Stage-coach and Tavern Days. Earle Alice Morse

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СКАЧАТЬ sea-captain who sailed to the West Indies was expected to bring home a turtle on the return voyage for a feast to his expectant friends. A turtle was deemed an elegant gift; usually a keg of limes accompanied the turtle, for lime-juice was deemed the best of all “sourings” for punch. In Newport a Guinea Coast negro named Cuffy Cockroach, the slave of Mr. Jahleel Brenton, was deemed the prince of turtle cooks. He was lent far and wide for these turtle-feasts, and was hired out at taverns.

      Near Philadelphia catfish suppers were popular. Mendenhall Ferry Tavern was on the Schuylkill River about two miles below the Falls. It was opposite a ford which landed on the east side, and from which a lane ran up to the Ridge Turnpike. This lane still remains between the North and South Laurel Hill cemeteries, just above the city of Philadelphia. Previous to the Revolution the ferry was known as Garrigue’s Ferry. A cable was stretched across the stream; by it a flatboat with burdens was drawn from side to side. The tavern was the most popular catfish-supper tavern on the river drive. Waffles were served with the catfish. A large Staffordshireware platter, printed in clear, dark, beautiful blue, made by the English potter, Stubbs, shows this ferry and tavern, with its broad piazza, and the river with its row of poplar trees. It is shown on page 93. Burnaby enjoyed the catfish-suppers as much as the turtle-feasts, but I doubt if there was a Kissing Bridge in Philadelphia.

      Many were the good reasons that could be given to explain and justify attendance at an old-time tavern; one was the fact that often the only newspaper that came to town was kept therein. This dingy tavern sheet often saw hard usage, for when it went its rounds some could scarce read it, some but pretend to read it. One old fellow in Newburyport opened it wide, gazed at it with interest, and cried out to his neighbor in much excitement: “Bad news. Terrible gales, terrible gales, ships all bottom side up,” as indeed they were, in his way of holding the news sheet.

      The extent and purposes to which the tavern sheet might be applied can be guessed from the notice written over the mantel-shelf of one taproom, “Gentlemen learning to spell are requested to use last week’s newsletter.”

      The old taverns saw many rough jokes. Often there was a tavern butt on whom all played practical jokes. These often ended in a rough fight. The old Collin’s Tavern shown on page 97 was in coaching days a famous tavern in Naugatuck on the road between New Haven and Litchfield. One of the hostlers at this tavern, a burly negro, was the butt of all the tavern hangers-on, and a great source of amusement to travellers. His chief accomplishment was “bunting.” He bragged that he could with a single bunt break down a door, overturn a carriage, or fell a horse. One night a group of jokers promised to give him all the cheeses he could bunt through. He bunted holes through three cheeses on the tavern porch, and then was offered a grindstone, which he did not perceive either by his sense of sight or feeling to be a stone until his alarmed tormentors forced him to desist for fear he might kill himself.

A picturesque and grotesque element of tavern life was found in those last leaves on the tree, the few of Indian blood who lingered after the tribes were scattered and nearly all were dead. These tawnies could not be made as useful in the tavern yard as the shiftless and shifting negro element that also drifted to the tavern, for the Eastern Indian never loved a horse as did the negro, and seldom became handy in the care of horses. These waifs of either race, and half-breeds of both races, circled around the tavern chiefly because a few stray pennies might be earned there, and also because within the tavern were plentiful supplies of cider and rum.

      Almost every community had two or three of these semi-civilized Indian residents, who performed some duties sometimes, but who often in the summer, seized with the spirit of their fathers or the influence of their early lives, wandered off for weeks and months, sometimes selling brooms and baskets, sometimes reseating chairs, oftener working not, simply tramping trustfully, sure of food whenever they asked for it. It is curious to note how industrious, orderly Quaker and Puritan housewives tolerated the laziness, offensiveness, and excesses of these half-barbarians. Their uncouthness was endured when they were in health, and when they fell sick they were cared for with somewhat the same charity and forbearance that would be shown a naughty, unruly child.

      Often the landlady of the tavern or the mistress of the farm-house, bustling into her kitchen in the gray dawn, would find a sodden Indian sleeping on the floor by the fireplace, sometimes a squaw and pappoose by his side. If the kitchen door had no latch-string out, the Indian would crawl into the hay in the barn; but wherever he slept, he always found his way to the kitchen in good time for an ample breakfast.

      Indian women often proved better helpers than the men. One Deb Browner lived a severely respectable life all winter, ever ready to help in the kitchen of the tavern if teamsters demanded meals; always on hand to help dip candles in early winter, and make soap in early spring; and her strong arms never tired. But when early autumn tinted the trees, and on came the hunting season, she tore off her respectable calico gown and apron, kicked off her shoes and stockings, and with black hair hanging wild, donned moccasins and blanket, and literally fled to the woods for a breath of life, for freedom. She took her flitting unseen in the night, but twice was she noted many miles away by folk who knew her, tramping steadily northward, bearing by a metomp of bark around her forehead a heavy burden in a blanket.

      One Sabbath morning in May a travelling teamster saw her in her ultra-civilized state on her way home from meeting, crowned, not only with a discreet bonnet, but with a long green veil hanging down her back. She was entering the tavern door to know whether they wished her to attack the big spring washing and bleaching the following day. “Hello, Teppamoy!” he said, staring at her, “how came you here and in them clothes?” Scowling fiercely, she walked on in haughty silence, while the baffled teamster told a group of tavern loafers that he had been a lumberman, and some years there came to the camp in Maine a wild old squaw named Teppamoy who raised the devil generally, but the constable had never caught her, and that she “looked enough like that Mis’ Browner to be her sister.”

      Another half-breed Indian, old Tuggie Bannocks, lived in old Narragansett. She was as much negro as Indian and was reputed to be a witch; she certainly had some unusual peculiarities, the most marked being a full set of double teeth all the way round, and an absolute refusal ever to sit on a chair, sofa, stool, or anything that was intended to be sat upon. She would sit on a table, or a churn, or a cradle-head, or squat on the floor; or she would pull a drawer out of a high chest and recline on the edge of that. It was firmly believed that in her own home she hung by her heels on the oaken chair rail which ran around the room. She lived in the only roofed portion of an old tumble-down house that had been at one time a tavern, and she bragged that she could “raise” every one who had ever stopped at that house as a guest, and often did so for company. Oh! what a throng of shadows, some fair of face, some dark of life, would have filled the dingy tavern at her command! I have told some incidents of her life in my Old Narragansett, so will no longer keep her dusky presence here.

      Other Indian “walk-abouts,” as tramps were called, lived in the vicinity of Malden, Massachusetts; old “Moll Grush,” who fiercely resented her nickname; Deb Saco the fortune-teller, whose “counterfeit presentment” can be seen in the East Indian Museum at Salem; Squaw Shiner, who died from being blown off a bridge in a gale, and who was said to be “a faithful friend, a sharp enemy, a judge of herbs, a weaver of baskets, and a lover of rum.”

      Another familiar and marked character was Sarah Boston. I have taken the incidents of her life from The Hundredth Town, where it is told so graphically. She lived on Keith Hill in Grafton, Massachusetts, an early “praying town” of the Indians. A worn hearthstone and doorstone, surrounded now by green grass and shadowed by dying lilacs, still show the exact spot where once stood her humble walls, where once “her garden smiled.

      The last of the Hassanamiscoes (a noble tribe of the Nipmuck race, first led to Christ in 1654 by that gentle man John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians), she showed in her giant stature, her powerful frame, her vast muscular power, no evidence of a debilitated race or of enfeebled vitality. It is said she weighed over three hundred pounds. Her father was Boston Phillips, also СКАЧАТЬ