[Illustration: W. G. Puddefoot with hand-written signature] THE MINUTE MAN ON THE FRONTIER BY THE REV. W. G. PUDDEFOOT, A.M. FIELD SECRETARY OF THE HOME MISSIONARY SOCIETY NEW YORK: 46 EAST 14TH STREET THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY BOSTON: 100 PURCHASE STREET COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. TYPOGRAPHY BY C. J. PETERS & SON, BOSTON. PREFACE. In a very able review of Maspero's "Dawn of Civilization," the writer says "that for hundreds of years it was believed that history had two eyes; but now we know she has at least three, and that archæology is the third." This may account for the saying that "history is a lie agreed to;" for it needs to be argus-eyed to give us any adequate idea of the truth; and while the writer of the following sketches does not aspire to the rank of a historian, he has been induced to print them for two or three reasons. First, because urged to by friends; and secondly, because of the unique condition of American frontier life that is so rapidly passing away forever. One may read Macaulay, Froude, Knight, and, in fact, a half-dozen histories of England, and then sit down to the gossipy sketches of Sidney culled from Pepys's, Evelyn's, and other diaries, and get a truer view of English life than in all the great histories combined. It would be impossible to give even the slightest sketch of a country so large as ours for a single decade in many volumes; although, in one sense, we are more homogeneous than many suppose. There was a greater difference in two counties in England before the advent of the railways than between two of our Northern States to-day. To-day a man may travel from Boston to San Francisco, and he will find the same headlines in his morning papers, and for three thousand miles will find the scenery desecrated by the wretched quack medicine advertisements that produce "that tired feeling" which they profess to cure. If he goes into one county in the mother country, he will find the people singeing the bristles of their swine, and counting by the score, in another by the stone, etc., and customs kept up that had grown settled before travel became general. But with us it is different. We had no time to become crystallized before the iron horse, the great cosmopolitan of the age, rapidly levelled all distinctions; and it is only by getting away from the railway, and into settlements that still retain all the primitiveness of an earlier day, that we find the conditions of which much of this book treats. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE PREFACE iii I. THE FRONTIER IN RELATION TO THE WORLD 1 II. EARLY REMINISCENCES 11 III. THE MINUTE-MAN ON THE FRONTIER 22 IV. THE IMMIGRANT ON THE FRONTIER 48 V. THE ODDITIES OF THE FRONTIER 61