Today's excerpt from the book "Sawdust City" is the rest of the story that we read last week on "Frontier Life in Eau Claire." This article was printed in the Chicago Record Herald on 14 October 1923 and was a review of the book "Selim Hobart Peabody" written by his daughter, Katherine P. Girling. This and all excerpts from Lois Barland's books are used by permission of the Barland family. The settlers had no sense of security. Their village lay in a No-man's land between two tribes of Indians, the Chippewas and the Sioux. While both were warlike, it was the "Chips" who were most disposed to be friendly, but "prehistoric patience cometh quickly to an end", and there was never any telling what might make an Indian angry. Each tribe shunned the neutral ground, where a straggler from either might meet death. Then there would be war dances and pow-wows; war paint was donned and trouble threatened. In case of war, the village street would probably be the battle ground. Three times during that first winter some one ran down to the Peabody cottage to warn the household to join the others in a building they had fortified and stocked to use as a fort. Many and many an afternoon Mrs. Peabody's sitting room window was darkened by a swart face looking curiously in. Sometimes, when she was alone in the house suddenly she knew that someone was breathing near, and turning, she would find an Indian standing close behind her. She learned to control her fear and to give him quickly whatever he asked for except whiskey. That she never had. If you hadn't it, you couldn't give it, and it was safer so. Those were the days of deep drinking, and, when he first came to Eau Claire, Peabody saw that to drink at all meant to drink with everyone or give serious offense; and so from the first he resisted all invitations even though he had almost to fight for liberty to do as he pleased. His good nature, however, gained the day. Before the winter was over, he had several occasions of helping his acquaintances through attacks of delirium tremens and, after that, his own wisdom was not doubted. I suppose that all early western towns were, to some extent, saloon towns. The barroom was often the only club, the only center of amusement, and ever the only village hall. In Eau Claire, the barroom was on occasion used for church services. But the Eau Claire people were on the whole fine people. Elizabeth Peabody had come West with the Eastern idea that the people she would meet would have lacked social privilege and that, as a result, they would be somewhat uncouth. What she found was a community of Eastern men and women, people from New York and New England, even from her own beloved Vermont. They were as newly arrived as she; and when one evening the Peabodys asked everybody to come to their home and to bring their copies of Shakespeare every one came an d many had a copy of the plays to bring. One person, however, had been omitted because it was known that he could not read. When he met Mr. Peabody in the postoffice the next day there would have been a boxing match if neighbors had not interfered. "Next time you have a party you ask me." There were other entertainments of a general nature; spelling bees, singing societies, and a lecture course. The acting of charades was very popular. Mr. Peabody sent for a copy of the Darley outline illustrations of Rip van Winkle and a series of tableau were given. Thus there was laughter and good will at Eau Claire through that dreary first winter. Almost every evening there were little social gatherings about some fireside. Stories were told which, though they roused breathless interest, were not altogether reassuring; Indian tales and stories of bears, snakes, and wolves, records of illness and death and babies buried in candle boxes in snowdrifts, and of little children who strayed into the forest and were never seen again. But the spring finally came, and with its coming Elizabeth Peabody knew heart searching homesickness. She had gone through the winter bravely; but with the mild spring days the call of the homeland came to her. In thinking of the weight of hardship that she endured, ti is to be remembered that she was city bred; in her father's home in Burlington there had been comforts of well-to-do city life. Her days before he marriage had been school days either as pupil or "preceptress". With security and comfort there had been social, intellectual and religious privileges. She accepted frontier life in the spirit of adventure; it interested even when it amazed her. No one of her friends had known experiences so unprecedented. To be sure, her grandfather, Edward Farrington, used to tell her stories, when she was a child, about frontier days in Vermont when he had lived in a log house on the slope of a mountain, and how one day a bear had shambled into the house; but the stories had a far-away and long-ago sound. Today, novels and magazines and the cinematograph reveal frontier life to us; but, except for Cooper's stories which showed a different phase of wild living, that of a masculine camp, nothing had prophesied to her the realities she was to face, the first of which was real danger. Twice her husband had been close to death; once when a man in the frenzies of delirium tremens had attacked him from behind, as he sat, bending over his desk in the land office. As a weapon the man held in his hand, a long, heavy brass ruler, but, by sitting perfectly still, and diverting attention to something else, Peabody had escaped. Another time of danger had come to him in an Indian canoe on t he river. He was above the dam and got into the rapids and was carried over the falls, a sheer descent of sixteen feet. To have come out of that adventure alive, the lumber jacks said, proved the luck of a greenhorn. Mrs. Peabody did not like the Indian. Their pow-wows were to her like scenes in Dante's Inferno. Beaver dams and bear dens were well enough in their way, if you cared for them, but vermin infested, filthy tepees roused in her not romantic or scientific interest. She was not an athletic girl; she was resolute and resourceful, not from choice but from a sense of duty. And so it was that, when the nagging wind and slapping rains of February had quieted down and the prairies were splashed with color as if a giant were using them for a painter's palatte, homesickness overwhelmed her. It seemed unbearable that the friendly little blooms she was used to did not appear! There were no dandelions! I wonder whether Wisconsin people will forgive her for asking her mother in Vermont to send her seed so that, when spring came again, the Indian trails were gilded. Always before, in the crises of her life, Elizabeth had done what every "well relatived" girl in those days did; she had gone home to her mother. Both of her children had been born in Burlington. Now she knew that, when the autumn came, she must face her ordeal again; this time there would be no finding again familiar city streets, no swinging outward of her father's front gate, no welcome of her own people. Now only was there, hidden in heart, the dread of the issues of life and death to be faced in a frontier town, but the consternation which came at the thought of taking a new baby through a winter like the last. Is anything so hard as we fear it will be? By the next winter the house was plastered and many of the trials had disappeared. The child, born in October, was a fine, vigorous boy of twelve pounds, whom no Wisconsin winter could have daunted. What Eau Claire meant to Selim Peabody as a civic experiment he never underestimated. There was no part of his life that he talked of more happily; it was his one taste of melodrama. When he went to Wisconsin, there were fewer than ten persons to the square mile; and one might travel for days without encountering a white man. The business of the state, for the time being, was the sale of land. Anticipated land values were subjects of speculation all over the country, and Eau Claire rode on the crest of the wave. Land-office business was so good a business as to create a new expression for success. Limitless acres, apparently, lay waiting to be surveyed and mapped and sold at triple their purchase price. There were frauds in land management and corruption in local and national politics. Although the leaven of honesty was working, nothing could check the crashing financial disaster that, sweeping the country in the fall of 1857 reached the little frontier settlement. Eau Claire banks failed. Money and credit disappeared, and the town was left like a mill without water. In the spring of 1857 settlers had flocked in but the next year the tide set the other way and even in 1861 there were no more than one thousand inhabitants. The railroad, which was to have come in 1858 delayed its arrival until 1870... +++++++++++++++++ And that's how Lois ended that portion of the story. Next we'll be reading about the days of the steamboat and it looks to be another interesting story. Hope you'll be staying with us for this one too. -- Nance mailto:nsampson@spacestar.net