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On a certain summer day, a few years ago, the little village of Briggsville, in Pennsylvania, was thrown into a state of excitement, the like of which was never known since the fearful night, a hundred years before, when a band of red men descended like a cyclone upon the little hamlet with its block-house, and left barely a dozen settlers alive to tell the story of the visitation to their descendants.
The settlers' wives contrive to make good pies and preserves with them, by first scalding the fruit and then rubbing it between coarse linen cloths. I have heard these tarts called thornberry pies, which, I think, was a good name for them.
A dreadful headache seized him, which was only a little relieved when his wife applied cloths wrung out of cold water to his forehead. After some hours came the great sweat, which saturated his night shirt and a portion of his pillow and bedclothes. This attack was so violent it bordered on a "congestive chill," which the settlers knew to be very dangerous.
Three pounds an acre was to be the price of land in the Canterbury Block, of which one pound was to go to the church and education, two pounds to be spent on the work of development. The settlers landed in December, 1850, from four vessels, the immigrants in which have ever since had in their new home the exclusive right to the name of Pilgrims.
Suddenly the settlers were set to wondering and worrying at the sight of strange surveyors taking new measurements through the farms wrenched from the wilds with so much of hard labor and wearisome toil. And then the blow fell. New York was claiming all this tract of land as part of her province, and declaring New Hampshire grants to be null and void.
It was about the time that his wheat-fields and orchards began to yield that some passing ocean traveller asked him: 'Do you think this country will ever be settled? 'Sir, answered M'Loughlin, emphasizing his words by thumping his gold-headed cane on the floor, 'wherever wheat grows, men will go, and colonies will grow. Afterwards, when he had to choose between loyalty to his company and saving the lives of thousands of American settlers who had come over the mountains destitute, these words of his were quoted against him.
And they were continually harassing the settlers; indeed they have not ceased yet, for at the present time they are attacking and murdering the traders who cross the plains, if they are not well armed, and in sufficiently large companies to keep them in check.
If you don't see nothing in that army of settlers going into a raw land and falling to work to make it bloom like the rose, a-setting out to live in solitude for years that in due time the world may be richer by a great territory, why, you ain't got a big vision. I've got it, for I was born in the West, and I've lived all my life, peaceable and calm, right out here or hereabouts.
Of these, 630,000 were from the United States, and it is estimated that those who went from the United States during the past five years took with them $267,000,000 in cash and settlers' effects. The end of the movement has not come, for the railway companies have now gone into the reclamation of arid lands.
Audacious pioneers, whether as visitors or settlers, eager to spread the new born Evangel beyond the confines of their native country, undertook journeys, and embarked on enterprises which carried its light to the heart of Europe, to the Far East, and as far as the islands of the Pacific.
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