From the West to the West

The surroundings of the budding daughters of the Ranger and Robinson families had thus far been limited, outside of their respective homes, to attendance at the district school on winter week-days when weather permitted, and on Sundays at the primitive church services held by itinerant clergymen in the same rude edifice.

Oh, that never-to-be-forgotten schoolhouse of the borderland and the olden time! Modelled everywhere after the same one-roomed, quadrangular pattern,—and often the only seat of learning yet to be seen in school districts of the far frontier,—the building in which the children of these chronicles received the rudimentary education which led to the future weal of most of them was built of logs unhewn, and roofed with “shakes” unshaven. One rough horizontal log was omitted from the western wall when the structure was raised by the men of the district, who purposely left the space for the admission of a long line of little window-panes above the rows of desks. A huge open fireplace occupied the whole northern end of the room; rude benches rocked on the uneven puncheon floor and creaked as the students turned upon them to face the long desks beneath the little window-panes, or to confront the centre of the room. The children’s feet generally swung to and fro in a sort of rhythmic consonance with the audible whispers in which they studied their lessons,—when not holding sly conversation, amid much suppressed giggling, with their neighbors at elbow, if the teacher’s back was turned.

The busy agricultural seasons of springtime and summer, and often extending far into the autumn, prevented the regular attendance at school of the older children of the district, who were usually employed early and late, indoors and out, with the ever-exacting labors of the farm.

Up to the time of the departure of the Ranger family for the Pacific coast and for a brief time thereafter, the most of the summer and all of the winter clothing worn in the country districts of the middle West was the product of the individual housewife’s skill in the use of the spinning-wheel, dye-kettle, and clumsy, home-made hand-loom.

But, few and far between as were the schoolhouses and schooldays of the border times, of which the present-day grandparent loves to boast, there was a rigorous course of primitive study then in vogue which justifies their boasting. Oh, that old-fashioned pedagogue! What resident of the border can fail to remember—if his early lot was cast anywhere west of the Alleghanies, at any time antedating the era of railroads—the austere piety and stately dignity of that mighty master of the rod and the rule, who never by any chance forgot to use the rod, lest by so doing he should spoil the child!

The terror of those days lingers now only as an amusing memory. The pain of which the rod and the rule were the instruments has long since lost its sting; but the sound morals inculcated by the teacher (whose example never strayed from his precept) have proved the ballast needed to hold a level head on many a pair of shoulders otherwise prone to push their way into forbidden places.

And the old-fashioned singing-school! How tenderly the memory of the time-dulled ear recalls the doubtful harmony of many youthful voices, as they ran the gamut in a jangling merry-go-round! Did any other musical entertainment ever equal it? Then, when the exercises were over, and the stars hung high and glittering above the frosty branches of the naked treetops, and the crisp white snow crunched musically beneath the feet of fancy-smitten swains, hurrying homeward with ruddy-visaged sweethearts on their pulsing arms, did any other joy ever equal the stolen kisses of the youthful lovers at the parting doorstep,—the one to return to the parental home with an exultant throbbing at his heart, and the other to creep noiselessly to her cold, dark bedroom to blush unseen over her first little secret from her mother.

And there is yet another memory.

Can anybody who has enjoyed it ever forget the school of metrical geography which sometimes alternated, on winter evenings, with the singing-school? What could have been more enchanting, or more instructive withal, than those exercises wherein the States and their capitals were chanted over and over to a sort of rhymeless rhythm, so often repeated that to this day the old-time student finds it only necessary to mention the name of any State then in the Union to call to mind the name of its capital. After the States and their capitals, the boundaries came next in order, chanted in the same rhythmic way, until the youngest pupil had conquered all the names by sound, and localities on the map by sight, of all the continents, islands, capes, promontories, peninsulas, mountains, kingdoms, republics, oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, harbors, and cities then known upon the planet.

In its season, beginning with the New Year, came the regular religious revival. No chronicles like these would be complete without its mention, since no rural life on the border exists without it. Much to the regret of doting parents who failed to get all their dear ones “saved”—especially the boys—before the sap began to run in the sugar maples, the revival season was sometimes cut short by the advent of an early spring. The meetings were then brought to a halt, notwithstanding the fervent prayers of the righteous, who in vain besought the Lord of the harvest to delay the necessary seed-time, so that the work of saving souls might not be interrupted by the sports and labors of the sugar camp, which called young people together for collecting fagots, rolling logs, and gathering and boiling down the sap.

Many were the matches made at these rural gatherings, as the lads and lasses sat together on frosty nights and replenished the open fires under the silent stars.

To depict one revival season is to give a general outline of all. The itinerant preacher was generally a young man and a bachelor. In his annual returns to the scenes of his emotional endeavors to save the unconverted, he would find that many had backslidden; and the first week was usually spent in getting those who had not “held out faithful” up to the mourners’ bench for re-conversion.

Agnostics, of whom John Ranger was an example, were many, who took a humorous or good-naturedly critical view of the situation. But the preacher’s efforts to arouse the emotional nature, especially of the women, began to bear fruit generally after the first week’s praying, singing, and exhorting; and the excitement, once begun, went on without interruption as long as temporal affairs permitted. The rankest infidel in the district kept open house, in his turn, for the preacher and exhorter; and once, when the schoolhouse was partly destroyed by fire, John Ranger permitted the meetings to be held in his house till the damage was repaired by the tax-payers of the district.

The kindly preacher who most frequently visited the Ranger district as a revivalist would not knowingly have given needless pain to a fly. But, when wrought up to great tension by religious frenzy, he seemed to find delight in holding the frightened penitent spellbound, while he led him to the very brink of perdition, where he would hang him suspended, mentally, as by a hair, over a liquid lake of fire and brimstone, with the blue blazes shooting, like tongues of forked lightning, beneath his writhing body; while overhead, looking on, sat his Heavenly Father, as a benignant and affectionate Deity, pictured to the speaker’s imagination, nevertheless, as waiting with scythe in hand to snip that hair.

“I can’t see a bit of logic in any of it!” exclaimed Jean Ranger, as she and Mary, accompanied by Hal, were returning home one night from such a meeting.

“God’s ways are not our ways,” sighed Mary, as she tripped over the frozen path under the denuded maple-trees, where night owls hooted and wild turkeys slept.

Harry laughed immoderately. “Jean, you’re right,” he exclaimed. “I’m going to get religion myself some day before I die, but I’ve got first to find a Heavenly Father who’s better’n I am. There’s no preacher on top o’ dirt can make me believe that the great Author of all Creation deserves the awful character they’re giving Him at the schoolhouse!”

“Don’t blaspheme, Hal. It’s wicked!” said Mary.

“I’m not blaspheming; I’m defending God!” retorted Hal.

“You used to be a sensible girl, Mame,” said Jean; “and you could then see the ridiculous side of all this excitement just as Hal and I now see it. But you’re in love with the preacher now, and that has turned your head.”

Jean was cold and sleepy and cross; but she did not mean to be unkind, and on reflection added, “Forgive me, sister dear. I was only in fun. I have no right to meddle with your love affairs or your religious feelings, and neither has Hal. S’pose we talk about maple sugar.”

Mary did not reply, but her thoughts went toward heaven in silent, self-satisfying prayer.

The Reverend Thomas Rogers—so he must be designated in these pages, because he yet lives—was the avowed suitor for the hand and heart of Mary Ranger; and the winsome girl, with whose prematurely aroused affections her parents had no patience,—and with reason, for she was but a child,—was the envy of all the older girls of the district, any one of whom, while censuring her for her folly in encouraging the poverty-stricken preacher’s suit, would gladly have found like favor in his eyes, if the opportunity had been given her.

But while romantic maidens were going into rhapsodies over their hero, and many of the dowager mothers echoed their sentiments, most of the unmarried men of the district remained aloof from his persuasions and unmoved by his fiery eloquence. But they took him out “sniping” one off-night in true schoolboy fashion; and while Mary Ranger dreamed of him in the seclusion of her snug chamber, the poor fellow stood half frozen at the end of a gulch, holding a bag to catch the snipes that never came.

“If I were not too poor in worldly goods to pay my way in your father’s train, I’d go to Oregon,” he said, a few nights after the “sniping” episode, as he walked homeward with Mary after coaxing Jean and Hal to keep the little episode a secret from their parents,—a promise they made after due hesitation, but with much sly chuckling, as they munched the red-and-white-striped sugar sticks with which they had been bribed.