Ogden

“ In 1880 the Ogdens had left India hurriedly on account of Colonel Ogden's health. When Milly was a baby and Joan three years old, the family had turned their backs on the pleasant luxury of Indian life. Home they had come to England and a pension, Colonel Ogden morose and chafing at the useless years ahead; Mrs. Ogden a pretty woman, wide-eyed and melancholy after all the partings, especially after one parting which her virtue would have rendered inevitable in any case. ”

“ Ogden, the man is Failure walking about in blue and buff and high boots! I read him like a page of print! He is slow, dull, bovine, proud, and of no decision. He lacks initiative; and, while he might defend, he is incapable of attacking. ”

“ Ogden is intensely interested in human beings; he cannot think of an unfortunate individual or class of individuals without feeling a strong impulse to help them. He has spent a large portion of his time, energy, and fortune in inspiring a large number of other people with that same sentiment. I do not believe any man has done more than Mr. Odgen to spread, among the masses of the people, a spirit of unselfish service to the interests of humanity, irrespective of geographical, sectarian or racial distinction. ”

“ But when the Doctor repeated it to Mrs. Ogden, she would not hear of any such violation of the customs and traditions of the family. Her sons had always spent Christmas Eve together; and so long as she lived, she was firmly resolved that they always should. The pertinacity with which a determined woman will uphold a custom that she cherishes is simply irresistible—that is, unless the rebel makes up his mind to incur her perpetual enmity; and Isaac Ogden was less than ever in a condition of mind either to brave the hostility of his mother or wound her tenderer feelings. ”

“ Astor sent him to Astoria, on the far Pacific. He reached there just in time to find the post in the hands of the British. Of course Ogden became British again. He it was that explored the Yellowstone, the Utah and Shoshonie countries, made his winter rendezvous at Ogden's Hole in the Bear River Mountains, paddled his canoes on Great Salt Lake, and discovered Ogden's River, that Fremont renamed the Humboldt. He raided the beaver dams of Colorado, and following Jedediah Smith over the Sierras, trapped on the Sacramento. ”

“ At the bell Ogden was through the ropes and dragging him to his corner. A little trickle of blood was gathering on the point of Denny’s chin where the glove had opened afresh the half-healed cut on his cheek; he was shaking his head as he waved aside the wet towel in Ogden’s hands.
“Man, but you’re some bear for punishment!” Ogden chattered, strangely weak himself beneath his belt. “If you only had a little speed––just a little! Why, he sent over a dozen to your chin that ought to have laid you away. But you’re playing him right! ”

“ Colonel Ogden wilted perceptibly but Mrs. Ogden throve. The heat agreed with her, it made her expand. She looked younger and she felt younger and said so constantly, and her family tried to feel pleased. Lessons were a torment in the airless schoolroom; Joan flagged, Milly wept, and Elizabeth grew desperate. There was nowhere to walk except in the glare. The turf on the cliffs was as slippery as glass; on the sea-front the asphalt stuck to your shoes, and the beach was a wilderness peopled by wilting parents and irritable, mosquito-bitten children. ”

“ Have we the energy, the directness, the singleness of purpose, the unflinching steadiness in the dullest possible labor, that mark the typical industrial chief? We know that we have not; we know that these qualities are not compatible with the tranquillity of the studious temperament and the meditative life. And if the Ogdens cannot be men of letters, neither can the men of letters be Ogdens.
It is admitted, then, that Jacob Ogden was utterly and irreclaimably illiterate. He really never read a book in his life, except, perhaps, that book on dog-breaking. ”

“ Ogden came to dine at Grosvenor Place. It was a man's dinner—a dinner of political extremists and faddists; but so far from Master Vincent retiring to his own room and his books, as he sometimes did, he joined the party, and even stipulated for a place next the great electioneerer and wire-puller of the North. Further than that, he made himself most agreeable to Mr. Ogden: was most meek and humble and good-humoured (for to what deeps of hypocrisy will not a young man descend when he is madly in love?) ”

“ His father had been a loyalist, in early times, in New York, and had emigrated to Canada. Young Ogden was for a short time in the service of Mr Astor, and later of the Northwest Company, from which he was transferred to the Hudson's Bay Company. He had been active in establishing posts and negotiating commercial relations with Indian tribes. In one of his expeditions he discovered the Humboldt River. [13] Ogden was a contrast in every way to McLoughlin and Douglas, being short, dark-skinned, and rather rough in his manner, but lively and witty, and a favorite with everybody. ”

“ Ogden was a good hebraist, conversed in Greek with 'the pretended archbishop of Samos,' and wrote Latin verse in his old age. He delighted in mathematics, and maintained that 'very few good mathematicians were lewd and scandalous.' He was versed also in physics, and an excellent practical botanist, and was fond of music. ”

“ They might still be in the minority and yet they sprang up everywhere; one saw them now even at Seabourne during the summer season. They were particular about their clothes, in their own way; the boots they wore were thick but well cut, their collars immaculate, their ties carefully chosen. But she, Joan Ogden, was the forerunner who had failed, the pioneer who had got left behind, the prophet who had feared his own prophecies. ”

“ Not in the church; no, I don't mean that. He is only a policy clerk in that insurance office, at ten dollars a week, probably—hardly enough for him to live on decently, alone. Yes, I know he gets more from the choir, but even that—"
Ogden stopped one ear by propping his elbow on his ledger and putting his hand to his head, and went on with his writing as well as he could. But he had left the Underground for St. Asaph's; he was busy no longer with notes for collection, but with the notes—the melting tenor notes—of the all-admired Vibert. ”

“ Great was the successful cotton-spinner in his eyes, but there were beings cast by nature in a nobler mould. For Jacob Ogden actually believed, in all sincerity and simplicity, that there was the same natural difference between a lord and a plebeian that there is between a thorough-bred and a cart-horse. ”

“ There is a curious superstition about carriage-keeping which Mrs. Ogden fully shared. It is thought to be the most extravagant, though the most respectable, way of spending money; and an annual outlay which, if dissipated in eating and drinking, or Continental tours, would excite no remark, is considered extravagance if spent on a comfortable vehicle to drive about in one's own neighborhood. Thus Mrs. Ogden considered her son's proposition as revolutionary—as an act of secession from the simplicity of faith and practice which had been their rule of life and the tradition of their family. ”

“ The scent of them was in his nostrils, stirring memories of his old days of simple poverty, of days in the free fields. Again he turned his face toward the window, the little flowers clutched in his hand. His breast heaved as if he fought in the deep waters of his soul against some ignoble weakness.
She moved a little nearer, and reached timidly through the bars with the breathless quiet of one who offers a caress to a sleeper. Her finger-tips touched his arm.
“Joe,” said she, as if appealing in pity to him for permission to share his agony. ”

“ And if any cultivated and intellectual reader, in the thoughtful retirement of his library, feels himself superior to Jacob Ogden, the illiterate cotton-spinner, he may be reminded that he is not on all points Ogden's superior. We are all but tools in the hands of God ”

“ Ogden in particular was anxious for his emphatic remembrance and good wishes to go. The dear old man is fast passing into the last stage of his illness and he knows it and he soon expects the end, in a mood as brave and as game as he ever was. ”

“ Ogden's return was a matter of nearly an hour, and he left first. He carried away the discontented feeling of a young man whose aim in the direction of a young woman is frustrated by the presence of uncongenial elders and irrelevant outsiders. He had been quite certain of his ability to meet Abbie Brainard after the bank episode without any particular embarrassment or restraint; certainly he had come to view with more interest a girl whose hand had lain in his and whose head had rested on his shoulder. ”

“ Mr. Ogden, to whom she owed all this splendor, regarded with unconcealed displeasure the day's proceedings. He reproached himself for having yielded to her entreaty. She had begged and coaxed him so much, until he gave his consent, then he ordered the decoration of the boat. [Pg 17] Her costume was especially ordered from the most expensive tailor according to ancient pictures of the Egyptian Queen. Ogden undoubtedly wanted her to be the most striking figure on the lake. ”

“ Ogden could tell us that the rewards are worthy of the sacrifices,” said Sir William, blandly.
“Are they better than the enjoyments of leisure, the delights of friendship, and the joys of home?” asked she, half earnestly.
“By Heaven, madam!” cried Ogden, and then stopped; when Sir William broke in,—
“Mrs. Morris is too severe upon public men. They are rarely called on to make such sacrifices as she speaks of.”
While thus talking, they had reached the terrace in front of the house, where Agincourt was standing between May and Clara, holding a hand of each. ”

“ Ogden married the chiefs daughter for her influence, but in time he valued her far more for personal bravery, for distinguished talents, and undying devotion. With the form of an Indian squaw Princess Julia had the head of a statesman. One day there came .a little pappoose to Ogden's tent he named her Sarah after his mother in Montreal, and Julia after his Flathead spouse. ”

“ Brethren came to it from Salt Lake City. Gentiles came from everywhere. The settlement grew and prospered.
In 1849, people began to talk of locating a city right there at the junction of the two rivers.
In 1850, Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and others, laid out the settlement and called it Ogden, after Peter Skeen Ogden, the explorer, long since dead, but whose dashing, daring, brilliant adventures were still charming to the men of that wild land. Every time the city's name is mentioned it is another proof that although,
"The man might die, his memory lives." ”

“ She waved aside this ardent apology, and looked rather shyly through the rusty iron-work of the hand-rail. The syringas were in blossom; the asphalt path had stopped its afternoon's running and had solidified since sundown.
"I think he likes her because she isn't afraid of him. Neither are you," she added, in a low tone, as if on an after-thought. She did not look his way.
Ogden appreciated this appreciation of his behavior. He had always been prompt and respectful with Brainard, but he had never knuckled down.
"He gives her letters almost every day. She corrects his mistakes." ”

“ Ogden asserted that it was "a great comfort" to her to have him near her, and that he should go back to Milend with his grandmother at such times as she might see fit to return thither. Jacob Ogden was a wilful and a mighty man; but either from habit or some genuine filial sentiment, or perhaps because no man can be really happy unless he is governed by a woman of some sort—either a wife, or a mother, or a maiden aunt—this hard and terrible master-spirit submitted to "the old woman" without question, and whatever she willed was done. ”

“ IF HE WAS A GENTLEMAN
“Don’t you think we’d better drop it now, Frances, and be good?”
Major King reined his horse near hers as he spoke, and laid his hand on the pommel of her saddle as if he expected to meet other fingers there.
“You puzzle me, Major King,” she returned, not willing to understand.
They were bringing up the rear of the tired procession which was returning to the post from the ball. Already the east was quickening. The stars near the horizon were growing pale; the morning wind was moving, with a warmth in it from the low places, like a tide toward the mountains. ”

“ The man at the door had entered, and was jangling his spurs through the hall in hasty stride. Chadron stood as if frozen in his boots, his face growing whiter than wounded, blood-drained Macdonald’s on his cot of pain.
Now the sound of the newcomer’s voice rose in the hall, loud and stern. But harsh as it was, and unfriendly to that house, the sound of it made Frances’ heart jump, and something big and warm rise in her and sweep over her; dimming her eyes with tears.
“Where’s my daughter, Chadron, you cutthroat! Where’s Miss Landcraft? If the lightest hair of her head has suffered, by God! ”

“ He was known to the Indians during his later years as the Old White-Head. During his management at Fort Vancouver, he came to be generally known by the whites as Governor Ogden. He never became a citizen of the United States, but described himself in his will as of Montreal, Canada."
There are few instances in history where a man has filled so large a page in dealing with the native races of men as that of Peter Skene Ogden. And ther are none where greater patience, successful management and supreme courage were manifested. ”