Harper's Ferry, December 8, 1883. The face of nature is frowning here forever. Dark and wrinkled, rugged and unfriendly to look upon, there is an atmosphere of hostility about this place, of savagery, of sullen defiance and impatience, that makes one willing to hasten away. Sabre-cuts in the faceof the land; a fierce scowl on the face of the earth; a sullen roar in the rivers as they run angrily together; a sullen silence on the few people; dilapidation over the town a tired, deserted, nightmare town, as if it would like to wake up and throw off some indefinable terrors; and this is Harper's Ferry, where was, in fact, fired the first gun of the greatest, the saddest, the best and the worst war that ever was.
I do not get at the heart of the best people here. I have little time, little inclination too, perhaps. A scribe wandering about alone with his own meditations, no letters of introduction, a pad and pencil in his hand and a flannel shirt on his back, is not just the man for first-class men to open either their hearts or their doors to, I admit. And then, what could they tell me that has not been told a thousand times? Besides, what does this new generation know? As for the old, it perished in the war.
But those hills have not perished. They looked down on it all. Their stony lips are set in everlasting silence. And yet they tell me that John Brown came here, climbed their heights, looked down into these rivers, measured their waters, made a thousand calculations how to advance, how to retreat, where to fight, and then to die. I think the arsenal with its store of arms had not all to do with bringing John Brown here. There was comradeship in these glorious old hills. One likes to have such friends at his back and close about him in days of desperate enterprise.
"What! A pilgrimage to Harper's Ferry to write of old John Brown? Thought you were a Democrat; thought you had your paper in Oregon suppressed for treasonable utterances durin' the wah?" A good man, a friend, said this to me, and I answered: "My friend, whether it is my love for the poor man at election, the little horse in the horse-race, or the bottom dog in the dog-fight, I do not know. I do not care. I only know that I admired, pitied, and now revere John Brown. I am going to make a pilgrimage to Harper's Ferry now on the twenty-fourth anniversary of his execution.
"But this man John Brown was a murderer--murdered my people,sah."
"Yes, but he did not murder many men; not one hundredth part as many as Sherman or Sheridan. He did not desolate the defenceiess Shenandoah or burn his way through the South. He did not say, 'I have made the Shenandoah Valley so desolate that even a crow would have to carry its rations if it attempted to fly over it.' It was the man now at the head of the nation's army who said that. And yet if you were asked to dine with that man to-morrow, the chances are you would not only break bread with him, but even pocket the b!ll. of fare as a trophy. I prefer the dead lion to the hvmg but why finish the biblical paraphase?"
"Then you don't like Grant?"
"As a soldier, no. The most pitiful sight to me is that of a man, any man, strutting about this earth with an implement buckled to his side for the purpose of poking some unfortunate fellow to death We are a pastoral people in these States; keepers of sheep are we, and tillers of the soil. But right here let me tell you, while speaking of tilling the soil, that the best, the bravest, the very noblest deed that now looms up and out of and over all the desolate days and deeds of that war was done by that man Grant; and quietly and modestly done, and done m defiance, too, of all the powers at Washington. And that immortal deed, the one splendid work of the war, was expressed in these words under the apple-tree at Appomattox: 'No, General Lee, I don't want your horses. Let your men take them home. They will need them to plough with.'"
Some old, indolent mules from the country round about; greasy old wagons; a good many old and very indolent negroes shivering in the frosty weather on the corners; corner groceries that have been whittled away by jack-knives the only sign of industry I see about or enterprise of any kind; a few seedy-looking horses hitched before the few stores; an old fortress on a winding hill where "Stonewall" Jackson pointed to the State flag of Virginia and said, "Wherever thou goest, there also will I go" and that is Harper's Ferry as i find it, where john Brown bled, with his sons about him.
Out yonder in the middle of the river the water still splashes and leaps over and divides around the same great rock there where his black allies fell. Some ignorant, tobacco-eating idlers showed me a battered old establishment from which the old man, now sixty years old, pointcd his gun and fought all night, his sons at h!s side, at his feet, dead, dying, fighting. Of course there is no sentiment about these men. You hear hard, and maybe not entirely undeserved, remarks from these ignorant and unsympathizing idlers.
Coming here on the anniversary of John Brown's execution he was hung on the second of December, only a short walk away I hoped to find something new to tell you. Not so.
But it is an impressive fact that, looking south from any other point of the Republic, this one man and his sons stand up forever before you forever true, grand, reverend, resigned.
In the great dramas of the days to come this is the man who will walk the stage with the most majestic mien. It will not be the noisy-mouthed man of the capital; it will not be the contractor with his bloody millions; it will not be the general of the war with a million men at command, who will loom up largest and last. But it will be simple, honest, humble old John Brown, who died in pity for his helpless fellow-men.
It as a singular thing that this man, in one sense, ordered his tombstone before setting out for Harper's Ferry. At lcast he had his father's tombstone brought from New York to the half-savage little farm which Gerrit Smith had given him. The inscription on this stone reared to the father of John Brown of Harper's Ferry reads as follows:
"In memory of Capt. John Brown, who died at New York, Sept. ye 3, 1776, m the 42d year of his age." Beneath this is the old hero's epitaph, and it reads: "John Brown, born May 5' 9'9.1'800; was executed at Charlestown, Va., Dec. 2, I
Joseph De Bloney, whom I first met on the head of the Sacramento River in the spring of 1855, was of the old Swiss family of that name famous, you know, for being the first to renounce their high rank of nobility and assume a simple republican name. This was a learned man. Even in the mountains there he had many books. But I think few people ever knew his worth. Certainly but few ever sympathized with him. I believe he had first crossed the plains with Fremont. He is probably entirely forgotten now. And the world never heard of his feeble efforts to help his fellows. His ambition was to unite the Indians about the base of Mount Shasta and establish a sort of Indian republic, the prime and principal object of which was to set these Indians entirely apart from the approach of the white man, draw an impassable line, in fact, behind which the Indian would be secure in his lands, his simple life, his integrity, and his purity. Some of the many tribes were friendly; some were hostile. It was a hard undertaking at best, perilous, almost as much as a man's life was worth, to attempt to befriend an Indian in those stormy days on the border, when every gold-hunter crowding the hills in quest of precious metals counted it his privilege, if not his duty, to shoot an Indian on sight. An Indian sympathizer was more hated m those days, is still, than ever was an Abolitionist. And it was against bitter odds that this little California John Brown, even long before John Brown's raid, tried to make a stand in behalf of a perishing race. He, too, failed. The plastic new land was in a chaotic state. More men than he were trying to fashion something solid and useful out of the Republic's new possessions. Walker was even trying to expand these possessions to Nicaragua. Fremont had hoisted the bear flag. It made him a prisoner. It ought to have made him President.
De Bloney gradually gathered about twenty-five men around him m the mountains, took up homes, situated his men around him, planted, dug gold, did what he could to civilize the people and subdue the savages.
Our neighbor, Captain Jack, in his lava-beds, was born of this man's endeavor. Of course his motives were miscontrued by the few who took any notice of him at all. Some suspected that we had found gold-mines of great wealth. Others, again, said we were stealing horses and hiding them away in the hearts of the mountains. And I concede that property disputes with some settlers gave some grounds for suspicion. Yet De Bloney was as honest as a sunset and as pure as the snowy mountains around US.
But he had tough elements to deal with. The most savage men were the white men. The Indians, the friendly ones, were the tamest of his people. These white men would come and go; now they would marry the Indian women and now join a prospecting party and disappear for months, even years. At one time they nearly all went off to join Walker in Nicaragua. Only two ever lived to return. I, too, wandered away from him more than once, but at last kept close and always with him. He taught me much, and was good. Once the unfriendly Indians burned his camp. He raised a company, followed and fought them. This was the battle of Castle Rocks. I was shot in the face and neck, and was nearly a year getting well. By this time there was a war on the other side of the mountain, and I was drawn into that also. This was the Pit River war. Here I got a bullet through the right arm, and was laid up for another long season.
By and by he had his plans matured, and had armed his Indians in defence against the brutal and aggressive white men. I was sent on one occasion to Shasta City for ammunition. I had made similar raids before. My horse was shot on the return. I was dreadfully bruised by a fall, and the two Indians with me took me in turns behind them. Then we got, or rather captured, a fresh horse and kept on. But I was too badly hurt to go far, and they left me with some Indians by the road. Here I was captured by the pursuing white men. This was in 1859. i was in my seventeenth 13 year, and small for my age. Of course, they had sworn to hang the renegade to the nearest tree. I was really not big enough to hang, and so they took me back to Shasta City, put me in jail, and my part in the wild attempt to found an Indian republic was rewarded with a prompt indictment for stealing horses. A long time I lay in that hot and horrible pen, more dead than alive.
God pity all prisoners, say I. Fortunately I could see and even smell some pine trees that stood on the hillside hard by. I know I should have died in those hot days, with the mercury up in the nineties, but for the friendship, the fragrance, the sense of freedom in those proud old pine trees on the hillside. Meantime, as always happens, I was left alone. All the men passed away like water through a sieve, and only the Indians remembered me. On the night of the 4th of July, while the town was carousing, they broke open the jail, threw me again on to a horse, and such a ride for freedom and fresh air was never seen before.
Poor De Bloney lost all heart and gradually sank to continued drunkenness on the border and ultimate obscurity. As for myself, I tried to inherit his high plans and spirits, and made one more attempt, for I had formed ties not to be broken. But the last venture was still more disastrous. Volumes only could tell all the dreadful story that followed--the tragedy and the comedy, the folly and the wisdom. And yet now, after a quarter of a century, I still fail to see anything but good and honesty and integrity in these bold plans for the protection of the Indians the Indians, to whose annihilation we, as a nation, have become quite reconciled. Ahl how noble in us to be so easily reconciled to the annihilation of another race than our own! I never saw De Bloney after this final failure. I would not be taken again prisoner, and so an officer in pursuit was shot from his horse. We separated in the Sierras, and sought separate ways in life. I made my way to Washington Territory, sold my pistols, and settled down in an obscure settlement on the banks of the Columbia, near Lewis River, and taught school. And here it was that the story of John Brown, his raid, his fight, his capture, and his execution, all came to me. Do you wonder that my heart went out to him and remained with him? I, too, had been in jail. Death and disgrace were on my track, and might find me any day hiding away there under the trees in the hearts of the happy children. And so, sympathizing, I told these children over and over again the story of old John Brown there. And they, every one, loved, and honored and pitied him.
And now you can better understand why I was so resolved to make a pilgrimage to Harper's Ferry on the anniversary of his execution. However, he does not need my sympathy, or any one's sympathy. I am here simply because it is my sad pleasure to be here at this time.
It was an odd sequel to our failure to establish our Utopian Republic about the base of Mount Shasta, with the great white cone for a centre, that I should finally meet these same men who had fought and had captured me in California up in the new gold-fields of Northern Oregon. And singularly enough, they were very kind. I had received too many wounds fighting for these same men on the border of California to be quite the "renegade" they counted me once. And when the Shoshonee indians now attacked our camp at Canyon City, Oregon, these same men chose me their captain to lead them in battle. And how they did wish for poor De Bloney HOW! But he had been buried away up m the golden fields of Idaho. A three-month's campaign, and I was finally beaten, leaving many dead. But, as if still to convince me of their love and confidence, when we returned to Canyon City, they elected me judge of the country, and for the four years of my administration stood truly by me, as if to try to make me forget something of the sorrow and the shame of imprisonment. Yet for all that I was in some sense an old man from the time of our failure and flight. And how wretched the few remaining Indians there now! There are only now and then in all that splendid mountain region a few miserable hovels of half-starved, dispirited beggars of the lowest sort to be met with. Captain Jack and his sixty brave rebels were the last of this race. But they made a red spot on the map which the army will long remember.