was greeted by my old Missouri friend, Judge Wells, I have often thought of as a type of our advent into the world to come. I was most happy to meet in this ‘“ promised land” any one I had ever known in the East or elsewhere; whereas if I had been a bad character, if I had ever done anything of a disgraceful nature in any country, I should have been afraid of meeting some one who knew my antecedents, and that fear would have been ‘fire and brimstone” to me. = EE - RE MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. CHAPTER VIII And here commences a new chapter in three lives, one of which ended (earthly) fifteen years later, another (my own), about closed out, and the third has reproduced seven others to take the places of the three. I left my family on shipboard with Mrs. Farren, Eliza and little Hettie, took steamer armed with letters of intro- duction for San Jose. At Alviso took the stage, which, with great difficulty, by leaving the old tracks and driving anywhere over the land, as there were few or no fields enclosed—we made out to navigate the mud, mud, mud, the first week in May, 1853, to that city, where I en- gaged board and returned to San Francisco for my family and goods, and in a few weeks settled professionally in Santa Clara. We boarded a few months before we could rent a house, paying thirty dollars a week for us three, and soon found myself prospering. Finally we hired a house for thirty dollars per month. The next March I determined to settle permanently in San Jose. It afforded me a larger field for business and a social circle that suited me better. So deep was the mud that it was hardly possible to haul a light load, but we were soon pleasantly situated, and a lucrative practice made me a prosperous man. My wife’s health had again failed in the preceding September, caused by eating too freely of imperfectly ripened grapes, occasioning inflammation of the bowels. The few thousand dollars brought with and remitted to me from Missouri (together with my earnings), se- cured me a good income in the way of interest at three and ECONOMY. 85 a higher per cent per month. Money was occasionally deposited with me for safe keeping, we having no banks at that time. This (when I knew to a certainty that I could pay it on call) I would loan, taking the risk and getting the interest for myself. I do not name this as an example for my boys to follow, but flush as I was of money in those days, I risked little, and certain it is, no man ever failed to get the money he had entrusted to my care when called for. One piece of our close economizing is worth naming: A cow would cost one hundred dollars—that was worth three dollars per month interest. This, with the feed and care, would amount to the cost of our needful milk and butter, hence we long deprived ourselves of the luxury of a cow. The cow might die, and the first we bought actu- ally did die; a noble animal, costing five twenties. The controlling reason for our anxious care in regard to ways and means arose from the possible contingency of my death or inability to earn current expenses, which might reduce my wife and daughter to the necessity of earning their own living soon as the little we had was ex- hausted. I shall here add that the ground now covered with buildings and streets in the beautiful city of San Jose, (Garden City, as it 1s appropriately called,) was then an ex- cellent range for all the cows the inhabitants needed, with but little feed any part of the year. In addition to my large practice, I took charge of the City and County Hospital. This augmented my netincome some two thousand ormoredollarsayear. My wife, was an invalid, but nevertheless, for the welfare of our daughter, we caused her to go with some friends to visit our relatives in the East—New York and Ohio. Her aunt Catherine Glidden proposed to accomplish this, by making her a travel- ing companion. Mr. Glidden was a rich man—had, after one failure in the iron business, already related, by indominable perse- ~ A A i a Ei a a A i sea 86 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE. verance, made a fortune. He acted more sensibly with it than TI ever knew a man to act before. Instead of using his money solely for the purpose of making more, and making himself a slave to business, he intrusted the build- ing and care of iron-making furnaces to his less fortunate brothers. They would place their children under the care of suitable teachers, and if they thought best for considera- tions of health or improvement, take some of them on a travel. Summer, they spent in the high North ; Fall at home, in Ohio, and Winter in Louisiana and the South, where Charles G. Young had become a distinguished man, a brother of whom Catherine felt justly proud. At this period of their history it was perfectly easy for them to meet the expense of taking in their company a lively, fine-looking, intelligent neice of twenty or more years, and we were willing to part with our daughter for a year, believing that not only her enjoyment for the time, but her condition permanently in life, under existing cir- cnmstances, demanded we should make the sacrifice. The possibility of our child marrying during her ab- sence had not been considered by us. She had declared so positively, and there was such excellent reason for the resolution, that she would not have her liberty restrained by any living man till she had enjoyed a year’s travel. Therefore, we felt safe on that score. And I felt, in a gen- eral way, much as I did when our infant boy became seri- ously sick. A delusion was over me. I realized that other people’s children might, and did, die, but it seemed to me quite out of the question that mine should die! Just so of marrying. I could not seem to comprehend that such a disruption of our little family could occur. Our son, had he lived, in spite of good examples and all the anxious care considerate parents bestow upon their children whom they feel to be a part of themselves—Ilife of ABORTIVE HOPES. 87 their life—might have ruined all our hopes. I ought here to speak in the plural, for several sons were born to us, none of whom, save the first, reached the degree of de- velopment that invests infancy with a charm that nothing under heaven can equal in the feelings and affections of men and women. But who knows that their early death, both to us and them, were not blessings in disguise. If the spirit philogo- phy be true; if Swedenborg’s teachings one hundred years ago, before modern spiritualism was born, are true, they were mere germs of immortality, and their escape from the pains of earth transplanted them .into a higher sphere in which they have since lived and expatiated in the world to come.” When my wife, in 1845, after having been six months in bed, not one time leaving it only as she was lifted by me to another, gave birth to a son, whose incessant cries for a few hours rent her heart strings, was told the child was dead, she coolly replied: * I suppose they needed a little page in the Courts of Heaven, and could find no one that suited so well as my baby.” I said our sons might have ruined all our hopes on earth, if they had continued to live. Proof of this we all but too often see. One of the most amiable and intel- lectual fifteen-year-old boys, son of a valued fiend, a boy promising the highest happiness to his parents, at a later age became a villain, and is now at hard labor in the penitentiary, among outcasts. Others become liquor drinkers. Ah, and more terrible than all, more terrible than even seeing a devoted child fading away—life going gradually, but surely out of a devoted san or daughter, in the bloom of youth—is the living death caused by a promising boy going astray and becoming an abandoned drunkard. MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. CHAPTER IX. My daughter and her husband, John Miller McPike returned to San Jose in the Spring of 1857. Their lest son, Henry, was born the following June. McPike de- termined to re-engage in the cattle business on the San Joaquin, and live there ata place called Oris Timber To be separated from her daughter, to my wife was fo die. I succeeded in hauling her on a bed to Mary’s ne home, where she remained over a year, I ic E maining there when her health Qomandod my Drescie wandering about when I could leave her. One while convalescent, isolated as we were Yeo the tl rs awoke in agony, and said, when she was able to ny Pa is dead.” After a pause she added: ¢It may be Katy, it is one of them certain. Your words of disbelief or consolation are fruitless, / Anow it is so.” Three it later this was repeated with the addition: It is all nr now, it is Katy, and the next letter will tell us so.” Wo had not heard that Catherine was seriously sick but re wie alain learned that the fatal letter, aan tor : Ba was then en-route to her. This was in the Toae i Unused to such social isolation-—unused to livi amid physical surroundings which at that time—a on Winter having preceded, resembled the Nubian Desert 1 ‘sought something. like what I had abandoned in San J ot Flattering -and; remunetative as. hdd been my pros cols there; 1 was unwilling te. return: .. I have: often co » a oY leaving that place. and people; where I 708 alos for -allL was worth, morally: and intellectually, to the story of Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Woman was the cause in both cases. I only speak of my own, literally. VITICULTURE. 89 I felt as I always did—the- necessity of having a busi- ness which would yield me an incomé without my personal, active supervision. The belief had become very general that investments in grape culture would pay a large per cent. So many men were here who came from wine mak- ing countries, that I felt certain of always being able to obtain the service of reliable workers and managers of the business, and consequently I could give undivided time to the care of my suffering wife. She habitually complained that the north wind in San Jose «had an edge to it” that irritated her delicate lungs, caused frequent painful and dangerous spasmodic constrictions of her chest; the water, too, irritated her bowels. She had become 80 anxious to and a residence which would better agree with her health, it is probable I should have become obliged to leave - that, to me, most enjoyable residence, even though our datigh ter had remained with us. i - I found in Napa Valley the remarkable meteorological fact of the wind blowing north when it blew south through Santa Clara valley. The water north of Napa City is un- usually free from mineral. ingen I resumed in Napa City the practice of my ‘profession in partnership with Dr. Daniel K. Rule, who agreed to perform the long rides, and continued with him while I was having a vineyard planted and growing near St, Helena—now within the corporate limits of the OWN, At that time it was generally believed that; vines. coiid .not be successfully cultivated on land so gry: and, ROL AS most of my purchase of three hundred ;and thigtyrfiye acres west of the road, but it proved otherwise. :: The; land cost me originally two thousand and five hundred dollays, but contesting title added about thirty. per cent to, that amount. 40 {iol [rg re 0 We builta cabin and settled here in the Fall: or Winer of 1860, where, freed from the duties of the profession, I rin 57 “ ETON fy 3 \ 155° Li 90 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. enjoyed myself in opening a farm, planting fruits, cultivat- ing vines, and for some years small game was so plentiful that when wife was able to ride with me, I did a great deal of shooting of hare and quail from a buggy, and often shot them from the porch of the house. McPike and I bought land in 1862 between the road and the creek (Napa river), about the same quantity as my original purchase. He built a house on the southerly part of it, where his family have resided ever since, while his main business in stock or farming has been on the San Joaquin. This place is more suitable for his family on ac- count of schools, climate, social considerations, etc. That it was fortunate, in one respect, for McPike and wife that they selected this locality as a home, is evidenced by the fact that, frail as is the constitution of the mother, the whole family of seven children born in this valley-—save the oldest—are every one well grown, vigorous children, and of good promise: Henry Clay, born in San Jose, June 25th, 1857; Alice Maria, born in Napa City, Feb. 13th, 1859; John DeWitt, born in St. Helena, June 29th, 1861; George Crane, born in St. Helena, September 19th, 1863; William Watson, born in St. Helena, April 30th, 1866; Abe, born in St. Helena, August 13th, 1868; Ed- ward Grayson, born in St. Helena, Sept. 22d, 1871. On the conduct of the above named, on the characters they will develop and maintain during their natural lives, depends the question whether George Belden Crane, and Nancy Maria Young’s exisetnce on earth—was, in modern parlance, a ‘‘success.” And what that word means, when applied to an individual’s history in all its multifarious relations through life, it is not easy to determine. Whether the accumulation of property, and transmitting the same to posterity, in a shape that does not add to the interest of general society or in any way improve its social or politi- cal condition, should be called a success, I will not pre- GRANDPA McPIKE. 01 tend to decide. But I will undertake to claim that the parents who bring up children with good constitutions of body and mind, train and educate them soas to make good citizens in a general sense, have not lived in vain. And if paternal infirmity, if life-long suffering, if a condition of endurance, in place of domestic enjoyment, has blighted the hopes of a household, and the descendants of that household or family, even in the second generation, add to the intelligence, morality, enterprise and general welfare of the community, then in a large and comprehensive sense that unhappy family has been a success, because the world has been a gainer through them. If human history is limited to time—if the “be is the be all and the end all here,” a consciousness of having done something for posterity—to a person whose life has been a life of ¢¢ gall and bitterness of woe,” is but a poor return. But if there is a «© Great Beyond,” for which this world is but a preparatory condition,—and I do not re- gard the if” in the question, but consider this life as only a rudimental existence—then we can afford to endure its disappointments and hardships in the belief of what the story of Lazarus and Dives illustrates. Our works do fol- low us and follow our posterity also, and we will be happy or otherwise in eternity, in proportion to our virtues in the present world. My grandchildren are all promising beyond my rea- sonable expectation. So far as I can remember, there is no one of them that is not equal, if not superior, in physique, mother wit and education, to what I was at their respective ages, and 1 suppose the same can be said in relation to their grandfather, McPike. He was a man of excellent physical constitution and native powers of mind, and, I think, aside from my partiality, I can say the cross of that Kentucky with my New York Yankee CPR Naa 92 MEMOIRS OF G. B.CRANE. blood, will prove an improvement on the stock of both families. While Henry is endowed by Nature with mental power which might assuredly enable him to win his way in the battle of life, he is in danger of proving a failure from the ardency of his temperament. If his energy could always be directed to one end, and never ‘switching off the track,” as I humorously tell him, it would not matter so much; but he allows himself to get interested in other subjects than the profession he has chosen. The fact, however, of his being able to see himself chargeable with this weakness, occasionally, indicates favorably. I think he is getting the better of it. Alice;—well, it is so long since I have seen the child, I ought to wait on her arrival home to morrow;—near six months she has been absent, I have thought while Henry's fort was imagination and quickness of perception, her’s was solid sense; of this, however, Henry is not lack- , ing, though erratic. I am more confident of the oom] / ness of what I say of him than of her. : I have never been able to analyze DeWitt sufficiently to find all that is in him, but there is evidently much pure metal, with more or less dross. We shall see. His pro- pensity to use tobacco makes me fear a love of strong drink may be awakened in him. George will win; he is a thinker, but I must know him, and all of them, better before I predict their future. While the old maxim is generally true, ‘¢ the boy is the father of the man,” we have little certainty that a good boy will not become a bad man—conversely is possible. He must be forever on his guard not to yield to any tempta- tion to do wrong; not to get into any, even innocent, PHRENOLCGY. 93 friend, Rev. Dr. : a beautiful, though vicious young woman seduced him into embezzlement of a large sum of money. He is now draging ont a miserable existence in a felon’s cell, when, if he had never yielded to temptation, had continued strictly honest and faithful, he would have remained a favorite in the highest circles of San Francisco society. Phrenology teaches that an organism may be so happi- ly balanced that the moral sentiments will predominate in forming character, and that in spite of the neglect of parents or guardians a child may develop into mature life with an almost irresistable inclination to strictly virtuous conduct. There are more than ordinarily strong reasons for hoping that such organizations obtain in my grand children. I am not, unmindful of the ‘‘Law of love”, but my long professional experience has but too frequently demon- strated that the paramount good of the child--the best service a parent can render it-—is in teaching passive obedi- ence to parental authority. If the child is taught that there is no appeal from the father’s or mother’s decree, the youth will remember and abide by it. How many chil- dren have I seen consigned to the grave, from literally ‘eat- . ~ ing forkidden fruits,” or going into dangers and ex- posures, regardless of parental forbiddings,—and what is infinitely worse than early graves—become a disgrace to relations and society by falling into dissolute habits. The law of love demands that self-denial shall be taught the child in connection with indulgence. And self- denial can be habitually taught, by requiring the child or youth to be putting their time in systematically with a view "to useful results, for the family convenience, comfort and interest, for the present, and for the paramount ultimate benefit of the child. And all this can be compassed with- out deprivation of reasonable recreation. habits of a kind that might lead to dangerous ones, or, no matter how safe he feels, he may go to destruction. Only to think of that promising son of my esteemed . —“e . - N p= SO SR ZEEE" EE ————— I... - EEE EEE Ek tar? reer UO = a aa i a - a SUSU SIRS ce cr TIERRA, I. = hi 5 i] | - I — pr a 94 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE. It would be a great misfortune to one who is certain of inheriting a competency, or of being established in business in early life, with ample means, not to be taught industry and handy craft while growing up, for properly is vastly more liable to be lost than health, education or a practical knowledge of something by which a livelihood can be gained. I suppose the old Jewish proverb, ¢‘A child that is not bred to a trade is bred for the gallows,” meant simply that the man who had not been taught and trained to some useful pursuit by which an honest living could be gained would, in the desperation to which necessity might Seive him, become a thief, robber or otherwise criminal. The experience of every man who has brought up a family to the age of manhood, will attest the correctness of the above. The sons of rich men, whom .he knew in early life, he more frequently saw poor at the age of thirty or forty than well off, while at those ages he saw the boys who had been trained as above prescribed were building up the wealth of the country and made soldiers to 2% fend it. When I lived in Alabama they had a saying that ‘the overseers of one generation were the owners of the land and slaves the next.”’ But, to this, the exceptions more frequently disturbed the rule than in Solomon’s saying, ‘Train up a child in the way he should go,” etc. But Solomon, I opine, only intended to be understood in a general sense. There are many boys that even he, with all his power and wisdom, . could not make exemplary men of, and he surely did not of his own children. HUMAN VANITY. CHAPTER X. Well, Mary and the children have returned, but I do not see that improvement in health and vigor I had hoped. The quiet of home, however, may soon show good results. While her account of the marvelous changes which enter- prise and the multiplied machinery of civilization have ef- fected in my native land; the ease and pleasure with which one is moved in a day, ten times as far as we could go in rough, jolting stages or wagons in my boyhood; while palatial residences have taken the place of rude cabins: while temples dedicated to literature and science are ele- vating youthful minds to a comprehension of nature's laws, one of those laws, stern and inflexible, has been steadily at work, proclaiming to man that this life is held by but a feeble tenure——that it is “fleeting and transitory.” For she found none of my ancestors, and my contem- porary relations were literally ¢ few and far between,’ bowed down with age and having ‘but little here below,” and certain of not ‘needing that little long.” Tt is gratifying to me that mytwo years of professional life in Tompkins county, New York, secured me a charac- ter in that locality, which made the visit of my descendants agreeable to many who had a recollection of me, or who had been made to think favorably of me by their parents. Such is human vanity. Mary brought me, from Ben. T. Crane, great grand- son of the Judge, a picture of the old house which he (the Judge), built as early as 1768, and in which he had enter- tained General Washington during the Revolutionary war. One story, a narrow porch or shed,” and an ‘‘ up stairs ”’ or sleeping room under the roof—attic. Cellars we used TE aaa EE ad — be ort cel i VC — | | i | ! 96 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. to have eight feet or more deep under such houses, but they were seldom so made that fruits, vegetables and even cider was safe against freezing in very cold Winters. The house in question, I suppose, was a fine one when built, but thirty or forty years later was comparatively any thing but a fine one; architecture had improved after the Revolution. * * * * * x I am often charged with evil forebodings of failure of health-—of approaching end of earthly career, etc. I am very sure it is not morbid sensitiveness to the approach of what is called Death that has caused me to talk about it, when I have known (as a physician) that indications dan- gerous to life existed, for I have long felt, to which my wife can testify, from the way I have been exercised, that these apprehensions were well founded; she has often been awakened by my struggles to get my heart again in action. Have been perusing some preceding pages, and while I repeat that the matter and the composition 1s as good as I expected, considering the helter-skelter manner in which it has been written, sometimes writing an hour when physically exhausted, then an hour when mentally so; then again writing under depression of spirits, and at the same time my business affairs in an unsatisfactory condition which would be otherwise but for one cause, the general derangement of the country, and, indeed, I may say of the civilized world. And whether any of those for whom this book is intended will be of that cast of mind that will lead them to interest themselves about public questions remains to be seen. I have felt concerned as to the future of my grand- children, not that they are vicious or intellectually inferior to boys of their age generally, but because they are not required to do the work they are capable of performing, thereby saving the expense of hiring, and have less tempta-- tion to go astray. Children who are not taught that PARENTS. | 97 time is money, and that ‘“a penny saved is a penny earned,” will lead a life of poverty. (See page 93.) The same authority says most men are so organized that outside influences determine the character and conse- quently their fate in life. % * % While self-destruction is generally reprehensible to the highest degree, it is sometimes entitled to charitable consideration. The person who knows him- self to be the subject of a fatal disease, the old man or woman whose whole hearts have been devoted to their children and have scrimped, spared and deprived themselves of comforts to elevate them to higher respect- ability and establish them more happily in life, and then find themselves, when the infirmaties of age weigh them down, discarded by these children, and even turned over to the tender mercies of the poor house, as I have known to be the case when the parents of a well to do family could no longer make themselves useful, can we wonder that un- der such circumstances an intelligent, sensitive man should hope that ¢¢ death would end all,” and seek it as an escape from his own bitter memories. I am sensitive on this sub- ject, because I feel that I might by possibility have done more to cheer the old age of my parents, and wish to warn my successors against their committing a similar error and regret it when regret becomes unavailing. (See page 76.) The aggregate of the happiness of this life, like other grand aggregates, is made up of minutie, and it is amazing to see how small a thing in itself may cause a sleepless night or lead to domestic infelicity. Byron in ‘Age of Bronze” —in allusion to Napoleon said: “A bust delayed, a book refused can shake The sleep of him who kept the world awake.” * * * * * x * But I had no intention of dealing with questions and subjects on a large scale, I purpose to redord a portion of REPEAT IT RT OTE Y PRCT A gh, TENN AP hi TL ’ ww A iro A Ee SETS Ge pa rl ‘ x at AT Re FTE LS Th Ae OW ge TRE AN To st 98 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. the thousand ills to which flesh is heir, and have them stand as beacons to enable those who come after me, to avoid the rocks on which so many split. * * * * * “The bow well bent and smart the string Vice seems already slain; But passion rudely snaps the string, And it revives again.” But yet I am thankful that his <“ passion,” in spite of his impulsiveness, does not exhibit itself in ‘¢ vices.” If he does not prove a ‘‘ success” the failure will be clearly attributable to what I have written. (Pages 118-19, MSS.) Nothing I have there said or elsewhere should be con- strued into a justification of a boy’s neglect of his duties, and his disregard of the proprieties of behavior that any one of good common sense can easily understand without prompting or instruction from others. For example—his reason, his intuitive knowledge is sufficient to show that if he pays two of his six dollars for shoes that will answer as well, he will have four dollars left to buy something use- ful. «Who lives to Nature rarely can be poor; Who lives tofancy never can be rich.” A good and sensible boy must be admonished how- ever that if he lends his money to oblige a friend he is in danger thereby of losing both ¢¢ money and friend.” And if, to make a display of liberality he treats his companions with ‘play tickets » or anything else—as a general rule, he not only fools away his money but makes a bad name for himself with the class of older people with whom it is his interest to stand well. I said I write to show my boys the beacons by which they may avoid errors that have placed me in old age in circumstances less satisfactory than would have been the case had I been able to see beacons to guard me or warn me of danger. But like too many others probably I would have closed my eyes and not listened to such warnings, SAN FOAQUIN. 99 though one of the great errors of my life, one of the most im- portant weaknesses of my character, is the too great readi- ness with which I have listened or deferred to the opinion of others. I can now appreciate the wisdom embraced in the ad- vice of Polonius to his son in Hamlet, — Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment.” CHAPTER XI What I have written on page 88 of social isolation in the San Joaquin Valley requires that I should say more; and in view of the prominence which it has since acquired it may interest my folks hereafter to know what its con- dition was in 1857. They (my grandchildren). may inherit lands fifty or sixty miles south of Stockton which their father now owns, provided he is not unfortunate. And first the way of getting into it from San Jose via Pacheco Pass. The other route was through Livermore Valley. The Twelve Mile House was reached by the dryest, Justiest road and surroundings. At this place was a deep well and sign to be noticed by all who watered there: ‘This well cost money. Pay at the bar.” On and on, dry and desolate, through the endless «Murphy Ranch” with scarcely a house or enclosed field, a greater part of the way, among stunted growth of trees, till we reach Gilroy, then distinguished from ¢<01d Gilroy,” a little cluster of adobe buildings in sight of the new town, if a store, little tavern, and blacksmith shop could be called a town. Then on through fertile land and farms, past a sort of alkaline pond, full of wild fowl, to the west opening of the EE aa FEPPSPETESREE E Bt io ata ET i ie i aa A ASSP Sd Sg—— . a Sa rian J am ae 100 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. «: Pacheco Pass.” Dragging on through it a mile or two we find a cabin kept Ly Firebaugh, who gave a name to a ferry somewhere on the San Joaquin. Then up—up—up till—well, you can imagine how high-—before we pass the “Aqua Divitorum” as Humboldt callsthe apex of a dividing ridge. Then we look down and see an endless expanse fading out and becoming invisible in the distance, millions of acres of rich land, worthless “twas thought for any other purpose than wild range for cattle, horses, etc., ete. Descending the eastern slope we come into the plains near a good large dwelling house with fruit trees, a stream of water, large corral—averything indicating comfort and civilization —this is called Pacheco’s Ranch. He probably had a large tract of land ‘‘granted” him by the Mexican Government when it was dangerous to live there from wild Indians. Passing it, we ride in a northerly direction, the vege- tation dry as stubble, the grass nevertheless very nourish- ing ‘‘natural” hay on which immense herds of cattle feed ~ and fatten, and we wonder how they can endure the terri- ble heat on those shadeless plains, though they move off to the timber that skirts the river, or get up to the foot of the shadier hills. But what is that little clamp of trees yonder on the plains? I don’t remember of seeing it when passing this way before. I approach, and away it flies like the wind. It was a herd of wild horses (mustangs) made to look like trees by mirage. | Coyotes —unused to top buggies or wheel carriages of any kind—would allow a near approach and move lazily away. I took advantage of their ignorance of what cov- ered carriages might contain, while staying at McPike’s. I would take dogs into one that Mac Crow had just brought across the plains from Missouri, get close on the little wolves, raise the curtain, and the dogs would soon over- MUSTANGS. 101 haul one. The man with me, by this time had mounted a led horse, and saved the dogs the labor of killing the wolf by shooting him with a revolver. We then gave the dogs water from a keg hauled along for the purpose, and on for another chase. j Near McPike’s improvement (Oris Timber) a little grove of sycamores, some nine miles west of Hill’s Ferry — on the San Joaquin—was an old enclosure, a small acre or so lot, though I may be forgetful of the size, but I know it was at the end of a pass or break through a grassy spur of the west side mountains that run out into the great valley, It would seem that wild animals are familiar with these ‘passes’ and mustang htinters availed themselves of the habits of the wild horses of passing through, and built these pens to entrap them. The herd would be started a great distance, say twenty miles, from the pass, and horsemen stationed along to show themselves often enough to keep the wild animals traveling in the right direction till they were near the pen when all would close in and scare the mustangs into a run towards the pass. At the other end of it they would find themselves unable to scale the fence; frightened and con- fused by it, their attempt to return by the entrance would be stopped by a man who had been concealed nearit. All the pursuers coming up the lassos went to work and each animal would be astonished by finding his legs tied to- gether—then a saddle and man on his back. They would be fidden or led out into ‘civilization’ and, sooner or later, according to the ‘‘game” of the animal, become domesti- cated. According to my experience they needed watching a long time. I astonished the people of Napa when fifty- four or five years old, by keeping balanced on the back of a powerful mustang, doing his ¢“level best” to unseat me. And now, how changed! I sit here writing, feeling 102 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE. that I am not only on the down hill of life but nearing its foot. And the great valley, too, has changed, but in another direction. The boundless expanse of naked prairie sur- face over which—twenty-one years ago—tens of thousands of cattle roamed unobstructed by fence or cultivated field, has now become an agricultural, rather than a grazing region, and when the great irrigating enterprise is estab- lished, will be the richest part of the State. That fertile level land could then be bought for from some fifty cents to one dollar per acre of the old grantees. When found that it would produce enormous CIOpS of grain, the price went up from ten to thirty tipnes the cost at that date —-1854-58. This is the 3d day of September, and what a beginning of Autumn. Henry C. McPike could not be persuaded to wait for the morning train, because he had promised ex- Governor Haight that he would meet him at his office in San Francisco at 9 a. m. Monday. In the afternoon of that same day he telegraphed, ‘Governor Haight died this afternoon.” How strange! How mysterious! How unreasonable __how unjust, apparently, what they call the dispensation of Providence. Apparently—I very properly say—for when we get ‘beyond the veil” we shall understand that what appears here unreasonable and a great wrong, was only a very in- finitesimal part of a «‘stupendous whole,” and that the man who, like Governor Haight, was so much needed on earth, was needed still more in Celestial Society. And here I am reminded of the rapidity with which time flies with old men, how different from boyhood ! Eleven years ago this day, I, in common with a major- ity of the voters of California, was zealously engaged en- GOV. HAIGHT. 1¢3 deavoring to improve the political condition of the State by the election of H. H. Haight, Governor. Twenty-five years ago last Spring I was introduced to him, then seemingly a beardless boy, but in fact a full fledged ativrney-at-law and partner of my lamented friend Judge Joseph B. Wells. Mr. Haight was elected Governor over the Republican candidate, Geo. C. Gorham, in the Fall of 1867. A good working majority was elected of Democrats and we promised ourselves the political reform so much needed. Soon after the election I went to New York with a part of the wine which had accumulated in my cellars. I returned in the Fall of 1868, and was mortified to learn that our Democratic Legislature had, to say the best of 1t, done no more in the work of political reform than their Republican predecessors. Governor Haight’s administration was highly approved, his integrity was conceded by his political enemies, per- sonal enemies he had none, but the corruption of the Dem- ocratic Legislature and its failure to redress public griev- ances ruined his prospects for re-election. Afterward Governor Haight evinced an unwilling- ness to re-enter political life, but his high character as a citizen and statesman, with the prospect of the twenty or more years before we might expect an impairment of his faculties, led to the hope that his great talents and sterling integrity would be brought to bear in effecting a re- formation of the public morals and political condition of the State. And here is a fitting place for a sketch of the political history of our State since I have been one of its citizens— but I shall only allude to what will not be likely to appear in general history—I mean the county politics or the use that has been made of party spirit. That devotion to ‘‘our side,” politically, which has enabled men to getinto county TE SE —————— I A a —————— . J. TT Eee ~ ER tes Rae ES Eg ER Cry RRL SO Edn BE SE SS | 104 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. offices for the purpose of making money and enabling others to do the same at the expense of tax-payers. This I shall preface by a reference to what may prop- erly be termed the lawlessness or disregard of the rules by which elections had usually been conducted before the war. When what was called the ¢“Union Party” was organ- ized, embracing a large majority of the people, many of those who did not declare for it, did not withhold their support because they were in favor of a dissolution of the Union so much as though a belief that the Republican party, or rather its leaders, had provoked the Southern people into secession for any thing but patriotic, or even philanthropic motives. (See page 63.) I wish my posterity to the fortieth generation to know that their ancestor lineal, who lived in the time of the Great Rebellion, while not a rebel—not in favor of disunion of the great Confederacy, freely acknowledged that he would prefer to have them believe he was both, than suppose he ever gave the least countenance to the mad and suicidal policy of making voters of the newly emancipated slaves! That unpatriotic measure was first enunciated by Henry Ward Beecher, who undoubtedly was used by leading Re- publicans to prepare the public mind for such a monstrous innovation in our form of government—form I say—rather perhaps in the policy which was so universally recognized, so indispensible to the maintainance of our system; that is, to make the right of suffrage and intelligence, so far as possible, go hand in hand. For it has ever been conceded by all that the perpetu- ity and prosperity of free governments must depend on the intelligence of the voters in whom the sovereignty is vested. The Republican party, reversing all this, put the ballot into the hands of creatures who could no more appreciate its significance than the mules they drove in plowing cot- PUBLIC VIRTUE. 105 ton, and for no higher motive than to use the negroes’ votes to keep their pariy in power. I am not certain that the Democrats would have been more honest. It was plain that public virtue, that feeling which caused men to support such measures as they sup- posed would benefit the public weal, and which was active and controling in my boyhood, had measurably died out before the war, and from the death of the lamented Lin- coln it was every man for himself, from the President down, save and except the last honest man (Andy Johnson) who filled the executive chair, and whose administration— defective as they charged it to be—-contrasted so patrioti- cally with the years of his successors. And Beecher, who last week was the center of attrac- tion in San Francisco, a nine days’ wonder, people of all kinds of faith and no faith erowding the great lecture hall to see the man whose talents had made him famous, before the Tilton scandal made him infamous, probably did more than any one man, with the exception of Horace Greely, editor of the New York Tribune, to prepare the public mind for the great conflict of the war, while he was liberal- izing sectarian religion, will be regarded in the next cen- tury as the great bad man of this. * * * * * Here I intended to give a brief history of the adminis- tration of our Napa county government since the war, but I have grown so feeble in body and mind that I determined to go to the City and try the efficacy of the change on my health. The cool, bracing air, the luxurious beds and high alti- tude in which I slept at the Palace, the warm bathing, with fish (mainly) diet, did seem to renovate me, but I have not been able to do much in the way of writing during the week I have been home, and feel now a doubt whether I shall ever fill this volume—ever ! 106 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. But a word about San Francisco hotels: I had supposed the Lick, Russ, Grand, Cosmopolitan, Occidental, and the numerons lower grade hotels, forbade further investment in that kind of property. Bub the Palace and Baldwin, eclipsing not only the above named first class, but probably any in tha wide world, have since been built, and the Palace could not furnish me a room on the sixth floor, which I preferred; the rooms and furniture being the same a3 on the lower flyor, and of tha same easy access, by the elevators. It is needless to deseribe that architectural wonder, for any body can see it a thousand years hence, unless en- gulphed by an earthquake. The Baldwin, on the same street (Market), is not $3 large, but they say more tasteful, a more splendid style of architecture. The sireat railroads which run over the hills by an un- seen power, ara still a greater wonder. The mansions on «Nob Hill” and other places, built at the cost of millions each by men in many cases who made their money by vir- tual robbery of Government and tax-payers, and dupes wh were inveigled into stock speculations, exceed in splendor anything I ever saw before. These roads take passengers up and down grades of thirty or forty degrees for two miles plus at the rate of five or six miles an hour, for five cents a ride. This invention (cable roads) makes a hilly city plat practically the same as level ground—except for whole- sale trade, and San Francisco has abundant level land for all such purposes. And now a little about the history of our Napa valley railroad. I encouraged the enterprise, not suspecting the design of the company that started it of dishonest intention, mainly because I was so anxious to enable my wife to go to’ NAPA VALLEY R. R. 107 Napa and San Francisco, she having been too feeble to drive to either place in a carriage, for eight or more years. The controlling interest of the road, according to the charter, was inalienable by the county. The private stockholders—among whom were Eugene L. Sullivan and Sam Brannan—procured special legisla- tion requiring our Board of Supervisors to sell the road, and it was sold for forty per cent of the county's and smaller stockholders’ interest, and we have been taxed annually for the interest of the balance ever since, the principal still standing as a mortgage on the county property. We were assured, when advances were solicited, and votes to legalize a subsidy of five thousand dollars per mile, that the road should be forever a county property, yielding a revenue that would greatly reduce our taxes. On the strength of such assurances, I was induced to give fifteen hundred dollars and give the right of way through my farm, six hundred of which were returned to me, and my taxes have been quadrupled. In this I only suffered in common with all who had contributed to the railroad enterprise, but my unsparing denunciation through the press of mal-administration of county business, subjected me not only to the abuse of officials, whose wrong-doings I exposed, but I was made to feel, pecuniarily, the consequences of inter-meddling with schemes and rings. I was called into court and $25,000 demanded of me for telling the truth where the taxpayers’ interest was concerned. While the law of libel will permit a man to be har- rassed on groundless charges, it is gracious enough to acquit him on trial if he proves the alleged libelous matter to be true; I consequently never entertained the remotest fear of a verdict, but providentially I was not put - to the proof. | b- (5 ¥ VAD ov, Nt d - Lovan Losw er 3 £5 an ioe Ld 112 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. A little Adventist house has been built, they hold meetings every Saturday, and there is some talk of getting up a German (Lutheran) church. Churches multiply faster than practical religion. The funds I understand are on hand to build an Episcopal ed- ifice soon, though that persuasion is numerically weaker than any of the above mentioned. Rev. J. Avery Shep- herd is the local rector and Bishop Wingfield (Bishop of the Northern Diocese) occasionally visits us. Bishop Kip had control of the whole State as one Diocese, till within a year or two past the State has been divided into two de- partments. What a pity that every man who venerates or thinks he venerates the name of Jesus of Nazereth would not ap- ply himself religiously to the observance of His teachings, practice His precepts, obey His commands and seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, instead of seeking to establish forms of faith and substituting metaphysical abstractions for practical virtue. Jesus said: Cloth the naked, feed the hungry.” James, His disciple, defined his religion to consist in the spirit of doing good to our fellow creatures and especially the widows and fatherless. If Christ and His ancient followers should now appear anywhere in Christendom, they would feel, I opine, that not one particle of the primitive religion remained upon earth, at least among those who arrogate to themselves ex- clusive orthodoxy. In the Apostolic age, we do not read of costly church edifices, high salaried clergy, church fairs, loud-sounding organs, hired singers, and ding dong bells to attract peo- ple to religious meetings. But things professedly religious have changed, and as Burns said in the epitaph, ‘A dev’lish change indeed.” The meeting house that was burned belonged to what PROCRASTINATION. 113 is called Cumberland Presbyterian; the present one, on its site, to the old fashioned, J ohn Knox, Jonathan Edwards style, the kind Bob Ingersoll refers to in his book entitled «The Gods,” ‘‘the best thing he could say forthe Pope was that he was not a Presbyterian.” Le It is not to be inferred that I sympathise in the teach- ings of Ingersoll. While he only admits the possibility of a future personal existence, I believe when my worn-out body, like a worn-out garment, is laid aside as worthless, my moral and mental faculties, will be somehow mysteri- ously embodied in what Saint Paul calls a spiritual body, “with their capacity for progress and development enlarged, and happiness proportionally increased according to my deserts in earth life. “For forms of faith let graceless zealots fight; His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.” CHAPTER XIII It is now February, 1879, and is the first time I have written in my journal since the New Year began, a neg- ligence which 1s significant. In my professional life, when driven with business, I acquired the habit of attending to the most urgent cases of sickness first, and neglecting patients where I thought delay mightbeof no loss, or even serviceable by giving the recuperative power of Nature a better chance. And in later life I find that this * put off ” policy became habitual. The 105th page will show how long it is that I have neglected to work on my biography. But I, this time, have a little, I fear considerable, to ex- cuse the indifference it (the omission) indicates. I have felt, ever since I reached manhood, that it would be most gratifying to me to know more of the char- aaa PTE as 110 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE Had not the All-wise implanted this dread or fear of death, and other instincts, in our nature, in man and beast alike, the babe and young brute in common would not sees the nipple with their first of breathing, nor when grown, dodge a cannon ball or falling tree. Morbid vigilance was the curse of my early profes- sional life. While other physicians could sleep at will— drop down on a lounge or blanket, even in a sick room, and be refreshed by a nap—the barking of a distant dog, or ticking of a clock, would drive sleep from me, however much Ineeded it. And even when the chirp of a cricket could not be heard in the night, or when utterly exhausted in day time, I have gone to bed, and my dear, watchful wife would stay outside to keep people from approaching, and all things quiet, I have lain for hours feeling as if sleep was not among what the ancient physicians called the non-naturals; as if, indeed, I had never felt the sensa- {ion of sleepiness. Exhaustion from fatigue inclines most people to sleep; it had a reverse effect on me, but I now, for the most part, enjoy tranquil repose—need less of it than at thirty or forty years of age. But for this unfortunate nervousness, as it is called, I should have performed much more in the profession than I did, as there was generally, wherever I lived, a much greater demand for my services than I could supply, and that, too, if I had been physically more enduring. My power of endurance, from twenty-five to six-five, I suppose, was equal to that of many practitioners of medi- cine and surgery, though, as I have shown, I was not un- remittingly engaged in the business those forty years and did not practice till 1829. But now I feel that I am approaching the condition of the character so graphically delineated in Ecclesiastes, 12th chapter; but promise myself something better than ST. HELENA. 111 this life after the ¢ golden bowl is broken,” or crushed, as the Douay Bible has it. By the way it is strange that Bible makers of the Old Testament do not give more encouragement for a virtuous life by promising more clearly a future existence, and one that will be better or worse according to the way we spend our time in this, whether in the way of virtue or vice, and the degrees of each. It would seem that ‘“ inspired prophets >» should have known as much of immortality as Pythagorus, Zeno, or Socrates. But I do not know what the clergy mean by ‘‘in- spiration,” whether plenary or ethical. I think that much, if not all the ¢“inspiration” of the Bible isof the same na- ture as the phenomena that have engaged the attention of enquiring minds for the past twenty-eight or thirty years; and I believe that what is called death is but the develop- ment of a higher life, and yet I firmly believe in future re= wards and punishments, as elucidated on page 91. Here I shall resume my history of this valley in gen- eral and St. Helena in particular. I shall tell something of the growth of what constituted the school district when I was the principal trustee in 1861-2. We then had not pupils enough to keep up the school; now that district is divided into four, each good, vigorous district schools; the parent one has over three hundred pu- pils by the census and a high school is in progress. The different religious societies have strained hard to build. The Baptist meeting-house (used for awhile for all denominations) has been added to and improved. The Cumberland Presbyterian was burned some three or more years ago by an incendiary, and has been rebuilt by another school of Presbyterians. A new Methodist and new Catholic—none of the lat- ter here in 1864. They now have a nice building in which Bishop Alemany held forth last Sunday;—‘‘Dedication.” 108 VEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. The above outline of the history of our Napa Valley Railroad but too clearly shows how the public at large may be to suffer by a few individuals under a State Con- stitution that admits of special legislation. A majority of our State Legislators usually consists of briefless lawyers, impecunious professional politicians and talented men of slip-shod moral principles, who can be handled by cun- ning lobyists in the interest of capital and monopoly. I hope the time is not far distant when all this will be changed so that the class of people who support the State will have a controling influence in making its laws, and that we shall have a Constitution that will effectually prevent class and special legislation and encourage immigration. I had begun to think that my biography, like Dickens’ last work, would not be finished. I do not expect to write so much that I can think of nothing more to write, but I ~ feel more like going on than I have done for months—I wish to see a little more of this world while in the form;-— wish to see whether California will be improved by the labors of the Convention now in session, Nov., 78. * * I have been very well ever since I ‘returned from San Francisco. [Page 105]. Wife has been there some nine or ten days, but I have deprived myself of being with her because of my anxiety to have marketed the remainder of the wines, about fifteen thousand gallons of sherry yet on hand, besides white and port wines, and the lesees owe me largely. The new crop will be soon ready for sale, at least the claret, the wine marketed, then my business will be in good shape. Delivered a carload, twenty-one hundred gallons of our make of sherry wine. We make it by a heating pro- cess. Our oven will hold some twenty-five thousand gal- lons, or more, and it is kept steadily at 130 degrees, or higher, for three months. This sherry nets at depot about fifty cents per gallon. Its alcoholic strength is about 13 INSTINCT. 109 or 14 degrees, i. e., 13 or 14 fiftieths of brandy strength. This was the first sherry-making factory started in this valley, and far as I know, in the State. An old Portu- cuese conducted the process for me. The full alcoholic strength of sherry, when ready for the markets of the world, is about twenty degrees. CHAPTER XII. It is remarkable how easily I tire, in view of the fact that I eat and sleep reasonably well;—indeed, my sleeping is so immeasurably better than formerly, that I have cavse to be thankful for the blessing. That my physical system has remained so long and so well preserved as it is, will seem incredible to a good pathologist, who will read my record book A, page 231, et ceg. But for the hardships, disease and structural lesions, there and elsewhere narrated, I might have expected to last in the flesh long as others of the family. Although my constitution and bodily strength never were as good as my brothers, I seem to have equal tenacity of life. While our instinct in our normal state of mind impels us to seek the perpetuation of our earthly existence in common with the lower animals, our experience confirms as a general rule the opinion or estimate of the man who claimed to be wiser than all others of the value of life after ‘ three score and ten.” I do not believe that the unwillingness to die, after the weight of years becomes an unendurable burden, arises so much from the dread of something after death, as Shakspeare puts it, as from an instinctive desire to live, and for which we can give no well defined reason. In- stinct is the word—reason has nothing to do with it. 114 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. acter of my ancestors. Of my grandparents I only know they were highly respectable, and church members, at a time when such membership was at least pruna facie evi- dence of high moral worth. They worshiped God in Presbyterian temples, and honored Washington and liber- tv on the field of battle. | "This was a hundred years ago. A hundred years hence will there be one person On earth whose traditions or whose interest in his own genealogy will enable or cause him or her to trace their ancestry back to George Belden . |Page 5. oo Wn just out has suggested some of the above reflections. It shows the value of painstaking with : chil- dren in training them properly. Itis eminently creditable to my youngest sister. She had wisely refused to marry, because, like, or rather- unlike, tco many young woluen, she could not marry to suit herself. With rare fidelity to parents, she devoted her time to their care till after our father’s death, when, at the age of about thirty-six, she became the stepmother of four children, the youngest a a mere babe. Their training by my sister developed intel- lect, and more particularly in the youngest. The letter 1n question was from her; she was taught to treasure up family, history and through her I sought confirmation g: my records of the deaths of my family. Her answer, date Mecklenberg, N. Y., January 29, 1879, shows that a child can be made to feel the same interest in relations by law as anguinity. hy Os very naturally, with her father, John Smith, of Enfield, Tompkin’s county, N. Y., and then gives a record of her stepmother’s (my sister’s) family. * x * x * * we I get up at 6 or 7, and sometimes 8 o'clock a. m., and am in the habit of taking a cup of coffee half an hour be- fore breakfast. It is worthy of note that tinctures of bit- NAPA VALLEY BR. RR. 115 ters, or spirituous drinks of any kind; even a teaspoonful dose of brandy not only does no good but is quite sure to make me feel more weak and uncomfortable. Here it is May, and nothing written since February, but my long absence from home accounts for this seeming neglect. Well, it appears that the New Constitution is adopted, and by a rousing majority of 11,000 plus, in a vote of only 145,321, by men who had public spirit and independence enough to go to the polls; but a large portion of the debtor class were compelled by their creditors to vote against the New Constitution by threats of foreclosure of mort- gages, fear of creditors generally, and threats to raise the rate of interest. But I went for a change, believing we could not be “worsted.” The monopolists and money changers had the people by the throat. The New Consti- tution will equalize taxation and make land-grabbing un- profitable. I am something of a money-lender myself, and expect to be more so, but if I know myself, I am a stickler for exact justice and exact truthfulness. But it must be confessed after all that our new or- ganic law may utterly or in part fail to remedy the abuses which the people have so long and so justly complained. It is humiliating to feel that we have no certainty that our Supreme Court can at all times be relied upon. Now, as in the days of Dr. Johnson, we may feel the truthfulness of his poetic saying: For gold, his sword the hireling ruffian draws, For gold, the hireling Judge distorts the laws. And Pope says: For forms of Government let fools contest, That which is best administered is best. x * * * xX * 3 And again I suspended for nearly two weeks. How little energy I have? I have written numbers of letters, assisted in getting up a political organization to endeavor Je eer em mm ert ere == 116 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. —— to ensure the election of a legislature that would carry out the spirit of our constitutional reform instead of allowing the first laws enacted under it to be made by men who opposed its adoption. And I shall explain farther my reasons for working in favor of the new instrument which SO many constitutional lawyers Say will work evil to the State: First—The railroad company have monopolized the carrying trade by land and water. Their interest has con- trolled our legislation for years. It was plain that all com- petition would continue to be crushed out and shippers and travel would be at their mercy. The New Constitu- tion will impose restraints on that (corporation’s) rapacity which we have in vain for years striven to gain by legisla- tion. gecond—Our Supreme Court has so ruled as to €X- empt rich men from paying but nominal taxes. Probably o million of dollars in this county alone escapes taxation, which, under the new defination of property, will be assessed. One banking company has three hundred thou- sand dollars at interest at from twelve to fifteen, or more, per cent. per annum in the county, and pays less taxes than I do, or about as much. Third—Great baronial estates—hundreds of thousands of acres of land——have fallen into the possession of what we call ¢ land-grabbers,” and their lands are held at prices which prevent small farmers from settling in this State. The New Constitution assesses sich lands so high that it will prove unprofitable for owners to hold them. Fourth—1It is impossible to doubt that an understand- ing exists over the whole State among money lenders for the purpose of maintaining a higher rate of interest, while millions in the East has been seeking safe investment at trom two and one-half to four per cent. per annum. The rate here, secured by mortgage, has been, and is, as above INSTINCT. 117 stated, and the holders of those mortgages, while using their wealth to corrupt legislation to obtain franchises at the expense of the State, and practice oppression gener- ally, virtually escape taxation. This privilege, constituting practically a ¢ privileged order,” very naturally created dissatisfaction among what is called the common people. For years I have been en- deavoring to awaken the voters of our county to action in the way of ignoring political party machinery and making common cause in putting down rings” and combina- tions for individual and corporate interest at the expense of the proletaria or masses. But ringsters—combinations for selfish purposes— have been too strong for me. Money would not buy the press; the press mislead the people, and in their blind zeal for party, would unconsciously be used to subserve schemers’ purposes. When a plan was gotten up by leading Republicans to elect a notoriously bigoted Democrat to the Legislature, I knew there was a job in it. ~ Grange;—The object of that institution was to pro- mote the industrial interests of the State, irrespective of party politics; hence, conformably with the feelings of duty to the public, I resolved to support a Reform candi- date, in opposition to that of my political party. This disturbed those who expected to be legistated into profitable jobs by their candidate, and they conspired to destroy my influence. One of the banks in Napa, that had ever been zealous for the Republican party success, spent money for the election of its tool, and succeeded. Then, as I had anticipated, the ‘put up job” ap- peared. The handling of the funds the State had appro- priated for the building of the Napa Insane Asylum, was the prize that, somehow, was to reward the men whose SEIUIIUNUUUTIPNUNISPISISSSSISS——— 118 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE love of gain exceeded their love of country or party; but how much the money changers made I do not know. We all know, however, that the building was to have been constructed for six hundred thousand dollars. First and last, it has cost the State all of one million five hundred thousand dollars, and needs more to furnish it. Verily, ¢¢ the love of money is the root of all evil.” The plotters got a man who had recently come into the county (editor of the Napa County Reporter), to help them handle me roughly, charging I was in my dotage, etc. The Register, the Republican paper of the county, was petitioned by about thirty of my neighbors to open 1ts columns to me. Depend upon it, I made those fellows wince, and a spirited contest went on. Every one of them not only felt my retaliation, but all but one have since en- deavored to make redress. CHAPTER XIV. July 31st, 1879— Seventy-three years ago this day the home of my parents, now known as «Rock Mill,” about sixty miles north of the City of New York, witnessed the advent into this world of affliction of a “man child.” An outline of the history of that boy is recorded in this book, and this anniversary of my birth is a fitting time to resume the endeavor to make it as complete as possible, but the terrible heat of the weather forbids an extended exercise, even in the use of my pen. At five o'clock p. M., under the dense shade of a tree, we have a temperature of 102 deg. Two hours ago it was three de- grees higher, and a westerly wind continues. I drove to town and felt so much cooler than while sit- ting in or about the house, that I advised my wife to ride ST. HELENA. 119 to see Mary, who is still in bed. She has been treated for chronic intestinal and liver derangement by the Doctors Henry Gibbons, Sen., of San Francisco, and Dawson of this place, who —at my suggestion—prescribed, among other medicines, mercurials, which unexpectedly caused saliva- tion, that has been protracted and painful; but if she sur- vives this ‘heated term,” improvement may be expected. McPike, with DeWitt and George, are attending to their harvests on the San Joaquin, and I remain here on Mary’s account, while others of my neighbors are camping out and visiting springs; a luxury in which we should hardly indulge, even if we were not needed at home. 1 have written to-day for Henry to come home from San Francisco (where he is studying law) for the gratification of his mother, and to assist in her care. Yes, I now begin my seventy-fourth year. All my organic functions are better performed than in April and May; then the heart irregularity which had troubled me much of the time for several years, and an apparent de- cline of vital powers generally, made me resolve and pub- lish that I would not assume any avoidable duty thereaf- ter, even in my zeal to assist in putting our New Constitu- tion in running order; nevertheless I worked carnestly with my pen for its adoption. : Sunset— Wife returned. Mary moved into a cooler room, begins to take nourishment. Thus endeth the work of my seventy-third birthday. Have been reading the obituary of four or five eminent men, who died at from sixty-nine to seventy-four. My brother Charles went a dozen or so years beyond. He had no children or grandchildren to cheer his soli- tude, and it is possible that the anomalies and perversity of human nature are such that if he had been both a father and a grandfather, he might have seen cause to mourn over his loneliness nevertheless; and his consequent want of Rg g————— n . p———————rEEEEL Al - 120 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. opportunity to impart useful lessons to his posterity, thereby preparing them to exercise a judicious control of property he would fecl a pleasure in accumulating for their benefit, aud surrendering to them as his successors, for their comfort and respectability when they come to fill the place in society, so soon to be vacated by the death of their progenitor. The heat during the day has been simply terrible, and yet that is not a proper word to express the effect it has on man and beast. Business with teams I see going on as usual, carriages filled with men, women and children pass- ing on the road at a good speed. It is not easy to explain, conformably with our knowl- elge of atmospheric or meteorological laws, how tempera- ture undergoes so great a change in so short a time, with- out any change of wind, or rather with an entire fall of the wind. At nine or ten o’clock p. M. in dead calm, mercury at 70 deg.-—38 deg. lower than at four o’clock, in a brisk northerly and variable wind. May not a stratum of cold air, sustained in a high altitude during the day by the motion of the atmosphere in the valleys, be able to gravi- tate to the earth after the more or less rapid circulation in the valley ceased? : In the Santa Clara valley I have often found a higher tamperature at, or a little before sunrise, than at nine or ten o'clock the preceding night. This seemed phenome- nal, for certainly the earth has accumulated (Galoriciduring the day, and radiated the same during the night.” I could only explain the fact on the theory that upper air came vertically down after the sea breeze, which had been press- ing up through the valley during the day had ceased, and grew warmer, during the night, by resting on the warm earth. Commodore Farragut, while studiously engaged 1n the investigation of the climatology of the Pacific Coast, COM. FARRAGUT, 121 admitted to me that my explanation, as above, of the phe- nomina was not only original, but was entirely in harmony with established physical law. He then had charge of the Navy Yard on Mare Island, 1858. But weather statistics and my speculations on the at- mospheric peculiarities of California may be found in sev- eral manuscript books, from which I could compile a very readable history, not only of peculiarity of seasons, but of things in general in this county, since May, 1853. But these are small matters compared with what I was intending to say when diverted from it by the behavior of the mercury in the little indicators of temperature. I was intending to call the attention of my boys to certain important considerations on which their respecta- bility and happiness in life largely or entirely depends. I mean, not only by the exercise of their perceptive facul- ties, and the admonitions of guardians and friends, to learn to resist, i e, to acquire the power of controlling hereditary proclivities, or acquired habits. For example: A man may be impulsive from temper- ament. He, to use a slang, “will kick before he is spurred;” that is, he will become irritated, and give ex- pression to resentful feelings before the offending party has made his meaning clear, which, when understood, may have proved kind—nay, complimental. Again—another may be so constituted, phrenologically, that he is often inclined to deceive, and finds it necessary to twist the truth out of shape to effect deception. These examples are sufficient to make my meaning plain. Moral philosophy assumes, and religion teaches, that we are able to resist temptation to do wrong in any- thing. Nothing can be plainer than the justice of penal laws in some shape. Nature ordained them. The glutton and drunkard feel the pain of debauch, the thief is ex- ‘cluded from social privileges. 122 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. — And it is also plain, that his reason, if not his educa- tion, shows him that lying and stealing are wrong, hence the penalty is deserved and needs to be reformatory. There is no knowing what some of my boys may make. They inherit something of their grandmother’s strength of character without her physical infirmities. This last evil was avoided by the more immediate inheritance of their father’s excellent physique. They may yet develop more of his moral and mental peculiarities, or those of remote ancestors; but as John, like myself, is made up of good and defective qualities, uncertainty awaits them. And it might be well, as curiosity may prompt some of them to examine critically what the strength of mind of their grandfather was on the first day of the fourth year of the eighth decade of his life’s history, to record some of the weaknesses that I regard as constitutional in myself in part, and in part acquired, from the force of circumstances; but, on the whole, this will be sufficiently understood if they give deserved attention to what I have already written and am now writing. Constitutional or phrenological defects it is terribly hard to get the mastery of, and acquired ones, of long standing, almost equally so, and parents can not begin too early, nor strive too perseveringly to repress every indica- tion the budding intellect may show of a constitutional tendancy to do any thing that is morally wrong or inexpe- dient. Phrenology teaches that in this way cerebral organs that cause a natural bent to evil, may be arrested in their growth, and those of the moral sentiments proportionally developed. ¢¢ As the twig is bent the tree is inclined.” If the mother of the famous Mississippi bandit, Mur- ril, had compelled him to restore the pins he had stolen at school, instead of praising him for his smartness, he would not have died a convict. This was his own expressed opinion. PECCADILLOCS. 123 But it is often as difficult to eradicate unfortunate habits that have been allowed to forin in amiable, smart children, as it is to prevent the growth of vicious ones in children constitutionally inclined to be so. I'know an unusually promising youngster whose im- pulsiveness I regard as the result of an hereditary nervous- ness, who can never wait till his interlocutor has finished his sentence before he breaks in with his reply, which often clearly shows that his anticipations of the meaning of the other party were erroneous. This is at all times unmannerly and often occasions a great waste of words and time. If the parents of that young man had been as careful to correct all such peccadillos in him as my mother was to guard me against any careless departure from literal truth lest it might lead me into in- tentional falsehood, this serious drawback on his otherwise superior colloquial gifts would not now exist. And again, how many otherwise brilliant conversa- tionalists damage themselves by repetition as ¢ I see;” “1 see;” I see you, 'hem;” “I see you do not get my mean- ing,” ete. I have in my mind one in whose future I feel an abiding interest, who will read the above without suspect- ing it applies to him, so confirmed is Le in the unfortun- ate habit that he can not be made to notice it in himself but might in others. The financial ruin which has threatened me for years seems to have passed by, and I claim some credit for avoiding expense and for the prudence that has enabled me to survive the commercial crisis which bankrupted tens of thousands whose opportunity to escape was better than mine. My wife, too, is justly entitled to the credit of cheerfully co-operating with me to avoid expense till we are now able to meet it and live as we please. I said—over leaf—<¢ thus endeth,” ete., but my sole i er tn my good wife to enjoy after I am gone. a a or 1 oes, ahh a g, sre, face to face, with what, in common parlance, is called Death, it is natural to —_— “ Does death end all 2” My answer is briefly onptoned on page 91, and more generally anc speeliionlly sleewhore. But the question naturally arises, have I done my duty in all the relations of life, under the circumstances and surroundings for which I am not responsible " ” manner to acquit me of blame at the bar of a healilor con- science? Have I lived in a manner to enable me to feel when I reach the “higher life” that I shall have no fear of meeting any who «can justly charge me with having done by them, in this, my rudimental state of AISiETe what I ought not to have done or left andone—Auties which I ought to have performed. Is it possible, in my little remaining time, for me to do anything that will add to the respectability and happi- ness in this life of any whom it would contribute greatly to my enjoyment to serve. ak This it is impossible for me to answer, but while 1 know that I have always aimed to act in accordance with the golden rule, ‘“Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you,” I am quite sure I have, from defoc- tive knowledge, erred in that particular, as for example: 1 have refused to help beggars, because I feared they were impostors; but at the same time have often given such peo- ple the benefit of a reasonable doubt. I am very certain that I never endeavored to over- reach, by misrepresentation, in a business transaction, and am sure that I am not chargeable with the most odious of all vices, untruthfulness. And yet I can not claim an ex- emption from one of the weaknesses so common to human- ity, an inability ¢ to see ourselves as others see us.” If Burns had written nothing else but that couplet it 134 MEMOIRS OF G.B. CRANE. alone ought to have immortalized him. Blindness to our own defects and moral obliquities is so general among all classes of people that I am fully aware of my own unavoid- able participation in the weakness, but to me it really seems impossible that I have ever been as much given to falsehood, which I dispise, or to tergiversation, dissimula- tion and deceit, in my demeanor generally, as many peo- ple, who seem to abhor all those vices as much as I do, and who even profess to be profoundly religious, and with evident sincerity. I do not claim that wrongs I have suffered justify me in wronging others, as did a man lately to whom I had lent money and indulged till barred by limitation. Itis a maxim in law that one wrong does not justify another, and I am often troubled by the inquiry to myself, whether I am justified in withholding favors under some circum- stances from those who do not perform duties of kindness to me. I believe the Divine Laws are self executing, that jus- tice is an attribute of God, that God can not suspend his attributes, and consequently that if it ( justice) does not over- take the evil doer in time, it must reach him in eternity; hence, punishment for wrongs, whether by a Catholic pur- gatory literally, or under the immutable law of cause and effect, is certain, and virtue is equally sure of its reward. If we regard punishment as reformatory in its design we can easily see the reasonableness and enlightenment of that class of divines and reformers who are now break- ing loose from the shackles of creedal theology. By the term God, I do not mean the titular deity that theologians admit was out-generaled by what they call Satan in the «« beginning, ” but I mean the Grand Controlling Agency, the Primal Source of alllife, all being—Omniscient, Omni- potent, Omnipresent Creative Power, that cay never be in- dividualized. LEX TALIONIS. 135 Reformers known as Liberalists are now divesting the otherwise moralizing religion of the age, of the super- stitious elements with which it has become intermingled, and boldly declaring that the terrible language, ‘‘ Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” when understood properly, conveys a meaning so broadly different from what we should expect of Him who makes his ¢“ rain fall upon the just and on the un- just,” as to be increditable-—indeed blasphemous. Punishment under human laws, we know (and to the deep disgrace of mankind) has ever, in the main, from Lex Talionis of Moses to the present day, been of a vindictive character. We punish a starving man for stealing bread, as a dog punishes another dog for stealing his bone. But I am not to write a system of theology or juris- prudence; I am incapable of doing either, though I am capable of recording thoughts and reflections in which it is so natural for men to indulge when they feel themselves about to resign the load of life, and enter a new—to them —untried theatre of existence. It is possible that some of my successors may feel the same interest, the same desire to know something of the manners, customs, and social usages of their grandfathers, that I have long felt to know more minutely than we can learn from general history, the peculiarities, prevailing habits, fashions, prejudices, aspirations, engrossing thoughts and speculations on religion, polities, moral duties, etc., etec., that characterized the age of my grand- parents. J Much of this account of my surroundings in early life is already recorded on the first pages of this book, and I may add a chapter on the improvement of the machinery of civilization in California or elsewhere, since my advent into the State. : On the 6th of March I went to San Francisco, where Pon Somes ——————— pera—————————— Eesha ee | 136 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. Mary has been staying for months, being treate.l by Drs. Henry Gibbons and Son. The second week in March I spent in Sacramento, lis- tening to proceedings of Legislature, a rather disgusting pastime from the ignorance of a portion of that body, who represent>d the ‘¢ working men’s” party, known in the language of the two or three past years as “ Sand-lot- ters,” from the fact of ‘‘/aboring men” of San ['rancisco mezting every Sunday on an open sand lot near the New City Hall to listen to the diatribes of an Irish deinagogue and other roughs, whose war cry was, ¢‘ the Chinese must 20.” By their expulsion from the country it was thought each loafer could compel employers to pay high rates of wages, and domineer over capitalists and producers; but the time may go by when farmers and mechanics are obliged to coax and pet rough men, besides paying unrea- sonably high prices in order to get their work done. My object in going to the Capitol was to lobby through the Legislature a bill for the wine interests of the State. And in this connection I will leave on record a ridicu- lously amusing incident that will never appear in the gen- eral history of the California Legislature, to show how warfare between the great leading parties of intelligent men caused San Francisco to be represented in part by the hoodlum element. It was shown that a certain provision in the contem- plated agricultural college, would prevent adulteration of wines. A << Sand-lotter ” took the floor and said: perpetrated, and thereby add to the nurabee of really honest men that are the © salt of the earth. JULY 23d. And while I write, the solemn sound of bells reaches my weakened auditories, presumably the death knell of the Nation’s present idol, General Grant. i i in he lies,’ «« Barth’s highest stations end in ‘here | And dust to dust concludes her noblest song. And is this all? Yea, verily it is, if death ends all In that event this poetry would be mournfully beautiful, solemnly true, and a fitting dirge for greatness. But death does not ‘end all.” Our belief in immortality no longer rests on the visionary hope inspired by faith alone. 234 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. We now have sensuous, tangible proof that a higher life awaits this rudimental existence which compels the con- viction that U. S. Grant, in his spiritual body, is now en- joying the greetings of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and their compeers, all of whom have been antic- ipating, with lively interest, his advent to spirit life. How absurd the materialistic assumption that patriotism and philanthropy are sufficiently rewarded by a consciousness during life of the happiness such services will secure to posterity, and the satisfaction these world’s redeemers will enjoy in the belief that their names will live, but live only in song.” No, no, as human nature is constituted, good men find their most exalted happiness in this life, in a firm conviction that if ‘“ Spring never visits the mouldering urn,” day will most certainly ‘‘ dawn on the night of the grave.” ———— ———————— e——. THOUGHTS ON DEATH. I have compared what I imagine the feelings and re- flections of condemned criminalsior political offenders, who know exactly their remaining time, with those of old peo- ple whose margin of earrh-life has become unmistakably narrow. They, the former, I suppose, busy themselves 4 with the inquiry whether ‘‘ death euds all,” or with the multitudinous theories of an after-life, if they believe in a continuous existence in the hereafter. The man of three score and ten, on the contrary, con- trary, continues in the delusion that has followed him from his early years, so forcibly expressed by Alex. Pope: ¢¢ All men think all men mortal but themselves.” And at seventy says: ¢ My mother lived ’till eighty, and why not I?” At eighty he remembers others who have gone on to ninety, and continues to put ‘far away the evil day.” DEATH. 235 But why regard the day of death as an evil day ?” It is an event as natural as that of our birth. Our birth was for a purpose. We are compelled to believe, from analogical reasoning, that there is a purpose in so-called death. The apparent difference between birth and death is not real. The first is to people earth with rudimental intelligences,—the next to translate those intelligences to a higher sphere of existence. Progress is the order of nature. Death is only an apparent end, our surroundings are generally more apparent than real, the earth seemingly :s immovable and essentially flat, the sun in motion, stars small, seed in the ground dying; the reverse is amazingly true of all. But what the object of continuing physical life after our usefulness has ceased, and even the process of think- ing becomes laborious, I hold to be inexplicable, and especially so the continuance of animal life after the intel- lectual is practically exhausted ? These are enigmas for a solution of which we must be content to wait ’till we get «« Beyond the Gate,” which is now only ¢¢ Ajar.” ¢« All nature is but art unknown to thee, ; 3 All chance, dir. ction which thou canst not see. | a RETROSPECTION. July 30th, 1885.—And this day ends the seventy-ninth year of my long and anxious life (see page 119); to-mor- row will be my ¢birthday,”—yes, “ birthday!” What a world of delightful retrospections do those two expressive monosyllables inspire! Ah! too, and what melancholy reflections do they awaken! They carry me back to the halcyon days of childhood and youth, when our mothers would prepare, in anticipation, an entertainment for the delectation of ourselves and companions, our fathers and ¢¢ big” brothers gave us a mock whipping to make us be- 236 MEMOIRS OF G B. CRANE. have well for the next year, and for the misbehavior of the past. But now how changed. Then, life with all its ex- pected joys,--which succeeding years proved to be delu- sions,—lay spread out promiscuously before our en- raptured vision, inviting us to cull and pick. Then, hope beckoned us on, promising that the next should be as the past year, but abounding with new and rarer pleasures in addition. Then, the foot-race, the hop and jump, the eating and drinking, the fun and frolic generally, were enjoyed with lively zest. Now, the footsteps are tottering, ¢ the grasshopper 1s a burden,” the ¢ lookers-out of the window are dark- ened,” the acoustic machinery dulled, and if a man who has reached to the point on the nether side of the hill of life, that I find myself occupying this day, can see himself surrounded, on his natal anniversary, by his own descend- ants who are delighted to *¢ learn from the wisdom of age,” while he, in his turn, is cheered by the sallies of youth,” it will tend to divert his thoughts from the gloomy inquir- ies that so naturally arise: —— «« Will Spring ever visit the mouldering urn, Will day ever dawn on the night of the grave?” And however undoubtingly one may believe, from faith or evidence, that the end of this will prove to be but the beginning of a higher life, ¢¢ Nature’s self will work in him so” that reflections indicated by the couplet will irresistibly lead to the inquiry. And, too, it will be tinged with gloom. The interruption of his social ties, and ten- der sympathies, even though—as with me—he believes it to be but temporary, must seriously impress him, espec- ially so when to this is added the certainty that he is on the eve of being forced to surrender the accumulated APPREHENSIONS. 237 treasures and conveniences with which his industry and frugality have surrounded him, and which are enshrined in his affections by familiarity; contributions to his com- fort, and feelings of ownership—of mine, in short. And to this may be added a well-grounded apprehen- sion that the fruits of the labor of his long life may fall into the hands of spendthrifts, or parties incapable of making a judicious use of property, or of appreciating motives, examples of which we often and so painfully witness. These considerations, together with the voice of Na- tare that ¢¢ will not down at our bidding,” can hardly fail to make us realize, in anticipation of our final departure, that at that grand crisis we will be compelled, in the language of the poet, to cast a longing, lingering look behind;”’ that we shall wishfully look on all we are leaving, now no longer ours.” And this, too, whether confident of a happy reception in the Great Beyond,” or laboring under a guilty consciousness of a badly-spent life, that will justly consign us to a state of retributive justice. In the language of a ceremonial religion, ¢¢ Thus end- eth” the mental labors of my seventy-ninth year. — A FAULT FINDING CHAPTER. And this would seem to be not only a fitting, but con- sidering my age, a final conclusion to an outline review of my long and—and—what adjective will most truthfully qualify the word ¢¢]ife” in my case? * % * % After long reflection, I find it impossible to give an answer satisfactory to myseli. ‘Will the hackneyed one, «cgventful,” do? Events, uncontrollable, shape the destiny of all, and fix unalterably that of many, but one man may prove superior to another by his skill in originating events, 238 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. or so shaping the casual as to subserve his purpose. Shall I say afflictive? Affliction is common to human- ity, none escape, and where apparently unalloyed happi- ness has resulted from successful enterprise and ambitious aspirations to public distinction, one sad bereavement, one misalliance, one dissolute son, one disappointed, betrayed daughter, may prove a skeleton in what appears to be the most happy family; that, nevertheless, is realizing the adage, ‘Every heart knows its own bitterness.” I may continue to search our vocabulary for a word more expressive than any other of the character of myself and of my life’s history, but I shall search in vain if I re- fuse to admit that mine has been but the common lot of humanity; disappointment, vexation and remorse com- mingled with occasional intense gratifications and brilliant hopes, that have proved evanescent and delusive—the re- morse often intensified by retrospective discovery of the ease by which misfortune might have been averted had I taken more pains to know beforehand, what subsequent developments brought to light. But regrets now are vain, my race is run, my life a failure, provided my posterity fail to pattern efter the good that can be seen in my personal history, and zealously aspire to make a better record in such directions for them- selves than I have done for myself, and be forever on the alert to avoid my errors, great and small. My race is run, I say, and yet my mind seems to main- tain its integrity, as indicated by the preceding page, com- posed this morning; and my physical vigor enabled me on yesterday to serve as pall-bearer for the last melancholy duty I owed my valued friend, Col. Jo. B. Chiles, and I am in every respect as well as when I wrote April, 1884. The passing away of veteran pioneers, of which I almost daily hear, whose years my own outnumber, ad- monishes me that the grim messenger may -at any time DANGER. 239 come ‘like a thief in the night,” as was the case with another friend, whose obsequies I must attend to-day. But I do not yet find a suitable adjective to qualify the word life” as inquired for above. I have often been charged with being & fault finder. Perhaps if I should say my long, careful, though erring, but industrious, and fault finding life, I would best express my friends’ con- ception of my peculiar make up. Whether my fault finding proclivities are the out- growth of a mora than ordinary right-mindedness, a mor- bid sensitiveness, or constitutional impatience with which I notice the foibles and irregularities of others, I will not undertake to say, but will insist that it is a duty we owe to all, in whose welfare we have a right to interest ourselves, to remind them of faults and foibles which may damage themselves or others, in any way. If I see a boy smoking a cigarette, I fault him because 1 know it will lead to an increased use of tobacco at the expense of his pocket, and damage to his nervous system. When I see him drink beer, wine or stronger fluid, I fault him because I know it may lead to intemperance. When a boy or man goes into saloons or gambling dens, I fault him because I know that is the road to the penitentiary or gallows. | When I find anybody indulging in exaggeration, I fault them because there is danger of its leading to a crimi- pal disregard of truth. : If a man contracts a debt, which, in the event of fail- ure of crops, commercial revulsion, or any possible con- tingency, may endanger the loss of his home, I not only fault, but condemn him as guilty of treason to himself and family. ¢ I fault the person who invents an excuse for nonper- formance of any duty, however trivial, for it opens the way to downright lying. I do not apply the word “fault” to 240 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. lying nor use it in connection with small vices and mis- takes,—lying should be located in the category of shame- less frauds or crimes. If one puts off till to-morrow what he ought to do to- day, I fault him and then do the same thing myseli, but I plead infirmity of age in extenuation. When I see a man at work with a pipe, or any other smoking machine in his mouth, I understand him, and fault him if I think there is anything left in him worth saving. When an otherwise cleanly and respectable decent man, who habitually smokes, is met with a kiss by his lov- ing wife, who then speedily retreats to the open air, I fault him for not having discovered that the burnt oil of tobacco that has lodged in his hair, beard, and clothes, has caused him to stink worse than a skunk. Sickening and disgusting as the above is, to people of culture and refinement, it is a virtue compared with liquor- drinking, in addition to a degree that increases the offen- ° sive smell —that ruins young and old, upsets the under- standing, and brings families to beggary by causing bad business arrangements. I can call to mind from thirty to forty such cases that I have personally witnessed. And finally I fault every one who does not fault me for finding such a variety of faults in men, women, boys and girls who would not have discovered such faults in them- selves, if there had been no fault-finders to notice and point them out, provided they will show that I am, or ever have been, an unreasonable fault-finder, and in my final conclusion as a fault-finder, I emphatically aver that if any one for whose interest I have so diligently and anxiously labored, in writing and publishing this book, fail to give careful and pious attention to whatever is instructive and moralizing in it, but, instead, with uncharitable prejudice, endeavors to find and magnify my own faults, it will prove that I have been ¢‘ casting pearls before swine.” - 8 A TRUE MONUMENT. CONCLUSION. Indifferent as I have long felt as to the disposition which may be made of the ‘¢ house I have lived in” (my mortal body), for the past seventy-nine years, and al- though I prefer cremation, I have given directions for its inhumation, and have procured a rezpectable and some- what costly monument, in compliance with the wishes of my family, to commemorate my former wife and self. But, I hold that the man or woman who fails to do something to perpetuate their memory more valuable to the world than sculptured marble can attest, has lived to very little purpose. = Yes, our plain, substantial tomb and expressive, though unique inscriptions, will survive generations of our descendants; but what will that avail us, or the people who live a hundred years hence, if none shall then be found who will appreciate, and claim the honor of being lineally descended from the persons these stones commem- orate, and boast the possession of a little book, written by one of those ancestors in the eighth decade of the Nine- teenth century, which volume has ever been carefully pre- served as an heirloom in the family, and which contains abundant intrinsic evidence of the respectability of its author, and can show, from the fact of its long preserva- tion, and perhaps new editions which they have had pub- lished for their own families, that the intermediate genera- tions have been virtuous and intelligent, otherwise the book would have been lost. This sort of a monument,—a monument of a line of descendants who have been good, industrious citizens, and who have contributed to the growth of morality, intelli- gence, and the material worth of their country,—ecan alone give value to the silent stones that will have outlived the corroding effects of time. = —— 3 re ———— SES ) 242 MEMOIRS OF G. B. CRANE. The modern custom of masquerading the ‘city of the dead” by costly piles, untruthful inscriptions, ornaments and symbols, often tending to transmit to succeeding gen- erations an entirely erroneous Opinion of the estimate in which the persons they commemorate were held by their living contemporaries, appeals forcibly to the thoughtful living for a corrective. Example, and especially examples that involve ex- pense, and subject their authors to uncharitable criticism, are always more productive of results than precept. Actuated by these views I have written instructions for my own obsequies which I know, in the «course of Nature, cannot be a remote event. They are substantially to the following effect, and the reasons therein explained in detail, in manuscript book “A” more particularly. The ceremonies on the occasion to be at my own house, and by Some person or persons of my own religious views. OX COX * * * * * I have appointed my wife and daughter, and authorized a third person—whom they may select—to act as a com- mittee to ascertain who are the most needy and deserving poor in this vicinity, and to distribute among them, at their (the committec’s) discretion, the difference in cost, between my plain, inexpensive coffin and the most costly casket ever used in our cemetery-—this difference in no event to fall short of $100. I desire that no mourning apparel shall be worn by any of my relatives in consequence of my passing away. We can better testify our sorrow for the loss of departed friends by imitating their virtues, complying with their wishes, and avoiding all conduct that we know they would condemn. “We have seen families, when clad in mourning weeds, availing themselves of technicalities to defeat the plainly a ™ 2 on Ara CONCLUSION. 243 expressed wishes of a testator in the distribution of pro- perty. I have no fear of anything so disgraceful in my own family. If these instructions subject my memory to the Charge y eccentricity, singularity, or even insanity, it matters ict 8 for my stewardship generally through life will be basse ‘upon on a higher plane of humanity where motive wi the standard of merit. THE END. END OF REEL. PLEASE REWIND.