Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/278

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

270 WILLIAM BARLOW as he proved by throwing it open to the public as soon as he got his money back. It had cost about two thousand dollars and was sixty- five miles long. This ends the old pioneer's part of this history. Now I will go back seventy years and tell as briefly as pos- sible what I know of my own knowledge of the changes, habits and style of that period. I was born on the 26th day of Oc- tober, 1822, in Marion County, Indiana, twelve miles south- west of Indianapolis, on Little Whitelick River, right in the midst of a Quaker settlement. So my early training had to be of the strictest kind. I never saw a drunken man or heard an oath sworn or profane language of any kind until I was ten years old ; never heard the words "Yes, sir/' or "No, sir," but instead "Yes, man," or "No, man." If one would say "Madam" to a woman she would say, "Thou is mistaken, friend, I am neither mad nor dumb." Their ways were very peculiar ways, but I must say, they were very peculiar good ways. They had no use for lawyers, as all difficulties were settled by the Church. They had no use for drones, all had to work alike. A lazy man they disposed of. If they could not get rid of him any other way they would just hate him out of the hive. Bees kill their drones, but the Quakers were averse to taking blood under any circumstances, so they first turned their drone out of the church, and afterwards hated him out of the neighborhood. You might think strange that they let him into the church, but in that respect they are just like the Catholics, if the parents are Quakers their children are also Quakers so long as they conform to the rules of their religion. These rules were honesty, industry, strict morality and teetotal temperance. This is all the religion they had, and when summed up it is, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Any slight deviation from any of the rules would turn them out of the church, or would have done it when I was a boy. I will now give their style of matrimony sixty years ago. No priest or preacher of any kind, judge or justice of the peace or any kind of law officer had anything to say about it. The