Part 6

estry, they had fewer follies to explain away than either of the others. They may have fallen on their knees, but they did not fall on the aborigines. They were for the most part friendly, kind and full of the right spirit--the spirit of helpfulness. At Castle Garden, one man gave Jamie an orange and another man gave him a kick. He never forgot either, and would undoubtedly have paid both parties back, if he had met them in later life. There was a trip to Albany on a steamboat, the first our friends had ever seen. It burned wood, and stopped every few miles for fuel. They ate brown bread and oatmeal, and at New York bought some smoked bear's meat and venison. At Albany an Indian sold them sassafras for tea, also some dried blackberries--it was a regular feast. At Albany there was a wonderful invention, a railroad. The coaches ran up the hill without horses or an engine, and the father explained that it wasn't a miracle either. A long rope ran around a big wheel at the top of the hill, and there was a car that ran down the hill as another one ran up. The railroad extended to Schenectady--sixteen miles away--and the trip was made in less than half a day if the weather was good. There they transferred to a canal-boat. They had no money to pay for a stateroom, and so camped on deck--it was lots of fun. Jamie then and there decided that some day he would be the captain of a fast packet on a raging canal. His fond hope was never realized. After the cooped-up quarters on the ocean the smoothness and freedom of the Erie Canal were heavenly. They saw birds and squirrels, and once caught a glimpse of a wolf. At Montezuma they changed canal-boats, because the craft they were on went through to Buffalo, and they wished to go to Geneva, where John, Andrew and Jane were getting rich. Two miles out of Geneva the boat slowed up, a plank was run out and all went ashore. John worked for a farmer a mile away. They found him. And in the dusty road another prayer-meeting was held when everybody kneeled and thanked God that the long journey was ended. Paterfamilias had predicted they would never arrive, but he was wrong. The next day they saw Andrew and Jane, and tears of joy were rained down everybody's back. Now for the first time they had plenty to eat--meat every meal, potatoes, onions and corn on the ear. There is no corn in Scotland, and Jamie thought that corn on the ear was merely a new way of cooking beans. He cleaned off the cob and then sent the stick back to have it refilled. America was a wonderful country, and Brother John had not really told half the truth about it. Jamie got a job at fifty cents a week with board. Fifty cents was a great deal more than half a dollar--I guess so! He would have been paid more only the farmer said he was a greenhorn and couldn't speak English. Jamie inwardly resented and denied both accusations, but kept silent for fear he might lose his job. His only sorrow was that he could see his mother only once a week. His chief care was as to what he should do with his money. * * * * * In the Fall of Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six, there were several Scotch families going from Geneva to the "Far West"--that is to say, Indiana. The Oliver family was induced to go, too, because in Indiana the Government was giving farms to any one who would live on them and hold them down. They settled first in Lagrange County, and later moved to Mishawaka, Saint Joseph County, where Andrew Oliver had taken up his abode. Mishawaka was a thriving little city, made so largely by the fact that iron-ore--bog-iron--was being found thereabouts. The town was on the Saint Joseph River, right on the line of transportation, and boats were poled down and up, clear to Lake Michigan. It was much easier and cheaper to pole a boat than to drive a wagon through the woods and across the muddy prairies. Mishawaka was going to be a great city--everybody said so. There was a good log schoolhouse at Mishawaka, kept by a worthy man by the name of Merrifield, who knew how to use the birch. Here James went to school for just one Winter--that was his entire schooling, although he was a student and a learner to the day of his death. The elder Oliver fell sick of chills and fever. He sort of languished for the hills of bonny Scotland. He could not adapt himself to pioneer life, and in the Fall of Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven, he died. This was the end of a school education for James--he had to go to work earning money. He became the little father of the family, which James J. Hill says is the luckiest thing that can happen to a boy. He hired out for six dollars a month, and at the end of every month took five dollars home to his mother. Jamie was fourteen, and could do a man's work at almost anything. "He has a man's appetite at least," said the farmer's wife, for he took dinner with the man he worked for. He soon proved he could do a man's work, too. This man had a pole-boat on the river, and James was given a chance to try his seamanship. He might have settled down for life as a poleman, but he saw little chance for promotion, and he wanted to work at something that would fit him for a better job. Then the worst about life on the river was that each poleman was paid a portion of his wages in whisky, and the rivermen seemed intent on drinking the stills dry. James had not only a strong desire to be decent, but liked also to be with decent people. Now, in Mishawaka there were some very fine folks--the family of Joseph Doty, for instance. The Dotys lived in a two-story house and had a picket fence. James had dug a ditch for Mr. Doty, and split out shingles for a roof for the Doty barn. At such times he got his dinner at Doty's, for it was the rule then that you always had to feed your help, no matter who they were, just as you feed the threshers and harvesters and silo-men now. About this time, James began to put bear's grease on his unruly shock of yellow hair, and tried to part it and bring it down in a nice smooth pat on the side. That's a sure sign! The few who noticed the change said it was all on account of Susan Doty. Once when Susan passed the johnnycake to James, he emptied the whole plate in his lap, to his eternal shame and the joy of the whole town, which soon heard of it through a talkative hired man who was present and laughed uproariously--as hired men are apt to do. James once heard Susan say that she didn't like rivermen, and that is probably the reason James quit the river, but he didn't tell her so--not then at least. He got a job in the iron-mill and learned to smelt iron, and he became a pretty good molder, too. Then the hard times came on, and the iron-mill shut down. But there was a cooper's shop in town, and James was already very handy with a drawshave in getting out staves. Most of the men worked by the day, but he asked to work by the piece. They humored him, and he made over two dollars a day. Joseph Doty was a subscriber to "Gleason's Pictorial" and "Godey's Lady's Book." They also had bound copies of "Poor Richard's Almanac" and "The Spectator," with nearly forty other books. James Oliver read them all--with Susan's help. Then something terrible happened! The young folks suddenly discovered that they were very much in love with each other. The Doty family saw it too, and disapproved. The Dotys were English, but as the family had been in America for a century, that made a big difference. Susan was the handsomest and smartest girl in town--everybody said so. She seemed much older than James Oliver, but the fact was they were of the same age. The Doty family objected to the match, but Doty the Elder one day dropped a hint that if that young Oliver owned a house to take his wife to, he might consider the matter. The news reached Oliver. He knew of a man who wanted to sell his house, as he was going to move to a town called Fort Dearborn--now known as Chicago--which had recently been incorporated and had nearly a thousand inhabitants. The house was a well-built cottage--not very large, but big enough for two. It was a slab house, with a mud chimney and a nice floor of pounded blue clay. It had two rooms, a cupboard across the corner, a loft to store things in, and forty wooden pegs to hang things on. Oliver offered the man eighteen dollars for the mansion, cash down. The offer was accepted, the money paid and the receipt was duly shown to Joseph Doty, Esquire. And so James and Susan were married, on May Thirtieth, Eighteen Hundred Forty-four, and all Mishawaka gave them a "shower." To say that they lived happily ever afterward would be trite, but also it would be true. * * * * * James Oliver was thirty-two years old before he really struck his pace. He had worked at the cooper's trade, at molding and at farming. His eighteen-dollar house at Mishawaka had transformed itself into one worth a thousand, fully paid for. The God's half-acre had become a quarter-section. His wife had beauty and competence--two things which do not always go together. She was industrious, economical, intelligent and ambitious. She was a helpmeet in all that the word implies. The man whose heart is at rest is the only one who can win. Jealousy gnaws. Doubt disrupts. But love and faith mean sanity, strength, usefulness and length of days. The man who succeeds is the one who is helped by a good woman. Two children had come to them. These were Joseph D. and Josephine. Napoleon was always a hero to James Oliver--his courage, initiative and welling sense of power, more than his actual deeds, were the attraction. The Empress Josephine was a better woman than Napoleon was a man, contended Susan. Susan was right and James acknowledged it, so the girl baby was named Josephine. The boy was named Joseph, in honor of his grandfather Doty, who had passed away, but who, before his passing, had come to see that Nature was nearer right than he had been. Children should exercise great care in the selection of their parents. Very, very few children are ever dowered with a love that makes for strength of head, hand and heart, as were these. In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five, James Oliver was over at South Bend, a town that had started up a few miles down the river from Mishawaka, and accidentally met a man who wanted to sell his one-fourth interest in a foundry. He would sell at absolutely inventory value. They made an inventory and the one-fourth came to just eighty-eight dollars and ninety-six cents. Oliver had a hundred dollars in his pocket, and paid the man at once. Cast-iron plows formed one item of this little foundry's work. Oliver, being a farmer, knew plows--and he knew that there was not a good plow in the world. Where others saw and accepted, he rebelled. He insisted that an approximately perfect plow could be made. He realized that a good plow should stay in the ground without wearing out the man at the handles. The man who hasn't been jerked up astride of the plow-handles or been flung into the furrow by a balky plow has never had his vocabulary tested. Oliver had a theory that the plow should be as light in weight as was consistent with endurance and good work, and that a moldboard should scour, so as to turn the soil with a singing sound; then the share, or cutting edge, must be made separate from the moldboard, so as to be easily and cheaply replaced. A plow could be made that needn't be fought to keep it furrow-wise. Without tiring the reader with mechanical details, let the fact be stated that after twelve years of experimenting--planning, dreaming, thinking, working, striving, often perplexed, disappointed and ridiculed--James Oliver perfected his Chilled Plow. He had a moldboard nearly as br