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Preface
Every work partaking of the
nature of an autobiography is supposed to demand an apology to the public.
To refuse such a tribute, would be to recognize the justice of the charge,
so often brought against our countrymen— of a too great willingness to be
made acquainted with the domestic history and private affairs of their
neighbors.
It is, doubtless, to refute this calumny that we find travellers, for the
most part, modestly offering some such form of explanation as this, to the
reader: "That the matter laid before him was, in the first place, simply
letters to friends, never designed to be submitted to other eyes, and only
brought forward now at the solicitation of wiser judges than the author
himself.”
No such plea can, in the present instance, be offered. The record of events
in which the writer had herself no share, was preserved in compliance with
the suggestion of a revered relative, whose name often appears in the
following pages. "My child,” she would say, "write these things down, as I
tell them to you. Hereafter our children, and even strangers, will feel
interested in hearing the story of our early lives and sufferings.” And it
is a matter of no small regret and selfreproach, that much, very much, thus
narrated was, through negligence, or a spirit of procrastination, suffered
to pass unrecorded.
With regard to the pictures of domestic life and experience (preserved, as
will be seen, in journals, letters, and otherwise), it is true their
publication might have been deferred until the writer had passed away from
the scene of action; and such, it was supposed, would have been their
lot—that they would only have been dragged forth hereafter, to show to a
succeeding generation what “The Early Day” of our Western homes had been. It
never entered the anticipations of the most sanguine that the march of
improvement and prosperity would, in less than a quarter of a century, have
so obliterated the traces of “the first beginning,” that a vast and
intelligent multitude would be crying out for information in regard to the
early settlement of this portion of our country, which so few are left to
furnish.
An opinion has been expressed, that a comparison of the present times with
those that are past, would enable our young people, emigrating from their
luxurious homes at “the East,” to bear, in a spirit of patience and
contentment, the slight privations and hardships they are at this day called
to meet with. If, in one instance, this should be the case, the writer may
well feel happy to have incurred even the charge of egotism, in giving thus
much of her own history.
It may be objected that all that is strictly personal, might have been more
modestly put forth under the name of a third person; or that the events
themselves and the scenes might have been described, while those
participating in them might have been kept more in the background. In the
first case, the narrative would have lost its air of truth and reality — in
the second, the experiment would merely have been tried of dressing up a
theatre for representation, and omitting the actors.
Some who read the following sketches may be inclined to believe that a
residence among our native brethren and an attachment growing out of our
peculiar relation to them, have exaggerated our sympathies, and our sense of
the wrongs they have received at the hands of the whites. This is not the
place to discuss that point. There is a tribunal at which man shall be
judged for that which he has meted out to his fellow-man.
May our countrymen take heed that their legislation shall never unfit them
to appear “with joy, and not with grief,” before that tribunal!
Chicago, July, 1855.
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