No argument or persuasion on the part of Mr. Glover could shake her resolution. At last, in response to his solemn promises that, after reaching Bear River, he would return to the mountain-camp and bring back her children, after standing in silence for some moments, she turned from her darling babes and asked Mr. Eddy, "Are you a mason?" A reply being given in the affirmative, she said, "will you promise me, upon the word of a mason, that when you arrive at Bear River Valley, you will return and bring back my children if we do not meantime meet their father going for them?" "I do thus promise," Mr. Glover replied. "Then I will go on," said the mother, weeping bitterly as she pronounced the words. Patty, the little girl, then took her mother by the hand and said, "Well, mamma, kiss me good-bye! I shall never see you again. I am willing to go back to our mountain-camp and die, but I cannot consent to your going back. I shall die willingly if I can believe that you will see papa. Tell him good-bye for his poor little Patty."

The mother and the children lingered in a long embrace. As Patty turned from her mother to go back to the camp, she whispered to Mr. Glover and Mr. Mootrey, who were to take her, that she was willing to go back and take care of her little brother, but that she should never see her mother again.

Before reaching the settlement Mrs. Reed met her husband, who had been driven, for some cause, from the party several weeks before, and had succeeded in crossing the mountains in safety.

Messrs. Reed and McCutchen next headed a relief party, and crossed the mountains with supplies for the remainder of the emigrants. The Reed children were alive, but terribly wasted from their dreadful sufferings.

Hunger had driven the emigrants to revolting extremities. In some of the cabins were found parts of human bodies trussed and spitted for roasting, and traces of these horrid feasts were seen about the space in front of the doors where offal was thrown.

The persons taken under Mr. Reed's guidance on the return, were Patrick Brinn, wife and five children; Mrs. Graves, and four children; Mary and Isaac Donnor, children of Jacob Donner; Solomon Work, a stepson of Jacob Donner, and two of his children. They reached the foot of the mountain without much difficulty; but they ascertained that their provisions would not last them more than a day and a half. Mr. Reed then sent three men forward with instructions to get supplies at a cache about fifteen miles from the camp. The party resumed its journey, crossed the Sierra Nevada, and after traveling about ten miles, encamped on a bleak point, on the north side of a little valley, near the head of the Yuba River. A storm set in, and continued for two days and three nights. On the morning of the third day, the clouds broke away and the weather became more intensely cold than it had been during the journey. The sufferings of the emigrants in their bleak camp were too dreadful to be described. There was the greatest difficulty in keeping up the fire, and during the night the women and children, who had on very thin clothing, were in great danger of freezing to death; when the storm passed away, the whole party were very weak, having passed two days without food. Leaving Patrick Brinn and his family and the rest of the party who were disabled, Mr. Reed, and his California friends, his two children, Solomon Hook and a Mr. Miller, pressed forward for supplies, and in five days they succeeded in reaching the settlement.

It was some weeks before a new relief party organized by Messrs. Eddy and Foster were successful in reaching the party which Reed had left. A shocking spectacle was presented to the eyes of the adventurers at the "Starved Camp" as they rightly named it. Patrick Brinn and his wife were sunning themselves with a look of vacuity upon their faces. They had eaten the two children of Jacob Donner: Mrs. Graves' body was lying near them with almost all the flesh cut from the arms and limbs. Her breasts, heart, and liver were then being boiled over the fire. Her child sat by the side of the mangled remains crying bitterly.

After being supplied with food they were left in charge of three men who undertook to conduct them to the settlement. Meanwhile Messrs. Eddy and Foster went on to the horrible mountain-camp only to be shocked and revolted by new scenes of horror. Strewed about the cabins and burrows, in the snow, were the fragments of human bodies from which the flesh had been stripped; among the dbris of the hideous feasts sat the emaciated survivors looking more like cannibal-demons than human beings. Kiesburg had dug up the corpse of one of Mr. Eddy's children and devoured it, even when other food could be obtained, and the enfuriated father could with difficulty be restrained from killing the monster on the spot. Of the five surviving children at the mountain-camp, three were those of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Donner. When the time came for the party of unfortunates to start for the settlement under the guidance of their generous protectors, Mr. Donner's condition was so feeble that he was unable to accompany them, and though Mrs. Donner was capable of traveling, she utterly refused to leave her husband while he survived. In response to the solicitations of those who urged that her husband could live but a little longer, and that her presence would not add one moment to the remaining span of his life, she expressed her solemn and unalterable purpose which no hardship or danger could change, to remain and perform for him the last sad offices of duty and affection. At the same time she manifested the profoundest solicitude for her beloved children, and implored Mr. Eddy to save them, promising all that she possessed if he would convey them in safety to the settlement. He pledged himself to carry out her wishes without recompense, or perish in the attempt.

No provisions remained to supply the needs of these unhappy beings. At the end of two hours Mr. Eddy informed Mrs. Donner that a terrible necessity constrained him to depart. It was certain that Jacob Donner would never rise from the wretched couch on which he lay, worn out with toil and wasted by famine. It was almost equally certain that unless Mrs. Donner then abandoned her unfortunate partner and accompanied Mr. Eddy and his party to the settlement, she would die of wasting famine or perish violently at the hands of some lurking cannibal. By accompanying her children she could minister to their wants and perhaps be the means of saving their lives. The all-powerful maternal instinct combined with the love of life, urged her to fly with her children from the scene of so many horrors and dangers. Well might her reason have questioned her, "Why stay and meet inevitable death since you cannot save your husband from the grave which yawns to receive him? and when your presence, your converse and hands can only beguile the few remaining hours of his existence?" Time passed. By no entreaties could she enlarge the hour of departure which had now arrived. Nor did she seek to and thus endanger the lives of those who were hastening to depart. She must decide the dread question that moment.

Rarely in the long suffering record of woman, has she been placed in circumstances of such peculiar trial, but the love of life, the instinct of self-preservation, and even maternal affection, could not triumph over her affection as a wife. Her husband begged her to save her life and leave him to die alone, assuring her that she could be of no service to him, as he could not probably survive under any circumstances until the next morning; with streaming eyes she bent over him, kissed his pale, emaciated, haggard, and even then, death-stricken cheek, and said:

"No! no! dear husband, I will remain with you, and here perish rather than leave you to die alone, with no one to soothe your dying sorrows, and close your eyes when dead. Entreat me not to leave you. Life, accompanied with the reflection that I had thus left you, would possess for me more than the bitterness of death; and death would be sweet with the thought in my last moments, that I had assuaged one pang of yours in your passage into eternity No! no! no!" She repeated, sobbing convulsively.

The parting interview between the parents and the children is represented to have been one that can never be forgotten as long as reason remains or the memory performs its functions. In the dying father the fountain of tears was dried up; but the agony on his death-stricken face and the feeble pressure of his hand on the brow of each little one as it bade him adieu for ever, told the story of his last great sorrow. As Mrs. Donner clasped her children to her heart in a parting embrace, she turned to Mr. Eddy with streaming eyes and sobbed her last words, "O, save, save, my children!"

This closing scene in the sad and eventful careers of those unfortunate emigrants was the crowning act in a long and terrible drama which illustrated, under many conditions of toil, hardship, danger, despair, and death, the courage, fortitude, patience, love, and devotion of woman.



CHAPTER XX.

THE COMFORTER AND THE GUARDIAN.

Mind-power and heart-power—these are the forces that move the moral universe. Which is the stronger, who shall say? If the former is within the province of the man, the latter is still more exclusively the prerogative of woman. With this she wins and rules her empire, with this she celebrates her noblest triumphs, and proves herself to be the God-delegated consoler and comforter of mankind. This is the power which moves the will to deeds of charity and mercy, which awakens the latent sympathies for suffering humanity, which establishes the law of kindness, soothes the irritated and perturbed spirit, and pours contentment and happiness into the soul.

If we could collect and concentrate into one great pulsating organ all the noble individual emotions that have stirred a million human hearts, what a prodigious agency would that be to act for good upon the world! And yet we may see something of the operation of just such an agency if we search the record of our time, watch the inner movements which control society and reflect that nearly every home contains a fractional portion of this beneficent agency, each fraction working in its way, and according to its measure, in harmony with all the others towards the same end.

Warm and fruitful as the sunshine, and subtle, too, as the ether which illumines the solar walk, we can gauge the strength of this agency only by its results. Nor can we by the symbols of language fully compass and describe even these results.

The man of science can measure the great forces of physical nature; heat, electricity, and light can all be gauged by mechanisms constructed by his hand, but by no device can he measure the forces of our moral nature.

The poet, whose insight is deeper than others' into this great and mysterious potency, can only give glimpses of its source, and draw tears by painting, in words, the traits which it induces.

The historian and biographer can record and dwell with fondness upon the acts of men and women, which were prompted by this power of the soul.

The moralist can point to them as examples to follow, or as cheering evidence of the loftier impulses of humanity. But still, in its depth and height, in its fountain, and in its remotest outflow, this power cannot be fully measured or appreciated by any standards known to man. The comprehensive and conceptive faculty of the imagination is wearied in placing before itself the springs, the action, and the boundless beneficence of this grand force, which flourishes and lives in its highest efficiency in the breast of woman. "Thanks," cries the poet of nature and of God,

"Thanks, to the human heart, by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, its fears."

We have shown how in all the ages since the landing, woman has proved her title to the possession of the manly virtues. We have shown her as a heroine, battling with the hostile powers of man and nature, and yet, even in those cases, if we were to analyze the motives which prompted her heroic acts, we should find them to spring at last from the source of power whereof we are speaking. It is out of her abounding and forceful emotional nature that she becomes a heroine. It is to relieve, to succor, or to save her dear ones, that she is brave, strong, enduring, patient, and devoted.

Frontier life has called, upon her for the exercise of these qualities, and she has nobly responded to the call. She fought; she toiled; she was undaunted by the apprehension of dangers and difficulties as well as intrepid in facing them. She bore without complaint the privations and hardships incident to such a life, and taxed every resource of body and mind in efforts to secure for her successors a home which neither peril nor trial should assail.

But this did not embrace the entire circle of her acts and her influence. To soothe, to comfort, to sustain in the trying time, to throw over the darkest hour the brightness of her sunny presence and sweet voice—by these influences she did more to establish and confirm, that civilization which our race has been carrying westward, than by even those exhibitions of manly heroism of which we have spoken.

Nine generations of men and women, through a period which a few years more will make three centuries, have been engaged in extending the frontier line, or have lived surrounded by circumstances similar to those which environ the remote border. The aggregate number of these men and women cannot be any more than estimated. Doubtless it will amount to many millions. A million helpmeets and comforters in a million homes! Mothers, wives, daughters, sisters—all supporting and buoying up the well-nigh broken spirits of the "stronger sex," and, by simple words, encouraging and stimulating to repair their desperate fortunes. Who can calculate the sum total of such an influence as this?

Among the myriad instances of the solacing and soul-inspiring power of a woman's voice in hours of darkness on the lonely border, we select a few for the purpose of showing her in this her appropriate domain.

Nearly two centuries ago, in one of those heated religious controversies which occurred in a river settlement in Massachusetts, a young man and his wife felt themselves constrained, partly through a desire for greater liberty of thought and action, and partly from natural energy of disposition, to push away from the fertile valley and establish their home on one of those bleak hillsides which form the spurs of the Green Mountain range. Here they set up their household deities, and lit the lights of the fireside in the darkness of the forest, and amid the wild loneliness of nature's hitherto untended domain.

In such situations as these, not merely from their isolation, but from the sterility of the soil and the inhospitable air of the region, the struggle for existence is often a severe one. Perseverance and self-denial, however, triumphed over all difficulties. Year after year the trees bowed themselves before the axe, and the soil surrendered its reluctant treasures in the furrow of the ploughshare.

Plenty smiled around the cabin. The light glowed on the hearth, and the benighted traveler hailed its welcome rays as he fared towards the hospitable door.

Apart from the self-interest and happiness of its inmates, it was no small benefit to others that such a home was made in that rugged country. Such homes are the outposts of the army of pioneers: here they can pause and rest, gathering courage and confidence when they regard them as establishments in the same wilderness where they are seeking to plant themselves.

Five years after their arrival their house and barns were destroyed by fire. Their cattle, farming utensils, and household furniture were all fortunately saved, and before long the buildings were replaced, and in two years all the ravages of the devouring element had been repaired. Again a happy and plenteous abode rewarded the labors of the pair. Three years rolled away in the faithful discharge of every duty incumbent upon them, each toiling in their respective sphere to increase their store and rear their large family of children.

A series of severe rains had kept them within doors for nearly ten days. One afternoon as they were sitting before their fire they experienced a peculiar sensation as though the ground on which the house stood was moving. Running out doors, they saw that the rains had loosened the hill-side soil from the rock on which it lay, and that it was slowly moving into the ravine below. Hastily collecting their children, they had barely time to escape to a rock a short distance from their house, when the landslide carried the house and barns, with the ground on which they stood, into the ravine, burying them and their entire contents beneath twenty feet of earth.

Almost worn out with his unremitting toils continued through ten years, and seeing the fruits of that toil swept away in an instant, looking around him in vain for any shelter, and far away from any helping hand, it was not surprising that the man should have given way to despair. He wept, groaned, and tore his hair, declaring that he would struggle no longer with fates which proved so adverse. "Go," said he, "Mary, to the nearest house with the children. I will die here."

His wife was one of those fragile figures which it seemed that a breath could blow away. Hers, however, was an organization which belied its apparent weakness. A brave and loving spirit animated that frail tenement. Long she strove to soothe her husband's grief, but without avail.

Gathering a thick bed of leaves and sheltering her children as well as she could from the chilly air, she returned ever and anon to the spot where her husband sat in the stupor of despair, and uttered words of comfort and timely suggestions of possible means of relief.

"We began with nothing, John, and we can begin with nothing again. You are strong, and so am I. Bethink yourself of those who pass by on their way to the great river every year at this time. These folk are good and neighborly, and will lend us willing hands to dig out of the earth the gear that we have lost by the landslip." Thus through the night, with these and like expressions, she comforted and encouraged the heart-broken man, and having at length kindled hope, succeeded in rousing him to exertion.

For two days the whole family suffered greatly while awaiting help, but that hope which the words of the wife had awakened, did not again depart. A party of passing emigrants, ascertaining the condition of the family, all turned to, and having the necessary tools, soon dug down to the house and barn, and succeeded in recovering most of the buried furniture, stores, and utensils. The unlucky couple succeeded finally in retrieving themselves, and years after, when the father was passing a prosperous old age in the valley of the Mohawk, to which section the family eventually moved, he was wont to tell how his wife had lifted him out of the depths of despair by those kind and thoughtful words, and put new life and hope into his heart during those dark days among the mountains of Massachusetts.

There is no section of our country where the presence of woman is so strong for good, and where her words of lofty cheer to the stricken and distressed are so potential as in the mountain republics on our extreme western border. There are in that section communities composed almost entirely of men who not only treat the few of the other sex who live among them, with a chivalrous respect, but who listen to their words as if they were heaven-sent messages. In one of the mining settlements of California, during the early years of that State, an epidemic fever broke out, and raged with great malignity among the miners. The settlement was more than two hundred miles from San Francisco, in a secluded mountain gorge, barren of all but the precious metal which had attracted thither a rough, and motley multitude. There was no doctor within a hundred miles, and not a single female to nurse and watch the forlorn subjects of the pestilence.

Mrs. Maurice, a married lady who had recently come from the east to San Francisco with her husband, hearing of the distress which prevailed in that mountain district, immediately set out, in company with her husband, who heartily sympathized with her generous enterprise, and crossed the Sierra Nevada for the purpose of ministering to the wants of the sick. She carried a large supply of medicines and other necessaries, and after a toilsome journey over the rough foot-paths which were then the only avenues by which the place could be reached, arrived at the settlement. By some means the miners had become apprised of her approach, and she was met by a cavalcade of rough-bearded men, a score in number, mounted on mules, as a guard of honor to escort her to the scene of her noble labors. As she came in sight, riding down the mountain side, the escort party waved their huge hats in the air and hurrahed as if they were mad, while the tears streamed down their swarthy cheeks. With heads uncovered they ranged themselves on either side of the lady and her husband, and accompanied them to the place where the pestilence was raging. Some of the sick men rose from their beds and stood with pale, fever-wasted faces at the doors of their wretched cabins, and smiled feebly and tried to shout as the noble woman drew near. Their voices were hollow and sepulchral, and the ministering angel who had visited them witnessed this moving spectacle not without tears. For two months she passed her time night and day in watching over and ministering to those unfortunate men. Snatching a nap now and then, every other available moment was given to her patients. Many died, and after receiving their last messages to friends far away in the east, she closed their eyes and passed on in her errand of mercy.

One of her patients thus testified to the efficacy of her ministrations: "As I owe my recovery to her exertions, I rejoice to give my testimony to her untiring zeal, her self-sacrificing devotion, and her angelic kindness. She never seemed to me to be happy except when engaged in alleviating the sufferings of us who were sick, and she watched over us with all the tenderness and love of a mother. Many of the sick men called her by that endeared name, and we all seemed to be her children.

"Even in the gloomiest cabins and to the most disheartened of the fever-stricken, her presence seemed to bring sunshine. Her face always wore a smile so sweet that I forgot my pain when I gazed upon her. Her voice rings in my ears even now. It was peculiarly soft and musical, and I never heard her speak but I recalled those lines of the great dramatist, 'Her voice was ever low, an excellent thing in woman.' Every sufferer waited to hear her speak and seemed to hang upon her accents. Her words were few, but so kind that we all felt that with such a friend to help us we could not long be sick.

"She was entirely forgetful of herself, so much did the poor invalids dwell in her thoughts.

"The storms of autumn raged with frightful violence throughout that gorge, and yet I have known her, while the wind was howling and the rain pouring, to go round three times in one night to the bedsides of those whose lives were hanging by a thread. Once I recollect after my recovery, going to see a young man who was very low and seemed to have life only while Mrs. Maurice bent over him. She had visited him early that evening, and had promised to come and see him again after making her rounds among her other patients. A fierce snow storm had come up and a strong man could barely maintain himself before the blast. I found the poor fellow very low. He was evidently sinking rapidly. He moved feebly and turned away his eyes, which were fixed upon me as I entered. It was already considerably past the hour when it was expected she would return, and as I bent to ask him how he was, he looked into my face with a bright eager gaze, and said in a whisper, 'ask mother to come.' I knew in an instant whom he meant and said I would go in search of her and conduct her thither through the storm.

"I had only reached the door when she met me. I never shall forget her appearance as she entered out of the howling storm and stood in that dim light all radiant with kindness and sympathy, which beamed from her face and seemed to illumine the room. The sufferer's face brightened and his frame seemed to have a sudden life breathed into it when he saw her enter. It seemed to me as if she had a miraculous healing power, for that moment he began to mend, and in a few weeks was restored to his pristine health."

It was beyond doubt that her presence and gentle words were more potent in effecting cures than were the medicines which she administered. Those who recovered and walked out when they saw her approaching, even at a distance, were wont to remove their hats and stand as she went by gazing at her as if she was an angel of light.

The scene after the last patient was convalescent, and when she came to take her departure, was indescribable. All the miners quit work and gathered in the village; a party was appointed to escort her to the mountain and the rest formed a long line on each side and stood bareheaded and some of them weeping as she passed through.

The mounted men accompanied her and her husband and their guide to the top of the mountain. All of the escort had been her patients and some of them were still wasted and wan from the fever. When they bade her farewell there was not a dry eye among them, and long after she had left them they could have been seen gazing after the noble matron who had visited and comforted them in their grievous sickness and pain.

Life in the Rocky Mountains before the great transcontinental line was built was remarkable for concentrating in itself the extremest forms of almost every peril, hardship, and privation which is incident to the frontier. Even at the present day and with the increased facilities for reaching the Atlantic and Pacific coast by that single railroad, the greater part of the region far north and far south of that line of travel is still isolated from the world by vast distances and great natural obstacles to communication between the different points of settlement.

So much the more valuable and stronger therefore upon that field is the emotional force of good women. Such there were and are scattered through that rocky wilderness whose ministrations, in many a lonely cabin, and with many a wayfaring band, are like those of the angel who visited the prophet of old when he dwelt "in a desert apart".

An incident is told of a party of emigrants, who were journeying through Idaho that powerfully illustrates this idea.

There were five in the party, viz. James Peterson, an aged man, his two daughters, his son, and his son's wife.

While pursuing their toilsome and devious course through the gorges and up and down the steeps, a friendly Indian whom they met informed them that a few miles from the route they were following, a body of men were starving in an almost inaccessible ravine where they had been prospecting for gold. Mr. Peterson and his son, although they pitied the unfortunate gold hunters, were disinclined to turn from their course, judging that the difficulties of reaching them, and of conveying the necessary stores over the rocks and across the rapid torrents were such that they would render the attempt wholly impracticable.

The two daughters, as well as the wife of young Peterson, refused to listen to the cold dictates of prudence which controlled Mr. Peterson and his son: they saw in imagination only the wretched starving men, and their hearts yearned to relieve them.

Turning a deaf ear to the arguments and persuasions of the elder and younger Peterson, they urged in eloquent and pleading tones that they might be allowed to follow the impulses of kindness and pity and visit the objects of their compassion. The father could stay with the team and the brother and husband could accompany them under the guidance of the Indian, on their errand of mercy.

Their prayers and persuasions at last prevailed over the objections which were offered. Selecting the most concentrated and nourishing food, which their store of provisions embraced, young Peterson and the Indian loaded themselves with all that they could carry, the three women, who were strong and active, also bearing a portion of the supplies. The party, after a most difficult and toilsome march on foot, succeeded in reaching the top of the mountain, from which they could look down into the ravine upon the spot where the unfortunate men were encamped. They could see no sign of life, and feared they had come too late.

As they neared the place, picking their way down precipices where a single misstep would have been death, one of the women waved her handkerchief and the men shouted at the top of their voices. No response came back except the echoes which reverberated from the wall of the mountain opposite. The rays of the setting sun fell on seven human forms stretched on the ground. One of these forms at length raised itself to a sitting posture and gazed with a dazed look at the rescuers hastening towards them. The rest had given up all hope and lain down to die.

A spoonful of stimulant was immediately administered to each of the seven sufferers, and kindling a fire, the women quickly prepared broth with the dried meat which they had brought. The starving men were in a light-headed condition, induced by long fasting, and could scarcely comprehend that they were saved. "Who be those, Jim, walking round that fire; not women?" said one of the men. "No, Pete," was the reply, "them's angels; didn't you hear 'em sing to us a spell ago?" The kind words with which the three women had sought to recall the wretched wayfarers to life and hope might well have been mistaken for an angel's song. One of the men afterwards said he dreamed he was in heaven, and when his eyes were opened by the sound of those sweet voices, and he saw those noble girls, he knew his dream had come true.

Another said that those voices brought him back to life and hope, more than all the food and stimulants.

For a week these angels of mercy nursed and fed the starving men, the Indian meanwhile having shot a mountain goat, which increased their supplies, and at the end of that period the men were sufficiently recruited to start, in company with their preservers, for the camp, where Mr. Peterson was awaiting the return of his daughters, of whose safety he had been already informed by the Indian.

When the rescued men came to bid them farewell, they brought a bag containing a hundred pounds weight of gold dust, the price for which would have been their lives, but for those devoted women, and begged them to accept it, not as a reward, but as a token of their gratitude. The girls refused to take the gift, believing that the adventurous miners needed it, and that they had been amply rewarded by the reflection that they had saved seven lives.

The parting, on both sides, was tearful, the rough miners being more affected than even the women. Each party pursued its separate course, the one towards Oregon, the other towards Utah; but after the Petersons had reached the spot where they encamped that night, they discovered the bag of gold, which the miners had secretly deposited in the wagon. The treasure thus forced upon them was divided between the Miss Petersons and their sister-in-law. Bright and pure as that metal was, it was incomparably less lustrous than the deeds which it rewarded, and infinitely less pure than the motives which prompted them.

Finely has a poet of our own time celebrated the wondrous power of those words of cheer and comfort which woman utters so often to the unfortunate.

O! ever when the happy laugh is dumb, All the joy gone, and all the sorrow come, When loss, despair, and soul-distracting pain, Wring the sad heart and rack the throbbing brain, The only hope—the only comfort heard— Comes in the music of a woman's word. Like beacon-bell on some wild island shore, Silverly ringing through the tempest's roar, Whose sound borne shipward through the ocean gloom Tells of the path and turns her from her doom.

Acting within their own homes, who can sum up the entire amount of good which the frontier wife, mother, sister, and daughter have accomplished in their capacities as emotional and sympathetic beings? How many fevered brows have they cooled, how many gloomy moods have they illumined, how many wavering hearts have they stayed and confirmed?

This service of the heart is rendered so freely and so often that it ceases to attract the attention it merits. Like the vital air and sunshine, it is so free and spontaneous that one rarely pauses to thank God for it. The outflow of sympathy, the kind word or act, and all the long sacrifice of woman's days pass too often without a thought, or a word, from those who perhaps might droop and die without them.

England has its Westminster Abbey, beneath whose clustered arches statesmen, philanthropists, warriors, and kings repose in a mausoleum, whither men repair to gaze at the monumental bust, the storied urn, and proud epitaph; but where is the mausoleum which preserves the names and virtues of those gentle, unobtrusive women—the heroines and comforters of the frontier home? In the East, the simple slabs of stone which record their names have crumbled into the dust of the churchyard. In the far West, they sleep on the prairie and mountain slope, with scarcely a memorial to mark the spot.

Nowhere more strongly are the manifestations of heart-power shown than among the women of our remote border. Speaking of them, one who long lived in that region says, "If you are sick, there is nothing which sympathy and care can devise or perform, which is not done for you. No sister ever hung over the throbbing brain, or fluttering pulse, of a brother with more tenderness and fidelity. This is as true of the lady whose hand has only figured her embroidery or swept her guitar, as of the cottage-girl, wringing from her laundry the foam of the mountain stream. If I must be cast, in sickness or destitution, on the care of a stranger, let it be in California; but let it be before avarice has hardened the heart and made a god of gold."

What is said of the California wives, mothers, and sisters, may, with equal force, be applied to woman throughout the whole vast mountain region, including ten immense states and territories. In the mining districts, on the wild cattle ranche, in the eyrie, perched, like an eagle's nest, on the crest of those sky-piercing summits, or on the secluded valley farm, wherever there is a home to be brightened, a sick bed to be tended, or a wounded spirit to be healed, there is woman seen as a minister of comfort, consolation, and joy.

The military posts on the frontier have long had reason to thank the wives of the soldiers and officers for their kindness, manifested in numberless ways.

One of these ladies was Mrs. R———, who accompanied her husband to his post on the Rio Grande, in 1856.

Here she remained with him for more than three years, till that grand mustering of all the powers of the Republic to the long contested battle-grounds along the Potomac. Their life on the Mexican frontier was full of interest, novelty, and adventure. The First Artillery was often engaged in repulsing the irregular and roving bands of Cortinas, who rode over the narrow boundary river in frequent raids and stealing expeditions into Texas. When in camp, Mrs. Ricketts greatly endeared herself to the men in her husband's company by constant acts of kindness to the sick, and by showing a cheerful and lively disposition amid all the hardships and annoyances of garrison life, at such a distance from home and from the comforts and refinements of our American civilization.

She was a spirit of mercy as well as good cheer; and many a poor fellow knew that, if he could but get her ear, his penance in the guard-house for some violation of the regulations, would be far less severe on account of her gentle and womanly plea.

She afterwards shared her husband's imprisonment in Richmond. Captain R——— had been severely wounded and grew rapidly worse. The gloomiest forebodings pressed like lead upon the brave heart of the devoted wife. Again the surgeons consulted over his dreadfully swollen leg, and prescribed amputation; and again it was spared to the entreaties of his wife, who was certain that his now greatly enfeebled condition would not survive the shock. Much of the time he lay unconscious, and for weeks his life depended entirely on the untiring patience and skill with which his wife soothed down the rudeness of his prison-house, cheering him and other prisoners who were so fortunate as to be in the room with him, and alleviating the slow misery that was settling like a pall upon him.

As the pebble which stirs the lake in wider and ever wider circles, so the genial emotion which begins in the family extends to the neighborhood, and sometimes embraces the whole human race. Hence arises the philanthropic kindness of some, and the large-hearted charity that is willing to labor anywhere and in any manner to relieve the wants of all who are suffering pain or privation.

In all our wars from the Revolutionary contest to the present time, woman's work in the army hospitals, and even on the battle-field, as a nurse, has been a crown to womanhood and a blessing to our civilization and age. Many a life that had hitherto been marked only by the domestic virtues and the charities of home, became enlarged and ennobled in this wider sphere of duty.

Wrestling in grim patience with unceasing pain; to lie weak and helpless, thinking of the loved ones on the far off hillside, or thirsty with unspeakable longing for one draught of cold water from the spring by the big rock at the old homestead; to yearn, through long, hot nights, for one touch of the cool, soft hand of a sister or a wife on the throbbing temples, the wounded soldier saw with joy unspeakable the coming of these ministering angels. Then the great gashes would be bathed with cooling washes, or the grateful draught poured between the thin, chalky lips, or the painful, inflamed stump would be lifted and a pad of cool, soft lint, fitted under it. These ministrations carried with, them a moral cheer and a soothing that was more salutary and healing than medicines and creature comforts.

The poor wounded soldier was assured in tones, to whose pleasant and homelike accents his ear had long been a stranger, that his valor should not be forgotten, that they too had a son, a brother, a father, or a husband in the army. After a pallid face and bony fingers were bathed, sometimes a chapter in the New Testament or a paragraph from the newspapers would be read in tones low but distinct, in grateful contrast to the hoarse battle shouts that had been lingering in his ear for weeks.

Then the good lady would act as amanuensis for some poor fellow who had an armless sleeve, and write down for loving eyes and heavy hearts in some distant village the same old soldier's story, told a thousand times by a thousand firesides, but always more charming than any story in the Arabian Nights,—how, on that great day, he stood with his company on a hillside, and saw the long line of the enemy come rolling across the valley; how, when, the cannon opened on them, he could see the rough, ragged gaps opening in the line; how they closed up and moved on; how this friend fell on one side, and poor Jimmy ——— on the other; and then he felt a general crash, and a burning pain, and the musket dropped out of his hand; then the ambulance and the amputation, and what the surgeon said about his pluck; and then the weakness, and the pain, and the hunger; and how much better he was now; and how kind the ladies had been to him.

Such offices as these lift woman above the plane of earthly experience and place her a little lower than the angels. Only she can fill the measure of such duties, and only she does fill them.

* * * * *

Among the deities of the Eastern Pantheon, the god representing the destroyer is embodied under the form of a man, while the preserver is symbolized under the form of a woman. This is an adaptation in Polytheism of a great and true idea. Woman is a preserver. Her's is the conservative influence of society. It is from man that the destructive forces that shake the social organization emanate. He wars on his kind and the earth shakes under the tread of his armies. He organizes those mighty revolutionary movements which pull down the fabric of states. He is restless, aggressive, warlike. But it is woman's province to keep. Her mission is peace.

A party of soldiers passing through the western wilds, sees in the distance a body of horsemen approaching. Cocking their rifles and putting themselves in a defensive attitude, they prepare for battle. But when they see that there are women among the riders who are galloping towards them, they relax their line and restore their rifles to their shoulders. They know there will be no battle, for woman's presence means peace.

Woman is the guardian of our race. In the household she is saving; in the family she is protecting, and everywhere her influence is that which keeps.

It is this characteristic that makes her presence on the frontier so essential to a successful prosecution of true pioneer enterprises. The man's work is one of destruction and subjugation. He must level the forest, break the soil, and fight all the forces that oppose him in his progress. Woman guards the health and life of the household, hoards the stores of the family, and economizes the surplus strength of her husband, father, or son.

We are speaking now of the sex as it is seen in a new country and in remote settlements. In crowded cities, amid a superabundant wealth, and an idle and luxurious mode of life, we see too often the types of selfish, frivolous, and conventional females such as are hardly known on the border. But even in these, populous districts the same spirit is not unfrequently shown, with important results, in respect to the accumulation of great fortunes.

Some forty years since, a capitalist who now counts his fortune by the tens of millions, informed his wife that if he was only in possession of five thousand dollars, he could derive great gains from a business into which he designed to enter. To his astonishment she immediately brought him a bank book showing a balance of five thousand dollars, the savings of many years, and told him to use it as he thought best. Those hoardings judiciously invested laid the foundation of one of the largest properties owned by a single man upon this continent.

As a conserving agency, the spirit and influence of woman is of course most strongly exerted within the circle of her own family. Here she knits the ties that binds that circle together, and gathers and holds the material and moral resources which make the household what it is. When disaster comes, it is her study to prevent disintegration and keep the home uninjured and unbroken.

While a family were flying from a ferocious band of tories during the Revolution, in the confusion, one of the children was left behind. It was the eldest daughter who first discovered the fact, and only she dared to return and save her little brother from their blood-thirsty enemies. It was dark and rainy, and imminent danger would attend the effort to rescue the lad. But the brave girl hastened back; reached the house still in possession of the British; begged the sentinel to let her enter; and though repeatedly repulsed doubled the earnestness of her entreaties, and finally gained admittance. She found the child in his chamber, hastened down stairs and passing the sentry, fled with the shot whizzing past her head, and with the child soon joined the rest of the family.

When deprived of her natural protector and left the sole guardian of her children she becomes a prodigy of watchful care.

Some years since, one of the small islands on our coast was inhabited by a single poor family. The father was taken suddenly ill. There was no physician. The wife, on whom every labor for the household devolved, was sleepless in care and tenderness by the bedside of her suffering husband. Every remedy in her power to procure was administered, but the disease was acute, and he died.

Seven young children mourned around the lifeless corpse. They were the sole beings upon that desolate spot. Did the mother indulge the grief of her spirit, and sit down in despair? No! she entered upon the arduous and sacred duties of her station. She felt that there was no hand to assist her in burying her dead. Providing, as far as possible, for the comfort of her little ones, she put her babe into the arms of the oldest, and charged the two next in age to watch the corpse of their father. She unmoored her husband's fishing boat, which, but two days before, he had guided over the seas to obtain food for his family. She dared not yield to those tender recollections which might have unnerved her arm. The nearest island was at the distance of three miles. Strong winds lashed the waters to foam. Over the loud billows, that wearied and sorrowful woman rowed, and was preserved. She reached the next island, and obtained the necessary aid. With such energy did her duty to her desolate babes inspire her, that the voyage which, depended upon her individual effort was performed in a shorter time than the returning one, when the oars were managed by two men, who went to assist in the last offices to the dead.

But female influence in the way of conservation, is not bounded by the narrow limits of home, family, and kindred. It is also seen on a wider field and in the preservation of other interests. The property, health, and life of strangers often become the object of woman's careful guardianship. Nearly thirty years since a heavily freighted vessel set sail from an English port bound for the Pacific coast. After a voyage of more than three months it reached the Sandwich Islands, and after remaining there a week, sailed in the direction of Oregon and British Columbia.

When two days out from Honolulu, the captain and mate were taken down with fever, which not only confined them, to their berths, but by its delirium incapacitated them from giving instructions respecting the navigation of the vessel. The third officer, upon whom the command devolved, was shortly afterwards washed overboard and lost in a gale. The rest of the crew were of the most common and ignorant class of sailors, not even knowing how to read and write. The heavens, overspread with clouds which obscured both the sun and the stars, was a sealed book to the man at the wheel, and the good ship, at the mercy of the winds and waves, was drifting they knew not whither.

At this juncture the wife of the captain stepped to the front, and boldly assumed the command. She had been reared on Cape Cod, and was a woman of uncommon intelligence and strength of character. Her husband, in the early stages of his illness, had thoughtfully instructed her in the rudiments of navigation, and foreseeing that such knowledge might be the means of enabling her to steer the ship safely to port, she diligently employed every moment that she could spare from the necessary attendance on the sick men, in studying the manual of navigation. She soon learned how to calculate latitude and longitude. When the third officer was washed overboard she knew that all must then depend upon her, and at once put herself in communication with the steersman, and instructed him as to their true position. The men all recognized the value of her knowledge, and obeyed her as if she had been their chief from the outset. The correctness of her calculations was soon proved, and such was her firmness and kindness while in command, that the sailors came to regard her as a superior being who had been sent from heaven to help them out of their dangers. The clouds at length cleared away, the wind subsided, and after a voyage of twenty-five days, the ship made the mouth of the Columbia River. Meanwhile by diligent nursing she had also contributed to save the lives of her husband and his second officer. But for her knowledge and firmness it was acknowledged by all that the ship would have been lost; and a large salvage was allowed her by the owners as a reward for her energy and intelligence in saving the vessel and its valuable cargo.

Another of these guardians on the deep was Mrs. Spalding, of Georgia. She was one of those patriot women of the Revolution of whom we have already spoken. The part she bore in that struggle, and the anxieties to which she had been necessarily subjected, so impaired her health that some years after the termination of the war an ocean voyage and a European climate was prescribed for her restoration.

While crossing the Atlantic a large ship painted black, carrying twelve guns, was seen to windward running across their course. She was evidently either a privateer or a pirate. As there was no hope of out-sailing her, it was judged best to boldly keep the vessel on her course, trusting that its size and appearance might deter the strange craft from attacking it.

Mr. Spalding, realizing the danger of their situation, and not daring to trust himself with an interview till the crisis was past, requested the captain to go below and do what he could for the security of his family.

The captain on visiting the cabin, found that Mrs. Spalding had placed her daughter-in-law and the other inmates of the cabin, for safety, in the two state-rooms, filling the berths with the cots and bedding from the outer cabin. She had then taken her station beside the scuttle, which led from the outer cabin to the magazine, with two buckets of water. Having noticed that the two cabin-boys were heedless, she had determined herself to keep watch over the magazine. She did so till the danger was past. The captain took in his light sails, hoisted his boarding nettings, opened his ports, and stood on upon his course. The privateer waited till the ship was within a mile, then fired a gun to windward, and stood on her way. This ruse preserved the ship.

America, like England, has had her Grace Darlings, whose lives have been devoted to the rescue of drowning sailors. Such a life was that of Kate Moore, who some years since resided on a secluded island in the Sound. Disasters frequently occur to vessels which are driven round Montauk Point, and sometimes in the Sound when they are homeward bound; and at such times she was always on the alert. She had so thoroughly cultivated the sense of hearing, that she could distinguish amid the howling storm the shrieks of the drowning mariners, and thus direct a boat, which she had learned to manage most dexterously, in the darkest night, to the spot where a fellow mortal was perishing. Though well educated and refined, she possessed none of the affected delicacy which characterizes too many town-bred misses, but, adapting herself to the peculiar exigencies of her father's humble yet honorable calling, she was ever ready to lend a helping hand, and shrank from no danger if duty pointed that way. In the gloom and terror of the stormy night, amid perils at all hours of the day and all seasons of the year, she launched her barque on the threatening waves, and assisted her aged and feeble father in saving the lives of twenty-one persons during the last fifteen years. Such conduct, like that of Grace Darling, to whom Kate Moore has been justly compared, needs no comment; it stamps its moral at once and indelibly upon the heart of every reader.

That great land ocean which stretches southwestward from Fort Leavenworth on the Missouri, to the fountains of the great rivers of Texas, has its perils to be guarded against as well as the stormy Atlantic. The voyagers over that expanse, as well as the mariners on the ocean, have not seldom owed their safety to the watchfulness of the prairie woman, who possesses, in common with her more cultivated and conventional sisters, a keen insight into character. This enables her to take early note of danger arising from the agency of bad men, and avoid it.

In 1858, a gentleman, accompanied by a Creek Indian as a guide, while escorting his sister to her husband, who was stationed at Fort Wayne, in the Indian Territory, near the southwest corner of Missouri, lost the trail, and the party found themselves, at nightfall, in an immense plain, which showed no signs of any habitation. Riding southward in the darkness, they saw, at last, a light twinkling in the distance, and, directing their course toward it, they discovered that it proceeded from the window of a lonely cabin. Knocking at the door, a man of singularly repulsive appearance responded to the summons—invited them in. Three rough-looking characters were sitting around the fire. The hospitalities of the cabin were bargained for, the horses and Indian being quartered in a shed, while the gentleman and his sister were provided with shakedowns in the two partitions of the loft. The only inmates of the house besides the four whom we have mentioned was a girl some fifteen years of age, the daughter of one of the men. The lady, who was very much fatigued, was waited upon by this girl, who moved about as if she was in a dream. She was very pale, and had a look as if she was repressing some great fear, or was burdened by some terrible secret.

When she accompanied the lady to her sleeping apartment, she whispered to her hurriedly that she wished to speak to her brother, but begged her to call him without making any noise, as their lives depended upon their preserving silence. The lady, though astonished and terrified at such a revelation at that hour and place, checked the exclamation which rose to her lips, and, lifting the partition of cotton cloth which hung between the apartments, in a low tone asked her brother to come and hear what the girl had to say.

Her information was of a terrible character. They were, she said, in a den of murderers. She knew not how they could escape, unless by a miracle. It was the intention of the assassins, she believed, to murder and rob the whole party. Then, telling them to keep awake and be on their guard, she glided down to the room below. The brother and sister, listening sharply for a few minutes, heard the girl say in a loud tone, as if she intended the guests should hear her, that she was going out to the shed to look for her ear-ring, which she believed she had dropped there. They surmised she was going to put the Indian on his guard.

The gentleman had a pair of revolvers, and resolved to sell his life dearly, should he be attacked. Peering down into the room below, he saw, by the dim light, the ruffians making preparations for bloody work. Axes, knives, pistols, and guns had been brought out, and, in low whispers, the miscreants were evidently discussing the plan of attack. Sometime after midnight two of the men stole out of the door, with the obvious intention of killing the Indian, as the first act in the bloody drama. For a few minutes after their disappearance all was still, and then the silence was broken by two pistols shots in quick succession, followed by a triumphant war-whoop, which served to tell the story. The Indian, who was also armed with a revolver, must have shot his two assailants. The gentleman fired down the hatchway of the loft, killing one of the villains as he was running out of the door. The other, after shouting loudly for his partners in murder, took to his heels and fled away.

It appeared that the Indian guide, having been notified of his danger by the girl, rose from his bed and ensconced himself behind the shed. When the two men came out to attack him, he shot them both dead, and then waited, expecting that the others would have come out and furnished him with a new target.

The girl came out of her hiding place, whither she had run on hearing the shots, and looked sharply into the faces of the three dead ruffians, and finding that her father was not among them, expressed her joy that her unworthy parent had escaped the fate he richly deserved.

She told her story to the gentleman and lady while they were standing on guard and waiting for the morning to dawn. It appeared that she had been brought to the den a few days before by her father, and had become knowing to a murder which he and his companions had committed. Her mother, a pious woman, had instructed her daughter in the principles of Christianity, and had checked the evil propensities of her husband as long as she lived, but after her death, which had taken place shortly before the events we have been describing, all constraint had been removed from the evil propensities of the misguided man, and he joined the murderous gang who had just met their fate.

The natural goodness of the young girl's nature, fostered by the teachings of her guardian mother, thus exerted itself to save three lives from the assassin's stroke.

She gladly accompanied the lady on her route the following morning, and ever remained her attached proteg.

Montana is one of the newest and wildest of our territories. Its position so far to the north and the peculiarly rugged face of the country, make it the fitting abode for the genius of the storms. Gathering their battalions the tempests sweep the summits and whirling round the flanks of the mountains, roar through the deep, lonely gorges with a sound louder than the ocean surges in a hurricane. The snows fill the ravines in drifts one hundred feet in depth, and such are the rigors of winter that the women who live in the fur-trading posts on that section of our northern border, are often carried across the mountains into Oregon or Washington territory, to shield them from the severities of the inclement season.

Late in the fall of 1868, a party consisting of thirty soldiers, while faring on through the mountains of that territory, were overtaken by one of these fearful snowstorms. The wind blew from the north directly in their faces, and the snow was soon piled in drifts which put a thorough embargo upon their further progress. Selecting the fittest place that could be found they pitched their tents on the snow, but hardly had they fastened the tent ropes when a blast lifted the tents in a moment, and whirled them into the sky. After a night of great suffering they found in the morning that all their mules were missing. They had probably strayed or been driven by the fury of the blast into a deep ravine south of the camp, where they had been buried beneath the enormous drifts.

The storm raged and the snow fell nearly all day. The rations were all gone, and progress against the wind and through the drifts was impossible. Another night of such bitter cold and exposure would in all probability be their last.

They shouted in unison, but their shouts were drowned in the shrieks of the tempest. Towards night the storm lulled and again they shouted, but no sound came back but the sigh of the blast. Help! help! they cried. Unhappy men, could help come to them except from on high! What was left to them but to wind their martial cloaks around them and die like soldiers in the path of duty!

But what God-sent messenger is this coming through the drifts to meet them? Not a woman! Yes, a poor, weak woman has heard their despairing cry and has hastened to succor them. Drenched and shivering with the storm she told them to follow her, and conducted them to a recess in the crags, where beneath an overhanging ledge and between projecting cliffs, a spacious shelter was afforded them. They crowded in and warmed their numbed limbs before a great fire, while their preserver brought out her stores of food for the wayfarers.

But how could a woman be there in the heart of the mountains in the wintry weather, with only the storm to speak to her?

Her husband was a miner and she a brave and self-reliant woman. He had left her two weeks before to carry his treasure of gold dust to the nearest settlement She was all alone! Alone in that rock-encompassed cabin in the realms of desolation, and still the heroine-guardian who had snatched thirty fellow beings from the jaws of death.

Solitude is the theatre where untold thousands of devoted women—the brave, the good, the loving—for ages past have acted their unviewed and unrecorded dramas in the great battle of frontier life. Warriors and statesmen have their need of praise, and crowds surround them to throw the wreath of laurel or of bay upon their fainting brows, or to follow their plumed hearse to the mausoleum which a grateful people has raised to their memory.

"Yet it may be a higher courage dwells In one meek heart which braves an adverse fate, Than his whose ardent soul indignant swells Warmed by the fight or cheered through high debate, The soldier dies surrounded, could he live Alone to suffer and alone to strive?"



CHAPTER XXI.

WOMAN AS AN EDUCATOR ON THE FRONTIER

"Within the house, within the family the woman is all: she is the inspiring, moulding, embellishing, and controlling power." This terse description of woman's influence in the household applies with double force and significance to the position of the pioneer wife and mother. Her life in that position was one long battle, one long labor, one long trial, one long sorrow. Out of this varied, searching, continuous educational process came discipline of the body, of the mind, and of the whole moral nature. Adversity, her

"Stern, ragged nurse, whose rigid lore, With patience, many a year, she bore,"

taught her the practice of the heroic as well as of the gentler virtues; courage, labor, fortitude, plain living, charity, sobriety, pity. In that school these virtues became habitual to her mind; because their practice was enforced by the stress of circumstances. Daily and nightly, in those homes on the frontier, there is some danger to be faced, some work to be done, some suffering to be borne or some self-denial to be exercised, some sufferer to be relieved or some sympathy to be extended.

There is a two-fold result from this educational process: first, the transmission, by the law of hereditary descent, of marked traits of character to her children, who show, in a greater or less degree, their mother's nature as developed in this severe school; second, woman becomes fitted to mould the character and instruct the mind of her children in the light of her own experience and discipline. Woman is the great educator of the frontier.

Within the first half of the 18th century, in that narrow belt of thinly settled country which follows the indentation of the Atlantic ocean, in lonely cabins in the forest, or on the, hill-slope, or by the unvisited sea, most of the representative men of our Revolutionary Era first saw the light, and were pillowed on the breasts of the frontier mothers.

The biographical records of our country are bright with the names of men—the brave, the wise, the good—who were born of pioneer women, and who inherited from them those traits which, in after life, made them great and illustrious in the learned professions, in the camp, and in the councils of their native country. Who can doubt that the daughters, too, of those strong women, and the sisters of those eminent men, inheriting similar traits, exercised in their sphere as potent though silent an influence as did their brothers in the high stations to which they were called.

As by a strain of blood, inherited traits come down to succeeding generations, and, as from the breast of the mother the first elements of bodily strength are received, so from her lips are obtained those first principles of good and incentives of greatness which the sterner features and blunter feelings of the father are rarely sufficient to inculcate.

On parent knees, or later, in intervals of work or play, the soldier who fought to make us a free republic, and the statesman who laid deep and wide the foundations of our constitution, acquired from their mothers' lips those lessons of virtue and duty which made their after careers so useful to their country and memorable in history.

We have said that woman was the great educator on the frontier. She was something more than an educator, as the term is usually applied. The teaching of the rudiments of school-learning was a fraction in the sum-total of her training and influence.

The means of moulding and guiding the minds of the young upon the border are very different from what they are in more settled states of society. Education in the older states of the Union is organized in the district and high school, in the academy and the college, and is maintained by large taxation of the town, city, or state. Here are wealth, aggregations of intelligence, and a surplus of the educated labor class. Commodious and often beautiful edifices shelter the bright tribes whom the morning bell calls together beneath the eye of cultured teachers. Stately halls and quaint chapels are the seats where the higher learning is inculcated; the paraphernalia of education is splendid, the appliances are adequate, and the whole machinery by which knowledge is diffused among the young, works with a smooth regularity that makes it almost automatic.

Contrast this system which prevails to-day, and in the more settled conditions of American society, with that which prevailed in earlier years in a thinly and newly-inhabited country, and which now obtains on our frontier line, and how striking is the difference!

Indeed, how could we look for any such organism where small settlements were separated from each other by long spaces and bad roads, and where single cabins were so completely isolated, as in the New England and the Middle and Southern States a century and a half ago, or as in the earlier settled States of the West seventy years ago, or as in the newly-settled States of the West within the present generation, or as on the frontier proper to-day? Under such conditions even the district school was impracticable or inaccessible. To supply its place, each household where there were children was a training school, of which the mother was the head.

The process, under her eyes and hand, of forming the mind and character, is very slow, but it is healthy and natural. It is conducted in the short interval of severe toil. She reverts to first principles, and teaches by objects rather than by lessons. It is the character that she forms more than the mind.

She has about her a band of silent but powerful coadjutors. The sunshine and free air of the wilderness are poured around the little stranger, which soon grows into a handsome, largely-developed, vigorous nursling.

The air of the wilderness, too, is the native air of freedom: this, and the ample space wherein the young plant flourishes, makes it large in frame and broad in mind and character.

Transplant a cypress from a garden in a populous community to the deep black mould of the west, and it grows to be a forest monarch. It is Hazlitt who says "the heart reposes in greater security on the immensity of nature's works, expatiates freely there and finds elbow room and breathing space."

In the log-cabin there is perhaps but a single room: there is a bed, a table, blocks of wood for chairs, and a few wretched cooking utensils. Thank God! The life of the pioneer woman is not "cribbed and confined" to this hovel. The forest, the prairie, the mountain-side are free to her as the vital air, and the canopy of heaven is her familiar covering. A life out doors is a necessary part of both the moral and the physical education of her children.

Riding through one of the prairies of the far West, some years since, we arrived just at dusk in front of a cabin where a mother was sitting with her four young children and teaching them lessons from the great book of nature. She had shown them the sun as it set in glory, and told them of its rising and of its going down; of the clouds and of the winds, and how God made the grass and trees, and the stars, which came trooping out before their eyes. She taught them, she said, little as yet from books. She had but a Bible, a catechism, an almanac. The Bible was the only Reader in her little school. Already she had whispered in their ears the story of Jesus' life and death, and charged their infant memories with the wise and beautiful teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.

What a practical training was that which children had in that outdoor knowledge which had been useful to their mother! The chemistry of common life learned from the processes wrought out by the air and sunshine; astronomy from the great luminaries which are the clocks of the wilderness, and the science of the weather from the phenomena of the sky. There was no "cramming" in that home-school; each item of knowledge was well absorbed and assimilated, for the mother's toils made the intervals long between the lessons. So much the better for the young heart and mind, which grows, swells, and gathers force unlaced and unfettered by scholastic pedantry and repression.

It is from the mother, too, that the boy or girl must take their first lessons in the tillage of the soil, which are most readily learned in the garden, for the women are the gardeners of the frontier. Gardening is a labor of patience and virtue, and is excellent discipline for the character. A child's true life is in the fields, and should be early familiarized with the forms of vegetable life. No small part of the education of a child may be carried on by the care and assiduous contemplation of plants and flowers. Observation, experience, reflection, and reasoning, would all come of it. A flower is a whole world, pure, innocent, peacemaking.

Woman's natural fitness for the work of an educator of the human plant is seen in the readiness and zeal with which she enters into this work of tending and training the plants in a vegetable or flower garden, and the garden is one of the outdoor schools where her little ones gain their most useful instruction. The difference between plants, the variegation of colors, their relations to the air, the sunshine, the dew, the rain; the habits of plants, some erect, some creeping, some climbing, the seasons of flowering, fruitage, and seed, are impressed with ease upon the plastic mind of childhood.

From the garden it is but one step to the meadow and the forest. Here the boy and girl sees nature unaided by man working out similar processes on a grander scale. There is heroic force and valor in the trees and grasses, and the child is early brought into antagonism with these strong forms of wild nature, and learns that he and his parents live by subjugating or converting them to their use. This is the lesson of contention in carrying through a useful purpose. The native sward is to be overturned and a new growth implanted; bushes are to be torn up root and branch so that the cattle may have pasture; the trees must be hewn down and cut into beams and boards.

Thus, too, is learned the great lesson of labor. There is no rest for the mother. The stove, the broom, the needle, the hoe, and the axe are ever the familiar implements of her household husbandry. The cows and poultry are her protgs. Her brown arms and sunburned face are seen among the mowers and reapers. Endowed with the practical faculty for small things, she reaches into details which escape the blunter senses of the stronger sex. The necessities and contingencies of frontier life make her variously accomplished in the useful arts. She becomes a "jack at all trades," carding, spinning, weaving, cobbling shoes, fitting moccasins, mending harness, dressing leather, making clothes, serving as cook, dairy-maid, laundress, gardener, and nurse. From example and from precept the children learn the lesson of labor from the mother.

The girls of course remain longer than their brothers under her tutelage. Theirs is a lofty destiny—lofty because as wives and mothers they are to carry the shrine of civilization into the wilderness, and build upon the desert and waste places the structure of a new civil and social state. Serving as a duty and a pleasure is woman's vocation. The great German poet and philosopher has finely amplified this idea:

"Early let woman learn to serve, for that is her calling, For by serving alone she attains to ruling; To the well-deserved power which is hers in the household. The sister serves her brother while young; and serves her parents, And her life is still a continual going and coming, A carrying ever and bringing, a making and shaping for others. Well for her if she learns to think no road a foul one, To make the hours of the night the same as the hours of the day; To think no labor too trifling, and never too fine the needle; To forget herself altogether, and live in others alone. And lastly, as mother, in truth, she will need every one of the virtues."

A French traveler in the course of his wanderings through, the western wilds of our country, came to a single cabin in one of the remotest and most inaccessible of our mountain territories. The only inmates in that lonely home were a middle-aged woman and four girls, ranging from eight to fifteen. The father was a miner, who spent a large part of the time in digging or "prospecting" for precious ores, as yet with only moderate success. The matron did the work of both man and woman. The cabin was a museum of household mechanisms and implements. Independent of the clothier, the merchant, and the grocer, their dress was the furry covering of the mountain beasts; their tea was a decoction of herbs; their sugar was boiled from the sap of the maple; the necessaries of life were all of their own culture and manufacture. Yet, thanks to the unwearied toils of the good woman and her little help-meets, there was warmth, comfort, and abundance, for love and labor were inhabitants of those rocks.

The girls had already been taught all that their mother knew, and she had sent out to fight their own battle, three sons, strong, brave, and versed in border-lore.

It was my mother, said the matron, that taught me all that I know, forty years ago in the forests of Michigan, and I am trying to bring up my girls so that they shall know everything that their grandmother taught me. They could read, and write, and cypher. They were little farmers, and gardeners, and seamstresses, and housewives. Nor had their religious and moral training been neglected. The good Book lay well thumbed and dogeared on the kitchen shelf. The sound of the "church-going bell" had never been heard by those children, but every Sunday the mother gathered them about her, and they read together from the New Testament. "It is ten years," said the matron, "since I have seen a church. I remember the last time I visited San Francisco, awaking Sunday morning and hearing the sound of the bell which called us to meeting. It was sweeter than heavenly music to my ears, and I burst into tears." What a suggestion was that, pointing to the unsatisfied craving of that lonely heart for the consolation of the promises uttered by consecrated lips! Right and fitting it is that woman, God-beloved in old Jerusalem, that she, the last at the cross and the first at the sepulcher, though far from the Sabbath that smiles upon eastern homes, should keep alive in the hearts of her children the remembrance of the Saviour and of the Lord's day.

Rove wherever they may, the sons and daughters of the wilderness will find amid the stormiest lives a safe anchorage in the holy keeping of the Christian Sabbath, and in the word of God, for these are the best and surest legacies of a pious mother's precepts. A civilization in which the early lispings of childhood are of God and Christ, cannot become altogether corrupt and degenerate, for woman here is the depository and transmitter of religious faith.

From the earliest times to a comparatively recent period, a large proportion of the distinguished men of our country have necessarily passed their first years in remote settlements, if not on the extreme border of civilization. The lives of those men who have risen to eminence as generals, statesmen, professional men, and authors, and date their success from the lessons received from woman's lips in the early homes of their childhood, would fill volumes. We pass by the first generations of these pupils, and come to the men of that period from which to-day we date the birth of the Republic.

The heroic age of American statesmanship commenced in 1776. Of all those illustrious men who signed the immortal Declaration, or framed the Constitution of the United States, a considerable number passed their childhood and youth in secluded and remote settlements. They were the sons of "Women on the American Frontier." They drew in with their mother's milk the intellectual and moral traits, and gathered from their mother's lips those lessons which prepared them in after years to guide the councils of their country in the most trying period of its history.

Let us commence the list with the deathless name of Washington. Born in a secluded and primitive farm-house at Bridge's Creek, Virginia, he was left by the death of his father to the care and guardianship of his mother. "She," says his biographer, "proved herself worthy of the trust. Endowed with plain, direct good sense, thorough conscientiousness, and prompt decision, she governed her family strictly, but kindly, exacting deference while she inspired affection. George, being her eldest son, was thought to be her favorite, yet she never gave him undue preference, and the implicit deference exacted from him in childhood continued to be habitually observed by him to the day of her death. He inherited from her a high temper and a spirit of command, but her early precepts and example taught him to restrain and govern that temper, and to square his conduct on the exact principles of equity and justice. Tradition gives an interesting picture of the widow, with her little flock gathered round her, as was her wont, reading to them lessons of religion and morality out of some standard work. Her favorite volume was Sir Mathew Hale's Contemplations, moral and divine. The admirable maxims therein contained, for outward action as well as self government, sank deep into the mind of George, and doubtless had a great influence in forming his character. They certainly were exemplified in his conduct throughout life. His mother's manual, bearing his mother's name, Mary Washington, written with her own hand, was ever preserved by him with filial care, and may still be seen in the archives of Mount Vernon. A precious document! Let those who wish to know the moral foundation of his character, consult its pages."

Among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, the author of that immortal document; George Wythe, afterwards Chancellor of Virginia; Francis Hopkinson, the poet and patriot Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Huntington, Edward Rutledge, and many others, have left upon record testimonials of their great obligations to their mother's care and teachings.

In the second era of American statesmanship, a large number of those most eminent for public services were also born and nurtured on the frontier. A cursory examination of the biographies of those distinguished men will show how largely they were indebted to the early training which they received from their mothers.

Incidents drawn from the early life of the seventh President of the United States, will prove with striking clearness the lasting influence of a mother's teachings.

During one of the darkest periods of the Revolution, and after the massacre at Warsaw by the bloodthirsty Tarleton, when the British prison-pens in South Carolina were crowded with wounded captive patriots, an elderly woman, with the strongly marked physiognomy which characterizes the Scotch-Irish race, could have been seen moving among the hapless prisoners, relieving their wants and alleviating their sufferings. She had come the great distance, alone and on foot, through swamps and forests, and across rivers, from a border settlement, on this errand of compassion.

After her work of charity and mercy had been finished, she set out alone and on foot, as before, upon her journey home. She sped on, thinking doubtless of her sons, and most of all of the youngest, a bright and manly little fellow whom she had watched over and trained with all of a mother's care and tenderness. The way was long and difficult, the unbridged streams were cold, the forest was dark and tangled. Wandering from her course, weary and worn with her labors of love and pity, she sank down at last and died.

That woman who gave her life to her country and humanity was the mother of Andrew Jackson, and that youngest son, her especial pupil, was the seventh president of the United States. He had lost his father when an infant, and his early training devolved upon that patriot mother, from whom he also inherited some of those marked and high traits of character for which he was afterwards so conspicuous. She was an earnest and devoted Christian woman, and strove, like the mother of Washington, to glorify God as much in the rearing of her children as in the performance of any other duty. She taught Andrew the leading doctrines of the Bible, in the form of question and answer, from the Westminster catechism: and these lessons he never forgot. In a conversation with him some years since, says a writer, "General Jackson spoke of his mother in a manner that convinced me that she never ceased to exert a secret power over him, until his heart was brought into reconciliation with God." Just before his death, which occurred in June, 1855, he said to a clergyman, "My lamp is nearly out, and the last glimmer is come, I am ready to depart when called. The Bible is true. Upon that sacred volume I rest my hopes of eternal salvation, through the merits and blood of our blessed Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ."

If departed spirits, the saintly and ascended, are permitted to look from their high habitation, upon the scene of earth, with what holy transport must the mother of Andrew Jackson have beheld the death-bed triumph of her son. The lad whom she sent to an academy at the Warsaw meeting-house, hoping to fit him for the ministry, had become a man, had filled the highest elective office in the world, and was now an old man, able in his last earthly hour, by the grace of God attending his early pious instruction, to challenge death for his sting and to shout "victory" over his opening grave.

It is a faculty of the female mind to penetrate with singular facility into the true character of the young. Every intelligent mother quickly, and by intuition, discerns the native bent of her child and measures his endowments. Evidences of latent talent in any particular direction are scrutinized with maternal shrewdness, and encouraged by applause and caresses. The lonelier the cabin, the more secluded the settlement, the sharper seem to grow the mother's eyes, and the more profound this intuitive faculty. It is the mother who first discerns the native bent and endowments of her child, and she too is the quickest to encourage and draw them out. How many eminent and useful men whose childhood was passed in the outlying settlements have been able to trace their success to a mother's insight into their capabilities.

In one of the forest homes on the skirts of civilization in Pennsylvania, Benjamin West, the greatest historical painter of the last century, showed first to his mother's eyes the efforts of his infant genius. The picture of a smiling babe made on a summer's day, when the little painter was but a child of seven, caught his mother's delighted eyes, and she covered him with her kisses. Years after, when Benjamin West was the guest of kings and emperors, that immortal artist was wont to recall those electric caresses and say "my mother's kiss made me a painter."

Daniel Webster's childhood home was in a log-cabin on the banks of the Merrimac, in a sequestered portion of New Hampshire. Here he passed his boyhood and youth, and received from his admirable mother those lessons which formed his mind and character, and fitted him for that great part which he was to play in public life. She recognized the scope of his genius when she gave him the copy of the constitution on a pocket handkerchief. She pinched every household resource that he might go to Exeter Academy, and to Dartmouth College, as if she had had a prophetic vision that he would come to be called the defender of those institutions which his father fought to obtain. And when in after years he had grown gray in honors and usefulness, he was wont to refer with tears to the efforts and sacrifices of this mother who discerned his great capacity and was determined that he should enjoy the advantages of a college education.

It is the affectionate and noble ambition of many other pioneer mothers besides Mrs. Webster which has secured to their sons the benefits of a thorough academical training.

The next step from the home-school is the district-school. The cabin which shelters a single family is generally placed with shrewd eyes to its being the point around which a settlement shall grow up. Wood and water are contiguous: the soil is rich: not many seasons roll away before other cabins send up their smoke hard by: children multiply, for these matrons of the border are fecund: out of the common want rises the schoolhouse, built of logs, with its rude benches: here the school teacher is a woman—the grown-up daughter, or the maiden sister of the pioneer.

How many of our greatest men have learned their first rudiments from the lips of "school marms," in their primitive school-houses on the frontier!

Population increases by production and accession. There is soon a dearth of teachers; all along the frontier the cry is sent up to the east, come and teach us! Woman again comes to the front; the schools of the border settlements have been largely taught by the faithful and devoted female, missionaries in the cause of education from the east. These pioneer school mistresses bore the discomforts of remote western life patiently, and did their duties cheerfully. Most of them afterwards became wives and mothers, and have in both these relations done much towards building up the settlements where they made their homes. Others have enrolled their names among the missionary martyrs. The toils, hardships, and privations incident to a newly settled country have often proved too heavy for the delicate frames reared amid the comforts and luxuries of eastern homes, and they have fallen victims to their noble ambition, giving their lives to the cause they sought to promote.

One of these martyrs was Miss M. She was one of that band of lady-teachers, numbering several hundred who, nearly thirty years ago, went out to the then far west under the auspices of Governor Slade and Miss Catharine Beecher, to supply the crying need of teachers which then existed in that section of our country.

This, it should be remembered, was before railroads had brought that region within easy access from the east. That wild, primeval garden had been, as yet, redeemed from nature only in plots and patches. On the boundless prairies of Illinois the cabins of the settlers were like solitary vessels moored in a waste of waters, and between them rolled in green billows, under the wind, the tall, coarse grass. The settlers themselves were of the most adventurous and often of the roughest class. Society presented to the cultured eye a rude and almost barbarous aspect.

Man, while grappling, almost unaided, with untamed nature, and seeking to subdue her, seems to gravitate away from civilization and approach his primitive state. Everything is taken in the rough; the arts and the graces of a more settled condition of society are cultivated but little, because they are non-essentials. The physical qualities are prized more than mental culture, and the sentiments and sensibilities are in abeyance during the reign of the more robust emotions.

During the onset which the pioneer makes upon the wilderness he and his entire family bear the rugged impress which such a life stamps upon them. The wife, in the practice of the sterner virtues of courage, self-denial, and fortitude, may become hardened against the access of the quick sensibilities and tender emotions of her more delicately reared sisters. The children, bright-eyed, strong, and nimble, run like squirrels through the woods, and leap like fawns on the plain. The mother's tutelage has done much, but more remains to be done in the schooling to be had from books. After the first victory has been won over the forest and the soil, and the pioneer reposes for a season upon his laurels, in comparative ease, he discerns the needs of his flock, and craves the offices of one who can supply the place of the weary mother in schooling the children.

Out of the void that exists the appliances of education must be created; the nurslings of the plain must be brought together and taught to subject themselves to the regular discipline of the district school; and who but woman can best supply such a discipline!

Such was the condition of frontier society and education when Miss M. came to Illinois. Her immediate field of labor was a wide prairie, over which were thinly scattered the cabins of the pioneer families. There were no books, no school house, no antecedent knowledge of what was needed. But under the advice and suggestions of this intelligent young lady every want was, in a measure, supplied. A rough structure, with logs for seats, and planks for benches, was soon prepared, books provided, and the children gathered together into the comfortless room, where Miss M. made her first essay as a preceptor of the little pioneers.

The children were like wild things caught and confined in a cage. Their restlessness was a severe tax to the patience of the delicate girl. The long walk to and from the school room in all weathers, through the snows of winter, the mud of spring, and against the blast which sweeps those plains, formed no small part of her labor. Luxuries and even comforts were denied her. They gave her the best they had, but that was poor enough. Her chamber was an unplastered loft; her bed a shakedown of dried grass. The moonbeams showed her the crevices where the rain trickled in, and the snow fringed her coverlid. Her fare was of the coarsest, and her social intercourse, to her sensitive nature, was almost forbidding.

But she never swerved from the course she had marked out, nor shrank from the labors and duties incident to her mission. Her body, extremely fragile, was the tenement of an intellect of premature activity and grasp, a native delicacy, sensibility, and great moral force. She was a born missionary, and in the difficult and trying career which she had chosen, she showed courage, self-denial, tenacity of purpose, which, combined with a sweetness of disposition, soon made her beloved by her scholars and enabled her to soften their wildness, smooth their rudeness, and impress upon their minds the lessons of knowledge which it was her study to impart.

In sunshine or storm her presence was never wanting at her post of duty. On the dark mornings of winter she could have been seen convoying her little protgs through the driving sleet, or the snow, or slush, and those rough but not unkindly parents scarcely dreamed that her life was waning. The vivid carnation of her cheeks was not painted by the frosty air, nor by the scorching heat of the iron box which warmed her little charges as they gathered beneath the ethereal splendors of her eye in the school room. The destroyer had set his seal upon her, but her frail body was swayed and animated by the spirit whose energies even mortal disease could not subdue.

The discovery of the sacrifice was too late, though, all that rude kindness and unlearned thoughtfulness could do was lavished upon her in those few days that remained to her. Months of exposure, hardship, solitude of the soul, and intense ambition in her noble mission had done their work, and before the light of the tenth day after she was driven to her couch, had faded, surrounded by a score of her pupils, she passed away, and was numbered in the army of missionary heroines and martyrs.

Those brave labors and that noble life was not for nought. The lessons taught those pupils, the high example set before them, and the life expended for their sake were not lost or forgotten. Some of those little scholars have grown to be good and useful men and women, and are now repeating, in other schools, farther towards the setting sun, the lessons and example of devotion which they learned from the teacher who gave her life that they might have knowledge.

The place which woman, as an educator, now fills, and so long has filled upon the frontier, is not bounded, however, by the home-school, nor by the district school, in both of which she is the teacher of the young. She is the educator of the man. She moulds and guides society.

The home where she rules is the center and focus from which wells out an influence as light wells out from the sun. The glow of the fireside where the mother sits, is a beacon whose light stretches far out to guide and guard.

The word "home," as used among the old races of Northern Europe, contains in its true signification something mystic and religious. The female patriarch of the household was regarded with superstitious veneration. Her sayings were wise and good, and the warrior sat at her feet on the eve of battle and gathered from her as from an oracle, the confidence and courage which nerved him for the fight; and today the picture of an aged mother sitting by the hearth, and the recollection of her counsels, is a source of comfort and strength to many a son who is far away fighting the battle of life. The home and mother is the polar-star of absent sons and daughters. She who sat by the cradled bed of childhood, "the first, the last, the faithfulest of friends," she, the guardian of infancy, is the loving and never to be forgotten guide of riper years. As far as thought can run upon this earthly sphere, or memory fondly send back its gaze, so far can the influence of a mother reach to cheer, to sustain, to elevate, and to keep the mind and heart from swerving away from the true and the right.

One who received his early training from a mother's lips in a frontier State, and afterward attained to wealth and influence in one of our mountain republics, lately told the writer that he kept the picture of his mother hanging up in his chamber, where it was the last object which his eyes lighted on before retiring, and the first upon rising; and whenever he was about to adopt any new course, or commence any new enterprise into which the question of right or wrong entered, he always asked himself, "what will my mother say if I do thus and thus?" That mother's influence was upon him though a thousand miles away from her, and the thought of her in the crises of his life was the load-star of his strong heart and mind.