Captains of Industry

J >> James Parton >> Captains of Industry

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Poor little lonely wretch! One day, when he was thirteen years of age,
there occurred a total eclipse of the sun, a phenomenon of which he had
scarcely heard, and he had not the least idea what it could be. He was
hoeing corn that day in a solitary place. When the darkness and the
chill of the eclipse fell upon the earth, feeling sure the day of
judgment had come, he was terrified beyond description. He watched the
sun disappearing with the deepest apprehension, and felt no relief until
it shone out bright and warm as before.

It seems strange that people in a Christian country could have had a
good steady boy like this in their house and yet do nothing to cheer or
comfort his life. Old men tell me it was a very common case in New
England seventy years ago.

This hard experience on the farm lasted until he was old enough to be
apprenticed. At fourteen he was bound to a carpenter for seven years,
during which he was to receive for his services his board and his
clothes. Already he had done almost the work of a man on the farm, being
a stout, handy fellow, and in the course of two or three years he did
the work of a full-grown carpenter; nevertheless, he received no wages
except the necessaries of life. Fortunately the carpenter's family were
human beings, and he had a pleasant, friendly home during his
apprenticeship.

Even under the gentlest masters apprentices, in old times, were kept
most strictly to their duty. They were lucky if they got the whole of
Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July for holidays.

Now, this apprentice, when he was sixteen, was so homesick on a certain
occasion that he felt he _must_ go and see his mother, who lived near
her old home, twenty miles from where he was working on a job. He walked
the distance in the night, in order not to rob his master of any of the
time due to him.

It was a terrible night's work. He was sorry he had undertaken it; but
having started he could not bear to give it up. Half the way was through
the woods, and every noise he heard he thought was a wild beast coming
to kill him, and even the piercing notes of the whippoorwill made his
hair stand on end. When he passed a house the dogs were after him in
full cry, and he spent the whole night in terror. Let us hope the
caresses of his mother compensated him for this suffering.

The next year when his master had a job thirty miles distant, he
frequently walked the distance on a hot summer's day, with his
carpenter's tools upon his back. At that time light vehicles, or any
kind of one-horse carriage, were very rarely kept in country places, and
mechanics generally had to trudge to their place of work, carrying their
tools with them. So passed the first years of his apprenticeship.

All this time he was thinking of quite another business,--that of
clock-making,--which had been developed during his childhood near his
father's house, by Eli Terry, the founder of the Yankee wooden-clock
manufacture.

This ingenious Mr. Terry, with a small saw and a jack-knife, would cut
out the wheels and works for twenty-five clocks during the winter, and,
when the spring opened, he would sling three or four of them across the
back of a horse, and keep going till he sold them, for about twenty-five
dollars apiece. This was for the works only. When a farmer had bought
the machinery of a clock for twenty-five dollars, he employed the
village carpenter to make a case for it, which might cost ten or fifteen
dollars more.

It was in this simple way that the country was supplied with those tall,
old-fashioned clocks, of which almost every ancient farm-house still
contains a specimen. The clock-case was sometimes built into the house
like a pillar, and helped to support the upper story. Some of them were
made by very clumsy workmen, out of the commonest timber, just planed in
the roughest way, and contained wood enough for a pretty good-sized
organ.

The clock business had fascinated Chauncey Jerome from his childhood,
and he longed to work at it. His guardian dissuaded him. So many clocks
were then making, he said, that in two or three years the whole country
would be supplied, and then there would be no more business for a maker.
This was the general opinion. At a training, one day, the boy overheard
a group talking of Eli Terry's _folly_ in undertaking to make two
hundred clocks all at once.

"He'll never live long enough to finish them," said one.

"If he should," said another, "he could not possibly sell so many. The
very idea is ridiculous."

The boy was not convinced by these wise men of the East, and he lived to
make and to sell two hundred thousand clocks in one year!

When his apprenticeship was a little more than half over, he told his
master that if he would give him four months in the winter of each year,
when business was dull, he would buy his own clothes. His master
consenting, he went to Waterbury, Connecticut, and began to work making
clock dials, and very soon got an insight into the art and mystery of
clock-making.

The clock-makers of that day, who carried round their clock-movements
upon a horse's back, often found it difficult to sell them in remote
country places, because there was no carpenter near by competent to make
a case. Two smart Yankees hired our apprentice to go with them to the
distant State of New Jersey, for the express purpose of making cases for
the clocks they sold. On this journey he first saw the city of New York.
He was perfectly astonished at the bustle and confusion. He stood on the
corner of Chatham and Pearl Streets for more than an hour, wondering why
so many people were hurrying about so in every direction.

"What is going on?" said he, to a passer-by. "What's the excitement
about?"

The man hurried on without noticing him; which led him to conclude that
city people were not over polite.

The workmen were just finishing the interior of the City Hall, and he
was greatly puzzled to understand how those winding stone stairs could
be fixed without any visible means of support. In New Jersey he found
another wonder. The people there kept Christmas more strictly than
Sunday; a thing very strange to a child of the Puritans, who hardly knew
what Christmas was.

Every winter added something to his knowledge of clock-making, and, soon
after he was out of his apprenticeship, he bought some portions of
clocks, a little mahogany, and began to put clocks together on his own
account, with encouraging success from the beginning.

It was a great day with him when he received his first magnificent order
from a Southern merchant for twelve wooden clocks at twelve dollars
apiece! When they were done, he delivered them himself to his customer,
and found it impossible to believe that he should actually receive so
vast a sum as a hundred and forty-four dollars. He took the money with a
trembling hand, and buttoned it up in his pocket. Then he felt an awful
apprehension that some robbers might have heard of his expecting to
receive this enormous amount, and would waylay him on the road home.

He worked but too steadily. He used to say that he loved to work as well
as he did to eat, and that sometimes he would not go outside of his gate
from one Sunday to the next. He soon began to make inventions and
improvements. His business rapidly increased, though occasionally he had
heavy losses and misfortunes.

His most important contribution to the business of clock-making was his
substitution of brass for wood in the cheap clocks. He found that his
wooden clocks, when they were transported by sea, were often spoiled by
the swelling of the wooden wheels. One night, in a moment of extreme
depression during the panic of 1837, the thought darted into his mind,--

"A cheap clock can be made of brass as well as wood!"

It kept him awake nearly all night. He began at once to carry out the
idea. It gave an immense development to the business, because brass
clocks could be exported to all parts of the world, and the cost of
making them was greatly lessened by new machinery. It was Chauncey
Jerome who learned how to make a pretty good brass clock for forty
cents, and a good one for two dollars; and it was he who began their
exportation to foreign lands. Clocks of his making ticked during his
lifetime at Jerusalem, Saint Helena, Calcutta, Honolulu, and most of the
other ends of the earth.

After making millions of clocks, and acquiring a large fortune, he
retired from active business, leaving his splendid manufactory at New
Haven to the management of others. They thought they knew more than the
old man; they mismanaged the business terribly, and involved him in
their own ruin. He was obliged to leave his beautiful home at seventy
years of age, and seek employment at weekly wages--he who had given
employment to three hundred men at once.

He scorned to be dependent. I saw and talked long with this good old man
when he was working upon a salary, at the age of seventy-three, as
superintendent of a large clock factory in Chicago. He did not pretend
to be indifferent to the change in his position. He felt it acutely. He
was proud of the splendid business he had created, and he lamented its
destruction. He said it was one of his consolations to know that, in the
course of his long life, he had never brought upon others the pains he
was then enduring. He bore his misfortunes as a man should, and enjoyed
the confidence and esteem of his new associates.

CAPTAIN PIERRE LACLEDE LIGUEST,

PIONEER.

The bridge which springs so lightly and so gracefully over the
Mississippi at St. Louis is a truly wonderful structure. It often
happens in this world that the work which is done best conceals the
merit of the worker. All is finished so thoroughly and smoothly, and
fulfills its purpose with so little jar and friction, that the
difficulties overcome by the engineer become almost incredible. No one
would suppose, while looking down upon the three steel arches of this
exquisite bridge, that its foundations are one hundred and twenty feet
below the surface of the water, and that its construction cost nine
millions of dollars and six years of time. Its great height above the
river is also completely concealed by the breadth of its span. The
largest steamboat on the river passes under it at the highest stage of
water, and yet the curve of the arches appears to have been selected
merely for its pictorial effect.

It is indeed a noble and admirable work, an honor to the city and
country, and, above all, to Captain James B. Eads, who designed and
constructed it. The spectator who sees for the first time St. Louis, now
covering as far as the eye can reach the great bend of the river on
which it is built, the shore fringed with steamboats puffing black
smoke, and the city glittering in the morning sun, beholds one of the
most striking and animating spectacles which this continent affords.

Go back one hundred and twenty years. That bend was then covered with
the primeval forest, and the only object upon it which betrayed the hand
of man was a huge green mound, a hundred feet high, that had been thrown
up ages before by some tribe which inhabited the spot before our Indians
had appeared. All that region swarmed with fur-bearing animals, deer,
bear, buffalo, and beaver. It is difficult to see how this continent
ever could have been settled but for the fur trade. It was beaver skin
which enabled the Pilgrim Fathers of New England to hold their own
during the first fifty years of their settlement. It was in quest of
furs that the pioneers pushed westward, and it was by the sale of furs
that the frontier settlers were at first supplied with arms, ammunition,
tools, and salt.

The fur trade also led to the founding of St. Louis. In the year 1763 a
great fleet of heavy batteaux, loaded with the rude merchandise needed
by trappers and Indians, approached the spot on which St. Louis stands.
This fleet had made its way up the Mississippi with enormous difficulty
and toil from New Orleans, and only reached the mouth of the Missouri
at the end of the fourth month. It was commanded by Pierre Laclede
Liguest, the chief partner in a company chartered to trade with the
Indians of the Missouri River. He was a Frenchman, a man of great energy
and executive force, and his company of hunters, trappers, mechanics,
and farmers, were also French.

On his way up the river Captain Liguest had noticed this superb bend of
land, high enough above the water to avoid the floods, and its surface
only undulating enough for the purposes of a settlement. Having reached
the mouth of the Muddy River (as they called the Missouri) in the month
of December, and finding no place there well suited to his purpose, he
dropped down the stream seventeen miles, and drove the prows of his
boats into what is now the Levee of St. Louis. It was too late in the
season to begin a settlement. But he "blazed" the trees to mark the
spot, and he said to a young man of his company, Auguste Chouteau:--

"You will come here as soon as the river is free from ice, and will
cause this place to be cleared, and form a settlement according to the
plan I shall give you."

The fleet fell down the river to the nearest French settlement, Fort de
Chartres. Captain Liguest said to the commander of this fort on
arriving:--

"I have found a situation where I intend to establish a settlement which
in the future will become one of the most beautiful cities in America."

These are not imaginary words. Auguste Chouteau, who was selected to
form the settlement, kept a diary, part of which is now preserved in the
Mercantile Library at St. Louis, and in it this saying of Captain
Liguest is recorded. So, the next spring he dispatched young Chouteau
with a select body of thirty mechanics and hunters to the site of the
proposed settlement.

"You will go," said he, "and disembark at the place where we marked the
trees. You will begin to clear the place and build a large shed to
contain the provisions and tools and some little cabins to lodge the
men."

On the fifteenth of February, 1764, the party arrived, and the next
morning began to build their shed. Liguest named the settlement St.
Louis, in honor of the patron saint of the royal house of France--Louis
XV. being then upon the throne. All went well with the settlement, and
it soon became the seat of the fur trade for an immense region of
country, extending gradually from the Mississippi to the Rocky
Mountains.

The French lived more peacefully with the Indians than any other people
who assisted to settle this continent, and the reason appears to have
been that they became almost Indian themselves. They built their huts in
the wigwam fashion, with poles stuck in the ground. They imitated the
ways and customs of the Indians, both in living and in hunting. They
went on hunting expeditions with Indians, wore the same garments, and
learned to live on meat only, as Indian hunting parties generally did.
But the circumstance which most endeared the French to the Indians was
their marrying the daughters of the chiefs, which made the Indians
regard them as belonging to their tribe. Besides this, they accommodated
themselves to the Indian character, and learned how to please them. A
St. Louis fur trader, who was living a few years ago in the ninetieth
year of his age, used to speak of the ease with which an influential
chief could be conciliated.

"I could always," said he, "make the principal chief of a tribe my
friend by a piece of vermilion, a pocket looking-glass, some
flashy-looking beads, and a knife. These things made him a puppet in my
hands."

Even if a valuable horse had been stolen, a chief, whose friendship had
been won in this manner, would continue to scold the tribe until the
horse was brought back. The Indians, too, were delighted with the
Frenchman's fiddle, his dancing, his gayety of manner, and even with the
bright pageantry of his religion. It was when the settlement was six
years old that the inhabitants of St. Louis, a very few hundreds in
number, gathered to take part in the consecration of a little church,
made very much like the great council wigwam of the Indians, the logs
being placed upright, and the interstices filled with mortar. This
church stood near the river, almost on the very site of the present
cathedral. Mass was said, and the Te Deum was chanted. At the first
laying out of the village, Captain Liguest set apart the whole block as
a site for the church, and it remains church property to this day.

It is evident from Chouteau's diary that Pierre Laclede Liguest, though
he had able and energetic assistants, was the soul of the enterprise,
and the real founder of St. Louis. He was one of that stock of Frenchmen
who put the imprint of their nation, never to be effaced, upon the map
of North America--a kind of Frenchman unspeakably different from those
who figured in the comic opera and the masquerade ball of the late
corrupt and effeminating empire. He was a genial and generous man, who
rewarded his followers bountifully, and took the lead in every service
of difficulty and danger. While on a visit to New Orleans he died of one
of the diseases of the country, and was buried on the shore near the
mouth of the Arkansas River.

His executor and chief assistant, Auguste Chouteau, born at New Orleans
in 1739, lived one hundred years, not dying till 1839. There are many
people in St. Louis who remember him. A very remarkable coincidence was,
that his brother, Pierre Chouteau, born in New Orleans in 1749, died in
St. Louis in 1849, having also lived just one hundred years. Both of
these brothers were identified with St. Louis from the beginning, where
they lived in affluence and honor for seventy years, and where their
descendants still reside.

The growth of St. Louis was long retarded by the narrowness and tyranny
of the Spanish government, to which the French ceded the country about
the time when St. Louis was settled. But in 1804 it was transferred to
the United States, and from that time its progress has been rapid and
almost uninterrupted. When President Jefferson's agent took possession,
there was no post-office, no ferry over the river, no newspaper, no
hotel, no Protestant church, and no school. Nor could any one hold land
who was not a Catholic. Instantly, and as a matter of course, all
restricting laws were swept away; and before two years had passed there
was a ferry, a post-office, a newspaper, a Protestant church, a hotel,
and two schools, one French and one English.

ISRAEL PUTNAM.

It is strange that so straightforward and transparent a character as
"Old Put" should have become the subject of controversy. Too much is
claimed for him by some disputants, and much too little is conceded to
him by others. He was certainly as far from being a rustic booby as he
was from being a great general.

Conceive him, first, as a thriving, vigorous, enterprising Connecticut
farmer, thirty years of age, cultivating with great success his own farm
of five hundred and fourteen acres, all paid for. Himself one of a
family of twelve children, and belonging to a prolific race which has
scattered Putnams all over the United States, besides leaving an
extraordinary number in New England, he had married young at his native
Salem, and established himself soon after in the northeastern corner of
Connecticut. At that period, 1740, Connecticut was to Massachusetts what
Colorado is to New York at present; and thither, accordingly, this
vigorous young man and his young wife early removed, and hewed out a
farm from the primeval woods.

He was just the man for a pioneer. His strength of body was
extraordinary, and he had a power of sustained exertion more valuable
even than great strength. Nothing is more certain than that he was an
enterprising and successful farmer, who introduced new fruits, better
breeds of cattle, and improved implements.

There is still to be seen on his farm a long avenue of ancient apple
trees, which, the old men of the neighborhood affirm, were set out by
Israel Putnam one hundred and forty years ago. The well which he dug is
still used. Coming to the place with considerable property inherited
from his father (for the Putnams were a thriving race from the
beginning), it is not surprising that he should have become one of the
leading farmers in a county of farmers.

At the same time he was not a studious man, and had no taste for
intellectual enjoyments. He was not then a member of the church. He
never served upon the school committee. There was a Library Association
at the next village, but he did not belong to it. For bold riding,
skillful hunting, wood-chopping, hay-tossing, ploughing, it was hard to
find his equal; but, in the matter of learning, he could write legibly,
read well enough, spell in an independent manner, and not much more.

With regard to the wolf story, which rests upon tradition only, it is
not improbable, and there is no good reason to doubt it. Similar deeds
have been done by brave backwoodsmen from the beginning, and are still
done within the boundaries of the United States every year. The story
goes, that when he had been about two years on his new farm, the report
was brought in one morning that a noted she-wolf of the neighborhood had
killed seventy of his sheep and goats, besides wounding many lambs and
kids. This wolf, the last of her race in that region, had long eluded
the skill of every hunter. Upon seeing the slaughter of his flock, the
young farmer, it appears, entered into a compact with five of his
neighbors to hunt the pernicious creature by turns until they had killed
her. The animal was at length tracked to her den, a cave extending deep
into a rocky hill. The tradition is, that Putnam, with a rope around his
body, a torch in one hand, and rifle in the other, went twice into the
cave, and the second time shot the wolf dead, and was drawn out by the
people, wolf and all. An exploit of this nature gave great celebrity in
an outlying county in the year 1742. Meanwhile he continued to thrive,
and one of the old-fashioned New England families of ten children
gathered about him. As they grew towards maturity, he bought a share in
the Library Association, built a pew for his family in the church, and
comported himself in all ways as became a prosperous farmer and father
of a numerous family.

So passed his life until he reached the age of thirty-seven, when he
already had a boy fifteen years of age, and was rich in all the wealth
which Connecticut then possessed. The French war broke out--the war
which decided the question whether the French or the English race should
possess North America. His reputation was such that the legislature of
Connecticut appointed him at once a captain, and he had no difficulty in
enlisting a company of the young men of his county, young farmers or the
sons of farmers. He gained great note as a scouter and ranger, rendering
such important service in this way to the army that the legislature made
him a special grant of "fifty Spanish milled dollars" as an honorable
gift. He was famous also for Yankee ingenuity. A colonial newspaper
relates an anecdote illustrative of this. The British general was sorely
perplexed by the presence of a French man-of-war commanding a piece of
water which it was necessary for him to cross.

"General," said Putnam, "that ship must be taken."

"Aye," replied the general, "I would give the world if she was taken."

"I will take her," said Putnam.

"How?" asked the general.

"Give me some wedges, a beetle, and a few men of my own choice."

When night came, Putnam rowed under the vessel's stern, and drove the
wedges between the rudder and the ship. In the morning she was seen with
her sails flapping helplessly in the middle of the lake, and she was
soon after blown ashore and captured.

Among other adventures, Putnam was taken prisoner by the Indians, and
carried to his grave great scars of the wounds inflicted by the savages.
He served to the very end of the war, pursuing the enemy even into the
tropics, and assisting at the capture of Havana. He returned home, after
nine years of almost continuous service, with the rank of colonel, and
such a reputation as made him the hero of Connecticut, as Washington was
the hero of Virginia at the close of the same war. At any time of public
danger requiring a resort to arms, he would be naturally looked to by
the people of Connecticut to take the command.

Eleven peaceful years he now spent at home. His wife died, leaving an
infant a year old. He joined the church; he married again; he cultivated
his farm; he told his war stories. The Stamp Act excitement occurred in
1765, when Putnam joined the Sons of Liberty, and called upon the
governor of the colony as a deputy from them.

"What shall I do," asked the governor, "if the stamped paper should be
sent to me by the king's authority?"

"Lock it up," said Putnam, "until we visit you again."

"And what will you do with it?"

"We shall expect you to give us the key of the room where it is
deposited; and if you think fit, in order to screen yourself from
blame, you may forewarn us upon our peril not to enter the room."

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