My life in the log house had been full of joyous interests. There were
turkeys and ducks and chickens, lambs and colts and calves, kittens and
puppies—never could I be without playmates. There were trees and woods
and flowers in summer—a great fireplace with popcorn and maple candy in
winter, and I an only grandchild the center of it all. But what had I
come to? As mother realized, a place of perils, a creek rushing wildly
at the side of the house, great oil pits sunken in the earth not far
away, a derrick inviting to adventurous climbing at the door. No wonder
that warnings and scoldings and occasional switchings dogged my steps.
Moreover, I was no longer the center of the circle: a baby filled her
arms—“my” arms! A man still strange gave me orders and claimed her—“my”
mother.

It was not to be endured, and so one November day just after my third
birthday I announced I was going to leave. “Going back to Grandma.”
“Very well,” my mother said. I knew the way the men went when they
walked away from the shop, and I followed it, but not far. Across the
valley in which we lived ran an embankment. To my young eyes it was as
high as a mountain, and the nearer I came the higher it looked, the
higher and blacker. And then suddenly as I came to its foot I realized
that I had never been on the other side, that I did not know the way to
Grandma’s. I knew I was beaten, and sat down to think it over. Never in
all these years since have I faced defeat, known that I must retreat,
that I have not been again that little figure with the black mountain in
front of it, a little figure looking longingly at a shanty dim in the
growing night but showing a light in the window.

Finally I turned slowly back to the house and sat down on the steps. It
seemed a long time before the door opened and my mother in a surprised
voice said:

“Why, Ida! I thought you had gone to Grandma’s.”

“I don’t know the way,” I said humbly.

“Very well. Come in and get your supper.”

Respect for my mother, her wisdom in dealing with hard situations, was
born then. I was not to be punished; I was not to be laughed at; I was
to be accepted. Years later she told me of the unhappy hour she spent
watching me go off so sturdily, to come back so droopingly, watching
with tears running down her cheeks, but determined I must learn my
lesson. It was a bit of wisdom she never ceased to practice. My mother
always let me carry out my revolts, return when I would and no questions
asked.

In the three years we spent in the shanty on the flats there was but one
other episode that had for me the same self-revealing quality as this
revolt. It was my first attempt to test by experiment. The brook which
ran beside the house was rapid, noisy, in times of high water dangerous
for children. Watching it, fascinated, I observed that some things
floated on the surface, others dropped to the bottom. It set me to
wondering what would happen to my little brother, then in dresses, if
dropped in. I had to find out. There was a footbridge near the house,
and one day when I supposed I was unobserved I led him onto it and
dropped him in. His little skirts spread out and held him up.
Fortunately at that moment his screams brought a near-by workman, and he
was rescued. I suppose I was spanked; of that I remember nothing, only
the peace of satisfied curiosity in the certainty that my brother
belonged to the category of things which floated.

What I really remember of these early days concerns only my personal
discoveries, discoveries of the kind of person I was, of the nature of
things around me which stirred my curiosity. Whether a childish
experience was deep enough to etch itself on my memory or I only know of
it from hearing it told and retold, I always decide by this test: if I
really remember it, the happening is set in a scene—a scene with a
background, exits, entrances, and properties. I know I remember my
revolt and defeat because I always see it as an act on a stage, every
detail, every line clear.

Of the pregnant, bizarre, and often tragic development going on about me
I remember nothing; yet the uncertainties and dangers of it were part of
our daily fare.

Whether there was oil in the ground in sufficient quantities to justify
the prodigious effort being made to find it, nobody could know. If not,
the shop and shanty were a dead loss—another long delay on the road to
Iowa. All that winter of 1860 and 1861 my father was asking himself that
question; but in 1861 it was answered when up and down Oil Creek a
succession of flowing wells came in, wells producing from three hundred
to three thousand barrels a day—“fountain wells,” “gushers,” “spouters,”
they called them from the great streams which rose straight into the air
one to two hundred feet, to fall in an oily green-black spray over the
surrounding landscape.