The Hoosier Schoolmaster | Page 5

in the wilds of Pennsylvania, these Irishmen built rude cabins, planted little patches of corn and potatoes, and distilled a whiskey that was never suffered to grow mellow. The forest was congenial to men who spent much the larger part of their time in boisterous sport of one sort or another. The manufacture of the rifle was early brought to Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, direct from the land of its invention by Swiss emigrants, and in the adventurous Scotch-Irishman of the Pennsylvania frontier the rifle found its fellow. Irish settlers became hunters of wild beasts, explorers, pioneers, and warriors against the Indians, upon whom they avenged their wrongs with relentless ferocity. Both the Irish race and the intermingled Pennsylvania Dutch were prolific, and the up-country of Pennsylvania soon overflowed. Emigration was held in check to the westward for a while by the cruel massacres of the French and Indian wars, and one river of population poured itself southward into the fertile valleys of the Virginia mountain country; another and larger flood swept still farther to the south along the eastern borders of the Appalachian range until it reached the uplands of Carolina. When the militia of one county in South Carolina was mustered during the Revolution, it was found that every one of the thirty-five hundred men enrolled were natives of Pennsylvania. These were mainly sons of North Irishmen, and from the Carolina Irish sprang Calhoun, the most aggressive statesman that has appeared in America, and Jackson, the most brilliant military genius in the whole course of our history. Before the close of the Revolution this adventurous race had begun to break over the passes of the Alleghanies into the dark and bloody ground of Kentucky and Tennessee. Soon afterward a multitude of Pennsylvanians of all stocks--the Scotch-Irish and those Germans, Swiss, and Hollanders who are commonly classed together as the Pennsylvania Dutch, as well as a large number of people of English descent--began to migrate down the Ohio Valley. Along with them came professional men and people of more or less culture, chiefly from eastern Virginia and Maryland. There came also into Indiana and Illinois, from the border States and from as far south as North Carolina and Tennessee, a body of "poor whites." These semi-nomadic people, descendants of the colonial bond-servants, formed, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the lowest rank of Hoosiers. But as early as 1845 there was a considerable exodus of these to Missouri. From Pike County, in that State, they wended their way to California, to appear in Mr. Bret Harte's stories as "Pikes." The movement of this class out of Indiana went on with augmented volume in the fifties. The emigrants of this period mostly sought the States lying just west of the Mississippi, and the poorer sort made the trip in little one-horse wagons of the sorriest description, laden mainly with white-headed children and followed by the yellow curs that are the one luxury indispensable to a family of this class. To this migration and to a liberal provision for popular education Indiana owes a great improvement in the average intelligence of her people. As early as 1880, I believe, the State had come to rank with some of the New England States in the matter of literacy.
The folk-speech of the Ohio River country has many features in common with that of the eastern Middle States, while it received but little from the dignified eighteenth-century English of eastern Virginia. There are distinct traces of the North-Irish in the idioms and in the peculiar pronunciations. One finds also here and there a word from the "Pennsylvania Dutch," such as "waumus" for a loose jacket, from the German wamms, a doublet, and "smearcase" for cottage cheese, from the German schmierk?se. The only French word left by the old voyageurs, so far as I now remember, is "cordelle," to tow a boat by a rope carried along the shore.
Substantially the same folk-speech exists wherever the Pennsylvania migration formed the main element of the primitive settlement. I have heard the same dialect in the South Carolina uplands that one gets from a Posey County Hoosier, or rather that one used to get in the old days before the vandal school-master had reduced the vulgar tongue to the monotonous propriety of what we call good English.
In drawing some of the subordinate characters in this tale a little too baldly from the model, I fell into an error common to inexperienced writers. It is amusing to observe that these portrait characters seem the least substantial of all the figures in the book. Dr. Small is a rather unrealistic villain, but I knew him well and respected him in my boyish heart for a most exemplary Christian of good family at the very time that, according to testimony