IV
FOX CREEK
From the Commonplace Book:
Fox Creek
The charge has been persistently made that John Brown and his men wantonly and fiendishly mutilated the dead bodies of the persons killed [near Osawatomie]. This charge has been made by the bitter personal enemies of Brown. It will be remembered that the men were killed with short, heavy swords at night. The victims evidently tried to ward off the blows with their hands and arms, and as they were wholly unprotected, the swords severed fingers, hands, and possibly arms. No blow was struck after death came to the misguided men. This is expressly stated by [Brown’s cohort James] Townsley. In some of the works prepared for the purpose of defaming the memory of John Brown, the last statement of Townsley is published at length, but that portion of it which says the bodies were not intentionally mutilated and were not struck after death, is omitted, as is also that portion saying that the killing was a benefit to the Free-State cause.
—William E. Connelley,
John Brown (1900)
In face and form [Salmon] Chase was a model for president of the United States. Six feet in height, broad-shouldered and well built, with a finely shaped head, a handsome face, and a courtly manner, he looked a leader of men. And fine qualities were behind this imposing front. Methodical, hard-working, and efficient, he quickly rose to prominence. . . . But if the years brought a considerable measure of achievement, they also disclosed defects of mind and character. As Chase rose to prominence a certainty of opinion, a touch of pomposity, and a tendency to sanctimonious smugness became more and more pronounced. When confronted by the necessity of making great decisions he sometimes showed a distressing tendency to straddle. He lacked a sense of humor, and he lacked charisma. Despite his desire to serve his country and mankind, he had no appeal to the hearts of men.
—Glyndon G. Van Deusen,
Encyclopedia of American Biography (1974)
Chase is about one-and-a-half times bigger than any other man I ever knew.
—Abraham Lincoln,
A remark (1863)
Reading [Chase’s] diaries we find how he chided himself on his sinfulness; how at times he declined communion from self-distrust; how he was equally disturbed if at other times his unworthiness failed to oppress him; how he repeated psalms while bathing or dressing.
—James Garfield Randall,
Dictionary of American Biography (1929)
And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of almighty God.
—Salmon Portland Chase,
The Emancipation Proclamation (1862)
The Democracy is not democratic enough yet.
—Salmon Portland Chase,
Chase Papers, Library of Congress (1868)
The underlying idea of [Chase’s] public life was to bring the law up to the moral standards of the country, and to make both moral standards and law apply to black men as well as to white men.
—Albert Bushnell Hart,
Salmon Portland Chase (1899)
“Yer see, Andy, its bobservation makes all de difference in niggers. Didn’t I see which way the wind blew dis yer mornin’? Didn’t I see what Missis wanted, though she never let on I Dat ar’s bobservation, Andy. I ’spects it’s what you may call a faculty. Faculties is different in different peoples, but cultivation of ’em goes a great way.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851)
Charles Aldrich, the first colored man to come to Chase County . . . was of the type of the old southern Negro slave. He was always polite and respectful in his manner and retiring in his disposition. . . . Charley [arrived in] Cottonwood Falls in 1866 and spent almost all of the rest of his life at this place. He was for many years in the service of J. W. McWilliams as stable boy, houseman, valet, and general chore boy. It was often said of him that he was as faithful to his master as was Mr. McWilliams’ dog, which was a real tribute.
—Obituary,
Chase County Leader (1923)
Most residents spend their lives without ever being affected by a tornado—or ever observing one.
—F. C. Bates,
“Tornadoes in the Central United States” (1962)
[The Coyote to the Young Indian Hunter:] Whenever you take a beast’s body, give something in return. How can a man expect much without paying something? If you do not give creatures the wherewithal of changing being, how can you expect them to relish your arrows! So, whenever you slay a game creature, offer him and his like prayer-plumes—then they will feed you with their own flesh and clothe you with their own skins.
—F. H. Cushing,
Zuñi Breadstuff (1920)
The [coyote or prairie] wolf is no moralist, only a committee of ways and means to get what himself wants.
This wolf bark is like the laughter of a child maniac, repetitional, meaningless, remorseless, a laughter without joy in or behind it. The cry is a wandering voice of the prairie levels; disappearing and reappearing among the billows of a rolling prairie, but is mirthless, insistent, uncanny.
The wolf is careless of any man; and his lope, than which nothing could be less routine or more care free, less stilted, less an acquisition, or more an extemporaneous procedure, is the heedlessness of the prairies, the needlessness of wings, the playing with the ground as if it were a jest, with waggish head thrown over the shoulder as to insult your laggard speed. The wolf-leap is the prairie in cruel motion, not creeping like feline hypocrisy, but the vagabond swing of a wild, elastic delight in the unfenced wonder of the prairie. The wolf is a prairie child.
—William A. Quayle,
The Prairie and the Sea (1905)
The prairie wolf . . . is a sneaking, cowardly, little wretch, of a dull or dirty white color, much resembling a small, short-bodied dog set up on pretty long legs. . . . His usual provender is the carcass—no matter how putrid—of any dead buffalo, mule, or ox that he may find exposed on the prairies. He is a paltry creature.
—Horace Greeley,
An Overland Journey (1859)
The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck, and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely!—so scrawny, and nbby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sagebrush, glancing over his shoulder at you from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again—another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sagebrush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a Minié rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have “drawn a bead” on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now.
But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much—especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he
knows something about speed. The coyote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the coyote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the coyote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the coyote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him—and then that town dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the coyote with concentrated and desperate energy. This “spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the coyote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub—business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day”—and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!
—Mark Twain,
Roughing It (1871)
[The coyote] is a brute which is entitled to respect from his very persistence in knavery. Contemptible in person and countless numbers, he forages fatness from things despised of all others. [He is] the figurehead, the feature, the representative of the broad and silent country of which he comes more nearly being master than any other.
—James W. Steele,
The Sons of the Border (1873)
The ugly, repulsive, sneaky coyote skulks in force, filling the night with frightful howls. Chilling. Yet hunters and trappers welcome the howls: when they stop, watch out for Indians!
—Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg,
“Across Kansas by Train” (1877)
The stomach from one [coyote] taken on the Fort Riley hunt in 1948 contained sixteen meadow mice. . . . A low [mice] population of twenty per acre on a hundred-acre meadow or pasture will consume twenty-two tons of grass or eleven tons of cured hay each year. . . . The percentage of coyotes that have ever raided a chicken yard in Kansas has never been great and the number that have killed a sheep or a calf has been extremely limited.
—Otto W. Tiemeier,
“Winter Foods of Kansas Coyotes” (1955)
As a scavenger of dead animals, the livestock industry may receive protection through reduced exposure to contagious diseases and parasites. Considering the economic benefits coyotes provide to the agricultural industries, improved management of [coyote] populations may be indicated.
—John B. Mulder,
“Food Selection by Wild-Caught
Captive Coyotes” (1979)
God sleeps in minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man.
—Sanskrit apothegm
(c. fourth century B.C.)
It would imply the regeneration of mankind if they were to become elevated enough to truly worship stocks and stones.
If he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before is a benefactor, he who discovers two gods where there was only known the one before is a still greater benefactor. I would fain improve every opportunity to wonder and worship.
—Henry David Thoreau,
The Journal (1856)
Was there ever a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were thrown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture; were raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky so much above the less animated clay of the wild below?
—Gilbert White,
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1773)
The sublunary world is divided for the alchemist into three kingdoms: the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, and the animal kingdom. . . . The rhythm of the animal kingdom is that of everyday existence. The rhythm of the mineral kingdom is that of the ages, of life calculated in millennia. As soon as we contemplate the thousands of years of existence for minerals, cosmic dreams come to us.
—Gaston Bachelard,
La Terre et les Rêveries de la Volonté (1948)
It is the mysterious power possessed by stone, the manner in which it linked the cosmic order with our own inner search for order, that accounts in large part for its architectural importance.
Stones, gems, to be understood, must be dreamt about, and whereas the flexibility and adaptability of wood allows us to use it without understanding its basic nature, stone demands that we think of origins.
—J. B. Jackson,
“Stone and Its Substitutes” (1984)
Why not look “into” the earth?
—Gretel Ehrlich,
“Landscape,” introduction to Legacy of Light (1987)
What are the natural features which make a township handsome? A river, with its waterfalls and meadows, a lake, a hill, a cliff or individual rocks, a forest, and ancient trees standing singly. Such things are beautiful; they have a high use which dollars and cents never represent. If the inhabitants of a town were wise, they would seek to preserve these things, though at a considerable expense; for such things educate far more than any hired teachers or preachers, or any at present recognized system of school education. I do not think him fit to be the founder of a state or even of a town who does not foresee the use of these things, but legislates chiefly for oxen, as it were.
If we have the largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into door-steps.
We cut down the few old oaks which witnessed the transfer of the township from the Indians to the white man, and commence our museums with a cartridge-box taken from a British soldier in 1775.
—Henry David Thoreau,
The Journal (1861)
Mobility and change are the key to the vernacular landscape, but of an involuntary, reluctant sort; not the expression of restlessness and search for improvement but an enduring patient adjustment to circumstances. Far too often these are the arbitrary decisions of those in power, but natural conditions play their part and so do ignorance and a blind loyalty to local ways, and so does the absence of long-range objectives: the absence of what we would call a sense of future history.
—J. B. Jackson,
“Concluding with Landscapes” (1984)
With every great idea comes a gaggle of mediocre minds who oppose it. It was so with the creation of virtually every national park in the United States, from Yellowstone to Yosemite, from Kobuk Valley to the Everglades.
—Kim Heacox,
“A Poet, a Painter, and the Lonesome
Triangle” (1990)
We are creatures of endless and detailed curiosity. We are not sufficiently enlightened by abstractions devoid of flesh and bones, idiosyn ciasies and curiosities. . . . We revel in the details of history, because they are the source of our being.
—Stephen Jay Gould,
“George Canning’s Left Buttock and
the Origin of Species” (1989)
This fascination with the quotidian is one of the habits for which biographers are regularly chided by critics, who, craving plot and dramatic tension, dismiss the daily as mere besotted inclusiveness.
—B. L. Reid,
Neces
sary Lives (1990)
A close examination of any object is a graphic description of the level of intelligence, manual dexterity, and artistic comprehension of the civilization that produced it.
—Richard Latham,
“The Artifact as a Cultural Cipher” (1964)
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