My Boyhood

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Tonya Allen, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
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MY BOYHOOD

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

WITH A CONCLUSION BY HIS SON

JULIAN BURROUGHS

FOREWORD

In the beginning, at least, Father wrote these sketches of his boyhood
and early farm life as a matter of self-defense: I had made a determined
attempt to write them and when I did this I was treading on what was to
him more or less sacred ground, for as he once said in a letter to me,
"You will be homesick; I know just how I felt when I left home forty-
three years ago. And I have been more or less homesick ever since. The
love of the old hills and of Father and Mother is deep in the very
foundations of my being." He had an intense love of his birthplace and
cherished every memory of his boyhood and of his family and of the old
farm high up on the side of Old Clump--"the mountain out of whose loins
I sprang"--so that when I tried to write of him he felt it was time he
took the matter in hand. The following pages are the result.

JULIAN BURROUGHS.

CONTENTS

MY BOYHOOD By John Burroughs

MY FATHER By Julian Burroughs

WAITING

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.

I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.

Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.

What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
And garner up its fruit of tears.

The waters know their own, and draw
The brook that springs in yonder heights;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delights.

The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave comes to the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.

MY BOYHOOD

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

You ask me to give you some account of my life--how it was with me, and
now in my seventy-sixth year I find myself in the mood to do so. You
know enough about me to know that it will not be an exciting narrative
or of any great historical value. It is mainly the life of a country man
and a rather obscure man of letters, lived in eventful times indeed, but
largely lived apart from the men and events that have given character to
the last three quarters of a century. Like tens of thousands of others,
I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the
activities--political, commercial, sociological, scientific--of the
times in which I have lived. My life, like your own, has been along the
by-paths rather than along the great public highways. I have known but
few great men and have played no part in any great public events--not
even in the Civil War which I lived through and in which my duty plainly
called me to take part. I am a man who recoils from noise and strife,
even from fair competition, and who likes to see his days "linked each
to each" by some quiet, congenial occupation.

The first seventeen years of my life were spent on the farm where I was
born (1837-1854); the next ten years I was a teacher in rural district
schools (1854-1864); then I was for ten years a government clerk in
Washington (1864-1873); then in the summer of 1873, while a national
bank examiner and bank receiver, I purchased the small fruit farm on the
Hudson where you were brought up and where I have since lived,
cultivating the land for marketable fruit and the fields and woods for
nature literature, as you well know. I have gotten out of my footpaths a
few times and traversed some of the great highways of travel--have been
twice to Europe, going only as far as Paris (1871 and 1882)--the first
time sent to London by the Government with three other men to convey
$50,000,000 of bonds to be refunded; the second time going with my
family on my own account. I was a member of the Harriman expedition to
Alaska in the summer of 1899, going as far as Plover Bay on the extreme
N. E. part of Siberia. I was the companion of President Roosevelt on a
trip to Yellowstone Park in the spring of 1903. In the winter and spring
of 1909 I went to California with two women friends and extended the
journey to the Hawaiian Islands, returning home in June. In 1911 I again
crossed the continent to California. I have camped and tramped in Maine
and in Canada, and have spent part of a winter in Bermuda and in
Jamaica. This is an outline of my travels. I have known but few great
men. I met Carlyle in the company of Moncure Conway in London in
November, 1871. I met Emerson three times--in 1863 at West Point; in
1871 in Baltimore and Washington, where I heard him lecture; and at the
Holmes birthday breakfast in Boston in 1879. I knew Walt Whitman
intimately from 1863 until his death in 1892. I have met Lowell and
Whittier, but not Longfellow or Bryant; I have seen Lincoln, Grant,
Sherman, Early, Sumner, Garfield, Cleveland, and other notable men of
those days. I heard Tyndall deliver his course of lectures on Light in
Washington in 1870 or '71, but missed seeing Huxley during his visit
here. I dined with the Rossettis in London in 1871, but was not
impressed by them nor they by me. I met Matthew Arnold in New York and
heard his lecture on Emerson. My books are, in a way, a record of my
life--that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind. You
could reconstruct my days pretty well from those volumes. A writer who
gleans his literary harvest in the fields and woods reaps mainly where
he has sown himself. He is a husbandman whose crop springs from the seed
of his own heart.

My life has been a fortunate one; I was born under a lucky star. It
seems as if both wind and tide had favoured me. I have suffered no great
losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no
great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch, I have not wanted
the earth. I am pessimistic by night, but by day I am a confirmed
optimist, and it is the days that have stamped my life. I have found
this planet a good corner of the universe to live in and I am not in a
hurry to exchange it for any other. I hope the joy of living may be as
keen with you, my dear boy, as it has been with me and that you may have
life on as easy terms as I have. With this foreword I will begin the
record in more detail.

I have spoken of my good luck. It began in my being born on a farm, of
parents in the prime of their days, and in humble circumstances. I deem
it good luck, too, that my birth fell in April, a month in which so many
other things find it good to begin life. Father probably tapped the
sugar bush about this time or a little earlier; the bluebird and the
robin and song sparrow may have arrived that very day. New calves were
bleating in the barn and young lambs under the shed. There were earth-
stained snow drifts on the hillside, and along the stone walls and
through the forests that covered the mountains the coat of snow showed
unbroken. The fields were generally bare and the frost was leaving the
ground. The stress of winter was over and the warmth of spring began to
be felt in the air. I had come into a household of five children, two
girls and three boys, the oldest ten years and the youngest two. One had
died in infancy, making me the seventh child. Mother was twenty-nine and
father thirty-five, a medium-sized, freckled, red-haired man, showing
very plainly the Celtic or Welsh strain in his blood, as did mother, who
was a Kelly and of Irish extraction on the paternal side. I had come
into a family of neither wealth nor poverty as those things were looked
upon in those days, but a family dedicated to hard work winter and
summer in paying for and improving a large farm, in a country of wide
open valleys and long, broad-backed hills and gentle flowing mountain
lines; very old geologically, but only one generation from the stump in
the history of the settlement. Indeed, the stumps lingered in many of
the fields late into my boyhood, and one of my tasks in the dry mid-
spring weather was to burn these stumps--an occupation I always enjoyed
because the adventure of it made play of the work. The climate was
severe in winter, the mercury often dropping to 30° below, though we
then had no thermometer to measure it, and the summers, at an altitude
of two thousand feet, cool and salubrious. The soil was fairly good,
though encumbered with the laminated rock and stones of the Catskill
formation, which the old ice sheet had broken and shouldered and
transported about. About every five or six acres had loose stones and
rock enough to put a rock-bottomed wall around it and still leave enough
in and on the soil to worry the ploughman and the mower. All the farms
in that section reposing in the valleys and bending up and over the
broad-backed hills are checker-boards of stone walls, and the right-
angled fields, in their many colours of green and brown and yellow and
red, give a striking map-like appearance to the landscape. Good crops of
grain, such as rye, oats, buckwheat, and yellow corn, are grown, but
grass is the most natural product. It is a grazing country and the dairy
cow thrives there, and her products are the chief source of the incomes
of the farms.

I had come into a home where all the elements were sweet; the water and
the air as good as there is in the world, and where the conditions of
life were of a temper to discipline both mind and body. The settlers of
my part of the Catskills were largely from Connecticut and Long Island,
coming in after or near the close of the Revolution, and with a good
mixture of Scotch emigrants.

My great-grandfather, Ephraim Burroughs, came, with his family of eight
or ten children, from near Danbury, Conn., and settled in the town of
Stamford shortly after the Revolution. He died there in 1818. My
grandfather, Eden, came into the town of Roxbury, then a part of Ulster
County.

I had come into a land flowing with milk, if not with honey. The maple
syrup may very well take the place of the honey. The sugar maple was the
dominant tree in the woods and the maple sugar the principal sweetening
used in the family. Maple, beech, and birch wood kept us warm in winter,
and pine and hemlock timber made from trees that grew in the deeper
valleys formed the roofs and the walls of the houses. The breath of kine
early mingled with my own breath. From my earliest memory the cow was
the chief factor on the farm and her products the main source of the
family income; around her revolved the haying and the harvesting. It was
for her that we toiled from early July until late August, gathering the
hay into the barns or into the stacks, mowing and raking it by hand.
That was the day of the scythe and the good mower, of the cradle and the
good cradler, of the pitchfork and the good pitcher. With the modern
agricultural machinery the same crops are gathered now with less than
half the outlay of human energy, but the type of farmer seems to have
deteriorated in about the same proportion. The third generation of
farmers in my native town are much like the third steeping of tea, or
the third crop of corn where no fertilizers have been used. The large,
picturesque, and original characters who improved the farms and paid for
them are about all gone, and their descendants have deserted the farms
or are distinctly of an inferior type. The farms keep more stock and
yield better crops, owing to the amount of imported grain consumed upon
them, but the families have dwindled or gone out entirely, and the
social and the neighbourhood spirit is not the same. No more huskings or
quiltings, or apple cuts, or raisings or "bees" of any sort. The
telephone and the rural free delivery have come and the automobile and
the daily newspaper. The roads are better, communication quicker, and
the houses and barns more showy, but the men and the women, and
especially the children, are not there. The towns and the cities are now
colouring and dominating the country which they have depleted of its
men, and the rural districts are becoming a faded replica of town life.

The farm work to which I was early called upon to lend a hand, as I have
said, revolved around the dairy cow. Her paths were in the fields and
woods, her sonorous voice was upon the hills, her fragrant breath was
upon every breeze. She was the centre of our industries. To keep her in
good condition, well pastured in summer and well housed and fed in
winter, and the whole dairy up to its highest point of efficiency--to
this end the farmer directed his efforts. It was an exacting occupation.
In summer the day began with the milking and ended with the milking; and
in winter it began with the foddering and ended with the foddering, and
the major part of the work between and during both seasons had for its
object, directly or indirectly, the well-being of the herd. Getting the
cows and turning away the cows in summer was usually the work of the
younger boys; turning them out of the stable and putting them back in
winter was usually the work of the older. The foddering them from the
stack in the field in winter also fell to the lot of the older members
of the family.

In milking we all took a hand when we had reached the age of about ten
years, Mother and my sisters usually doing their share. At first we
milked the cows in the road in front of the house, setting the pails of
milk on the stone work; later we milked them in a yard in the orchard
behind the house, and of late years the milking is done in the stable.
Mother said that when they first came upon the farm, as she sat milking
a cow in the road one evening, she saw a large black animal come out of
the woods out where the clover meadow now is, and cross the road and
disappear in the woods on the other side. Bears sometimes carried off
the farmers' hogs in those days, boldly invading the pens to do so. My
father kept about thirty cows of the Durham breed; now the dairy herds
are made up of Jerseys or Holsteins. Then the product that went to
market was butter, now it is milk. Then the butter was made on the farm
by the farmer's wife or the hired girl, now it is made in the creameries
by men. My mother made most of the butter for nearly forty years,
packing thousands of tubs and firkins of it in that time. The milk was
set in tin pans on a rack in the milk house for the cream to rise, and
as soon as the milk clabbered it was skimmed.

About three o'clock in the afternoon during the warm weather Mother
would begin skimming the milk, carrying it pan by pan to the big cream
pan, where with a quick movement of a case knife the cream was separated
from the sides of the pan, the pan tilted on the edge of the cream pan
and the heavy mantle of cream, in folds or flakes, slid off into the
receptacle and the thick milk emptied into pails to be carried to the
swill barrel for the hogs. I used to help Mother at times by handing her
the pans of milk from the rack and emptying the pails. Then came the
washing of the pans at the trough, at which I also often aided her by
standing the pans up to dry and sun on the big bench. Rows of drying tin
pans were always a noticeable feature about farmhouses in those days,
also the churning machine attached to the milk house and the sound of
the wheel, propelled by the "old churner"--either a big dog or a wether
sheep. Every summer morning by eight o'clock the old sheep or the old
dog was brought and tied to his task upon the big wheel. Sheep were
usually more unwilling churners than were the dogs. They rarely acquired
any sense of duty or obedience as a dog did. This endless walking and
getting nowhere very soon called forth vigorous protests. The churner
would pull back, brace himself, choke, and stop the machine: one churner
threw himself off and was choked to death before he was discovered. I
remember when the old hetchel from the day of flax dressing, fastened to
a board, did duty behind the old churner, spurring him up with its score
or more of sharp teeth when he settled back to stop the machine. "Run
and start the old sheep," was a command we heard less often after that.
He could not long hold out against the pressure of that phalanx of sharp
points upon his broad rear end.

The churn dog was less obdurate and perverse, but he would sometimes
hide away as the hour of churning approached and we would have to hustle
around to find him. But we had one dog that seemed to take pleasure in
the task and would go quickly to the wheel when told to and finish his
task without being tied. In the absence of both dog and sheep, I have a
few times taken their place on the wheel. In winter and early spring
there was less cream to churn and we did it by hand, two of us lifting
the dasher together. Heavy work for even big boys, and when the stuff
was reluctant and the butter would not come sometimes until the end of
an hour, the task tried our mettle. Sometimes it would not gather well
after it had come, then some deft handling of the dasher was necessary.

I never tired of seeing Mother lift the great masses of golden butter
from the churn with her ladle and pile them up in the big butter bowl,
with the drops of buttermilk standing upon them as if they were sweating
from the ordeal they had been put through. Then the working and the
washing of it to free it from the milk and the final packing into tub or
firkin, its fresh odour in the air--what a picture it was! How much of
the virtue of the farm went each year into those firkins! Literally the
cream of the land. Ah, the alchemy of Life, that in the bee can
transform one product of those wild rough fields into honey, and in the
cow can transform another product into milk!

The spring butter was packed into fifty-pound tubs to be shipped to
market as fast as made. The packing into one-hundred-pound firkins to be
held over till November did not begin till the cows were turned out to
pasture in May. To have made forty tubs by that time and sold them for
eighteen or twenty cents a pound was considered very satisfactory. Then
to make forty or fifty firkins during the summer and fall and to get as
good a price for it made the farmer's heart glad. When Father first came
on the farm, in 1827, butter brought only twelve or fourteen cents per
pound, but the price steadily crept up till in my time it sold from
seventeen to eighteen and a half. The firkin butter was usually sold to
a local butter buyer named Dowie. He usually appeared in early fall,
always on horseback, having notified Father in advance. At the breakfast
table Father would say, "Dowie is coming to try the butter to-day."

"I hope he will not try that firkin I packed that hot week in July,"
Mother would say. But very likely that was the one among others he would
ask for. His long, half-round steel butter probe or tryer was thrust
down the centre of the firkin to the bottom, given a turn or two, and
withdrawn, its tapering cavity filled with a sample of every inch of
butter in the firkin. Dowie would pass it rapidly to and fro under his
nose, maybe sometimes tasting it, then push the tryer back into the
hole, then withdrawing it, leaving its core of butter where it found it.
If the butter suited him, and it rarely failed to do so, he would make
his offer and ride away to the next dairy.

The butter had always to be delivered at a date agreed upon, on the
Hudson River at Catskill. This usually took place in November. It was
the event of the fall: two loads of butter, of twenty or more firkins
each, to be transported fifty miles in a lumber wagon, each round trip
taking about four days. The firkins had to be headed up and gotten
ready. This job in my time usually fell to Hiram. He would begin the day
before Father was to start and have a load headed and placed in the
wagon on time, with straw between the firkins so they would not rub. How
many times I have heard those loads start off over the frozen ground in
the morning before it was light! Sometimes a neighbour's wagon would go
slowly jolting by just after or just before Father had started, but on
the same errand. Father usually took a bag of oats for his horses and a
box of food for himself so as to avoid all needless expenses. The first
night would usually find him in Steel's tavern in Greene County, half
way to Catskill. The next afternoon would find him at his journey's end
and by night unloaded at the steamboat wharf, his groceries and other
purchases made, and ready for an early start homeward in the morning. On
the fourth night we would be on the lookout for his return. Mother would
be sitting, sewing by the light of her tallow dip, with one ear bent
toward the road. She usually caught the sound of his wagon first. "There
comes your father," she would say, and Hiram or Wilson would quickly get
and light the old tin lantern and stand ready on the stonework to
receive him and help put out the team. By the time he was in the house
his supper would be on the table--a cold pork stew, I remember, used to
delight him on such occasions, and a cup of green tea. After supper his
pipe, and the story of his trip told, with a list of family purchases,
and then to bed. In a few days the second trip would be made. As his
boys grew old enough he gave each of them in turn a trip with him to
Catskill. It was a great event in the life of each of us. When it came
my turn I was probably eleven or twelve years old and the coming event
loomed big on my horizon. I was actually to see my first steamboat, the
Hudson River, and maybe the steam cars. For several days in advance I
hunted the woods for game to stock the provision box so as to keep down
the expense. I killed my first partridge and probably a wild pigeon or
two and gray squirrels. Perched high on that springboard beside Father,
my feet hardly touching the tops of the firkins, at the rate of about
two miles an hour over rough roads in chilly November weather, I made my
first considerable journey into the world. I crossed the Catskill
Mountains and got that surprising panoramic view of the land beyond from
the top. At Cairo, where it seems we passed the second night, I
disgraced myself in the morning, when Father, after praising me to some
bystanders, told me to get up in the wagon and drive the load out in the
road. In my earnest effort to do so I ran foul of one side of the big
door, and came near smashing things. Father was humiliated and I was
dreadfully mortified.

With the wonders of Catskill I was duly impressed, but one of my most
vivid remembrances is a passage at arms (verbal) at the steamboat
between Father and old Dowie. The latter had questioned the correctness
of the weight of the empty firkin which was to be deducted as tare from
the total weight. Hot words followed. Father said, "Strip it, strip it."
Dowie said, "I will," and in a moment there stood on the scales the
naked firkin of butter, sweating drops of salt water. Which won, I do
not know. I remember only that peace soon reigned and Dowie continued to
buy our butter.

One other incident of that trip still sticks in my mind. I was walking
along a street just at dusk, when I saw a drove of cattle coming. The
drover, seeing me, called out, "Here, boy, turn those cows up that
street!" This was in my line, I was at home with cows, and I turned the
drove up in fine style. As the man came along he said, "Well done," and
placed six big copper cents in my hand. Never was my palm more
unexpectedly and more agreeably tickled. The feel of it is with me yet!

At an earlier date than that of the accident in the old stone school
house, my head, and my body, too, got some severe bruises. One summer
day when I could not have been more than three years old, my sister Jane
and I were playing in the big attic chamber and amusing ourselves by
lying across the vinegar keg and pushing it about the room with our
feet. We came to the top of the steep stairway that ended against the
chamber door, a foot or more above the kitchen floor, and I suppose we
thought it would be fun to take the stairway on the keg. At the brink of
that stairway my memory becomes a blank and when I find myself again I
am lying on the bed in the "back-bedroom" and the smell of camphor is
rank in the room. How it fared with Jane I do not recall; the injury was
probably not serious with either of us, but it is easy to imagine how
poor Mother must have been startled when she heard that racket on the
stairs and the chamber door suddenly burst open, spilling two of her
children, mixed up with the vinegar keg, out on the kitchen floor. Jane
was more than two years my senior, and should have known better.

Vivid incidents make a lasting impression. I recall what might have been
a very serious accident had not my usual good luck attended me, when I
was a few years older. One autumn day I was with my older brothers in
the corn lot, where they had gone with the lumber wagon to gather
pumpkins. When they had got their load and were ready to start I planted
myself on the load above the hind axle and let my legs hang down between
the spokes of the big wheel. Luckily one of my brothers saw my perilous
position just as the team was about to move and rescued me in time.
Doubtless my legs would have been broken and maybe very badly crushed in
a moment more. But such good fortune seems to have followed me always.
One winter's morning, as I stooped to put on one of my boots beside the
kitchen stove at the house of a schoolmate with whom I had passed the
night, my face came in close contact with the spout of the boiling tea
kettle. The scalding steam barely missed my eye and blistered my brow a
finger's breadth above it. With one eye gone, I fancy life would have
looked quite different. Another time I was walking along one of the
market streets of New York, when a heavy bale of hay, through the
carelessness of some workman, dropped from thirty or forty feet above me
and struck the pavement at my feet. I heard angry words over the mishap,
spoken by someone above me, but I only said to myself, "Lucky again!" I
recall a bit of luck of a different kind when I was a treasury clerk in
Washington. I had started for the seashore for a week's vacation with a
small roll of new greenbacks in my pocket. Shortly after the train had
left the station I left my seat and walked through two or three of the
forward cars looking for a friend who had agreed to join me. Not finding
him, I retraced my steps, and as I was passing along through the car
next my own I chanced to see a roll of new bills on the floor near the
end of a seat. Instinctively feeling for my own roll of bills and
finding it missing, I picked up the money and saw at a glance that it
was mine. The passengers near by eyed me in surprise, and I suspect
began to feel in their own pockets, but I did not stop to explain and
went to my seat startled but happy. I had missed my friend but I might
have missed something of more value to me just at that time.

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