The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 2
ONE crisp autumn morning in the year 1840 a little after dawn there appeared out of the mists covering the Illinois prairies a great covered wagon drawn by four oxen and guided by a man of great physical power and beauty who wore his hair cropped at the line of his shoulders and a black curling vigorous beard that covered his whole breast. In the wagon rode his wife and the four children which she had borne him in five years. Guiding the oxen with a long pole, he walked beside the cart much as Abraham in the glory of his strength walked beside his flocks, erect and beautiful and full of dignity. In his eyes there was a burning light and on his arm he carried a great Bible fastened and locked with brass clasps.
Beneath the ox-cart swung a crate filled with shivering fowls and behind it walked a cow, a black he-goat and two milking she-goats. He had come from the Mormon settlement where a little while before he had been publicly cast out for immoral practices. Behind him in the colony he left two wives and three other children. The wife who slept in the covered wagon with the nursing child in her arms was his first wife, a woman called Maria Trent, two years older than himself and the daughter of a fur trader of St. Louis. The youngest child was a male child who had already been baptized by his father in the waters of the Mississippi with the name of Uriah.
On the outskirts of a shabby village the wanderer halted his wagon, unyoked the oxen and set about building a fire, and in a little while a dozen early morning risers wandering out from the village gathered about to stare at him. Of these he took no notice either by word or glance, but went on filling an iron pot with water and oatmeal. This he hung over the fire. Then he turned toward the wagon and called out "Maria!" and a pale, sickly woman with reddish hair opened the canvas and climbed down carrying a baby in her arms. In turn the stranger lifted down three small children, two boys and a girl. When they had seated themselves on a log beside the fire, the man turned his face toward the sky and raising his mighty arms began to pray in a voice of singular beauty.
For a moment the little crowd gathered about the wagon became uneasy, as if looking upon something not meant for its eyes. One of the men grinned with a self-consciousness rare in that crude frontier world. And then slowly the voice and presence of the stranger began to work its effect upon them. They were simple people and the words of the stranger's prayer were commonplace and filled with noble expressions of a grandeur long since worn threadbare by the mouthings of countless bad and insincere preachers. But the same worn phrases in the voice of this preacher became different.
"O Lord of Hosts," he prayed in the beautiful voice, "guide Thy poor children in their wanderings through the wilderness. Look upon Thy poor servant and humble him. Take him as Thy rod and Thy staff to spread Thy truth like a morning sun piercing the darkness. . . ."
He prayed for a long time and one by one the three village women knelt on the frozen clay. One of them threw off her shawl and flinging herself down cried out, "Forgive us our sins, O Lord. Hallelujah. Forgive us our sins." One of the men began to pray and the others stood about in silence, staring resentfully at the ground. The wife of Cyrus Spragg began to rock to and fro on the log, silencing the baby Uriah, who had begun to cry with cold and hunger.
When the stranger had finished, he opened his eyes and looked round him with the empty stare of one who had come back from a great distance. Then the burning eyes rested in turn upon each of the kneeling women, and he murmured, "Arise, my children, and go your ways, telling publicans and sinners ye have found him on whom the Spirit of the Lord is descended. Blessed be he who fills the belly of the Prophet of God."
They went away in silence and in a little while the three women returned bringing with them two boys who carried bags of beans and potatoes, late melons and bread and a quarter of fresh mutton. These they laid beside the fire and then one of the women, a plump and handsome young thing, pulled her shawl more closely over her yellow hair and speaking in a low, timid voice said, "Will you come and preach for us, Reverend? It's been a long spell since we had a good preacher." There was a curious hot excitement in her voice.
When they had gone again the woman on the log looked up at her husband with the strangest expression. In her eyes there was the light of admiration, but the thin mouth curled as if in derision. She was the only woman in the world who knew this man, and she could not bring herself to leave him.
He stayed and preached. His wife played for the services on a melodion which they carried in the covered wagon. Each night brought souls to God. Each night brought singing and weeping. In that little town all came to God save one old man whose deafness shut him out from the sonorous beauty of Cyrus Spragg's voice and whose blindness hung a veil between him and fire in the preacher's eyes. They came to him, each one, in secret to ask forgiveness from their sins. He was to them the Prophet of God.
He left at last with his ox-cart and chickens and goats, his wife and children, and he took with him a store of food and a young heifer bred and due to calve the following spring, and on the day he left a little crowd followed the covered wagon for three miles beyond the village, and in it were women weeping and crying out hysterically. When at last he took leave of them at the ford in a muddy prairie stream, he stood on the back of the wagon and made a long prayer while they knelt on the frozen turf. And when he had finished he said, "And God came to His servant in a dream and said, 'Go ye into the wilderness and when ye find a place where three streams meet, there shall ye found a new kingdom which shall be called the New Jerusalem. And it shall flourish and flow with milk and honey, and to all the faithful the founding of the kingdom will be revealed by a sign, and the faithful shall sell all and leave their homes and firesides, their wives and husbands, nay even their children, and come at last into the Kingdom of Heaven.'"
Then he blessed them all and taking up the long wand by which he guided the oxen, set out through the water to cross the ford. One woman, the plump comely one who had spoken to him on the first morning, rushed into the cold water up to her knees, but he turned her back saying, "Until the Lord send you a sign, tend your hearth and your home."
Inside the wagon the wife lay with her face buried in a new feather-bed, her fingers pressed against her ears. She was sobbing and ill and pregnant with another child of the Prophet.
And in the village early in the following summer, the plump blonde woman gave birth to a child which she said was not her husband's child, but the child of God and that she must take it to the Prophet. Some thought her mad and some whispered about her, and her husband hired a woman to keep watch over her while he worked in the fields, but one day when he had gone to Chicago she escaped, and with the child joined a wagon-train bound westward and they never heard of her again.
The tale of Cyrus Spragg is a legend of the flat country, of those prairies of the Middle West where one can travel for days discovering only monotony, and the origin of Cyrus Spragg is as mysterious as his end. No one ever knew whence he came and none knows when he died. There is no record of his grave. Some said that he was a gypsy, but he was far too massive in build for one of the Romany race. Others said that he was the son of a French-Canadian father and a New England mother, and others that he was of German origin, the son of immigrants from the Palatinate, and still others that he was the son of a white man and an Indian woman. It is known only that he came out of the wilderness somewhere on the borders of Canada. It is likely that he had Indian blood and that it was the blood of the Five Nations. But there is little chance that the truth will ever be known, for the Spraggites ceased to exist half a century ago. The sect died when it no longer had a God and those remaining alive who saw him in life never knew anything of his origin.
The first existing record of his physical appearance is to be found in the works of Miss Amelia Bossert, a lady of a highly emotional nature who became the poetess and historian of the Spraggite sect as well as the mother of three children by the Prophet. After she had passed middle age and was no longer attractive she quarrelled with the sect and was publicly expelled from the colony. But her impressions had been written as a girl and having been already printed and distributed she found it impossible to collect and destroy them. She was seventeen at the time when Cyrus Spragg first entered her life. She saw him on the morning he entered Valencia, Illinois, driving a wagon-train laden with food and household furniture sent West into the frontier country by an enterprising Philadelphia merchant. She must even then have been a woman of an hysterical nature easily susceptible to a faith which rested upon outbursts of wild religious ecstasy. There was a great deal in her account that was significant.
She wrote: "He was a handsomely made man of about six feet two inches with a remarkable high-colored, full-blooded look, with fiery black eyes and black curling hair which he wore cropped so that it fell just below the ears. In weight he was much heavier than he appeared because he was a muscular man of huge physical strength fashioned in such grandeur of proportion as might have been chosen by Fidias or one of the Greeks (sic). His brow was open and noble and his nose large and straight with elegant nostrils. These nostrils were always a little distended as I have remarked is the case with men of virility and passion of purpose. The lips were of a fine strawberry red and finely shaped though I have heard it said they were too full for some tastes. His hands were large and powerful, but of a beautiful shape, although hard and calloused from the powerful and heavy work which his truly Democratic (sic) nature craved warmly. Though he was but nineteen he had the mien and dignity of a well-developed man of forty.
"In his countenance there was already the light of Godhood. His were the flashing eyes of a man born to command as the Prophet of God. People on whom the Great Light had descended knew him at once as the leader sent by God to conduct His children out of the black slough of this world's sin and despair. A great light shone from his countenance. Many times since, the sight of him has called to mind those noble words of Solomon in describing God's love for the Church:
"'His eyes are the eyes of doves by the river of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.
"'His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers; his lips like lilies dropping sweet-smelling myrrh.
"'His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl.
"'His legs are as pillars of marble set upon sockets of fine gold; his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.'"
Miss Bossert, perhaps through a modesty which appears to have deserted her later in life, saw fit to delete one sentence of the passage. She writes that she saw him for the first time when she was standing in front of Petersen's General Store, where she had been sent to buy eggs by her afterward sainted mother.
"While I stood watching him with all the curiosity which we in Valencia felt for each newcomer, he lifted single-handed out of the rut into which it had sunk a whole laden ox-cart which two oxen had been unable to move."
Of that first appearance in Valencia there is no further record, but from Miss Bossert's description it is easy to see that he was no usual frontier youth. It may have been that he had in Valencia one of those adventures which later marked his progress back and forth across the face of the Middle West, but Miss Bossert, being at that time only seventeen, would scarcely have heard of it. Her own adventure came much later.
From Valencia he went westward to sell what remained of his store of commerce and then for nine years he appears to have been lost, like Saint John the Baptist, in the wilderness. They were years spent perhaps in trading and trapping. Throughout his life he was surrounded from time to time by complete mystery. At the end of the nine years he appeared in Saint Louis, where he married Maria Trent and began his long career as a religious experimenter and itinerant preacher.
For thirty years from the day the Mormons cast him out Cyrus Spragg and his ever-increasing family wandered the frontier country, appearing now here, now there, bringing with him excitement and romance and ecstasy where otherwise there was only poverty and work. As he grew older and more certain of himself, a kind of conscious glory came to envelop him, so that at times his journeying took on the aspect of a royal progress. Villages came to await his coming. Twice there were scandals that became known. Once in Mississippi he was forced to flee before the threats of an outraged husband across the border into Tennessee, leaving his family and his ox-cart to follow him. And each year the tired pretty woman who was his wife bore him another child until at length there were thirteen.
They were strong children, full of vitality, who thrived on the abundant food given by those to whom Cyrus Spragg had brought the light. He had other children, beyond all doubt—children like that of the plump yellow-haired woman who had disappeared seeking the Prophet. They were scattered throughout the borders of the Middle West. There were thirteen by his wife and three by the two deserted Mormon wives and countless others not included among those he sired after he ruled as God in New Jerusalem.
The wife, it seemed, could not bring herself to leave him, perhaps because without him she could not have fed all those mouths, perhaps because in the end, after he had come to believe in himself, she, too, began to believe that he might be God. Or it may have been a thing even simpler and less complex, that he had for her that fascination which he had for other women, like Miss Amelia Bossert and the yellow-haired wife.
The children had Biblical names—Jared and Obadiah, Vashti and Uriah, Solomon and Bathsheba, Joshua and Isaiah, Boaz and Sulamith, Abraham and Ishmael—all save the last. For some reason the tired woman rebelled against giving the last a Biblical name. Perhaps it was because she had some foreknowledge that she would never have another child and so sought to have one that might be her own instead of his. Perhaps she knew even before it was born that the last child was destined to be strange and different from the others.
The child was born one hot August night in a cottonwood grove in Iowa. There was a clear sky with a red moon that came up out of the flat prairie as the sun disappeared. The tired woman felt the pains coming on and begged her husband to stop for the night among the pleasant trees. She could not bear a child far out alone on that flat monotonous plain with not even a bush to hide her agony. And when she had seen to it that the smaller children were asleep and the older ones had wandered off among the trees, she went with Cyrus Spragg deep into the grove until they came to a swamp bordered round with deep thickets of witch-hazel, and there in the wildest corner they made a bed of leaves and blankets under the trees and Cyrus heated water in an iron pot.
Her pain lasted all through the night, to the wild accompaniment of frogs croaking in the marshes and white herons moving about and chortling in their sleep. A single coyote somewhere on the edge of the marsh sat on his haunches and bayed at the moon, long quivering wails that came surely from another world. It seemed that the child would never be born and that surely she must die, but when morning came and the moon had disappeared and only Venus hung red in the pale East, Cyrus Spragg tore the child from its mother's womb. It was a girl and it lived, but the tired mother knew she could never have another child.
They baptized the baby in the waters of the marsh, giving it the name of Annie, which was the name of Maria Spragg's mother.
In the years that followed, revelations that were false came from time to time to the Prophet. Once he returned from meditation in the wilderness declaring that God had come to him in a pillar of fire to say that mankind could alone be saved by turning again to the ways of the birds and the beasts of the field. There must be no more marrying or giving in marriage and man must go about clothed only in his skin, like the birds and the beasts. Sin, God told Cyrus Spragg, was born of the garments with which man covered his body.
With his family and a little band of followers he set up a kingdom of Nature in the dunes and forests of Michigan. But two things he had failed to consider. The winter came and with it forty-seven Vigilantes from the nearest town. Together they dispersed the little band. Among the followers was Miss Amelia Bossert, the poetess, who early in the summer of the next year bore a son to the glory of the Prophet. The tired wife was released at last from the servitude of her body.
And then again at Cairo, Illinois, God came to him in the shape of a ram speaking with the tongues of angels to warn him against the new deluge. From the back of the great ox-cart he preached repentance and destruction, and beside it he and his followers set about building a clumsy barge that would have sunk as soon as launched. The great ship was finished in November and he settled himself to waiting for the rains to descend and the waters to rise. It is true that in that year the rains came and the rivers in the Middle West rose higher than they had ever risen before; but the Ark remained on dry land. No trickle of water touched it, despite even the prayers of all his band of followers. On the eighth day the river subsided again.
He did not wait for new floods, but told his followers that he had been guilty of error and sin and so had been blind to the true meaning of God's revelation, and packing his family into the cart, he disappeared again, moving toward the west with a small band of eccentric disciples. The Ark remained, a curiosity which farmers drove miles to see, and at last it was carried off piecemeal for firewood by the negroes who lived on the riverbanks.
In the spring of the following year the little caravan led by the Prophet came suddenly upon "the spot where three rivers joined their waters." He was no longer a young man and no longer quite a charlatan. At sixty-one he had come to believe in himself as others believed in him. The thing he had created took possession of him. The site where three rivers joined their waters was the spot indicated by him in a prophecy thirty years earlier. He had not believed it then, and now it had come true. It was as if God had chosen him, after all. Here he unyoked the oxen for the last time. This was the New Jerusalem.
It was a fertile country, green and well watered, with deep black soil, though it was a flat country and treeless and bare. The land was to be had for the taking. At this time there were in his train seven grown sons and nineteen followers, men and women, and among them they claimed land larger in area than all Judea. Cyrus Spragg became the ruler and the patriarch and throughout the prairie country those who had been awaiting a sign heard of the New Jerusalem and left their homes and flocked to join him. They came for days and weeks in wagons and ox-carts, on foot and on horseback, a restless, emotional people seeking the compensation of a romantic faith.
He built a Temple of which Miss Amelia Bossert's description remains. It was eight-sided, without windows, and possessed a single door. Inside there were no dividing walls, but only draperies and curtains. What light there was came through the roof, which rose to a height of a hundred feet in a gigantic dome-topped tower that was visible for miles across the flat prairie from any part of New Jerusalem. Near it he built the Ecclesiastical Palace, a rambling wooden house painted white, that was to shelter his wife, his six daughters, his seven sons and daughters-in-law and his eighteen legitimate grandchildren. It was the first house his tired wife had known in forty years and when it was finished she took to a bed placed near a window that gave out on the square before the Temple. There she lived, wearing out her tired life in watching with dimmed but uncomplaining eyes this strange thing built up out of nothing by the strange man she had loved and despised for nearly forty years. Neither the thing nor the man had she ever understood.
When the Temple and the Palace were finished there was a great service in the open air. Cyrus Spragg was photographed and took leave of his followers and entered into the Temple, to pass eternity in repose and meditation. God, he told them, would rule New Jerusalem through His instrument, Cyrus Spragg. He would send out revelations from time to time administering the sowing of crops and price of grain and the shearing of sheep. As God's instrument, Cyrus Spragg could not die. He would live forever in the depths of the Temple watching over their good. There would be only virgins to serve him, virgins to carry forth his revelations into the light, virgins to feed him and attend his will. Then he entered into the Temple and no man ever saw him again. He became an Invisible Presence and there were converts to the faith and children born in New Jerusalem who had never seen Cyrus Spragg and so came to think of him as God.
But in New Jerusalem dissension and wrangling broke out even in the family of the Prophet himself, for his third son, Uriah, was unlike the others and would take no part in the plan, and went about muttering against his father. He and the Prophet's youngest daughter, Annie Spragg, who never left the side of her mother, talked bitterly against their father, even though their brothers upbraided and beat them, until at last the tired mother, with her favorite children, Uriah and Annie, left the squabbles of the Palace and went to live by themselves in a house on the borders of the colony. It was there the defeated old woman died at last calling on the Prophet to leave the Temple and visit her. But he never came, for God could not appear among his people. When she was buried, Uriah Spragg and his sister fled the colony one dark night, and with them went Miss Amelia Bossert and her four sons, for she was an old woman now and when the Prophet failed to choose her among those to serve him in the Temple, she uttered blasphemies that caused her to be driven from New Jerusalem. She went to Omaha to live and supported her four sons by sewing. One of them became a senator.
When the Prophet was sixty-eight God sent him a revelation saying that it was through his seed that the world would be redeemed and that all his children would be blessed unto the fifth and sixth generation as the chosen and the true Children of God. It became a great honor for any woman to be chosen as the mother of God's children.
There lived in a house not far from the Temple a young woman of twenty called Eliza Weatherby, the daughter of one of the Prophet's oldest converts. She was a pretty girl, devout and serious, but not without vanity. She sinned by wearing brooches and bright ribbons, and so she attracted many admirers. Her father's house adjoined the building where the produce of New Jerusalem was sold and the mail given out. Through this circumstance she made the acquaintance of a young man, the only unbeliever who was ever allowed within the sacred ground of the colony. He was tall and straight and lean and a Kentuckian. He was a hard rider and employed by the government to bring the mail from Omaha west across the prairies to New Jerusalem. For Miss Eliza Weatherby he conceived a romantic Southern passion which appears to have excited the girl, perhaps because it was so free of all the piety which surrounded the dour courtships of the Faithful. For New Jerusalem was a moral community where there was no dancing or gambling and no drinking of alcohol, and adultery was punished by expulsion from the sect. But the girl resisted him because she could not marry an infidel and urged him to become converted.
The suitor was a young man and quite out of his head with love and desire for the pretty Eliza Weatherby and at length, when she remained firm, he was driven beyond endurance. He expressed a desire to be converted and under Obadiah Spragg, eldest son of the Prophet, he began a course of instruction. What he learned there was never known, for the secrets of the sect were well guarded, but it caused him to violate the Temple. He discovered that Eliza was among the virgins chosen to serve the Prophet and on the day she was called to enter the sanctuary the Kentuckian broke in the door. A passing woman heard three shots of a pistol and saw him emerge and leap on his horse and ride off, not toward Omaha but toward the West. A little while later Eliza Weatherby ran screaming into the street crying out that her lover had murdered God.
A crowd gathered about the Temple, but none dared enter to violate its sanctity save the woman chosen to serve on that day, and as Eliza Weatherby had fallen into a faint that lasted until nightfall, she could not enter. So they waited, praying until morning of the next day, when the young woman chosen went into the Temple. All day they waited for her to emerge and when at last she came out she bore a revelation written by the Prophet. It read, "Fear not, my people. Thy God is immortal." The young woman told them that a darkness had descended upon the Temple and that she had not seen the Prophet's face.
There was great rejoicing in the colony, and out of death Cyrus Spragg wrung a greater faith.
But before six months had passed murmurs began to arise in New Jerusalem. The revelations of the Prophet had caused the crops to freeze out of the ground, and ewes to be bred too early so that the lambs died of cold. There came a great plague of grasshoppers which ate what was left of the wheat. Among the chosen women who served the Prophet other strange murmurs arose, that now he received them only in the darkness of the innermost chamber and that his manner was strange. Eliza Weatherby, who had become pregnant and seemed a little out of her head, made the hysterical statement that the Prophet no longer existed and that an impostor had taken his place. But they held her in disfavor for having loved an infidel and so having been the cause of all their misfortunes, and no one believed her. She was tried and, being expelled from the colony by the Prophet's eldest son for blasphemy, went to Des Moines to live, where she embraced a literary career and wrote book reviews for the newspapers.
But in the end it was a thing as simple and commonplace as jealousy that destroyed the strange kingdom of Cyrus Spragg. One day in the midst of worship before the Temple the wife of Obadiah Spragg rose and cried out wildly that the Prophet was dead and that an impostor had taken his place. And then turning upon one of the female followers who had been shown special favor by the Prophet she began to scratch and pull the woman's hair and call her all manner of evil names. When they had calmed her and Obadiah Spragg had bade her be silent, she turned and, pointing her finger, screamed at him: "There is the False Prophet. Him and his brother Jared. It took two of them to fill the place of the True Prophet. One wasn't good enough."
In their fear that God had chosen them for calamity the colony held a meeting in the open space before the Temple and four of the oldest followers of the Prophet, with prayer on their lips and despite the cries of "Sacrilege" from Jared and Obadiah Spragg, opened the door and entered the Temple. At the end of an hour they appeared again with terror in their eyes. The Temple was empty. There was no Prophet.
It was the end of the colony. Some sold their land and went away from the accursed ground and some stayed until better times brought prosperity. But the Spraggites were no more, and no one knows to this day what became of Cyrus Spragg. His son Obadiah declared that he had been taken to Heaven in a chariot of fire, but Obadiah was not Cyrus Spragg and he had neither the vigor nor the beauty nor the voice of Cyrus Spragg and none believed him.
In Des Moines the child of Eliza Weatherby was born. It was a boy and sickly, the child of the Prophet's old age. She christened it Alonzo for the Kentuckian and because she thought Alonzo a pretty name. But she refused to marry her lover. She died in the belief that he had murdered God.