Me 14. b*0«.9t C IN OlIO- rft ;?53) LI B RAR.Y OF THE UNIVERSITY Of ILLINOIS 6 >jL mnwis mmm sum QcoR)e(!Sf|C|I^W) Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://archive.org/details/lifeinearlyindiaOOeggl Ceory Canj tqtfe&toti LIFE IN EARLY INDIANA By George C. Eggleston Prepared by the Staff of the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County 1953 One of a ftbioricai series,ilu* pampftlet b published under tfte direction of \ke gwerattg Boards 4 tte Public library of fort Wayne an6 QllcnGxmty. W-OF-raK-OF-l-OT-dTy-OP-FOd-WM lf2KSatibi*. e K l lk < fyeJ>K 1 i Hi f I ^ose/>^ Z J&Q7ner, JecrtZhsy V.&agefeme/fc , ftMlojd <56jom£aag6. m^Mm^^MMM^MU citizen* dwsor^w CillcitCcuK^cabw'Ide corpoiafeCify of farWayiie Jom»s Z.Gruhjajn Qrtfuv /Zuvnt^ier f/2n. C/vaties 9jey/>o/c/s Mfa.G/en/t ^eruaiefson B FOREWORD The coming of the railroads to the backwoods settlements of Indiana over a century ago was an event of major importance. The railroads speeded transportation and communication and brought waves of new set- tlers to the state. The economic and social life of the earlier pioneers was profoundly affected by the advent of the iron rails. Education, too, felt the impact of new ideas and new methods. In the following extract from RECOLLECTIONS OF A VARIED LIFE, these changes are vividly depicted. George Cary Eggleston, author of the RECOLLECTIONS, was a na- tive Hoosier. He was born in 1839 in the little town of Vevay. In later years, his newspaper work for the NEW YORK EVENING POST and the NEW YORK WORLD, his articles in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY and GAL- AXY magazines, and his series of books for boys brought him a measure of fame. His RECOLLECTIONS, published in 1910, is a leisurely autobi- ography enlivened by anecdotes of his early life and by characterizations of his newspaper and literary friends. The following excerpt has been reprinted verbatim with the kind per- mission of the publishers, Henry Holt and Company. The Boards and the Staff of the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County present the au- thor's sketch of life in early Indiana in the hope that it will prove interest- ing to present-day Hoosiers. I The life of that early time differed in every way from American life as men of the present day know it. The isolation in which every community existed, com- pelled a degree of local self-dependence the like of which the modern world knows nothing of. The farmers did most things for themselves, and what they could not con- veniently do for themselves, was done for them in the villages by independent craftsmen, each cunningly skilled in his trade and dependent upon factories for nothing. In my native village, Vevay, which was in nowise different from other Western villages upon which the region round about depended for supplies, practically everything wanted was made. There were two tinsmiths, who, with an as- sistant or two each, in the persons of boys learning the trade, made every utensil of tin, sheet-iron, or copper that was needed for twenty-odd miles around. There were two saddlers and harnessmakers ; two or three plas- terers ; several brick masons ; several carpenters, who knew their trade as no carpenter does in our time when the planing mill furnishes everything already shaped to his hand, so that the carpenter need know nothing but how to drive nails or screws. There was a boot- and shoe- maker who made all the shoes worn by men, women, and children in all that country, out of leather bought of the local tanner, to whom all hides were sold by their pro- ducers. There was a hatter who did all his own work, whose vats yielded all the headgear needed, from the 1 finest to the commonest, and whose materials were the furs of animals caught or killed by the farmers' boys and brought to town for sale. There was even a wireworker, who provided sieves, strainers, and screenings of every kind, and there was a rope walk where the cordage wanted was made. In most households the women folk fashioned all the clothes worn by persons of either sex, but to meet the demand for "Sunday bests" and that of preachers who must wear broadcloth every day in the week, and of ex- travagant young men who wished to dazzle all eyes with " store clothes," there was a tailor who year after year fashioned garments upon models learned in his youth and never departed from. No such thing as ready-made clothing or boots or shoes — except women's slippers — was known at the time of which I now write. Even socks and stockings were never sold in the shops, except upon wedding and other infrequent occasions. For ordi- nary wear they were knitted at home of home-spun yarn. The statement made above is scarcely accurate. Both socks and stockings were occasionally sold in the country stores, but they were almost exclusively the surplus prod- ucts of the industry of women on the farms round about. So were the saddle blankets, and most of the bed blankets used. Local self-dependence was well-nigh perfect. The town depended on the country and the country on the town, for nearly everything that was eaten or woven or otherwise consumed. The day of dependence upon fac- tories had not yet dawned. The man who knew how to fashion any article of human use, made his living by doing the work he knew how to do, and was an independ- ent, self-respecting man, usually owning his comfortable home, and destined by middle age to possess a satisfactory competence. Whether all that was economically or socially better than the system which has converted the independent, home-owning worker into a factory hand, living in a tene- ment and carrying a dinner pail, while tariff tribute from the consumer makes his employer at once a millionaire and the more or less despotic master of a multitude of men — is a question too large and too serious to be discussed in a book of random recollections such as this. But every " strike " raises that question in the minds of men who re- member the more primitive conditions as lovingly as I do. As a matter of curious historical interest, too, it is worth while to recall the fact that Henry Clay — before his desire to win the votes of the Kentucky hemp-growers led him to become the leading advocate of tariff protection — used to make eloquent speeches in behalf of free trade, in which he drew horrifying pictures of life conditions in the Eng- lish manufacturing centers, and invoked the mercy of heaven to spare this country from like conditions in which economic considerations should ride down social ones, trample the life out of personal independence, and con- vert the home-owning American workman into a mere " hand " employed by a company of capitalists for their own enrichment at cost of his manhood except in so far as the fiat of a trades union might interpose to save him from slavery to the employing class. Those were interesting speeches of Henry Clay's, made before he sacrificed his convictions and his manhood to his vain desire to become President. n At the time of my earliest recollections there was not a mile of railroad in Indiana or anywhere else west of Ohio, while even in Ohio there were only the crudest beginnings of track construction, on isolated lines that began nowhere and led no whither, connecting with noth- ing, and usually failing to make even that connection. He who would journey from the East to the West, soon came to the end of the rails, and after that he must toil- somely make his way by stagecoach across the mountains, walking for the most part in mud half-leg deep, and carry- ing a fence rail on his shoulder with which to help the stalled stagecoach out of frequent mires. Nevertheless, we heard much of the railroad and its wonders. It was our mystery story, our marvel, our cur- rent Arabian Nights' Entertainment. We were told, and devoutly believed, that the " railcars " ran at the rate of " a mile a minute." How or why the liars of that early period, when lying must have been in its infancy as an art, happened to hit upon sixty miles an hour as the uniform speed of railroad trains, I am puzzled to imagine. But so it was. There was probably not in all the world at that time a single mile of railroad track over which a train could have been run at such a speed. As for the railroads in the Western part of this country, they were chiefly primitive constructions, with tracks con- sisting of strap iron — wagon tires in effect — loosely spiked down to timber string pieces, over which it would have been reckless to the verge of insanity to run a train at more than twelve miles an hour under the most favorable circumstances. But we were told, over and over again, till we devoutly believed it — as human creatures always believe what they have been ceaselessly told without con- tradiction — that the " railcars " always ran at the rate of a mile a minute. The first railroad in Indiana was opened in 1847. A year or two later, my brother Edward and I, made our first journey over it, from Madison to Dupont, a distance of thirteen miles. Edward was at that time a victim of the faith habit; I was beginning to manifest a skeptical, inquiring tendency of mind which distressed those re- sponsible for me. When Edward reminded me that we were to enjoy our first experience of traveling at the rate of a mile a minute, I borrowed his bull's-eye watch and set myself to test the thing by timing it. When we reached Dupont, after the lapse of ninety-six minutes, in a journey of thirteen miles, I frankly declared my unbelief in the " mile a minute " tradition. There was no great harm in that, perhaps, but the skeptical spirit of inquiry that had prompted me to subject the matter to a time test, very seriously troubled my elders, who feared that I was des- tined to become a " free thinker," as my father had been before me, though I was not permitted to know that. I was alarmed about my skeptical tendencies myself, be- cause I believed the theology and demonology taught me at church, having no means of subjecting them to scientific tests of any kind. I no longer believed in the "mile a minute " tradition, as everybody around me continued to do, but I still believed in the existence and malign activ- ity of a personal devil, and I accepted the assurance given me that he was always at my side whispering doubts into my ears by way of securing the damnation of my soul under the doctrine of salvation by faith. The tortures I suffered on this account were well-nigh incredible, for in spite of all I might do or say or think, the doubts con- tinued to arise in my mind, until at last I awoke to the fact that I was beginning to doubt the doctrine of sal- vation by faith itself, as a thing stultifying to the mind, unreasonable in itself, and utterly unjust in its applica- tion to persons like myself, who found it impossible to believe things which they had every reason to believe were not true. Fortunately I was young and perfectly healthy, and so, after a deal of psychological suffering I found peace by an& sd mq*c\\ Xo k*k the ifcuwj bg timing \t reconciling myself to the conviction that I was foreor- dained to be damned in any case, and that there was no use in making myself unhappy about it. In support of that comforting assurance I secretly decided to accept the Presbyterian doctrine of predestination instead of the Methodist theory of free will in which I had been bred. I had to make this change of doctrinal allegiance secretly, be- cause its open avowal would have involved a sound thresh- ing behind the smoke-house, with perhaps a season of fast- ing and prayer, designed to make the castigation " take." I remember that when I had finally made up my mind that the doctrine of predestination was true, and that I was clearly one of those who were foreordained to be damned for incapacity to believe the incredible, I became for a time thoroughly comfortable in my mind, very much as I suppose a man of business is when he receives his discharge in bankruptcy. I felt myself emancipated from many restraints that had sat heavily on my boyish soul. Having decided, with the mature wisdom of ten or a dozen years of age, that I was to be damned in any case, I saw no reason why I should not read the fascinating books that had been forbidden to me by the discipline of the Methodist Church, to which I perforce belonged. In that early day of strenuous theological requirement, the Methodist Church disapproved of literature as such, and approved it only in so far as it was made the instru- ment of a propaganda. Its discipline required that each person upon being " received into full membership " — the Methodist equivalent of confirmation — should take a vow not " to read such books or sing such songs as do not pertain to the glory of God." I quote the phrase from memory, but accurately I think. That prohibition, as interpreted by clerical authority at the time, had com- pletely closed to me the treasures of the library my schol- arly father had collected, and to which, under his dying in- structions, my mother had added many scores of volumes of the finest English literature, purchased with the money for which his law books had been sold after his death. I had read a little here and there in those books, and had been fascinated with the new world they opened to my vision, when, at the ripe age of ten or twelve years, I was compelled by an ill-directed clerical authority to submit myself to the process of being " received into full membership/' under the assumption that I had " reached the age of responsibility." After that the books I so longed to read were for- bidden to me — especially a set entitled " The British Drama," in which appeared the works of Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and a long list of other classics, filling five thick volumes. By no ingenuity of construction could such books be regarded as homilies in disguise, and so they were Anathema. So was Shakespeare, and so even was Thiers' " French Revo- lution," of which I had devoured the first volume in de- light, before the inhibition fell upon me, blasting my blind but eager aspiration for culture and a larger knowledge of the world and of human nature. HI After I made up my mind to accept damnation as my appointed portion, I felt myself entirely free to revel at will in the reading that so appealed to my hungry mind; free, that is to say, so far as my own conscience was concerned, but no freer than before so far as the restraints of authority could determine the matter. I had no hesi- tation in reading the books when I could do so without being caught at it, but to be caught at it was to be punished for it and, worse still, it was to have the books placed 8 beyond my reach, a thing I dreaded far more than mere punishment. Punishment, indeed, seemed to me nothing more than a small advance upon the damnation I must ultimately suffer in any case. The thing to be avoided was discovery, because discovery must lead to the con- fiscation of my books, the loss of that liberty which my acceptance of damnation had given to me. To that end I practised many deceits and resorted to many subterfuges. I read late at night when I was sup- posed to be asleep. I smuggled books out into the woods and hid them there under the friendly roots of trees, so that I might go out and read them when I was sup- posed to be engaged in a search for ginseng, or in a hunt for the vagrant cow, to whose unpunctuality in returning to be milked I feel that I owe an appreciable part of such culture as I have acquired. The clerical hostility to literature endured long after the period of which I have been writing, long after the railroad and other means of freer intercourse had re- deemed the West from its narrow provincialism. Even in my high school days, when our part of the country had reached that stage of civilization that hangs lace cur- tains at its windows, wears store clothes of week days, and paints garden fences green instead of white, we who were under Methodist dominance were rigidly forbidden to read fiction or anything that resembled fiction, with certain exceptions. The grown folk of our creed per- mitted themselves to read the inane novels of the Phila- delphia tailor, T. S. Arthur; the few young men who "went to college," were presumed to be immune to the virus of the Greek and Latin fictions they must read there — probably because they never learned enough of Greek or Latin to read them understandingly — and finally there were certain polemic novels that were generally permitted. Among these last the most conspicuous example I re- H ... J rco4 late at rcigftt .J 1 member was a violently anti-Roman Catholic novel called " Danger in the Dark," which had a vogue that the " best- sellers " of our later time might envy. It was not only permitted to us to read that — it was regarded as our religious duty in order that we might learn to hate the Catholics with increased fervor. The religious animosities of that period, with their re- lentless intolerance, their unreason, their matchless malev- olence, and their eagerness to believe evil, ought to form an interesting and instructive chapter in some history of civilization in America, whenever a scholar of adequate learning and the gift of interpretation shall undertake that work. But that is a task for some Buckle or Lecky. It does not belong to a volume of random reminiscences such as this is. IV Though the railroads, when at last they came to us, failed utterly in their promise of transportation at the rate of " a mile a minute," they did something else, pres- ently, that was quite as remarkable and far worthier in its way. They ran down and ran over, and crushed out of existence a provincialism that had much of evil promise and very little of present good in it. With their coming, and in some degree in advance of their coming, a great wave of population poured into the West from all quar- ters of the country. The newcomers brought with them their ideas, their points of view, their convictions, their customs, and their standards of living. Mingling to- gether in the most intimate ways, socially and in business pursuits, each lost something of his prejudices and pro- vincialism, and gained much by contact with men of other ways of thinking and living. Attrition sharpened the 11 perceptions of all and smoothed away angles of offense. A spirit of tolerance was awakened such as had never been known in the Western country before, and as the West became populous and prosperous, it became also more broadly and generously American, more truly national in character, and more accurately representative of all that is best in American thought and life than any part of the country had ever been. It represented the whole country and all its parts. The New Englanders, the Virginians, the Pennsylva- nians, the Carolinians, the Kentuckians, who were thus brought together into composite communities with now and then an Irish, a French, a Dutch, or a German family, a group of Switzers, and a good many Scotchmen for neighbors and friends, learned much and quickly each from all the others. Better still, each unlearned the prejudices, the bigotries, and the narrownesses in which he had been bred, and life in the great West took on a liberality of mind, a breadth of tolerance and sympathy, a generous humanity such as had never been known in any of the narrowly provincial regions that furnished the materials of this composite population. It seems to me scarcely too much to say that real Americanism, in the broad sense of the term, had its birth in that new " winning of the West," which the railroads achieved about the middle of the nineteenth century. With the coming of easier and quicker communication, not only was the West brought into closer relations with the East, but the West itself became quickly more homo- geneous. There was a constant shifting of population from one place to another, much traveling about, and a free interchange of thought among a people who were eagerly alert to adopt new ideas that seemed in any way to be better than the old. As I recall the rapid changes of that time it seems to me that the betterments came 12 with a rapidity rarely if ever equaled in human history. A year or two at that time was sufficient to work a revolu- tion even in the most conservative centers of activity. Changes of the most radical kind and involving the most vital affairs, were made over-night, as it were, and with so little shock to men's minds that they ceased, almost immediately, to be topics of conversation. The old had scarcely passed away before it was forgotten, and the new as quickly became the usual, the ordinary, the familiar order of things. I do not mean to suggest that the West, or indeed any other part of the country, at once put aside all its crudities of custom and adopted the ways of living that we are familiar with in this later time. All that has been a thing of gradual accomplishment, far slower in its coming than most people realize. I remember that when Indianapolis became a great railroad center and a city of enormous proportions — popu- lation from 15,000 to 20,000, according to the creative capacity of the imagination making the estimate — a won- derful hotel was built there, and called the Bates House. Its splendors were the subject of wondering comment throughout the West. It had washstands, with decorated pottery on them, in all its more expensive rooms, so that a guest sojourning there need not go down to the common washroom for his morning ablution, and dry his hands and face on a jack-towel. There were combs and brushes in the rooms, too, so that if one wanted to smooth his hair he was not obliged to resort to the appliances of that sort that were hung by chains to the washroom walls. 13 Moreover, if a man going to the Bates House for a sojourn, chose to pay a trifle extra he might have a room all to himself, without the prospect of being waked up in the middle of the night to admit some stranger, assigned by the hotel authorities to share his room and bed. All these things were marvels of pretentious luxury, borrowed from the more " advanced " hostelries of the Eastern cities, and as such they became topics of admiring comment everywhere, as illustrations of the wonderful progress of civilization that was taking place among us. But all these subjects of wonderment shrank to nothing- ness by comparison, when the proprietors of the Bates House printed on their breakfast bills of fare, an an- nouncement that thereafter each guest's breakfast would be cooked after his order for it was given, together with an appeal for patience on the part of the breakfasters — a patience that the proprietors promised to reward with hot and freshly prepared dishes. This innovation was so radical that it excited discussion hotter even than the Bates House breakfasts. Opinions differed as to the right of a hotel keeper to make his guests wait for the cooking of their breakfasts. To some minds the thing presented itself as an invasion of per- sonal liberty and therefore of the constitutional rights of the citizen. To others it seemed an intolerable nuisance, while by those who were ambitious of reputation as per- sons who had traveled and were familiar with good usage, it was held to be a welcome advance in civilization. In approving it, they were able to exploit themselves as per- sons who had not only traveled as far as the state capital, but while there had paid the two dollars a day, which the Bates House charged for entertainment, instead of going to less pretentious taverns where the customary charge of a dollar or a dollar and a half a day still pre- vailed, and where breakfast was put upon the table before 14 ,. wakwt op ir? tfoe roi&fc of the ftigbiT.. * the gong invited guests to rush into the dining room and madly scramble for what they could get of it. In the same way I remember how we all wondered, over the manifestation of luxury made by the owners of a newly built steamboat of the Louisville and Cincinnati Mail Line, when we heard that the several staterooms were provided with wash-basins. That was in the fifties. Before that time, two common washrooms — one for men and the other for women — had served all the passengers on each steamboat, and, as those washrooms had set-bowls with running water, they were regarded as marvels of sumptuousness in travel facilities. It was partly because of such luxury, I suppose, that we called the steamboats of that time " floating palaces." They seemed so then. They would not impress us in that way now. Perhaps fifty years hence the great ocean liners of the present, over whose perfection of equipment we are accustomed to won- der, will seem equally unworthy. Such things are com- parative and the world moves fast. VI The crudities here referred to, however, are not prop- erly to be reckoned as belonging exclusively to the West, or as specially indicative of the provincialism of the West. At that time and for long afterward, it was usual, even in good hotels throughout the country, to assign two men, wholly unacquainted with each other, to occupy a room in common. It was expected that the hotel would pro- vide a comb and brush for the use of guests in each room, as the practice of carrying one's own toilet appliances of that kind had not yet become general. Hotel rooms with private bathrooms adjoining, were wholly unknown before the Civil War, and the practice of taking a daily bath was 16 very uncommon indeed. A hotel guest asking for such a thing would have been pointed out to bystanders as a curiosity of effete dandyism. Parenthetically, I may say that as late as 1886 I engaged for my wife and myself a room with private bath on the first floor of the Nadeau House, then the best hotel in Los Angeles, California. The man at the desk explained that the bathroom did not open directly into the room, but adjoined it and was accessible from the dead end of the hallway without. We got on very well with this arrangement until Saturday night came, when, as I estimated the number, all the un- married men of the city took turns in bathing in my private bathroom. When I entered complaint at the desk next morning, the clerk evidently regarded me as a monster of arrogant selfishness. He explained that as I had free use of the bathroom every day and night of the week, I ought not to feel aggrieved at its invasion by other cleanly disposed persons on " the usual night for taking a bath." The experience brought two facts to my attention : first, that in the opinion of the great majority of my fellow American citizens one bath a week was quite sufficient, and, second, that the fixed bathtub, with hot and cold water running directly into it, is a thing of comparatively modern use. I suppose that in the eighteen-fifties, and quite certainly in the first half of that decade, there were no such appliances of luxurious living in any but the very wealthiest houses, if even there. Persons who wanted an " all-over bath," went to a barber shop for it, if they lived in a city, and, if they lived elsewhere, went without it, or pressed a family washtub into friendly service. So, too, as late as 1870, in looking for a house in Brooklyn, I found it difficult to get one of moderate rent cost, that had other water supply than such as a hydrant in the back yard afforded. 17 s**±. •- aft tftc wwwrrtoi mm of ^ city t