Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming) - Skookum Chuck Fables
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Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming) >> Skookum Chuck Fables
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Of Sicamous
The Okanagan Valley, in the Province of British Columbia, is bounded on
the north by the mosquitoes at Sicamous, and on the south by the
forty-ninth parallel of north latitude, which is the United States; and
to one who is accustomed to the sand and the sage, the general aspect
throughout gives a most pleasing rest to the eye. A trip to the Okanagan
is like one sweet dream to the inhabitants of the dry belt--a dream that
is broken only once by a dreadful nightmare--the mosquito conquest at
Sicamous; but you forgive and forget this the moment after you awake.
The mosquitoes at Sicamous are as great a menace to that town as the
Germans are to Europe.
The train for the valley, when on time, leaves Sicamous, on the main
line of the C.P.R., at about ten, good morning, but sometimes she waits
for the delayed eastern train. This happens very frequently on
Sundays--for who or what was ever on time on a Sunday? Sunday is the
lazy man's day--the lazy day of the world--the day on which we creep
along out of tune with things.
Now, when you get side-tracked at a C.P.R. station in the Rocky
Mountains waiting for a delayed eastern train, you may as well throw all
your plans into the lake, because they will be out of fashion when you
have an opportunity to use them again, and you will require new
ones--the train may come to-day and she may not come till to-morrow.
But, if that station chances to be Sicamous, and it is Sunday--and it
must be raining heavily, for when it is raining there are no
mosquitoes--you will not regret the delay, and you will be very much
interested if you have an eye for the unique, or if you have the
slightest inclination to be eccentric you will be reminded that--
There are friends we never meet;
There is love we never know.
Here people--strangers and friends--meet and nod, smile, talk and depart
ten or twelve times every day. You will wonder how people can talk so
much, and what they get to talk about--people who meet accidentally
here, only for a moment, and will never meet again, perhaps. Almost
hourly, night and day, cosmopolitan little throngs jump from trains,
chat a few moments among themselves, or with others who have been
waiting, and then allow themselves to be picked up by the next train and
rushed off into eternity--that is, so far as you are concerned, for you
will never see them again--and some of them were becoming so familiar.
They are voices and faces flitting across your past; they are always
new, always strange, always interesting; they are laughing, chatting,
smiling, scowling, worrying. There are fair faces and dark faces,
pleasant faces and angry faces, careless faces and anxious faces, and
faces that are thin, fat, long and short. The voices are as varied as
the faces. There is the sharp, clear voice and the dull voice, the
angry one and the pleasant one. There are young and old, beautiful and
ugly, scowls and smiles, the timid and the fearless--the black, the
white, and the yellow; and there are faces that look so much like ones
you know at home that you are just on the point of asking them how the
boys and girls have been since you left. If they had known that they
were the actors on a stage, and you were the audience, conditions might
have been improved--artificially; they might have acted better, with
more "class," but the interest would have been injured; you would have
been robbed of a genuine entertainment. Those people went north, south,
east and west; they went to the four corners of the earth. The sound of
their voices and laughs go up into the tree-tops, up into the hills and
down into the lake, and they are echoed back to us; and that is the only
record that is ever taken, of this interesting drama; and then the
voices fade away east--fade away west.
But you hear the elaborate puffing and snorting of a locomotive as
though laboring under its great load of humanity; there is a loud
whistle from somewhere, and then another; two engines are speaking to
each other; then the bell rings, the engine sweeps by, and the whole
earth trembles--it is the delayed eastern train. There is a great
scramble for entrance. Chance acquaintances are forgotten in the
individual excitement. The steps to one car are blocked by one man who
has enough baggage for ten, and one worried-looking young lady with a
baby is afraid she will lose her train. The train pulls out with a
"swish, swish" of escaping steam under great pressure from the engine,
and the station is robbed of half its population. The familiar faces
have disappeared, but a new throng has been cast into your midst--new
faces, new smiles, new voices, new scowls; and the chatter is renewed
with vigor when we have found ourselves, and are located in several
little isolated bunches. But the Okanagan local is here waiting for our
scalps. There is another scramble of men, women, children, bag and
baggage, for seats, and we are off. The little station platform is
deserted and silent but for the clatter of the wheels of the baggage
truck. The tree tops sigh, the lake murmurs, but they cannot hold us, we
must hurry to the great beyond--the whole world depends upon our
individual movements.
Of the Ubiquitous Cat
Once upon a time I had a very curious experience which had a very
curious ending.
I walked into a strange person's house, uninvited, for some mysterious
reason perfectly unknown to myself.
Sitting promiscuously around an old-fashioned fire-place, in which
blazed a cheery fire, were a man and woman and four small children; and
on a lounge, partly hid under the eiderdown quilt, lay a pure white cat,
half asleep and half awake, and at intervals casting sly glances at some
of the children. The cat seemed to all intent and purpose one of that
human family.
Now, although the cat can be abused like a toy doll by the children
without losing his temper, yet he has the most curiously composed
disposition of all the domestic animals. Although extravagantly
domesticated, and although he shares our beds and tables with impunity,
yet he is, to the mouse, as cruel and treacherous as a man-eating tiger.
However, we did not take up our pen to discuss cat psychology. Upon
entering the strange person's house so unceremoniously, I sat me down
upon a vacant chair, also uninvited, and began to make myself at home.
The strange persons did not seem to take any exception to my strange
behavior, but, kept on talking as though nothing extraordinary had
taken place in the human social regulations. I was more interested in
the cat than I was in the people, and I could not keep my eye from him,
he was so much like our "Teddy" at home.
At last I convinced myself that it _was_ Teddy.
"Where did you get that cat?" I asked.
"Why, we have always had him. We raised him. He sleeps with the children
every night, and gets up with them in the morning--when he is here,"
said the mother.
Our Teddy had the same weakness, and I was so positive that this was he
that I called him by name.
In a moment he came to me and was on my knee--it was indeed Teddy.
Now, here was one of the most unique situations on record.
"This is my cat," I said demandingly.
"It is ours," said the chorus of children's voices.
It suddenly occurred to me that Teddy was in the habit of leaving home
and would be absent for several days at a time. Could it be possible he
had two homes? Did this cat actually accept the affections and
hospitality of two distinct families, at the same time, without once
breathing the truth or giving himself away?
I went home puzzled to my wife and said:
"Do you know, Teddy is not all ours?"
"What do you mean?"
I was just about to tell my strange story when I awoke, and, behold, it
was a dream.
BITS OF HISTORY
Of the Foolhardy Expedition
The people who inhabited this globe during the year 1725 undoubtedly
obtained a different view of things terrestrial than we do who claim the
world's real estate in 1915, because they had no telegraph, no
telephone, no electric light, no automobile, and no aeroplane. How they
managed to live at all is a mystery to the twentieth century biped.
Fancy having to cross the street to your neighbor's house when you
wanted to ask him if he was going to the pioneer supper, and just think
of having no "hello girl" to flirt with. The condition seems appalling.
But what they lacked in knowledge and in indolent conveniences we beg to
announce that they made up in foolhardiness which they called bravery.
Well, if it can be called brave to make a needless target of oneself to
a bunch of savage Indians, why then they had the proper derivation of
the term.
From one of Francis Parkman's admirable works we have seized upon the
scene of our story, which was acted out at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, namely, 1725. The Indians seem to have been very
hostile in those early days in the immediate vicinity of the early New
England provinces; and we are convinced some of the white men were very
hostile as well. Of course we, in our day, cannot blame them--they had
no telephones, autos, electricity, "hello girls"--they had to be
something, so they were hostile towards the Indians.
Dunstable was a town on the firing line of Massachusetts, and was
attacked by Indians in the autumn of 1724, and two men were carried off.
Ten others went in pursuit, but fell into an ambush, and nearly all were
killed. But now we will follow the words of Francis Parkman, who has a
delightful way of relating his stories.
"A company of thirty was soon raised." They were to receive two
shillings and sixpence per day each, "out of which he was to maintain
himself";--very little to risk one's life for; but in those days it was
no concern with a man whether he was killed or not. Besides, it was
worth something to get killed and have Francis Parkman write about you
more than a century later. Perhaps they anticipated this perpetuation of
their names and deeds.
However, "Lovewell was chosen captain; Farwell lieutenant, and Robbins,
ensign. They set out towards the end of November, and reappeared at
Dunstable early in January, bringing one prisoner and one scalp." It
does not seem to us to have paid the interest on the investment of two
shillings and sixpence per day, "out of which he was to maintain
himself," and, for anything we know to the contrary, perhaps the captain
was getting more than this--it has not been recorded. "Towards the end
of the month Lovewell set out again, this time with eighty-seven men.
They ascended the frozen Merrimac, passed Lake Winnepesaukee, pushed
nearly to the White Mountains, and encamped on a branch of the upper
Saco. Here they killed a moose--a timely piece of luck, for they were in
danger of starvation, and Lovewell had been compelled by want of food to
send back a good number of his men. The rest held their way, filing on
snowshoes through the deathlike solitude that gave no sign of life
except the light track of some squirrel on the snow, and the brisk note
of the hardy little chickadee, or black-capped titmouse, so familiar in
the winter woods."
Now here is where the foolhardiness of the expedition begins to appeal
to us. Supposing just here they had met five hundred crazy Indians with
five hundred crazy bows and arrows? And they must have expected it. They
were searching for Indians. Perhaps they were seeking martyrdom? But the
New Englander of the frontier was nothing if not foolhardy. They mistook
it for bravery, and there must have been some bravery amalgamated with
it, because a man must have a certain quantity of that rarity before he
can lend himself out as a target at two shillings and sixpence a day,
"out of which he was to maintain himself."
Now, if you have patience to follow you will learn that they ultimately
met the very thing which you expect--which they must have expected.
"Thus far the scouts had seen no human footprints; but on the twentieth
of February they found a lately abandoned wigwam, and following the
snowshoe tracks that led from it--" Right into the lion's jaw, as it
were. Perhaps they were anxious to be shot to get out of their
misery--"at length saw smoke rising at a distance out of the gray
forest." They saw their finish, and their hearts were filled with joy.
"The party lay close till two o'clock in the morning; then, cautiously
approaching, found one or more wigwams, surrounded them, and killed all
the inmates, ten in number." They were to pay dear for this, as anyone
could have told them. "They brought home the scalps in triumph, ... and
Lovewell began at once to gather men for another hunt.... At the middle
of April he had raised a band of forty-six." One of the number was Seth
Wyman, ... a youth of twenty-one, graduated at Harvard College, in 1723,
and now a student of theology. Chaplain though he was, he carried a gun,
knife and hatchet like the others, and not one of the party was more
prompt to use them.... They began their march on April 15th." After
leaving several of their number by the way for various causes, we find
thirty-seven of them on the night of May 7th near Fryeburg lying in the
woods near the northeast end of Lovewell's pond.
"At daybreak the next morning, as they stood bareheaded, listening to a
prayer from the young chaplain, they heard the report of a gun, and soon
after an Indian.... Lovewell ordered his men to lay down their packs and
advance with extreme caution." Why this caution? "They met an Indian
coming towards them through the dense trees and bushes. He no sooner saw
them than he fired at the leading men." Naturally. We should have said
"leading targets." "His gun was charged with beaver shot and he severely
wounded Lovewell and young Whiting; on which Seth Wyman shot him dead,
and the chaplain and another man scalped him." As yet they had only
entered the lion's den. "And now follows one of the most obstinate and
deadly bush-fights in the annals of New England.... The Indians howled
like wolves, yelled like enraged cougars, and made the forest ring with
their whoops.... The slaughter became terrible. Men fell like wheat
before the scythe. At one time the Indians ceased firing; ... they
seemed to be holding a 'pow-wow'; but the keen and fearless Wyman crept
up among the bushes, shot the chief conjurer, and broke up the meeting.
About the middle of the afternoon young Fry received a mortal wound.
Unable to fight longer, he lay in his blood, praying from time to time
for his comrades in a faint but audible voice." One, Keys, received two
wounds, "but fought on till a third shot struck him." He declared the
Indians would not get his scalp. Creeping along the sandy edge of the
pond, he chanced to find a stranded canoe, pushed it afloat, rolled
himself into it, and drifted away before the wind. Soon after sunset the
Indians drew off.... The surviving white men explored the scene of the
fight.... Of the thirty-four men, nine had escaped without serious
injury, eleven were badly wounded, and the rest were dead or dying....
Robbins, as he lay helpless, asked one of them to load his gun, saying,
'The Indians will come in the morning to scalp me, and I'll kill
another of them if I can.' They loaded the gun and left him." The
expected had occurred. Most of them had been killed. Anyone could have
told them this before they set out--they could have made the same
prophecy for themselves. And after all they had accomplished nothing but
their own deaths. The story of their return rivals that of Napoleon's
retreat from Moscow. Of the whole number eleven ultimately reached home.
We leave it to the reader to determine whether this was an exhibition of
bravery or foolhardiness, or a mixture of both.
We congratulate ourselves that we did not live on the frontier of New
England in the year 1725.
Of the Laws of Lycurgus
Lycurgus reigned over a place called Lacedaemon, which is a part of
Greece, about the year 820 B.C. Now, this is a great many years ago, and
is further back into the archives of history than most of us can
remember. There is no doubt, however, that this great ruler, Lycurgus,
was crazy, or he was one of those persons whose brains cease to develop
after they have left their teens. He certainly secures the first prize
as a "whim" strategist. In spite of his insane eccentricities, he was
allowed the full exercise of his freedom. Had he flourished in 1915 A.D.
instead of 820 "B.C." (which does not mean British Columbia), the asylum
for the insane at New Westminster would not have been strong enough to
retain him. Lycurgus did one redeeming thing--he founded a Senate;
"which, sharing,"--we are following Plutarch--"as Plato says, in the
power of the kings, too imperious and unrestrained before, and having
equal authority with them, was the means of keeping them within bounds
of moderation, and highly contributed to the preservation of the State.
The establishment of a Senate, an intermediate body, like ballast, kept
it in just equilibrium, and put it in a safe posture: the twenty-eight
senators adhering to the kings whenever they saw the people too
encroaching, and on the other hand, supporting the people, when the
kings attempted to make themselves absolute."
Now, what in the world possessed this despotic imbecile to form a
senate? His action in this can only be accounted for in the light that
it was one of those unpremeditated whims of a narrow-minded faddist. One
naturally wonders what the newly created senators were doing while the
king was imposing his insane laws. This body was formed for the
"preservation of the state." The wonder is that there was any state
left, for the king paralyzed commerce, smothered ambition, choked art to
death, and placed a ban on modesty. Further than having been "formed,"
the "Senate" never again appears on the pages of the "Lycurgus" book.
Plutarch, who lived in Greece about the year 100 A.D., nine hundred
years after the subject of his biography, relates the forming and
imposing of those laws with the utmost faith, and the most implicit
innocence; which goes to prove that the Grecian idea of government, with
all its knowledge, had not advanced much, at least up to the time of
Plutarch.
And now for the laws.
"A second and bolder political enterprise of Lycurgus was a new division
of the lands. For he found a prodigious inequality; the city overcharged
with many indigent persons, who had no land; and the wealth centred in
the hands of the few. Determined, therefore, to root out the evils of
insolence, envy, avarice, and luxury, and those distempers of a state
still more inveterate than fatal--I mean poverty and riches--he
persuaded them to cancel all former divisions of land and to make new
ones, in such a manner as they might be perfectly equal in their
possessions and way of living.
His proposal was put in practice.
"After this he attempted to divide also the movables, in order to take
away all appearance of inequality; but he soon perceived that they could
not bear to have their goods taken directly from them, and therefore
took another method, counterworking their avarice by a stratagem."
Now, this seems to be the only law to which they made objection; and
this proves that the love of personal "icties" has very deep roots.
Perhaps the influence of the "senate" sustained them in this, for
qualifications for a senator, even in those days, must have called for
men of some means, and they, when the shoe began to pinch their own
feet, would not care to divide up their sugar and flour with the rank
and file. It does not appear, however, that they had any say in the
matter, and, beyond the statement that they were formed for a purpose,
they seem to have taken no part in the affairs of state; if they had,
Lycurgus and his laws would never have been made part of history.
"First he stopped the currency of the gold and silver coin"--thus he
paralyzed industry--"and ordered that they should make use of iron money
only; then to a great quantity and weight of this he assigned but a
small value.... In the next place he excluded unprofitable and
superfluous arts.... Their iron coin would not pass in the rest of
Greece, but was ridiculed and despised, so that the Spartans had no
means of purchasing any foreign or curious wares, nor did any merchant
ship unlade in their harbor." Even Plutarch sees nothing suicidal in all
this voluntary isolating of themselves from the main arteries of
commerce.
"Desirous to complete the conquest of luxury and exterminate the love of
riches, he introduced a third institution, which was wisely enough and
ingeniously contrived. This was the use of public tables, where all were
to eat in common of the same meat, and such kinds of it as were
appointed by law. At the same time they were forbidden to eat at home,
or on expensive couches and tables.... Another ordinance levelled
against magnificence and expense, directed that the ceilings of houses
should be wrought with no tool but the axe, and the doors with nothing
but the saw. Indeed, no man could be so absurd as to bring into a
dwelling so homely and simple, bedsteads with silver feet, purple
coverlets, or golden cups." Thus he smothered art and personal ambition,
two of the most requisite essentials to a people on their onward and
upward trend to civilization and success. "A third ordinance of Lycurgus
was, that they should not often make war against the same enemy, lest,
by being frequently put upon defending themselves, they too should
become able warriors in their turn."
And thus he made them defenceless against their enemies.
"For the same reason he would not permit all that desired to go abroad
and see other countries, lest they should contract foreign manners, gain
traces of a life of little discipline, and of a different form of
government. He forbade strangers, too, to resort to Sparta who could not
assign a good reason for their coming!"
Improvement with Lycurgus means retrogression with us. He wished,
perhaps ignorantly, to arrest the progress of civilization and
substitute a slovenly ideal of his own. His purpose was to cancel the
civilization which the race had gained during thousands of years of
effort, and bring it back to a semi-savagery. But the world was too big
for him. It had things in view which were too great for his small,
hampered mind to have any suspicion of. No doubt he was sincere in his
little, infinitesimal way; but it is a blessing for the world that his
influence was confined to a very small corner of the then civilized
world, and that others of broader views succeeded him to manage the
affairs of states and nations. With all deference to old Plutarch, the
biographer of Lycurgus, we wish to say that however grand the laws of
this man may have been as ideals, they were utter failures when brought
into practice.
Of Joan of Arc
Some people say the world is getting no better, but if we take a dip
into history and consider the conditions which prevailed there from the
earliest times up to only a few hundred years ago, we will find a race
of human beings which in no wise resemble the present output except in
form and stature. And our own forefathers--the people of the British
Isles, the Anglo-Saxons who are to-day leading in the social world--were
not one iota better throughout those pages than many of the smallest and
most unpretentious of obscure tribes living here and there in ignorant,
local isolation. One of the strongest points in our argument is the fact
that history, as we have it, is composed of the clang of battles and the
private lives of kings and despots. The ordinary, everyday life of the
peasant people--the working classes--the backbone of the nation, so to
speak--was beneath the consideration of the historian throughout all
times. The only virtue, in his estimation, was a strong arm--a large
army to murder and destroy property. And the life of the historian must
needs reflect that of the people. There is no doubt that in a great
majority they were of a cruel, murderous nature. We get rare glimpses,
however (at intervals of sometimes hundreds of years), of the doings,
manners, and customs, likes and dislikes of the common people, that we
can rely upon as authentic; the rest is poetry and legend, and,
although typical, are relations of incidents that did not really occur.
There is no doubt that, although it has been withheld, there was a great
deal of virtue, which blushed and bloomed unseen, amid all this blood
and war.
As though by accident the historian who immortalized Joan of Arc has let
slip a few words in connection with this heroine's early life that are
more valuable to us than page upon page of some of our so-called
history. "Jeanne d'Arc was the child of a laborer of Domremy, a little
village on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne. Just without the
cottage where she was born began the great woods of the Vosges, where
the children of Domremy drank in poetry and legend from fairy ring and
haunted well, hung their flower garlands on the sacred trees and sang
songs to the good people who might not drink of the fountain because of
their sins. Jeanne loved the forest; its birds and beasts came lovingly
to her at her childish call. But at home men saw nothing in her but 'a
good girl,' simple and pleasant in her way, spinning and sewing by her
mother's side while the other girls went to the fields--tender to the
poor and sick."
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