USA > Iowa > Lucas County > History of Lucas County, Iowa containing a history of the county, its cities, towns, etc > Part 42
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THE PIONEER.
Lo! here the smoke of cabins curled, The borders of the middle world; And mighty, hairy, half-wild men Sat down in silence, held at bay By mailed horse. Far away The red men's boundless borders lay, And lodges stood in legions there, Striped pyramids of painted men. What sturdy, uncommon men were these, These settlers hewing to the seas; Great, horny-handed men, and tan; Men blown from any border land; Men desperate and red of hand, And men in love, and men in debt,
*Joaquin Miller.
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And men who lived but to forget, And men whose very hearts had died, Who only sought these woods to hide Their wretchedness, held in vain! Yet every man among them stood Alone, along the sounding wood, And every man, somehow a man, A race of unnamed giants these, That moved like gods among the trees, So stern, so stubborn-browed and slow, With strength of black-maned buffalo, And each man notable and tall, A kindly and unconscious Saul, A sort of sullen Hercules. A star stood large and white awest, Then time uprose and testified;
They push'd the mailed woods aside, They toss'd the forests like a toy, That great, forgotten race of men, The boldest band that yet has been Together since the siege of Troy, And followed it-and found their rest.
What strength! What strife! What rude unrest! What shocks! What half shaped armies met! A mighty nation moving west, With all its steely sinews set Against a living forest. Here, The shouts, the shots of Pioneer!
The rended forests! rolling wheels, As if some half checked army reels, Recoils, redoubles, comes again, Loud sounding like a hurricane.
Oh bearded, stalwart, westmost men,
So tower like, so Gothic built! A kingdom won without the guilt
Of studied battles, that hath been
Your blood's inheritance, * Your heirs
Know not your tombs. The great plowshares Cleave softly through the mellow loam Where you have made eternal home. And set no sign.
Your epitaphs
Are written in furrows. Beauty laughs While through the green waves wandering Beside her love, slow gathering,
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White starry hearted, May time blooms Above your lowly level'd tombs; And then below the spotted sky She stops, she leans, she wonders why The ground is heaved and broken so, And why the grasses darker grow And droop, and trail like wounded wing. Yea, time, the grand old Harvester,
Has gathered you from wood and plain.
We call to you again, again; The rush and rumble of the car Comes back in answer. Deep and wide The wheels of progress have pass'd on; The silent Pioneer is gone, His ghost is moving down the trees, And now we push the memories, Of bluff, bold men who dared and died In foremost battle, quite aside.
Oh perfect Eden of the earth, In poppies sown, in harvest set; Oh sires, mothers of my west;
How shall we count your proud request? But yesterday you gave us birth; We eat your hard earned bread to-day, Nor toil, nor spin, nor make regret, But praise our pretty selves and say How great we are and all forget The still endurance of the rude Unpolished sons of solitude.
Prior to the year 1843, the soil of Lucas county belonged to the red man. Over it he hunted, and fished in its streams; and by his camp- fires his people danced and sang their songs, unmolested by the white man, save now and then an invader within their wild domain as a trap- per. But such invasions were speedily repelled, and the intruders driven back to their frontier cabins, with a menace that assured the pale-faced trespasser of severe treatment if his incursions should be repeated.
But subsequent to 1843, this beautiful domain passed, by treaty ratified March 23d of that year, to the ownership of the United States. By the terms of that treaty, the aboriginal occupants were given three years in which to remove beyond the Missouri river. Hence, early in the year 1846, while Iowa was yet a territory, and after the red man had been forced on toward the setting sun, and relinquished possession of the territory now covered by Lucas county, and in fact by all the state west, which he had occupied from a time to which the record of history nor tradition
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do not extend, the white man followed immediately upon his trail, and assumed possession of the coveted lands.
As already elsewhere noted, the first white people to thus enter within the bounds of Lucas county, were a party of Mormons. Many years ago, the founder of this religious sect, Joseph Smith, a native of Wayne county, New York, located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, in Hancock county, Illinois, and built up a town which they called Nauvoo. . Here they grew, and strengthened by accessions from Europe, until they assumed to exercise their self-established prerogatives in defiance of the established law. Here, too, they built a grand and imposing temple of ' worship. In their defiant aggressions against the constituted civil author- ities, they provoked a conflict with the citizens-the gentiles as they termed those who were not of their faith-not only in public sentiment, but in the maintenance of the civil authority of the county and state, which finally resulted in an open rupture. The feeling ran so high that the Mormon town was attacked on different occasions; in one of which their leader, Joseph Smith, was captured and incarcerated in the jail at Carthage, the county seat. In July, 1844, the jail was attacked by a mob, by whom Smith was murdered when in the act of escaping from a window. He was shot, and subsequently riddled with bullets. This cre- ated intense excitement among the people-culminated in a crisis. An effort was made to drive the mob across the river.
An attack was made upon the town of Nauvoo in 1845, so formidable, that a general exodus among its inhabitants was the result. The histo- rian, Lossing, gives a vivid account of the final exodus from Nauvoo, and their pilgrimage to Salt Lake, where they built their New Jerusa- lem, and still abide.
" In September, 1846, the last lingering Mormons at Nauvoo, Illinois, where they had built a splendid temple,* were driven away at the point of the bayo- net, by 1,600 troops. In February, preceding, some sixteen hundred men, · women and children, fearful of the wrath of the people around them, had crossed the Mississippi on the ice, and traveling with ox teams and on foot, they pene- trated the wilderness to the Indian country near Council Bluffs, on the Missouri The remnant, who started in autumn, many of whom were rich, men, feeble women and delicate girls, were compelled to traverse the same dreary region. The united host, under the guidance of Brigham Young, then temporal and spiritual leader, halted on the broad prairies of Missouri the following summer, turned up the virgin soil and planted. Here leaving a few to cultivate and gather for wanderers who might come after them, the host moved on, making the wilderness vocal with preaching and singing. Order marked every step of their progress, for the voice of Young, whom they regarded as a seer, was to them as
*Soon after Nauvoo was deserted by the Mormons, the winds hurled this temple to the ground. The stone was used for new buildings and street pavements by the subsequent population of the town .- Carl Cadmus.
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the voice of God. On they went, forming Tabernacle Camps, or tem- porary resting places in the wilderness. No obstacles impeded their progress- They forded swift-running streams, and bridged the deeper floods; crept up the great eastern slopes of the Rocky mountains, and from the summits of the Wasatch range, they beheld on the 20th of July, 1847, the valley where they were to rest and build a city, and the placid waters of the Great Salt Lake, glittering in the beams of the setting sun. To those weary wanderers this moun- tain top was a Pisgah. From it they saw the promised land-to them a scene of wondrous interest. Westward, lofty peaks, bathed in purple air, pierced the sky; and as far as the eye could reach, north and south, stretched the fertile Valley of Promise, and here and there the vapors of hot springs, gushing from rocky coverts, curled above the hills, like smoke from the hearth fires of home."
Many of these Mormon people did not cross the Missouri river, but tarried at different points in Iowa, as they happened to be attracted by them in their pilgrimage, toward their New Jerusalem. This county was in their route and when they struck the extreme northern bend in the Chariton river, some two miles southeast from the courthouse in the present town of Chariton, they camped for the night in the edge of the timber extending out from this bend or point. Some six families, includ- ing about thirty persons, were so delighted with the country about them that they concluded to stop here for the winter at least.
Therefore, in pursuance of this determination, they erected six shanties, constructed with unhewn logs which they thatched with poles and prairie grass, and made comfortable with mud, the ground being their floor, and dry prairie grass their mattresses for beds. They reached this point in the autumn of 1846, only a few months after the Sacs and Foxes had surren- dered final possession of the territory from the western limit of the Black Hawk purchase of 1832, and the treaty purchase of 1837, which was a line running north and south through the west tier of townships in Jefferson county, some six or ten miles east of the present town of Agency City, in Wapello county, to the Missouri river.
Here they remained for nearly a year as completely isolated from the outside world as the red men were who had so recently surrendered pos- session to them. With such stores as they brought with them, and with what they raised from the patches of ground which they planted the fol- lowing spring of 1847, they subsisted. But later in the summer of this year they determined not to make this place to which they had given the name of "Chariton Point," called after the river by that name, and the point it made in its pyramidal angle southeastward-their permanent abode; but to push forward in obedience to the promptings of their religious con- victions, and join many others of their faith who had gathered at what was then called Kanesville, but now Council Bluffs, which former name was given in honor of Dr. Kane, the famous Arctic explorer.
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From this point the Mormon throng thus gathered, including our early day Chariton Pointers, went forward to Salt Lake, their New Jerusalem. Tradition tells us that these Mormon sojourners were the first white peo- ple who ever trod the soil of Lucas county.
This year, however, dates the first permanent settlement of Lucas county, which was made by William McDermit, a native of the green Isle of Erin, in September, 1847, near the eastern limit of the county, . some ten miles from Chariton, in what is now Cedar township. He was accompanied with his wife Nancy, and four children of tender years. He gave to his settlement the name of " Ireland, " the land of his nativity. He came from Illinois and first settled near Pella, Marion county, but the "Dutch" were crowding too closely, and he sold his claim there for $1,000, and pushed out to a,new locality. With his capital thus acquired, two yoke of cattle, a wagon, his household effects and family, he started for Mon- roe county, where he reached the house of Henry Harter, in August,. 1847, with whom he left his family while he made a prospecting tour for a new home. He came into Lucas county, some fifteen miles distant, and he was so pleased with the country that he laid claim to one hun- dred and sixty acres in section sixteen, of its virgin soil, upon which to make his future home and rear his family. He then returned over to Monroe county, where he had left his family and worldly effects, and with them he at once returned to his claim in Lucas, which he reached early in September, bringing with him some men-Henry Harter, John Bell, Sam Richmond and Charles Reynolds, of that settlement, to aid. him in the construction of his cabin. It was sixteen feet square, built of round oak logs, and covered with clapboards. This accomplished, his friends, who thus aided him, returned to their settlement in Monroe county.
This accomplished, he found that winter was approaching and he must provide supplies for it. He made every arrangement for his family he could by making a log heap in front of the new shanty, upon which his wife could cook their food, as he had not yet built a chimney in it. The next morning he was to start to Oskaloosa, forty-five miles away, to mill, for his groceries and other supplies for the winter, and to his surprise he found his oxen were missing. Concluding that they had gone back to Harter's, which was on the route, he gathered up his sacks and started out on foot. Finding his cattle there he borrowed a wagon and pro- ceeded on his journey. He was gone some ten days. During this period Mrs. McDermit with her four children-the eldest but nine, and the youngest short of a year old-as her sole companions, remained at the cabin in her solitude. The cabin had yet no door, no window, nor floor, though places were cut for the former. She cooked upon the log heap in front, and slept alone in the open cabin at night, as her only shel-
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ter. Not a white being, save her children, nearer than fifteen miles away; and a band of Pottawattamie Indians were camped on the Cedar creek not far away, who, in their hunting ranges, would occasionally call at the cabin in the day. However, they were friendly, and did not molest her. There were a few who lingered behind after their surrender of the territory under the treaty of 1843, and the final exodus of the tribes beyond the Missouri in the spring of 1846. They found abundance of deer and turkeys to hunt at that time. During those ten days that Mc- Dermit was thus absent, the wolves broke the solitude of the nights and made them hideous with their howls; and not infrequently would they surround the cabin and attack the faithful watch dog, who would keep them at bay until they retired and their howls were lost in the distance. Here was bravery exemplified, vividly illustrating the courage, dangers and privations of the pioneer. How many women of Lucas county would to-day exercise the nerve and fortitude which Mrs. McDermit did during those ten days-yea, during her whole pioneer life?
When McDermit returned he at once finished his cabin, placed it in condition for comfortable occupancy by building a chimney, putting in a window, making a door and floor. The latter was made of basswood logs, with one side hewn smooth and edged, and laid down so they made a comfortable surface. The openings between the logs were filled with prairie mud. It is said that he made the floor the next Sunday after his return for his winter's supplies, which he probably regarded a work of necessity. To his new home and settlement McDermit gave the name of "Ireland," after his native land. By this it was long known, and is still remembered by early settlers. Of it McDermit was king, monarch of all he surveyed until the next spring after his settlement. The county was not surveyed until after he located his claim and built his shanty; not until late that fall, when a Mr. Webber of Burlington, did the work under con- tract with the surveyor-general of the State. He entered his claim at Fairfield December 20, 1849, also another one hundred and sixty acres in section nine, with a Mexican war land-warrant.
For his pork and corn for the winter he had to go over into Monroe county, where he purchased the former ot Nelson Wiscott at $1.50 per hundred pounds; and the latter of one Stricklin, at twenty cents per bushel. His nearest neighbor was fifteen miles away to the northeast. For more than six months Mrs. McDermit did not see a white woman, and yet, it is said that she expressed herself long after that those were the happiest months of her life. Albia, then called Princeton, was their nearest post- office, and Eddyville and Oskaloosa their nearest trading and milling points.
Though McDermit was without education, yet he had good practical sense, and did much toward shaping and opening the way for the upbuild-
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ing of the new county. His was the first house built within its limits by a permanent settler. His family comprised the settlement from Septem- ber, 1847, until March, 1848. Here he toiled to make his new home. That winter must have been a solitary one, though not like restrained exiles without hope or purpose. They had plans for the future, which made them buoyant with hope, and cheerful in the expectation of realiz- ing them. This gave them courage, and inspired them with a spirit of contentment, and to labor on.
McDermit appears to have been quite conspicuous in shaping the civic affairs of the county in its infant days-took quite an active part in politi- cal matters, and doubtless was imbued with some political ambition, not- withstanding his lack of education, and inability to write his name other- wise than with an "x." In April, 1851, he was elected township trustee, before the organization of townships-when the whole county was one township, or precinct. Also, at the August election in 1852, he was elected prosecuting attorney on the Democratic ticket over James Mit- chell, the Whig candidate, by a large majority as will appear from the "political record" elsewhere given. His election to the last named office must have been a joke, or a combination of the old pioneer brotherhood still existing, who desired to extend a mark of their good will toward their oldest member. Of course, he did not qualify, and the office was filled by appointment.
McDermit died only a few years since, after having accumulated a com- fortable property for his family. As elsewhere noted, the first election in the county was held at his house, August 6, 1849; and after "Ireland" was organized into Cedar township it was then held there for that town- ship.
But the spring of 1848 came, and with it came new settlers. The first to join McDermit was Elijah Baldwin, who came from Indiana with his wife and children, in March of that year. He made a claim about a mile west of McDermit's, which he improved. It is now known as the Hixon farm. In June, of that year, three brothers, Wyatt W., Iverson H. and Dr. D. W. Waynick, and James Roland came to "Ireland " from Indiana. The Waynicks were young men without families, and were in search of a new Eldorado. They returned to Monroe county, and laid a claim on the west boundary of that county, where they remained, breaking its soil for crops that summer. In the fall they sold out to one David J. Prather, of that county, and whose claim adjoined theirs, but continued to occupy their cabin that winter-that severe winter of 1848- 9. They happened to have plenty of hay and corn for their use, besides they supplied other settlers who had run short. When the "Ireland " settlers drove their stock some twenty miles eastward into Monroe county late that winter, through crusted snow three feet deep upon the
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level, where they could get feed to save them from starvation, they stopped over night with the Waynick brothers, who extended the hospi- talities of their cabin to the men, and their rude pole sheds with hay and corn to their starving cattle. The snow was so deep and so solidly fro- zen that two men had to precede the cattle and break the way, and some- times a third man would precede the other two with an ax and cut the way through the solid crust of the deep snow. This, of course, caused slow progress to the Egypt ahead. Such were the hardships of the pioneer. James Roland, who accompanied the Waynick brothers, had a family. He remained at " Ireland " and located a claim of one hundred and sixty acres about a mile and a half south of McDermit's, in section five. The next move was the building of a log cabin upon it, which was speedily accomplished, through the proffered assistance ot the Ireland settlers. This was completed late in June of that year, 1848, and early in July following, soon after they had become settled in their new domi- cile, Mrs. Roland gave birth to the first white child ever known to have been born within the county. It was a girl baby, and to the bereavement . of the parents, it died at the age of three years. So this was the first birth occurring within Lucas county. This year, 1848, brought quite an acquisition to the settlement in addition to those already named, including Thomas Wilson, James Ballard and James Barker. The latter gentleman dispensed the gospel for " Ireland" while there; but tradition says he did not remain very long, and therefore quite likely sought a more ample field for his theological efforts.
It was, doubtless, through the sagacity of Mr. McDermit that it was first discovered that the leading branch of the agricultural interest of Lucas county would be stock raising for market and dairy purposes. Observing this, he in the summer of 1848, went over into Monroe county and purchased of Nelson Wescott thirty-five head of cattle, for which he paid from ten to twelve dollars per head for cows, and four dollars per head for calves. With these he was the first to make stock raising a specialty. His example was followed, and to-day his foresight is fully confirmed. After he and his wife had lived and made the battle of life together to an advanced age-after they had gone through the hardships, privations and dangers of pioneer life, had raised a family of children, and accumulated a competence to carry them comfortably through life's pilgrimage, they became estranged, and, in 1873, he gave his wife, at her request, one-half of his property, and in 1874 she went to Kansas, and Mr. McDermit came to Chariton to live, where he died July 31, 1875, from a disease which produced gangrene in the foot. He insisted on amputation of his leg against his physician's advice as a life-saving rem- edy, which was performed by Dr. Fitch, on the 20th of the month prior to his death. And thus passed away the first pioneer settler of Lucas
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county. At the close of 1848 there had gathered in the McDermit set- tlement some eight families.
During the same year-1848-meager settlements were made at other points in the county. Among those who thus came to battle with fron- tier life, and to aid in changing a wild, though beautiful domain, from its primitive condition into cultivated fields, blossoming with the rich fruits of their toil, was William S. Townsend, who came from the Bourbon fields of Kentucky. He laid a " claim " to a quarter section of land which the peregrinating Mormons had made historic, as "Chariton Point," in their sojourn thereon during the winter of 1846-7, as elsewhere noted. Townsend was an active man and coveted prominence and success, and did much in the early days of the county to organize its civic machinery and shape its future history, which will more fully appear in the chapter on "County Organization."
Tradition says that Townsend was a restless, scheming person, eager for speculation. That when he left Lucas county he went to Nebraska, · and there procured and trained a band Indians for exhibition in the east- ern states, in their native costumes, in which they were to perform the war dance and various other maneuvers illustrative of their native char- acter and modes of life. With this troupe trained for the tour, he started eastward, and when he reached Hoosierdom they became disgusted with civilization and its pomps, and longed to return to their hunting grounds, and therefore they left their manager in disappointment, with broken engagements and unpaid bills. His gilded dreams of a fortune were thus dispelled, rugged life beckoned him back to its toiling pathway. Townsend returned westward, and the following winter he is said to have been drowned in the Missouri river while crossing it on the ice.
About the time, or quite soon after Mr. Townsend came to Chariton Point, one David Roland, a much married Mormon of the Brigham Young persuasion, also came and squatted not far from him, accompanied with two or three wives. This was the first practical introduction of polygamy into Lucas county. But their stay was short-they pushed forward to a more congenial atmosphere for the evil-an atmosphere impregnated with the exhalations of Salt Lake.
The same year, 1848, a settlement was made in what is now Washing- ton township, by Samuel Mckinley and Xury E. West; and in what is now Liberty township, by James M. Brown, Peter M. Barker, William R. Myers, John Myers and T. Robbins. A man named McAllister, who hailed from Missouri, located in what is now Union township; but his stay was brief-less than a year, when he returned from whence he came. That year also brought the first installment of the Phillips families to the county. Daniel Phillips with his family laid a claim some mile and a half west, and Ellis Myers, some six miles west of Chariton, both in what is
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