The Great Accident
9781465653109
200 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
THERE are two kinds of people: small-town folks, and others. The others are inclined to think of the people of the small towns as men and women of narrow horizons and narrow interests and a vast ignorance of such important things as cocktails. But, as a matter of fact, the people who dwell in the little mid-western cities and towns are your real cosmopolites. They know their own country, east, west, north and south, at firsthand. The reason for this is simple. When a city dweller goes to the country, he is careful to remain a city dweller; but when a small-town man goes to the city, he becomes a city man for as long as he is within the city’s gates. Your Bostonian knows Boston, has a smattering of New York, and a talking acquaintance with London. Your New Yorker knows New York—perhaps; and he desires to know nothing else. But the men and women of Hardiston, for example, know New York, and they know Boston—and they prefer Hardiston with a steadfast and unshakable preference. This little town of Hardiston—it is really no town at all, since the last census showed it with a population above the five thousand mark, and so entitled it to be called a city—stands on a plateau above Salt Creek, and it is overlooked by a circle of hills, and at three corners of the town the gaunt, black iron furnaces stand sentry at the gates. The hills, of clay and iron ore and conglomerate rock, are pink with apple blossoms in the spring; and in the fall the hardwood growth which clothes them where the orchards have not yet spread presents a dazzle of reds and yellows that blind the eye with their splendor. It is a rich and fertile country, with well-watered bottom lands; and Hardiston town and Hardiston county have a past, a present and a future. The past goes back to the Indians and beyond. Salt Creek won its name by no mere chance. There have always been traces of salt in its water; and in the ancient days, the Indians used to come to a riffle below where Hardiston now stands and boil the water for this salt. There was a big encampment here; and the tribes came from all over Ohio, and from Kentucky, and farther, too, to boil salt and take it home with them. They brought Daniel Boone here once; and you may still see, to the north of Hardiston, a crumbling precipice of sand conglomerate over which Boone is said to have jumped in making his escape. Also, at the foot of that sandy bluff, you may dig in an ash bed twenty feet deep, and find the skeletons of Indian braves, buried there beneath the campfires, with perhaps an arrow head of flint between their ribs. When the whites came in, they took up the making of salt where the Indians left off. The state recognized the industry, and chartered it. But at last cheaper salt came in, and the salt boilers found themselves with their occupation gone. So, seeking about them for work for their hands to do, they discovered black coal in the hills, and rusty brown ore; and they digged the coal and the ore and made iron. It was good iron; none better in the world; and it commanded the highest prices in any market. The county was all undershot with coal; the hills were crowned with iron. Twenty years ago, every valley in the county had its gaunt tipple and its pile of crumbling slack; and every road was dotted with the creaking, rusty wagons that hauled the ores to the furnaces in Hardiston. To-day, much of the coal is gone; and the ore has vanished. But the furnaces fetch ore from Superior, and smelt it into heavy pigs of iron; and their roar is eternal about the comfortable little town.
