USA > Iowa > Poweshiek County > History of Poweshiek County, Iowa: a record of settlement, organization, progress and achievement, Volume 1 > Part 6
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The Curlin boys were relatives of Ogden's and he, with his wife, took possession of their vacant cabin in the fall of 1843. Another man, Henry Snook, on a tour of exploration, left Johnson county about the time that Ogden entered this county. The land on Bear creek pleased him so well that he decided to locate in Warren township. It was a considerable time before either Ogden or Snook knew of the existence of the other, much less that he was so near. The southern group increased much more rapidly than the northern.
INDIAN TRADERS AND AGENTS.
Sixty years ago, more or less, these traders and these agents, in general, were expected to acquire wealth in a few years. If they did not, they dis- appointed the public. When an agent sought the good of his wards, and when a trader stimulated them to become civilized, he was believed to neglect his opportunities in a way altogether exceptional. General Street went among the Winnebagoes in Wisconsin in 1827, and did his best to inspire them to give up hunting and become farmers, to abandon whisky and become workful temperance men. The traders did their worst to thwart his efforts at every turn, with the Indians and with the president. Jackson said: "I know he is a whig, but he is a good man, and he will be an Indian agent as long as I am president." He began that service as stated, and held the office till he died in 1840. The traders were more successful with the Indians. Their condition today may be the fruit of their efforts sixty years ago. A branch of them is in Nebraska, and it will be hard to find a more worthless company anywhere. They are said to be sots so far as they can make themselves by patronizing Sioux City saloons. The agent today seems to earn his money as General Street did with but little good result. The whites have long been their corrupters, and ruin to them.
Their traders were thieves, many of them at least, in the time of Street, as they were among the Foxes when he went to Agency City. Their friends which became known when settlements were made with the traders at Agency City, have been referred to. They aroused the furious indignation of Gov-
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ernor Chambers when he received a letter from one whose account had been cut down about a quarter, and he was complaining of "irregular traders." He replied: "If the vengeance of Heaven is ever inflicted upon man in this life, it seems to me we must yet see some signal evidence of it among these 'regular traders.'"
General Street had the same opinion of the traders as a group. He wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs concerning the treaty of 1832 made after the Black Hawk war:
"At the mention of annuities, which in most of our Indian treaties are specially stipulated to be paid in specie, every heart that feels for the fad- ing remnant of a once numerous race, would do well to pause and consider the cruelty of such a system of abominations directly tending to the destruction and ultimate extermination of the Indians. The present system of acquiring Indian lands is horrible in its results, revolting to every sense of justice and humanity towards poor, ignorant, dependent savages, in the hands of cunning, wily, unprincipled, and unfeeling traders. The Indian land is purchased, the hunting ground is circumscribed, and thousands are stipulated to be paid an- nually to the Indians, not in any way calculated to improve their condition, and lead them to provide for themselves by learning to cultivate the soil, but in specie. Does no member in congress in legislating for these defrauding crea- tures wish to know the reason for this strange demand? It is the trader acting by his whisky on the unsuspecting mind of the poor, ignorant savage. And will such a government as ours, aspiring to the highest character among the governments of the world for liberality and justice to all nations, permit such an abominable system of fraud, involving certain ruin to the Indians, to exist under the sanction of their treaties with the Indians?"
Again and again Street's complaint of the "abominable system of fraud" for the benefit of "cunning, wily, unprincipled traders" aroused bitter opposi- tion and attacks. Again and again his personal intimacy with the president saved him from summary removal. True, we must limit their hunting grounds. Lands intended to be the home of thousands must not be reserved for tens. But the difference ought to have been put into the support of farmers among the Indians, and of schools, teaching how to raise corn and to keep accounts. But, no. "In specie" the Indians can pay for whiskey, watered whiskey, and for gewgaws at a profit of thousand per cent.
Many an honest Indian agent has been obliged to choose between being enriched by money stolen from the Indians or being impoverished and slandered by the attacks of white thieves and liars among them. It has been said that when Rome was most corrupt her officers in the provinces needed to have three salaries, one to repay the money spent in getting the office, one to keep, and a third as a means of defense against suits for frauds while in office. Two fair incomes would have been sufficient for the average Indian trader, one to retain, and another for bribes or for defense, although he was rearely obliged to defend himself in court.
Vol. I-4
CHAPTER III.
PIONEERING.
MEN OF BRAWN AND STOUT HEARTS-NEIGHBORS WERE RED MEN-THE PIONEER WOMEN-CLAIM ASSOCIATIONS-PRAIRIES-MORMON EXODUS THROUGH IOWA- CRIMINALS AND THEIR CRIMES-SNAKES.
If men lived in this county before 1843 when the Indians abandoned it for a point farther west, and when the whites had a right to settle here, they were dishonest with the Indians and with the government. But those who came from Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Illinois were not inferior in character to those who were pioneers in any neighboring state. They came with an honorable purpose, and that purpose was to provide homes for themselves in good society. They brought their guns and they used them, and their bullets furnished them meat and a large part of the men's clothing for a time, but they wasted little time in shooting matches and none at all in shooting one another, or in killing Indians. History and tradition are silent as to contests like those of the "Clary boys" as they welcomed Lincoln to their company, or the contest which left a man's eye hanging on his cheek when it was over. "The best man" in a com- munity was not the one whose fist was the terror of the neighborhood, or the rowdy who could live with the least amount of work. The answer to my inquiry, "What kind of a man was Ogden?"-the first permanent settler in the south part of the county, may suggest a key to the common thought among the pioneers. The answer was: "He was a great man. He split five hundred rails one Christmas day."
Such men take pride in doing something useful. The children of such have a right to be proud of the ambitions of their ancestry. Perhaps the children of those pioneers lived on a dirt floor as Lincoln did. It is probable that some of them were not ashamed to have earned the title given to Clay, "the mill boy of the slashes." The Iowa boys rode as far to mill as did that Virginia youth, on a horse as valueless, and used a fiddle as scraggy as he did.
We have seen the pioneers' cabins and slept in their beds, eaten at their tables when they gave us the best they had in the house, and talked with their children about their plans for the tomorrow of manhood. We have seen their
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eye gleam with purpose and glisten with hope, and then, after a few years of effort and of success, we have seen their achievements surpass their highest expectations.
The pioneers themselves have enjoyed work and its rewards. They have cared little for the pleasures of idleness and less for the rough and tumble sports that absorb some men.
The pioneers for several years after the first came into the locality, wore their buckskin clothes and coon skin caps, drove their oxen and horses and fattened their long nosed hogs in their groves and haggled down their corn, but the years revealed a better way.
F. A. Kilburn was the herald of a new civilization in the south part of the county. His huge teams took the pork and grain to railroad centers and left more money behind him than the people had been accustomed to, and brought back clothing ready made and more satisfactory than any the women could make or the men had worn. The products of the farm went readily for cash, when taken to market, and the cash would buy necessities for house and farm as the pioneers desired, and buyer and seller became more independent and both were more comfortable.
The newcomers began to bring more money in their pockets and to scatter more among those who had preceded them. They built better houses than they found here, and when the log cabins of the earlier day faded out, frame houses of some pretentions succeeded them. The prairie dwellers made im- provements on their farms of necessity and had no thought of log houses or barns, or rail fences-they cost too much, too much lumber.
Schools improved and were appreciated more and more. Teachers multiplied and the aspiration to be ready to teach stimulated to better scholarship in the schools.
Families came from larger towns and cities who had luxuriated in wealth and more cultivated communities. They brought other conveniences and lux- uries unknown on the frontier, and he who brought materials or methods that made life more comfortable was a benefactor to the community. He who caused a single child to admire sincerely a Socrates or a Cornelia, to rise out of an unaspiring environment into an atmosphere of moral ozone, to avoid the low aims of a Governor Berkeley for the sterling manliness of William Penn, has pointed the way to a better tomorrow.
The pioneers of our county had time for some amusements in the midst of graver matters. Their "parties" were not numerous and the youth went far to attend them. They seem to have been more sober affairs than in some counties where they were too often obliged to walk by twos before they dis- persed. An occasional dance enlivened the years and added to the pleasant memories of age. It seems just to other counties to say that the young people of none of them had gatherings more worthy of manly life or more indicative of a purpose to do their part in it. Amusements did not waste their days or nights, or exclude serious purpose or serious work.
This review increases our respect for the young people of that day who became the men and women of our county's larger growth.
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NEIGHBORS WERE RED MEN.
From Brooklyn Mrs. Mary Capehart writes very interestingly of the early days, as follows :
We first came from Illinois in a covered wagon and settled in Iowa. This country was timberland and our nearest neighbors were six miles away. We had plenty of wild game, such as turkey, deer, prairie chicken and quail. Our home was a log house and the chimney was made of sticks, laid across each other, like a cattle pen, while the outside and inside of it was covered with mud. The fire place served as a stove. The furniture was as primitive as the house and did not consist of many pieces.
Flour was scarce until we were able to raise our own wheat. It took us a week to go to the mill and another week to return home, so you can see two weeks were consumed by us in having our grain ground. When we were out of bread we would often put a half bushel of wheat, or corn, in a big block of wood hollowed out, and with the well sweep, mash the grain.
Our neighbors were red men. Their clothing consisted of red blankets, leggings and moccasins. These red men were great people to beg for some- thing to eat or wear.
THE WOMEN.
We shall scarcely do justice to the west and to Poweshiek county unless we devote a chapter to our women.
Iowa has been the theater of immense changes in the general estimate of woman. The savage has been here with his love and practice of war, and his war estimate of the woman at his side. The one who could pursue the enemy by day and by night, over mountain and plain, through forests and rivers, and, when he was found, could strike the deadliest blow, was of the greatest value to a warring tribe. The strongest is their most heroic. So long as their Great Spirit wanted them to live "to kill Sioux," so long was one's power to kill his greatest vir-tue.
Women then were their beasts of burden, their "workingmen," respected as carriers, and builders of their wickiups, and cultivators of their corn. True, one might win higher honor now and then by asserting herself in battle or by the use of the tomahawk in settling a domestic question. Rantchewaime, the wise, and beautiful wife of Mahaska, tried that experiment once most suc- cessfully when her brave lord was on his way to Washington. As he was getting his supper he felt a blow on his back. On looking up he met the blazing eye of Rantchewaime as she stood near him with her threatening toma- hawk, and asking him: "Am I not your wife? Am I not going with you to see the Great Father?" Discretion then was the better part of valor. He replied : "You are my wife. A brave man loves a beautiful woman. You are going with me to the Great House." The tomahawk won her case. She could wield it as well as a man!
The first whites to build their cabins in Iowa did not come from the dille- tante of the cities, or from the soft handed of Princeton College. They came
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from the rugged frontier families of both sides of the Ohio, or from those scattered among the deer and catamounts of other states. They came on foot or with the strong, heavy wagons of commerce and not of luxury. The women were as rugged as the men. They could walk with the men on their journey and work with them at its end to build the cabin and open the farm. They' shared in every improvement, and were as happy as the men in every step of progress. They loved their husbands as faithfully as Mrs. Garfield, and ac- counted their children their "jewels" as proudly as the Roman Cornelia. She did her best for them even though they were clothed in buckskin and slept on leaves.
Railroads came nearer. They reached the county in 1862. They bore away the products of the farm at good prices. They brought clothes from the east at prices that could be paid by the pioneer. The luxuries of yesterday became the necessities of today in houses, furniture, clothing, and carriages. Schools improved, papers multiplied, bookcases ornamented houses, and the latest novel and the best history and the freshest science appeared on their shelves in monthly magazines or in new books.
In villages social, literary and historical clubs were formed, and gatherings, which old bachelors called "groups of gossiping women" met monthly or weekly to read George Eliot together, or to discuss current events, or to inquire what could be done to benefit some one at home or abroad.
When a German professor in Harvard met a young German, a short time ago, who had recently arrived in America, he inquired whether the newcomer kept a diary of noteworthy things here. It was found that he was keeping a debit and credit account with America. On the credit side he placed parlor cars, oysters, shoes, Niagara, autumn leaves, the city of Boston, ice cream, the Atlantic Monthly, etc. On the debit side he had written, politicians, boarding houses, servants, spring weather, street cleaning, pavements, sauces and more than one may possibly guess. Among things doubtful were newspapers, mince pies, millionaires, sleeping cars, furnaces, negroes, poets, New York city, etc. He classified families thus: The men doubtful, children debits, and women credits. None will object to his credits here, much as they may object to his estimate of men and children. But nothing excited the Professor's curiosity more than two things: (Ist) the college girl with her diploma, and (2d) build- ings twenty-four stories high. It is reported that La Place once said that there were only two women in the world who could understand his mathematical writings, viz, Miss Mary Fairfax and Mrs. Mary Somerville. It turned out that his "Miss" Fairfax and his "Mrs." was only one after all. Now more than one woman in Iowa, more than one in our county, probably, can read La Place with pleasure.
The field of woman's activities has enlarged immensely in the nation and in the state during the last half or quarter of a century even. They have been crowding men out of clerkships and out of the schools mercilessly. They are swarming in stores and shops, in the offices of the lawyer, the physician, and the business man. The largest city of the interior of our nation has chosen a woman to take charge of her schools instead of any of her masculine com-
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petitors who have already achieved eminent success in that sphere. Our Har- vard professor from Germany, who we have already quoted, says:
"That very soon no male school teacher of good quality will survive is certain, but there is no reason to expect that it will stop there. We have already more than sixty per cent of girls among the upper high-school classes and this dis- proportion must increase. Must we not expect that in the same way in which the last thirty years have handed the teachers' profession over to the women, the next thirty years will put the ministry, the medical calling, and finally the bar, also, into her control."
When such opportunities are opening to women, and when they are highly educated, some are fearful that they will not marry. "It is not good for man to be alone"-or for woman either. Perhaps they will not marry into a class below themselves intellectually. It is probable, indeed, that such girls will not welcome an alliance with a manifest inferior. They love too well to think a husband is their superior, and "the best man in the world." The young men may be obliged to attain very nearly their level before marriage, but when she finds him she will accept his offer. "George Eliot," Marian Evans, is, certainly, partially a representative of her sex, and she snapped a law of God and of man by an alliance with George Henry Lewes when she was thirty-five, and showed her respect for marriage by taking a real husband after the death of Mr. Lewes.
But educated women will want to vote!
Some of them, but what then? They have not turned the world upside down in Colorado! There is no indication that they are about to do it, either. They go to the polls and vote for a woman as state superintendent of schools, and now and then for a woman legislator, but never for their share of woman lawmakers. They go home contented and their state superintendent goes into her office and the state is contented. Iowa women and the women of Poweshiek county look on, and are as well satisfied with the laws that the men make in Iowa as with those which the men and women make in Colorado. True, some here would like to vote, but if they should do so, they would want more room in legislative halls than the women of Colorado have yet secured !
The men of Iowa are proud of the women of Iowa, and the women of Poweshiek county are taking first places in our schools, pushing the men into . the background in some of our offices like the county superintendency and the recorder's position. Some are among our best speakers and writers, and our oldest paper in politics is now edited by a woman. They are lecturers, public speakers, graceful and able writers, are dentists, physicians and pastors of churches.
The rule here applies to women as to men. Let them do what they can do best. Let neither men nor women try to speak in public if their audience cannot hear them. Let no one attempt to do anything for which neither nature nor training has fitted him. Poweshiek county throws the door wide open to them.
CLAIM ASSOCIATIONS.
Some men came to a land sale as to any other auction, assuming that any who chose might acquire title by bidding the required sum on the land which
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was offered for sale. They soon found that men living on the land had a right to it, superior to any one else. If a bid was made by an "outsider" a few score of men gave the stranger such an invitation to surrender his bid that he complied very quickly. If not, he soon felt the grip of strong hands and has visions of an ugly rope, or of a man in a threatening stream. Unpleasant reports were made of such scenes. They reached the United States senate. John C. Calhoun, no friend of Iowa just then, heard them. He said in the United States senate, January 27, 1838, that if he was rightly informed, the Iowa country had already been seized on by a lawless body of armed men, who had parcelled out the whole region and had entered into written stipulations to stand by and protect each other-and who were actually exercising the right of ownership and sovereignty over it, permitting none to settle without their leave, and exacting more for the license to settle than the government does for the land itself.
If Calhoun had been so ill-informed on all subjects as he was in 1838 about Iowa he never could have been the great leader in the senate which he was before and after that date, or as when he came in collision with Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.
But evidently his opposition to Iowa as a territory or as a state was due less to what he had heard of their claim associations than to anxiety for the perpetuation of slavery. He well knew that Iowa was friendly to him in those days and not actively unfriendly to slavery. He knew, also, what some others did not seem to know, that is, that Iowa would eventually change its coat as to slavery.
But was Iowa fair as to intending settlers? Eminently so, so far as we can ascertain. As soon as the Indian title expired, the government permitted the whites to enter, to build cabins and make improvements, but gave no title until the land was surveyed, for until then land could not be properly described. Claims came in collision, the law gave no protection, would treat all as having no right. The settlers formed associations, made rules by which a settler could ' know what his neighbors deemed fair, and chose men by whom conflicting claims should be adjudicated.
These rules were so fair as to be adopted, usually, by the courts when the government created them. Those courts could have given the claim associations no higher compliment.
Poweshiek county had one of these associations early enough to revise their constitution in 1851. It was beginning to be an obscure memory when a son of one of the earliest settlers, Joseph Satchell, discovered the revision in a mass of old papers supposed to be utterly useless, and when they were laid aside for a bonfire by Mr. Muscott, a former county auditor.
It was fortunate for the county and its history that Joseph W. Satchell became county auditor, January 1, 1882, and fortunate, too, that two neighbors of Union township were at loggerheads at that time about a road laid out in 1850, and it was a third piece of good fortune that the auditor was specially interested in that road question. That interest suggested a search through those old papers before they were burned.
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There he found what he was looking for, and more than that, the "Revised Constitution of the Old Claim Association," a paper of much wider concern. We now have the pleasure of putting that revision into type, with the proceed- ings of the meeting which adopted it.
NAME AND OBJECT.
"1. The society shall be called the Poweshiek Protection Society, the object of which shall be to protect actual settlers, and those to whom they shall make a legal transfer of their claims.
"2. The officers of this society shall consist of one president, one vice president and one secretary, and a committee of seven.
"3. It shall be the duty of the president to preside at all meetings of the society.
"4. It shall be the duty of the president to call the committee together, upon the written request of five or more legal citizens.
"5. It shall be the duty of the vice president to preside at all meetings of the society, in the absence of the president.
"6. It shall be the duty of the secretary to keep a book, in which he shall keep a record of all the proceedings of the society.
"7. It shall be the duty of the committee to render a decision in all cases and their decision shall be final, in regard to claims brought before them.
"8. That it shall be the duty of the plaintiff in all cases to notify the committee.
"9. That every male citizen eighteen years of age, shall be entitled to hold a claim.
"IO. That every widow, being the head of a family, shall be entitled to hold a claim.
"II. That the amount of said claim shall be determined by the statutes of the state of Iowa, now in force.
"12. That deeded land, shall in all cases, be included in said claim. Any person holding a claim, shall, in six months after making and registering said claim, do, or cause to be done, thirty dollars worth of labor on said claim.
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