Ancestors (11 page)

Stephen England continued to call the settlers together and preach to them. When the benches and stools were all taken and there was no longer even a place to stand, the women would take their shoes off and get up on the beds—eight to ten of them on a single bed. As my great-great-great-grandfather warmed to his subject he would pull his coat off. Sometimes there were Indians present. What they made out of the service is rather hard to imagine. The Bible presented no difficulties. It was right there in front of them,
and the medicine man made magic with it. But the doctrine of saving faith? Baptism? the doctrine of Atonement? the right of the individual congregation to govern itself? and the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the unbegotten Father and the eternally begotten Son? Was it perhaps simply that the Indians were by nature gregarious, and until they met with a sufficient amount of discouragement from the white men couldn’t see a gathering of any kind without adding themselves to it?

In 1820 Stephen England formed a church, with himself, his wife, two other men and five other women as members, all of whom signed this agreement: “We, members of the church of Jesus Christ, being providentially moved from our former place of residence from distant part, and being baptized on the profession of faith and met in the house of Stephen England, on a branch of Higgins Creek, in order to form a constitution, having first given ourselves to the Lord and then to one another, agree that our constitution shall be on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, believing them to be the only rule of faith and practise.” Three years later they built a log meetinghouse, and Stephen England continued to serve as minister until he died, of a cancer in one of his ankles. He preached the gospel as long as he could stand, and delivered his last sermon sitting in a chair.

The inscription on his tombstone reads:

On his way to this wedding he passed through a field where a neighbor was plowing and borrowed a pair of shoes from him for the occasion.

The reason I was so sure I couldn’t be descended from Stephen England was that the Christian Church was the abiding interest of my Grandmother Maxwell’s life. Surely if she was descended from the man Dr. England referred to as a towering figure in the early days of the Christian Church, I’d have heard about it over and over as I was growing up—not only from her, but also from my Aunt Maybel. I still find it hard to believe, though it is a simple fact. I was eighteen when my grandmother died, and so the explanation is not that she did speak of Stephen England and I was just too young to remember or be interested in matters of this kind. What she had to say about later preachers—Brother Hatfield and Brother Cannon, Brother Holton and other men whose sermons she had sat through—did not interest me but I remember their names, even so.

In a letter to Max Fuller, my Aunt Maybel says, “I am glad you enjoyed the Maxwell genealogy and will be glad to give the letters to you, will put them in an envelope and mark your name on them so should anything happen to me they will be yours. Blinn [my younger brother] is the only other interested in such so will want you to share what you find with him, he has been very interested in my D.A.R. About this
Exema
, Maxwell, I feel quite sure you never had anything like that but if you remember when you came home from Laurel, Mississippi, you had eaten so much salt pork, your stomach was upset and your skin was very rough but we soon cured that up with proper food …”

My cousin’s eczema is neither here nor there, but the very breath of her being is in that expression of concern and I could not bring myself to shut her up when I should have.
My brother was in high school when this letter was written, and his interest in antiquarianism did not survive the pressures of a busy law practice. My older brother, with his passionate pleasure in horses and guns, is too much a displaced pioneer himself to have much romantic curiosity about them. My aunt’s statement was correct in so far as it applied to me: at that period I was not “interested in such.” Stories, yes, but not dry facts and especially not genealogical details and speculations that would open the portals of the D.A.R. But why did they keep me in such total ignorance?

Some time in the 1930’s, in Illinois, there was a reunion of the living descendants of Stephen England, at which fifteen hundred people were present. I learned about it from Dr. England. One would almost think they conspired to keep me from finding out about my ancestors. Though my grandmother and my Aunt Maybel and my Aunt Bert and my father all had their secrets, like everyone else, they were not of a conspiring disposition. There must be some other explanation.

The only explanation I can offer is hurt feelings. My father did not much care who he was descended from. He was by nature forward looking, and disliked everything that was old—old houses with windows that didn’t fit properly and let the cold in, antique furniture that you had to be careful how you sat on, and music not written in his lifetime. “Oh, that’s ancient history,” he would say, about something that was not remote but merely in the past; what happened in the past was of no possible interest to anyone. It is conceivable that my grandmother and my aunt, not liking to have their toes stepped on, stopped speaking of genealogical matters in his presence. Or I may have said something that made them think I shared his prejudice. I don’t think I did, though. The truth is, I am not convinced by any of this reasoning. Their failure to speak of Stephen England remains mysterious to me.

The other line of descent in my Grandmother Maxwell’s family begins with a James Turley who was born in Fairfax County, Virginia, and who served as a private in the Continental Army when he was sixteen. He married Agnes Kirby, in Virginia, and they had fourteen children, seven boys and seven girls. If he was anything but a farmer there is no record of it. When he was thirty-one he moved to South Carolina. Four years later he moved again—to Kentucky this time, with two of the children in baskets slung on either side of a steady pack horse.

After twenty years in Kentucky he crossed over into southern Illinois and settled in Union County, which is on the Mississippi River, below St. Louis. Five years later he moved north to Sangamon County, where several of his sons joined him and where he died fifteen years later at the age of seventy-one. The
Logan County History
says that among the Indians he was a sort of arbitrator, and known as the “Big Chief” and “Big Bostony.” What does the name mean? The list of his goods and chattels offered up for auction includes seven horses, thirty-nine head of cattle, twenty-three sheep, and sixty-five head of hogs. At this auction his son Charles, who was my great-great-grandfather, bid on and got a pair of hatchets, a powder gourd, two barrels of lime, a basket of sundries, a razor, a lot of old iron, a side saddle, and a pair of specktickles. He cannot have had much use of these things, for he himself died that same year.

Charles Turley was born in Henry County, Virginia, in 1786. His wife, Elizabeth Cheathem, was also a Virginian but brought up in Kentucky. In 1823, when he was approaching forty, he pulled up stakes and went north, to join his father. The route lay through rough country. Swamps and marshes had to be crossed with great exertion and fatigue, and dangerous rivers forded. They could have come
in almost any kind of wagon, but it undoubtedly had a canvas cover of some sort and was drawn by oxen, with cattle and hogs being driven alongside, and a horse, and a hound dog.

Five years later they would have been part of an emigrant train, and the air would have been full of the sound of shouting, laughing, cursing, and cracking of whips, but in 1823 the Turleys were the vanguard, and probably alone. If you could have peered into the covered wagon, you’d have seen six children, the youngest a year old.

What the children saw must have been like enough to this old man’s remembering (though he is not any old man I am related to): “Riding along the gently rolling prairie, now you descend into a valley and your vision is limited to a narrow circle. That herd of deer has taken fright at your coming, quits its grazing on the tender grass of the valley, and, following that old buck as leader, runs off with heads erect, horns thrown back, their white tails waving in the air, has circled around until yonder hillock is reached, when, turning towards you, they gaze with their dark bright eyes, as if inquiring why you have invaded their free pastures. As you ride along, the rattlesnake is stretched across the road, sunning itself, and the prairie wolf takes to his heels and gallops off much like a dog.”

Their new home was about four miles from the village of Elkhart, in the extreme southern part of Logan County, and it was probably not very different from the one they left—a log cabin with a deerskin door, a clapboard roof, a puncheon floor, if there was a floor at all, and a stick chimney daubed with clay and straw. The children fell asleep in a room lighted with a rushlight, to the sound of the spinning wheel or the slam, crash of the loom.

Here they are walking home from school (I am quoting from the same old man): “the road was a path through the high grass and woods, and there were wolves and panthers
plenty. They were frequently seen, and you can imagine how we felt when the stars began to shine. The oldest ones would form a front and rear guard, and put the smallest in the middle, and hurry them along, all scared nearly to death.”

The
Logan County History
goes on to say that my Great-great-grandfather Charles Turley was a genial, generous-hearted man and had a host of warm friends; that he had his shares of the trials and hardships incident to the life of a pioneer; that he died about 1836, aged about fifty. And that in his last days he allied himself with the Christian Church.

I suppose one has a right to pick and choose among one’s ancestors. In any case I have a fondness for my grandmother’s great-grandfather, William Higgins.

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—”