Also Indians from the Kickapoo reservation, while harmless enough at the time, had a habit of prowling about over the country, and a band of them nearly scared the wits out of my mother one hot summer day. She saw the blanketed red skins, on ponies, coming down the road, single-file. Gathering her youngsters, much as a hen gathers her brood the approach of danger—and much as my mother had once before taken her children under her protecting arms and saved their lives, as you shall see presently—she hid in the cornfield until the rovers had left our farm.
And now another prairie fire. If there could be any question about the youngster having retained with photographic accuracy the horrors of the one earlier mentioned, there can be no doubt about this later one, which, whipped by the ever-present wind, stole in upon us in the night, My father’s much prized rail fence was laid low, and only by heroic efforts was the house saved. These dreaded prairie fires and other subjected frights incident to the new country seemed to place a mark upon my mother.
“William,” she said one day to my father, “we might as well have remained in Tennessee and taken our chances on being killed by guerillas as to come all the way out to this God-for-saken country only to be burned to death by prairie fires, or shaken to pieces by earthquakes, or frightened to death by Indians.” And I am sure that if the Kansas cyclone had then enjoyed the widespread reputation that it does in this year of grace, my mother would have included that also.
In Tennessee, my father was a shoemaker and tanner by trade. And, by the grace of a kind Providence—and some quick shooting—he was a live Union “sympathizer” in a Rebel stronghold. The great conflict—the Civil War—between the North and the South was then on. My father had not, at this time, joined the fighting forces on either side. He was content to ply his trade, make leather and shoes, both of which were very much needed at the time. But my father made the almost fatal mistake of “exercising his rights as a free-born citizen,” in having his say.
The South was not quite solid for Confederacy. Sometimes even families were divided. In my mother’s family two of her brothers favored the North and two were for the South—”rank rebels,” my mother said. None of them went to war. They worked in a powder mill—more dangerous, by far. Twice the mill blew up, and each time one of my Uncles was blown into fragments. Also one of my mother’s acquired relatives hid in a cave for the duration of the war.