A MODERN CORYCIUS
October 1887

THERE is a river in one of our northern mid-continental States whose charms are a ceaseless temptation to the lover of out-door sports. It glides along like a great snake through a low country of alternating wood and prairie. The winter and spring rains cause it to swell to wide proportions, and during a great part of the year it spreads into shallow lakes and lagoons. This characteristic, of the stream keeps back the march of civilization and preserves a wide swath of undisputed territory which is sacred to the wild things of the wood, the iridescent creatures of the water, and the far travellers of the air. [The region referred to is that of the Kankakee River, which crosses Northern Indiana, keeps waste a large area, and, being traversed by many east and west railways, gives the traveller who judges and condemns by what he sees from car-windows a very poor idea of a very rich State.]

I sat recently on the rear platform of a "Pullman" in company with an acquaintance, admiring the splendid natural barrier of the western bank of the Mississippi. He had been a great traveler, and had hunted in the mountains, traversed the deserts of Africa, and enjoyed the awful solitude of night in the waste places of the world. And he made a remark which impressed me by its truthfulness -- that a man newer really breathes the deep breath of existence in all purity, nor realizes the perfection of physical life and the melodious harmony of nature, until he has lived in the wild beyond the influences of civilization. Such a place is the territory of our river, and such are the indescribable rewards with which it repays the appreciative visitor. I had for a long time been acquainted with a portion of it, but at last resolved to know its whole length of wilderness, to follow it between the manifold contortions of its shores, from the lake where it rises to the place where its banks become high and its course well defined through a rich region devoted to agriculture.

In the month of October, with two companions and two boats, tent, guns, and all necessary articles of food and camp equipment, I started. It was that period of the year when the woods and waters blend most perfectly. The first frosts had come and removed the mosquitoes. The leaves were beginning to shade off from the deep green of summer into rich orange, purple, and carnation. The nights were cool and the air of the closed tent was kept pure and bracing--nights for perfect deep after the day’s wholesome labors at the oar or the excitement and healthful fatigue of hunting. From the wild places of the north geese and ducks were coming to usurp for a while the abode of the wood-duck and the woodcock.

We moved down the river in our flat-bottomed boats, pulling up by the bank at noon to cook our dinner an our coal-oil stove, and as evening approached going ashore to pitch our tent, cook our supper, and eat it with that relish and exuberance of spirits which are the privileges of such a life. Such were the details of a day not spent in threading the marsh in quest of ducks, where the wild rice, standing four or five feet above the water, concealed us from this swift-flying, keen-sighted denizen of the air, which is equally at home on the surface of the water.

But who can describe the beauty of those days when we glided down the glassy surface, peered through its transparent body upon the sandy bottom where a thousand shadows, reflected through the surface, danced with intermingled light? Then the solitude of the wooded marshes where there is no place for human foot to tread, where the trees stand thick in the oozy earth, and the wild vine and heavy underbrush forbid the eye to penetrate the haunt of the coon, the squirrel, the mink, and the musk-rat--how shall one paint the weird sweetness of such scenes?

For a week we loitered down the stream, now shrunk, after the dry heats of the summer, into the narrow limits of its real channel, until we reached a great dismal marsh and wooded loneliness through which the river passed, a two days’ journey by boat. There was but one camping-place which, by steady labor at the oar, we might reach on the evening of the first day. It was an island in the swamp, called "Grape Island," and we beached upon it towards sunset. We had been told we should find a log-cabin at this point; sure enough there it was--a human habitation in the heart of this strange region. There was no boat at the slip cut into the bank for a landing, but a little column of smoke rose from the mud-and-stick chimney, and we knew that the owner could not be far distant.

We landed our traps, and pitched our tent ten paces from the hut, on the opposite side of the path leading to it from the landing, and were busy getting ready for supper when a little old man with a dog came hobbling up the path, passed our open tent-door unconcernedly, and, without even looking to see who had thus encroached upon his privacy, passed into the hut. We had noticed a string of ducks, seven in number, hanging at the end of the cabin nearest the river, which had evidently been killed in the morning, and, as we supposed, by the owner of the house, and we looked to see him come out and get them. But we waited in vain. Our potatoes were almost done, and our meat and coffee were impregnating the air with scents grateful to the hungry, when up the path came a second figure, a large man, loaded down with ducks and carrying a gun. He was a very different character from the one who had passed us with so much indifference, and in a moment we were in the full tide of conversation with him. He was a go-ahead, companionable, shrewd Yankee, of the rough-and-ready stamp--full. of laughter and oaths and hearty good-nature, and bristling all over with mother-wit. "Now," I thought to myself," we have cooked enough for five; I’ll go in and invite the old man and this Yankee hail-fellow to supper, and we’ll have a right jovial time." But the old man wouldn’t come; he was much obliged, but he had had his supper and was going to cook some for his friend, the Yankee, whose name was George Allen, as we had learned without the employment of any extraordinary art in eliciting facts, and in less time than I am telling it. "But ‘most everyone calls me George," he added, "and lets the rest go." But we persuaded Allen to save the old man any extra trouble, seeing our supper was going a-begging, and he agreed to accept our invitation after an ante-prandial wash.

We had noticed near our tent the traces of fire which outlined the space once occupied by two houses. It had occurred to me also that the hut in which the old man lived seemed to cover less ground than formerly, and that its furniture was abnormally scanty, even for the wilderness. The old man himself roused my curiosity, and before George Allen turned up, with fresh face and hands, it had reached the effervescing point.

Nothing throws down the barriers to communicativeness so quickly as the informal hospitality of a board when hungry hunters sit them down; for in the temporary similarity of dress, of pursuits, of enjoyment, the identifying marks of social distinctions are almost erased, or sufficiently covered up to make the intercourse of men from the most diverse poles of life--provided that they are men and not priggish counterfeits of manhood—if not enjoyable, at least easy and friendly. So we soon found out that thirty years ago George Allen and his wife Samantha had reached these parts, he with nothing but a "shillin’" in his pocket. Allen Dutcher--our old man of the log hut was then living where we now found him. His brother was with him, and they hunted and trapped together until the brother went the way of all flesh. George Allen had used well his burly form, quick wit, and single shilling, and ten miles from where we sat he now owned a large farm, and had money out at interest. Strong, manly sons cared for his fields, while for his own part he did little more than keep his shrewd eye upon things, and occasionally take his gun and boat and come dawn to the region of Grape Island for a hunt.

Then he told us how old Dutcher had lived and trapped here alone, never marrying, but going on in his easy way, hospitable and kind to every passer-by, modest and unassuming, accumulating a few such traps, guns, tools, and household articles as were necessary to his manner of life, and even laying by in odd cracks and crannies of his log hut a dollar here and a dollar there, until only a few weeks back, by some accident, the fire which he had left in the stove when he went off to attend his traps somehow communicated itself to his double cabins, and everything was burned. It was not much, but a little is a great deal when thirty years have garnered it and it is all you have. The only things he saved were the clothes on his back, his boat, dog, and a few "out" traps. George Allen, who was not by any means a modest philanthropist, took pains to emphasize the crushing weight of this catastrophe, and to tell us that, as soon as he heard of it from the old hermit’s own lips, he went about with the news among his neighbors. Many of them knew Dutcher, but even those who did not contributed to his needs in various ways. Then Allen came with his big sons, bearing what they had given and collected, and read to him the list of the names of those who had sent him necessaries, "At many a name," said George Allen, "he stopped me, and, with tears in his eyes, said, ‘Why, I don’t know that man.’" One gave clothing, and another a stove, others flour, coffee, and sugar, some money and various tools. Then the old man hewed him out logs for another house, and was now living in it.

The next morning at sunrise our little encampment was alive. My companions went out to hunt, for the ducks had been screaming over us all night, and we could hear the constant call of the drakes in the wild-rice marshes about us. The others were eager to go, none more so than our Yankee friend, who, though twice the age of the oldest of us, had as much enthusiasm as the youngest. I preferred to remain in camp and cultivate the acquaintance of this living remnant of by-gone generations who had dropped aside from the march of "progress" and hid himself in the unfrequented wild. I found him easy of access, and wholly without curiosity as to ourselves. We had corn-meal, but neither milk nor soda to mix with it in making corn-bread. He had some of each and urged me to use them. So we mixed up the ingredients in their necessary proportions, filled two tin pans, and placed them in his stove to bake. When they were done I told him he must keep one, but he demurred. I insisted. He said he always paid for everything, had plenty, and did not need the corn-bread. But as his milk and soda and fire were invested, I simply obliged him to retain his half. This is a simple incident; but as a straw may show which way the wind blows, so it indicated the character of this old man. He was generous to selff-abnegation, and, as George Allen told us and I believed, he would often give the half of the last he had to eat to stranger hunters coming his way hungry and unprovisioned, and would obstinately refuse all recompense.

I laid siege to, him--a gentle siege, for I respected the delicacy of his nature, so strongly evidenced by his unobtrusive and open-handed hospitality. He told me many things of early days and of himself. Like all old people, he loved to talk of the remote past. He was a type of those characters who were known as "pioneers" in the first half of the century--men who were raised in the simplicity of a home cut out of the virgin forest; who loved nature with a sympathy which they felt but could not articulate; who were veritable reproductions of what the Latin poet called the prissa gens mortalium. As the flood of immigration flowed in from Europe and pushed across the continent, these men went ahead of it, as did the animals of the forest. They were simple and manly; they hated ties; they loved the truth; possibly they knew how to read; they were generous to a fault, for they had learned to be so from generous, prolific mother-earth herself. The catalogue of their wealth, material and moral, would not ramify into many details; they had an axe, a gun, and a spade, "a few strong instincts and a few plain rules." Had "Boswell" Jocelin, of Brakeland, come back to the site of St. Edmundsbury in the days of his resuscitator, Thomas Carlyle, after seven centuries of absence, he would probably have experienced much the same sentiments as would Allen Dutcher had he gone back to his early home at Poughkeepsie after forty years spent near the great heart of nature, where her giant throbs were hourly felt and no clangor of the mart disturbed the music of her voice. Strange to say, the old man had no inclinations to go back. In the solitude his disposition had kept its sweetness, and a contented spirit had not allowed his mind to chafe at coming infirmities or recent disasters. I have no doubt that he felt a sort of dread of those wonders "of the railway, of the steamship, of the thoughts which shake mankind," which he knew by hearsay only, and that he lived in the land of recollection, where he chased the deer, shot the bear, trapped the furred animals of the water, or sat in the lodge of the Indian and shared his rude repast.

The employments of Dutcher were very simple. He had a long, narrow canoe, of very light draught, which he pushed and guided with a single paddle. He went up and down the river for some seven miles every day in those seasons of the year when the fur of the water-animals had got its winter texture; and wherever his keen eye told him there was a crossing of the muskrat, mink, or coon, there he set a steel trap so dexterously as to oblige the visitant to cross and spring it. What know the wild creatures of fen and forest about these cruel devices?

He visited these traps every morning and brought home what they contained. The ceiling of his hut was hung with hides of the little animals drying on boards upon which they were stretched. In late years the subsistence he gained in this way had been scant indeed, for the game was becoming scarce, and, besides, interloping trappers, who ignored the unwritten but recognized law of the trappers’ rights, had trenched seriously upon the old domain where he had lived so long alone and unmolested.

My companions returned in the evening well rewarded for the day’s labors by a considerable load of plump ducks. We tried again to induce old Dutcher to share our hospitality, but he still declined, and we saw it was no use to urge him. The next morning we were astir early for our day’s pull to the railway bridge, whence we intended to send our ducks home by express. Some things of which we had an unnecessarily large supply we placed in separate parcels and laid on Dutcher’s table in his absence from the house. As this was the only way to get him to take them, we managed to engage his attention by asking him to help us at the landing, and while he was so occupied we carried into the hut such things as we could spare and which would be useful to him. As we were departing George Allen proposed to sell us some of his ducks to fill out an odd half-dozen of our own. Those hanging at the end of the old man’s hut were tied together with a green cord. Allen had killed them two days before, and as the weather was still warm, although the nights were frosty, they were not fit for shipping. We agreed upon the price of half a dozen and requested fresh ones. "Let me pick them out for you," said George Allen; "I will get you a good string." He lifted those of his selection in both hands, not taking them by the string, and transferred them from his boat to one of ours. We gave him the money. "You had better cover them," he said, "to keep off the sun." Suiting the action to the word, and with an apparently disinterested solicitude for our game, he drew one of our rubber coats over them.

We said good-by to the old hermit with that feeling which they experience who meet on ships in mid-ocean. I flattered myself that his feelings in our regard were of a similar character. Here we had met on the ocean of life by a mere accident, and the ports from where we had come were so different, our objects so diverse, the world so wide, and shipwrecks so frequent that we should probably never meet again. Sooner or later we should all go down!

It was a beautiful day. The surface of the water was as smooth as the face of a French mirror. Indian-summer was upon us with all its glory of sound and scent and color. We were soon out of sight of the cabin. The river made a sudden turn around a cape high-grown with reeds and giant grass, and an instant later one would scarcely have dreamed of seeing a human habitation within ten miles. In the midst of this scene of dreamy beauty I began to think of our ducks. A suspicion flashed across my mind that possibly that Yankee had palmed off some of his wooden nutmegs upon us. "Marion," I said, "will you raise those coats and see what kind of a string the ducks at the top are tied with?" Back came the reply and a hearty laugh: "It is the green string." That meant that we had got the stale ducks. Wooden nutmegs, indeed! Fit to sell, but not fit to eat. We had only to throw them over and philosophize upon our own simplicity. As we glided away I could not forego the reflection that this incident illustrated more forcibly than was pleasant the wide difference between the simple honesty which is so large a constituent of true greatness, and the small meannesses so often practised by those who raise themselves to "respectability" and wealth. How magnificently Allen Dutcher, that failure measured by social and financial standards, stood out beside the "successful" George Allen!

Jos. W. Wilstach.


Printed in THE CATHOLIC WORLD -- A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science.


1850 Indiana Census lists Allen Dutcher in Boone Township, Porter County.


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