Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  In 1881, at a meeting of the Old Settlers’ Association, William H. Herndon, Abraham Lincoln’s law partner in Springfield, delivered an address in which there were frequent bursts of eloquence such as this: “The wild animals that preceded the Indians are gone, the Indian treading closely on their heels. The red man has gone. The pioneer, the type of him, is gone, gone with the Indian, the bear, and the beaver, the buffalo and the deer. They all go with the same general wave, and are thrown high on the beach of the wilderness, by the deep wide sea of our civilization. He that trampled on the heels of the red man, with his wife and children, pony and dog, are gone, leaving no trace behind.… The trapper, bee and beaver hunter is gone—all are gone.”

  It is the bee hunter—that is, the hunter and trapper who always had one eye out for a bee tree, from which to gather the wild honey the frontier people used as a substitute for sugar—that I would like to consider at this point. Herndon’s idea of literary style was to say everything in three different ways, and since I don’t share this pleasure in prolixity I have cut his sentences where cutting seemed to me to do no harm to the sense. The bee hunter “is … a cadaverous, sallow, sunburnt, shaggy-haired man … his nose is … keen … his eyes … are sharp and inquisitive … he is all bone and sinew, hardly any muscle … He wears a short linsey-woolsey hunting shirt … buckled tightly about his body. His moccasins are made of the very best heavy buck. His … rifle is on his shoulder or stands by his side, his chin gracefully resting on his hand, which covers the muzzle of the gun. The … crop-eared, shaved mane and bobtailed pony browses around, living where the hare, the deer, mule or hardy mountain goat can live. It makes no difference where night or storm overtakes him … He sleeps on his rifle for pillow, his right hand awake on the long … hunting knife in the girdle, carved over and over with game and deer. The will in the hand is awake. Such is the conscious will on the nerve and muscle of the hand, amid danger of a night, placed there to watch and ward while the general soul is asleep, that it springs to defense long before the mind is fully conscious of the facts. How grand and mysterious is mind!… This man, his trusty long rifle, his two dogs—one to fight and one to scent the trail … are equal to all emergencies. As for himself, his snores … testify to the soul’s conscious security … he is a fatalist and says ‘what is to be will be.’ He never tires … He is swifter than the Indian, is stronger, is as long-winded, and has more brains … He is … uneasy … in the village where he goes twice a year to exchange his furs for whiskey, tobacco, flints, and lead. He dreads … our civilization. Overtake the man, catch him, and try to hold a conversation with him, if you can … His words are words of one syllable, sharp nouns and active verbs mostly. He scarcely ever uses adjectives, and always replies to questions asked him—‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘I will,’ ‘I won’t.’ Ask him where he is from, and his answer is ‘Blue Ridge,’ ‘Cumberland,’ ‘Bear Creek.’ Ask him where he kills his game, or gets his furs, and his answer ever is—‘Illinois,’ ‘Sangamon,’ ‘Salt Creek.’ Ask him where he is going—‘Plains,’ ‘Forest,’ ‘Home,’ is his unvarying answer. See him in the wilds, as I have seen him, strike up with his left hand’s forefinger the loose rim of his old home-made hat, that hangs like a rag over his eyes, impeding his sight and perfect vision, peering keenly into the distance for fur or game, Indian or deer. See him—”

  But enough is enough. The Old Settlers had nothing more on their minds that afternoon than to listen to oratory, which of necessity is packed with adjectives and seldom concise. The important thing is that the description is not taken from Fenimore Cooper but from life, and in the absence of any other, I offer it as a portrait of my great-great-great-grandfather, William Higgins. He was a Kentuckian, and forty-five years old when he settled on the south bank of the Sangamon River. The County History says that before he completed his cabin he crossed to the north side of the river, with his wife. “They were belated, and spent one night in the river bottom, near the mouth of Fancy Creek. A few days later, Mr. Higgins went to the north side alone, found five bee trees, and killed a panther which measured nine feet from tip to tip. He went over soon after, accompanied by his wife and two daughters, one of whom is now the wife of David England. These three are believed to have been the first white women who ever crossed to the north of the river.”

  Stephen England and his two sons-in-law turned up so soon after the encounter with the panther that they must have been told about it. They were the first people he could tell about it, except his wife and daughters, and it wouldn’t have been human not to. I see all four men admiring the hide of this animal, and I see Stephen England fidgeting and biding his time, for he has something on his mind: He must talk to William Higgins about the Christian Church and the sufficiency of the Scriptures as a rule of faith and of life.

  Apparently he did not convert him, for William Higgins’s name is nowhere listed as belonging with the faithful. Like the fool in King Lear, he is never mentioned again by anybody, and for that reason I keep wondering about him.

  When my daughter Kate was four or five years old, she dreamed that she was pursued by a snake crying “Ancestors! Ancestors!”

  From the faraway past I can hear my grandmother saying “Grandpaw England,” meaning David, the preacher’s son. And I never heard her speak of him in such a way as to suggest that he might once have been very different from his picture, which was that of an old man in his seventies. David England was fourteen years old when he made that winter journey with his father and his sisters’ husbands. When they came back with the women and children, in the heavy wagons, what he saw was not ice fields and snow but seas of grass and wildflowers.

  In 1868, and again in 1869 and 1870, by which time David England was the oldest citizen of Fancy Creek Township, he addressed the annual meeting of the Old Settlers’ Association. He said that he remembered seeing Indians bury their dead by putting them in troughs and suspending them in trees; also by building pens around them and leaving the bodies to decay. He once worked, reaping, three days and got three bushels of wheat in payment. When they first came to this country the price of salt was six dollars a bushel and pork was five dollars to six dollars per hundred pounds but shortly after that would not bring a fourth as much, for there was no market. The nearest mill was about four miles from St. Louis. Being a preacher’s son was not the inhibiting thing it later became, because the preacher was also a farmer and hunter. Foxes, raccoons, wildcats, and great herds of deer abounded. His father was a good gunner and they had plenty to eat. Men who lived within six to ten miles were considered neighbors. If a family was sick with the ague, they were cared for. New settlers were supplied with seed corn and wheat. They had wild honey and an abundance of fresh fish for the taking.

  David England was not quite twenty when his father died. That same year he married William Higgins’ daughter Margaret. They had fourteen children. He was a deacon of the Christian Church, and then an elder, and he continued to live on the land his father had chosen. He could hardly have done better. Speaking of Fancy Creek Township, The History of Sangamon County says, “The soil is deep black loam, especially along the bank of the Sangamon River. The surface of the country is generally rolling, and timber in large quantities can be found along the banks of the streams.” It was one of the best countries in the world until 1831, David England said. Prior to that time they raised plenty of cotton without cultivation—all they wanted. But after the deep snow, which all the old men remembered, there was a change in the climate and it was never the same again.

  It was not merely the depth of the snow but also the defenseless condition of the land it fell on. There is a firsthand account of this disaster in The History of Sangamon County: “The autumn of 1830 was wet and the weather prevailingly mild until the close of December. Christmas Eve the snow began to fall. That night it fell about a foot deep. It found the earth soft, grass green, and some green peach leaves on the trees. The day was mild. The snow contributed greatly to the amusement of the boys, an
d called for the hilarity of all who had sleighs or sleds, or who could rig a ‘jumper’ with a store-box or a crate. Bells of any description, if not in the cutter, were hung on the horses by ropes or twine.… As the snow fell night after night, serious preparations were made by increasing the size and strength of the sleighs, and doubling teams, to break the way to mill and woods, for household bread, fuel, corn and provender. Mr. Enos, one of the wealthiest men of the place, and Receiver of the Public Moneys, turned out with a great sled and two yoke of oxen, to haul wood to the destitute. With wolf-skin cap on head, with Yankee frock, buttoned up close to the neck behind, reaching below his knees, belted over a great coat beneath, with legging protectors and ox-goad in his hand, he rolled up the bodies and limbs of trees, some of them more than fifty feet long, to the door of the writer, for which he and his family shall receive our thanks while life shall last. The same kind act he did to many others. His timber was nearest to the town. Woodmen felled the trees, rolled them on the sled, and the benevolent veteran left them at our doors.

  “Snow succeeded snow, interchanged with sleet and fine hail, which glazed and hardened the surface. Nine long weeks witnessed this coming deep snow, until in all these parts its depths averaged from four to five feet.… The thermometer ranged close to zero; a few times it went twenty below, and the water dropped from the eaves only two days, so intense was the continuous cold. When the snow fell there was no frost in the ground; the sap of the trees had not been forced by the cold to the roots. The consequence was that the peach trees were invariably killed; apple trees and nurseries mostly shared the same fate. The summer before I had seen wagon loads of peaches in some orchards. Such a sight has never greeted our eyes since, in these parts.

  “Great hardships were endured that winter by men and beasts. When the snow came it found most of the corn standing on the stalks. The fall had been so warm and wet that the farmers had better reason than common to indulge the careless habit of leaving their corn in the field, to be gathered in winter, when they wanted it. The snow became so deep, the cold so intense, the crust at times so hard, and the people were so unprepared for such an extreme season, that it became almost impossible in many parts of the country to obtain bread for family use, though amid stacks of wheat and fields of corn.

  “Hundreds of hogs and fowls perished. Horses and cattle were in many instances turned out into the corn fields. Prairie chickens, whose habit is to roost on the ground, perished that winter in such number that we feared the race of this fine bird would become extinct. When their time of roost come they would light upon the snow, if the crust would bear them; or if its bosom was soft, plunge into it, and spend the night as on the earth; but if a heavy fall of snow come that night, especially as it were coated with a crust of ice, as often happened, the poor imprisoned things were locked in and thousands and thousands perished.”

  David England died in his sleep, in his eighty-fourth year. His oldest daughter, Louisa England, was, as I have said, my Grandmother Maxwell’s mother, and she died the year I was born, so all this is not as far away as it seems.

  Charles Turley had a son Charles, and he married Louisa England, in 1842. When he was approaching forty, restlessness overtook him as it had his father and grandfather, and he moved a few miles south and settled near the brand-new village of Williamsville, which a hundred and fifteen years later is still only a cluster of houses. He was elected deacon of the Williamsville Christian Church in 1866—the year that my Grandfather Maxwell walked into his front yard, dusty and footsore, and asked for a drink of water.

  I have told that story as it was told to me, but I somewhat mistrust it. What I think is that there is something missing—a detail left out because it could be taken for granted. When I was a small child and stayed overnight at my Aunt Maybel’s house, I slept with my grandmother, and after I was too old for that I slept in a little room across the hall from her, watched over by enlarged sepia photographs of grim-faced, God-fearing elderly men and women—Turleys and Englands. In their youth they had looked on the earthly paradise, but this experience had been overlaid by a life of hard work, and innumerable preachers had told them to expect no ease or comfort here but to look for it in the Life Beyond. There was one old man with a grey beard and no collar or tie to detract from the importance of his collar button, and a stare so accusing that even in the dark I used to have to avert my eyes from his face in order to go to sleep.

  Nobody ever said what my grandfather looked like when he walked into the farmyard, but I have an idea that he was not exactly prepossessing. After weeks and weeks under the open sky, he must have been as dark as an Indian. He would have lost a good deal of weight. Every time he got caught in a rainstorm his clothes must have shrunk a little more. He must have washed in streams, with a cake of soap that got smaller and smaller, no matter how sparingly he used it. When it was gone, he used sand from the river bottom, and beat his shirt on a stump as he had seen the women do. It was most likely in rags. Somewhere along the line he was bound to have picked up body lice and fleas.

  Suppose this scarecrow had said he was a Free Will Baptist or a Cumberland Presbyterian. I would not at all put it past the fierce old man (who was only forty-four when this happened) to have asked him if he’d had all the water he wanted and let him go on his way. Instead, what I suspect happened is that my grandfather said, “Sir, I am a member of the Christian Church,” and, rejoicing (for it could only be the work of Providence), my Great-grandfather Turley led the gaunt, blue-eyed young stranger, fleas and all, into his house.

  * Nathaniel S. Haynes: History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois (Cincinnati, 1915).

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  My Grandmother Maxwell believed that there was only the Christian Church; every other religion was a mistake, based on total misunderstanding of the Bible and of Jesus’ intention for mankind. She had lost sight of—if she ever knew—the fact that in the beginning the church she belonged to did not think of itself as a separate religion but a reformation of the Presbyterian Church. The adherents at first called themselves and were called “Reformers.” Later on, they were called “The Disciples of Christ,” and that is precisely what they thought of themselves as being. Uppermost in their minds at all times was the intention to achieve the impossible—to bridge the centuries and through the purity and propriety of their religious devotion become not merely like but spiritually indistinguishable from Simon who was called Peter, and Andrew his brother, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip, and Bartholomew, Thomas, and Matthew the publican, James the son of Alpheus, Lebbeus, whose surname was Thaddeus, and Simon the Canaanite.

  That is to say, they took the New Testament literally.

  The events of the Old Testament—Abraham entertaining the angels, Joseph in Egypt, Moses smiting the rock, the wisdom and magnificence of Solomon—were at a certain distance; what happened in the New Testament was like something that they had heard about, and that they would be adding to, by their own lives.

  Among the people who detested them, the followers of this movement were usually referred to as Campbellites.

  Thomas Campbell was a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian minister who so long as he remained in Ireland did not publicly depart in any way from orthodox belief; after six months in America he behaved with such implacable independence of spirit that informal charges were brought against him for heretical teachings, and he ended up wholly outside his own church. He was born in the North of Ireland, in County Down, in 1763. His father had been a soldier in the British Army and fought on the Plains of Abraham, and it was believed in the family that General Wolfe died in his arms. If so, he died in the arms of an eccentric and irascible man; once when Thomas Campbell was conducting family prayers at home, he prayed longer than the old man’s rheumatism allowed for, and when Archibald Campbell was at last able to get up from his kneeling position, he took his cane and, to the surprise and scandal of all who were present, began to lambaste his son with it.

  He had been a Roman Ca
tholic and became an Anglican when he married. In his early youth Thomas Campbell was drawn to the Presbyterians, and attended their meetings, and this inevitably led him to feel concern for his salvation. He prayed diligently and used every means that was recommended to him in order to produce the evidence of an “effectual calling,” and for this evidence he waited several years. One day, walking in a field, he “felt a divine peace suddenly diffuse itself throughout his soul.”

  The Scottish Presbyterian Church had not only divisions but subdivisions, and Thomas Campbell became an Old-Light, Anti-Burgher, Seceder Presbyterian—the names are enough to make your head swim until you discover that they do not represent theological distinctions but have to do with the relations of church and state.*

  Most of our personal knowledge of Thomas Campbell comes from the official biography† of his son, Alexander Campbell, and Alexander Campbell’s Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell. In the literature of autobiography there have been instances of a son subjecting his father’s character to a cold or judicious scrutiny, but not when they were conducting a religious movement together. And the official biographer, Robert Richardson, was a pious and goodhearted man who was awed by the story he had to tell. His view of Thomas Campbell is not in all respects convincing, and because of the way Thomas Campbell’s life turned out, it matters very much that one come to some sort of satisfactory conclusion about what kind of man he was. Richardson says that he was handsome, with a square, massive forehead, a ruddy complexion, and soft grey eyes full of intelligence. His sermons were long but livened by homely illustrations and given weight and authority by his evident earnestness. From the moment of his conversion he felt that he had been called to be a minister. He tried to talk to his father about this, and his father changed the subject. It was a well-to-do Presbyterian of the neighborhood who paid for his three years at the University of Glasgow and five annual sessions at a Scottish theological seminary. Richardson says that Thomas Campbell had an unusually sweet and sociable nature, with a ready flow of conversation, and that he was also given to introspection and self-examination. The nature of his self-examination is suggested by this passage from his diary for the year 1800—at which time he was thirty-seven years old and conducting an academy for gentlemen’s sons in the town of Rich Hill, thirty miles southwest of Belfast, and preaching in a country church. “Very dull and heavy in prayer, both in secret and public. The prevalent carnality of the last week has prevailed much this day.… I have reason to bless God I have not felt so much concern for public approbation, nor such strong emotions of self-conceit as formerly; but alas! what weakness and timidity in publicly reproving the violation of the holy Sabbath.”