In the meantime his son Milton had grown to maturity, had taken the degree of doctor of medicine after a classical course of study at Hamilton Literary and Theological Institute, not far from the early boyhood home of the student—a school founded in 1820, and now become Colgate University. The duties of a physician were too exacting for his own health, however. After a few years of practice at Zanesville, Ohio, where he married his first wife, he became a local merchant, and in 1833, when the wife died, was the father of four children, none of whom long survived their early manhood or womanhood.
Not long after the death of Mrs. Cushing, Dr. Cushing removed his business and home to Columbus, where in 1836 he married Miss Mary Barker Smith of Boston, who was visiting in the West at the time. She was then 29 years old, of splendid physical and mental constitution, and fortunately endowed with a passionate love for life in an open, free atmosphere, as near as practicable to nature itself.
After the birth of their eldest son, named for his father, in 1837, the young couple prepared for their removal into the far west of Wisconsin, where the Potawatomi still fished and hunted, and whence the Sauk leader, Black Hawk, had recently been driven. Neither documentary evidence nor tradition show the manner of travel of the young couple—whether through the prairies of Indiana and Illinois, and down the east shore of Lake Michigan, or by sailing vessel around through the straits of Mackinac. Either of the two routes was then available, and neither was especially dangerous.
What seems certain is, that on the 22nd of August, 1838, Howard B. Cushing, the eldest of the three Wisconsin-born members of that family, first saw the light at Milwaukee. Nine days previous to the event, Mrs. Cushing was impressed with the presentiment of death, and wrote in her Bible the verses following, under the heading, "To Milton, with the Legacy of his Mother's Bible."[1]
[1] E. M. H. Edwards, Commander William Barker Cushing (N. Y., 1898), pp. 22, 23.
If this is to be understood as an indication of despondent gloom, on the part of the writer, it is the only one left by this conspicuous exemplar of fine American womanhood. In later years, as will appear in these pages, she was obliged to undergo privations more difficult to encounter than those of a residence at the confluence of the Milwaukee and Menomonee rivers—then a forlorn waste of swamps and hills, that looked as though they would successfully defy the efforts of man for transformation into the fairest of the cities along the shores of the Great Lakes.
In 1838 the little village contained not more than about eight hundred inhabitants, and these were divided by Milwaukee River into two hostile camps, whose differences were always apparently on the point of breaking out into actual violence. The stream was still unbridged, and it seemed likely that this watery frontier would long remain a boundary line as fixed as that of the Rhine in Europe. Mrs. Cushing had been reared among the most highly-cultivated people of Boston, and was related to such distinguished families as the Adamses, Hancocks, and Phillipses. It was not at all strange, therefore, that with three or four children of her husband by a former wife to care for, besides her own baby of sixteen months, she should have been attacked by the nostalgia that has often dragged grown men to untimely graves.
It was an evidence of the strength of character of this city-bred lady that she so soon recovered her elasticity of spirit after the birth of Howard, and again faced the hardships of frontier life as fearlessly as her sons faced death in the campaigns of the great Civil War. It must have been soon after her convalescence that she paralleled the shout of Hannibal's soldiers, "Beyond the Alps lies Italy!" with the thought, at least, that beyond the Menomonee marshes lay a country resembling in aspect the most carefully tended English parks, but swarming with more delicious and satisfying game of earth, water, and air than could be found in any open hunting grounds of Europe. This was the country of the "oak openings," extending for scores of miles to the westward, and jeweled with lovely lakelets, from Pewaukee to beyond the "Four Lakes," between two of which latter was to rise the capital of the nascent state.