Margaret McCarter - Winning the Wilderness

A reach of level prairie bounded only by the edge of the world – misty ravelings of heliotrope and amber, covered only by the arch of heaven – blue, beautiful and pitiless in its far fathomless spaces. To the southwest a triple fold of deeper purple on the horizon line – mere hint of commanding headlands thitherward. Across the face of the prairie streams wandering through shallow clefts, aimlessly, somewhere toward the southeast; their course secured by gentle swells breaking into sheer low bluffs on the side next to the water, or by groups of cottonwood trees and wild plum bushes along their right of way. And farther off the brown indefinite shadowings of half-tamed sand dunes. Aside from these things, a featureless landscape – just grassy ground down here and blue cloud-splashed sky up there.

The last Indian trail had disappeared. The hoofprints of cavalry horses had faded away. The price had been paid for the prairie – the costly measure of death and daring. But the prairie itself, in its loneliness and loveliness, was still unsubdued. Through the fury of the winter’s blizzard, the glory of the springtime, the brown wastes of burning midsummer, the long autumn, with its soft sweet air, its opal skies, and the land a dream of splendor which the far mirage reflects and the wide horizon frames in a curtain of exquisite amethyst – through none of these was the prairie subdued. Only to the coming of that king whose scepter is the hoe, did soul of the soil awake to life and promise. To him the wilderness gave up everything except its beauty and the sweep of the freedom-breathing winds that still inspire it.

The old Aydelot farm reached quite down to the little village of Cloverdale, from which it was separated by Clover Creek. But the Aydelot farmhouse stood a good half-mile away up the National pike road toward the Virginia state line. The farm consisted of two long narrow strips of ground, bordering the road on either side and walled about by forests hiding stagnant marshes in their black-shadowed depths. Francis Aydelot had taken up the land from the government before the townsite was thought of. Farming was not to his liking and his house had been an inn, doing a thriving business with travelers going out along that great National highway in ante-railway days. But when the village took root and grew into a little town, the village tavern absorbed the revenue from the traveling public, and Francis Aydelot had, perforce, to put his own hands to the plow and earn a living from the land. It was never a labor of love with him, however, and although he grew well-to-do in the tilling, he resented the touch of the soil as something degrading.

Cloverdale did not grow toward him, because, out of prejudice at its being, he would not sell one foot of his ground for town lot purposes. Nevertheless, since he was upright in all his dealings, the villagers grew proud of him, deferred to his judgment, quoted his opinions, and rated him generally the biggest asset of the community, with one exception. That exception was young Asher Aydelot, a pink-cheeked, gray-eyed boy, only son of the House of Aydelot and heir to all the long narrow acres from the wooded crest on the east to the clear waters of Clover Creek on the west. He was heir to more than these, however, if the heritage of ancestry counts for anything.

Jean Aydelot, the first of the name in America, driven from France by his family on account of his Huguenot beliefs, had settled in Virginia. He had quickly grasped the American ideals of freedom, the while he affiliated easily with the exclusive English Cavaliers. Something of the wanderlust in his blood, however, kept him from rooting too firmly at once. It happened that when a band of Quaker exiles had sought refuge in Virginia and was about to be driven out by the autocratic Cavaliers, young Aydelot, out of love for a Quaker girl, had championed their cause vehemently. And he was so influential in the settlement that he might have succeeded, but for one family – the wealthy and aristocratic Thaines. Through the son of this family the final expulsion of these Quakers was accomplished. The woman in the case was Mercy Pennington, a pretty Quakeress with whom young Jerome Thaine fell in love, promising protection to all her people in return for her hand. When she refused his offer, the Thaines carried the day, and the Quakers again became exiles. Jean Aydelot followed them to Pennsylvania and married Mercy Pennington, who was promptly disowned by the Quaker Church for this marriage to one outside its membership.

In spite of all this heresy, however, the Aydelots became one of the leading families in the development of the colonies. Their descendants fell heir to the traits of their French-English forbears: freedom of belief, courage to follow a cause, a touch of the wanderlust, the mercurial French mind, and the steady poise of the followers of the Inward Light. A trace of bitterness had come down the years, however, with the family history; a feud-like resentment against the family of Jerome Thaine of Virginia.

Francis Aydelot had crossed the Alleghanies and settled in Ohio in frontier days. Here his life, like his narrow, woods-bound farm, was clean and open but narrowed by surroundings and lack of opportunity. What had made for freedom and reform in his ancestors, in him became prejudice and stubborn will. Mrs. Aydelot was a broad-minded woman. Something of vision was in her clear gray eyes. Love of beauty, respect for learning, and an almost statesman-like grasp of civic duty and the trend of national progress were hers, too.

From such ancestry came Asher Aydelot, the healthiest, happiest country boy that ever waked the echoes of the old Ohio woodlands, or dared the currents of her mad little rivers, or whistled fearlessly as he scampered down the dusty pike road in the soft black summer nights.