Boys of the Old Sea Bed: Tales of Nature and Adventure

Men of science who have made a study of the earth’s surface, say that Lake Erie, from which flows Niagara river northward into Lake Ontario, will, in a certain, or uncertain, number of years, go dry, and what is now a wide though shallow sheet of water become a plain, through which may meander a slowly-flowing river. The reason for this prediction is that Niagara Falls, which have cut their way back from Lewiston through a gorge some seven miles, and are still eating their way through the limestone and the softer underlying shale at the rate of more than two feet a year, will finally accomplish their journey, and the great lake be reached and drained.

A similar event seems really to have occurred in the past history of the earth near the geographical center of the state of Wisconsin. Draw a line through the center of the map of this state, from north to south, and then another from east to west, at a little more than one-third of the way up from the southern boundary, and at the intersection you will have the location of the lower end of what appears to have been an ancient lake, or inland sea.

The eastern boundary, evidently, was a range of hills some forty miles to the east, along whose sides, fifty years ago, were easily recognized traces of successive diminishing shore lines, in rows of water-worn pebbles and shells.

The southern boundary is marked by sandstone bluffs, which bear the fantastic carving of waves. Rising nearly perpendicular from the sands like the front of some gigantic ramparts of a fortress, an hundred or more feet, the upper portions are fashioned into turrets, bastions, and domes, until at a distance it is difficult to believe that one is not looking upon some mighty work of man.

Here and there, many miles apart, huge granite rocks rear their heads hundreds of feet above the plain--islands of the old sea.

Of course caves abound in these water-worn bluffs, and these were found, in the early days of settlement, to be the homes and hiding places of bears, wolves, panthers, and the even more dreaded “Indian-devil,” or northern lynx. Not infrequently they were utilized for temporary human habitation. Indeed, one of these very caves became the last hiding place of Black Hawk, the famous Indian chief, as he sought escape from the white man after the failure of the war he had waged, like his predecessor, Tecumseh, in hope of uniting the various tribes against the crowding, appropriating paleface.

Near the present city of Kilbourn, at what is known as the Delles, the Wisconsin river breaks through the rocky barrier and pours its foaming flood down a narrow gorge that is only exceeded in size, and not at all in wild beauty and grandeur, by the gorge and rapids below Niagara. The falls have worn their way through, but evidently, here was the Niagara of the ancient sea.

The shallower part of the old sea was the eastern portion, where in width of fifty miles or more, in the time of which I write, there stretched a level waste of sand. It was to this floor of the old sea that people from the eastern states flocked by thousands, at the time of the “hop boom,” when it was discovered that this vine could be grown and would bear fairly good crops upon these sands. The ground was easily worked, and while the hop plant required two years to come into bearing, the profit from the dried blossoms was enormous, and the settlers saw great fortunes ahead. Money was borrowed, possessions in many cases mortgaged, fine houses erected, drying kilns built, hop roots planted, and the slender tamarack poles upon which the vines were to climb to the ripening sunlight, were set into the ground. The country was settled. The first immigrants harvested one crop at the bonanza price. Then rumors came of an enormous crop thrown upon the market from the fields of Washington and Oregon, new lands of the Pacific coast. The second season found the market overstocked, and prices tumbled from sixty cents to eight and ten cents per pound, which was less than would pay the expense of picking. Hundreds of the settlers never harvested their first crop. For years afterward one could travel miles across the sand and see nothing but deserted houses with abandoned farms growing up to stunted pines.

Among those who had lost in the hop venture, was the family of John Allen, in which were two boys, Robert and Ed, lads of twelve and ten years. The Allens, coming of the rugged Scotch-Irish stock, had no thought of returning to their old home “back east” defeated, but pushed further westward into the wilderness. Coming to the river in the time of low water, they easily crossed the broad bed of the “Ouis-kon-sin,” or, as the modern spelling has it, the “Wisconsin” river, and pushed on past the sandy plains west of the river over into the western half of the old lake bed. It was among the beautiful hardwood trees that lined the banks of the golden-hued Ne-ce-dah, or Yellow river, that they halted and said, “This shall be home.”

To the city-bred boys the land was one of perpetual wonder, and their sturdy bodies and enquiring minds were actively employed. Of course there was much work to do, fencing and clearing willow shrubs from the land, making hay for the winter use of their stock, but Mr. Allen was wise enough to give the boys a large portion of time for their “education,” as he called their excursions into the forest and along the river.

Coming home from one of these trips, the boys were seen to be in a state of excitement, and almost before they were near enough to be understood they were shouting, “Neighbors, neighbors! Just around the big bend.” It was a happy discovery for the Allens, as the new-found neighbors proved to be a family who had come, several years before, from Ohio, and whose young son, Dauphin, was about the age of the Allen boys. The name of the family was Thompson, the wife, Ruth, being the only daughter of “Old John Brown,” whose soul “goes marching on.”

During the years the Allens were neighbors to this family, they came to learn much of the life and character of that strange man who was hated as no other man by the slaveholders of his time, and, probably, was as little understood by those of the north who apologized for him. To this humble home of their only sister, in the wilderness, there came, as occasional guests, one and another of the sons who remained of the man who threw away his life at Harper’s Ferry, that a people might be aroused to a knowledge of the sin of human slavery. Ruth, they said, was the womanly image of her father. She had an abundance of red hair like his, had his features, and more, was like him in spirit. With all the ardor of youthful hero-worship the Allen boys bestowed homage upon John Brown’s daughter, Ruth Thompson. If she was like her father, he had been patient in trial, sweet of spirit in affliction, tender in love for the unfortunate, and utterly void of any desire of retaliation for injuries received. The hair of the Allen boys is silvering, and Ruth has long ago passed to her rest, yet they do not forget an incident which reveals the Christ-like spirit of the daughter of “Old John Brown”--and perhaps of the father.

It was upon the visit of John Brown, Jr., the son who had charge of the Canadian end of the “underground railway” over which so many of the slaves of the South had found their way to freedom, that Mr. Thompson and “Uncle Sam,” a younger brother, both of whom were in the attack upon the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, and had lost other brothers in that raid, were recalling the time when John, Jr., had been taken by the “bushwhackers,” tied to the tail of a horse and compelled to run at great speed for several miles, or be dragged to death. John, Jr., was a heavy man, and the fearful experience brought on a heart trouble from which he suffered all the rest of his life. The men, as they talked over those days of sorrow and trial, would occasionally utter some stout words against their persecutors, but quickly Ruth would break in, in her gentle voice--“Boys, boys! Speak evil of none. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ It may be those poor men thought they were doing right.”

Never did the Allen boys hear one unkind word from this daughter against the government, the individuals, or the section that had imposed upon her father an ignominious death.

Dauphin Thompson and the Allen boys became great friends and inseparable companions, and in the “education” of the latter the grandson of “Old John Brown” not only joined, but was able to initiate them into many of the mysteries of wood and stream. The Allen boys had new breech-loading shotguns, but Dauphin was the proud possessor of the carbine which his father had carried from Osawatomie to Harper’s Ferry, and which had been fitted for small-shot cartridges.

To the north, from which the Yellow river flowed, lay the vast, unbroken forests of pine; to the west stretched many miles of swamp and low-lying prairie. In the summer these prairies were covered with grass often so high as to completely hide the tallest man walking through. Game abounded. Deer were so unafraid that frequently the boys would find them quietly feeding among the cattle when they went at night to bring home the milch cows. Bears, panthers, and wild cats came at night to call, and left their “cards” in great tracks on the sand along the river front of the new home.

Here, in the bottom of the ancient sea, these boys began lessons which made of two of them stalwart, honored men, and which one of them had the good fortune to supplement, at a later day, in college.