Main Street Boyhood

by George Stewart MAIN STREET BOYHOOD. By George Stewart.—In contrast with the boyhoods of those whose parents remained in the East—of those who are growing up now in a planned economy—this article presents a lively, rugged interest. The author, now minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Stamford, Connecticut, summers in Harrisville, N. H. OUR TOWN, Baxter Springs, located on the Spring River in Cherokee County in the extreme southeastern corner of Kansas was not unlike four or five thousand other towns at the turn of the century. Along with Wichita, Kansas, and Seneca, Missouri, it had been one of the shipping points for cattle driven north from Texas, Oklahoma and the Indian Territory. It had one straggling business street with the usual general stores, blacksmith shops, the full complement of lodges, lawyers, butcher shops, banks, doctors and dentists. The local truckman had organized a band. There was a decayed hotel which had been a watering place in more prosperous years when the springs had been thought to contain healing salts. The houses were nearly all frame, many unpainted, with the exception of a few substantial brick and stone residences which dated from the 50’s and 60’s. On Saturdays Main Street was jammed with horses and mules tied to hitching Poles in front of the stores. On this day Indians came in great numbers—Quapaws, Modocs, Wyandottes, Chickasaws, and a few Creeks and Osages from further south. They rode in buckboards with many children, one rich fellow indeed had a hearse. He drove on the box while his squaw and numerous papooses looked out through the frosted glass. The red men, their squaws and families dressed in gaudy blanket cloth with bright red, green and yellow yarn braided into their coarse black hair hanging down over both shoulders in front. Upon their heads were large sombreros with gay bands of beadwork. Soft moccasins not unskillfully decorated with dyed porcupine quills, covered their feet as they walked silently and often with great dignity over the limestone flagging. Native silver ornaments added to silk kerchiefs were knotted about their necks. Some of them were tall and handsome, many were squat, inclined to heaviness as they became older, with masque like faces, as if cut out of brown butter. The Indians seldom had anything to trade or sell, save horses, living for the most part upon money the Government paid them at stated intervals. White farmers generally came in with loaded wagons. They often ran year long accounts at stores with never the exchange of a single dollar, trading chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, guineas, pigs, cattle, butter, eggs, hay and grain, for clothing, shoes, groceries and farm implements and not infrequently for professional service. Doctors received smoked hams or a butchered shoat for delivering a baby, and lawyers were often content with a horse or side of beef for writing a will or arranging a divorce. In spite of the Kansas Prohibition Law and a Federal interdict against selling liquor to Indians the red skins secured all the whiskey they wished from white friends who purchased from the· drug stores. Nearly every Saturday night while the band played, as farmers traded horses and women talked of children, chickens’ diseases, or new Butterick patterns, some Indian would start a fight. There would be guttural shouts, the rip of a knife through a rawhide shirt, the sound of moccasined feet running, the rapid unhitching of a horse and the thunder of hoofs as a White Bird, a Kicking. Hoof, a Black Eagle or a Fish Hawk sped on his way ahead of deputy sheriffs to the Border of the Indian Territory. Late at night when farmers and Indians had all but cleared the streets, as drowsy merchants were twirling combinations upon strong boxes, preparing to lock up, one would see poor men who had stood unluckily all day beside bony horses hoping to sell stove wood in order to buy groceries. Some townsmen were mean enough to bargain with these dejected men. Often I have seen a man who had worked days to split up a load of fuel in some sweating creek bottom sell it for a dollar and a half, rush into a grocery store not yet closed and start homeward to a lean farm miles away in the dark. We had a small aristocracy in Baxter Springs. In this circle big hay buyers occupied a prominent place. These men purchased blue stem cut and baled by the trainload on the prairie. This sweet smelling feed was shipped to Omaha, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, and points throughout the northern and eastern Mississippi Valley. In this upper crust were also leading merchants, professional men, the editor, the druggists, the postmaster, and their families. Fairly sharp lines were drawn between this set and the next lower stratum of society. We children saw the social ambitions of our families, and, as healthy young animals, were unimpressed. We had a world of our own, largely unknown to our parents, an exciting, and, often, a dangerous world. Our life was marked by a seasonal round of games which followed almost without variation a yearly routine. On an afternoon in spring big boys in the seventh or eighth grade would begin a game of marbles. The idea would spread along dirt roads to the remotest parts of the town. Colored lads who lived in one room shacks with a half dozen brothers and sisters would, by dark, be playing with cheap ‘pee wees’ and ‘crookies.’ On River Street, where a few wealthy boys resided, ‘agates’ and ‘glassies’ would be clicking against one another. In every alley and on every back lot the frenzy would be in evidence. Pigs went unfed, horses uncurried, cows unmilked, lessons unlearned. The same thing occurred when it came kite flying time. Some Saturday morning a lone kite would soar crazily upward in the blue prairie sky. Within two hours half a hundred kites would be taking the breeze. Tops followed in the same manner. The girls were the same. Rope jumping, dolls, crocheting, new styles in hair dressing, all had a short day of fashion and were left for some other interest. Life may have been imitative, but it never could be dull! We had a complicated game which taught us much about the business of the grown ups, our tin money towns. I do not know how widespread these were in the Middle West but every summer many of them sprang up in weedy backyards upon our sun flailed countryside. Back of every drug store was a moist pile of saw dust, smelling strongly of malt. Among these sweepings were the metal caps of beer bottles—Lemps, Annheuser-Busch, Pabst, and other varieties. We pounded these out flat. Different designs and sizes were made to represent various coins. Through the tin money towns we early learned one of the laws of trade, that when there was much money prices were high, when money was scarce prices were low. Two boys who had visited their cousin in Joplin, Missouri, a nearby town, brought home a gunny sack full of metal caps, pounded out and began an inflation of prices which would have astonished the shop keepers of Unter den Linden in the dizzy days when the German mark reached sidereal figures. In our tin money towns we sold everything we could beg from our mothers, or steal when they were not looking-old garments, pieces of harness, shoes, fishing tackle, guns, broken down bicycles, sling shots, birds eggs, five cent novels, flint Indian arrow heads and edibles. The girls maintained food stores, the more enterprising ones had a whole set of perfumes made out of the leavings in medicine bottles. I recall receiving a bad burn from a bottle of carbolic acid I had filched. There was always a saloon where lemonade made from extract, and other drinks concocted from vinegar, sugar and cider were available. These towns would go forward for two or three weeks and then drop suddenly out of existence as we turned our minds to other interests. The river itself was a great school. Here we learned to swim, build boats and carry on marauding expeditions. The trot lines of the regular fishermen were raided again and again. From the bridge we shot soft-shelled turtles floating lazily in the stream below. Chickens and turkeys were chased into the brush where we killed, roasted and ate them. Not infrequently a group of us, with or without our parents’ consent, would journey miles down the river in row boats and camp out for a week at a time. Sometimes we dressed as Indians, each boy and girl with his or her special name. It was the kind of adventure which demanded that everyone stand on his own feet and take care of himself. Gliding silently down stream we would often see wild turkeys along the bluffs. Now and then a deer would burst through the underbrush like a yellow streak of sunlight and bound into the deep shadows of the woods. Otters made their intricate homes with concealed openings beneath the water in the unfrequented stretches of the river. At night with a deep voiced fox hound we would tree ’possums, sometimes catching as many as six in a hunt, selling them next day for a quarter apiece to negroes who relished them with sweet potatoes. Now and then we would trap a ’coon but they were more alert than ‘possums and required more patience in the hunting. We made a specialty of trips inland in territory where we were not known, robbing the “figure four” trigger rabbit traps of other boys. Sometimes there were fierce fights ending with eyes swelled shut and bloody tips. Our imagination was stimulated by tales of the old timers. As we shivered on a sand bar beside a thin fire of drift wood we would recall the hardships of men who had actually hunted the buffalo, fought Indians and faced the desperadoes of the older West. One or two of our white haired neighbors had crossed the Isthmus of Panama in ’49 and ’50 on the way to California. We relived all their exploits—all they retold to us! In the summertime groups of mothers with their children would go into the woods to gather wild blackberries. Boys and girls with tin buckets would help in the picking, while babies were slung Indian fashion between saplings in the shade. One woman would make coffee on an open fire and lay out the lunch from the various bundles upon the grass. For many women these berry gatherings and a few fishing parties each year were the only break they had from the endless tedium of baking and mending and caring for milk and chickens and children. In the fall we gathered tubs full of wild grapes from which our mothers made jelly for the winter. After the first frost there were paw-paws, a rich exotic fruit which tasted like spiced custard, and persimmons. When leaves were dropping the stronger boys would climb high up into the walnut trees and shake down the green fruit. For weeks our hands would be stained brown from beating off the pulpy covering of the nuts. Each gang had its own groves where the great shell bark hickory nuts grew thickly. There were secret hazel nut regions, miles away, known only to the elect. To these we would slink with sacks upon our backs on long Saturday afternoons. The Civil War was still a matter of keen interest among us. There was hardly a family in town that had not had one member in the Blue or the Grey. John Brown’s name was familiar for only a little way west near Ossawatomie where he had made his raid. Further north Quantrell had robbed and burned in the town of Lawrence. The Border Ruffians had gone up and down all through this country. Every year in late summer we had The Old Soldiers’ Reunion. Thousands of the veterans gathered from neighboring states in a handsome piece of woods near the river. It was our Carnival. Hundreds of families camped out for the week. It was a time to entertain guests and bring home married sons and daughters. In spite of the dry law there was a bar one hundred feet long. Dozens of barrels of beer and thousands of quarts, pints, half pints of raw, harsh whiskey were lined up on the pine counter. There were snake charmers, revival tents, exhibits, occasional primitive moving picture shows, bearded ladies, fat women, Egyptian dancers, cream puffs, great dancing platforms where the young men took their girls and stepped through figures in the old square dances under the command of a man who called out each movement, demonstrations of a new device called the gramophone, an invention of a wizard in the East named Edison. There were negroes who thrust their heads through a hole at which one could shy three balls for a nickel. If you hit him you got a cigar. There were lovely knives thrust into two by fours on which you could try your luck in throwing rings, for a small consideration. But best of all there were the sunrise and the sunset guns, there were parades of old soldiers, when the Stars and Bars snapped in the wind beside the Stars and Stripes, when the Blue and the Grey marched side by side. Often I have climbed into a walnut tree, watching the ranks go by, hugging the smooth round bole and weeping through sheer patriotic frenzy. These men had fought at Lookout Mountain, Bull Run, Cold Harbor, Antietam and Vicksburg. Some of them had battled Indians on the plains and in the Rockies, some had pulled a trigger against Geronimo and the Apaches far to the South-West. Some had broken their feet on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. Some had looked at Yosemite and Yellowstone when they were unknown to the knickerbockered East. These men, and not sharp eyed financiers who dealt with figures in New York, were the true Empire Builders. Often, we, the sons and daughters of those who had come West in wagons, perched on our backyard fences or kicking up dust with our stubby feet, watched other wagon trains with gleaming canvas covers going southwest into Oklahoma or Texas. Sometimes these trains would have as many as one hundred and fifty wagons, water barrels strapped to the outside, women holding children against their breasts rocking as the wheels chucked in the ruts. Little boys drove herds of spare animals, lame calves or colts rode in the wagons. Sometimes the equipment of those trains would be old and shabby, sometimes a whole colony of people would have everything brand new from tassels between the horses’ ears to Moline plows with gaudy paint laced to the running gear. One could smell new harness, see the fine horses snorting at the dust. These people were leaving behind everything to make a new start in life out yonder! Sometimes there would be bright pots of geraniums or nasturtiums in the wagons, sometimes a canary bird, always cats and dogs, and boxes of little pigs. They were going to the promised land. They were carrying their flowers, the kith and kin, their seeds, animals, Bibles, their simple culture, their hopes. By long watering troughs we talked with their children, traded beanies, marbles, dolls, food, heard their experiences of the road. We understood them. Some of us had made similar journeys. Nearly all our parents had known months of living in cramped quarters of prairie schooners. Much has been said of the religion of these little towns. There was of course revivalism, hysteria, and all varieties of fundamentalism. But along with it there was much sincere and humble faith—the religion of hardworking people who were seeking in colorful stories of the Bible and in the florid preaching of their churches a picture of God’s City whose foundations they were sure they were building in sod and frame and brick houses of the frontier. I have seen a traveling evangelist preach in the Town Hall under whose exhortations men and women, otherwise completely normal, spoke in outlandish jargon hour after hour. In this ‘gift of tongues’ there was supposed to be some special visitation of the Holy Spirit This and much else, wild, fantastic and often cruel and narrow aberrations of religion we saw. We went to revivals, heard the shouting, attended negro churches with their Holy Rollerism. Even then, our childish eyes and ears, made realistic by life in the open where we daily saw birth and death and all that lay between, quite easily distinguished between the false and the true. For every strange cult or strange person there were splendid people who read the Bible, said their prayers, and still were gay and dealt fairly with their neighbors. Such men and women showed us what true religion was and kept us from becoming cynical about the church. Of course, there were local enthusiasms which were out of all bounds. Every little town had the idea that it would be a great metropolis. Campaigns for new railroads, street cars, water works, and modern conveniences were launched which could only be attained after decades of work and waiting. Even as children we began to detect something specious about florid Fourth of July speeches of politicians. But regardless of these extravagances, I never failed to admire these people I knew in Cherokee County. Their lot was cast upon a virgin prairie; they not only intended to make that prairie yield food for themselves and their children, but year after year they put it under the plow, built their houses, corrals, barns, saw their stock multiply with their children. They believed with the zeal of an honorable fanatic in education, in improvement, and in progress. The rough and somewhat undisciplined life we led made for self reliance, the hard and rather hot type of religion left a deposit of iron in the blood of these boys and girls. Faith was not a fragile flower to languish under droughts that seared the crops, nor did it wilt beneath the blast of death, disappointment or the speculations of agnostic writers. Like the blue stem trodden under harsh hoofs, burnt over by prairie fires, it sprang up again because it was rooted deep in the rough soil of experience. The ambition of parents was communicated to children. Belief came easily to us. We believed in our town, in our state, in our families, in ourselves, and in a bold, unscientific, but nevertheless valid sense, most of us believed in God. I find no fault with those who have peered into our back doors, seen the debris in our alleys, and caught us in the looseness of our speech. Perhaps we of the Bible Belt were due for a corrective. Certainly frontier boom town psychology had reached nauseating limits. But nothing the debunkers and the deflationists have ever written will lessen my praise and gratitude to the men who underneath an almost tropic sun broke the blue stem and made the soil bear fruit; I shall never fail to respect those women who raised large broods of us children, and then, late into the night, when we were asleep, by the light of oil lamps made and mended garments which clothed our bodies against blizzards and the Arctic cold. Perhaps there is some question, now that we have become literate, now that we have been discovered to ourselves by Masters, Lewis, et al, whether or not we still can have ambition. Now that we are surrounded with mechanical helps can we still stand as self reliant as we did when we poled our skiffs through the boiling rapids of Spring River? Now that we know that Moses did not write at one sitting the five books of the Pentateuch, can we still believe in God? Now that we are no longer homesteaders with dreams of houses and herds, ready to move on if we did not like a place, can we learn to divide the fruits of the earth that our crowded and complicated society shall be fulfilled? Is it possible for us, in brief, to keep the push of individualism and yet gain the benefits of a sensible and limited collectivism? I sometimes wonder, but mostly I believe we can. We cannot go back to the old uncritical belief in Manifest Destiny. But we can believe in a new type of Americanism, literate, disciplined, and with a social vision. The old frontier civilization is gone. But that which made it great remains, the soul of Yanks gone further West now, towards a new Beyond.