The Eaton Democrat. (Eaton, Ohio) 1875-1903, 1885-03-19
CUPID IN
The worlds womanless Wonderland-A
screed from the Wild Boanerges of the
llowstO

Yellowstone:
Cupid is a queer little chap, and the
older he grows the crankier he gets
He is a bigger fool-maker to-day than
he was four thousand years ago, when.
he induced Colonel Samson, the great
original lion-tail-twister and Congress
ional-jaw-bone swinger, to lay his wool
and his glory in the lap of half negro,
Delilah. He is a more resistless moral
tangler and common-sense-smasher in
this 1O9th year of Yankee Doodle than
when he made the Psalmist David a
Mormon and an assassin. He is q more
egregious ninny-breeder now than when
he led all Homer's heroes on that wild
Grecian bender after the Sarah Bern
hardt of the Trojan era. He is a more
ineffable idiot-manufacturer this mo-
ment than when. twenty centuries agone,
he wheedled Mark Antony-the ances-
tor of Susan B., who spells it with an
''h"-into casting aside the sceptre of
the world for a nappy-pated Egyptian
mulattress. He is a more unconsciona
BILE heather amid all our nineteenth
century blaze of Gospel light and liberty
than when he and his scanty-skirted
mamma, Mrs. Venus, led the pagan Or
gies of Athena damsels beneath the
shade of ancient olive groves. He is
creations marplot, dignity's %dethroner,
reasons upsetter and scoffer.
Fang of hydrophobic u never
punched as many madcap fancies into
It's victims body as the slightest Craze
Of one of his tiny molasses candy shafts.
Aged Senators, slightly stricken, oil
their rusty joints and caper around in
fantile Treasury clerkesses, like hand
organ monkeys with ringworms on their
Darwinian combinations. Old women,
toothless and shriveled, touched by the
pestiferous little archer who turks in
rosebuds and cabbage heads, plaster
their graveyard c~ountenances with
enamels and paints enough to gorge a
camp of Kickapoo squaws, swing gawds
and gewgaws to every available pro-
tuberance, pile on sweet-sixteen toggery,
and smirk and giggle in a style that
would drive a whole bedlam of ordi-
nary lunatics to suicide. Seventy-year-
old Christiancys go spooneying after
sixteen-yearling girl clerks; antiquated
Maior-General Harneys, after escaping
cannon, musketry, bombs, and scalping
knives for a century or more, tumbled
before the smiles and wiles of buxom
petticoated private secretaries; queenly
Widow Hickses firt with octogenarian
O'Conors. and elope with antediluvian
Tom Lords; and she Methuselahs, like
Burdette-C outts, surrender $780, 600 a
veal for the pleasure of calling a lacka-
daisical lily-boy Bartlett chubby"
The bigger the folly the surer the
stroke. No man was ever truly in love
~ III -~H ~oot4 n avon .f him
self, and the huger the ears the purer
the flame. No woman ever loved who
was not prepared to discount a whole
assilly-um of man-iacs at a moments
notice. No freak is too wild, no vagary
too monstrous. Eagles mate with
moles, and swans with hedge-hogs.
Tom Thumbs pine for she Goliaths; sons
of Anak wed human humming-birds;
mighty-brained heroes and statesmen
rave over inane little butterflies, puny
wax dolls, and ta~ffy-faced pigmies; kings
bow down to ballet dancers, and queens
take refuge in the arms of cooks and
coachmen; and, in all lands and climes,
in every condition and state. the Cupid
wounded gosling and goslingess have a
hard road to travel to a paradise OF
sguash-an imaginary elysium, whose
roses are too often rue.
All masculinity is doomed, ooner OF
later to be smitten, punctured, har-
pooned; and, sheltered beneath the
mantle or wings-whichever he wears
of st. Valentine, I wish to tell all wo-
mankind that nowhere else on earth is
that shifting, ~puncturing, and harpoon.
ing so easily done; nowhere else be.
meath the sapphirean dome of heaven
does Cupid, the Lilliputian gizzard.
piercer, come so near having, like
death, all seasons for his own; nowhere
| else in all the grand rounds of the sun
and moon and peeping stars, are the
victims so plentiful and so readily catch.
able, crazable, and smashable as in the
vast imperial regions of the new North
west, the womanless wonderland of the
world.
Girls of America, look at Dakota,
with four and a half men and boys to
every woman and girl. Thousands Of
young and enterprising men, bonanza
farmers and miners, raisers of gold and
golden grain, bankers, merchants
town-site proprietors, and boomers
mining engineers and experts, lawyers
doctors, ranchmen, army officers and
millionaire editors, coming Congress
men, Governors, Senators, and consta-
bles of the proud, soon-to-be North
western g~iantess of the Union sister
hood, all dying to be struck with jew
eled shafts, rendering eve the misery
Of it delicious. Thousands on thousands
of young men of noble heart and brain
and Drawn, too brave and tender ant
true to be wasted, all signing ant
and longing to be heart-spitted
gigged like sentimental founders
and not one manageable girl t.
every half-hundred of them! Nearl,
every town in this greatest and grandes
of the Territories is in the same de
plorable fix. counting its girls owe
every night as carefully as old-timel,
ladies do their chickens or spoons, anC
never able, by n arithmetic. to scar,
up more than one to every fifty fellows
The whole great American Northwes
groans under the woes of a similar DIES
titution. Think of a single missionary
in Manitoba, wv OF three years ago
with eight hundred bachelors under hi.
charge, and not one weddable girl o
gushing widow!
Girls of the WOman-crowded, old
maid-accumulating older States, here i
the field for you; here you are needed
here you are at a premium; here you ar
sure of a dozen husbands apiece, if yo1
want them. Here is an empire, stretch
ing two thousand miles to the mort
and west, up the Saskatchewan an
across the mighty Rockies, to tn
golden slopes of the Pacific-an empir
vaster and grander, more fertile an
beautiful and glorious than ever Rome
gAled eagles glittered over in he
palmiest days of power a.,si pomp an
pride-that waits the coming of it
mistresses, its princesses and queens
1t is ready to fling all its glories and it
fellows at your feet. Without you it
doomed to be a vast, sky-roofed horizon
walled prison house of hapless, hopeless
satyrs, a masculine wilderness,