USA > Iowa > Story County > History of Story County, Iowa; a record of organization, progress and achievement, Volume I > Part 17
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After this dreadful winter there was no sale for land and occupancy had to be made the most of. Mrs. Wheeler reflects that business in Chi- cago, had Mr. Wheeler engaged in it as he had thought of doing, would have yielded even poorer returns. There the financial depression would have sunk his all. Here the land was left.
Lack of market was a sorry trial for many a year after feed had be- come plenty. Butter carried to Iowa Center brought but ten cents per pound; and a fine Suffolk sow which the Wheelers had brought from Chicago in '57, being slaughtered with several of her progeny, each of which dressed weighed 500 lbs., and the lot sent by team the 120 iniles to Iowa City-the nearest railway station-there brought but 11/2 cents per 1b. The resulting disappointment and hardship were sore indeed. The Pike's Peak craze in '58 and '59 raised prices. J. C. Lovell, fitting out for the trip, paid Mrs. Wheeler 40 cents a pound for butter. She did not get rich from her sales, however, for sheeting cost 40 cents a yard, and the sleaziest kind of calico 20 cents.
An Indian scare was one of the unhappy experiences brought by war time. The Bushwhackers of Missouri sent terror up even into central Iowa. Word came that they had hired Indians to massacre the whites on Iowa farms, that men prone to swell the Union army might be kept at home. Settlers in some quarters scared by this rumor were precipitately leaving their claims and fleeing to Fort Dodge or back to the east. While appre- hension was wide awake, Mrs. Wheeler one summer day sat sewing on her doorstep. She was alone, even the dog being gone, and glancing around she saw two men mounted on ponies coming over the hill. Watching their approach it became evident that they were Indians, both of whom wore belts stuffed with knives and pistols which glistened in the sunlight. She thought her doom at hand. Retreating into the house, she fastened the door, drew down the shades, and with quaking limbs awaited the next. Before the house resounded whoops, each yell renewing terror such as blanches hair in a night. Then all was still. Silence increased suspense till it became unendurable. Rallying strength, the trembling woman raised a back window, stepped out and peeped around the house. Lo, the enemy was gone. One Indian was disappearing in the distance, and the other was tarrying before the house of Neighbor U. S. Nourse, a quarter of a mile distant. And this was Mrs. Nourse's experience :
She was quite alone when a whoop before the door called her attention, and the comer held up a paper which evidently had some message for her. She answered the call, not daring to do otherwise, and read on the paper a written request that whatever the bearer asked for be given him. Said bearer peremptorily demanded "meat," and indicated the size of the piece that would be satisfactory by measuring the length of his arm quite to the shoulder. The frightened woman quickly brought from her meat barrel the biggest piece she could lay hands on, and made it a peace offer-
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ing. She confessed later that the entire contents of the barrel would have gone just as readily, had it been the price of the caller's departure; and Mr. Nourse was accustomed jokingly to declare that he could no more leave home for this purpose or that, because it was necessary for him to guard his pork barrel.
Indians troubled the neighborhood no more for some time; but the nervous strain occasioned by the visit noted was a misfortune from which Mrs. Wheeler's health has never fully recovered. And the scare was wholly needless. The alarming rumor had originated with claim jumpers from Chicago for the express purpose of scaring away settlers who had filed on their land but had not proved up. The callers belonged to the Tama band, and were only on a begging expedition.
BLYLER DID NOT LIKE IT.
In connection with the foregoing there is a letter of F. F. Blyler of Polk County, old soldier and veteran politician, whose father appears to have been pursuaded by Mr. Wheeler to come to Story County, but who entered the county from the wrong side, was disappointed and sold out, and went away. Mr. Blyler in his fiftieth year in Polk County and in Iowa wrote of the family migration into and out of Story County as follows :
In April, 1857, father sold his property in Summit County, Ohio, and invested the proceeds in horses, wagons, boots and shoes and matches. He shipped these from Wellsville, Ohio, to Keokuk, and came from there overland to Des Moines. The family remained in Ohio. At Des Moines he met an old Ohio friend named Wheeler who had some Story County land. Wheeler described the land and location as being about 4 miles west of Nevada, and father soon traded for 100 acres of it. This he did without going to see the land, relying entirely on his friend's representa- tions. He also traded for other lands until his stock was exhausted and then returned to Ohio and made preparation to move to Iowa-which we did in September, 1857.
Father had arranged with some one to rent a new hotel just about com- pleted in Nevada. Whether he rented from Wheeler or not I don't know. But we left Ohio intending to settle in Nevada in the hotel business. Which house it was I don't know. Iowa City then was the nearest railroad point. We came by rail as far as Davenport and from there drove across the country to Nevada with our own team, which we had brought from Ohio. We passed on up through Cedar, Iowa, Tama, Marshall and Story Coun- ties. Father liked all of these counties except Story County and this last, of course, in that early day he saw from the wrong side. We came by the way of Marietta, then the county seat of Marshall County. We drove straight through and naturally had to pass over the low wet lands of east-
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ern Story, probably near Colo and much the same route now traveled by rail (about where Marshall-Story ditch No. I is even now helping to transform the face of the country ). This was early in October, 1857. the weather was fine, but the roads were bad in that then low, swampy coun- try. Houses were few and far between, as the settlements were found only where there was timber, along Indian creek and Skunk river. and around the groves, and of course none of these were found on the roads east of Nevada.
After much exertion we arrived in Nevada. one horse was sick and father was already sick of the country, and when he found that his land did not lie just where Wheeler told him, but about two miles farther away. he became disgusted and was ready to take the back track without even going to see his land, which was located some 6 miles west and south, and was really in a good country and no doubt was good land and in a loca- tion which would have suited him all right. for over there could be seen some very nice hills and a good deal of timber. He never saw the land and after the war traded it off for a song. This showed poor judgment on his part, but more especially his disgust for Story County.
Early impressions of course are the most lasting, and father never for- got the low wet prairies of eastern Story. now the richest and finest farm- ing country in lowa. Last fall I took a drive over this country and for a week visited in and about Maxwell and Colo, and visited the remains of many of the old orchards which I had sold to the early settlers as they be- gan to scatter over these prairies. My wife and little granddaughter were with me and as I would point out the orchards to her which I had furnished years before, she was much surprised. Many trees are yet bearing fine fruit, but the most of them are dead. The little girl wanted to know why so many of them were dead. I told her a generation had passed since I sold those trees and that one by one they passed away, the same as did the people who bought them, most of whom are also gone. Way out near Colo 1 found Elmore and Charles Dolph who were playmates of mine in Ohio more than fifty years ago. They lived on one side of the street and we on the other in the little village from which we came to this country.
To me lowa always has been an inspiration. I know of no spot on earth which excels it and I now know of no better county than Story. But lowa counties are all good, and the lands that were once rejected as being too low and wet. are fast becoming the most beautiful and fertile lands of lowa. Although but it years of age when we came to lowa, yet I was at once enamored with its beauties. Its changes have been as rapid as the kaleidoscope, and all the time from good to better. For fifty years 1 have watched these changes and to me they seem wonderful and incom- prehensible, and the man or woman who now owns a farm in eastern Story County is certainly in luck. Fifty years are a long time and one can look
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back and see the many opportunities passed by and see their mistakes along the line, and yet perhaps we are not to blame after all.
F. F. BLYLER.
W. W. SPRING .- ON SQUAW FORK IN 1855.
Mr. W. W. Spring of Grant Township became a resident of Story County on the 17th of November, 1855. He carries the weight of eighty years, yet maintains interest in the march of human events both near and afar. Mr. and Mrs. Spring celebrated their golden wedding in 1905. They abide in a new dwelling on the farm which has been theirs for quite half a century, although their immediate settlement in the county was with others of their migrating company along Squaw Fork, west of Skunk river, their farm being first east of Skunk river in Grant Township.
Mr. Spring and one sister, who is two years his senior and has her home in Kansas, are the last of a family of thirteen who grew up in Owen County, Indiana. His mother passed away when he was a babe and a new mother took her place. An incident which he relates as illustrative of the early age to which his memory goes back, indicates also that the new mother gave to him the tenderness, as well as the care without which in- fancy does not thrive. The incident is of an unlucky fall when he was eighteen months old, which resulted in his striking his head on a kettle and cutting it badly, and of his step-mother binding up the wound and kissing him. Pleasanter is this impression brought down through the long years than is the one resulting from paternal strictures which turned Sunday into a day of dread-a day when to use the lad's jack-knife was to forfeit it, and to indulge in sport of any sort was to incur a whipping.
FROM INDIANA TO 10WA.
The boy became a man. and married the daughter of Samuel Coffelt of his own neighborhood. When, in 1855, the first babe of the young married pair was four weeks old, they became a part of the migration of the Coffelt tribe and their kindred to the promising fields of Iowa. The senior Coffelt had prospected in the new country a few years before and had filed on choice lands along the Skunk river in the interest of his five sons and his son-in-law, as well as for himself. So they started out in hope, even though adversity rested rather heavily on the Spring contingent. Mr. Spring had been ill all summer-ague had shaken away his flesh and strength, had consumed opportunity and his small savings, and now without adequate means and with good prospect of filling an early grave on the new soil, he left the home land assured that in the leaving was his best chance for life.
There were twenty-five people in the company, seven wagons, of which three belonged to Mr. Coffelt, and a lot of stock for use on the new lands.
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Mr. Spring's share of this outfit was a single horse, one cow (which soon went dry), a yoke of two-year-old steers, a few housekeeping articles, and $2.50 in cash which latter went for ferryage before they were out of Indiana.
The journey was little more than begun, when Mrs. Spring was pros- trated with fever, and from that time she was not carried from the wagon till the train had reached Saylorville, in Polk County. Meantime this fever having deprived the babe of nature's food supply, trouble was doubled. Baby foods which stock the market now had not been invented, and the best substitute which emergency could supply was corn bread soaked in coffee. But the baby throve, and continued to develop beautifully till, when it was two years old, an attack of membranous croup proved too much for the best efforts of Dr. Carr of New Philadelphia, and carried the little one off.
Mr. Coffelt killed a deer on the journey to Iowa which helped out the meat supply.
The company landed on the bank of Squaw creek, November 15, 1855, and the Coffelts and Springs prepared to become residents of Story County.
GETTING A START.
Without money enough to buy a meal, in a new land and returning strength still scant, the planting of a home at the beginning of winter was exceedingly difficult and its best results were very primitive. Poles driven between the logs of the cabin served for a bedstead whose ridges a thin feather bed only partially disguised, a bed covering all too scant in supply, was far from affording proof against cold. And O, the problem of sub- sistence! Mr. Spring remembers that corn bread was the staple. that there was no meat but wild meat, and no milk or butter. What a tale Mrs. Spring might tell of the perpiexities of the housekeeper in those days! Spring- time brought wild onions, and slight variation in fare which was wel- comed indeed. But the health of Mr. Spring came back, and through- out the spring he, like Abraham the Good, split rails. He received fifty cents per hundred for his work, and once only accomplished the splitting of 500 rails in a day.
After that his main work for about eight years was breaking. He broke nearly all of the area which Ames now covers, using from four to seven yokes of oxen before a twenty-seven-inch breaking blow and wading some of the time through water up to his knees. He turned the prairie sod of the agricultural college farm, of the state fair ground at Des Moines, and of many another tract now covered with fine improvements.
Mr. Spring does not seem to have been passionately fond of hunting, but the hunting microbe did work in his blood on one occasion, and with a squirrel rifle and his obedient dog he set out to find a deer whose big tracks were evidence that if he could be brought down he would be game worth having.
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The dog got the scent and led in the hunt for a mile or two along the timber skirting Squaw Creek. His master had difficulty now and then in control- ling canine enthusiasm, but was successful until all at once out came a sharp yelp. Then lo! from a thicket close at hand sprang the identical object of their search, and, both dog and man being now silent and motionless, the magnificent fellow with great branching horns, turned and seemed to make a study of them. He was less than 50 paces away, but surprise, wonder and admiration engrossed the hunters, and the gun was not thought of. Dog instinct resumed activity before the hunter's did, and a second yelp sent fleet-foot bounding up to the brow of the bluff. There he turned to ob- serve his pursuers again, and the hunter sent a shot after the fellow. He was hardly sorry it was not effective, and that the grand creature retained his God-given liberty. It was Mr. Spring's first and only shot at a deer.
For the first three years the new settlers went to New Philadelphia for their mail. Between them and Nevada the awful Skunk intervened, and miles of prairie travel were not comparable to the crossing of the river bot- tom in time of high water. The mail went to New Philadelphia however by way of pony express from Nevada, unless the Skunk blocked its passage. Such a time occurred in the spring of 1857. For three long weeks no mail had crossed westward, and all of this time Mr. Spring had anxiously awaited the receipt of $50 which was to come from his father in Ohio. The sum was to help the young pioneer on to his feet, and he chafed at delay.
"The worst 'll be over in another week of two," comforted the P. M. at New Philadelphia.
"You give me an order on the postmaster at Nevada and I'll have the worst over in less time than that," answered the impatient settler.
The order was given and Mr. Spring started the next morning to execute it. Tramping northward from his home as far as D. R. Craig's, he was rowed across the river in Mr. Craig's canoe; then he came southward to Milo McCartney's and there passed the night. He came to Nevada the next forenoon, presented his order to Postmaster Alderman and received the mail. The letters were consigned to him in an old oil-cloth satchel of which the postmaster kept the key, and the papers were in a common meal sack. Nevada's attractions were not sufficient to overcome the urgency of business, so he soon took the trail back to McCartney's, where, the hour being too late for undertaking the perilous crossing, he again spent a night.
McCartney had no boat, but by daylight he was able to point out a cross- ing place which would save the round-about journey by way of Craig's. Flood covered, but did not wholly hide, the footlog which spanned the main channel of the Skunk. This Mr. Spring crossed without accident, and then he struggled across the three-quarters of a mile of river bottom, through water waist high, the sack of papers reposing on his head, and the satchel of letters held aloft in one hand.
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"I kept the mail dry though," he says with satisfaction, "and the next day I crossed Squaw Creek in my own log canoe, took Uncle Sam's pack- ages to Ontario, and got my money."
REMINISCENCE OF NEVADA'S FIRST SCHOOLHOUSE.
"The ferry," he continues, "was mighty handy in those days of high water and no bridges. The canoe which I had made out of a hollow log served good turns to many besides myself. and I did quite a business in the ferrying line for a few years. George Drake of Swedes Point was the builder of Nevada's early school house-the brick one which stood east of the present Lockridge residence. I used to ferry him across twice a week. on his way to and from his work, the team swimming.
"Speaking of the Nevada school house reminds me that I furnished the shingles for its roof. I helped myself to a tree after the manner in vogue among settlers in that day, and Father Coffelt sawed it in his shingle mill.
"Then I hired Dolphus Kintzley to help me draw the shingles to Nevada all in one load. We had not only a big load, but a big time. The roads were simply awful. 1 had three yoke of oxen and Dolphus two; we got Thomas Black's big, wide-tired prairie schooner to complete the outfit, and my two brothers-in-law and Kintzley's brother came along to help through emergencies. When the shingles had been delivered at the building site, the boys began celebration of their achievement in frontier style. There was some remonstrating but it did not prevail. Dr. Adamson was the county agent for selling the 'o-be-joyful and to him went a certain long-necked bottle several times, besides the last time, when, in disguise, it went minus its neck. Of course it was presented by a different messenger each time.
"The return trip was slightly hilarious, but good fellowship rather than ill humor prevailed ; and this fellowship found vigorous expression over on the McCartney hill where an emigrant outfit was found stalled. The boys and two or three yoke of cattle made a jolly job of relieving the troubles of the mover and starting him off on the firm turf rejoicing."
MRS. HARRIET STULTZ-1857 AND LATER.
"It is just fifty years since we came to Story County," remarked Mrs. Harriet Stultz reflectively, as she sat before the fire in the living room of her comfortable cottage at the corner of Court Avenue and Chestnut streets, where she and her daughter, Ida, who had lately become Mrs. Wood. have resided for the past fifteen years. Fifty years means a great deal in a lui- man life, and a great deal in the changed conditions of a frontier state.
Harriet Mathers first saw the light on a farm near Orleans, Orange county, Indiana. She was the youngest of nine children, and March, 1857. she was wedded to her neighbor, young Daniel Stultz, who had grown up on a nearby farm. The bridegroom, having sometime before imbibed the west-
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ern fever, had spent a summer over in Iowa and had located a forty-acres near Story City, in the county of Story, on which the hopes of the young pair were doing such castle-rearing as was appropriate to youthful prime.
In April, five weeks after the wedding, they set their faces toward their destination. Their outfit consisted of a team and wagon, their clothing, beds and bedding. $200 in money, and cooked provisions to last them on the road. They rested Sundays and made slow progress week days, for flats were yet soft with the spring deluge, streams were high and bridges rare. They fre- quently made but twenty-five miles a day. They crossed the Mississippi by ferry at Keokuk, then made their way over fair plains garlanded with tim- ber and checkered with prairies and "island groves," till the line between Marion and Jasper counties were reached. Here they tarried through the summer and raised a crop on hired land. In the fall they completed their journey to Story City, and prepared to grow up with their adopted state.
Story City did not then exist. The little settlement was known as Fair- view, and comprised only Jolin J. Foote, Noah Hardin, William Wier. L. R. Larson and F. A. Rhoades and their respective families. The first school house was being erected. The church of that vicinity had been built by the Norwegians about a mile away in the edge of the timber on the east side of Skunk river. Some time later it was torn down and rebuilt at Story City.
The Stultzes found shelter at Fairview till, after several months, they bought a small house of somebody and removed it to their little farm. Then with their own roof above them they were truly at home. But upon the happiness of this first home on their own acres, a shadow quickly fell, and the first spring there was the darkest time that is chronicled in Mrs. Stultz's recollections of pioneering. One of their horses slipped, broke his leg and had to be killed. The crop to be put in could not wait, and they had no money. Their extremity was great. Then the kindliness which is char- acteristic of the pioneer community, found expression through Mr. Solomon Sowers. He had a horse of his own which his son Lindsey with whom he was living did not need for farm work, so it was generously loaned to fill the breach made by the loss of the Stultz horse. Thus pluck and neighborly kindness tided over one trial after another.
But after three years came a still deeper experience. Mr. Mathers, back in the old home in Indiana, was critically ill, and wished to look once more upon his youngest daughter. Of course she must go to him, though there were mountains to be overcome. To begin with, it was spring of the year and travel to Iowa City, the nearest railway point, was temporarily sus- pended. Delay was inevitable till passage with some teamster could be se- cured. In the second place, the Stultz family now comprised two babies. This complication was provided for by securing Mr. and Mrs. Lars Larson to come and keep the house, the husband and the elder babe. After a week's delay. the journey was begun, Mrs. Stultz and her infant being gratuitous passengers of Jason D. Ferguson, a young man whose heroism and death in the Civil War are now memorialized in the name of the Grand Army Post
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at Nevada. Ferguson and Asa Griffith were each with his team going to Iowa City for merchandise.
Mrs. Stultz's trip to Indiana being finished, she met the sorrowful fact that her father's earthily life ended the day her homeward journey began. She prolonged her visit with her kindred for over two months, and then safely wended her way back to the husband and little one from whom she had been separated. She took back, too, some temporal helps for increasing pioneer comfort-little aids to household convenience, money which bought back the wagon that had been swapped off for a horse to complete the team, and which also bought a timber lot. After this small boost things went easier. The original acres were subsequently sold and two or three changes followed which in 1875 established the family home on the 160 on Indian Hill in Milford township, on which the life of Mr. Stultz closed in 1881 and which is still the property of the Stultz family.
Still resources continued scanty for many a day. Children were not pampered. There was choice between no fare at all and the usual fare of corn bread and butter or gravy, vegetables and a bit of meat, washed down with barley coffee unsweetened, or with milk or cold water. The cookery of that time with no sweet at all except a little homemade sorghum, contrasted strongly with the culinary concoctions of today when the annual average consumption of sugar is seventy pounds per head. A little sugar did come to the local market occasionally, but the price was high and the pioneer had no money to buy with. However, plenty of fresh air and exercise, hope and endeavor, provided sauce for such dishes as were possible, and nature converted the edibles into robustness and contentment.
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