The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson's Landing,
on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey,
per steamboat, below St. Louis.
In 1830 it was a snug collection of modest one- and two- story
frame dwellings, whose whitewashed exteriors were almost concealed
from sight by climbing tangles of rose vines, honeysuckles,
and morning glories. Each of these pretty homes had a garden in front
fenced with white palings and opulently stocked with hollyhocks, marigolds,
touch-me-nots, prince's-feathers, and other old-fashioned flowers;
while on the windowsills of the houses stood wooden boxes containing
moss rose plants and terra-cotta pots in which grew a breed of geranium
whose spread of intensely red blossoms accented the prevailing pink tint
of the rose-clad house-front like an explosion of flame. When there was room
on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there--
in sunny weather--stretched at full length, asleep and blissful,
with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose.
Then that house was complete, and its contentment and peace were made
manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible.
A home without a cat--and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat--
may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?
All along the streets, on both sides, at the outer edge
of the brick sidewalks, stood locust trees with trunks protected by
wooden boxing, and these furnished shade for summer and a sweet fragrancer
in spring, when the clusters of buds came forth. The main street,
one block back from the river, and running parallel with it, was the
sole business street. It was six blocks long, and in each block two
or three brick stores, three stories high, towered above interjected
bunches of little frame shops. Swinging signs creaked in the wind the
street's whole length. The candy-striped pole, which indicates nobility
proud and ancient along the palace-bordered canals of Venice, indicated
merely the humble barbershop along the main street of Dawson's Landing.
On a chief corner stood a lofty unpainted pole wreathed from top to
bottom with tin pots and pans and cups, the chief tinmonger's noisy
notice to the world (when the wind blew) that his shop was on hand
for business at that corner.
The hamlet's front was washed by the clear waters of the great river;
its body stretched itself rearward up a gentle incline;
its most rearward border fringed itself out and scattered its houses
about its base line of the hills; the hills rose high, enclosing the
town in a half-moon curve, clothed with forests from foot to summit.
Steamboats passed up and down every hour or so. Those belonging to
the little Cairo line and the little Memphis line always stopped;
the big Orleans liners stopped for hails only, or to land passengers
or freight; and this was the case also with the great flotilla of
"transients." These latter came out of a dozen rivers--
the Illinois, the Missouri, the Upper Mississippi, the Ohio,
the Monongahela, the Tennessee, the Red River, the White River,
and so on--and were bound every whither and stocked with every imaginable
comfort or necessity, which the Mississippi's communities could want,
from the frosty Falls of St. Anthony down through nine climates
to torrid New Orleans.
Dawson's Landing was a slaveholding town, with a rich, slave-worked
grain and pork country back of it. The town was sleepy and comfortable
and contented. It was fifty years old, and was growing slowly--
very slowly, in fact, but still it was growing.
The chief citizen was York Leicester Driscoll, about forty years old,
judge of the county court. He was very proud of his old Virginian ancestry,
and in his hospitalities and his rather formal and stately manners,
he kept up its traditions. He was fine and just and generous.
To be a gentleman--a gentleman without stain or blemish--was his
only religion, and to it he was always faithful. He was respected,
esteemed, and beloved by all of the community. He was well off,
and was gradually adding to his store. He and his wife were very
nearly happy, but not quite, for they had no children. The longing for
the treasure of a child had grown stronger and stronger as the years
slipped away, but the blessing never came--and was never to come.
With this pair lived the judge's widowed sister, Mrs. Rachel Pratt,
and she also was childless--childless, and sorrowful for that reason,
and not to be comforted. The women were good and commonplace people,
and did their duty, and had their reward in clear consciences and the
community's approbation. They were Presbyterians, the judge was a freethinker.
Pembroke Howard, lawyer and bachelor, aged almost forty, was another
old Virginian grandee with proved descent from the First Families.
He was a fine, majestic creature, a gentleman according to the nicest
requirements of the Virginia rule, a devoted Presbyterian, an authority
on the "code", and a man always courteously ready to stand up before you in
the field if any act or word of his had seemed doubtful or suspicious to you,
and explain it with any weapon you might prefer from bradawls to artillery.
He was very popular with the people, and was the judge's dearest friend.
Then there was Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, another F.F.V.
of formidable caliber--however, with him we have no concern.
Percy Northumberland Driscoll, brother to the judge, and younger than
he by five years, was a married man, and had had children around
his hearthstone; but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup,
and scarlet fever, and this had given the doctor a chance with his
effective antediluvian methods; so the cradles were empty. He was a
prosperous man, with a good head for speculations, and his fortune
was growing. On the first of February, 1830, two boy babes were born
in his house; one to him, one to one of his slave girls, Roxana by name.
Roxana was twenty years old. She was up and around the same day,
with her hands full, for she was tending both babes.
Mrs. Percy Driscoll died within the week. Roxy remained in charge of
the children. She had her own way, for Mr. Driscoll soon absorbed himself
in his speculations and left her to her own devices.
In that same month of February, Dawson's Landing gained a new citizen.
This was Mr. David Wilson, a young fellow of Scotch parentage.
He had wandered to this remote region from his birthplace in the interior
of the State of New York, to seek his fortune. He was twenty-five years old,
college bred, and had finished a post-college course in an Eastern
law school a couple of years before.
He was a homely, freckled, sandy-haired young fellow, with an intelligent
blue eye that had frankness and comradeship in it and a covert twinkle
of a pleasant sort. But for an unfortunate remark of his, he would no
doubt have entered at once upon a successful career at Dawson's Landing.
But he made his fatal remark the first day he spent in the village,
and it "gaged" him. He had just made the acquaintance of a group of
citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make
himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said,
much as one who is thinking aloud:
"I wish I owned half of that dog."
"Why?" somebody asked.
"Because I would kill my half."
The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even,
but found no light there, no expression that they could read.
They fell away from him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy
to discuss him. One said:
"'Pears to be a fool."
"'Pears?" said another. "_Is,_ I reckon you better say."
"Said he wished he owned _half_ of the dog, the idiot," said a third.
"What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half?
Do you reckon he thought it would live?"
"Why, he must have thought it, unless he IS the downrightest fool
in the world; because if he hadn't thought it, he would have wanted to own
the whole dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half died,
he would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed
that half instead of his own. Don't it look that way to you, gents?"
"Yes, it does. If he owned one half of the general dog, it would be so;
if he owned one end of the dog and another person owned the other end,
it would be so, just the same; particularly in the first case,
because if you kill one half of a general dog, there ain't any man
that can tell whose half it was; but if he owned one end of the dog,
maybe he could kill his end of it and--"
"No, he couldn't either; he couldn't and not be responsible if the other
end died, which it would. In my opinion that man ain't in his right mind."
"In my opinion he hain't _got_ any mind."
No. 3 said: "Well, he's a lummox, anyway."
That's what he is;" said No. 4. "He's a labrick--just a Simon-pure labrick,
if there was one."
"Yes, sir, he's a dam fool. That's the way I put him up," said No. 5.
"Anybody can think different that wants to, but those are my sentiments."
"I'm with you, gentlemen," said No. 6. "Perfect jackass--yes,
and it ain't going too far to say he is a pudd'nhead.
If he ain't a pudd'nhead, I ain't no judge, that's all."
Mr. Wilson stood elected. The incident was told all over the town,
and gravely discussed by everybody. Within a week he had lost his
first name; Pudd'nhead took its place. In time he came to be liked,
and well liked too; but by that time the nickname had got well stuck on,
and it stayed. That first day's verdict made him a fool, and he was not
able to get it set aside, or even modified. The nickname soon ceased to
carry any harsh or unfriendly feeling with it, but it held its place,
and was to continue to hold its place for twenty long years.
