Chapter Va — A Native Daughter, Born in Fort Decatur
Madge Decatur Denny was born in Fort Decatur, in the year of the Indian war, on March 16th, 1856; to those sheltering walls had the gentle mother, Louisa Boren Denny, fled on the day of battle. Ushered into the world of danger and rude alarms, her nature proved, in its development, one well suited to the circumstances and conditions; courage, steadfastness and intrepidity were marked traits in her character. Far from being outwardly indicated, they were rather contrasted by her delicate and refined appearance; one said of her, “Madge is such a dainty thing.”
Madge was a beautiful child, and woman, too, with great sparkling eyes, abundant golden-brown curls and rosy cheeks. What a picture lingers in my memory!—of this child with her arms entwined about the slender neck of a pet fawn, her eyes shining with love and laughter, her burnished hair shimmering like a halo in the sunlight as she pattered here and there with her graceful playfellow.
The Indians admired her exceedingly, and both they and the white people of the little settlement often remarked upon her beauty.
In early youth she showed a keen intellectuality, reading with avidity at ten years such books as Irving’s “Life of Washington,” “History of France,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Sir Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “Lady of the Lake.” From that time on she read every book or printed page that fell in her way; a very rapid reader, one who seemed to take in a page at a few glances, she ranged happily over the fields of literature like a bright-winged bird. Poetry, fiction, history, bards, wits, essayists, all gave of their riches to her fresh, inquiring young mind.
The surpassing loveliness and grandeur of the “world in the open air” appealed to her pure nature even in extreme youth; her friends recall with wonder that when only two and a half years of age she marked the enchantment of a scene in Oregon, of flowery mead, dark forest and deep canyon, under a bright June sky, by plucking at her mother’s gown and lisping, “Look! mother, look! so pitty!” (pretty).
And such a lover of flowers! From this same season when she gathered armfuls of great, golden buttercups, blue violets, scarlet columbines, “flags” and lilies from the sunny slopes of the Waldo Hills, through her youth, on the evergreen banks of Puget Sound where she climbed fearlessly about to pluck the purple lupine, orange honeysuckle, Oregon grape and sweet wild roses, was her love of them exemplified. Very often she walked or rode on horseback some distance to procure the lovely lady’s slipper (Calypso borealis), the favorite flower of the pioneer children.
A charming letter writer, she often added the adornment of a tiny group of wild flowers in the corner, a few yellow violets, fairylike twin-flowers or lady’s slippers.
At one time she had a large correspondence with curious young Eastern people who wished to know something of the far Northwest; to these she sent accurate and graphic descriptions of tall trees, great mountains, waterfalls, lakes and seas, beasts, birds and fishes. She possessed no mean literary talent; without her knowledge some of her letters strayed into print. A very witty one was published in a newspaper, cut out and pasted in the scrapbook of an elocutionist, and to her astonishment produced as a “funny piece” before an audience among whom she sat, the speaker evidently not knowing its author. A parody on “Poe’s Raven” made another audience weep real tears in anguished mirth.
Every felicitous phrase or quaint conceit she met was treasured up, and to these were added not a few of her own invention, and woe betide the wight who accompanied her to opera, concert or lecture, for her sotto voce comments, murmured with a grave countenance, were disastrous to their composure and “company manners.”
It must be recorded of her that she gave up selfish pleasures to be her mother’s helper, whose chief stay she was through many years. In her last illness she said, with much tenderness, “Mother, who will help you now?”
Madge was a true lady or loaf-giver. Every creature, within or without the domicile, partook of her generous care, from the pet canary to the housedog, all the human inhabitants and the stranger within the gates.
Moreover, she was genuine, nothing she undertook was slighted or done in a slipshod manner.
Her taste and judgment were accurate and sound in literature and art; her love of art led her to exclaim regretfully, “When we are dead and gone, the landscape will bristle with easels.”
A scant population and the exigencies of the conditions placed art expression in the far future, yet she saw the vast possibilities before those who should be so fortunate as to dwell in the midst of such native grandeur, beauty and richness of color.
Like many other children, we had numerous pets, wild things from the forest or the, to us, charming juvenile members of the barnyard flocks. When any of these succumbed to the inevitable, a funeral of more or less pomp was in order, and many a hapless victim of untoward fate was thus tearfully consigned to the bosom of Mother Earth. On one occasion, at the obsequies of a beloved bird or kitten, I forget which, Madge, then perhaps six years of age, insisted upon arranging a litter, draped with white muslin and decorated with flowers, and followed it, as it was borne by two other children, singing with serious though tearless eyes,
“We’re traveling to the grave
To lay this body down,
And the last word that I heard him speak
Was about Jerusalem,” etc.
She was so thoroughly in earnest that the older children refrained from laughing at what some might have thought unnecessary solemnity.
Madge had her share of adventures, too; one dark night she came near drowning in Lake Washington. Having visited the Newcastle coal mines with a small party of friends and returned to the lake shore, they were on the wharf ready to go on board the steamer. In some manner, perhaps from inadequate lighting, she stepped backward and fell into the water some distance below. The water was perhaps forty feet deep, the mud unknown. Several men called for “A rope! A rope!” but not a rope could they lay their hands on. After what seemed an age to her, a lantern flashed into the darkness and a long pole held by seven men was held down to her; she grasped it firmly and, as she afterward said, felt as if she could climb to the moon with its assistance—and was safely drawn up, taken to a miner’s cottage, where a kind-hearted woman dressed her in dry clothing. She reached home none the worse for her narrow escape.
Her nerves were nerves of steel; she seldom exhibited a shadow of fear and seemed of a spirit to undertake any daring feat. To dare the darkness, climb declivities, explore recesses, seemed pleasures to her courageous nature. At Snoqualmie Falls, in the Archipelago de Haro, in the Jupiter Hills of the Olympic Range, she climbed up and down the steep gorges with the agility of the chamois or our own mountain goat. The forest, the mountain, the seashore yielded their charm to her, each gave their messages. In a collection which she culled from many sources, ranging from sparkling gayety to profound seriousness, occur these words:
“I saw the long line of the vacant shore
The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand
And the brown rocks left bare on every hand
As if the ebbing tide would flow no more.
Then heard I more distinctly than before,
The ocean breathe and its great breast expand,
And hurrying came on the defenseless land,
The insurgent waters with tumultuous roar;
All thought and feeling and desire, I said
Love, laughter, and the exultant joy of song
Have ebbed from me forever! Suddenly o’er me
They swept again from their deep ocean bed,
And in a tumult of delight and strong
As youth, and beautiful as youth, upbore me.”
It must have been that “Bird and bee and blossom taught her Love’s spell to know,” and then she went away to the “land where Love itself had birth.”