History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 6

Author: Williams bros., Cleveland, pub. [from old catalog]; Riddle, A. G. (Albert Gallatin), 1816-1902
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Williams brothers
Number of Pages: 574

USA > Iowa > Buchanan County > History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 6

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We will not attempt to describe the scene which fol- lowed-the angry rebukes of the father and the speech- less grief of the daughter. Suffice it to say that the former, when the storm had spent itself, apprehending no further trouble, at least for the present, and remembering his daughter's skill in the preparation of venison, bade her in a kinder tone to dry her tears and get him his supper. He was very hungry and very tired, and as night had set in before the repast was over, it had not long been finished when he lay down in his blanket and went to sleep. The dusky Pinicon, with eyes red with weeping, also retired, but not to sleep. She thought of many things; but especially she thought of the trysting place where she and her lover had so often met, and it occurred to her that, led by the sacred associations of the place, and perhaps by an undefined presentiment that she would follow him, he might now be awaiting her in that hallowed spot. At any rate it would not take her long to visit it herself, as it was but little more than a mile, partly through the oak openings and partly across the prairie. If she found him not, it would at least af- ford her a melancholy pleasure to be there alone, as she had so often been; and she could casily return to the wigwam before her father would awake. So she arose, wrapped her blanket around her and went quietly out. The October moon was shining brightly, and she had no difficulty in making her way to the well known spot. It

HISTORY OF BUCHANAN COUNTY, IOWA.

was just on the border of the grove where, in the shad- ow of a spreading oak, lay a huge rock, on which they were accustomed to sit in the deepening twilight, bewail- ing their unhappiness or discussing plans for bringing it to an end.

As soon as she came in sight of the tree she beheld a dark object beneath it, which she soon recognized as the form of her lover, the noble Wapsie. Almost at the same instant, he, too, beheld an indistinct figure gliding in and out among the shadows. At first he suspected that it might be a deer, and immediately became convinced that he was not mistaken-that it was his dear deer, Pinicon! He flew to meet her, and clasped her in his arms, ex- claiming: "Not even death shall ever part us more. Let us fly to my northern home, where parental tyranny can never separate us." And so, looking to the north star for guidance, as many duskier fugitives have since done, they set out upon their flight.

But they had not proceeded far when ominous sounds were heard in the distance behind them. They paused and listened, and soon distinguished angry voices. They turned and looked, and at first could discover nothing; · but a moment after they discovered four tall forms emerg- ing from the grove. "It is my father and the other chiefs," exclaimed the frightened Pinicon. "The river! the river ! Let us die rather than be taken!" The stream was about a mile to the west of them, and toward it they turned in eager flight, as if to reach it were life instead of death. Their pursuers perceived them at the same moment, and redoubled their speed. About half the distance was across the open prairie, and the rest through a grove of straggling trees. When the fugitives reached this grove the pursuing chiefs were so near that the trees afforded no concealment; and when the former arrived at the bank of the river, the latter were hardly a rod be- hind them. There was no time for the young hero (who is said to have been the best soloist of his tribe) to sing his death song, nor was any needed. The murmuring river was singing it even then, and, without waiting for encores, it was going to repeat it through all the coming days.

With one backward glance of mingled despair and forgiveness at the angry faces glaring upon them in the moonlight, the devoted lovers, clasped in each other's arms, leaped into the stream. The enraged father reached the bank only to behold them sinking, rising, struggling in the waves. At once his anger was changed to sorrowing love.

"Come back! come back!" he cried in grief, "Across the stormy water; And I'll forgive your Highland chief- My daughter ! O, my daughter !"

Too late! too late! The eloquent Indian words, reproduced centuries later in passable English by a Scotch poet, had scarcely died upon the air, when the two devoted lovers, casting another and more melting glance of forgiving love at the poor old despairing chief, weeping on the shore, sank in the engulfing waters to rise no more. The broken-hearted chief returned to his wigwam, a sadder and a wiser man. But his sadness

got the better of his wisdom, and ended his days. He never smiled again. A settled melancholy took posses- sion of his mind. The medicine men could do nothing to arrest his malady, and before spring bloomed again upon the prairies he sickened and died. But he left a will (no copy of which, we regret to say, has been pre- served) requiring that a memorial mound should be erected on the bank of the river, near where the lovers perished; and that the stream itself should forever after bear their united names, WAPSIPINICON. The mound, we believe, has been carried away by some of the tre- mendous freshets which characterize the stream; but the name, barbarous as it sounds to some fastidious ears, has come down to the present day, and will probably never wash out.

As this legend will suit any river whose name contains the requisite number of syllables, we suggest that it may be applied to the Maquoketa. We have not been able to find any interpretation of the Indian name given to that stream; but we have only to imagine that two Ind- ian lovers, Maquo and Keta, drowned themselves in its waters, and all the reasonable demands, both of ro- mance and of etymology, will be met and satisfied.

We hope the reader will not get impatient: we will try and let our balloon down in time for dinner. But as we are speaking of rivers, we cannot think of leaving the subject without saying a few words about

THEIR FREQUENT VARIATIONS.

What we have to say in regard to this matter will refer principally to the Wapsipinicon river, but will, of course, apply, mutatis mutandis, to all the other streams. The features of every landscape are always changing more or less rapidly, under the action of its watercourses. Every stream is liable to fluctuations. When rains are heavy, and general and long continued, it rises, overflows its banks or washes them away, changes its direction, makes new bends or cuts off old ones, covers green fields with beds of sand or gravel, washes away dams, bridges and other artificial structures, and scatters their debris along its banks. All of these changes, of course, tell upon the landscape. If we could take an accurate photograph of the scene that lies below us, and return again, in only a year's time and take another, we should find the two very perceptibly different, in consequence of the fluvial chan- ges brought about in that short interval.

Changeable as are streams in general, we think the Wapsipinicon is exceptionally so. The soil through which it flows is, for the most part, sandy, and there- fore drifts readily with every overflow. This fact makes it difficult to bridge in many places where bridges are very necessary. The first crossing of the river below In- dependence, is a place of this character. The stream, before reaching this point, makes a sudden deflection toward the east; and since the present bridge was built, the stream has changed its bed to such an extent, and the detrition of the bank has been so great at the south- ern extremity of the bridge, that it has been thought necessary (now that the old structure has become dilapi- dated, and a new and more substantial one is about

HISTORY OF BUCHANAN COUNTY, IOWA.

to be built), to cross the river forty rods below-al- though the road will have to turn that distance out of its direct course in order to reach the new crossing.

The contrast which the Wapsie presents, between its usual condition in midsummer, with the water shrunk far within its banks; the cattle standing in the shade in the middle of the current; and the entire stream passing through mill-flume on its way-and the condition in which it often finds itself in early spring, in the "June rise," or in the "January thaw,"-is about as great a con- trast as can be imagined. The Wapsie "with his back up" is always an imposing, and sometime seven a terrible, sight. If the stream freezes in a time of high water, and breaks up with heavy rains, look out for fearful floods, and much damage from floating ice. The writer of this will never forget the spectacle he witnessed at In- dependence, in the spring of 1871, in precisely such a conjecture as the one above mentioned. It had been a very cold winter, and the ice had formed to the thick- ness of three feet or more; consequently, when the "break up" came, the masses of ice that came crashing down the stream, were like floating islands.

The water was so deep that it made only a ripple as it passed over the mill-dam, which is some ten or twelve feet in height. Three or four ice breaks, placed above the dam, and consisting of large cribs filled with bowlders, were cut away by the immense ice shears that passed over them, as if they had been so many muskrat houses. The huge ice cakes, as they slid over the dam, just showed their thick edges as a token of their power, then dipped themselves gracefully, but majestically beneath the wave, lifted their monster forms again to the surface, and hurled themselves like battering rams against the piers of the bridge below. These, like the ice breaks mentioned above, were cribs built of large timber and filled with bowlders. The principal attack was upon the pier near- est to the eastern abutment. This, like the other (we believe there were but two), was protected by a wooden guard, built of heavy timbers and extending out into the water in the form of an angular inclined plane. Against this the huge masses of ice were hurled with such force that, sliding up the inclined plane to its summit, they fell back into the chaotic mass, sometimes with a dull, leaden thud, and sometimes with an explosive sound, like that of heavy ordnance. The guard was soon worn away, and then the giant rams came butting directly against the pier. The whole bridge trembled with every concussion. A cry goes up from the vast crowd of people gathered on the banks of the river, that the bridge is doomed. A breach is made in the crib. The bowlders begin to tum- ble out. The upper part of the pier settles down, and the floor of the bridge tips in that direction. The whole structure becomes more and more askew till suddenly the rest of the pier gives way, and that part of the bridge comes down with a tremendous crash. As the other pier and the abutments stood their ground, less than half the bridge was washed away; but the authorities wisely decided to remove the rest of the old structure and re- place it with another more substantial, and likely to be permanent. The result is the present iron bridge of two

spans, strong and graceful, resting upon two abutments and one immense pier, all of solid masonry, which, it is reasonably believed, no ice rams will ever be able to bat- ter down.

Having studied the Wapsie in his varying moods, all of which, from the peaceful to the furious, are both pic. turesque and poetic, we trust we shall be pardoned, even by the prosaic reader (if we have any such) for embody- ing our impressions and recollections of those moods in a rhyme which shall at least have the merit of appropri- ateness.

SONG OF THE WAPSIPINICON.

When vernal rains descend no more,

And summer skies are luminous;

He glides along each verdant shore

With murmurs softly fluminous.

The children sport upon the brink,

While sultry noontide hies away:

The thirsty kine go in to drink, And stand and whip the flies away.

The love-boats kiss the water's cheek,

When moon-lit nights begin again;

And rustic joys play hide and seek

Along the Wapsipinicon,

The sliding Wapsipinicon-

The gliding Wapsipinicon:

The rolly-poly, cheek-by-jowly, strolly Wapsipinicon.

But when the lowering clouds come back, And o'er the green earth frown again;

And all along his winding track

The summer rains come down again;

The waters, gathering from the bills And upland prairies far away,

Descend in thousand swollen rills That bear each hindering bar away.

The farmers round in terror wake

To hear the deluge din again,

And see a spreading, surging lake Where rolled the Wapsipinicon,

The welling Wapsipinicon- The swelling Wapsipinicon:

The washy, swashy, splishy-sploshy, sloshy Wapsipinicon.

But winter comes with icy chain To bind the north-land fast once more;

And Boreas, in a wild refrain, Breathes forth his bugle blast once more.

Then Wapsie dons his cloak of ice, Set round with snowy fur above;

And ne'er an ear, however nice, Can hear the water stir above.

The skaters, shod with flashing steel, Glide circling out and in again;

And joy, as sweet as sunimer's feel, Broods o'er the Wapsipinicon,

The white-bound Wapsipinicon- The tight-bound Wapsipinicon:

The snowing, knowing, stealthy-flowing, blowing Wapsipinicon.

But when he feels the touch of spring Through all his kindling pores again,

And vernal clouds their treasures fling Along his loosened shores again;

Upspringing from his wintry lair He hurls his frosty chains abroad,

Which fierce destruction madly bear Through vale and flooded plains abroad.

In aspect wild, in gesture grand, A blustering giant Finnegan, With ice shillelah in his hand, Goes forth the Wapsipinicon, The roaring Wapsipinicon- The pouring Wapsipinicon:

The dashing, clashing, wildly smashing, thrashing Wapsipinicon.

HISTORY OF BUCHANAN COUNTY, IOWA.

And thus, while seasons come and go, Through all the years voluminous, He marks their ever-changing flow With his own changes fluminous. The red men owned his verdant banks But shortly after time began,

Which white men took with little thanks Not long before this rhyme began. But while the tide of time flows on, Still, as old Saturn's minikin. Till earth, sun, moon and stars are gone, Shall flow the Wapsipinicon, The changing Wapsipinicon- The ranging Wapsipinicon:

The swopsy, whopsy, flipsy-flopsy, slopsy Wapsipinicon.

We fear that the reader may be getting a little weary of being kept so long "up in a balloon;" but, before de- scending to terra firma, we desire to take a cursory glance at the Buchanan

RAILROADS, VILLAGES AND TOWNSHIPS.

For a county whose chief town contains less than four thousand inhabitants, Buchanan possesses more than ordinary railroad facilities. The Dubuque & Sioux City road, now a division of the Illinois Central, passes through the centre of the county from east to west; and the Milwaukee division of the Burlington, Cedar Rapids & Northern passes through north and south, the most of the way a little west of the Central line. These roads furnish a convenient outlet for the surplus products of the county ; and a person wishing to make a journey in any direction, has but a short ride by private conveyance to reach one of these great public thoroughfares, which make direct connection with others leading to all parts of the country. In going from Independence, and parts adjacent, to Chicago, the great metropolis of the west, the traveller has choice of two competing routes-the one by way of Dubuque, and the other by Cedar Rapids. There are four passenger trains a day, two east and two west, on the Illinois Central, and several freight and mixed trains in each direction. On the Northern road there is one passenger and two or three regular freight trains each way. Besides all these regulars, there are frequent "wild trains" on both roads; so that there are not many minutes together, during the entire day, when, from our aerial lookout, we should not be able to see a train of cars, like some huge articulate animal, "dragging its slow length along," in one direction or another. We say "slow length," for, however swiftly a train may move as it dashes past one standing upon the border of the track, yet when the beholder is elevated, as we are, so as to take in many miles of the space over which the train is moving, its motion is retarded in proportion to the distance-just as the motions of the planets, though im- perceptibly rapid, are quite imperceptible across the in- terstellar spaces.

While we are speaking a train of about thirty cars, some of them loaded with produce and some with stock, leaves the Independence station, about three miles west and a little to the north of us. The huge engine comes on puffing, wheezing and panting with its Brobdignagian load. We hear the rumbling of the countless wheels, like "the voice of many waters," and the squeals of the

poor hogs, crowded into their narrow and uncomfortable encampments. The steam whistle, that agglomeration of unearthly sounds, yells out its alarm as it crosses the road below us; and vast clouds of stifling gas, belched forth from the huge smoke stack, rise through the air and envelop us in their sickening stench. Bah! We wonder if the Lunarians smell it. If they do, they must regard the earth as the very centre of the stygian do- minions.

The Illinois Central road, entering the county from the east, passes through the southern tier of sections in Fremont, Byron, Washington and Perry townships- making a curve to the south, while passing through Byron, so as to run, for about a mile, just below the north line of Liberty. The Burlington road, as you en- ter the county from the north, passes through the centre of Hazleton, Washington and Sumner; deflecting toward the east as it leaves the last-named township, cutting off the northeast corner of Homer and the southeast corner of Cono.

All the townships in this county coincide with the national surveys, except that the north part of Sumner (consisting of its upper tier of sections, together with a part of sections twelve and thirteen) is added to Washington- partly to accommodate the town of Independence, which having first been laid out in the latter township, soon extended itself across the line into the former-and partly to accommodate the people living near the county- seat.

The naming of the townships in this county presents a singular poetic coincidence, which has no parallel in the state; and probably none in the entire nation. The county, twenty-four miles square, is divided into sixteen townships, each six miles square. Hence there are four tiers, each containing four townships. Every township name consists of either two or three syllables with but one accent ; hence, when arranged as they appear on the map, they form a regular poetic stanza-what would technically be called a dimeter quatrainthus:

Fairbank, Hazleton; Buffalo, Madison, Perry, Washington; Byron, Fremont; Westburgh, Sumner; Liberty, Middlefield; Jefferson, Homer; Cono, Newton.

Of course, if these names are arranged in any other order of fours, a similiar stanza will be formed; but, after ringing all the possible changes upon them, we are con- vinced that the order in which they are found on the map is the most musical. Surely, those who had the charge of the township nomenclature in this county were skilful prosodists, or else "they builded wiser than they knew."

There are twelve villages in the county, including towns corporate, and cities so called. Five of these rail- road stations: viz., Independence, the capital in Wash- ington township, where the two roads cross, nestled among the oaks of the Wapsie, just below us; Winthrop, in Byron, toward the east, and Jesup in Perry, toward the west ; Hazleton station, in the township of that name, on the north, and Rowley in Homer, on the south. Afar to the northwest in the township of Fairbank, situated on the

HISTORY OF BUCHANAN COUNTY, IOWA.

Little Wapsie close to the Fayette county line, we see the smart village of Fairbank, which is getting sufficiently ambitious to look for a railroad in the near future. Let- ting the eye turn toward the east, passing over the well- wooded Otter creek, we come to the village, situated in the midst of the timber, growing small by degrees and beautifully less, from its contiguity (only about a mile away) to the railroad station, which has stolen its name, and is fast stealing its life. Passing on still to the east across Buffalo township, we come to the village of Buffalo Grove, situated in a fine belt of timber thus named, extending along Buffalo creek. We reckon the buffaloes must have been pretty thick here in early times. At any rate they are so now; and the present herd, though buffaloes only in name, will effectually prevent their shaggy precedessors from ever being forgotten.

Turning again toward the west, and tracing up the Wapsie from Independence for about ten miles, we come to the little village of Littleton, just below the mouth of the Little Wapsie. This is in the township of Perry. Retracing the course of the river, we come to Otterville, in Washington township, situated on Otter creek, about a mile from its mouth. Perry and Washington are the only townships that have two villages apiece, since Ha- zleton and Hazleton Station can hardly be considered two permanent and separate villages. Far down in the southwest corner of the county, in Jefferson township, near Lime creek, we espy the lonely little village of Brandon, which is separated farther from neighboring villages than any other in the county. And finally, sweeping with our vision across the open prairie, past Rowley Station on the Burlington road, in an eastly- northerly direction, we come to the oldest and next to the largest town in the county-the goodly village of Quasqueton, picturesquely located on the Wapsie in the township of Liberty, just within the southern border of the finest body of timber in the county. Thus, in our enumeration and location of the villages of the county, the first is last.

There are seven of the townships (lacking but one of being half of the entire number) that have as yet no villages-at least, none with plats duly laid out and re- corded. These are Westburgh, Sumner and Cono, and the whole of the eastern tier, viz: Madison, Fremont, Middlefield and Newton. Probably the time will come when every township will contain one or more of these centres of population and business. That time may be somewhat remote, since at present the population of the county is increasing very little, if at all; owing to the vast quantities of excellent, but unoccupied, land now being opened for settlement in the territories west of the Missouri. When the desirable lands west of us are as fully occupied as those of northern Iowa, the large farms in Buchanan county will begin to be subdivided, and the population will rapidly increase. Then the vil- lages already existing will increase in size and impor- tance, and new ones will be established as centres of commerce and manufactures, for the accommodation of the rural districts. Additional facilities for the transpor- tation of produce, and for intercommunication with oth

er parts of the country, will be needed; and the era of free turnpikes will dawn upon Iowa, as it has already dawned upon Ohio. New railroads will be built, some of them crossing, as do the present ones, in the goodly little city below us, which will have assumed by that time metropolitan dimensions. The surface of the county will be much more thickly dotted over with farm houses and barns, half hid among their sheltering groves. The State hospital for the insane, which now looms up in such striking proportions on that fine eminence, a little southwest of the city, will be no less conspicuous an object then than now; but the trees about it, which are as yet hardly perceptible in the distance, will have grown into a leafy screen, which, though partly conceal- ing, will only enhance, its beauty. The prairies will all have become enclosed fields, and the prairie fires, once so characteristic of Buchanan autumns, and now seen but rarely, will then be only a matter of history.

Just how long it will be before all these changes will occur, we would not undertake to predict ; but, proba- bly, if we should return to our present ærial out-look at the end of fifty years, we should be as much at a loss to recognize the landscape we should then see below us, as an aged Indian would be were he now with us, to recog- nize in the picture upon which we have been so long gazing, the scenery with which he was familiar fifty years ago.

The history of the railroad enterprises of the county will constitute a chapter by itself farther on ; and addi- tional notices will be given of the streams, townships and villages when we come to the township histories. But, for the present, we leave them, and relieve the reader, by letting out gas from our balloon and descend- ing once more to terra firma.

THE LAND SURVEYS.

The division of Buchanan county into townships is, as we have seen, immediately connected with the origi- nal survey of the land. A description, therefore, of the method by which the United States land surveys are made, will not be out of place in this chapter on the physical features of the county.

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History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 6

Author: Williams bros., Cleveland, pub. [from old catalog]; Riddle, A. G. (Albert Gallatin), 1816-1902 Publication date: 1881 Publisher: Cleveland, Williams brothers Number of Pages: 574

Author: Williams bros., Cleveland, pub. [from old catalog]; Riddle, A. G. (Albert Gallatin), 1816-1902
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Williams brothers
Number of Pages: 574