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The Bullhead River Saga: 1858 to1864

Ellis: 1860

Ellis Thorvald's earliest recollections were of the sights, sounds and excitement of buying and selling.A parade of strange men came and went from their Buffalo farmhouse, and heremembered standing in the kitchen doorway as a child watching his father and a man atthe table, the air sweet with the smell homemade wine, and a pile of bills lying betweenthem. His mother had come to lead him away, but he could still hear bursts of loudchatter punctuated by explosive guffaws.A little later he could recall sitting on a brown bag of linseed oil meal, nibbling someof the meal from his hand, as he watched his father, Thomas, natty in a deerskin jacketand boots, describe the admirable qualities of one of the horses that came and went,seemingly without pattern. There was a gentle palomino he would have gladly caredforever, but she went too, one blindingly bright day in summer when he was pullingweeds in the corn patch. He half-expected every buggy that came up their rural road toturn into their driveway.But the source of his fascination with it all was the game being played out; thegestures, the postures signifying acceptance or rejection, the anxious silence of deliberation or reconsideration, and the final moment when the game was done, the righthands clasped, and the animal led back to its stall, for a day or so, or out the barn door to be tethered to the back of a buggy.Larger wagons came and went, too. A meal might be interrupted at any moment by theshout of a teamster, the snort of horses, and the sound of iron-clad wheels crunchinggravel stones. Everyone used the back door off the kitchen of the big white house. Thefront door opened to the parlour, which no visitor wanted to track up with muddy boots,and which was used largely as a place to serve tea to the minister or the school teacher.The large wagons gave, and took, a surprising number and variety of creatures; red,white, brown, black, and and varicolored cows and calves, huge Belgian farm horses andshaggy ponies,usually towed behind, and once they brought a load of goats. When one of the animals died, a seedy-looking man with a bizarre wagon that could winch a carcaseaboard with much grunting and pulling of ropes by its owner, came and hauled it away.These animals were taken for "rendering" his father told him, but he sometimes hintedthey were headed for the meat markets.Occasional and inexplicable surpluses of food would appear. Once it was stacked baskets of ripe peaches that his mother took charge of, and which soon had the kitchenfragrant with the smell of preserves. Every meal, until the baskets disappeared, offered allone could eat of every dish incorporating the peach that his mother knew.There were eggs, piles and bags of potatoes and pumpkins, and barrels of apples.Therewere also loads of hay and bags of wheat and oats. Once there four stacks of white boxes,

piled one atop the other, that he was told were bee hives. They came in late fall anddisappeared in spring, so all he could remember about them were a few bees crawlingaround on the outside of the boxes.Thomas extracted a wooden frame from one of the boxes, which was solidly packedwith a fascinating pattern of wax and honey and which was called a comb. The comb wasremoved from the frame and sliced up with a butcher knife, and dinner that eveningfeatured a dessert consisting of a piece of dripping comb served on a plate. His parentsdevoured it with gusto, although he found the sticky honey a little too sweet for his taste.He ate a part of the wax, too, until he was told not to.When Ellis grew older, it was his task to do the chores involving the care of animals.He dragged forkfuls of hay to the cattle and cleaned up their manure with a fork andshovel, dumping it from a wheelbarrow into a rustic sled called a 'stoneboat,' which waslargely a shallow box nailed to a pair of logs that served as skids.But this practice, like so many other things in their lives, was not constant. During one period, the stoneboat held a tank and was used transport water to a yardful of horses. For awhile, it sat abandoned in the corner of the farmyard while giant burdocks grew uparound it. During this time, Ellis dumped the manure in a pile, as he was told it was better for the garden if it was thoroughly rotted. Later, at about the age of twelve, whenhe was thought to be capable of handling a team, he would harness up the Belgians,standing on an overturned pail so that he was tall enough to be able to throw the harnessover their backs, and used the stoneboat or wagon to do his chores.There were long dull periods of work, and then times in which the farm was cleared of animals and there was little to do. Ellis remembered a week in which the family's mainoccupation was the putting together of a large,ornate, wooden puzzle, and during whichevery other meal seemed to consist of milk toast.Then the winds of fate would shift, andthey would be off to Buffalo to pick up goods, with side excursions to see Niagara Fallsor to watch barges being pulled along the Erie canal.The adventures took place largely in summer. The rest of the year his main occupationwas that of attending a small crossroads school about two miles distant. He learned toread and write, of course, and something of the world, the countryand the state he lived in, which was the United States of America, and the State of NewYork, being one of the twenty-four states, as everyone knew.From his mother he learnedhe had been born on the morning of July fifteenth, in the Year Of Our Lord, 1823.He was a good student, but not particularily ambitious in school or life-- he was notdriven to be someone else or live somewhere else. He was a dutiful son and his parentswere pleased. When he finished the little school he was a rapidly growing teenager who promised to be a big, but not husky, man. He had sandy-colored hair and could becharming with strangers, but no one could say they understood him.Nor could he understand his father. The man both fascinated and eluded him.Ellisknew he would never attain Thomas' skill as a horsetrader and cattle dealer--it was hardfor him to strike a pose without feeling awkward or insincere.What baffled him about hisfather was that he was never certain which of the personalities he displayed was the realman.The boy's skill and care in looking after animals did not go unnoticed. The familyconclusion that he was headed for a career in medicine was tacitly arrived at. He wasinformed one summer day that he had been placed in a preparatory school in Buffalo for

the fall semester. The school, at which he was to board, was highly recommended, andoperated by the Jamesons, a brother and sister who were both University graduates. Ellisremembered them with fondness for the rest of his life.Mr. Morton Jameson was a student of science, and like his sister Anne, a bright-eyeddisciple of optimism. His steady gaze, probing questions, and lectures dense with fact andquotation left his students disconcerted, but his glowing encomiums of progress left themelated. He knew, better than they, the unplumbed depths of ignorance in their minds, andwhat intensity of light was needed to penetrate the stubborn meat of their brains. He ledthem through the lucid formulations of Galileo, Newton, and Boyle. He lighted their paththrough unbelieveably ancient ages with Lyell and Lamarck, he struggled with themthrough Aristotle, Kant, and Goethe, he showed them the blue spark of electricity thatwas pursued by Franklin and Volta.From a battered leather case, he one day extracted an instrument of brass and glasscalled a microscope, through which they peered at the diminutive agents of putrifactionand disease. He toured the weedlots of Buffalo with them on field trips to improve their grasp of Botany.Miss Jameson --"Anne" was an intimacy that did not extend to the students--taughtthem the rudiments of Latin, art, and the basic agreements of human society. Sometimesan outsider would appear to talk of their profession.They attended concerts and recitals,as properly attired as their wardrobes would allow. One trip involved traveling to anancient brick auditorium to hear an elderly flautist accompaning a soprano's rendition of Old English Hunting Songs.On another excursion, they heard a violinist, wearing a redsash, who played Hungarian folk songs--all this to bring to their attention that there waslife and art beyond the city limits of Buffalo.Anne had the power to entrance Ellis with her sincerity, her lustrous brown eyes, her soulful gaze that seemed privately intended for him, her outpouring of love for all thatwas beautiful and good, the delicious curve of her arm and full bosom, her unerring senseof what was proper and kind in speech and deportment, the beguiling intersection of her throat and jaw.He traveled with her to the ends of the earth. They stood with Napolean as he pondered the inscrutable Sphinx with its gaze fixed on eternity, they strolled beside thereflecting pool of the Taj Mahal in the moonlight, they peered over the shoulder of Keats,as immortal words, yet unknown to the world, flowed upon paper. He fought beside her atthe Alamo; huddled together, they crossed the Delaware with Washington in his longboat;and they watched, with awe, Caesar's triumphal entry into Rome.Anne spoke with a passion against slavery, and championed the plight of the poor andoppressed. She told of the hope of the future, of Robert Owen and his city of worker cottages at New Lanark, Scotland, and of the Promise of Socialism.She was a mostuntypical example of a spinster, in Ellis' mind, and he was dismayed when, before the endof the second term, she left to be married.And, in early 1840, in the 18th year of his life, Ellis Thorvald was shaken rudelyawake by one of the boarders who informed him that he had a visitor. It was his mother,who in a subdued voice told him that his father had died.They rode back to the farm with a local man Ellis knew by sight. Two days later,dressed in their best clothing, they drove back into Buffalo for the funeral, then back tothe Jameson's for Ellis's things. Morton Jameson expressed his condolences, gave Ellis a