LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, Chap._0_2wopyrigirt No, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. \ r CHI M .1' hi i\ l-\ T. H. BALL. Southwestern Indiana FROM 1800 TO 1900 A View of our Region through the Nineteenth Century T. H. BALL, Active Member of Indiana Academy of Science; Corresponding Member of Wisconsin State Historical Society; Hohorary Member of Trinity Historical Society of Texas ; Author of Lake County, 1872; Lake of the Red Cedars; Poems and Hymns ; Annie B. ; Notes on Luke's Gospel; Home of the Redeemed, etc. it? CROWN POINT, VALPARAISO, LA PORTE, KNOX, WINAMAC, MONTICELLO, RENSSELAER, KENTLAND. 1900 Copyright, 1900, By T. H. Ball. 40370 1 * apiEs Rfcf mo AUG 30 1900 second copv. Of iver«l u OftOtH DIVISION, SEP 6 "It is well for every form of organized society, from the family to the nation, to pause occasionally and devote itself to a review of the past, recalling 1 whatever of persons and events may be worthy of recollection, and placing on permanent record so much of the gathered results as ought to be preserved." DR. BARON STOW. 74233 r s iA- DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY, PRINTERS AND BINDERS, CHICAGO. DEDICATION. To the memory of my Father and my Mother, who were true pioneers in Lake County, and from whom my earli- est and best impulses in the line of literature were received; and to the memory of other pioneers, good and true men and women, hundreds of whom made homes in this North- western Indiana in the early pioneer days; as a memorial of their privations, their energy, their success; this volume is affectionately dedicated. T. H. BALL. CONTENTS. 19. PAGE. Introduction 5 (General Outlines 11 The Indians 21 The Early Settlers 35 What the Early Settlers Found 61 Pioneer Life 79 County Organizations.. 98 Our Lakes and Streams 112 Lake Michigan Water Shed 117 Townships and Statis- tics 121 Railroad Life 124 Political H; story 148 The War Record 164 Religious History 178 Religious History 201 Religious History 221 Sunday Schools 234 Towns and Villages of Newton and Jasper. . . 246 Towns and Villages of White, Pulaski and Starke 260 Villages, Towns and Cities of Lake 275 PAGE. 20. Villages and Towns of Porter 308 21. Villages, Towns and Cities of La Porte 330 22. Early Travels 352 23. Public Schools 361 24. Private and Parochial Schools 386 25. Libraries 392 26. Our Indn stries 402 27. Social Organizations... 421 28. The Kankakee Region . . 43(5 29. Draining Marshes 439 30. Animals and Plants.... 448 31. Miscellaneous Records. 458 32. Court Houses 476 33. Archaeological Speci- mens 485 34. Birth Places of the Pio- neers 491 35. McCarty 497 36. Attempts to Change .... 502 37. Altitudes 507 38. Miscellaneous Records. 510 39. Some Statistics. 536 40. Weather Record 541 Conclusion 564 Separate maps of Lake and Jasper Counties will be readily found. The map or chart of Indiana showing date of purchases was copied by permission from an official chart issued by the State Auditor. Lake County on the larger map is not filled out because there is a separate map of that County. INTRODUCTION. This work will include, in the term North- Western Indians, all the area between what is known in the United States survey as the Second Principal Meridian and the Illinois State Line, from township 26, north- ward to the Indiana Boundary Line. The width of this region is thus nine ranges and about one section, or fifty-five miles, and its length is nearly twelve town- ships, or about seventy-two miles, making an area, including a part of Lake Michigan, in even numbers, of 3,960 square miles. In this area are seven entire counties and parts of two others, but only a very small part of Cass County, and the counties to be^included in this history, as forming North-Western Indiana, are Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Starke, Pulaski, and White, and Newton and Jasper. It will thus, at the southeast corner of the parallel- ogram, barely touch the Wabash River a few miles from Logansport. The Tippecanoe, the Iroquois, the Yellow, the Kankakee, and the Calumet, are its prin- cipal rivers. In thus taking the second principal meridian as the limit eastward of North-Western Indiana there are left for North-Eastern Indiana fourteen ranges, or thirty miles more than one-half of the full width of the State. The entire history of this region, in much detail, could not in a volume of this size be given; but in- NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. teresting and certainly valuable facts connected with its early settlement and growth, will here be found, some of which can be found nowhere else; and the author believes that the condensed and the detailed history and the gathered facts and incidents, as ar- ranged in this book, will be an acceptable and a valu- able addition to the accumulating store of our historic treasure, as we are in Indiana, closing up one century of progress and closing up at the same time the Nine- teenth Century of the Christian Era. In regard to the sources of information for the statements contained in this work, the author can claim, in the first place, some personal knowledge de- rived from his own observation, as he has had a home in this region since 1837, coming here from the State of Massachusetts in the spring of that year, when eleven years of age (old enough to observe, and, as he had then studied Latin and Greek in academies and high schools, cultivated enough to discriminate and make records) ; ancl since 1875 ne nas been the Historical Secretary of the Old Settlers' Association of Lake County : and, in the second place, he has availed himself of the helps furnished by different County and State publications. Especially from an Illustrated Historical Atlas of Indiana, published in 1876, by Bas- kin, Forster & Co., he has taken many statements of early times and of settlements in counties which his personal knowledge did not reach, statements in re- gard to those early years which could not now be ob- tained. That historical atlas is a valuable work for Indiana up to 1875. That some corrections would need to be made, and that room would be found for desirable additions, in the historical writings of those who have gone before INTRODUCTION. him in giving county history, might naturally be ex- pected, and from his long residence in this region, while most of those writers referred to have been non- residents and strangers, and on account of his special training and the line of work which for many years he has pursued, the author of this book believes that the readers will find here some carefully prepared and quite accurate history, and he cherishes the hope that it will become a recognized authority, in its special lines of treatment, concerning North-Western In- diana. It is hoped that no apology is needed for inserting here the rather lengthy extracts that follow. A\'ell said Dr. Baron Stow, of Boston, at a large religious semicentennial in 1864, speaking of the dis- position of aged persons to give reminiscences of their youth, "this tendency to retrospection and historical narration is not merely an accident of human decline ; it is a beneficent arrangement of Divine Providence. In all education, experience renders an important service, . and for its teaching there is no substitute. 'Thou shalt remember all the way in which the Lord thy God hath led thee.' 'One generation shall praise Thy works to another, and shall declare Thy mighty acts.' The past is thus brought forward into the pres- ent ; the stream of tradition is kept running ; and, while the less valuable facts may be precipitated and left by the way, the more important are borne along as ma- terials for the continuous history of our race. * * * The world and the church of our times do well to un- derstand how much they are indebted to the memories of the more aged as the successive reservoirs of facts, and now much also, to what are thoughtlessly called the garrulities of age, for the communication of those 8 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. facts. If it is an ordering of Providence that every generation shall create a portion of history, it is equally intended that every generation shall convey to its successor all that is worthy of transmission. * * * The successive generations overlap one another in precisely the way to form a continuous channel for the traditionary current." ["The Missionary jubilee." Pages 91, 92.] THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK. In giving a view of North-Western Indiana for one hundred years, or through the Nineteenth Century, it is not proposed to give a continuous history of this region, county by county and township by township, as it is now divided and subdivided ; but, while recog- nizing these divisions as they now exist, it is proposed to give the history of the region as a whole, to show its early settlement, its growth, and what it now is, by treating in separate chapters, as topics or subjects of interest, the various particulars which belong to its topography, its physical features, and its general his- tory. The reader who will look over the chapter head- ings as given under the word "Contents," will see what these particulars are supposed to be, and so he will know what to expect in the book itself. Especially he will find, in making up the hundred years of his- tory, some thirty years of Indian life ; twenty years of white pioneer life, ten of that being white in connec- tion with Indian life; and then fifty years of railroad growth and the modern civilization and progress be- longing to the last half of the Nineteenth Century in the United States of America. When the reader has gone over these various chapters, has considered by INTRODUCTION. itself each subject, each topic, he will see what North- western Indiana once was, and what in seventy years of civilized life it has become. T. H. BALL, Crown Point, Indiana, 1900. Note. The county histories which I have ex- amined are these : 1. ''History of La Porte County, Indiana, and its Townships, Towns, and Cities, by Jasper Packard." 1876. This is an excellent and very reliable work. 2. History of La Porte County, C. C. Chapman & Co., Chicago, publishers. 1880. Writers names not given. This work has not dealt quite fairly by General Packard. From his valuable and carefully prepared history it has taken not the substance only, but the very wording, at times, sentence by sentence, with no marks of quotation, no apparent acknowledgment; yet, as a very much larger work, — it weighs four and a half pounds — it contains interesting material and is valuable for reference. 3. Counties of Porter and Lake, Indiana. 1882. F. A. Battey & Co., Publishers. Weston A. Good- speed and Charles Blanchard, Editors. This is also a large book, weighing four pounds and an eighth, and with some blemishes and some large faults is a valuable reference book. 4. History of Pulaski and White Counties, by the same company as the above. 5. History of Jasper, Newton then included, Ben- ton, and Warren counties, by the same, F. A. Battey & Co., Chicago. 1883. These four works, written by various persons, not 10 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. generally residents of the counties, are about the same in size, four pound books, and gotten up in the same style. They are all valuable, but too heavy for pleasant reading. 6. It is almost needless to mention "Lake County," 1872, by T. H. Ball, and "Lake County," 1884, from which some extracts are taken, both now out of print. I have also looked into a Biographical History of the counties of Tippecanoe, White, Jasper, Newton, Benton, Warren, and Pulaski, by the Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago, 1899, two large volumes, costing the subscribers fifteen dollars. And I have examined with care a late History of Indiana, 1897, by W. H. Smith, in two good sized volumes. This is an interest- ing and a valuable work, but contains very little in regard to Northern Indiana. T. H. B. CHAPTER I. GENERAL OUTLINES. The history, proper, of this book commences with the year 1801. It would be interesting to look back over even this small portion of our great and growing country, along the three hundred years between 1800 and the time of Christopher Columbus, ancl glance at the Indian oc- cupancy of this region and at its connection with Spanish, French, and English explorers and colonists. Its position as to railroads is peculiar now ; its po- sition as to Indian migrations, hunting expeditions and wars, and as to explorers, must have been some- what peculiar then. North of it extended the whole length of Lake Michigan, a distance of about three hundred and forty miles ; east of it were the immense forests and the mountain ranges extending to the Atlantic coast, distant about one thousand miles ; west of it lay that great prairie region reaching to the river which became known as the Mississippi, distant nearly two hundred miles ; and southward lay the great Wabash Valley, and then, beyond a stretch of forest, the greater Ohio Valley, and, south of that, forests and rivers, and at length that great southern slope, drained by what are now called the Black Warrior and Tombigbee, and by the Alabama which receives the waters of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, a slope which, passing the great pine belt, terminates at length at the waters of the Bay and the great Mexican Gulf. By 12 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. passing through forests and crossing rivers, Indians, explorers, and traders could pass from the shore of Lake Michigan to those Southern waters, a distance of some eight hundred miles. How many Indian parties ever made that journey before the days of Tecumseh there are no means of knowing ; but prob- ably the unwritten history of these three centuries would show some connection between our lake region and its Indians and that earlier explored region in the early Spanish and French times. That, in the latter part of the Seventeenth Century, La Salle and other French explorers passed over this lake region is quite certain. At the close of the "Old French War," 1763, the two British provinces of Illinois and West Florida met on the line of latitude 32.28 ; a line passing from the mouth of the Yazoo River eastward to the Chatta- hoochee, crossing the Alabama just below the union of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, so that in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century the claimants of the two contiguous provinces must have had some connection established between the two. But at the Indian life in these great forest regions, and the life of French and English traders and trappers as they journeyed between our Great Lake and the Southern Indians, we are not to look. Those three hundred years, from 1500 to 1800, were years of strange life in American wilds, when the red men and white men were meeting each other in commerce or in conflict, sometimes mak- ing treaties and smoking the pipe of peace. We commence with a later date. When the hour of midnight came, on December 31st, of the year called 1800, the Eighteenth Century was completed; and in the next moment of time, as 1 801 dawned upon the world, the Nineteenth Century began. GENERAL OUTLINES. 13 The close of the one century of the Christian Era and the opening of the other was not. a peaceful time among the European nations. Napoleon Bonaparte had been declared First Consul, December 5, 1799; on June 14, 1800, he defeated the Austrians at Marengo; and the strife was going on which led to his being proclaimed Emperor of the French, May 20, 1804. The waves of European strife crossed the Atlantic and struck upon our shores, and war with France seemed for a time inevitable. John Adams was the American President. Wash- ington died December 14, 1799; in 1800 the national capital was removed from Philadelphia to Washington City, and Thomas Jefferson was elected to be the next President of the United States. And on October 1, 1800, by the treaty of St. Ildefonso, Louisiana was ceded or re-ceded by Spain to the so-called French Republic, which placed that large territory including the present Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Indian Ter- ritory, and parts of Minnesota, Colorado, and Wyom- ing, in shape to be purchased by the United States April 30, 1803, "for fifteen millions of dollars." In 1800 took place another event of interest to the dwellers in this State of Indiana, the formation, as a new political division of the young and growing Union, of Indiana Territory. It was, as already mentioned, the closing year of the Eighteenth Century, a century which among other changes had seen at its beginning Detroit founded and Queen Anne's War begun, and, after the stormy events of the Revolution, which saw before it closed Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee, admitted as States into the new Union, when on May 7, of 1800, Indiana Territory was organized. 14 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Soon after the close of the American Revolution, in July, 1787, the North-West Territory had been established. The French had then in what became in 1802, Ohio, no settlement, the first permanent Eu- ropean settlement in Ohio having been made at Mari- etta in 1788, Dayton having been settled in 1796; but in that part of the Territory which became Indiana the French had trading posts, and Vihcennes had al- ready become "a flourishing town," these trading- posts dating from 1683 to 1763, while Indiana formed a part of the French domain called New France. At the Treaty of Paris, February 10, 1763, at the close of the "French and Indian War," these French posts and settlements passed into the nominal possession of the English, and when the War of the Revolution closed, they were in this wild and then largely unknown re- gion belonging to the territory of the new United States. In what became Indiana some early American set- tlements were made, but the record concerning them is, that "from 1788 to 1814 the settlements were much engaged in hostilities with the Indians." The North-West Territory, which has been men- tioned, of which Indiana Territory was a part, included the area west of Pennsylvania, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi. Some colonial claims to the possession of parts of this territory were ceded to Congress, by New York, in 1782, by Vir- ginia, in T784, by Massachusetts, in 1785, by Connec- ticut, in 1786. In 1787 an ordinance was framed for its management and government, passed September 13, which provided that land should not be taken up by white settlers until it had been purchased from Indians and offered for sale by the- United States ; that GENERAL OUTLINES. 15 no property qualification should be required for vot- ing or holding office ; that the territory, when settled sufficiently, should be divided into not less than three nor more than five States; that these should always remain a part of the United States ; that their form of government should be republican ; and that in none of them should slavery exist. It will be seen that the first of these was not fully observed in Northern In- diana, and, to some extent, slavery did exist in South- ern Indiana till after 1840. The credit of excluding slavery is due largely to Dr. Manasseh Cutler, of Massachusetts, agent of the Ohio Company. What our region was in 1800 when it was the home of the Indians may be quite well determined from jthe condition in which it was found by the first white set- tlers. The native red men made little changes in its natural appearance, in its animal races, in its vegetable productions. So we may safely assume that as the earliest settlers found it so it was in 1800. As a part of what was then the great and almost un- known West, it was a rather low, in most parts level, quite well watered region, in parts well wooded, in other parts open, undulating prairie and broad, level marshes, fifty-five miles in breadth from east to west, and averaging about sixty-five miles from north to south, containing a land area of 3,575 square miles. The northeastern part was heavily timbered, com- prising some genuine ''thick woods," the growth maple, beech, walnut; also ash, elm, bass-wood, and other species. Along Lake Michigan, for a few miles out, grew pine and cedar. South of this sandy belt, along the lake, and extending in a southwesterly direction into the Grand Prairie of Illinois, a stretch of fertile prairie in six divisions passed from the eastern 16 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. to the western limit. Each of these was separated by woodland or groves from the others, and three of them became, as settlers went upon them, noted for their wonderful native beauty. It is not probable that in all the prairie region east of the Mississippi River the beauty could be exceeded of what afterwards were called Rolling Prairie, Door Prairie, and Lake Prairie. It has been said that this region was well watered. As will be seen on the map attached to this book a number of rivers crossed it, and there were as tribu- taries to these many small streams which the map does not show. Along the largest of these rivers, known as the Kankakee, flowing in a south- westerly direction, was a broad strip of marsh land, originally covered with water. South of this river was quite an extent of marshy land, also of broad sand ridges, two considerable water courses, the Tippecanoe and the Iroquois, and prairie and woodland between the river valleys. The native fruits were abundant, if not of so many varieties as in some parts of the land. The principal ones were, huckleberries, cranberries, crab-apples, plums, some strawberries, wintergreen berries, sand- hill cherries, and grapes. Huckleberries and cranber- ries grew in great abundance. Hundreds of bushels, even thousands of bushels, of huckleberries and cran- berries must have been eaten by the Indians and wild fowls or have gone to waste each year. The quantity of these two varieties of wild fruit growing on these sand ridges and marshes, is almost incredible to one unacquainted with the real facts. So late as 1896, when much of the native growth would naturally have been destroyed, there were marketed, it is said, in what is now Pulaski County, four thousand bushels GENERAL OUTLINES. 17 of huckleberries, two thousand in Starke County, by one shipper in a good season; and many years ago, from a single railroad station in Lake County, there were shipped a thousand bushels, picked by women and children, in one season. Cranberries grew very abundantly in many marshes when the first settlers came. Hundreds and hundreds of bushels were gathered by them and sent off in wagon loads to the nearest markets. The Indian children, it is certain, could have had no lack of wild fruit in the summer and fall, from July ist till frost came. As late as 1837 the two varieties of wild plums, the red and the yellow, were excellent in quality — the red very abundant ; and of crab-apples, although they were sour, yet large and nice, there then was no lack. There were nuts, too, in great abundance in the autumn time — hazel nuts, hickory nuts, walnuts, white and black, and beech nuts. In the northeastern part, where the hard or rock maple trees were so large and of so dense a growth, "thick woods," the Indians in the spring time could make which they did make, maple sugar, to sweeten their crab-apples and cranberries.* Whether as early as 1800 the honey bees had arrived to furnish the Indians with honey is not certain. They are said to go a little in advance of the white man, the heralds of his coming footsteps. Here, as early as ♦Among the Indians in the northeastern part of La Porte County was a petty chief called Sagganee. "When the Indians were removed, Sagganee went to Southern Kansas with them, but soon returned, saying that he could not live there — there was no sugar tree. He had been in the habit of making maple sugar." Like the whites, he had become attached to the "forest nectar." He continued to live and died in Indiana. He would not live where there was no sugar tree. 18 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. 1835 the early settlers found them in trees then well stored with honey. Solon Robinson, Crown Point's earliest settler, mentions "a dozen honey trees to be cut and taken care of" during his first winter, the winter of 1834 and 1835. The Hornor party, camping in 1835, cut a Dee tree, from the contents of which they filled a three gallon jar with strained honey, a wash tub and a wooden trough with honeycomb, and estimated all at at least five hundred pounds. It is quite probable that, while fond of sugar, the Indians had also learned the taste of honey. Leaving fruits and sweets, which, without much labor on the part of the Indians, nature furnished in this favored region, some of the native animals may be noticed. Among those to be classed as game were black bears, probably not numerous, deer in vary large numbers, rabbits also and squirrels, the large fox, the smaller black, gray or cat, and red squirrels. For the presence of buffalo or bison on the prairies north of the Kankakee River, the evidence is very slight. One who was born at the Red Cedar Lake, in Lake County, who is a very close observer and a very ac- curate observer of nature, and of the traces of men and animals, accustomed to the wilds, who has trapped beaver and found traces of Indian encampments in South Alabama, encampments that had been tenant- less for some seventy-five years, who shot many buffalo on the great plains of Texas in 1877 and 1878, Herbert S. Ball, has found on these Indiana prairies no traces of the existence here of buffalo. The traces which they leave he knows well. But there probably were some small, straggling herds here once. Yet, all • the historic evi- GENERAL OUTLINES. 19 dence of such stragglers that has reached Crown Point is the statement, in some of the narra- tives of La Salle's expedition down the Kankakee River, that they captured a buffalo that was mired in the big marsh. Elk were evidently here, because their horns have been found in Lake County. Bones, sup- posed to be mammoth bones, have been found in Porter County; but of Buffalo no Bone, no horn, seems to have yet been seen. Of feathered animals, there were wild turkeys in the heavy timber, prairie chickens or pinnated grouse on the prairies by the thousands, partridges and quails in the woods, and, in a part of the summer, in numbers which it would be hard for the white boys of the pres- ent to credit, wild pigeons. To realize the immense numbers of pigeons that were here in each August month, when some of us who are now living were young hunters, one would need to see them almost darkening the sky sometimes, and hear the sweep of their wings, and see them rapidly gathering the acorns from the oak trees, and again covering large areas in the stubble of the grain fields, constantly in motion, as they picked up the scattered grains of wheat and of oats. Such sights would make the boys of this day almost go wild with delight. The American wild pigeon has gone, perhaps exterminated like the bison. They were here in the Indian times without doubt. There were also in prodigious numbers various kinds of water-fowls, wild geese, brants, swan, sand-hill cranes, ducks of many species, mud-hens, and plover. The rivers and the lakes, of which more mention will be made, were well stocked with fish. With a few ex- cellent varieties of these, such as pike, black bass, rock bass, and sunfish, the lakes may be said to have been NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. swarming, and especially one, afterwards called the "Lake of the Red Cedars." The Indians had no long drag nets with which to draw these from the water, and when the white men drew their nets through these waters the multitude of fish brought to the shore was a remarkable sight for any one to behold. There was also for the Indians a large abundance of valuable fur-bearing animals, beaver perhaps almost extinct — the white settlers saw only their works — but otter, mink, raccoons, muskrats in prodigious num- bers ; and wolves, the large timber, gray wolf, the smaller prairie wolf, some wild cats, and, perhaps, occasionally a lynx. Elk were here once, as has been said, but whether as late as 1800 has not been ascer- tained. No attempt is here made to give the entire list of native animals, but only to name those with which the Indians, as hunters and trappers, would have the most to do. From this outline sketch of this region, as it must have been in 1800, it is evident that it was a favorable location for uncivilized man. We are now ready to look at the Indians them- selves. CHAPTER II. THE INDIANS.— 1800-1833. The North American Indians, a singular and an interesting portion of mankind, whose origin on this continent is unknown, have been divided by different writers into eleven or more large families, these families being subdivided into tribes. The terms Nation and Clan are also used by writers to denote divisions among the Indians, some writers making tribe co-extensive in meaning with nation, others in- cluding in an Indian nation several tribes. Some make clan a subdivision of a tribe; others make clan more extensive than tribe. The meaning of these different terms must be learned from their use. That in 1800 Indians alone had any proper claim to this region is evident, and they roamed over it at their own will, whether they were, as Venable calls them in 1763, Kickapoos, or, as the pioneers here found them in 1830, Pottawatomies. In King's Handbook of the United States, it is said that La Salle, "Indiana's first European visitor,' , concentrated "all the Indians of the Ohio Valley around his fort on the Illinois River, for mutual defense against the terrible Iroquois, and in so doing he depopulated Indiana." That the Indians at that time left the south shores of Lake Michigan is not NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. certain. It is further stated in King's Handbook that "After the French founded Detroit the local tribes wandered back into Indiana and settled there."* William Henry Smith, in his History of Indiana (1897), says that the native Indians of Indiana were driven out by the Iroquois before 1684, and that they returned from Fort St. Louis on the Illinois about 1712. That the Pottawatomies were here in 1800 is abundantly sure, and while they or other tribes were proper owners of the region, they had learned that the French had claimed some control over them, and they had been in some contact with French civilization, and so were not the perfectly untutored Indians of the wilds. Yet was theirs largely the true Indian life. The smoke that went up into the sky from this region went from their wigwams or from fires that they had kindled ; the human voices that were heard beside the rivers and the lakes or in the woodlands and on the prairies, were the voices of their women and children or of their hunters and their warriors ; the pathways, the trails, the pony tracks, led to their villages or camping grounds, or dancing floors, and sometimes to their burial places; the boats paddled upon the waters were their canoes; the few places of the up- turned sod were the gardens for their vegetables and the patches for their maize. They were not, to much extent, tillers of the soil, although raising some corn, ♦Detroit was founded in 1701, passed to the English in 1760, fully in 1763; and came under the control of the United States in 1783. Detroit was again in the hands of the British from Au- gust 16, 1812 till October, 1813. T. H. B. THE INDIANS. 23 more than is generally supposed, and a few garden vegetables ; but they were the hunters, the fishers, and the trappers, where fully indeed abounded game and fish and fur. It would not seem probable that they had any need to suffer, in summer or in winter, for want of food. For the first third of this century and for how many "moons" or years or centuries before, who knows? these Indians, generation after generation, were the principal occupants here. Tribe may have succeeded tribe, yet Indians were they all. But these Indians, our immediate predecessors, the Pottawatomies, upon whose resources for food we have been looking, did not continue, through these three and thirty years of the century, in the peaceful pursuits of life. Let us look upon them as they too take part in some of the conflicts that were waged. That noted Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, until his death, in October, 1813, at the battle of the Moravian towns, was very active in endeavoring to unite the Indian tribes into one great confederacy, and encour- aged the hostilities which led to the battle of Tippe- canoe, November 7, 181 1, but whether any of our Pottawatomies took part in that engagement cannot here be stated. It is said that Saggonee, who was so much attached to maple sugar, was at Tippecanoe. But the war spirit was evidently among them. The French, who laid claim to such a large part of this once wild Western world, had given to a spot on Lake Michigan, in longitude west from Greenwich Sy'^y, the name in their language which became Chicago in ours ; and there they had built a fort and established a trading post. The United States Government estab- lished there Fort Dearborn in 1803 or 1804 a few 24 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. soldiers forming the garrison. War was declared be- tween the United States and Great Britain, June 18, 1812, and many of the Indian tribes were ready to aid the British. Seeing probable danger, it was arranged by some one, who certainly did not consider wisely the value of a slight barricade or stockade against Indian forces, for this Fort Dearborn garrison to pass, if possible, through the Pottawatomie tribe, across our region, and reach Fort Wayne. They left their fortifications August 15, 1812, with some friendly Miamis, but had proceeded only a short distance from the fort when tney were attacked by the Pottawatomies and nearly all killed. This action is called the Fort Dearborn massacre. What further part the Pottawatomies took in the events, the cam- paigns of 1813 and 1814, it is not needful here to in- quire. In 1816 Fort Dearborn was re-established, troops being kept there most of the time until after January, 1837; and the Pottawatomies settled down again to their former mode of life. The brisk fur trade, with the two trading posts of Chicago and Detroit, stimulated their trapper life, as from the days of the first French explorers they had learned that the white man sets quite a large value upon fur, and the influence of the French missionaries, some of them not only zealous, but self-denying, noble men, still remained among them. Their burials were not conducted altogether with pagan rites, they knew the symbol of the cross and they erected crosses be- side some of their graves. But while some of the French influences for good remained among them until the white settlers met them, evil influences were also among them, coming from the American traders. These men furnished THE INDIANS. 25 them with whisky, taught them to drink it, and nothing good could be the result. It has been found that Indians, in contact with unprincipled whites, al- ways lose some of their native virtues. The French, far better than the English or Americans, adapted themselves to the Indian nature, had larger control over them, and seem to have tried more faithfully to do them good. Yet in the first third of the Nineteenth Century, some Protestant American missionaries tried very faithfully to instruct, civilize,- and evangelize these Pottawatomies. In the year 1817 the Rev. Isaac McCoy, a Baptist, a native of Indiana, commenced a mission work among the Miamis and Kickapoos, but met with very little success. In 1822 he established himself at a locality on the St. Joseph River, about one hundred miles north and west from Fort Wayne, at what was called the "center of the Pottawatomie tribe," in what is now Southwestern Michigan, and named his mission station Carey, evidently in remembrance of Dr. Carey, one of the noted Baptist missionaries that went from England to India. He had as an assistant, Johnston Lykins, whom he had baptized, who was appointed as missionary September 2, 1822, and who "removed from Carey Station to the Shawanoes, July 7, 183 1"* At Carey a school for the Indians was opened which in less than two years numbered about seventy pupils, and in the recorded history of this station it is stated that "the people advanced in agriculture and the mechanic arts, and a considerable number were bap- tized." This report further states: "The first Potta- watomie hymn was sung at Carey November 14, 1824, ♦Missionary Jubilee, page 257. 26 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. by Mr. McCoy and the native assistant, Noaquette; the latter said, 'I wish we could make it a little longer.' This year there was a school of sixty Indian pupils. The Mission cultivated sixty acres of land." "In a little work called "Anthony Rollo, the Con- verted Indian," is found this paragraph, the record belonging to this same year of 1824. "In June, three lads, sons of one of the missionar- ies,* who had been at school in the state of Ohio, made a visit to their parents at Carey. As they passed Fort Wayne, one hundred miles from Carey, and the whole distance a wilderness without inhabitants, they met with poor, friendless Anthony. They set him on one of their horses,t they walking, and carried him to Carey, at which place they arrived on the 29th of June." This Anthony was but half Indian. His mother was a daughter of Topinchee, who had been a principal chief among the Pottawatomies, and his father was a French trader, He was a cripple in his lower limbs, walking with difficulty. At Carey he learned to read, became a diligent reader of the Scrip- tures, and an earnest, Protestant Christian. He died at Carey Missionary Station, March 8, 1828, twenty- two years of age. The reflection of the devoted mis- sionaries at that time was "how few of the Pottawat- omie tribe had reached the abodes of the blessed !" And they prayed, "O gracious God, permit us to hope that many others of this tribe will be allowed to unite in the everlasting song, 'Thou art worthy, for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and ♦Rev. J. McCoy. fThe boys had only two horses. THE INDIANS. 27 How much either Roman Catholic or Protestant teaching did for the Indians it is difficult, it is in fact impossible, for us to know. It is not likely very much. Christian principle was implanted. We all know that remarkable chapter about "charity," or "love/' as the revised version reads ; and we know also, both Roman Catholic and Protestant teachers alike, how needful this love is, love that worketh no ill to one's neighbor, love that is the fulfilling of the law, to fit the soul for the society of holy ones. And that the Indians who came in contact with the missionaries manifested the possession of much of this love is doubtful. And that no church rites will place this love within the soul we all have the opportunity of seeing. Yet is to be hoped that some of the Indians, learning as they did that a Saviour lived, that he died and arose from the dead, did through that knowledge and through the rich grace of God, who is no respecter of persons, reach the possession of this needful love. And all such we may confidently look for in Paradise. That from all the great divisions of the human family, from the white and black and red and yellow and brown, there will be individuals gathered to form the multitude that no man can number, no loving believer in the Christian teachings has a right to doubt. But however much or little real or lasting good was accomplished by these well meant and zealous mission efforts, some mention of which should justly be made on these pages of our Indian history, this Carey Mission was not in existence a sufficient length of time to extend its influence over our borders, for "by a treaty provision with the United States the station was substantially relinquished in 183 1." A change for the Indians, a great change for the 28 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. forests and prairies and all the native dwellers here, was rapidly coming. White migration was pushing westward into the great forests of the old Northwest Territory. Settlements were made in the Ohio por- tion, and along the Ohio River, and on the Wabash, and the line of advance was now toward the south shore of Lake Michigan. Settlements had gone up from the Ohio River over a part of Illinois, and had even reached Lake Michigan, for Major Long re- ported at Chicago in 1827 three families living in log cabins. The Indians, peaceful as they have become, are soon to leave their choice hunting and trapping grounds, their favorite fishing spots and camping grounds and dancing floors, and worst of all the burial places of their dead, to the white man's occupancy and the white man's plowshare. Upon very little of that Indian life for the first third of this century can we now look through the eyes of those who saw and knew them; and yet that little is sufficient to enable us, with no great stretch of imagination, to see their hunting parties, and to see the hunters bringing in the deer and other game, and the squaws, or Indian women and girls, dressing and cooking the deer, the rabbits and squirrels, the ducks and geese, the grouse and partridges and quails ; the wigwams with the fire in the center and the smoke passing out through the opening at the top ; and the children playing round the camp. We can easily see them picking the wild fruit and also see them at their domestic employments around the wigwams. Beside the water courses, the Calumet and the Kankakee, the Tippecanoe, and the Iroquois, and the Pinkamink, and on the banks of so many small and beautiful lakes, while the men and boys trapped or THE INDIANS. 29 fished, the women and children must have enjoyed the choice camping places amid the beauty of the bright autumn time; and those rich flowers of the prairie left from the golden summer, how could they fail, loving bright colors, richly to have enjoyed ? In those smoky days, when the Great Prairie and the Big Marsh and hundreds of smaller ones had been burn- ing, when the sun, so red in the morning and in the evening, and while visible, made no shadow even at midday, and the air was still ; and then in the evening when the full and red hunter's moon shone upon them, how they must have dreamed of the beautiful hunting grounds of which their pagan ancestors had told them and taught them to look for in the great future. Per- haps to them, amid those beauties of the world around them, some ideas of the power and the glory of the Great Spirit came. Perhaps some blind prayers went up from their darkened minds to his throne above. Per- haps some longings for a higher life came at times upon them. A little good, and yet it seems to have been a very little good, have white men done to the Indian race. They were here, those copper-colored, uneducated, native children of America, but a few years ago, where are now our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, our churches and schools, our domestic animals and our homes. Some of their stone axes, their arrow and spear heads, and many of their bones, are left in our soil ; their dust is here to be mingled with our dust; but they have passed forever away. They wrote no history, they published no songs, they erected no monuments ; even the earth- works are, probably, not their work; and after they had passed into the distant West, this fair, long stretch of land was almost as though they had never 30 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. been. There were no bridges, no mills, no fences, no buildings, and not much mark of human occu- pancy. Something more of these Indians and of their pe- culiar life we may see when we come to the mixed life of the pioneer and Indian from 1830 to 1840, when incidents may be found sufficient to make a long chap- ter. At present let us look at two of their noted chief- tains. SHAUBENEE. CHEE-CHEE-BING-WAY. The following particulars in regard to this noted Indian chieftain are taken from a Chicago publica- tion of 1889. He was what is called a "good Indian." His name is said to mean "built like a bear." He is said to have been "nearly a perfect specimen of physical development." He was born in 1775, in Canada, a grandnephew of Pontiac, and was a con- temporary of the celebrated Indians, "Tecumseh, Black Hawk, Red Jacket, and Keokuk." Born an Ottawa he was brought in 1800, by a hunting party, to the Pottawatomie country and married a daugh- ter of their principal chief whose village was where is now Chicago in Illinois. When forty years of age he was the war chief of the two tribes, the Ottawas and Pottawatomies. He joined Tecumseh in getting up his confederation, and was next to him in com- mand at the battle of the Thames, and when Tecum- seh fell on that battlefield Shaubenee ordered a retreat. That was his first and last battle against the whites. For his refusal longer to contend against the whites he was deposed as war chief, but continued to be the principal peace chief. For some twenty years he was "the practical head of the Ottawas, Pottawatomies, and THE INDIANS. 31 Chippewas." When the Indians ceded their Illinois lands to the United States they reserved 1,280 acres near Paw Paw Grove in Illinois, for Shaubenee, but of this rapacious whites "by force and fraud de- prived him." At length, in 1859, some generous white people bought twenty acres of land and built for him a house in Grundy County, Illinois, on the south bank of the Illinois River, where he died July 17, 1859, being 84 years of age, "and was buried with imposing cere- monies in the cemetery at Morris." While not resid- ing in Indiana yet as connected with our Pottawato- mies Shaubenee is surely entitled to a place in our Indian records. Next to this noted Indian chief may be named a man of mixed blood — Indian, French, and English — whose English name was Alexander Robinson and his Indian name Chee-Chee-Bing-Way, translated Blinking Eyes, who died at his home on the Des Plaines River near Chicago about 1872 (supposed to be 104 years of age), for he is claimed to have been a head chief among the Pottawatomies. No battle deeds of his have been found on record to be re- counted here, but as early as 1809 he is found en- gaged in taking corn around the south shore of Lake Michigan, having become connected with the found- er of Bailly Town in the fur trade and then being in the service or employ of John Jacob Astor. This corn was raised by the Pottawatomies and was taken to Chicago for sale and export "in bark woven sacks on the backs of ponies." So that we may call this Indian chief the first known buyer and exporter of corn at what is now that great mart of trade — Chicago. In August, 1812, it is said, he was on his way in a 32 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. canoe, again to buy up corn in Chicago, or at Fort Dearborn, when some friendly Miamis hailed him from the shore, and warned him not to go to Chicago, as "it would storm tomorrow." He left his canoe, therefore, at the mouth of the Big Calumet (which is in Lake County), and had no part in the "August Massacre." He lived the next winter in Indian style as a hunter on the Calumet. In 1829 he took a wife from the Calumet who was three-fourths Indian blood. His headquarters were at Chicago and his journeys outward for the purpose of buying fur extended as far southward as the Wabash River. It is claimed that he, as a Pottawatomie chief, evi- dently a trader rather than a warrior, called together an Indian council at Chicago in the time of the Black Hawk War (1832), and it is said that when, in 1836, the great body of this tribe met for the last time in Chicago, received their presents, and started for the then wild West, this trader chief went with them. But like Shaubenee, who also went out to see his people settled in their new home, he soon returned and passed his last years on the Des Plaines River. Mr. J. Hurlburt, a well-known citizen of Porter, and afterwards of Lake County, stated several years ago, that he was in Chicago at the time of that gather- ing of the "red children" in 1836, and that as many as ten thousand were supposed to have been then as- sembled there, and that it was understood that five thousand were Pottawatomies. JOHN B. CHAUDONIA. The name of another active and influential man may properly be placed on this record. General Lewis Cass says : "Chautfonia was a half- THE INDIANS. 33 breed Pottawatomie. His uncle, Topenebee, was the chief of the tribe, and was an old man of great in- fluence." Like Anthony Rollo he was the son of a French man and an Indian woman, but unlike him there seems no evidence that he received in any true sense the religion of the whites among whom for some years he lived. General Cass further says of him: "He served many years under my orders both in peace and war, and in trying circumstances rendered great services to the United States. Some of the events of his life were almost romantic, and at all times he was firm and faithful." General Cass says further: "From the commence- ment of our difficulties with Great Britain, Chau- donia espoused our cause, notwithstanding the exer- tions of the British agents to seduce him to their in- terests." "He was present at the massacre of the garrison of Chicago, where I have always understood he saved the life of Captain Heald, the commanding officer, and the lives of others also." After mentioning his in- fluence as exerted in inducing the chief, Topenebee, his mother's brother, and other Pottawatomie chiefs, to attend the council of Greenville in 1834 held by General Harrison and himself, General Cass adds : "From Greenville he accompanied me to Detroit, * * * and rendered me the most essential service." In 1832 Chaudonia was living for a time in La Porte County, on a piece of land, section 28, town- ship — , range — , "allotted to him by the treaty with the Pottawatomie Indians, held on the Tippecanoe River, October 26, 1832." He afterward became a resident near South Bend and there died in 1837. Congress granted in 1847 a 34 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. section of land to his widow and children "in consid- eration of the services rendered 1 ' by him to the United States. His name among the Indians, says Charles M. Heaton, was Shaderny, which seems to have been sometimes written Shadney. Two of his grandsons were faithful soldiers on the side of the Union in our great Civil War. One of them was severely wounded. So there was shed in that fierce conflict, not only the blood of Americans and of many European nationalities, but also Pottawatomie blood from the State of Indiana. It is not a part of the design of this historic sketch to give the present condition of the Pottawatomies in their Western homes, but this record may well be made : that their late head chief, Shoughnessee, died at his home in Jackson County, Kansas, of quick con- sumption, April 7, 1900, and was buried with full In- dian rites in his own door-yard. He was considered, as a leader, quite conservative. His successor is called a more progressive man. It is on record somewhere that an old Indian once said, "Give me back my forests and my bow, and my children shall no more die of a cough." CHAPTER III. EARLY SETTLERS— 1830-1840. According to a report concerning the Public Do- main of Indiana and its Survey, made in 1892 by J. C. Henderson, then Auditor of State, it appears that the eastern portion of a strip of land, ten miles in breadth, from north to south, across Indiana, was purchased from the Pottawatomies at Chicago, at a treaty made there August 29, 1821 ; and that the west- ern portion of the strip, the southern boundary line of which just touched Lake Michigan in what is now Lake County, was purchased when a treaty was made October 16, 1826, at Mississinewa. The line marking the south boundary of this purchase is known in some early descriptions of land as the "ten mile line. ,, The north boundary line of Indiana is exactly ten miles north of an east and west line that barely cuts the most southern limit of Lake Michigan. It is a question with some what is the real north boundary of Lake and Porter counties. The State boundary is the following, according to the Constitu- tion, Article XIV., Section 1. "On the east by the meridian line which forms the western boundary of the State of Ohio ; 'on the south by the Ohio River, from the mouth of the Great Miami River to the mouth of the Wabash River; on the west, by a line drawn along the middle of the Wabash River, from its mouth to a point where a due north line, drawn from the town of Vin- NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. cennes would last touch the northwestern shore of said Wabash River, and thence by a due north line, until the same shall intersect an east and west line drawn through a point ten miles north of the southern extreme of Lake Michigan ; on the north, by said east and west line until the same shall intersect the first- mentioned meridian line which forms the western boundary of the State of Ohio." Another treaty was made with the Indians October 2j y 1832, on the Tippecanoe River, made between Jonathan Jennings, J. W. Davis, and Marks Crume, Commissioners for the United States, "and the Chiefs and Warriors of the Pottawatomies on the part of said Pottawatomies," in accordance with which treaty the United States bought all the remaining land of these Indians in Indiana, also lands in Michigan Territory and in Illinois. This treaty was signed by the United States Commissioners and by fifty-one Indians. To each Indian name on the treaty there is attached the expression "his mark," for these children of the forests and the prairies, chiefs, warriors, head men of their tribe, were as ignorant of writing as were once the noblemen of England in those old days when the phrase originated, "benefit of clergy." By the terms of this treaty the Indians were to receive, as soon as possible after the treaty was signed, $32,000 in mer- chandise of some kind, $15,000 a year for twelve years, and some other amounts. The Commissioners say that at the request of the Indians, after the treaty was signed, $2,700 was applied to purchase horses for them, which the Commissioners say were immediately purchased and delivered. What price was paid for horses at that time does not appear in the record, but perhaps this sum was sufficient to buy a horse, at least EARLY SETTLERS. 87 a pony, for every man that signed the treaty. There then remained, due to the Indians, $29,300, the Com- missioners say, to be paid in merchandise, but how that was expended they do not mention. This treaty having been sanctioned by the Senate was confirmed by President Jackson, January 21, 1833.* According to the usage of our Government the In- dian title to this region was now extinguished, the sec- ond third of the century was soon to begin, and the land was ready for the coming of the pioneer settlers. The American Fur Company, John Jacob Astor, President, kept an open communication between De- troit and Chicago. Steadily westward and also north- ward, the pioneers were pushing along their advanced guards, some settlers as early as 1821 having reached the locality where is now Indianapolis. The Wabash Valley was settled. Fruit trees were planted. Peaches and then apples soon grew in that rich valley; and then into North-Western Indiana the pioneers came. In 1800 there were found to be in Indiana Territory, as its white population, 5,640, or (American Cyclo- pedia) 4,651, or (Colton) 4,875; about five thousand. In 1810 there were 24,520. In 1820, 147,178. In 1830, 341,582. But of this number in 1830, 3,562 were free blacks. Into the W^est as well as into the South the blacks have gone along with the early white settlers. (Some one once observed that the first white man who settled at Chicago was a negro.) In 1820 only fifty- one Indiana counties had been organized, and Wa- bash County had an area then of 8,000 square miles with 147 inhabitants. Delaware County had an area *A copy of this treaty, with the signatures, as sent out by General Jackson, I had the opportunity of examining in the office of Hon. T. J. Wood, of Crown Point. T. H. B. 38 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. of 5,400 square miles. Darby's Universal Gazetteer of 1826, from which these areas are taken, says : "In a review, however, of the settled parts of Indiana, the counties of Wabash and Delaware with the adjacent Indian country ought to be excluded," the entire area of the three divisions being 20,022 square miles. "The actually inhabited section of Indiana, 57 the Gazetteer says, "will be restricted to 13,972, say 14,000 square miles." This was in 1826. Of what was then called the "Indian country," area 6,622 square miles, more than one-half was in Northern Indiana. The first white settlers, who came to bring civiliza- tion and Christianity, commerce and manufactures, art, science, and literature, into* this corner of the State, began to come in 1830 and 183 1, a very few as early as 1829, before the land, to any extent, was pur- chased from the Indians ; and for some ten years, until the last land north of the Kankakee was put upon the market, in 1839, pioneer settlers continuing to come in, the proper Indian period and the period of white occupancy were blended together. It is evident that until 1833, except on the ten mile purchase, the first white settlers were intruders upon Indian hunting grounds and gardens and cornfields; and for some years after 1833 the Pottawatomies still lingered among their long-cherished and delightful camping places. They were in no haste to leave ; and although the large body of them, perhaps five thousand, left the State in 1836, some hundreds still remained among us, many even until 1840. We have therefore a period of ten years, from 1830 to 1840, of Indian and white life mingled. While in those years, among the pioneer families there were some privations, some hardships, yet those ten years of frontier life were years of a EARLY SETTLERS. 39 rich, delightful experience, enjoyed very fully by a few hundred families where savage life was ending and civilizations beginning, and which by those thus en- joying cannot be forgotten. In this age of steam and electricity in which we live such a frontier life cannot be again. It may be well to look over the records and see who were some of the first settlers, the true pioneers of North- Western Indiana. To give all their names, were it possible, would be decidedly impracticable, for on the Claim Register of Lake County, including the western part of Porter County, are nearly five hundred signatures. It is evident, therefore, that between 1829 and 1839 many hundreds of families came into the three counties lying north of the Kankakee; and many certainly, in those years, settled in Pulaski and White and Jasper. Of the comparatively few names that will here be given probably some are not cor- rectly written. There has been found as the name of the first set- tler in what became W T hite County, coming in the spring of 1829, Jacob Thompson, who died near Reynolds in 1875 > an d, as tne second settler, Ben- jamin Reynolds is named, who came from Ohio ; and then George A. Spencer, also in 1829. The next pio- neers, perhaps not in that year, were Jerry Bisher, Robert Rothrock, George R. Bartley, Peter Price; and then many others from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and from Kentucky ; also some Norwegians, among them Peter B. Smith and H. E. Hiorth, who settled and named the village called Norway on the Tippecanoe River. In what became Pulaski County there were very few, if any, whites till 1830, and most of the families now there came in after 1850. 40 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. For that County the following names of early citi- zens have been recorded: "James Justice, Eli and Peter Demoss, and Thomas McMany, in the north- east; T. J. Galbrith, Henry White, Robert Scott, Moses L. Washburn, and W T illiam Fisher in the south; John Rees, Michael Stump, Silas Phillips, Lewis McCoy, A. E. Moore, and John M. Cowan, in the western part ; and John Davenport, Andrew Keys, John Peirson, George P. Perry, H. W. Hornbeck, Tilman Hackett, and Benjamin Ballinger, in the more central sections."* The settlers of Pulaski came from Ohio, from older counties in Indiana, some from the South, some from Pennsylvania, a few from New England and New York, some from Great Britain, and, as later settlers, many Germans. In regard to settling the prairie the same practice prevailed here as in Lake County, that "as a general thing," some exceptions may have been, "the home- steads were located in or near the timbered lands, the large prairies being left unsettled until a consider- able advance had been made in the way of improve- ments." The first settlers in the central parts of what became Jasper County are said to have been George Gulp and Thomas Randle from Virginia. They came and ex- amined some localities in 1834. The United States survey had just been made and a surveyor directed them to the "Forks" of the Iroquois. It is stated that they found no settlement west of the present Pulaski County line, but that traveling on the "Allen Trail" they came to William Donahoe's, who had just settled near the present Francesville. ♦Historical Atlas of Indiana. EARLY SETTLERS. 41 They went on to the rapids of the Iroquois and to the mouth of the Pinkamink. They seem to have been pleased with the locality, for in May, 1835, they settled at what became known as "the Forks." In the sum- mer of 1836 there followed them as pioneer men with their families John G. Parkison and Henry Barkley, also with them came the widow of Simon Kenton, a noted Kentucky pioneer. Her daughter, then John G. Parkison's wife, was said to have been the first white child born at the present city of Cincinnati. This may, it may not be true. Mrs. Kenton died in Jasper County about 1848. Her age is not recorded. Other families followed these: "Reeds, Prices, Casads, Burgets, Guthridges, Reeves, and Shanna- hans"* Soon another settlement was made on the Iroquois and a third where is now Rensselaer. Those making this third settlement were John Nowels, with a young son, David, and a young daugh- ter, and a son-in-law, Joseph D. Yeoman and family. They came with an ox team, as did many other fami- lies, arriving in the fall of 1836, according to the statements in the "Historical Atlas/' A date two years earlier will be found in the history of the town of Rensselaer. William Mallatt soon became a neighbor to Joseph D. Yeoman, but on his claim was afterward laid an "Indian float." One of his daughters, Margaret Mallatt, is called the first white child born in Jasper County, and Mary Mallatt is said to have been the first young bride. The names of other pioneers in this county will be found in other connections. In that part of Jasper, which in i860 became New- ♦Historical Atlas of Indiana. 42 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. ton County, hunters and trappers for some time were roaming among the Indians. At length a few "squat- ters" came, and then some permanent settlers. The first names found are Josiah Dunn and John Elliott as settlers in 1832. About the same time settlements were made by James W. Lacy, W. Spitler, Zacharias Spitler, James Cuppy, Jacob Prout, John Mayers, Bruce Dunn, and Matthias Redding. About 1837 came Jacob, Samuel, and Frederick Kenyon, Charles Anderson, Amos Clark, and, in 1838, James Murphy. Still later settlers were James Elijah, John Darret, David Kustler, Daniel Deardorf, Benjamin Rood- nick, and Silas Johnson. Says the Historical Atlas : "These settlers found innumerable deer and turkeys in the woods and prairies, and wild bees were so plentiful that an abundant supply of honey was at the com- mand of any one who cared to exert himself a little to procure it/' Settlements were made on the north, on the east, and on the south of what, in 1850, became Starke County, earlier than in that rather small area of wet land, some sand ridges, and of, what was called some years ago, "comparative inaccessibility." Edward Smith, from England, is called the first set- tler in what is now Oregon Township in 1835. John Lindley was the first settler in North Bend Township, and others, called early settlers were John Tibbits, Nathan Koontz, and Samuel Koontz. Starke County was not organized until 1850, so but little of its his- tory belongs to the pioneer or early settler times. In the other three counties, La Porte, Porter, and Lake, many more names have been found. The first family credited as settling in La Porte County bore the name of Benedict. Mrs. Miriam EARLY SETTLERS. 43 Benedict, widow of Stephen S. Benedict, with six sens and one daughter, and Henly Clyburn, husband of the daughter, on March 15, 1829, made a settlement not far northwest from the present town of Westville. July 16, 1829, was born in this pioneer home among the Indians Elizabeth Miriam Clyburn, the first white child born in what became La Porte County. In April of this same year, near this locality, a few miles south of the Ten Mile Purchase, settled Samuel Johnson, William Eahart, and Jacob Inglewright; also Charles and James Whittaker, and W. H. Shirley. About seven miles distant from the Benedict and Cly- burn locality, in the same year, settled Adam Keith and family and Louis Shirley with his mother; and here, in October, 1829, was born the first white boy in La Porte County, according to the traditions, Keith Shirley. Settlers in 1830 — John S. Garroutte. Richard Harris. Andrew Shaw. Philip Fail. John Sissany. Aaron Stanton. William Garrison. Benajah Stanton. William Adams. William Clark. Joseph Osborne. Andrew Smith. Daniel Jessup. John Wills and sons. Nathan Haines. Charles Wills. Richard Harris. Daniel Wills. George Thomas. John E. Wills. William Stule. October 30th of this year was born Benajah S. Fail, son of Philip Fail, called by some the first white boy born in La Porte County. Settlers in 1831 — Rolling Prairie settlement commenced May 25th by David Stoner, Arthur Irving, Jesse West, E. Pro- 44 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. volt, and Willets. Other families came later in the year, among them the Harvey, Salisbury, and Whitehead families, also those of Daniel Murray, James Hiley, Jacob Miller, John Garrett, Emery Brown, C. W. Brown, James Drummond, Benjamin De Witt, Dr. B. C. Bowell, J. Austin, Ludlow Bell, and Myron Ives.* This soon became a noted settle- ment. Other settlers in different neighborhoods: James Highley, James Webster, Judah Learning, Abram Cormack, Daniel Griffin; Horace Markham, Lane Markham, on Mill Creek; Thomas Stillwell, giving name to Stillwell Prairie ; Alden Tucker ; Charles W. Cathcart, giving name to a beautiful grove; also the Ball, Blake, Landon, Wheeler, Bond, Fravel, Staneon, and Garwood families, and Joseph Pagin and Wilson Malone. Most of these earliest families as was nat- ural, made their settlements on that strip of land, ten miles in width, which had already been purchased from the Indians, although some settled south of that line on unpurchased Indian lands. Settlers of 1832 — Isham Campbell. Elijah Brown. Andrew Richardson. A. M. Jessup. Edmund Richardson. Silas Hale. John Dunn. Oliver Closson. Josiah Bryant. John Brown. Jeremiah Sherwood. Charles Vail. Jonathan Sherwood. W. A. Place. George Campbell. A. Blackburn. John Broadhead. Bird McLane. Peter White. John McLane. ♦For these names and many others I am indebted to the "History of La Porte County." T. H. B. EARLY SETTLERS. 45 Erastus Quivey. Joseph Wheaton. S. Aldrich. Charles Ives. John Hazleton. Settlers of 1833 — John Talbott. Brainard Goff. S. James. G. W. Barnes. Shubel Smith. W. Goit. R. Miller. H. Cathcart. Elmore Pattee. Joseph Orr. Jacob R. Hall. F. Reynolds. Joseph Starrett. Jesse Willett. Jesse West. Nimrod West. J. Gallion. J. Clark. John Wilson. Asa Owen. A. Harvey. B. Butterworth. H. Griffith. J. Griffith. G. Rose. John Lnther. Other names of early settlers in La Porte County will be found among the records of their Old Settlers' Association. Something singular is connected with the name John Beaty. N. Stul. W. Niles. John Osborn. L. Maulsby. L. Reynolds. T. Robinson. R. Prother, R. Williams. Peter Burch. W. Burch. Ira Burch. W. O'Hara. M. O'Hara. Samuel O'Hara. Edward O'Hara. J. Perkins. Isaac Johnson. W. Lavin. S. Lavin. John Winchell. John Vail. Henry Vail. J. Travis. Curtis Travis. 46 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. .Lykins. After detailing the supposed facts of the first settlement of Hudson Township, and naming as the first or one of the first settlers, Joseph W. Lykins, a Welshman, "connected with the Carey Mission,' " who settled there in 1829, General Packard mentions as one of the settlers in Wills Township in 1830 Joseph Lykins, and at length says : "During this year (1834) Joseph Lykins put up the first frame house that was erected in Wills." That this man was a Welshman he does not say. If all the statements are correct there must have been near the northeast corner of La Porte County three men by the name of Lykins — Johnston Lykins, born in Ohio ; Joseph W. Lykins, from Wales, and Joseph Lykins, presumably an American. The statements in regard to the first rest on docu- mentary evidence in missionary publications that can- not be questioned. The statements in regard to Jo- seph and Joseph W. rest upon the memories of the early settlers from whom General Packard obtained information. It is not probable any one is living now who knows anything of that frame house built in 1834. In what became Porter County, with the excep- tion of the French trader, Joseph Bailly, who will be elsewhere mentioned, who, in the employ of John Jacob Astor, is said to have made a home on the Calumet River with his Indian wife in 1822, settle- ments seem not to have commenced until the stage line from Detroit to Fort Dearborn or Chicago was opened in 1833. In that year three brothers — Vir- ginians, Jesse, William, and Isaac Morgan — made set- tlements and gave name to one of the small, rich prairies of the county. In April ' of the same year EARLY SETTLERS. 47 came from Ohio Henry S. Adams with his mother, his wife, and three daughters ; and in June George Cline, Adam S. Campbell from New York, and Rea- son Bell from Ohio. Also Jacob Fleming, Ruel Starr, and Seth Hull. The following are found as the names of early set- tlers in the northwestern part of the county. Some of these names may be found repeated in the following lists : For the year 1834, Jacob Wolf and three sons — John, Jacob E., and Josephus ; Barrett Door ; Reu- ben Hurlburt and sons — William, Henry, Jacob, David, and Griffith ; R. and W. Parrott ; and, a year or so later, S. P. Robbins, B. and Allen Jones, and the following whose given names have not been found : Blake, Peak, Sumner, Ritter, Harrison, Curtis, Smith, Arnold, McCool, and T. J. Field. The names Twenty- Mile Prairie and Twenty-Mile Grove, were given to the localities in that part of the county. Not that the prairie or the strip of woodland, in which grove for a time black squirrels abounded, extended for twenty miles, but they were twenty miles distant from some- where. In that locality these family names remained for many years and some still remain. The following lists of names are arranged accord- ing to the years of settlement, but perfect accuracy cannot be claimed for tnem all, as the authorities were evidently not perfectly accurate. But care has been taken in making corrections and perfecting as nearly as was practicable the entire list. Settlers in 1834 — Thomas A. E. Campbell. Levi Jones. Benjamin McCarty. Selah Wallace. Theodore Jones. C. A. Ballard. 48 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Joseph Bartholomew. William Frame. Benjamin Spencer. Miller Parker. J. Sherwood. Jacob Shultz. John Shultz. Owen Crumpacker. W. Downing. Jerry Todhunter. John J. Foster. Abbott. McCoy. William Thomas. John Hageman. William Coleman. Pressley Warwick. John Bartholomew. Stephen Bartholomew. J. P. Ballard. A. K. Paine. Jesse Johnston. Thomas Gossett. William Gossett. Theophilus Crumpacker. Jerry Bartholomew. Jacob Beck. In this year was born January nth the first white child in the county, Reason Bell, and the second on February nth, Hannah Morgan. Settlers in 1835 — Baum. Putnam Robbins. David Hughart. E. P. Cole. Hazard Sheffield. Allen B. James. G. W. Patton. Baum. Jesse Johnson, the first in Boone Township. George Z. Salyer. David Oaks. Alanson Finney. Henry Stoner. Abraham Stoner. N. S. Fairchild. Archie De Munn. Charles Allen. Josiah Allen. Lewis Cooner. Thomas Adams. Settlers in 1836 — Simeon Bryant. Thomas Clark. Peter Ritter. W. Calhoun. John Jones. David Bryant. Thomas- Dinwiddie. EARLY SETTLERS. 49 Orris Jewett. Solomon Dilley. James Dilley. Absalom Morris. Isaac Cornell. John Moore. William Bissell. John W. Dinwiddie. A. D. McCord. Settlers from 1836 to 1838— John Oliver. James Dye. Thomas Johnson. William Johnson. Jesse Johnson. Jennings Johnson. Joseph Laird. George Eisley. John Prim. Frederick Wineinger. Hu£'h Dinwiddie. Barkley Oliver. Daniel Kisler. T. C. Sweeney. David Dinwiddie. Amos Andrews. T. W. Palmer. James Hildreth. Casper Brooks. Smith. Dr. Griffin. John Dillingham. Abram Snodgrass. Asa Zone. Ira Biggs. F. Wolf. John White. John Safford. S. Olinger. Early settlers, date not found — Samuel Van Dalsen. John Berry. Abraham Van Dalsen. Elisha Adkins. Lyman Adkins. Enoch Billings. R. Blachley. Eli Cain. Charles De Wolf. John E. Harris. Morris Wisham. Ezra Wilcox. T. Wilkins. Eason Wilcox. W. Billings. H. Blanchard. There. died in Hebron, March 5, 1900, an aged woman, 88 years of age, known as Grandma Folsom, whose husband, a pensioner of the War of 1812, died some years ago. The year of their settlement is not 50 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. known, but she was called about the last of the early settlers in a neighborhood east of Hebron called Yan- kee Town. The names of early settlers of Cake County are taken from the history of that County by T. H. Ball, known as "Lake County, 1872," to distinguish it from "Lake County, 1884." According to the records of Solon Robinson there was a settler by the name of Ross in the summer of 1834, on section 6, township 35, range 7, and in 1884 James Hill, of Creston, a man of sterling weight of character, stated at the semi-centennial celebration of Lake County, that in February of 1834 he was looking over what became Lake County, and here saw William Ross, whom he had known in Decatur County, In- diana, as a settler here then with his family. So> that there is placed here as the name of the first farmer settler of Lake County, not counting those two or three stage-tavern keepers on the beach of Lake Mich- igan, and as the date of settlement, 1833, William Ross. For the summer of 1834 there are the names of "William Crooks and Samuel Miller in company, Tim- ber and Mill Seat." Also in the same summer, a man by the name of Winchell commenced a mill near the mouth of Turkey Creek, which he did not complete. William B. Crooks, mentioned above, was from Mont- gomery County, was located on the same section with William Ross, and became one of the first asso- ciate judges in Lake County, elected in 1837. The Claim Register is now the authority. Settlers in 1834 — In October — Thomas Childers. EARLY SETTLERS. 51 In November — Solon Robinson, Lumm A. Fowler and Robert Wilkinson, on Deep River. In December — Jesse Pierce and David Pierce, on Deep River and Turkey Creek, says the Claim Register. Settlers in 1835 — January — Lyman Wells and John Driscoll. February— J. W. Holton, W. A. W. Holton, Will- iam Clark and family, from Jennings County. March — Richard Fancher and Robert Wilkinson, the latter on W^est Creek from Attica ^Spring," Elias Bryant, E. W. Bryant, Nancy Agnew, widow, and J. Wiggins. May — Elias Myrick, William Myrick, Thomas Reid, S. P. Stringham, Vermillion, Ills., and Aaron Cox. June — Peter Stainbrook. November — David Hornor, Thomas Hornor, Jacob L. Brown, Thomas Wiles, Jesse Bond, and Milo Robinson. December — John Wood, Henry Wells, William S. Thornburg, R. Dunham, R. Hamilton, and John G. Forbes. Settlers in 1836 — William A. Purdy, New York. Elisha Chapman, Michigan City. S. Havilance, Canada. William N. Sykes. David Campbell. W. Williams, La Porte. Benjamin Joslen. John Ball. Richard Church, Michigan. Darling Church, Michigan. Leonard Cutler, Michigan. 52 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Charles Cutler, Michigan. B. Rhodes, La Porte. J. Rhodes, La Porte. Jacob Van Valkenburg, New York. James S. Castle, Michigan City. Hiram Nordyke, sen., Tippecanoe. Charles H. Paine, Ohio. Hiram Nordyke, Jr., Tippecanoe County. Joseph C. Batton, Boone County. James Knickerbocker, New York. John T. Knickerbocker. G. C. Woodbridge. H. Bones. John J. Van Valkenburg. Horace Taylor. S. D. Bryant. Daniel E. Bryant. Peter Barnard. Jonathan Brown. E. J. Robinson. David Fowler. Cyrus Danforth. M. Pierce, State of New York. Sprague Lee, Pennsylvania. John A. Bothwell, Vermont. Peleg S. Mason. Adonijah Taylor, 'Timber and Outlet." The last according to Claim Register, "May 15th." John Cole, New York. F. A. Halbrook, New York. Stephen Mix, New York. Silas Clough, New York. Rufus Norton, Canada. Elijah Morton, Vermont. EARLY SETTLERS. 53 Francis Barney. Hiram Holmes. Samuel Halsted, "Timber and Millseat." "Nov. 29th transferred to James M. Whitney and Mark Burroughs for $212." Calvin Lilley, South Bend. Samuel Hutchins, La Porte. Jacob Nordyke, Tippecanoe. Hiram S. Pelton, New York. Ithamar Cobb. J. P. Smith, New York,— settled July 5thr Twelve — Dressier. G. Zuver, Bartholomew County. H. McGee. Henry Farmer, Bartholomew County. William S. Hunt, "blacksmith," Wayne County. George Parkinson. S. Wilson. James Farwell. Abel Farwell. Carlos Farwell. M. C. Farwell. Henry Hornor. Ruth Barney, widow. J. V. Johns. James Anderson. E. W. Centre. Simeon Beedle. Isaac M. Beedle. William Wells. S. D. Wells. W. W. Centre. T. M. Dustin. E. Dustin, Jr. C. L. Greenman. Charles Marvin. Mercy Perry, widow. Peter Selpry. Jacob Mendenhall. H. M. Beedle. B. Rich. D. Y. Bond. S. L. Hodgman. John Kitchel. Henry A. Palmer. Paul Palmer. H. Edgarton. D. Barney. William Hodson. George Earle. Jackson Cady. A. Hitchcock. 54 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. E. H. Hitchcock. O. Hitchcock. Russell Eddy. C. Carpenter. William Brown. R. S. Witherel. Charles Walton. William Farmer. Jonathan Gray. Nathan D. Hall. Settlers in 1837- James Westbrook. Samuel Sigler. John Bothwell. John Brown. Henry Torrey. S. Hodgman. Joseph Batton. John Kitchel. N. Hayden. H. R. Nichols. N. Cochrane. A. Baldwin. Lewis Warriner. Josiah Chase. E. T. Fish. Charles R. Ball. John Fish. Hervey Ball. George Flint. Lewis Manning. Benjamin Farley. Ephraim Cleveland. D. R. Stewart. Edward Greene. S. T. Greene. Elisha Greene. W. Page. R. Wilder. John McLean. Solomon Russell. Daniel May. A. Albee. William Sherman. H. Galespie. J. H. Martin. John Hack. T. Sprague. G. L. Zabriska. J. Hutchinson. John Hutchinson. E. L. Palmer. Lewis Swaney. N. Reynolds. Francis Swaney. B. Demon. O. V. Servis. Joel Benton. Thomas O'Brien. John L. Ennis. Orrin Smith. Dennis Donovan. D. B. Collings. Patrick Donovan. Z. Collings. Thomas Donovan. EARLY SETTLERS. 55 Timothy Rockwell. Daniel Donovan. Jesse Cross. Oliver Fuller. E. Cross. Thomas Tindal. R. Cross. Orrin Dorwim A. L. Ball. H. Severns. Daniel Bryant. Hiram Barnes. Wid. Elizabeth Owens. Bartlett Woods. E. D. Owens. Charles Woods. X. Pierce. Dudley Merrill. William Vangorder. J. F. Follett. G. W. Hammond. A. D. Foster. J. Rhodes. Adam Sanford. Joseph Jackson. Charles Mathews. O. Higbee. James Carpenter. Z. W^oodford. Jacob Ross. William Hobson. Patrick Doyle. P. Anson. W. J. Richards. 56 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. In addition to the above from the Claim Register may be added, for December 10, 1836, the name of Benjamin D. Glazier, who then settled at Merrill- ville, or Wiggins' Point, where some of the family still reside. Also for 1837, the name of John Hack, the first German settler, who, with his large family, settled in the spring near the present town of St. John. Many of his descendants now reside in or near Crown Point. And the names of Peter Orte, Michael Adler, and M. Reder, German settlers, with their families in 1838; who commenced that large Catholic settle- ment in what is now St. John's Township; and also in 1838, H. Sasse, Senior, H. Von Hollen, and Lewis Herlitz, the first Lutheran Germans, who were fol- lowed by many others in what is" now Hanover Town- ship. These German immigrants that in those early years came into the different localities of our eight counties from their fatherland, while they could scarcely then have heard 61 Mrs. Hemans of England, yet soon learned the meaning of what she wrote in her beautiful "Song of Emigration" : "We will rear new homes, under trees that glow As if gems were the fruitage of every bough ; O'er our white walls we will train the vine, And sit in its shadow at day's decline ; And watch our herds as they range at will Through the green savannahs, all bright and still. All, all our own shall the forests be, As to the bound of the roe-buck free ! None shall say, 'Hither, no further pass !' We will track each step through the wavy grass ; We will chase the elk in his speed and might, And bring proud spoils to the hearth at night." EARLY SETTLERS. 57 Perhaps their women may at first have felt, what Mrs. Heman's puts for them into her song, "But oh! the gray church tower, And the sound of the Sabbath-bell, And the sheltered garden-bower, We have bid them all farewell !" Whatever some of them may have felt they soon here made new homes, apparently, with no regrets. The women and girls soon had their beautiful flower grounds, and all, Catholic and Lutheran alike, had their chapels and churches and bells. Instead of chasing the elk the boys found plenty of deer and wolves to chase, and some of them made good hunters in our woods.* Many pioneer families came^ into Lake County in the years of 1838 and 1839, but their names were not found on the Claim Register as its entries did not ex- tend over these years, and it would be quite imprac- ticable to collect many of these names now. In placing these few "hundred names upon this record as pioneers in Nortn-Western Indiana the names of men who came, for the most part, with their women and children, into this then wild region, it is recognized that there were also many others whose names, by some means, have not reached these pages, who were also true and worthy pioneers, doing well their part in laying here the foundations for the pros- *It was my lot to spend one night in August, 1838, at the home of the large Hack family on "Prairie West," and after "the shades of night" had fallen the family assembled in their door-yard, around a cheerful blaze, and sang the songs of their old homes. They were from one of those Rhine provinces that passed from France to Germany, then Prussia, and those old songs were new and strange to my young ears. T. H. B. 58 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. perity which we now enjoy; and their descendants who may not find their names on these few pages, will surely see the impossibility of any one's now se- curing every name of the settlers between 1830 and 1840, and also they may be sure that to the whole body of our pioneers, the known and the unknown, every rightminded person must Teel that, as this cen- tury closes, we owe a large debt of grateful remem- brance. Many of the "squatter" families, indeed very many, passed in a few years to the regions further west (these were of a restless class, people who loved fron- tier life), and there as here helped to prepare the way for the railroad life, the modern life, of this our day. They followed the Indians and the deer toward the setting sun, they tried the large western prairies, and the mountain region, and at last the Pacific slope, but the railroads followed them along, and they rest now where the steam whistles blow but do not disturb their slumbers. Note. — From evidence of different varieties it is con- cluded that fully one-half of the early settlers passed out of Lake County between 1840 and 1850. TREATIES AND SURVEYS. In 1818 a treaty with tEe Indians was made at St. Mary's in accordance with which a large tract of land in central Indiana was purchased and this included at its northern limit what became White County and a part of Jasper. By the terms of another treaty made in 1826 quite a portion of what became Pulaski County was purchased. Some surveys were made in these purchases in 1821 and 1828, but as early as 1821 only a small part of the southeast' corner of Pulaski EARLY SETTLERS. 59 was surveyed. As elsewhere stated the eastern part of the ten-mile strip was purchased in 1821 and the western part in 1826. This narrow strip was surveyed, the larger part in 1829, and the extreme eastern por- tion in 1830. The purchase made in 1832, at Tippe- canoe, was surveyed in 1834. Men employed in this survey were, Burnside, Sibley, Clark, Smith, Biggs, Van Ness, Hanna, Goodnow, Morris, Kent. LAND SALES. Land sales were held at Crawfordsville for White County in 1829, 1830, and in October, 1832. The Ten-Mile purchase was also offered for sale in 1832. For Pulaski County, land sales were held at Wina- mac in September, 1838, in March, 1839, and in March, 1841. Indian Creek Township was one of the earliest settled parts of that county. It contained some twenty families in 1840. The lands of Lake County came into market in 1839. The land office was at La Porte. It was after- wards removed to Winamac, where Lake County set- tlers at length went to enter land, finding a place to cross the Kankakee, passing through a wet region, and going by the White-post. It was considered a trying horseback trip. There were land sales also at Logansport in Octo- ber, 183 1, according to General Packard's history, when the "Michigan Road Lands," on which the city of La Porte now stands, were sold and bought. In 1832 there were land sales at La Fayette. Land in La Porte County was bought this year, and there being then no pre-emption law, speculators, those ruthless men, overbid the settlers. Says General 60 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Packard : 'This occurred in many instances where the settlers had expended all their means in making im- provements. Much of the land thus situated and lo- cated in New Durham, went as high as five and six dollars per acre." The settlers were not prepared to pay but one dollar and a quarter 1 per acre. Before the land sales of 1839 the citizens of Lake County had organized a Squatters' Union in which they bound themselves to stand by each other in purchasing their land at the government price. The second article of their constitution said, "That if Congress should neg- lect or refuse to pass a law, before the land on which we live is offered for sale, which shall secure to us our rights, we will hereafter adopt such measures as may be necessary effectually to secure each other in our just claims." And they did this. Speculators did not bid against five hundred united, determined, and prob- ably armed men. In Porter County lands came into market in 1835. CHAPTER IV. 1830 to 1840. What These Early Settlers Found — Pre-Historic and Historic Man. By prehistoric in this chapter is not meant, before human history on the earth commenced; that early Asiatic, African, and European written history, so many thousand pages of which yet remain; but only before 1 the real American written history finds its sure beginning, dating no further back than to the dis- covery of America by Christopher Columbus. Prehis- toric in this chapter, will denote not only any traces of man up to 1492, but even up to the time of the first recorded explorations of French and English in this region. So that, to reach our prehistoric period, we will not need to go far back in time. The early settlers first found the Indians, called sometimes aborigines, in actual possession here, with whom, for some ten years, more or less, they were brought in contact ; but they soon found, as they came out from the "thick woods," as they looked over the rich and beautiful prairies, and then over the low- lands and marshes, and viewed the rivers, — here and there not to be mistaken, they found those singular traces of an unknown people, called sometimes the Moundbuilders. In various places they found these mounds, evidently formed at some time by human hands, one of these, ten feet in height and some forty feet in diameter, being on the Iroquois River, four NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. miles from the present town of Rensselear, from which have been taken shells, bones, and ashes. Other mounds were found some three miles north of the pres- ent town of Morocco, in Newton County, from which have been taken human bones and stone implements ; another in what became Washington Township, in the same county; and yet another on the south bank of the Iroquois near the State line. Other mounds were found north of the Kankakee River, from some of which human skeletons have been taken, over some of which the plowshare has passed year after year, still bringing to the surface human remains ; and some are even yet undisturbed. Large trees were found growing on some of the mounds when the pioneers first saw them. They were in shape circular and smooth, and regularly formed, although the wolves had in some of them made their dens.* The following is taken from Lake County, 1884, page 474 : "On the farm now owned by J. P. Spal- ding, near the northwest corner of section 33, town- *The writer of this remembers well his first visit to one of these mounds With his father and mother, each on horse- back; that father a graduate of Middlebury College, Vermont, that mother educated in the best schools of Hartford, Con- necticut, and then 34 years of age; and what an interest they both took in that work of prehistoric man, as they rode up the sloping sides and looked at its smooth, level top, and looked around the landscape from that elevation, himself admiring it with the eyes of a boy twelve years of age. That mother had seen many beautiful and grand New England and Southern and ocean sights, nature she dearly loved, but on such a mound she had never looked before. I am quite sure no spade or plow has yet touched that mound. . T. H. B. WHAT THESE EARLY SETTLERS FOUND. 63 ship 33, range 8 west, are the remains of two mounds. They have been plowed over for more than forty years, [written in 1884] but human skeletons, arrow heads and pottery are still unearthed, as the plow- share goes deeper year by year. The pottery found is of two varieties." These ancient mounds were per- haps used in later times for Indian burial places. General Packard mentions two mounds near the early village of New Durham, in La Porte County, which were six feet in height. Hubert S. Skinner, in the history of Porter County says that, "numerous earth mounds are found" there, and that "In the mounds have been found human bones, arrow heads, and fragments of pottery." Says Mr. William Niles, of La Porte, in his his- torical sketch of the La Porte Natural History Asso- ciation : "At one time Dr. Higday got up an excur- sion to the Indian mounds near the Kankakee River, and secured for the association a large number of flint and copper implements and pottery, and skulls and other bones. He read a paper before the Chicago Historical Society describing this excursion and its re- sults. Some of the specimens were left with the Chi- cago society." The others, it seems to be implied, are still in La Porte. Very little copper as yet has been found in our excavations. Returning now south of the Kankakee, in White County, there were found several mounds on what was named Little Mound Creek ; these were only from three to five feet high, but at another location there were some about ten feet in height. Fifteen have been counted in White. A full account of the many mounds of this region does not enter into the plan of 64 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. this work ; but elsewhere will be found yet more par- ticulars in regard to human remains, or prehistoric man. That the pioneers found not a few Indians here has been already stated, and they found that these true native Americans had villages, camping places, danc- ing floors and burial grounds, and gardens and corn fields. South of the Kankakee River, in what became known as Beaver Woods, and along the Iroquois and Tippecanoe rivers, they had many favorite re- sorts, and a large Indian village was found and a favorite dancing floor or ground a few miles north of where the whites started their village called Morocco. Corn fields were found in various places near that same locality. In White County an Indian village was found half a mile north of the present Monticello, and another five miles up the river, where large corn fields were cultivated. For some reason these Indian fields seem to have been much larger on the south than on the north side of the Kankakee. For one thing, the soil was quite different. A noted Indian trail passed along the bank of the Tippecanoe, crossing it where is now Monticello, and leading from the Wabash River up to Lake Michigan. In what is now Jasper County many corn fields were found, generally small patches of land, but some- times in a single field would be an area of ten or fif- teen acres. One large field was four miles and an- other seven miles west of the present county seat of Jasper County. There were groves of sugar maple trees along the Iroquois River, and the first settlers found the Indians along that river knowing how to make maple sugar. WHAT THESE EARLY SETTLERS FOUND. 65 North of the Kankakee, at what took the name of Wiggin's Point, now Merrillville, in Lake County, was found, in 1834, quite an Indian village. It was called McGwinn's Village. There was a large danc- ing floor or ground, and there were trails, whicri were well-trodden foot-paths, sixteen in number, leading from it in every direction. The dancing ground, called a floor, but not a floor of wood, is said to have been very smooth and well worn. A few rods distant was the village burial ground, the situation, where the prairie joined the woodland, well chosen. A few black- walnut trees were found growing there, of which very few are native in Lake County, as also there were two or three near an Indian burial place found on the northeastern shore of the Red Cedar Lake. At this Wiggin's Point burial place the pioneers found in the center of the ground a pole some twenty feet in height on which was a white flag. This was the best known Indian cemetery in Lake County. As many as one hundred graves were there. Some dese- crating hands, said to have been those of a physician from Michigan City, took out from the earth here an Indian form about which were a blanket, a deer skin, and a belt of wampum ; and with the body were found a rifle and a kettle full of hickory nuts. The pioneers found that some of these Indians had not only the idea of a future life, but that they had received from their white teachers some idea of the resurrection of the body. Some of them preferred not to be placed in the earth, as they were to live again; and some of these early settlers found suspended in a tree, in a basket, with bells attached, the dead body of an In- dian child. The writer of this obtained his best knowl- edge of an Indian cemetery and of Indians lamenting 66 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. their dead, from a sand mound in Porter County, near the shore of Lake Michigan, which will be mentioned in the account of City West. Besides the Indians themselves, (and some of them were in contact with the settlers for ten full years) and their gardens, where the Indians cultivated some choice grapes as well as vegetables, and their trails, and camping grounds and dancing grounds, these pioneers found, and the later inhabitants have been finding through all these seventy years, flint and stone instruments of various kinds, evidently the work of human hands. A very little copper, not in its na- tive bed or form, they also found. One of the large collections of arrow heads, spear heads, and various small instruments, whose manufacture is attributed to our Indians, is in possession of the present genial and intelligent trustee of St. John's Township, H. L. Keil- man, all, some two hundred in number, having been found on the Keilman. farm near Dyer, on section eighteen, township thirty-five, range nine west of the second principal meridian. It seems desirable that some impression should be upon these pages of the real life of the Indians, as near as it can be obtained from such contact as they had with the whites, thus showing what the pioneers found Pottawatomie customs and ways to be. As, besides other camps and gardens, so-called, in the winter of 1835 and 1836 about six hundred had an encampment in the West Creek woodlands, where deer were abundant, and an encampment was there again the next winter ; and on Red Oak Island, where they had a garden, about two hundred camped in the winter of 1837 and 1838, and about a hundred and fifty on Big White Oak Island, south of Orchard WHAT THESE EARLY SETTLERS FOUND. 67 Grove, and quite an encampment the same winter south of the present Lovell, and a camp of thirty In- dian lodges the same or the preceding winter north of the Red Cedar Lake, and many wigwams along the Calumet, and a large Indian village at Indian Town, it is evident that the pioneers had some opportunities to learn something of their dispositions and ways. The following is from "Lake County, 1872." "On Red Oak Island they had two stores, kept by French traders, who had Indian wives. The names of these traders were Bertrand and Lavoire. At Big White Oak was one store, kept by Laslie, who was also French, with an Indian wife. Here a beautiful incident occurred on new year's morning, 1839. Charles Kenney and son had been in the marsh look- ing up some horses. They staid all night, December 31st, with Laslie. His Indian wife, neat and thought- ful, like any true woman, gave them clean blankets out of the store, treated them well, and would receive no pay. The morning dawned. The children of the encampment gathered, some thirty in number, and the oldest Indian, an aged, venerable man, gave to each of the children a silver half-dollar as a new year's present. As the children received the shining silver each one returned to the old Indian a kiss. It was their common custom, on such mornings, for the old- est Indian present to bestow upon the children the gifts. A beautiful picture, surely, could be made by a painter of this island scene; the marsh lying round, the line of timber skirting the unseen river, the en- campment, the two white strangers, the joyous chil- dren, and the venerable Pottawatomie who, long years before, had been active in the chase and resolute as a 68 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. warrior in his tribe, bestowing the half-dollars and bending gracefully down to receive the gentle kisses of the children. Such a picture on canvas, by an artist, would be of great value among our historic scenes." The following incidents, from different sources, are all well attested: Into what became Newton County in the time of the Black Hawk War, about five hundred Kickapoos came from Illinois and staid for some little time, but gave no trouble to the few whites then there unless whiskey was furnished them. In the spring of 1837, a party of Indians came to the location of David Yeoman, on the Iroquois, to catch fish. These they took not by means of spears or hooks, but by throwing them out of the water with their paddles. They were economical. They would exchange the bass with the whites for bread and would themselves eat the dog-fish. North of the Kankakee, near Indian Town, an enterprising settler proposed to plow some ground for planting. To this the head Indian objected, saying that the land was his, and the squaws wanted it to cultivate. This pioneer knew quite well that the squaws would not cultivate very much land, so he said to the Indian man, "I will plow up some land and the squaws may mark off all they want." As he could turn the ground over much faster than could the In- dian women, this was quite satisfactory. They marked off the little patches which they wanted, and left a good field for the white man. This incident certainly shows a good side of the Indian character. As mentioned elsewhere, an early school of La Porte County, the first in New Durham Township, was taught by Miss Rachel B. Carter, the school open- WHAT THESE EARLY SETTLERS FOUND. 69 ing January I, 1833. As illustrating the taciturn dis- position of the Indians, General Packard gives this incident: "When Miss Carter was teaching this school, Indians of various ages would come to the cabin, wrapped in their blankets, and stand for hours without uttering a word or making a motion, while they gazed curiously at the proceedings. Then they would glide away as noiselessly as they came." Other characteristics are illustrated by the following: "Upon one occasion an Indian woman, called Twin Squaw, informed Rachel that the Indians intended to kill all the whites, as soon as the corn was knee high. Rachel replied that the white people were well aware of the intention of the Indians, and taking up a handful of sand, said that soldiers were coming from the East as numerous as its grains, to destroy the Indians be- fore the corn was ankle high. The next morning there were no Indians to be found in the vicinity, and it was several months before they returned. "An Indian told Rachel, at one time, that they liked a few whites with them to trade with, to act as interpreters, and that they learned many useful things of them: but when they commenced coming they came like the pigeons." A pioneer could appreciate that comparison, but "like the pigeons" is hot expressive to those of this generation, to those who never saw a wild pigeon. Although for a time, on account of Miss Carter's reply to Twin Squaw, the Indians disappeared, in 1836 "some five hundred of them camped in and about Westville." The desecration of an Indian grave at the Wiggins' Point has been mentioned. "It is said that one day, after the robbing of the grave, two Indians armed 70 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. with rifles came into the field where Wiggins was at work alone. They went to the grave, and sat down their rifles, and talked. Wiggins was alarmed. He conjectured that avengers were near, and he was in their power. The Indians were evidently much dis- pleased, but finally withdrew without offering any violence. Wiggins, who had claimed this part of the Indian village, allowed his breaking-plow to pass over the burial ground. "This desecration did not pass unnoticed by the Red men. When, in 1840, General Brady, with eleven hundred Indians from Michigan, five hundred in one division and six hundred in the other, passed through this county, some of both divisions visited these graves, and some of the squaws groaned, it is said, and even wept, as they saw the fate of their ancient cemetery. Thoroughly have the American Indians learned the power and the progress of the Anglo- Saxon civilization, but not much have they experi- enced of its justice towards them and theirs." Some other incidents of the life at Indian Town are instructive, taken, as was the last, from Lake County, 1872 : "Simeon Bryant selected that section for a farm, and leaving Pleasant Grove, built his cabin near the village. The Indians at first were not well pleased with the idea of a white neighbor; but the resolute squatter treated them kindly, would gather up land tortoises and take to their wigwams, for which, when he threw them on the ground, the women and children would eagerly scramble; and alter he had fenced around some of their cornfields he still allowed them to cultivate the land. This kindness and consideration secured their regard. A father' and son from La WHAT THESE EARLY SETTLERS FOUND. 71 Porte County were stopping with this Bryant family while improving their claims, and the daughter and sister, a girl of eighteen or twenty, came out to assist in the housekeeping. She was necessarily brought in contact with the villagers. Among these were two young Indians about her own age, sons of a head man, who were quite inclined to annoy the white girl and play pranks. They would lurk around and watch her motions, and sometimes when she would enter the little outdoor meat-bouse, would fasten her in. One day, when she was coming out with a pail of buttermilk, one of these young Potta- watomies stood in the doorway, with his arms stretched across, and refused to allow fier to pass out. Reasoning and entreaty were unavailing, and as a last resort she took up her pail and, to the great surprise of the impolite young savage, dashed the buttermilk all over him. He then beat a retreat, and left her mistress of the field, with only the loss of one bucket of milk. Some time afterward an errand took her among the wigwams, and at a time, it appeared, when the occupants had obtained some "fire-water." ^Raising the curtain of their doorway, according to custom, to make an inquiry, the young savages sprang up and threatened her with their tomahawks. She stood and laughed at them, and at length, ashamed perhaps to injure the bold, defenceless girl, they let her pass on and accomplish her errand. This she succeeded in doing, and then returned in safety to the Bryant cabin, glad to have escaped the peril through which she had passed. The heroine of these ♦The French traders, it is said, did not sell whisky to the Indians, but other traders and some few settlers did sell to them. 72 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. incidents soon afterward married, and became an in- habitant of Lake, having now several grown up daughters, and being the head of one of our well known and highly respected families. "A still greater peril was experienced by Mrs. Saxton, who became a resident on the Wiggins place. Her husband was away, and she was at home with small children. The evening was cold and stormy, and, as it advanced, an Indian called at the door re- questing shelter. At first his request was refused, but one of the children pleaded for him; the storm was pelting without, and he was admitted. He was a young man, and unfortunately had with him a bottle of whiskey. He wanted some corn bread. It was made, but did not suit him. He drank whiskey and was cross. An intoxicated man, whether white or red, is an unpleasant guest. A second trial in the bread line was made, using only meal, and salt, and water, which succeeded better. The Indian talked some, sat by the fire, drank. He went to the door and looked out. Something to this effect he muttered, "Potta- watomie lived all round here; white man drove them away. Ugh !" Then he went back to the fire. A little child was lying in the cradle, and he threatened its life. The alarmed mother and children could offer little effectual resistance. But the Indian delayed to strike the fatal blow. At length he slept. Then the startled mother poured out what was left in the bottle, and waited for the morning. The savage and drunken guest awoke, examined his bottle, and finding it empty, said, "Bad Shemokiman woman ! Drink up all Indian's whiskey." He then went off to Miller's Mill, replenished his bottle and returned. Sometime in the day Dr. Palmer came along and succeeded in re- WHAT THESE EARLY SETTLERS FOUND. 73 lieving this family of their troublesome guest. The next night this Indian's father came; apologized as best he could; said that was bad Indian and shoulcl trouble them no more. "One pleasant Red Cedar Lake incident may be here recorded. A party of nine, eight men and one squaw, called one morning at the residence of H. Ball, and desired breakfast. It was soon prepared for them, and all took places at the table and ate heartily. At first only the men took seats for eating, but their en- tertainer insisted that the squaw also should sit down with them. This caused among the Indians no little merriment. They had brought with them consider- able many packages of fur, and as they passed ou: each one took two muskrat skins and laid them down as the pay for his breakfast. They then went into a lit- tle store on the place and traded out quite a quantity of fur. After some hours of trading they quietly de- parted. "And still further illustrative of the mode of liv- ing and customs of these French-taught Pottawa- tomies, let us look again upon the village and white family at Indian Town. "A head man resides there called a chief. J. W. Dinwiddie, his father, and sister, are staying with the Bryant family until their own claim is ready for oc- cupancy. The chief keeps a cow, and so do the whites. The chiefs wife would bring up their cow, and also would drive along sometimes the other cow, saying as she passed the settler's cabin, "Here, John, I have brought up Margaret's cow. This squaw had quite a fair complexion, was between thirty and forty years of age, in appearance; could talk some English, and was very kind to the whites. The chief's name was 74 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. called Shaw-no-quak. Here was also a dancing floor. The Indians would form in a line for a dance according to age, the oldest always first, the little chil- dren last. They danced in lines back and forth. The old chief, a young chief, and an old Indian sat to- gether and furnished the music. This was made by skaking corn in a gourd. The song repeated over and over the name of their chief. After the dance they feasted on venison soup, with green corn, made in iron kettles served in wooden trenches with wooden ladles. The white neighbors present at one of these enter- tainments were invited to partake. This the women declined doing, which the chief did not like. And thus he expressed his displeasure : "No good Shemo- kiman! no good! no eat! no good Shemokiman woman!" Then he would pat S. Bryant and say, "Good Shemokiman ! Good Shemokiman ! Eat with Indian !" The Indians here, on the gardens, and elsewhere, lived in lodges or wigwams. These were made of poles driven into the ground, the tops converging, and around the circle formed by the poles was wound a species of matting made of flags or rushes. This woven flag resembled a variety of green window shades seen in some of our stores and houses. The Indian men wore a calico shirt, leggins, moccasins, and a blanket. The squaws wore a broadcloth skirt and blanket. They "toted" or "packed" burdens. The Indians along the marsh kept a good many ponies. These they loaded heavily with furs and tent- matting when migrating. They also used canoes for migrating up and down the Kankakee. The village Indians lost some eighty ponies one winter for want of sufficient food. Those at Orchard Grove wintered WHAT THESE EARLY SETTLERS FOUND. 75 very well. During the winter the men were busy trapping. Three Indians caught, in one season, thir- teen hundred raccoons. They sold the skins for one dollar and a quarter each, thus making on raccoon fur alone $1,625. Other fur was very abundant and brought a high price in market. They trapped eco- nomically until they were about to leave forever the hunting-grounds of their forefathers. They then seemed to care little for the fur interests of those who had purchased their lands, and were destroying as well as trapping, when some of the settlers interfered. One of these was H. Sanger. He, in company with some others, went on to the marsh to stay the destruction it was said was there going on. He went in advance of the others after reaching the trapping ground, and told the Indians they must cease to de- stroy the homes of the fur-bearers. He was himself a tall, and was then an athletic man, and said he, "Look yonder. Don't you see my men?" They did see men coming, and were alarmed, and mentioned to others the threatening aspect of the "tall Shemokiman." One Indian burial-place has been mentioned, the one at the McGwinn village. This contained about one hundred graves. Another has also been referred to at the head of Cedar Lake. This one has not been specially disturbed. At Big White Oak Island was a third. Here were a good many graves ; and among them six or seven with crosses. There were prob- ably others over which the plowshare has passed and no memorial of them remains. At Crown Point was a small garden, and on the height Indians seem to have camped, but no burial-place is known to have been found here. A few tomahawks have been found near the present town." 76 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Few of the Indians remained after 1840, except around Winamac, where tHey lingered till 1844. To us the Pottawatomies have left their known and unknown burial places, the names of some of the rivers, "and their own perishing memorials and re- membrances as treasured up by those with whom they had intercourse." And few of those who saw them at their encampments, on their hardy ponies, in and around their wigwams, and received some of them into their houses, are living now. It is only justice that the citizens of Northern In- diana, as was written in 1872, should treasure up and transmit to posterity, among their own records, some memories and incidents of the once powerful Potta- watomies. Although coming in contact more or less with the Indians for ten years, the settlers here were fortu- nate, so far as any record has been found, in this re- spect, that no Indian life was taken by a white man. No murder of an Indian by a settler seems to have been committed, although a settler while hunting came near to taking life unintentionally. What kind of justice would have been administered here in case of the murder of an Indian is uncertain. INDIAN TRAILS. The early settlers found here some well marked or well trodden pathways, trodden apparently by hu- man feet and pony feet, but not by buffalo feet, to which the name was given of "trails." This word as often used by hunters and frontier men denotes the slight trace that is left where a wild animal or a man has passed but once, and to follow WHAT THESE EARLY SETTLERS FOUND. 77 such a trail is not an easy matter ; but it is also used to denote a narrow pathway that may have been trodden a hundred or a thousand times. One well defined trail, called the Sac Trail, as made or as supposed to have been made by the Sacs in journeying from their eastern to their western limit, passed across La Porte, Porter, and Lake counties, and as the ground was well chosen it became the line, occasionally straightened in the years of advancing settlement, for the main eastern and western thor- oughfare from Michigan to Joliet. To see in one continuous line, living and moving westward now, the Indians that during their occupancy had passed along it, and then, after them, the white covered wagons with ox teams and horse teams that from 1836 till even now have passed along that roadway, would be a sight, a procession, worth going many miles to see. Southwest a short distance, that is, a few miles from Kouts, two trails coming together, crossed the Kankakee River, at a good river and marsh fording place. Traces of some kind of earthworks, covering four or five acres, were found there in 1836, to which the early settlers gave the name of fort, conjecturing that it was once a French fort, when Tassinong first was named. A well-marked trail came up from the Wabash River called the great "Allen trail," passing near the present town of Francesville, and crossing the Kankakee, probably, at this fording place where the trails just mentioned divided. These seem to have been the larger trails. From the Sac trail one led off, passing near the Lake of the Red Cedars and across what was named Lake Prairie, to the Rapids of the Kankakee, where is now Mo- 78 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. mence. And passing by the old Baillytown one seems to have passed near or along Lake Michigan to Fort Dearborn, now Chicago. Traders, travellers, scout- ing parties, and frontier-men, passed along these trails before the wagons of the pioneers widened them out with their wheel tracks. CHAPTER V. PIONEER LIFE— 1830 to 1850. From the year 1830, or rather as early as 1829, when the first families of early settlers came in among Indian residents and Indian owners of the prairies and woodlands, down to the year 1840, when but few of the children of the wilds remained, the white families that here made homes were true pioneers. They led the true American pioneer life; but different in one respect from the pioneers of the Atlantic sea coast colonies, and of the South, and of some in the far- ther West in later times, inasmuch as the Indians, among whom for a time they were, remained on friendly terms, and there were no. massacres of families no wakeful nights when on the still air came the In- dian warwhoop, no need for building barricades or resorting to forts or stockades for the preservation of life. A few, it is true, there were, in the neighbor- hood that became Door Village, who had settled as early as 1832, who thought it needful to build a stock- ade fort when the Black Hawk War in Illinois broke out ; but they soon found that there was no need. The days of peril from Indians east of the Mississippi, and of perilous excitements had passed, before much set- tlement was made in North-Western Indiana. Some settlement had been made in W T hite County, and some alarmed families left their homes when the rumors 80 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. reached them in regard to Black Hawk. More set- tlement had been made in La Porte County before the Black Hawk War of 1832, and the opening events of that war did cause some alarm and some prepara- tions for defense. In May, 1832, information was sent to Arba Heald, near Door Village, from whom in 183 1 Sac Indians had stolen some horses, that hostilities had commenced at Hickory Creek, in Illinois, and im- mediately the inhabitants of that settlement, forty-two men among them, erected earthworks, dug a ditch, and planted palisades around an enclosure one hun- dred and twenty-five feet square, located half a mile east of Door Village. About three miles further east a block house was built. General Joseph Orr, a noted La Porte pioneer, who had received a commis- sion as Brigadier General, from Governor Ray in 1827, reported the building of this fort to the Gov- ernor of Indiana and was by him appointed to raise a company of mounted rangers for service, if needed. This company he raised, reporting to the commandant at Fort Dearborn and also to General Winfield Scott. Mrs. Arba Heald refused to repair to the stockade, but obtaining two rifles, two axes, and two pitchforks, determined to barricade and defend her own home. For the rangers, although they did some march- ing or scouting, there proved to be no need. The chief, Black Hawk, was soon captured and the alarm in La Porte County was over. The alarm could not extend over those then un- purchased and unsurveyed lands where there were no white families, and in La Porte and White counties it caused but a little break in the quiet of pioneer life. Although the pioner period has, to quite an ex- tent, been placed between 1830- and 1840, during PIONEER LIFE. 81 which time some of the Indians remained and some settlers were still "squatters," yet the real pioneer life in its general aspects continued, and will thus in this chapter be viewed, until the first half of this Nine- teenth Century was closing ; and as the second half of the century opened, the era of railroads in Northern Indiana commenced, when modes of life rapidly changed. This gives us pioneer or frontier life till 1850, or for a period of twenty years. What was this life? In all our land, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there is not much to be found that is like it now. It is difficult to picture it vividly before the minds of the young people of the present. Hon. Bartlett Woods, of Crown Point, in an arti- cle on "The Pioneer Setjtlers, Their Hjomes and Habits, Their Descendants and Influence," prepared for the Lake County Semi-Centennial of 1884, gave some fine pen-pictures of this variety of life. In a history of Indiana forty pages of a large vol- ume are devoted to a description of it. A more brief view will be given here. There were then, it should be recalled to mind, no railroads leading out from the Eastern cities, from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, across all the great Valley of the Mississippi. The mountain ranges and the dense forests were great barriers then between New England and New York and the new Indiana and Michigan Territory. Until 1837 Michigan was not a state. There was in that year a canal from Troy to Buffalo. Some steam- boats were running on Lake Erie. There was a short horse-car railroad extending out from Toledo. Some vessels passed around, it was said "through the great lakes," and took freight to the young Chicago. Some 82 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. schooners sailed on Lake Michigan. Here, in this- northwest corner of Indiana, there were in 1830 no roads, except Indian trails, no bridges, no mills, no stores, except, perhaps, some Indian trading posts, no workshops of any kind. All the necessities and conveniences of our modern civilization were then to be made. The families came in strong covered wagons drawn sometimes by horses, but often by oxen. The men brought a few tools, especially axes and iron wedges, hammers, saws, augurs, gimblets, frows, and some planes. The women brought their needles, scissors, thimbles, pins, thread, yarn, spinning wheels, and some looms. Especially the men and boys brought their guns and bullet-molds, for on the grand Indian hunting grounds they were entering, and that game, which had been so abundant for the Indians, was as free and as abundant now for them. Game laws then were not. A few cooking utensils these pioneers brought with them, tea-kettles, bake-kettles, skillets, frying- pans; also a few plates, cups and saucers, knives, forks, and spoons. Their household furniture, tables, chairs, bedding, were very simple outfits for house- keeping in the wilderness. After a location was chosen, and that must be near water, the erection of a log cabin was the first work, and then a little clearing was made, for these first settlers staid by the trees. They built few cabins in the open prairie. In the heavy timber of our eastern border and in the groves or woodlands skirting the prairies, along the Tippecanoe and Iroquois, and near to Lake Michigan, and on the borders of the little lakes, here and there cabins were erected, and what was called "squatter life" commenced. It was a wild, PIONEER LIFE. a free, in some respects a rich, a delightful life. The land like the game was free to all. Each one could go when he wished, locate wherever he chose, take whatever he could find on the prairie or in the woods, provided he interfered with no Indian and with no other settler's rights. He could cut down trees, pasture his few cattle, cut grass for his winter's hay, plow and plant the soil anywhere, careful only not to infringe on any other who was a squatter like himself. Largely was each man a law unto himself. It was a large freedom. And well was it that these squatters brought with them the power of self-restraint ac- quired in their eastern homes. Well was it that they kept in practice where scarcely any law but that of God was over them, their moral and religious principles, and so formed virtuous and religious communities. From at first a dozen and then a score of pioneer families, there gathered in several hundred families scattered over this region before 1840 came, and for ten years there were some Indians left among them. But now we may, to some extent, look at their modes of life and see them in their homes, in their schools, at their social and religious gatherings, and at their work. After the cabin was erected, the main tool used in its construction having been "the woodman's axe," the few articles of furniture from the wagons were placed within upon the "'puncheon" floor, and the rude bedstead was constructed by boring, if one was fortu- nate enough to have that very needful frontier tool, an augur, a hole in one of the logs, about six feet from one corner, the proper height from the floor for a bedstead, and then another four or five feet from the corner, in a corresponding log that formed a right 84 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. angle with the other; then cutting two saplings and making from them the one sideboard and the foot- board for the bedstead frame, and cutting a good solid post for the upright and boring two holes in that, and inserting in these the prepared ends of the two pieces of saplings, the other ends also prepared being placed in the holes in the walls, and see ! the frame of the bed- stead was all up. It had one post. The head board was the log wall, one side was the log wall, one side and the foot-board were held up by the sapling post, and only a little more ingenuity was then needful to enable one to stretch a bed cord for the support of the hay-filled tick or mattress. But if the family had not been so thoughtful as to bring bed cords, which were in such general use in those days, then poles were cut and fastened to the side sapling and to the opposite log. This might require additional use of the augur, a tool next to the axe and saw in its usefulness. But the luxury of one of these primitive bedsteads, on one of which the writer of this slept on his first visit to Lake County, was not always enjoyed. What the pioneers called the "soft" or smooth side, the hewed side, of a puncheon answered quite well in those days for resting weary limbs. The ample fire-place, the chimney made of clay and sticks, the sticks split out with that other needful frontier instrument, a frow, and laid up as children make cob-houses, the clay between the layers and on the inside spread over thick and well to keep the wood from taking fire, — this fire-place furnished a place for cooking, and the blazing logs with hickory bark fur- nished some light at night. But more light was often needed. The most primitive method of obtaining this was, to take an iron tablespoon, fill the bowl nearly PIONEER LIFE. 85 full with some of the fat from the fried meat, insert the handle of the spoon between the logs among "the chinks" of the wall, lay a piece of cotton cloth in the fat, and light the end, and thus light was obtained by means of which, when visitors were present, some families took supper. But others used candles, hav- ing brought the molds with them, by means of which with candle wicking they made first-class tallow can- dles. But a more rapid way of making candles, and affording a pretty sight in a winter evening, was the (mite common way of dipping. Small wooden rods were easily made, and on these the wicks were placed cut the right length for a candle, having about six on each rod. The tallow, melted and quite hot, was in a large, deep vessel, and into this the women and girls dipped the wicks that were on the rods. At each dip the wick took on a coating of tallow and time was allowed for it to cool between the dips. When the melted tallow became too shallow to cover all the wick hot water was poured in to fill up the vessel, the melted tallow rising to the surface. Thus the process was continued till the full sized candle was formed. In this way, before the oil wells were dug or kerosene known our pioneer women made candles. And a good many dozen could thus be made in one evening. An American home needs fire by day and light at night, and with these were the pioneer homes pro- vided. There was much sewing and knitting to be done in the long winter evenings. No machines tc work with then. There were books to be read, and sometimes papers, for many of these families were far from being ignorant; and it seems remarkable now, looking back from our bright kerosene and electric lights, into those homes of sixty-five and sixty years 86 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. ago, how much was accomplished by what would now be called the dim light of those ''tallow-dips." The writer of this., a pioneer child once, remembers well when giving in his youth, to a small but cultivated audience, one of his earliest public addresses, and be- ing then closely confined to his manuscript, how on one side of him stood "Deacon Luce" and on the other "Deacon Cushing," each holding in his hand a candlestick with a tallow candle to shed light upon the written page. (It was a different kind of light that went forth that night from that written page.) A picture of that room, the young reader, the au- dience, and the candle bearers, would be amusing now. There was no humor about the reality then. Those two noble, Christian men have gone, and the pioneer days have gone; but to a few gray-haired men and women now, Ossian's words may be true, that the memory of days that have passed is like the music of Caryl, pleasant but mournful to the soul. Home life is an important part of true life, and so we have looked into those early homes to see that warmth and light and industry and thrift were there. The light of love was surely there. The cards and spinning wheels and the scissors and needles in expert hands, are doing their proper work, and the boys have bullets to mold and whip lashes to braid and axe handles to make. There is employment for all. It is now 1837 ; and wild as is all this region still, there are families scattered over it who are to build up civilized institutions and civil and religious life. The smoke that now goes up into the sky, curling above the tree tops on a clear, frosty morning, is no longer from Indian wigwams arid hunting parties PIONEER LIFE. 87 alone, but from the cabins of white men, mainly, who with their women and children have come "to pos- sess the land." Social life has commenced. With so- cial life ,the families becoming acquainted and neigh- borhoods forming, school life also begins. Some of the earliest schools were held in the homes ; but log school houses were soon erected, having the stick and clay chimneys, large fire-places, and windows without glass. The public school system of Indiana was quite in its infancy then, but persons were ap- pointed by the State to examine teachers. These ex- aminations were private or might be so. There was no law to the contrary. One could be examined alone whenever or wherever he could find the ex- aminer. Each examiner asked his own questions and these were not generally many or difficult. The ex- aminations were short. One half hour was time enough. The public money paid to the teach- ers was correspondingly small in amount. Some- times one dollar, sometimes two for each week, the teachers boarding in the different families free from expense. This feature of the teach- er's life had its advantages and pleasures, and also its inconveniences. It insured an acquaintanceship be- tween the teacher and the parents of the pupils, and was probably some help in the matter of school gov- ernment. The inconveniences need not be named.* ♦One young teacher had an experience of more than in- convenience. Perhaps it was her first school. The time came to board a few days with a certain family. She went home with the children to the house. The dog was cross, hut the children kept him off. When bed-time came the woman of the house, a widow, the mother of the children, showed the teacher to a little room well enough furnished 88 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. There were in these earliest schools some well educated and accomplished teachers. There are no more thoroughly educated teachers now than were some of them. Yet many of them, probably, had not received much special training. Those thoroughly educated did not teach long. They were required in other lines of activity. Connected with the early schools was a part of the social life of those pioneer years. The young people felt the need of society of some kind, and those of some intellectual and literary aspirations sought this in the spelling schools held evenings at their school houses, other exercises besides spelling being introduced. And then literary societies were formed, the exercises helping to educate the ambitious; the going to and from these gatherings, sometimes on horseback, sometimes in sleighs, giving to all the in- fluences of social intercourse, leading to the forming of acquaintances and of friendships, some of them proving to be life-long. In these early days there were two varieties of people among the comparatively few inhabitants, as and not specially lacking in neatness; but before leaving she very unwisely said to the teacher that no one had slept in that room since her husband died there' with the small- pox. It did not matter, so far as the imagination of that young girl was concerned, that months had passed since then, or that the room, which was somewhat probable, had been fumigated, washed, cleansed. She begged to be allowed to stay somewhere else, to lodge with the chil- dren, anywhere other than there. But no. There she must lodge. The door was closed upon her. That teacher said she prayed all night. Prayer kept reason on its throne. But it was a night of terror. She did not return to that house again. She has daughters now teachers in our schools. They have no such experiences. PIONEER LIFE. 89 nearly always in every community there will be, those of strong, abiding religious principles, and those car- ing more for pleasure and for the enjoyments of the present. Of this latter some, from the very first, so soon as social life may be said to have commenced, sought their social enjoyments in little dancing par- ties, whenever there were homes in which they could meet. For literary exercises and intellectual enjoy- ments they had not much relish. The families of the other variety of settlers, who came from eastern homes of culture and of church life, whose children did not attend these little dancing parties, commenced religious meetings, organized Sunday schools, and gave opportunities to all for at- tending to the higher and grander interests of hu- manity. Thus among the earliest of the pioneers the foundations were laid for the schools, the literary life, the intelligence, and the church life of the present. Those early religious gatherings were quite dif- ferent from most of the staid church life of the pres- ent. An appointment was made for preaching at some dwelling house or school house, and at the time ap- pointed a true pioneer community gathered. Some came on foot, some on horseback, some with ox teams, their styles of dress various, and if in the summer time not only the children but some of the men barefooted, their dogs coming with them, yet, all, the dogs excepted, giving an earnest attention to the services. There was no organ and no choir, but some one would lead in the singing, and, as books of the same kind were scarce, the hymns were often "lined," and a variety of voices would join in the sing- ing. If there was not so much harmony or melody in the singing then as now, there was probably quite as 90 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. much real devotion. There were, too, among these pioneers some accomplished singers, and when a few of these met, as occasionally they did, there was rich music, harmony, melody, devotion. The pioneer preachers, as a rule, were well in- structed men, men who were not brought up in the "back-woods." And they were devoted to their duties and to the interests of the people. The names of some of them will be found in other chapters. The singing schools were another interesting and characteristic feature of those early days. As social gatherings they were very enjoyable, and some of the teachers of vocal music in Porter and Lake coun- ties, as Mr. Beach, of Beebe's Grove, and W. H. Mc- Nutt, of Yellow Head, and Professor Tyson, of Bos- ton, were accomplished masters of their art. Among the social gatherings were conspicuous also the Fourth of July celebrations, quite different from the observances of these days. Let us look now, for a few moments, more mi- nutely at the everyday life of these settlers. After erecting their cabins the first great work was, to make rails. They needed to become rail-splitters so as to build fences. It took no little work and hard work to open up a farm, even on the prairies, much more in the woodlands and in the heavy timber. It re- quired more than ten thousand rails to put a good fence around a quarter of a section of land, one hun- dred and sixty acres. All the early fences were what is called the Virginia or worm fence, two lengths for each rod. The cost of splitting rails in 1840 was fifty cents for a hundred. The first plowing, called "breaking," which was turning over the prairie sod, required a large plow PIONEER LIFE. 91 and a heavy team. Six or even eight yoke of oxen were used, and such a team was called in the lan- guage of the pioneers, a breaking team, and the large plow with its wooden mold-board and sharp coulter was a breaking plow, used only for "breaking up" prairie. The furrows were wide — eighteen or twenty inches — and the green sward of the prairie turned over smoothly and beautifully. When the time came for the second and third plowings of this fertile land, it was found that the soil would stick to the mold- boards of all their plows, which rendered the next turning over of the furrow difficult. The earth was crowded out from its place the width of the plow, but was not fairly turned over. The farmers longed for a plow that, in their language, would "scour." The following reminiscence was given by a writer in a secular paper soon after the death of David Bradley, founder of the great agricultural manufactur- ing company located somewhat recently near Kanka- kee, Illinois. The writer says : "While visiting Jack Spitler's famous farm in Newton County, Indiana, he witnessed the trial of a Bradley plow. It was rep- resented that the new fangled implement would scour, and the trial drew a crowd from miles around. Much to the delight of the farmers present the plow did the work as represented, and they imagined that the zenith of agricultural implement invention had been reached. "Up to this time," the writer adds, "no manufacturer had succeeded in making a plow that would scour in heavy black or clay soil." The year of this trial is not given, but it was not far, prob- ably, from 1848. The farmers then had no idea, of the improvements that would be made in agricultural implements in the coming fifty years. In those early 92 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. days, before 1850, the plowmen largely were obliged to stop every little while and clean off the earth sticking on the mold-board, either with the heel or, better, with a little paddle which they carried along with them. And when they began to hold plows that would throw all the black soil off and remain bright and clean it is no wonder they were delighted. While this home work of fence building and break- ing was going on, some of the men were busy build- ing dams, and erecting saw mills and then grist mills. They imitated the already extinct beaver in making dams, but from them they had not learned skill, for many times these man-made dams would give way. But the mills were very useful, very need- ful. Each man took his grain to the mill, waiting sometimes many hours for his turn to come, and re- ceiving at length, if he took wheat, flour and shorts and bran. Every farmer could then eat bread from grain of his own raising. After provision was thus made for the first phys- ical wants, carding mills also having been erected, blacksmith shops built and furnished with tools and iron, shoemakers and a few tailors commencing their work, stores having been opened for both dry goods and groceries, in a few years, for all this pioneer work took time, attention began to be given to the erection of frame houses, the burning of brick, and then the erection of church buildings. In Lake County brick kilns date from 1840, six years after the first few families built their stick chimneys. The first church building in La Porte County commenced about 1836; in Porter about 1842; and in Lake in 1843. A few words ought to be given fo the earliest shel- PIONEER LIFE. 93 ters for domestic animals erected by the pioneers. The axe was the great tool before the saw mill could be built, and for the first stables posts were cut, set upright in the ground, poles were laid upon these, posts with natural crotches having been selected, and then cross poles or rails laid over all, and these were covered with green grass or hay. Grass was one thing which the pioneers had in abundance. For the sides, slanting poles or rails were set up and covered with hay. These stables were sufficiently warm, but they were dark, and so not good for the horses' eyes when the sun shone on the snow without. Before grain was raised to furnish straw the hogs provided their own beds by gathering leaves in their mouths and placing these in some sheltered nook. From 1830 to 1835, except in La Porte County and to some extent in White County, not many fami- lies settled in among the Indians. But from 1835 to 1840 settlements, here and there, were made over all the region north of the Kankakee River, hundreds of families coming in and taking up claims before the land sale of 1839. Yet the population was not large when the census of 1840 was taken. Steadily along, yet not rapidly, improvements took place from 1840 to 1845, m ^ny German families com- ing in and some of other nationalities, seeking homes on new, unbroken land, or buying the improvements of the true frontier families who were ready to pene- trate into the wilds of the more distant West. Along in these years some private schools were commenced and several churches were built and frame houses were erected with brick chimneys. And then the closing portion of pioneer life, from 1845 to 1850 rapidly passed. The railroads were corning; and from fron- tier to railroad life the change was very great. 94 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. On the whole, notwithstanding some privations, this early life was pleasant. Such freedom from con- ventionalities, such hospitality, such equality, such freedom from the tyranny of fashion, from corrup- tion in civil government, from millionaire influence, such an aspect everywhere of true American citizen- ship, such an abundance of wild game and of wild fruits free for all, although there was even then some wrong-doing, it is no wonder that some look almost regretfully back to those good old days. Pleasant and some thrilling recollections of the wild animals of the early years belong to. those who were pioneer children then. It took these wild ani- mals, especially the quails and grouse and wolves and deer, so abundant in those days, some little time to learn that some new occupants were taking posses- sion of their haunts, and when the wolves would come suddenly, in the day time, into a field of corn, and the deer would come suddenly upon a settler's cabin, while the children were delighted, these animals were certainly surprised. It was for the children a thrilling experience of this rich life, when in the evening, returning home from some spelling school or literary society, they heard the sudden, quick, sharp barking of the wolves. While the pioneer children were not generally timid, two or three wolves could do enough howling to quicken tht flow of their blood and hasten their foot-steps. Yet it was a sound which some of the New England born children loved well to hear. The pioneers sometimes had large "drive" hunts. A good example of these was one in White County in 1840, in Big Creek Township. The boundaries of the hunting ground were, on the north, Monon Creek ; PIONEER LIFE. 95 on the east, the Tippecanoe River ; on the south, the Wabash; on the west, the county line. At eight o'clock in the morning the men and boys started along the outskirts of this large area, with no guns in their hands, as they were only to scare up the game and send the deer and the wolves, from grove and prairie, inward to the center. They were to meet at two o'clock at Reynold's Grove. There scaffolds had been erected, and on those were the sharp shooters with rifles and ammunition. As that afternoon hour approached, from each direction the startled deer and frightened wolves began to appear, and soon the sharp reports of the rifles reached the ears of the distant boys and men. On every side of those elevated stands the deer fell, and when the riders and footmen reached this central place they collected fifty deer as the result of that day's chase, and found many dead wolves stretched upon the ground. How many broke the ranks and escaped no one could accurately tell. In some of these hunts, when not carefully con- ducted, most of the enclosed game would escape.* The common mode of hunting deer was not what is called driving, but what hunters called "still hunt- ing" or sometimes called "stalking." No noise was made, no dogs were used to track them up. But some- *Deer will rush quickly by the excited hunter. I came near being run over, in my youth, by a large drove of startled deer, as I chanced to be, one day, in their run- way in the West Creek woods. There was no time to count their number, but had they been crowded together like buffalo they would have trampled the young hunter under their feet. It was a beautiful and a thrilling sight, as, one after another, they bounded by, almost within reach of one's very hands. T. H. B. 96 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. times a man would mount a horse from the back of which he could shoot, and having on the neck of the horse a bell, would start up a herd of deer and follow them up with his horse and bell as best he could. The theory was, and a fact it proved to be, that the deer would in a few hours become so accustomed to the sound of the bell and the sight of the horse that the hunter could approach near enough to make a sure shot. Then he could strap the deer on his horse behind him and return to his home. The time may come, in another generation or two, when no eye-witnesses are living, that the large num- bers of deer which traditions will say were often seen together, will be counted only as hunter's tales, and not entitled to belief ; but that those beautiful creatures that added so much life to the woodlands and the prairies Were here in large numbers, is now beyond any question. There are some living who have seen them. It is a well attested fact that when men were putting on the roof of what for many years was known as the "Rockwell House," in Crown Point, they saw- coming out from Brown's Point, two miles north- ward, and passing across the open prairie to School Grove, one mile southeastward, a herd of deer, num- bering, as well as they could count them, one hun- dred and eleven. In 1843 an( l m J &44 as man y as seventy deer, it is claimed, could be seen at one time on the prairies in Newton and Jasper counties ; and Mr. David Nowels, one of the substantial citizens of Rensselaer, says that he has seen as many as seventy-five at one time. While not a noted hunter, as his 1 father was, he has PIONEER LIFE. 97 killed as many as five deer in one day. He is au- thority also for the statement that, in those earlier years of pioneer life, good raccoon skins, black, would bring from two to three dollars each, and a good, large mink skin would sell for seven dollars, and a large otter skin would sometimes bring ten dollars. Musk- rat skins were not in so great demand.* The facts are well attested that others have seen, some of whom are yet living, from twenty to forty and fifty deer in a single herd or drove, either quietly feeding, or in that beautiful and rapid motion which has given to us the comparison, one "runs like a deer." Some few noted hunters were among the pioneers, equal, probably, in their success, to Ossian's "hunters of the deer/' One of these was V. Morgan, of Pulaski County, Jefferson Township. The number of deer that he killed is not exactly known, but it was esti- mated at four hundred. The last deer killed in that township, according to the traditions, were shot in the winter of 1880 and 1881. Of these there were only three or four. There can be no exaggeration in asserting that some sixty and seventy years ago there were deer here not only by the hundreds but by the thousands ; as there were the prairie chickens or pinnated grouse here thousands upon thousands, and wild ducks and wild geese and wild pigeons, surely by the millions. ♦Conversation in a visit October 16, 1899. CHAPTER VI. COUNTY ORGANIZATIONS. I. By an act of the Indiana Legislature, approved January 9, 1832, a certain area was to be from and after April 1, 1832, known as La Porte County. This area, according to the copy of the act examined, was thus described : "Beginning at the State line which divides the State of Indiana and Michigan Territory, and at the northwest corner of township number thirty-eight north, range number four west of the [second] principal meridian, thence running east with said State line to the center of range number one west of said meridian ; thence south twenty-two miles , thence west, parallel with said State line, twenty-one miles; thence north to the place of beginning." The northwest corner of La Porte County, it thus appears, like that of the State, is in Lake Michigan, and it also appears that the Legislature formed into a county some land, a strip twelve miles in width which had not then been purchased from the Indians. Since that time an addition has been made to the southern part of the county and a small area has been added on the east, so that now the Kankakee River forms most of the southern and a part of the eastern boundary. Commissioners of the new county were soon elected, Chapel W. Brown, Jesse Morgan, and Elijah H. Brown; also George Thomas was elected clerk, and Benjamin McCarty, sheriff. The commissioners COUNTY ORGANIZATIONS. 99 met May 28, 1832. They divided the county into three townships, and made of each a commissioner's district. A Circuit Court, probably in 1832, commenced its jurisdiction and its sessions. The judges until 185 1, when the new Constitution was adopted, were : Gus- tavus A. Evarts, Samuel C. Sample, John B. Niles, Ebenezer M. Chamberlain, and Robert Lowry. In 1833 Benjamin McCaity was probate judge. No record of the proceedings of the first court have been found for this work, but for some sixty- eight years civil and criminal cases have been dis- posed of, year by year, for the most part, it is to be hoped, not only according to law but equity. The judges of the La Porte Circuit, after 185 1 to 1880, were: Judges Stanfield, Dewitt, Osborn, Stan- held, and Noyes. 2. Next, as to its organization, in the order of time, was White County, organized by act of the Leg- islature July 19, 1834. On that day county commis- sioners already appointed met at the house of George A. Spencer, and formed four townships and three commissioners' districts. These townships were called Prairie, Big Creek, Jackson, and Union. Elec- tions for justices of the peace, those necessary officers in civil government, were ordered to be held at the houses of William Woods, George A. Spencer, Daniel Dale, and M. Gray, in August, 1834. On September 5, 1834, the county seat was lo- cated by three commissioners, and, evidently remem- bering Thomas Jefferson as the early American '"sage," the place was named Monticello. The first term of the White County Circuit Court was held in October, 1834, at the house of George A. Spencer. 100 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Only the associate judges were "on the bench." The sheriff was Aaron Hicks; clerk, William Sill. No cases were tried. Business postponed till the April term in 1835. J onn R- Porter was then present as presiding judge. Seven indictments were returned. One was for retailing intoxicating drink to Indians; one for illegally marking hogs; and one for setting fire to a prairie. In these years were three judges, two called asso- ciate or side judges, and these, having little to do, were not required to be lawyers or to have much knowledge of law. Their opinions as to justice and right were of value. The county thus commencing its civil life was named after Colonel Isaac White, an Illinois soldier, who was killed in the noted battle of Tippecanoe. Its area is five hundred and four square miles. There were, at its first settlement, oak openings ; some tim- ber land ; and, in the southwestern part, prairie. It contained some limestone rock, and some shale of what the geologists call the Devonian age, and "un- derlying lime rock of the upper Silurian." The fall of the Tippecanoe River is said to be about four feet to a mile, and the river furnishes much water power, as well as containing many fish. 3. The third of these counties to have a civil or- ganization was Porter, over the area of which as well as of that which became Lake County, the county commissioners of La Porte County seem to have ex- ercised some jurisdiction, having in March, 1835, divided it into three townships, Waverly and Morgan extending to the center of range six, and Ross includ- ing all that lay west of the line running through the center of range six. These commissioners also or- COUNTY ORGANIZATIONS. 101 dcrcd an election at that same time to be held in these townships. In the returns of this election, for Ross Township, one Lake County name is found, William B. Crooks, receiving twenty-eight votes for justice of the peace. George Cline in Morgan Town- ship for the same office received twenty-six votes, and in Waverly, Elijah Casteel, eleven. So that, in some sort, civil government commenced in 1835 in what be- came Porter and also Lake County. (In 1837 Will- iam B. Crooks was elected an associate judge for Lake County,) By an act of the State Legislature it was enacted, that after February 1, 1836, a certain "tract of coun- try" should "constitute the county of Porter,'' thus defined: "Commencing at the northwest corner of La Porte County, thence running south to the Kan- kakee River, thence west with the bed of said river to the center of range 7, thence north to the State line, thence east to the place of beginning." It is not said, north to Lake Michigan, but to the 'State line." At the same session it was enacted, in the same act, that "all that part of the country that lies north of the Kankakee River and west of the county of Porter within the State of Indiana, shall form and con- stitute a new county" to be called Lake. As sheriff for Porter County Benjamin Saylor was appointed, and an election for county officers was held February 23, 1836, twenty-six votes were that day cast at the house of William Gossett, fifty-five at the house of Isaac Morgan, twenty-four at the house of Morris Wilson, thirty-five at the house of John Spur- lock, and forty at the house of J. G. Jackson. Elected as county commissioners were : John Safford> Benjamin N. Spencer, and Noah Fonts ; 102 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. county clerk, George W. Turner; recorder, Cyrus Spurlock ; associate judges, L. G. Jackson and James Blair. The commissioners met April 12, 1836, and di- vided the county into ten townships. At that term they also ordered elections in each township for jus- tices, and appointed three assessors, one John Adams, was for the attached territory, Ross Township or Lake County. In June, 1836, the county seat of Porter County was located by three commissioners appointed by the State Legislature. They selected a place called Por- tersville at that time, where town lots had been laid off, but where no house had then been buiit. This paper town was on the "southwest quarter of section 24, township 35 north, range 6 west/' owned by Ben- jamin McCarty. This proposed town was represented at that time by the Portersville Land Company, of which Benjamin McCarty, Enoch [S.] McCarty, John Walker, William Walker, James Laughlin, John Say- lor, Abram A. Hall, and J. F. D. Lanier were mem- bers. "How the land company had its origin is now a matter of conjecture." "Whether the other members of the company bought their shares from Benjamin McCarty, or whether they were a gift to them in order to secure their influence, is not known."* Benjamin McCarty, who had been probate judge in La Porte County, who was afterwards prominent in Lake County, was fortunate in securing land in the cen- ter of the county. *Rev. Robert Beer in " Porter and Lake," 1882. COUNTY ORGANIZATIONS. 103 In October, 1836, was Held the first Porter County court, presiding judge, Samuel C. Sample.* This court was held in the house of John Saylor, in the new county seat, where before the year, 1836, closed, there were, it is said, eight houses, some made of logs and some small frame buildings. 4. Next in the order of organization was the County of Lake, already named by the Legislature, and declared by an act of Legislature January 18, 1837, to be an independent county after February 15, 1837. Lake County, therefore, commenced its independ- ent, organic existence February 16, 1837. March 8, Henry Wells was commissioned as sheriff, and an election for county officers was held March 28. As illustrating the mail facilities of those days it is on record that "a special messenger, John Russell, was sent to Indianapolis to obtain the appointment of a sheriff and authority to hold an election. He made the trip on foot and outstripped the mail.* Officers elected March 28, 1837: — William Clark and William B. Crooks, associate judges ; Amsi L. Ball, Stephen P. Stringham, Thomas Wiles, commissioners ; W. A. W. Holton, recorder ; Solon Robinson, clerk; John Russell, assessor. The county had been divided into three townships, North, Center, and South, before its organization; justices of the peace were elected for each township; "In North Township, Peyton Russell ; in Center, Hor- ace Taylor, at Cedar Lake, Milo Robinson; and in the South, F. W. Bryant. At the August election, ♦Solon Robinson was a juror. ♦Lake County, 1872. 104 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Luman A. Fowler was chosen for sheriff and Robert Wilkinson for probate judge.* In October of this year the first county circuit court was held by Judge Sample and Associate Judge Clark. A log building, designed for a court house, and long afterward used for that and other purposes, was built in the summer of 1837 by Solon Robinson and his brother, Milo Robinson. In 1839 commissioners ap- pointed, as was customary, by the Legislature, located the county seat at Liverpool, on Deep River, in the northwestern part of the county, on section 24, town- ship 36, range 8, about three miles from the county line and four from Lake Michigan. Dr. Calvin Lilley, on the northeast bank of the Red Cedar Lake, and Solon Robinson, at his village, named at first Lake Court House, had both been applicants, along with George Earle, of Liverpool, for the location. There was so much dissatisfaction among the settlers at the idea of having their county seat in a corner of the county, that a new location was ordered. In the meantime Dr. Lilley died, and his place came into the hands of Judge Benjamin McCarty, who had been successful in giving a county seat lo- cation to Porter County, and was now, with his large family, a resident in Lake. He laid off town lots, called his home town West Point, and was against Solon Robinson a competitor for the new location. But he was not now in the center of the new county, Solon Robinson was ; and the commissioners, Jesse Tomlinson and Edward Moore, of Marion County, Henry Barclay, of Pulaski, Joshua Lindsey, of White, and Daniel Doale, of Carroll County, determined *There were two pioneers named Robert Wilkinson. T. H. B. COUNTY ORGANIZATIONS. 105 that this time the location should be in the center of the county. They therefore located the county seat at Lake Court House, which soon after took the name of Crown Point. This was in June, 1840. Solon Robinson and Judge William Clark were trie pro- prietors of the new town, which was on section 8, township 34, range 8, as near as could well be to the "geographical center of the county." Area of Lake County, according to Solon Robinson, "five hundred and eight sections of land, about four hundred of which are dry tillable ground."* 5. Jasper. This county, but then including the present Newton and Benton counties, was organized in 1838. It contained then an area of thirteen hundred square miles, and the southern part, which in 1840 became Benton County, was said to include some of the best land in Indiana. Then the large sweep of the Grand Prairie came in at Parrish Grove, and in 1848 this was from "Sugar" to that grove almost a perfect wild of very fertile, unbroken prairie.* In 1838, the Indians roamed over it "almost un- disturbed in all directions," dotted only here and there, was this broad area, "by a solitary cabin." In January, 1838, the county commissioners, ap- pointed, met at Robert Alexander's in Parrish Grove. They ordered that the courts should afterwards be held at George W. Spitler's, if the voters consented, and for some time at Spitler's home the courts were ♦Lake County Claim Register. *I crossed this prairie region, staid over night in this grove in the fall of 1848, on the way from the Red Cedar Lake to Crawfordsville, and it was a memorable journey. T..H. B. 106 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. held, till of Jasper County proper, Rensselaer became the county seat. In March, 1839, two townships were marked out by the commissioners, one called Newton, the other Pinkamink, and an election for May 1, was ordered, to be held at the house of Joseph D. Yeoman, in New- ton, and at the house of William Donahoe, in Pink- amink. The first session of the Jasper circuit court was held at Spitler's, now in Newton County, Judge Isaac Naylor presiding; Joseph A. Wright, afterward Gov- ernor of Indiana, prosecuting attorney; George W. Spitler, clerk; associate judges, James T. Timmons and Matthew Terwilliger. Present as an attorney at this first term of court was Rufus A. Lockwood, after- ward a noted lawyer who established the claim of John C. Fremont to his Mariposa estate receiving for his fee one hundred thousand dollars. The first county commissioners were, Joseph Smith, Amos W T hite, and Frederick Renoyer. This first court room in George W. Spitler's house is said to have been sixteen feet square, with the ordinary puncheon floor, on which at night the judges, lawyers, and jury all lodged. In February, 1839, was held the first session of the Jasper Probate Court. Record: "Adjourned — there being no business before the court." In April, 1840, a place at first called Newton, afterwards, Rensselaer, became the county seat. The first marriage was in the Renoyer Settlement, the ceremony being performed by Squire Jones, of Mud Creek, whose home was thirty miles distant, and the license having been obtained at Williamsport, in Warren County, south of what became Benton County, fifty miles from the house' of the Renoyers. COUNTY ORGANIZATIONS. 107 The first grist mill was erected in 1840, by James C. Van Rensselaer, which was considered, at that time, the best mill northwest of Logansport. Dr. John Clark is named as the first physician. Jasper County, in 1840, comprising then the pres- ent counties of Newton, Benton, and Jasper, returned 138 polls, assessed at $20,347. As late as 1850 the State Gazetteer said: "J as P er is the largest county in the State and contains about 975 square miles ; but Beaver "Lake, the Kankakee Marshes, and the Grand Prairie, occupy so large a portion of it that its settle- ment and improvement have hitherto proceeded slowly." In 1840 the population was 1,267; m I ^5° about 3,000." The principal early settlements were five : the set- tlement at the Rapids of the Iroquois ; the Forks Set- tlement, at the union of the Iroquois and Pinkamink ; the Blue Grass Settlement ; the Carpenter Settlement, which became afterward, Remington ; and the Saltillo and Davidsonville Settlement. The State road from Williamsport to Winamac went through Saltillo. This settlement was made about 1836. John Gillam and Joseph Mcjimsey early settlers. The area of Jasper after Newton was set off was reduced to five hundred and fifty square miles. It was named after Sergeant Jasper, of Marion's Band in the time of the Revolution. What are called by some of the scientific students, ancient river beds, lie between the Kankakee and the Iroquois valleys. These are from three hundred to twelve hundred feet wide, with low ridges of white and yellow sand on each side. Burr oak, white oak, hickory, and other trees are a native growth. White Sulphur springs are near Rensselaer and there is also an artesian well of 108 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. sulphureted water. The land lies over a bed of lime- stone of what the geologists call the Upper Silurian age. From the surface outcrop lime is burned, and lower down good sand rock for building is obtained. Groves of sugar maple where the Indians made sugar were along the Iroquois River. 6. Pulaski. This county was organized by act of the Legislature, February 18, 1839. Governor Wallace appointed George P. Terry for sheriff. At the May election Peter Demoss, John A. Davis, and Jesse Coppick were chosen for commissioners, John Pearson for clerk, and John A. Davis for recorder. This county was named in honor of Count Pulaski, one of the noble Polanders who aided the Americans in the War of the Revolution, who fell at the assault upon Savannah in 1779. Many are familiar with Long- fellow's poem ''Pulaski's Banner." Names in our land often come into singular companionship. The place selected for the county seat of Pulaski bears the name Winamac, the name of a Pottawatomie Indian chief, whose place of residence on the Tippecanoe River had been selected for a town by a company of men of whom- the following names have been found : John Pearson, Wm. Polk, J. Jackson, John Brown and John B. Niles. Their offer the commissioners accepted and there located the county seat, May 6, 1839. It is said that the wife of chief Winamac was a white woman who had been made a captive in her girlhood. The bones of Winamac, it is further said, now re- pose beneath the Methodist meeting house in the town which perpetuates his name. The surface of this county is mainly quite level. Into the southwestern extends an arm of the Grand Prairie. COUNTY ORGANIZATIONS. 109 In the eastern part was originally timber, walnut ash, oak, and other valuable timber growth. Then, going westward, came oak openings. The prairie re- gion, with many "fly meadows," was next. The small prairies were called, Dry, Northwestern, Fox Grape, Pearsons, and Olivers. Deer, other game and fur bearing animals were abundant. Markets were dis- tant. Eastward was the Wabash & Erie Canal, after that was opened up for business and trade, which was the nearest grain and other produce market. The next was Michigan City or Chicago, ninety-two miles distant and rivers and marshes and sand and mud be- tween, and not one "gravel road." Cattle raising, al- most of necessity, became the great occupation. They could transport themselves to market. There was a mill in Carroll County and one at Logansport, in Cass County, to which the early settlers had access. A record of the first court has not been found. 7. Starke County has an area of three hundred and six square miles. It was named after a general of the Revolution. It was organized by act of the Legislature taking it out from Marshall County. In April, 1850, county commissioners were elected. John W. P. Hopkins, George Esty, William Parker. They met at the house of Mrs. Rachel A. Tillman, on the south bank of Yellow River. Her house was used for county purposes for some years. The next county officers elected were: Sheriff, Jacob I. W ampler; Auditor, J. G. Black ; Clerk, Stephen Jackson, Senior ; Recorder, Jacob Bozarth; Treasurer, Jacob Tillman; County Agent, C. S. Tibbits. May 19, 185 1, was held the first term of the Starke Circuit Court. Held at Mrs. Tillman's. Judge E. M. Chamberlain ; associates, Samuel Burk and George 110 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Milroy. One indictment was found. That was for hog stealing and the defendant was acquitted. Hog stealing in those days was very different from horse stealing. April i, 1850, the county seat was located. There was then no town wnere the place was selected, but town lots were laid out in June and the place was called Knox. Some of the first things in Starke County, accord- ing to the records found, were the following: The first boy born, Tipton Lindsay, 1836. The first burial in the county was of Thomas Robb, who was frozen to death while out hunting and was buried in a canoe. The first cnurch building was erected by the United Brethren in 1853 ; the second was built by the Methodists in Knox in 1856. The first minis- ters in the county were, "Elder Munson," Methodist ; "Elder Ross, United Brethren; and Rev. James Peele, "Christian." The first physicians, 185 1, Dr. Solomon Ward, Dr. Baldwin, Dr. Charles Humphreys. First lawyers, 1852, Judge Willoughby, M. McCormick. The first paper, the Starke County Press, pub- lished May, 1861, Joseph A. Berry, editor. Demo- cratic ; succeeding editors, James H. Adair, Napoleon Rogers, William Burns, Boyles & Good, and Oliver Musselman. The name Press was changed to Ledger. 8. The last of our eight divisions to become an in- dependent county was Newton. Area about four hun- dred and twenty-five square miles. In December, 1857, a petition was presented to the Jasper County Board of Commissioners that the area in ranges 8, 9, and 10, from township 26, to the Kan- kakee River, might become a new county. The peti- tion was granted, and Thomas R. Barker was ap- COUNTY ORGANIZATIONS. Ill pointed by the Jasper board as a sheriff, empowered to administer the oath of office to the new county of- ficers April 21, i860. In December, 1859, a place called Kent had been selected for the new county seat, a place afterward called Kentland, and at this time containing only two buildings. Here the elected of- ficers met to take the oath of office. They were : Will- iam Russell, Michael Coffelt, Thomas R. Barker, commissioners ; Zachariah Spitler, clerk ; Alexander Sharp, auditor ; Samuel McCullough, treasurer ; Elijah J. Shriver, sheriff ; A. W. Shideler, surveyor. In i860 a court house was built costing eighteen hundred dollars. The first term of court was held August 27, i860. Charles H. Test, judge; John L. Miller, prose- cuting attorney. It thus appears that not until i860 were all the eight counties of North-Western Indiana independent and separate as counties, each with its own civil juris- diction. The years of organization and commencement of courts, lawyers, judges, juries, and civil cases, were: 1832, 1834, 1836, 1837, 1838, 1839, ^o, and i860. The years of settlement commenced : La Porte, 1829; White, 1829; Pulaski, 1830; Newton, 1832; Porter, 1833; Lake, 1834; Jasper, 1834; Starke, 1835. CHAPTER VII. OUR LAKES AND STREAMS. The counties of Lake and Porter, if extending northward to the boundary line of Indiana, have in their limits a good many square miles of the area of Lake Michigan. And when the pioneers came that water was very clear and pure. No sewers from cities, no streams of filth, no decaying garbage, had gone into its waters. But besides quite a share in that great lake, there were in 1830 many small* beautiful lakes, with clear, pure water, the homes in summer, or in the spring and autumn time, of wild fowl, and a con- tinuous home for muskrats, for mink, and some of them for otter. In La Porte County the number of small lakes has been given from fifty up to one hun- dred, but many of these, probably, were properly marshes with some open, or clear water in the center. In a marsh proper, a prairie marsh, grass grows, sometimes rushes, sometimes even pond lilies ; but the larger marshes in early times usually had in the cen- ter open water where there was no grass, and in this open water one pair or more o? wild ducks might generally be found in the springtime. The more noted and the larger lakes of La Porte County are : Hudson, Pine, Clear, Stone, Fish, and Mud lakes. Fish Lake, in Lincoln Township, has three divisions, Upper Mud, 'Upper Fish, and Lower Mud. Mud Lake proper is an expansion of the Kan- OUR LAKES AND STREAMS. 118 kakee River, as also is English Lake, which is between La Porte and Starke counties. The streams of La Porte are mostly small, the Lit- tle Kankakee, Mill Creek, these entering the Kan- kakee; Trail Creek, Spring Creek, and many small ones in Cool Spring, Springfielci, and Galena town- ships, flowing northward to Lake Michigan. In describing Lincoln Township General Packard says : "Fish Lake, near the center of Lincoln, is of very peculiar shape. It is divided into four parts con- nected by narrow passages or straits, each of which have received distinctive names. The extreme upper part is called Upper Mud Lake, and is nearly circular in form with the outlet towards the northwest into Upper Fish Lake. This part is much larger, and curves so as almost to double back upon itself and has its outlet towards the southwest into Fish Lake which is almost one mile in length, and is connected by a nar- row passage with Lower Mud Lake. The outlet of the entire body is into the Little Kankakee. Upper Mud Lake is on the south side of section sixteen; Upper Fish Lake is in sections sixteen and seven- teen; Fish Lake is mostly in section twenty; Lower Mud Lake is in section twenty and twenty-nine. There are several other smaller lakes in Lincoln, iso- lated and having no outlet. 7 ' In Porter County are some sixteen small lakes, the more noted ones being Flint Lake, Clear Lake, Mud Lake, Lake Eliza, Long Lake, Quinn Lake, Bull's Eye Lake, and Sager's Lake. The streams are : The Calumet coming from La Porte County and flow- ing across into Lake, Fort Creek, Fish Creek, Coffee Creek, and Salt Creek, flowing northward; Wolf 114 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Creek, Sandy Hook Creek, and Crooked Creek, flow- ing into the Kankakee. In Lake County are not many lakes. Berry Lake, Lake George, and part of Wolf Lake, are in the north- west ; part of Long Lake is in the northeast ; the Red Cedar Lake, the most noted one and the most beauti- ful one, six miles southwest from Crown Point ; Fancher Lake, Lake Seven, and Lemon Lake, are the other lakes of this county. "Cedar Lake" is the name commonly given to the lake named above, called in this work Red Cedar Lake, to distinguish it from a lake in Starke County called Cedar Lake. But to avoid the confusion of similar names the Starke County lake has of late been called Bass Lake. Both these lakes are pleasure resorts. On the Lake County Cedar Lake, also called "The Lake of the Red Cedars," is Monon Park, which may need some fur- ther mention. The streams of Lake County are : The noted Calumet, Deep River, Turkey Creek, and Deer Creek, whose waters reach Lake Michigan ; and Eagle Creek, Cedar Creek, and West Creek, Stoney Creek, Spring Run, and Willow Brook, also a little stream fed by springs, Plum Brook, the waters of which reach the Kankakee River, and so pass on to the Missis- sippi. Passing across the Kankakee the principal lakes of Newton County are or were : Beaver Lake, Little Lake, and Mud Lake. Beaver Lake covered nearly one township, num- bered 30 in range 9. It was found to be shallow and was drained several years ago by a deep ditch some six miles in length taking the water into the Kan- kakee River. Twelve feet was, in places, the depth of the lake. The boys and men obtained quantities of OUR LAKES AND STREAMS. 115 fish when it was drained. The great ditches on each side of the Kankakee River have changed very much the natural water beds and courses. One of the streams is Beaver Creek. Not far away is the belt of woodland known as Beaver Woods. These names indicate the existence here once of beaver, and here was quite a favorite Indian resort. Jasper County has few if any real lakes. It has one considerable stream called Carpenter's Creek, also Curtis Creek. The Iroquois, with its tributary, the Pinkamink, is its river, and this flows across Newton County into Illinois. It now runs into the Kanka- kee ; but according to the earlier geographies the Kan- kakee discharged its waters into the Iroquois. Pulaski County seems not to be a region of lakes, but it has for its large streams the beautiful Tippe- canoe River and the large Monon Creek. White County also has few or no proper lakes, but its streams are many. Besides the Tippecanoe, there are the Big Monon, the Little Monon, Moot's Creek, Pike Creek, Honey Creek, Big Creek, and Little Mound Creek. Starke County has one quite noted lake formerly called Cedar Lake; for the last few years it is called Bass Lake. It is in length, lying nearly northeast and southwest, about two and a half miles and about one mile and a half across its southwestern expanse. Its shape is quite different from the Red Cedar Lake of Lake County, although like that lake it has abounded in fish and is something of a pleasure resort. The other lakes of Starke County are: Koontz Lake, in the northeast, about three-quarters of a mile in length, Lake Rothermel and Hartz Lake in the southwest corner of the county, one on section 35, 116 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. one on 36, and Round Eake three miles northwest of Bass or Cedar Lake. The streams of Starke are now for the most part turned into ditches. Their beauty of course is spoiled. So far as beauty is concerned, these large and small ditches which have cut up the entire Indiana part of the Kankakee Valley region, have spoiled what was once, in its natural water ways, attractive and picturesque. Although not like mountain streams and rivulets, the water in our streams was usually clear, their natural courses were winding, giving the curved lines of beauty, and the green herbage that fringed them was abundant. Now, nearly all is changed by the spade and the dredging machine of man's invention. The water in springtime runs off in straight lines, man's object being to get it from the land into the river and ocean as quickly as possible. He wants the use of all the land surface. And so thousands and thousands of acres where once the wild fowls had their resorts and where muskrats and mink and otter had their homes, are now pasture land and oat fields, and corn fields, and the ditches mar the landscape's beauty. CHAPTER VIII. THE LAKE MICHIGAN WATERSHED LINE. As we leave the lakes and streams, the natural and artificial water courses, it may be a matter of interest to some, in another generation, to have the dividing line between Lake Michigan waters and Mississippi River waters traced with some degree of definiteness, for the drying up of water courses and the draining by means of ditches have already almost consigned to oblivion the names and the winding bed.s of some of the small streams that were well known to the Illinois and Indiana pioneers. This line will not be given as though taken from a surveyor's field notes, yet it will be sufficiently accurate for the purpose for which it is here inserted. The substance of it may be found in a published volume of the papers read before the Indiana Acad- emy of Science, but this is not taken from that vol- ume. This line, commencing at the head waters of the Des Plaines River in Wisconsin, a few miles from the shore of Lake Michigan, passes southward, winding slightly, passing within eight miles of Lake Michi- gan, and then, just west of Chicago, passes by the south arm of the peculiar Chicago River, and going still southward passes west of Blue Island eight miles west of the Indiana State line. It then passes southwest around the head waters of Rock Creek, and 118 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. then southeastward around Thorn Creek, which is its most southern point in Illinois and is near Eagle Lake, two miles west of the Indiana line and directly west of the Lake County village of Brunswick and twenty-three miles south of the State line monument on the shore of Lake Michigan. The line now passes northward and enters Lake County in section 36, township 35, range 10, near the head waters of West Creek. It then bears southeastward to a high ridge one-fourth of a mile north of Red Cedar Lake, and passes along a low, curv- ing ridge, on which was once a wagon road, and which is the most beautiful and well de- fined portion of the line in Lake County. It passes now three miles over timber table-land, winding slightly, three miles eastward and nearly two miles south of the center of Crown Point, it passes across section 17, then 16, township 34, range 8, and then south on the east side of the old Stoney Creek. It then passes east across sections 35 and 36 and into section 31, where is now LeRoy. It here turns north- ward, having reached its extreme southern limit in Indiana, now not quite eighteen miles from Lake Michigan. Winding here around the head of the south branch of Deep River, passing between that and Eagle Creek, bearing eastward, south of Deer Creek, and northward, it leaves Lake County almost due east of the center of Crown Point, distant seven and a half miles and nearly a mile and a half south of its point of entrance into the county. It soon passes north of a little lake from which flows Eagle Creek. It now passes eastward and then a little south, wind- ing around Salt Creek, three miles and a half south of Valparaiso between ranges 5 and 6, having crossed THE LAKE MICHIGAN WATERSHED LINE. 119 section 12 in range 5. It passes, now, about due north just east of Valparaiso to Flint Lake, three miles north of the center of that city and the source of its water supply, and winding around the north of Flint Lake it passes on in a northwest direction to West- ville, and then passing northeastward to a ridge two miles north of La Porte and eleven miles from Lake Michigan, which ridge is said to be, according to some barometer, two hundred and seventy feet above Lake Michigan. Passing north of the lakes around the city of La Porte, and north of the head waters of the Little Kankakee, and near the line of the railroad track, near by the village of Rolling Prairie, passing eastward but a few miles from the north boundary of Indiana, it comes into Portage Township, St. Jo- seph County, where on the portage between the Kan- kakee and St. Joseph rivers this notice of it will end. Here seems to be a suitable place to notice those "lake ridges" which cross La Porte, Porter, and Lake counties, "which are nearly parallel to the present lake shore." According to Professor Cox they mark the ancient shore lines from which, time after time, the lake has receded. Five of these continuous sand ridges Professor Cox has counted. The last one in- ward is that ridge along which now runs the water- shed line, the highest ridge of land in La Porte County. The theory of formation of these ridges is this : That the sand which the dashing lake waves cast upon the beach, sparkling in their apparent play- fulness sometimes as they dance along, and then breaking in their fury far up on the beach when the fierce north wind sends them rolling in, in their might, this sand soon becomes dry. "Then the wind takes it and drives it like drifting snow to the first 120 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. barrier of trees and bushes, when it is checked, and be- gins to accumulate, forming a ridge. The vegeta- tion, well rooted, reproduces itself, growing to the top as the sand rises, and finally a range of hills is the result of the combined action of wave and wind on the moving particles of sand." In this way, most probably, was that quite large ridge of sand formed at the northeast of the Red Cedar Lake in Lake County, by the influence of the strong southwest winds that so often prevail, and not, as some have imagined, by the melting there of some great iceberg. All the sand ridges in Lake County seem to be due to the action of water, or of wind and water com- bined. Most of them lie north, but some are south of the watershed. Professor Cox found no evidences that the lakes around La Porte were ever a part of our Lake Michi- gan; but that its southern limit there was the high ridge distant now eleven miles. ' h t - Nv xC X CHAPTER IX. TOWNSHIPS AND STATISTICS. The maps in this book wiTT give the names and show the locations of the townships in some of the counties ; but they may fittingly all be named here. Of La Porte County they are: Commencing at the northeast, Hudson, Galena, Springfield, Michi- gan, Cool Spring, Center, Kankakee, Wills, Lincoln, Pleasant, Scipio, New Durham, Clinton, Noble, Union, Johnson, Hanna, Cass, and Dewey — 19. Of Porter County: Pine, Westchester, Portage, Liberty, and Jackson; Washington. Center, and Union; Porter and Morgan; Pleasant and Boone — 12. Of Lake they are: Hobart, Calumet, North; St. Johns, Ross; Winfield, Center, Hanover; West Creek, Cedar Creek, and Eagle Creek — 11. Of Newton: Lincoln, Lake, McClellan, Colfax; Jackson, Beaver ; Washington, Iroquois ; Grant and Jefferson — 10. Of Jasper: Kankakee, AVheatfield, Keener. Union, Walker, Gillam; Barkley, Newton, Marion, Hanging Grove; Milroy, Jordan, Carpenter — 13. Of White : Cass, Liberty, Monon ; Princeton, Honey Creek; Union, Jackson; West Point, Big Creek, Prairie, and Round Grove — 11. Of Pulaski : Tippecanoe, Franklin, Rich Grove, Cass ; White Post, Jefferson, Monroe, Harrison ; Van Buren, Indian Creek, Beaver, and "Salem — 12, 122 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. Of Starke the townships are : Oregon, Davis ; Jackson, Center, Washington; North Bend, Califor- nia; Wayne and Rail Road — 9. In all 97 townships. Having looked at some of the physical features of this region, having looked over the names of some of the early settlers, having reviewed some characteris- tics of pioneer life, and having seen the beginnings of organic civil life, before entering upon the records and changes in the last half of this century, the fol- lowing table, which will show the growth of twenty years of pioneer life on the north side and south side of the Kankakee River, is worthy of attention. Population, Farms, and Families in 1850 — Counties. Pop. Farms. Families. Lake 3,991 423 715 Porter 5,234 467 885 La Porte 12,145 1,116 2,150 Starke 557 53 101 Puiaski 2,595 2 ^6 454 White 4761 458 825 Jasper (then including New- ton) 3,540 343 592 Total 3 2 > 82 3 3^46 5>7 22 At this time there were in these counties, included in the population as given above, of free blacks, in Lake 1, in Porter 5, in La Porte 78, in Starke o, in Pulaski o, in White 9, in Jasper, including Newton 1. It seems families were larger then than now, there being between five and six members in each family. We now average about four in a family. Our towns at this date were all small. In 1850, the largest one, Michigan City, had a population of 999, ranking next in the State to Columbus, which TOWNSHIPS AND STATISTICS. 123 then had as its population 1,008. At that time New Albany, the largest city in the State, had of inhabi- tants 8,181, and Indianapolis, ranking second, 8,091. There were then in Indiana twenty-three other towns, counting Columbus, with a population above one thousand, but only nine others having over two thou- sand. The railroads had not cut up North-Western Indiana when the census of 1850 was taken. Indiana then had ninety-one counties. CHAPTER X. MODERN OR RAILROAD LIFE— 1850 to 1900. With the opening of the last half of the Nineteenth Century there came from the eastward railroad build- ers, pushing their roads onward to the young city of Chicago; and before these roads could reach that city they must cross the counties of La Porte, Porter, and Lake. When the children and the deer and the water fowls heard the whistle of the engines that, drew the freight trains, pioneer life came to an end. A short review of that variety of life has, in a former chapter, been given ; and in this, by means of contrast and of historic records, an attempt will be made to give some true impression of the railroad life or mod- ern life of the last fifty years. So soon as these earliest roads, the Michigan Cen- tral and Michigan Southern, passed through, Michi- gan City and Chicago, where the schooners could take away grain, were no longer the only markets, for La Porte, and Old Porter or Chesterton, and Lake Sta- tion, and Dyer, were railroad stations where goods could be landed and from which grain could be shipped. Miss Florence Pratt, in a paper on the Presby- terian history, in "Lake County 1884," assigning a reason why the church building, commenced in 1845, was not completed till 1847, sa y s : "But money was very scarce, the country wild with Very few roads MODERN OR RAILROAD LIFE. 125 or horses. Lumber was hard to get, and must be brought on ox-carts from Chicago or Porter County." And so for twelve years the people of Crown Point held their religious meetings in their homes and in their log court house ; yet, before they heard the first railroad whistle, they did "arise and build" two frame meeting houses. But now, when the railroad stations became shipping points, lumber was brought in and the true era of frame buildings, for dwellings and for churches, commenced. The log cabins, comfortable as they had been made, became out-houses, stables and cribs and granaries, and the family homes were clean, new, sightly, frame dwellings with ceiled or plastered walls, with good brick chimneys an outside that could be painted and inside walls that were not daubed with clay. Carpets soon were on some of the floors, large mirrors leaned out from the white walls, furniture such as the log cabins had not sufficient room to contain now graced the more spacious apart- ments, instruments of music began to be seen and heard in many a home, and comforts and even luxur- ies found their way wherever the freight cars could unload goods and take on grain and hay, and cattle and sheep and hogs, and butter and eggs and poultry. Soon there was much to be sent off, and much, for all the farming community, was brought back in re- turn. Changes in modes of living, in dress, in furni- ture, and then in farming implements, were not, of course, instantaneous, but they came very rapidly along. Instead of beating out the wheat and oats with flails, or treading it out on smooth ground floors with oxen or horses according to the old Oriental method, as was needful to be done at first, thresh- ing machines came to the farms, even before the 126 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. railroads were built. And then, instead of cleaning out the chaff by means of the wind, fanning mills came into use, and one was needed on every farm; and next the separator machine came, and so one im- provement followed another as the harvest times came round. For a few years in each July many would go from distant neighborhoods to the large grain fields on Door Prairie, a good cradler receiving sometimes two dollars for a day's work, and one who could rake and bind and keep up with the cradler receiving the same. From three to four acres a day was a good day's work. But the mowers came, the reapers came, unloaded from the cars they were taken out to the farms, and men no longer swung the cradles hour after hour and day after day. And, at length, the last triumph of human skill in this line seemed to be reached when the great harvesting machines came, the self-binders, cutting the grain, raking it into bun- dles, binding those bundles, all done by a machine drawn by horses, driven by one man. In the earliest years of settlement, and through all the pioneer period, oxen were quite generally used as draft animals. They were on almost every farm ; they drew the plows, the wagons, the harrows, the sleds. They were on the roads drawing the heavy loads to the market towns. They were strong, pa- tient, hardy, quite safe, not taking fright and running away, could live on rough food with not much shelter ; but generally they were slow. A few could walk, and draw a plow, along with ordinary horses, but only a few. On the road an ox team did well to make three miles an hour. A more true average would probably be two and a half miles per hour. It took but a few mo- ments to yoke them. The yoke was put on the neck of MODERN OR RAILROAD LIFE. 127 the ox on the right, called the "off ox," first, the bow put in its place and keyed ; then the other end of the yoke was held up, and it was instructive to see how the other ox, when well trained, would walk up and put his neck under the yoke, in the proper place for the bow to come up under his throat to the yoke, and there to be fastened with a wooden, possibly with an iron, key. When well treated, they were gentle, pa- tient, faithful animals, as for many generations, along a line of thousands of years, their predecessors had given their strength and endurance, in many lands, to the service of man. But now, as here the modern railroad era opened, and changes in modes of agriculture and living took place, horses for farm work and road work began largely to take the place of oxen. Mowers and then reapers came to the farms as early as 1855 and then onward, and for these and all the modern improve- ments that followed horses were found to be more serviceable. So in some neighborhoods in Lake County, the yoke was removed from the necks of the oxen as early as 1855 ; in other neighborhoods not until 1862 and 1863, when large quantities of beef be- gan to be wanted in the country; and when the year 1870 was reached oxen as working animals had al- most disappeared north of the Kankakee River. One farmer sold his last yoke for $150. In Jasper and Newton and Starke, as newer counties and not feeling so soon the influence of the railroads, the use of oxen continued into later years. There are many children and young people now who never saw a yoke of oxen ; many young farmers who would not know how to yoke them, to unyoke them, or to drive them ; to whom the ox-chains, and 128 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. the tongue bolts, and the ox-whips for directing the movements of three or four yoke of oxen in one team, would be quite strange farm furniture. To them, many allusions to oxen in sacred and classic story have little significance and beauty. Muzzling the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn, they do not understand ; of how much land a yoke of oxen would plow in a day, they have not much idea. Some things we have lost, while many things we have gained. Well and faithfully through all the pioneer time, these truly noble domestic animals served well in their day. Each one, as a rule, had a name, and old is the teaching, the ox knoweth his owner, but horses and steam and electricity have quite fully taken the place now of these once trusty servants of man. Their necks are free from the yoke and their shoulders from the bow. An ox-yoke is itself a curiosity now. Our yokes were generally shorter, heavier, with more work put upon them, and not so straight as those used in the Pine Belt of the South, where oxen still do much heavy work. Returning once more to the pioneer period, peo- ple travelled then on horseback, or in ox-wagons, and in large, two horse wagons which were used for any farm purposes. Buggies and carriages had not, to much extent, been brought in. But soon, when the railroad period opened, the young men purchased buggies and trained their horses for the harness in- stead of the saddle, and soon the farmers had buggies, and in these later years, good covered carriages, so that even the stylish carriage and fine horses .of Joseph Leiter, then the millionaire, the brother of "the first lady of India," who in the summer of 1897 was ac- customed to drive every week from Crown Point to the MODERN OR RAILROAD LIFE. 129 Red Cedar Lake, were but little in advance of the car- riages and horses of our own citizens who count no higher up than into the ten thousands. And where once, not so long ago, at our public gatherings were the ox teams and heavy farm wagons, now, when the hundreds and the thousands gather, covered buggies and close carriages are the general rule. As La Porte County is the oldest, the most populous, the wealthiest of these counties, there, as might be expected, costly carriages made their ap- pearance first. It was quite a struggle for a few years for the farmers to make headway and secure the conveniences which the railroads supplied, for many were in debt for their land, and prices for farm products were rather low, and money not very abundant, until the changes came from i860 and onward, as the nation was entering into the scenes of the great conflict. Those who are only about forty-five years of age can- not realize how financial matters were managed be- fore any "greenbacks" were issued. But since that change took place in the currency of the nation, changes in prices being connected with it, great im- provements have taken place in the homes of the farm- ers. Little remains now on the farms of the earlier farming implements. The entire mode of planting and sowing, of cultivating crops and of gathering, has changed. It is singular how so many once familiar objects Have disappeared. In the more costly and elegant mansions now, beautiful and costly and massive, like those in the large cities of the land, may be seen elegant furniture, costly engravings and beautiful pictures upon the walls, on the center tables, papers of various kinds, 130 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. choice magazines, the best published in the world, and near at hand, accessible readily to the family, and to visitors, the standard dictionaries and encyclo- pedias and large libraries of the noted and standard English and American books. There is as yet no private dwelling that has cost half a million, but there are, even in this corner of Indiana, some few who may be called millionaires, although as yet no city is here having of inhabitants twenty thousand. About fifteen thousand is now the limit. - In the counties south of the Kankakee River, rail- road life commenced in i860, and not fully until 1865, when the road now called the Pan Handle passed through Monticello and North Judson direct to Chi- cago ; and but a small part of Newton County felt the direct influence of the age of steam until the Chicago & Eastern Illinois road passed through Morocco in 1889. Lake Village is yet, as the capital of Florida used to be called, ''inland." Along these years, from 1850 to 1900, when one railroad after another was built across our borders, and stations were established nearer to the homes of many of the farmers, and villages and towns were growing, changes and quite rapid improvements were constantly going on among all the farming commu- nities. Not only were new farming implements intro- duced, not only w r ere much more showy and commod- ious dwelling houses and barns and granaries con- structed, not only were stylish vehicles often seen in the carriage houses of the farmers, but the social life, the school life, the church life, all were materially changed, and the farmers were, many of them, ac- cumulating much property. The domestic animals were largely on the increase, except in the exclusively MODERN OR RAILROAD LIFE. 131 grain producing neighborhoods, and such large addi- tions had been made to the fixed capital ana also to the circulating or loose capital in all this region of Indiana, that a stranger, a visitor, might well say, this is a largely prosperous, a contented and happy community. Yet it may after all be questioned whether real happiness or satisfaction, as connected with the ac- tivities of life, is any greater now, than in the early pioneer days. The men and the women and the very children were founders and builders then, looking eagerly often, surely hopefully for- ward, to the times of greater abundance and enlarged comforts, which they felt sure would come ; but the very activity and effort were large elements in the enjoyments of that life. When one has reached the position of assured competence possessed by one of the grand pioneer men, a mem- ber of one of our old settler associations, who ex- pressed Himself in this figurative language, that he had come to the condition in which he did not care ''whether school kept or not," it soon becomes evident that after all he is not perfectly contented. Well said that learned and wise philosopher, Sir William Ham- ilton, "It is ever the contest that pleases us and not the victory." And he quotes the "great Pascal" as saying : "In life we always believe that we are seek- ing repose, while in reality, all that we ever seek is agitation." And he quotes Jean Paul Richter as say- ing: "It is not the goal, but the course, which makes us happy." And he quotes, in the same line of senti- ment, Malebranche, one of "the profoundest thinkers of modern times," as saying : "If I held truth captive in my hand, I should open my hand and let it fly, in 132 Northwestern iKdiana. order that I might again pursue and capture it." And on this same principle, the enjoyment to be found in well directed human activity, if a young man in this, our modern railroad life, could choose for himself an inherited abundance or a reasonably sure inherited or acquired ability to gain for himself that abundance, he would do well to let the inherited abundance go. Like the philosopher, let truth fly in order to have the opportunity to pursue and capture., So here it may be repeated, it is quite questionable whether, with all the present abundance, the comforts, the luxuries of the present, there has come any greater happiness than was enjoyed in the old pioneer days. The fact, however, is, the prosperous farmers as well as the business men in towns and cities are not "sleeping in their carriages," to quote a figure from the once noted Chesterfield, but are eager and active to still gain more and more. Trie pioneer activity was a very healthful activity. Perhaps there is a little fever- heat connected with the rush of railroad life now. To one interested in studying human nature and in observing the workings of character, the effects of the change of surroundings which the railroad era brought were sometimes surprising and sometimes ? musing. Those who in their log building's had been hospitable and courteous, refined and polished in manners, continued the same kindly attentions to the needs or wishes of others. But some who in their log cabins had been hospitable, although unrefined, when occupying their well built mansions with plas- tered walls and painted surfaces and gilded furniture, seemed to forget that ever they were inside of logs and mud, and were warmed by the fire connected with stick chimneys. But good, common sense character- MODERN OR RAILROAD LIFE 133 ized the majority of those who had known pioneer life, and only some of their young people could be charged with "putting on airs." Bringing comforts, conveniences, luxuries, rail- roads also brought some undesirable new features into both country and town life. They tended to in- crease the number of saloons, to enlarge the bounds of Sabbath desecration, to encourage the escape of criminals ; and they opened the way for "tramps," a class of men unknown in the early days; and con- nected with them, if not of them, came "strikes." Some actual history of the years 1893 an d 1894 will show their great convenience in facilitating transport- ation, in aiding travel ; and also show them in con- nection with the conduct of a great strike. In the year 1893, while the Columbian Exposi- tion was open, the citizens of Lake, Porter and La Porte counties, enjoyed great facilities for attending that remarkable World's Fair, at Jackson Park, and witnessing the wealth of beauty and magnificence that could be seen that summer in the White City. It was estimated that fully two thousand school children of Lake County spent some Tittle time in that great exposition. A part only of the public schools re- ported an attendance ot nine hundred and seventy- three. Probably never again will so many people pass over Lake County in one month on the railroad lines which enter Chicago, as passed in September of 1893. The opportunities of that year, the enjoyment of the rich life of that summer, can never by thousands in northwestern Indiana be forgotten, as for six months, so near to their own borders, the great interest was concentrated of the civilized world. The year of 1894 was vastly different. The fol- 134 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. lowing quoted paragraph is from the Historical Sec- retary's report at the Old Settlers' Association of Lake County, read in August, 1894: This year has been no ordinary year although vastly unlike the last. Over all our land it has been a year of uncertainty, of unrest, of some conflict; and, to some extent, in all these we of Lake County have shared. There have been the remarkable inactivity of the American Congress, the great stagnation in min- ing and manufactures, the Pullman boycott, the Debs' strikes, the miners' strikes, the assassination of the French president, and a war commenced between the two great powers of Eastern Asia, China and Japan. In our narrow limits we have felt but little change from these events which have made this year mem- orable ; but in the north part of the county for a time the civil officers were unable to maintain law and order, and United States troops and some eight hun- dred state militia upheld the law and secured railroad transportation and the passage of the mails in the city of Hammond, quelling disturbances also in East Chi- cago and Whiting. For a time in Crown Point, on both roads, no trains could go through to Chicago, and passenger trains lay by here for many hours, re- minding us of the scenes during our great snow block- ade. The tents of the soldiers, the soldiers them- selves on guard duty, the presence of the soldiers with their arms in various places, the guard around the Erie station, the gatling gun on the platform, caused Hammond to appear for a number of days as a city under martial law. It was in our county a new expe- rience to have almost a regiment of soldiers under arms to preserve order, and to be able to reach the Erie station passenger room- only as one passed the sentry and the corporal of the guard. We may well hope that such times w T ill not often come. No mail, no travel, no claily papers, no intercourse with Chi- cago. Some of the Crown Point groeerymen had supplies brought out from Chicago by teams as was customary before railroads were built. Happily this MODERN OR RAILROAD LIFE. 135 condition of things did not last long. The President of the United States exercised his authority, the gov- ernors of Indiana and Illinois asserted theirs, troops poured into Chicago, and the gathering of mobs, the lawlessness, the destruction of property, the impossi- bility of moving trains in or out of the city ceased. Historical truth and justice to a part of the citizens of Hammond seem to require some further record here. In one of the city papers, the heading of the article, "To maintain Law," a notice appeared of a meeting of citizens of Hammond, in the hall of the Sons of Veterans, from which notice some extracts and statements are taken. "The first speaker was ex-Secretary of State, Charles F. Griffin, who, in a speech that was full of patriotism and loyalty, paid a graceful compliment to President Cleveland and Gov- ernor Matthews." He spoke for half an hour, and said, when closing : "The law-abiding citizens of this city have been outraged and their rights trampled upon. The fair name of Hammond and Lake County has been black- ened by the work of rioters." "The methods em- ployed by the mob that had possession of Hammond last week forcibly remind one of the days of bush- whacking. It is high time the citizens take action." He then read some resolutions, which after dis- cussion were adopted, which strongly condemned the action of the rioters, their upholders, and of some local officials, and which approved heartily the ac- tion of the President and of the Governor "in furnish- ing military protection to life and property." The names of others given as taking an active part in this meeting of citizens who pledged themselves to the enforcement of law, are the following : Pro- fessor W. C. Belman,Rev. F. W. Herzberger, G. P. 136 NORTHWESTERN INDIANA. C. Newman, J. B. Woods, Rev. August Peter, Colonel Le Grand T. Meyer, one of the Governor's staff, W. G. Friendly, and E. E. Beck, who was chairman of the meeting. It was a time of no little excitement; the results in Chicago were then uncertain; Hammond was the same as a part of Chicago in its locality; and some who were called Hammond citizens had held a meet- ing not long before, heartily endorsing "the conduct" of the officials whose action the citizens at this meet- ing condemned, and denouncing the sending of troops by the President to quell the disturbances. One of the resolutions, therefore, as read by Hon. C. F. Griffin, contained this strong language : "Resolved, That the business men and law abiding citizens of Hammond repudiate with disgust and alarm the disloyal senti- ments expressed by the resolutions of the so-called citizens meeting of last Tuesday, and assert that they are not indorsed by the masses of Hammond citizens." Quiet was at length restored, the soldiers were removed from Hammond, and trains could pass and re-pass without molestation. In this record of an experience as a part of modern railroad life, that life which in its different aspects and different stages it is the design of this chapter to de- pict, it is not strange that in Hammond at this time there should have been two very different positions taken ; for, unlike Michigan City and La Porte, which were early settled localities, unlike Winamac, Rennse- laer, Monticello, and Valparaiso, early settled locali- ties all, Hammond, a city so recently having become populous, separated from a part of Chicago and so from Illinois only by an air line, partakes very little in the characteristics of Lake County and of Indiana. MODERN OR RAILROAD LIFE. 137 Geographically in Lake County and in Indiana, few of its thousands of inhabitants have a share in the traditions and associations, as they had no share in the trials and privations and successes, of the earlier inhabitants of Northern Indiana, and so, in what is called the nature of things, they cannot be expected to be identified, to much extent, with the interests of Lake County. They form a community of their own, and must be expected to have the characteristics of the manufacturing portions of Chicago, a part of which, locally, Hammond is. But a few descendants of quite early settlers, as Charles F. Griffin, A. Murray Turner, and others from Crown Point and from old settled parts of the county, have homes now in that rapidly growing and enterprising city, while the thou- sands are, for Lake County and for Indiana, "new comers." And this same fact has its bearings in mak- ing not only Hammond, but East Chicago and Whit- ing with their gathered thousands, quite different from the other towns in North-Western Indiana. It should receive due consideration from those living in those three contiguous cities as well as from those out- side, especially as more than one half of the popu- lation of Lake County, as claimed, will no doubt this year be found inside of those three corporations and all living within about three miles of the city limits of Chicago. It is sufficiently easy to see how natural it was, at the time of the great Chicago strike, that two very different positions should be taken in Hammond. Leaving that not pleasant picture o