CHAPTER 11
CHARMED BY THE BEAUTY OF SAULT DE SAINTE MARIE AND FASCINATED BY ITS ENVIRONS I CHOOSE IT AS A HOME FOR LIFE
THE SAULT country fascinated me as it had many another and always will continue to do. Mazy summers of life and pure joy. Winters of stimulating majesty by which men, women and children are made robust or driven away; no colorless middle ground.
Mel Hoyt had recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin as a lawyer, but had taken up newspaper work and was already compelling. His rapier mind was reaching and strong. I told him the story of the north. He was as enthusiastic as Tom Moore was when he mused the Hyperboreans. And parenthetically Moore was an instinctive poet. He only knew the Greek legend of the peopled north and was not aware that moderns have proved the North Pole to have been habitable, and not unlikely to have been the incunabulum of the human race, at least as the race is now known.
Mel and I bought the Sault News, a struggling, under-dog, weekly paper in 1887. I had enough money to make the deal a cash one and as I had formed the attachment for my partner that has only grown richer between us all our lives, it was a keen delight to carry him for his share. We went at the thing hammer and tongs, and it was not long before we had our paper on a paying basis and our competitor on the run. The Sault was booming. Goose pastures were being subdivided. The whistle of the work train on the coming railroads could be heard. The trail to Hudson Bay, which had been one of the passages to and from the big world, would be side-tracked. French habitants were made over from muskrat hunters to millionaires in a day, in their minds. Many a palace with pink body and blue trimmings was started and some were built. An artificial atmosphere contaminated the Northwest wind for a while and then blew away, taking on its wings some of the adventurers and undesirables. Good people found their way and started legitimately to build a city in one of the most attractive locations on earth.
Our ambitions took fire with the others. We took in Sandy Dingwall as a third partner and planned as avidly as the best or worst. Sandy had been a clerk in the Wisconsin Fire and Marine Bank, of Milwaukee, for which George Smith laid the foundation and Alexander Mitchell, David Ferguson and John Johnston erected the superstructure. The Northwest was a New Scotland until the Germans and Scandinavians came to compete.
The Sault grew until its country trousers did not reach its ankles. It had to have a new suit cut by up-to-date tailors. That meant city organization. We were tremendously interested and took a very active part. There were ordinances to print and other fat takes, and it was our business to get them. I am positive that not one of us had an ethical thought. We were young fellows with eager hopes and no tangible ideals. My own boyhood and young manhood makes me think that vital youth is a thinly disguised barbarian, or was in my time.
Election day came. The village had been democratic if it could be said that there were partisan conditions. Really the Trempes, or the Ryans or the Browns, or an arrangement between them, usually controlled things. A short time before they had been shocked by Charley Chapman, a newcomer, who had been made village president without asking permission of the old regime. In the ancient days that were declining a few barrels of pork and some of whiskey carried every election.
At the first city election in the Sault there was a crazy quilt of corruption, and not a soul raised a warning or even an objecting hand. Political morals were as unknown as if the country had never been discovered. I saw the unclean hand ungloved, hard and bold, for the second time. Uncle Ike and A. C. Brown had exhibited a marked refinement compared with the methods in the Sault. I do not suppose that worse ever existed—the darkest practices before the dawn of reform.
Political lines were drawn taut. Otto Fowle, a banker, had been nominated for Mayor by the Republican local leaders, among whom William Chandler, Joseph H. Steere, George Kemp and Charley Spalding were prominent. There was no clash between the old and the new among the Republicans. The Democrats were not so lucky apparently. Billy Cady, also a banker, was nominated by the Democrats controlled by the new element.
Hoyt, Dingwall and I were as busy as three live young fellows could be. The open sewers ran whiskey, and drunken Indians staggered through the knee-deep spring slush in all directions. It might have been safe for a woman to have appeared on the street, but not one did. By ten o’clock we discovered that the Democrats were paying a dollar apiece for votes in addition to free whiskey. At once the leaders on our side armed their workers with a good many more dollar bills than the voting population of the town numbered, because the votes were coming in from Sugar Island, Sault Township, the Canadian Sault and even from the Indian Mission on Waiskai Bay and as far as Whitefish Point. It was not a question of morals with anybody concerned; the problem to be solved was whether they could get to this purchasable human commodity and had enough money to get it away from the other side. Nobody went into an alley or behind a barn unless it was to keep the other side from penetrating whatever strategy there was.
Fist fights were going on all day, and as my partners and I rushed from one polling place to another, we could not avoid them nor did we try to do so. Finally the day wore through. Soon the polls would close. The fight was furious. At the Fourth Ward polls occurred the astounding thing of the day, even as I now view that ollapodrida of strange experiences, proving that a condition is a condition and that morals have no stable standards and are really a matter of inner growth. Very evidently the leaders had either no inner growth or nothing else to go by, and everybody else was in the same boat.
About ten minutes before the polls closed, a thrifty citizen drove up with a team bearing twelve drunken Indians, an even dozen. Mike O’Day began to negotiate for them at once for the Democrats. A Republican pushed him aside and they roughed it a little, when, realizing how short the time was to buy those votes and get them in, they got to work again. It became a matter of open bidding as in a slave mart or auction of any kind. Dollar by dollar they raised each other. O’Day bid twelve dollars a head. Both leaders knew the election was close. The Republican raised his bid to fourteen dollars. It was more than O’Day had. The Democrats were all in. The Republicans got the votes—twelve—count them—at fourteen dollars each, open auction.
Otto Fowle was elected by seven majority.
Will you say that public morals have not improved since then? Improved is not meaningful enough. There has been a complete transformation, except in cities like Detroit, where the so-called good citizen is too often a silk-stocking derelict on election day. And my morals have improved. I thought of nothing wrong when I took part in that unclean election, and I wish to be charitable with those who may not have had a chance to see and know better and who still besmirch the ballot. About that Sault election even the preachers knew everything and said nothing, and the candidates were honorable men. Not a word was said before or soon after about the influence of money and whiskey and pork and their use. It was not long before the scales fell from my eyes and I saw the heinousness of it.
To atone is one of the reasons I have fought for clean politics and honest government ever since.
A number of candidates appeared for the Sault post-office after Cleveland’s defeat. There was a good deal of friction. The office was offered to me as a compromise, but I declined. However, while I was upon an expedition in the woods I was appointed. About the same time the business bubble burst. Hoyt, Dingwall and I jeffed to see who would keep the Sault News. We had made up our minds that there was not room enough for three in the business. Mr. Hoyt was a strong man and until very lately was the successful editor and publisher of the Milwaukee Daily News and one of the able men of the Nation. Mr. Dingwall became a millionaire play manager in New York, of which he gave signs when as a boy he had the dramatic column in the Milwaukee Sentinel. I lost, as we thought, as it fell to me to keep the paper and remain in the Sault, where my life has been so satisfactory and my friendships so happy among a people with no superiors, that it turned out that I won richly.
Before our debacle I had made plans for systematic exploration in Canada and had started the work. To the North from the Sault is a beautiful sky line of unbroken hills. Sometimes they wear a rich blue haze. At other times they are dressed in the gorgeous reds and golds of autumn. In the summer these hills are green and in the winter pure white. They are the oldest things in the world if geological chronology means anything. Stretching away from Cape Canso to Queen Charlotte Sound without a fracture they are more the back bone of the North American continent than are the Rockies. Between them and the North Pole there was nothing of man in those days and there is not much yet.
Behind those hills lay the greatest and least known wilderness in the world. It drew me like a human loadstone.
Something lost behind the mountains; “lost and waiting for you, go!”
If I had not gone something in me would have busted; now I don’t mean burst—something ruder than that. I knew that such little exploration as had been done followed the rivers. Along the rivers were trails and canoe routes. Fish lived in the waters; fur lived on the fish; Indians subsisted by the fish and fur, and the Hudson Bay Company exploited the Indians. Hence the one way of things along the streams. Drainage of this half the continent was south from the height of land to the basin of the Great Lakes, and North from the same great divide to Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean. Almost no attention had been given to minerals. Pine was coming in, and furs had been the golden fleece for two centuries and fleece is right.
My idea was to conduct reconnoissances across the country. This meant packing supplies on the back almost altogether and hard work. It also meant seeing country that even the Indians had not seen. I was eager to pay the toll. It was something of the spirit that had driven and coaxed my grandfather across the Alleghenies.
While I was in the wilderness the Sault News was expected to subsist my family. It was my permanent dock where I tied up my hope of sustenance and it did not fail. Critical conditions arose; most of them during my four-year term as postmaster. As I anticipated would be the case, a good many older citizens resented my selection. I was too new. Then, as postmaster, I was consulted by the state and national party machine. This also brought its conflicts and embarrassments and compelled me to attend at times very closely to my knitting.
Booms bring to towns a regular riffraff of things, more good than bad, no doubt, but it takes only one rotten apple in a barrel to foul all the rest, and a whole barrel of good apples will not cure a rotten one; just got to throw it out. I undertook the throwing out game and took on no end of tough enemies.
Two factions fought over variant plans for the water power development. One was for the old LaCrosse and Milwaukee Cargill-Elliott crowd and the other favored certain big promises made by Alexander Hamilton Gunn, for an alleged English syndicate. The enterprising townspeople had already gone down into their own pockets for a bonus of one hundred thousand dollars to start the thing and they were pyrographically concerned.
As usual in such things, politics poked in through the doorway of a desired franchise. I took sides with the tangible proposition made by Cargill and his associates. A popular local manufacturer named Lewis A. Hall, of Bay Mills, ten miles up the shore, became interested. In order to influence the council, ground was broken for the huge paper-making plant, which afterwards became the Niagara Pulp & Paper Company at Niagara Falls.
The segregated judgment of the people is ever a problem. In sufficient mass with adequate interest involving almost life or death, the people invariably go right; in local cases, wherein momentary passion obscures, they are just as apt or apter to go wrong.
After a bitter recriminatory contest the Sault rejected the bird in the hand for one that was said to be in the bush, but was never seen. It plunged the town into commercial gloom sooner or later, thus compelling a penance of years for the mistake.
During this fight another opposition paper was established, making three in the field—too many. I had been roasted until I was getting hardened to it, and had been hung and burned in effigy, all in the way of supplying me with experience that would entitle me some day to join the veterans’ corps of those who become immune to such shafts. My continual war against the gamblers, tough saloons and West End prostitutes always made it possible for my enemies to mobilize a strong force against me. At least once they started to march to my home to mob me. The common knowledge that I had a half a dozen rifles and could and probably would shoot, made the gang listen to those who advised giving me a wide berth. A coterie of citizens, respectable enough outwardly, but willing to lie in with the worst element to achieve a result, organized for the purpose and boasted that they would drive me out of town.
I have had two such fights in Sault Ste. Marie, running over several years. My frequent absence from home seemed to make it easier for my enemies to undo me. Sometimes, when I would return they would have a warrant awaiting me and would serve it on a Saturday night so as to keep me in jail at least over Sunday. Always some good friend would find out their plan and would have everything ready to circumvent it successfully. The favorite charge brought against me was criminal libel. I have defended nineteen libel suits and have been successful every time, because I tried to be in the right and was able to assemble a sufficient defense. Even now I cross my fingers and touch wood.
Once while I was postmaster my enemies charged me with overcharging an ignorant foreigner for a money order. Inasmuch as I had never issued a money order in my life, it was easy to disprove this. In fact, my enemies have generally, in their blind bitterness, overdone their attacks.
Such a life of civic and social warfare made for me many golden friends as well as unpleasant enmities. I learned that character may be good enough to be malice and slander bomb proof, and I tried to build such a one.
“If you don’t do it you can’t be caught,” was my motto.
That was a selfish thought at first and only gave way with years and growth to my guide of later years:
“Right because of Right.”
I will not try to convey the impossible idea that I was always right, because I was not. I was forever doing something and I made mistakes, but I never committed another criminal act after the Indian vote buying, related in a previous chapter. Perhaps I might go further and state that I have always tried to do right and hope that fifty-one per cent. of my acts have been of that character. At least I learned that life cannot be a bluff or a four flush, actions must square with words, and habits and associations must harmonize with aspirations. The hour never appealed to me and only those who know me least would designate me as an opportunist.
My Uncle William Osborn was one of the best men in the world. He said to me once:
“Nephew, where does the trail of life you are on lead to? Every man’s life is a trail; it is as long as he lives. There are many blind bypaths leading off. Some of them go nowhere; others lead to quagmires and precipices. The chart of the trail is the bible; the lights on the way are Christian efforts. If you get off the trail go back to the last point you were certain of and start again. Don’t be afraid to back up when you are wrong and don’t be afraid to go ahead when you are right. Carry your own load and help those who are not as strong as you are to bear their burdens. Show your colors. If you are not with a church you are against it, or worse yet, an agnostic, living in the twilight zone of individual cowardice. The average trail is three score and ten years long. Yours and every man’s will land him safe if he uses his conscience as a guide and his better desires as a staff. Where are you going to fetch up at seventy? Read ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’”
My uncle’s sermonette made the deepest impression on me of any advice I ever received. “Where are you going to fetch up at seventy?”
So the halfway houses have not held me very long and the jack o’lanterns have not dangerously enticed me off the main trail yet. For this I am thankful to God as the way to go has been very dim at times and hard to follow, and there have been rocks in the way and I have stumbled. But I always got up, put my jaws together, smiled to myself and went on. If I were asked the secret of success and happiness I would say applied energy and poised growth.
