Winning the Wilderness

Winning the Wilderness
Margaret McCarter

McCarter Margaret Hill

Winning the Wilderness

In all the story of the world of man,
Who blazed the way to greater, better things?
Who stopped the long migration of wild men,
And set the noble task of building human homes?
The learned recluse? The forum teacher?
The poet-singer? The soldier, voyager,
Or ruler? ’T was none of this proud line.
The man who digged the ground foretold the destiny
Of men. ’T was he made anchor for the heart;
Gave meaning to the hearthstone, and the birthplace,
And planted vine and figtree at the door.
He made e’en nations possible. Aye, when
With his stone axe he made a hoe, he carved,
Unwittingly, the scepter of the world.
The steps by which the multitudes have climbed
Were all rough-hewn by this base implement.
In its rude path have followed all the minor
Arts of men. Hark back along the centuries,
And hear its march across the continents.
From zone to zone, all ’round the bounteous world,
The man whose skill makes rich the barren field
And causes grass to grow, and flowers to blow,
And fruits to ripen, and grain turn to gold —
That man is King! Long live the King!

    – Mrs. J. K. Hudson.

To

THAT FARMER FATHER AND MOTHER

WITH THEIR HANDS ON TODAY

BUT WITH THEIR EYES ON TOMORROW

WHO THROUGH LABOR AND LONELINESS AND

HOPES LONG DEFERRED

HAVE WON A DESERT TO FRUITFULNESS

A WILDERNESS TO BEAUTY

FOREWORD

A reach of level prairie bounded only by the edge of the world – misty ravelings of heliotrope and amber, covered only by the arch of heaven – blue, beautiful and pitiless in its far fathomless spaces. To the southwest a triple fold of deeper purple on the horizon line – mere hint of commanding headlands thitherward. Across the face of the prairie streams wandering through shallow clefts, aimlessly, somewhere toward the southeast; their course secured by gentle swells breaking into sheer low bluffs on the side next to the water, or by groups of cottonwood trees and wild plum bushes along their right of way. And farther off the brown indefinite shadowings of half-tamed sand dunes. Aside from these things, a featureless landscape – just grassy ground down here and blue cloud-splashed sky up there.

The last Indian trail had disappeared. The hoofprints of cavalry horses had faded away. The price had been paid for the prairie – the costly measure of death and daring. But the prairie itself, in its loneliness and loveliness, was still unsubdued. Through the fury of the winter’s blizzard, the glory of the springtime, the brown wastes of burning midsummer, the long autumn, with its soft sweet air, its opal skies, and the land a dream of splendor which the far mirage reflects and the wide horizon frames in a curtain of exquisite amethyst – through none of these was the prairie subdued. Only to the coming of that king whose scepter is the hoe, did soul of the soil awake to life and promise. To him the wilderness gave up everything except its beauty and the sweep of the freedom-breathing winds that still inspire it.

PART ONE

THE FATHER

The old Antaean fable of strength renewed from the ground
Was a human truth for the ages; since the hour of the Eden-birth.
That man among men was strongest who stood with his feet on the earth!

    – Sharlot M. Hall.

CHAPTER I

The Blessing of Asher

Unless there be in the background a mother, no portrait of a man is complete.
– Winston Churchill

The old Aydelot farm reached quite down to the little village of Cloverdale, from which it was separated by Clover Creek. But the Aydelot farmhouse stood a good half-mile away up the National pike road toward the Virginia state line. The farm consisted of two long narrow strips of ground, bordering the road on either side and walled about by forests hiding stagnant marshes in their black-shadowed depths. Francis Aydelot had taken up the land from the government before the townsite was thought of. Farming was not to his liking and his house had been an inn, doing a thriving business with travelers going out along that great National highway in ante-railway days. But when the village took root and grew into a little town, the village tavern absorbed the revenue from the traveling public, and Francis Aydelot had, perforce, to put his own hands to the plow and earn a living from the land. It was never a labor of love with him, however, and although he grew well-to-do in the tilling, he resented the touch of the soil as something degrading.

Cloverdale did not grow toward him, because, out of prejudice at its being, he would not sell one foot of his ground for town lot purposes. Nevertheless, since he was upright in all his dealings, the villagers grew proud of him, deferred to his judgment, quoted his opinions, and rated him generally the biggest asset of the community, with one exception. That exception was young Asher Aydelot, a pink-cheeked, gray-eyed boy, only son of the House of Aydelot and heir to all the long narrow acres from the wooded crest on the east to the clear waters of Clover Creek on the west. He was heir to more than these, however, if the heritage of ancestry counts for anything.

Jean Aydelot, the first of the name in America, driven from France by his family on account of his Huguenot beliefs, had settled in Virginia. He had quickly grasped the American ideals of freedom, the while he affiliated easily with the exclusive English Cavaliers. Something of the wanderlust in his blood, however, kept him from rooting too firmly at once. It happened that when a band of Quaker exiles had sought refuge in Virginia and was about to be driven out by the autocratic Cavaliers, young Aydelot, out of love for a Quaker girl, had championed their cause vehemently. And he was so influential in the settlement that he might have succeeded, but for one family – the wealthy and aristocratic Thaines. Through the son of this family the final expulsion of these Quakers was accomplished. The woman in the case was Mercy Pennington, a pretty Quakeress with whom young Jerome Thaine fell in love, promising protection to all her people in return for her hand. When she refused his offer, the Thaines carried the day, and the Quakers again became exiles. Jean Aydelot followed them to Pennsylvania and married Mercy Pennington, who was promptly disowned by the Quaker Church for this marriage to one outside its membership.

In spite of all this heresy, however, the Aydelots became one of the leading families in the development of the colonies. Their descendants fell heir to the traits of their French-English forbears: freedom of belief, courage to follow a cause, a touch of the wanderlust, the mercurial French mind, and the steady poise of the followers of the Inward Light. A trace of bitterness had come down the years, however, with the family history; a feud-like resentment against the family of Jerome Thaine of Virginia.

Francis Aydelot had crossed the Alleghanies and settled in Ohio in frontier days. Here his life, like his narrow, woods-bound farm, was clean and open but narrowed by surroundings and lack of opportunity. What had made for freedom and reform in his ancestors, in him became prejudice and stubborn will. Mrs. Aydelot was a broad-minded woman. Something of vision was in her clear gray eyes. Love of beauty, respect for learning, and an almost statesman-like grasp of civic duty and the trend of national progress were hers, too.

From such ancestry came Asher Aydelot, the healthiest, happiest country boy that ever waked the echoes of the old Ohio woodlands, or dared the currents of her mad little rivers, or whistled fearlessly as he scampered down the dusty pike road in the soft black summer nights.

Asher was just fifteen when the Civil War swept the nation off its feet. The Quaker spirit of Mercy Pennington made fighting repulsive to his father, but in Asher the old Huguenot courage of Jean Aydelot blazed forth, together with the rash partisanship of a young hot-blood whose life has been hemmed in too narrowly by forest walls. Almost before Cloverdale knew there was a war, the Third Ohio Regiment was on its way to the front. Among its bearded men was one beardless youth, a round-faced drummer boy of fifteen, the only child of the big farmhouse beside the National road. In company with him was his boyhood chum, Jim Shirley, son of the Cloverdale tavern keeper.

An April sun was slipping behind the treetops, and the twilight mists were already rising above the creek. Francis Aydelot and his wife sat on the veranda watching Asher in the glory of a military suit and brass buttons coming up the pike with springing step.

“How strong he is! I’m glad he is at home again,” the mother was saying.

“Yes, he’s here to stay at last. I have his plans all settled,” Francis Aydelot declared.

“But, Francis, a man must make some plans for himself. Asher may not agree,” Mrs. Aydelot spoke earnestly.

“How can our boy know as well as his father does what is best for him? He must agree, that’s all. We have gone over this matter often enough together. I won’t have any Jim Shirley in my family. He’s gone away and nobody knows where he is, just when his father needs him to take the care of the tavern off his hands.”

“What made Jim go away from Cloverdale?” Mrs. Aydelot asked.

“Nobody seems to know exactly. He left just before his brother, Tank, married that Leigh girl up the Clover valley somewhere. But everything’s settled for Asher. He will be marrying one of the Cloverdale girls pretty soon and stay right here in town. We’ll take it up with him now. There’s no use waiting.”