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Updated: May 29, 2025
Now one took me out the hard U. S. highway that, once out of sight of the last negro shanty, rambles erratically off like the reminiscences of an old man through the half-cleared, mostly uninhabited wilderness, rampant green with rooted life and almost noisy with the songs of birds. Eventually within a couple of hours it crossed Fox River with its little settlement and descended to Mt.
He carried neither rifle nor gun in his hand, and his narrow leathern belt was empty of either knife or revolver. A half-mile from the main road, which seemed to him to have dropped out of sight the moment he had left it, he came upon a half-cleared area, where the hastily-cut stumps of pines, of irregular height, bore an odd resemblance to the broken columns of some vast and ruined temple.
Beyond Deer Creek the horseman spurred eastward along a black loamy wagon road, trotting through groves and half-cleared fields until he passed a small hamlet bearing the great name Columbia. Beyond this cluster of habitations lay Turkey Bottom, so named on account of the wild flocks which made it their resort.
The commercial demands of the early settlers embraced hardly anything beyond salt, ammunition and a little hardware. The forest and their half-cleared fields furnished meat and bread; workers in the households provided rude furniture and homespun; and luxuries, except home-made liquors, were unknown.
If it was not meant to last longer than the day, at least she would have this wonderful ride to remember always, this bird-like motion as if she were floating through a panorama! Not a thought of Ellen poking through her half-cleared house, finding unswept hearth and unmade beds and unwashed dishes, came to trouble her joy.
Thinking of these things as she crossed the ridge, she came suddenly into full view of the pass. It lay there just below her; there could be no mistake. A stony road wound along the stream, flanked by forest-clad heights; she recognized the timber bridge over the ravine, which had been described to her, the corduroy way across the swamp, the single, squat cabin crowning a half-cleared hillock.
We have stately old Colonial palaces in our ancient village, now a city, and a thriving one, square-fronted edifices that stand back from the vulgar highway, with folded arms, as it were; social fortresses of the time when the twilight lustre of the throne reached as far as our half-cleared settlement, with a glacis before them in the shape of a long broad gravel-walk, so that in King George's time they looked as formidably to any but the silk-stocking gentry as Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein to a visitor without the password.
Often, of course, these settlers of a higher grade found that for some reason they did not prosper, or heard of better chances still farther in the wilderness, and so moved onwards, like their less thrifty and more uneasy brethren, the men who half-cleared their lands and half-built their cabins. But, as a rule, these better-class settlers were not mere life-long pioneers.
There was one spot, however, so beautiful that we visited it again and again; it was by no means free from mosquitoes; and being on the bank of a stream, with many enormous trees lying on the half-cleared ground around, it was just such a place as we had been told a hundred times was particularly "dangerous;" nevertheless, we dared every thing for the sake of dining beside our beautiful rippling stream, and watching the bright sunbeams dancing on the grassy bank, at such a distance from our retreat that they could not heat us.
The patient sacrifices of the missionary who toiled at unaccustomed labors in the half-cleared cornfield and taught his primitive pupils in the log mission-house, introduced a new civilization. The daily contact of the Indian and the white man at the fort and agency were prophetic of a new relationship between the two races.
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