Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 August 1881 — The Native Michigander. [ARTICLE]

The Native Michigander.

The native Michigander is a good fellow at heart, but he has his eccentricities. “Yes, I struck this State over fifty years ago,” he said to me the other evening, as he hunted in his hind pocket for his plug tobacco. “I’ve heard the wolves howl, the b’ars roar, and the panthers scream.” “ You have, eh ?” “You bet I have? Yes, sir, and I’ve lived all winter on acorns, slept in Bummer in a tree top, and walked forty-two miles through the woods to prayer-meet-ing. ” “ Then you must be pious ?” “Pious? Dura my old hide to ballyhack and gosh all fish-hooks to thunder, but I raytlier reckon I am. Pious ? Why, how in thunder and blazes and tea-ket-tles could I have borne up if I hadn’t been pious! Say, did you ever live in the woods forty miles from the nearest human hyena, black or white ?” “Never.” “ Did you ever have to go barefoot in snow four feet deep ?” “No.” “Ever shake with the ager right along for 284 days, Sundays included?” “No.” “ Dod rot your pampered countenance, of course you never did! What did you ever do towards making Michigan the great and glorious State she now is?” “Well, I’ve run a lawn-mower.’* “ Run a thunder to blazes 1 How many acres of forest do you ’sposo I’vo cut down?” “ Two.” “Two! Why, you onery hyena, my old woman has slashed down over forty herself, and she’s left-handed, at that ! I calkerlate, sir—l solemnly calkerlate that I’ve cleared off at least 800 hundred acres of the toughest kind of forest. How much tea do you suppose I had in my house the first ten years of our pioneer life ?” ‘ * Twenty-five chests. ” “ Twenty-five h—lls !” he roared as he hunted for more plug, “we had just two drawings and no more !” “ Couldn’t you get trusted at the corner grocery ?” “Get trusted 1 Corner grocery ! Why, you infernal young lunatic, wasn’t I located forty miles from the nigliest grocery ! That’s what I’ve been telling you all along. None of you spiled children of luxury kin have any idea of how we had to get along in them old days.” “ I presume not.” “ One winter when the old woman was sick I had nothing to feed her but salt coon and corn-dodgers. ” “ Oyster soup would havo been nice.” “ Oyster thunder ! Don’t I keep telling you that I was fifty miles in the wood ?” “ Yes, but why didn’t you got out ?” “Git out? What fur?” “ Why, you might got out and lived on your motlicr-in-law and hod a trotting horse, a plug hat, a diamond pin and high living. You were vory foolish to stay in the woods, where they had no ward caucuses, or military parados, or circus processions, or ginger boor, or banana puddings.” We generally end here. The old native chokes and gasps and jumps up and down and kicks his hat into the street and goes away saying : “Them durned pampered idiots of luxury wouldn’t keer two cents if the hull State was growed up to jack-pinos so thick that a rabbit couldn’t squeeze through !” But next night he comes again to wrestle mo for the championship.— M. Quad.