Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1880 — New England and the West in Olden Times. [ARTICLE]

New England and the West in Olden Times.

’ln the third number of his “Discovery and Conquest of the Northwest,” published at Wheaton, HI., Rufus Blanchard indulges in the' following reminiscence of the old-fashioned New England cottage and the then existing impressions among the New, Englanders concerning the boundless and unexplored Western wilds: There are yet many persons living throughout the Northwest, but little past middle age, who were born in the old fashioned New England cottage. It stood upon a level sward of green, but scanty in extent, among the diversified hills and valleys around. Near' its side door was the well, with its “old oaken bucket” suspended from the elevated extremity of the well-sweep by means of a slender pole cut from the adjacent woods. The kitchen was the largest and most important room in the house. One door lea from it directly into a parlor half its size, but this door was seldom opened except when distinguished guests came to occupy the room sacred to their entertainment. Two other doors opened into bedrooms below, and a stairway led directly to apartments above, used for sleeping rooms or clut-ter-lofts. The fire-place was large enough to accommodate a large baking oven, reached through an aperture in the jamb on the right hand side, where the “ rye-Indian” bread and pork and beans were baked. All provident husbands kept on hand a stock of fine-split dry wood to heat the oven—hence the old familiar couplet: “ Yoa must be kind, yon must be food. And keep your wife in oven wood.”

The fuel used for heating the room in the winter was a green rock-maple back-log, in front of which small dry wood, laid upon two iron “fire-dogs/’ burned brightly, and ;!n the long winter evenings pine knots were used, that blazed with such brilliancy as to send a glaring light into the remotest part of the kitchen. By their light a bashful suitor to one of the daughters would kWh' a few games of checkers with her brother, who had nothing to distract his attention. While this was going on the fair one sits nearer the fire, busy with her slate-pencil and arithmetic. When nine o’clock comes all retire but the two lovers; but before doing this the father assures the young man by inviting him nearer the fire. The invitation is accepted, not without some reserve on the part of the young

man as he draws up to the fire, and consequently nearer the object of his affections. All. these old-fashioned ways are changed now, hot yet some of the cottages are still standing that have witnessed them; and let us look into one of their garrets and see if we oan find something to freshen our memories of early days. The garret is lighted by a six-light window in each gable end, fitted with seven-by-nine glass, and by their light we will look for what we wish to find. Here are the treadles of the old loom, that “mother's” feet have pressed with measured round as aha twilled the web she Was weaving; the spinning - wheel, and the wooden “finger” with which she turned it into a sonorous hum. Here is the old hand-reel, two feet long, with a cross-bar on each end like wT. Here is the flax-wheel and its distaff, With some of the tow still clinging to it. Next comes the old “foot stove.”* It is a sheet-iron box set in a wooden frame, in which a small sheet-iron dish of live ooala is placed, on which “mother's” feet rest while she sits in churoh in the winter, before the introduction of stoves. Ah! here comes something that would make the tears channel down the crow-tracks of age, if these original tenants of this piece of furniture could see it. It is the old wooden cradle, from the sides of which the hands of “mother” have worn off the paint in her efforts to rook to sleep her rollicking babies. It is full of a medley of cast-off relics—hand-cards, old newspapers, old copy-books filled up with straight marks, pot-hooks ana carves. At the bottom are the old school-books; among which are Marshall’s Spelling-book, the English Reader, the Columbian Orator, Murray’s Grammar, and lastly, Woodbridge’s Geography. This is what we have been looking for all this time, for on it the name “Chicago” first made its appearance in our school-book literature.

It was suggestive of reckless adventure far beyond the restraints of civilization; a place around which clustered Indian tents, ornamented with scalps hung out to dry as we boys stretched our coon skins on boards, and he who would dare to go there must be a prodigy of pluck. Beyond this place on our school maps interposed a vast plain between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi Rive”, on which were names of Indian tribes whose pronunciation set our stammering tongues at defiance. St. Anthony’s Falls, Prairie du Chien, Ft Armstrong, on Rock Island, and Ft Madison, at the Des Moines Rapids, were the only names on the Upper Mississippi above St Louis, except the inevitable nomenclature of Indian names, which were always such a puzzle to us. The Mississippi River was as far west as our maps of the United States went; but on the map of North America the immense void between this river and the Pacific coast was filled up with large spaces lettered unexplored; and on its extreme western verge was a stiff range of mountains, studding the Pacific coast like the bold headlands of a river. Here the majestic forces of nature crowned the mountain tops with everlasting snow, and warmed the valleys with perennial spring. Here were tenantless deserts and basins below tide water, having no connection with the sea—so our geographies said. Whatever else was there was left to conjecture, and our timid imaginations would paint the sublimest grandeurs of savage life, basking in the assurance of a perpetual lease among their mysterious and impregnable fastnesses. • Our fathers, from whose fanciful imagery the wire edge had been taken off by the adaptation of ways and means to ends, looked more practically upon the matter, and saw a glorious future spectacle opening before the world in the development of this exhaustless region of supply, though now beyond the limits of civilization. They beheld the vast chain of lakes on the map extending into the interior of a continent almost to the dividing ridge of the Mississippi Yalley, with an eye to the useful. Here unmeasured plains must be upturned by the plow, farm houses erected, churches, school houses and highways must be buitt, cities laid out, and all the ornamentation which belongs to them must be introduced. Where was to be the central metropolis of these productions of man’s handiwork in the great plateau of North America—the high salubrious plain from whence the Mississippi found its sources, where the great inland seas secreted their waters, like reservoirs for the use of a Nation? The solution of this was yet a sealed book whose secrets were to be revealed in their own fortuitous way.