Shelton of Tibet 1923

Front matter

& i Oo TE PS ee WER : . lease | t .

ra (Mrs. A il

"Sy osSa"a ae mn a we ee

Foreword

To the many letters and telegrams that reached us and were waiting upon my return from India, where I had been busy putting three Tibetan translations on the press in Calcutta, I tried to answer bya line. From every corner of the globe they came—kindly, loving messages. If they only could just have cured the heartache! To you all in this little note I wish to send heartfelt thanks; to those in India especially who kept and loved me when the news came. It was then I understood well what the suttee meant to an Indian wife, and the pain of the burning would have felt comfortable compared with the pain within. Unto you all may the blessing of those who comfort come.

To the many who have helped with encouragement when courage was gone, who said, Write, when every nerve was numb, and the brain refused to obey, when the world was all awry and I felt shelterless and alone, wondering how I could keep the girls sweet and true to their father’s ideal for them, in spite of the lightness and frolic and rush around them, I express deep gratitude. How hard it is to teach children to hold fast to prayer and forgiveness of sins and love to their fellows, when so many lose the best of life and see only self magnified, forgetting that only in losing self can be found the fullest usefulness. They said, Write—the world needs the book. I could not: the x1

Xli FOREWORD heartache was too big. I could not see the lines, and my heart was bitter that he in his unselfishness had been taken out of the world when we needed him so.

On many of the things that Dr. Shelton has spoken and written of in his own book, “Pioneering in Tibet,” I have not touched. He makes his life so very simple, and what anyone might do, did he but love enough. He loved and gave—himself, ‘losing himself that he might be found.” He marked in his books always the line, “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister,’ and verily he lived it, giving of himself in strength and love and service to those who demanded or needed it.

To write this book at this time seems utterly impossible. JI am so near what appears to be the great thing, that the perspective is wrong, and I am entirely out of focus. That one thing, big and overwhelming, overshadows all else, so that I am unable to see any resulting good. So many lives are broken, so much of misery falls on the heads of the innocent, that men may prosper, and nations be powerful. The world seems a great machine, grinding out life for daily gain.

What blinds men of power, and those who hold governments in leash, that makes it easier to kill than to save, to torture than to soothe, to make of crushed bodies and destroyed homes a pawn in a diplomatic move? They have forgotten the Nazarene, and the fact that the nation which calls itself Christian, and acts pagan, casts the lie in the teeth of all Christendom. A nation can reap what it sows as well asa man. The eternal wHy stands prominently, arrogantly.

Contents

CHAPTER ; PAUE I Tur MaKING OF THE MISSIONARY . .. . 2%

CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION. APPOINT- MENT TO THE MISSION FIELD.

II Up THE YANG-TSE TO TACHIENLU . . . .. 27

Chapter I The Making Of The Missionary

CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION. APPOINTMENT TO THE MISSION FIELD

“Of doctors there are three classes: first, second, and third. A _ first-class doctor can absolutely cure; a second-class doctor can cure m a day or @ month; tf you take one dose of medicine from a third-class doctor, a hundred other diseases appear.” | —TIBETAN PROVERB.

Who can say from what remote ancestry or line of ancestors comes the call for heroism, or the bent toward cowardice? Once in a hundred years comes a great, outstanding figure: great for his eloquence, great for his poetry, great for his service to his nation, or for -his sacrifice for all men. Who can say what makes one man great, or another less great? It only is so. Who can say from whence comes the urge to go on and on, until victory is won, or life is forfeited? Who can say from what old line of heroes or pirates comes the brain cell of adventure or service in this mixture we call American? That the combination makes men 2I of heroic mold is true; men who are yet children in the world’s development of nations, but upon whose shoulders in time to come will fall an adequate task. Upon one such man sometimes fall the sins of the world; on another, the making of a nation; on another, the salvation of a race; and on another the travail for souls.

A lad was born in the city of Indianapolis on June 9, 1875, whose father was acarpenter. The young mother of twenty, married some four years before, was busy all day about her tasks of housekeeping, caring for the new baby, perhaps dreaming dreams of his future, and of what he might do some day. When the boy grew a little bigger, always at his mother’s heels he tagged, bringing a book, and saying, “Please read me a story.” The mother read often, and told often, and soon he began to learn his letters wherever he saw them. The printing on the sacks of flour, headlines of newspapers, advertisements—all were grist as they came to the eyes of the boy, and the alphabet was learned by the time he was three.

Now the urge of the ancestors from the Old World in the blood of the father, whose progenitors were among the early settlers of Delaware, began to call for the West, and a wider range and adventure that must be undertaken. So into the West, that land of dreams and possibilities, goes the small lad, to the plains of Kansas.

Always and everywhere Nature builds into her people, to those who look and listen, strength, or love, or beauty; and always and everywhere do men learn from their native soil the lesson God meant them to

THE MAKING OF THE MISSIONARY 23 have. Dwellers near the sea know the call and comfort of its strength, feel the fear and love, realize the majesty of cruelty and the mercilessness of it, as well as the soothing peace which is ground into the lives of those who dwell near it or upon it.

To the forest dwellers come the love of the trees, and of wild life, the listening for bird calls, the soft rustling of leaves at night, the tender call of mating creatures; upon these people is the imprint of caution and boldness made, which is needed to cope with tame life and the wild creatures as well.

And the mountains—aye, “from the mountains cometh help.” Those who dwell there are great in soul, and love and hate to the highest degree, giving life itself for love, but knowing not the feeling of forgiveness toward an enemy. ‘These men are strong, vigorous—the survival of the fittest.

As the sands of the desert breed into its children romanticism and cruelty, wonderful dreams or the despair of utter desolation when they are alone in the endless, depthless sand, so the vastness of the western prairie gives to its children a strength, a vision, and a struggle that makes them or mars them always.

For out of the necessary everyday hardships of living comes either a character that fails, or one of iron and steel, ready to wrest from the placid land food or raiment whether it will or not, and as it calmly waits, unruffled, in the hottest sun or fiercest storm, with it battles the soul for what it must have for daily use, learning the lessons that are taught for future time.

Into this great, unknown West came the little dark-eyed lad, and began his fight. There was no water, and water must be had. So the wagon was loaded with barrels, hauled by the slow oxen, and water was brought eight miles to the other starving animals and the no less thirsty household. Sometimes the boy must _ wait his turn, and would spend the night near the well, when he had brought no food with him. Perhaps he would catch a rabbit, roast it over a tiny fire, and eat it without salt. Under the wagon often slept the lad, and the coyotes sniffing around seemed like immense wolves to the small boy. The sleepy oxen snuffed and grunted and chewed their cuds the whole night through.

Sometimes the boy made snares of string, and caught the hungry little gophers as they stuck their noses out of the ground, hunting for food in their struggle to live. Sometimes a rattler shook his warning, and was killed by a crack of the long ox whip; then the rattles were cut off to make a hat band for the boy brave enough to kill him. A little later, as the lad’s legs grew longer, he wanted to learn to shoot; the father taught him how to aim with an old squirrel rifle that he could not lift. Some time later a small “22” rifle was his. Then the coyotes suffered, as a bounty was given by the State for their scalps. Many snakes were killed, until a cigar box was full of rattles of all sizes, from the tiny button of a baby snake to the sixteen or eighteen rattles of a big one.

The gophers got killed, and were taken home to his pet cat that always came to meet him, sure of a big supper when he should come. When there was more than the cat wanted, they were dissected carefully by

THE MAKING OF THE MISSIONARY = 25 this young embryo doctor, and when Tommy ate too much, and had the stomachache, he heated hot blocks and put them on him to ease his pain.

To any life friends count; but here and there one _ or two stand out who help us over the hard places, and cut the track for the next mile. Into the boy’s life went camp meeting, ball games, country school, country church life, and stories of blood and thunder read by a camp fire, near a dug-out cave of ‘‘adventure’’ where the boys had their meeting place. Then one day came the story of “Ben Hur,’ and the boy awoke and dreamed of being a missionary to India; but that was a long road to go, as he was but fifteen.

Teaching was the next step with clerking in the summer time, and at twenty he went to the Kansas State Normal College—this wild-looking Western collarless lad. Yo wear a collar was to be “‘stuck-up” in Western Kansas. Men didn’t do it, only preachers and “dudes.” Many smiled as the rough-looking boy entered the Normal classes, striving in every way to remain and to get what he desired. Some silken skirts drew aside, and the stylish men refused to notice the janitor boy and newspaper carrier. Only the teacher of mathematics and those who saw America in the making waited for the raw material to shape itself and make a man worth while. Soon the clear-eyed lad was leading the classes in mathematics, and the silken skirts and high collars were failing to make good. And this same mathematics teacher, flinging erasers and chalk at them, and tearing his hair at their stupidity, sent them to the collarless lad to be tutored. Thus the way grew easier.

Now the Spanish-Cuban war came along, and the spirit of patriotism grew to fever heat in the schools of Kansas. A college company was formed, with one of the Normal instructors as captain, and the lad was one of the first volunteers. You know, all soldiers must have a sweetheart, or they couldn’t fight. And he had one, but he found it out only a few days before he left—only six days, and all the courting was done by letters. About a year the company was in Camp Alger, in Virginia, and, much to the young man’s disgust, — saw no real fighting. They were mustered out in the fall, and he married the sweetheart in apple-blossom time in Kansas. The next year both were back in school again; but about New Year’s time a scholarship from the Louisville Medical College came and it was given to the boy by the President of the Normal College.

Then followed four years of medical work, and at its close, the appointment to Nankin, China, by the Foreign Christian Missionary Society of Cincinnati, A. McLean, President. At this time Dr. Rijnhart was preparing to return to Tibet, where she had lost her husband and baby some time before, and was asking for a doctor and his wife to go with her to the Tibetan border. The young doctor was asked if he would go. He said “Yes,” and went. Often he said, “I hoped to go to India, was appointed to China, and wound up in Tibet—perhaps the only field in which I would have been able to work, as I felt absolutely unfitted for the other fields as time went on and I knew more about them.”

Pod

Chapter II Up The Yang-tse To Tachienlu By Steamer, House Boat, And Sedan Chair To The First Home

“It 1s better to be a subject in your own country than a king in any other.’ —TiIBETAN PROVERB.

From the port of San Francisco out through the Golden Gate harbor on to the wide Pacific, went the small steamer China one fall day in 1903, bearing Dr. Shelton and his wife. The island of Hawaii was the first stopping place, and many new impressions came thick and fast to the country-bred folk from Kansas. Tropical sea birds and vegetation were seen. New and queer things were found to eat. The magic mountain with the wisps of smoke around the crater spoke of the Goddess Pelee, whom the natives used to worship each year by throwing the most beautiful maiden and her handsome lover into the burning top, to appease her wrath for another year, and keep the island safe. But on again the good ship sailed. Japan came next, looking like a perfect jewel in its setting of sea and sky that is seen in no other place in the world. Its military fortifications are of the finest, and the busy people live and serve their country with a devotion and patriotism that are unsurpassed. Out from the coast of Japan 27 into the Yellow Sea steamed the vessel toward the coast of China. It was very soon discovered why it was called “Yellow,” for the great Yangtse through its length of travel from beyond the little Batang station brings down its loads of yellow dirt and pours them into the sea, making the blué a murky yellow; and on this muddy sea the boat sailed to the port of Shanghai.

The missionaries were expecting Dr. Shelton to stay in Nankin, and were filled with consternation when they found he was going on with Dr. Rijnhart to the Tibetan border. Nankin seemed very far from anywhere; what would farther on seem like? As to just where Tibet was, and how we were to get there was another question, but we were to find out all about it. Old China, the river, Tibet, and the people—what had the future in store?

Up as far as Ichang the trip was a simple matter. Around the city of Ichang were graves innumerable. Every place you looked you saw these little green mounds, thousands and thousands of them. One day as we passed the city wall we saw an old beggar sitting, blind and patient, and utterly silent, and as we dropped cash into his basket, the people said, “Don’t do that. He owns half the city now!”

The small steamers were clean and pleasant, with good service and good food and no seasickness; and China is always fascinating. Its river banks look like green velvet, with here and there feathery bamboo like bunches of ostrich tips. Villages are tucked away amid century-old trees and flat-nosed junks go up and down, man-pushed and pulled as they have been since time began or the Chinese race existed. Everything seems always to have been in China. All things are old, or should be. A new thing jars. You always expect the trees to be big and old and the cottages to be old and gray. Arches of crumbling stone commemorate some great deed or great man, and worn pagodas are here and there, where gods might dwell. Grain or rice is planted on every place where a seed could stick and multiply. Junks carry their old and weatherstained sails, patched until you cannot find a sign of the original one. A new sail makes a startling white blaze on the landscape. A new house stands out, and does not seem to belong to China.

Legends of the river were many. Here was the place where a steamer went down; all were saved except the captain, but he refused to leave his boat, and no trace was ever seen of either of them again. Two big rocks, called “The Two Orphans,” stood out in the middle of the stream; a small temple built upon one made you wonder how they ever got the stones and material at that height to build it. But it was a grand place for meditation for Buddhist priests.

Nineteen years ago there were not so many small steamers on the upper Yangtse and going up the great river was rather a tedious affair. At Ichang, a thousand miles inland, we had to take a house boat and be pulled the rest of the way up the river. Squarenosed it was, like the rest of them, high in the back, somewhat resembling a duck, and in a little room at the rear the captain and his wife dwelt. The middle part was partitioned off into three or four rooms for the rest of the party, while the long deck in front was where the coolies stretched at night. Some boards were laid for a bed, as there were no cots. The floor was bare and the flimsy walls felt as though a breath would blow them down. All the cargo was under the floor of the boat. Home food was not to be had—no coffee, no cheese, milk only out of a tin. The food was plenty, as pork and chickens and eggs could be bought, but it didn’t taste like America.

The day of starting came, and the rooster who had been sitting on the prow, tied by a string, was killed. The blood and a few feathers which were stuck on the front of the boat were made an offering to the river gods, and the boat started up river, its big, clumsy oars pulled by its crew of thirty or forty men. But that did not last long, for when the swift water comes the men must be put on shore, the long bamboo ropes unrolled, and they must pull. With a short strap over the shoulder, and a “cash” at the end of it to give it weight, each man threw it around the long rope and pulled with his hand almost touching the ground, a taskmaster at his back to drive, and, if necessary, to whip if a man was found to be shirking. So, with a lot of noise and rhythmic song, they pulled slowly ahead. The boat passed a rock in a dangerous curve, and each man tried to toss a pebble in a water-worn cup upon it, to insure him the arrival of a son upon his return.

Some days were calm, with no wind. Sometimes there were places where the men could not pull, as the great cliffs of the gorges were perpendicular, and there was no foothold to be had. Then they sat on the prow and whistled for the wind devils to come and fill the sails and help the boat onward. These gorges form some of the most magnificent scenery of the world, unequaled anywhere. The “wind-box” gorge is one where the wind seems to be bottled sure enough. Here they put up a sail, the men have a rest, and the boat goes with the wind. There the wind devils are usually kind.

It is well that travelers do not know the danger of the treacherous rocks and whirlpools. Sometimes as the coolies drag the ropes through great gashes in the rocks, made by ages of the same kind of travel, they clamber over paths that seem impossible, crossing first to one side of the river and then to the other, where even a goat would find it hard to get a foothold. Sometimes the ropes break, and back the boat crashes, turning round and round until a current of water hauls it in a lucky inlet or the “devils’’ lead it on a rock and it is smashed. Many wrecks can be seen along the river. From the banks one can see sugar dripping from tin cans, oil spilled, cargoes of cotton drying in the sun, and lamp-wicks, made of the weed-pith used by the Chinese, spread out to dry. Sometimes a man is knocked off the cliffs by the ropes, and falls into the river, but the boat never stops; they do not even attempt to save him—it is impossible. Sometimes the men are badly hurt, and there the Doctor had his first opportunity to help the people. Always and every day he was out among the men, some with crushed arms and broken bones and sore feet, following the boat all day for the pittance of cash that would be theirs at night. When he came back to the boat, he would say, “Oh, if I just had nine lives, that I might spend one going up and down among these thousands of river coolies to help them and heal them and preach to them, for they have no chance at all!”

One month of this kind of travel brought us to the port of Chungking, a great, crowded, dirty city. Some very fine hospital and church work is located in this place. We saw the small boats plying the river in their traffic for slave girls, to be sold in Shanghai and other cities. Here we had the story of a girl who cut out a piece of her liver in a fit of filial piety, to feed her sick father. The Chinese doctor told her that was all that could save him, but she lived under a German doctor’s care. Skin diseases were everywhere; blind and leprous beggars were at every turn, it seemed. The destitution and filth and sin were beyond belief. What the old river carries and knows about this city and could tell if it could talk, would be much. Up the steps and through the old city wall many feet thick, which has stood for centuries, are the water coolies, splashing water as they go, carrying the city’s supply from the old river. Very necessary is that dirty water.

Here another house boat was taken, a little smaller than the first, as above this point the cliffs are not so steep, nor the rapids so fierce, and travel is easier. Along the banks men are using cormorants for fishing. On the small boat sits the forlorn black bird, with a band around his throat so that he cannot swallow the fish. He must always be hungry, or he\ will not fish. Another time one sees otters that are throttled and forced to go after the fish. Mercy seems to have gone from the earth; all things seem pitiless and men most of all. Always and always, wherever we went there were misery and pain and suffering, especially among the

CARGO BOAT ON THE UPPER YANG-TSE

A LITTLE ISLAND OF THE YANG-TSE, ONE OF THE “ORPHANS”

THE CHAIN BRIDGE AT LUTINGCHOW, WEST CHINA. THIS SWINGING BRIDGE IS FULLY FIFTY FEET

ABOVE THE RIVER AND OVER THREE HUNDRED FEET LONG

A LAMASERY AT TACHIENLU ;

women and children, and there was just one thing to aid. That was opium, and it was everywhere. Perhaps it is a feast day and the Doctor has promised some pork if the men pull well, and so they joyfully and cheerfully sing away as they row, thinking of the meat to go with the rice and vegetables at night. Slowly the journey is made, and almost two months are gone before the end of the river journey is in sight. The muddy Yangtse has been left, and the boat enters the little river near Kiating, where the water is clear, and the stones can plainly be seen on the bottom of the stream.

It was with a great deal of rejoicing that we finished the water journey and could get upon earth again. We were glad indeed that the land looked and felt as it _ did in dear old Kansas, though most of it did not smell the same. A new order of travel must be arranged now. We were to be carried in sedan chairs, but as Dr. Shelton could not stand it to be carried by men, he put his coat and medicine bags in the chair and walked along the road.

Such a beautiful land it is! The little houses, the trim, neat little dooryards, a water buffalo nipping the grass along the banks of the rice fields, tended by a child sitting on his back. The tiny yard is as smooth and clean as it can be swept. The mud-beaten ricethreshing floor, flowering fields of mustard and beans —something on every inch of ground that can be used. There is only one thing to mar, and that is your sense of smell, or the horrible “cess-pools of iniquity,” which are at the end of each house, or in a field, or in the backyard, filled with dissolved human filth and all the animal filth they can pick up and swarming with maggots, and perhaps a man or woman is carrying a couple of bushels of this mixture in buckets, with a dipper decorating each tiny plant with a perfumed bath of the liquid.

Some of the Chinese women have never seen a foreigner before, and come near to investigate the queer shoes and clothes of the foreign women. Some of them think the white faces very strange, and the eyes and hair rather queer, especially if they were not black. But the plains are soon crossed, and the mountains come next. Leaving the tropical ferns and bamboos, we go on up the mountain road of stone steps, climbing slowly, the chair-men swinging the chair with a kind of rhythm. The bamboos grow smaller and smaller, the ferns disappear ; it is cold, and snow is on the ground. It is the last big climb just before we reach the top. The Doctor has gone ahead of the chairs, and has some hot soup ready for us, and the men eat or smoke opium to prepare for the last hard pull.

Up and up we go, and to the Kansas bred the mountains seem very high. On the top the men grow very quiet, and fail to call to each other or to sing—the wind is roaring, the tops of the chairs blow loose, and we wonder if we will go over the side of the mountain and | land on the tree-tops, or on the cloud\ banks, which look very soft out there. What is the matter with the men? They never do anything without noise, and now they are so still. Oh, they are afraid they will rouse the wind devils who live on the top of each pass if they speak—it is a good thing they did not rouse any more than were already awake, or the chairs would surely have blown away.

Two of these high mountain passes were on the road between Yachow and Tachienlu, and several smaller passes were traversed during the eight days’ journey. The lesser passes were not so cold, as they were not so high, but were about as dangerous. There were often landslides ahead or behind the chairs, and as we passed along and jarred the loose shale, the stones often rolled down the steep slopes of the mountain. It seemed often that we would never get anywhere, as the path ahead seemed to run into the mountain, and one would be sure there was an end of the trail; but somehow the surefooted, patient men found the way through, or over, or around; and the chairs still went on and on.

It is over this trail in snow and cold, rain and sleet and burning sun, that coolies carry their tea for use in Tibet. Old men, young men, boys, and a few women, carry these loads of coarse tea of a very inferior quality. In preparing the tea, it is swept up with the sticks and trash and coarse tea leaves of all kinds, and then steamed and pressed into what is called “brick tea’ for the Tibetans. The Chinese say it is good enough for the Tibetans and, strange to say, the latter prefer it to a better quality. It is put into splint bundles, weighing from twenty to forty pounds each, and carried on — the back. Little boys, carrying three or four small bundles, trudge along by their father or adopted father, who carries from two hundred to two hundred fifty pounds on his back. A small stick, with a crosspiece at one end and an iron-shod point at the other, is used to place under the load, shifting it for a rest to get the weight from the back for a few minutes. If one of these carriers gets a shove, or loses his balance in any way and falls over, he cannot lift the load or regain it, but must have help to get it on his back again. Their food often is only a slab of corn-bread. The meal for this is mixed with water and a little salt, and heated through, but the bread is solid enough to be stuck behind some of the bamboo splints of a load. Sometimes they use only opium to give the required strength, and require little food. One can sometimes see little brown opium lamps swinging from the load.