Geared to The Tread of Oxen-II

 

By Elwin A. McCornack, July 19, 1938:

You have asked me to write the story of that branch of the McCornack family which came west in pioneer days and include some personal reminiscences, either first or second hand.

As I write these lines I am west bound on one of America's fastest and finest trains.  My route crosses seemingly endless miles of level farmland, and this afternoon will follow for hours and hours the banks of the Platte River in western Nebraska—the "Old Oregon Trail."  As I ride these miles and look from the car window I see things that other people in the car do not see.  I can see outside on the prairie a long, thin winding line of straining oxen and creaking wagons, flanked and trailed by herds of loose stock and farther out mounted guards and scouts, the gray covered wagons trailing in a steadily rising cloud of dust, the loose stock and outriders scattered over the waving grass of an endless prairie.  One of these wagons is drawn by a team of horses and beside it walks Andrew McCornack, a sturdy Scotchman in his early thirties.  A substantial yoke of oxen draws the next wagon; a lad of eight with goad and the call of gee and haw encourages this team on its dusty way.  The boy is Walter, the oldest son.  The mother—who a few years before back in the little settlement in Illinois as Maria Eakin had joined young Andrew in life's adventures—can be seen under the great covered forward bow of the lead wagon.  She holds a baby, a boy of a few months, and in and out of the wagon clamber three other small boys.  These four were Edwin, William, Eugene and Herbert, the baby.

The McCornack family is bound west to find a new home.  The country through which they trek is five hundred miles from the eastern settlements.  Eighteen hundred miles ahead over two mountain ranges white settlers have established themselves in fertile valleys, and word has come from these settlers that free land is to be had and that a church has been established in the wilderness.  In between lay twenty-three hundred miles of mountains, swift rivers, parched deserts and Indians.

The bluffs that stand back to the right and the left of the train on which I ride were anxiously scanned for menacing Indians by all that came this way with the wagon trains.  On the narrow banks of the Upper Platte, the road-bed on which I ride is built of soil ground fine by the jolting wheels of those covered wagons.  The distance traveled from the time "chain up," rang out in the morning till the wagons pulled into a hollow square at night, I now cover in twenty minutes; I am carried along secure in every comfort.  Out there on the prairie Grandfather made camp beside his wagons in the wind and the smoke and the dust—the women bedding the children and themselves down in the wagons and on the ground; the men, as their turn was called, going out into the night with their rifles to stand guard.

They accepted these hardships to find homes and opportunity—to carry religion and education into a wilderness—to make fruitful an idle soil—to establish a nation beyond the rim of civilization.  I doubt though that they, even with this vision, could foresee the ultimate fulfillment of their mission.  Their uncertain destination of that day has in two generations become a land endowed beyond the understanding of that time, and these same youngsters who rode west in the covered wagons and their brothers and sisters born in the new country have had a large part in its building.  Able, progressive farmer though he was, I wonder if Andrew McCornack as he trekked westward with nothing certain ahead of him but faith in his ability to accomplish, would have believed that a son of one of these boys in the covered wagon would one day set out over that very same trail to bring to people three thousand miles away one thousand carloads of the fruits of the soil, grown where he and his fellows were yet to turn the native sod, or that almost daily over that and other routes across the continent other grandsons of his would be sending carload after carload of lumber cut from the great forests of the Pacific he was yet to see; that though he was to find hundreds of miles of land, fertile and unclaimed, yet so rapid would be the growth of this new country of the West, that his sons and grandsons would join in damming back the tides and the waters of the great inland lakes that more fertile land might be claimed for the plow.

My Father's Day and Mine

When my father was a young lad on the farm out west of Eugene he followed his father and four older brothers around the wheat field.  Each carried a short steel sickle, and as the wheat fell from the blade, it fell onto the reaper's left arm; and when a sizable bundle had accumulated, the reaper bound it together with a wisp of the newly cut straw, dropped it in the stubble and swung his blade to start another bundle.  Around and around the field, each reaper cutting right at the heels of the man next before him.

Grandfather and his boys were harvesting the grain they had planted that the family might be fed.  They knew of no other way of getting the harvest in.  All men harvested just as they were doing.  There was no other way.  Looking back from where we stand today we see that they were practicing the identical method used by the reapers who labored in the field of Boaz where Ruth the Moabitess gleaned.  The picture was the same.  Thirty one hundred years had passed without any change in this most essential and much used process.

When these bundles of wheat had lain out in the sun a sufficient time to cure and harden, Grandfather and the boys were again in the field, this time with oxen and wagons and hauled the bundles to the barnyard where they were piled in great weather proof stacks.  Then when thrashing day came, the bundles were pitched down on the hard-beaten ground of the yard, and horses and oxen were driven around and around over the ground until the straw was separated from the wheat.  Again we see the picture as no different than that of the Children of Israel thrashing out the grain on the thrashing floors of Pharaoh thirty five hundred years before.

And Grandfather had told his sons of the trip to America from Scotland just a few years before.  How they had made the crossing in a wind-driven sailing ship.  Just such a ship as had bourn the venturesome Phoenicians on their voyages into the unknown world of two thousand B.C.

Since those remote days the world had stood still with little change.  Gunpowder, the printing press, yes, and a few of man's new ideas had come on the scene, but the progress of mankind and of the world was largely unchanged.  It can truly be said that at the time my people came to the Oregon country the forward progress of man was still geared to the slow, measured tread of the oxen.

Note now the things which have happened in my father's day and mine.  Things which were unknown to an earlier generation.  The new things which have come about.  The list is limitless.  The harnessing and uses of electricity.  An understanding of the world of bacteriology and its uses in protecting human life.  The telephone, the radio, television, radar.  The use of steam and the railways.  Petroleum and its thousand uses.  The airplane and its world-wide service.  Each one of these innovations and a hundred more has stepped up the pace at which the world is moving from the four miles an hour tread of the ox to a fantastic speed much faster than that of sound.  Why has all this come to pass in our time?  Why was it that God in his infinite wisdom did permit the world to stand still for three thousand years and then in your time and mine pull the plug as it were and permit the world to rush to its full and final destiny?  That is truly the sixty-four dollar question of our day.

—E.A. McCornack (1883-1962)