USA > Iowa > Washington County > History of Washington County, Iowa from the first white settlements to 1908. Also biographical sketches of some prominent citizens of the county, Vol. I > Part 2
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35
It should have been noted that when the name of the county was changed, the boundaries were re-stated thus :
"Beginning on the range line between the ranges 5 and 6 west, where the township line divides townships 73 and 74 intersect said line, thence west with the said township line to the line dividing ranges 9 and 10 west, thence north on said line to the line dividing townships 77 and 78 north, thence east with said line between ranges 5 and 6 east, thence south with said line to the place of beginning."
So, after all the travail of our souls. as a part, in turn, of Louisiana, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan. Wisconsin, and Iowa territories, and also a part of the counties Demoine, and Louisa and all of Slaughter, we emerge at last into calm waters, with a clear identity and an individuality all our own. We could then sympathize with James W. Woods, alias "Old Timber," one of the earliest lawyers in Burlington, who rather bragged on his own omni- presence and ubiquity, in a playful mood, that he had had a child born in each of the territories of Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, and one in the state of Iowa, and all of them born in the self-same house.
CHAPTER II.
OUR PREDECESSORS.
No history of Washington county proper could be ancient history. There were but few traces of white folk in this region prior to 1835. But if we knew the details of all that went on here before the white men's coming, we might have a history far more ancient than anything written about Egypt, Persia and China.
At the close of the Black Hawk war in 1832, adventurous white men who, as rangers and "landless resolutes," had caught sight of the Canaan west of the Mississippi river, stole across, hoping to make lodgment as squatter sovereigns, but the government ousted the trespassers. The small garrison at Fort Armstrong on Rock Island was kept busier evicting these "sooners" than they had been in protecting the whites east of the river from Indian attacks. In the main. this region was held sacred to the redskins, and their good-will was kept by the honorable purchase of their lands, which they held by the right, not of discovery, but of possession.
In this county "civilization" began in 1835. The life of a man seventy- five years old spans the entire development of the order that supplanted barbarism on this ground. It is a short foreground, and we find no pictur- esque ruins in it. Therefore, we could not interest our English cousins, if they should visit us. Matthew Arnold could not be pleased even in Virginian and New England towns three centuries old, because they held no ruins of abbeys, coliseums, Roman walls, broken aqueducts, or ancient mosaic pave- ments. We probably could not show our cousins so many as a half dozen log cabins in this county, dating from the '30s. The best we could do, as hosts showing old things as curios, would be to set before them tlie remains and memorials of forgotten races of various colors-flint arrow-points, stone axes and hoes, granite mortars and pestles, stone or bone needles, and perhaps a few etchings of animals and birds on teeth or polished stone, and specimens of picture writing on bark and carvings on slate ledges, and rude copper utensils, ruder pottery, vast mounds used as burial places, temples, fortifications, etc. These implements, rude or fine, hark back millenniums
23
24
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
ago to the Stone Age, but they were not the work of the Indians we super- seded, though they used these tools of necessity to a still more ancient race. Our red men do not know how these were made. Thorean asked the New England Indians how arrow-heads were chipped, and he bade a friend going to the Rocky Mountains to ask the red men there how it was done. None knew. The darts, spear-points, stone axes and other rude cutlery were flaked and fashioned long ages ago, and the art has faded out of all barbarian tradition.
Our ancestors and the various peoples of the old world are more fortu- nate. They can trace their histories back of tradition till they are lost in the mists of fable and myth. Britain may wander back B. C., and wonder at her mysterious Stonehenge, and muse on the curios left by Caesar and Hadrian in various parts of the islands. Italy may grope back to the she- wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. France is so composite in nationali- ties, she can only guess at the mixture of her bloods, the result of the many fusions of the myriads of fighting men in migrations from the Germanic forests, nay. from the wilds of Asia, race crowding on race till the sea stood them at bay to fight to the death for a foothold and a home, or a grave.
Our records in the Mississippi valley are brief, like
"The short and simple annals of the poor."
We have to push these records back only seventy-five years to touch the edges and fringes of the prehistoric ages. Life, animal and human, had gone on here eons of time. We might as well call it millions of years as thousands. Time is the cheapest thing we have, if we, indeed, have that. In fact there is no such thing as time, or space, either-they are mere forms of thought. terms of convenience that we use, and must use. So we need not skimp in using big figures to denote duration.
Prior to seventy-five years ago there are but very few records of the lands and men west of the Mississippi river that we can dignity by the name of history. Indians wrote no history, for they made none. They needed no government outside narrow tribal range, and they organized none. Having no tise for institutions, they created none. They lived, loved, hated, fought, died, and there is small trace of their experiences. If they had been bison, deer and snakes, the record could not be leaner. Voiceless, silent races, as still and minte as the dust they turned into. Why should there be art and literature, speech and music, if eternal races fall into graves from which not even echoes come ?
All that precedes white men's coming here, lure and teaze the imagination far more than what has happened since their arrival. Let us state what is actually known and supposed to be known of the procession of ghosts that
-
-
GROUP OF INDIANS
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
27
IHISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
for ages prowled over these prairies, their war-whoops, ponies, game, toma- hawks, pipes of peace, war bonnets, ochres, lieaddress and ornaments, bows and arrows, scalping knives, tepees, wampum, all vanished irrecoverable.
The Indians we met here in the '30s were the confederated tribes of Sacs and Foxes, who were two of the many tribes composing the Algonquins. This powerful family roamed all over British America, as far as Hudson's Bay and the Eskimos, covered Canada and New England, the middle west and the south. They once numbered a quarter million, but disease and wars with the Iroquois decimated them to forty thousand. The Sacs and Foxes maintained the race reputation for prowess, and kept Iowa hot and red, fighting the Sioux. The forty mile wide Neutral Territory between them was hardly a barrier or buffer. The Sacs and Foxes had fought their way hither from the northern lakes. Very long ago they settled on the Wisconsin river, and, though detesting agriculture, they made the squaws raise a world of corn-maize, or grass, it was called-but they never learned the combina- tion of corn and hog, of corn and steer. They loved the shrill music of war, and thrived on scrapping. And wherever we find men who love savage fighting in politics and reform, and are eternally rowing, it is proof that they are not near civilized.
The Sacs and Foxes numbered seven thousand when white men came to their villages on the Des Moines river and to Poweshiek's village on the Iowa river. The villages of Keokuk, Wapello and Appanoose were a mile apart on the Des Moines. It was an idyllic life-for the braves, who loafed, dressed gaily, raced ponies, gambled, smoked, and drank whisky when they could get it, flirted with the maidens, hunted and fished, while the squaws did all the work, and their dogs diligently dodged the boiling pot. "The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot." The dogs hated the altar of sacrifice as cordially as the pot. For each dog boiled for food, another was lynched by a buckskin thong to a tree, to appease the wrath of the Evil Manitou or Spirit, who, as in our enlightened theology, divides the moral government of the world with the Great Spirit or Good Manitou. Nevertheless, the dogs kicked at the arrangement. A dog never did understand theology, anyhow. When company came, the dogs were troubled, as our chickens are when they see the minister coming. Uncivilized dog and civilized rooster have a common bond of sympathy. It was the old see-saw game-eat, avoid being eaten.
Let us not laugh at the superstitions of our red brethren-we have a few ourselves quite as silly. How many of us will not start on a journey on Friday, or plant in the light of the moon when it should be the dark of the same, according to agricultural sages of that breed? How many shiver in
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
the night it they hear the death-watch bug ticking on the wall? We have a lot of fool notions, too.
Luckily, we have a picture of Indian hospitality in lowa, and. it is sup- posed, quite near us, and as this was probably the first dinner ever served by reds to whites in this state, let the reader live it over with Father Mar- quette and Joliet. On the seventh of June, 1673, they floated down the Wis- consin river in two birch bark canoes, with five attendants, and discovered not only the Mississippi river, but Iowa. For days they did not see a human face on the southern voyage, but on the twenty-fiftlf they saw, like Robinson Crusoe, men's footprints on the river margin. They must have been near the site of Burlington. They traced the steps to a trail, and the two men took that path into the interior. An Indian village soon appeared, and the whites shouted and the reds leaped to their feet, all eyes fixed on the strangers. Four chiefs advanced toward them, but silent. The whites were wary, yet noticing that the redskins wore cloth that they must have got from the French, it was taken as a good omen. Arrived at the village, they were welcomed by the main chief, stark naked, as a token of respect. As Mar- quette could speak ten Indian languages or dialects, he learned that the Indians were the Illinois tribe, that he had long burned to preach to. More ceremonial of smoking. Then all hands, men, squaws, papooses, dogs, fleas, set out gaily to another village where the chief of all Illinois received them with rigid etiquet-he stood nude between two aged men in the same striking costume, and they were welcomed again, with more smoking. The naive ceremonial display of anatomy must have been as comical as Carlyle's conceit of a naked House of Lords in Westminster, described in "Sartor Resartus." Two betinselled pipes of peace were carried along, and now and then a co-operative whiff, and a young slave was given them, and a calumet, and a feast was ordered, but more tobacco first. It was a common mode of hospi- tality for Indians to urge wives upon guests, but the kindness was embarrass- ing to timid priests. By this time, tobacco had done its perfect work, and all fear fled in its benign aroma. Could tobacco be put to better use than to establish amity? Its use may be an evil habit, though smoking is still a social habit rather than a solitary vice. The two whites had such a good time, they staid all night, some writers say six days, spent in hunting and fishing on the red men's game preserves. Anyway, they spent the night, delighted guests of the most picturesque Indians they had met. Marquette describes the feast. It was a four-course dinner. in this order: 1. A big wooden bowl was brought on. filled with boiled corn meal, downright mush. A male Indian dipped a wooden spoon into the mess he called "tocamity," cooled it by blowing on it, and put it in the mouths of the guests, in turn. 2. Fish.
29
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
nicely cooked, all bones removed, and fed as before. And yet it was hardly "spoon vittels." 3. Roast dog-politely declined, and instantly removed from sight, the hosts probably wondering what was the matter with the dog -or the guests. 4. Buffalo boil, the juiciest cuts given to the Frenchmen. There is no mention that the tepee was decorated, or any color scheme, or of place or button-hole bouquets, ice cream, angel cake, etc. Being fed, the men needed no china, silver, napkins, finger bowls, and if there was pic, the polite French forgot to say so, nor do they hint of after-dinner coffee in ridiculous thimble cups or cubes of cheese, but tooth-picks would really have been acceptable. It was a neater meal than the dinner given by the Khedive of Egypt to Miss Amelia B. Edwards, the English authoress, and her party, a very swell diplomatic dinner. The greasy meats were in a common central dish, and each guest "jest reached to and helped himself," clawing out one's portion with one's bare hands. Cleopatra may have served the same sort of meal many a time to Antony and Caesar, on the Nile. Amelia needed a napkin. a finger bowl. and a bath. The untutored barbarian was the tidier host.
When the Frenchmen left for their boats, six hundred reds accompanied them, and there was after-dinner oratory, with this characteristic Indian speech :
"I thank the Black Gown Chief ( Father M.) and his friend for taking so much pains to come and visit us. Never before has the earth been so beautiful nor the sun so bright as now. Never has the river been so calm or free from rocks which your canoes have removed as they passed down. Never has the tobacco had so fine a flavor, nor our corn appeared so beautiful as to-day. Ask the Great Spirit to give us life and health, and come ye and dwell with us."
On this voyage, the men lay-by at night, anchored out in the deep stream for safety. The trip down to the Arkansas river mouth had one bad effect -- Marquette contracted dysentery, that became chronic.
The Indians rather over-did the welcome business, with pipes and speeches. On one occasion a white party were feted, and the old chief washed all the faces in warm water as a mark of respect, and they were placed on a rude cane rostrum and forced, in courtesy and diplomacy, to listen four hours to speeches of welcome in a tongue they could not under- stand. Are the Indians humorists? We, though boasting of our culture, etc., have not yet shed the silly welcome habit on all sorts of occasions. even at a home farmers' institute. There is always a lot of that sort of palaver at meetings. Better cut the absurdity clean out. Else have it in a foreign tongue without gestures.
30
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
The Indians in Iowa, when it was first explored, were the Dakotas in the north and in the south the Illinois, Sauks, Foxes, Chippewas, Pottawattomies et al. The Iowas were first heard of in 1690, migrating from the great lakes, crossing the big river and locating in the lower valley of the Iowa river. Schoolcraft says they migrated fifteen times, which means at least fifteen wars. They long warred with the Sacs and Foxes, and the latter nearly exterminated them in 1824, at Iowaville. Being heathen and wicked and knowing no better, the Iowas were racing ponies and betting, and Providence punished them by giving them into the hands of their treacherous Sac and Fox hosts. It was an outrageous massacre of all ages and both sexes. The lowas never recovered from the blow. The remnant offered their land in 1825 to the United States for one hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars, to be kept in trust at five per cent. interest to be paid annually to the tribe, and they dissolved as smoke into Missouri. Many of the younger ones en- listed in the union army in the Civil war and made good soldiers. Black Hawk helped in this massacre, and that fact discounts our pity for him in his downfall in 1832. His village was at Rock river, near Rock Island. He says in his autobiography that it was built in 1831 and had eight thousand population. The houses must have copied the Iroquois "long houses," as they were thirty to one hundred feet long, sixteen to forty wide, roofed with sheathing of elm bark laid on a frame of poles, curtains of buffalo skins at the three by six doors. The house was divided into rooms separated by a lengthwise hall, and holes were cut over the fire pots to let out the smoke. The beds were skins on elevated frames of elastic poles. Here Black Hawk had a watch tower commanding a vast sweep of noble scenery.
In 1804 Jefferson had negotiated for the lands of the Sacs and Foxes. Unknown to Black Hawk, several chiefs were lured to St. Louis, made drunk, and thus they were induced to sign a treaty, granting the government millions of acres east of the Mississippi, extending from East St. Lonis to the Wisconsin river, for two thousand two hundred and thirty-four dollars worth of goods and one thousand dollars in cash a year. Black Hawk and the other chiefs repudiated the treaty as an outrageous swindle, because these sots had no authority to cede the tribe's lands, and this led to the villainous Black Hawk war in 1832. When he returned from a hunt west of the river, the whites had surveyed his lands and sold them to settlers, and his cabin had been seized and his wife and children evicted. He drove off the intruders. Governor Reynolds, of Illinois, sent sixteen hundred soldiers to the Sac villages and sent the population across the Mississippi, with orders never to return. It was too late to plant corn, and the Indians had no prospect of food in the fall. In April, 1832, Black Hawk and others did re-cross, to
CHIEF BLACK HAWK
-
-
CHIEF KEOKUK
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
33
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
join the Winnebagoes in planting. It was like Napoleon's return from Elba. Black Hawk refused to go back, as his people would be destitute. General Whiteside, with twenty-four hundred militia went against him, and with him were Captain Abraham Lincoln, Lieutenant-Colonel Zachary Taylor, and Lieutenant Jefferson Davis, all destined to be presidents. There were less than five hundred Indians. Major Stillman and two hundred and seventy-five mounted men approached Black Hawk, who sent flags of truce by eight young warriors. They were taken prisoners and three of them shot. Black Hawk had but forty warriors, in ambush, and when the troops came on, the reds gave a war-whoop and fired. The contemptible white cads skedaddled thirty miles before stopping, and fifty rode clear home, to tell of the mur- derous fire that had killed eleven of them, and to report that there were millions of the braves charging on them. Perhaps the cowards are running yet. It was worse than Bull Run. Black Hawk retreated to the Wisconsin river, where he held the whites in check till his women and children had made bark canoes and crossed, when his men forded the stream. Lieutenant Davis said it was a masterly retreat against great odds. Indians were shot after surrender. It was wretched business, and one is sorry that Lincoln was in such damnable business, a war as mean as hell. The scurvy war cost us two millions and two hundred white and five hundred red lives. Black Hawk was taken to Washington City, and when presented to President Jackson, said, "I am a man, you are another," and added :
"We did not expect to conquer the whites. They had too many men. I took up the hatchet to avenge injuries my people could no longer endure. Had I borne them longer without striking, my people would have said 'Black Hawk is a squaw, he is too old to be our chief, he is no Sac.' These reflec- tions caused me to raise the war-whoop. The result is known to you. I say no more."
When an Indian is done, he quits. He is not brief and sententious because of a famine of thoughts. The fewer ideas a white speaker has, the longer he rants, the louder hie roars, and the more convulsive his gestures. How quiet, as with consciousness of reserve power. Indian orators are! Indian speeches were not edited by white men. For they are all alike, have common racial traits and characteristics, have the same pitch, tone and mannerism, because the red men all stood on one plane of culture, or lack of culture. Likewise the best written English journals read alike, have a common quality and style, for scholars, too, are of one plane and type. The Indian says his say, and stops, and it is very impressive. And it is a great virtue. The red man is a child of nature, brother to animals, birds, rivers, clouds, stars, trees, and his similes and images are of natural objects. He does not jump beyond
8
34
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
his range. When he wishes to indicate a host of men, he speaks of the leaves that whisper in myriads, as the old Greeks also poetically spoke of "the multi- tudinous laughter of the sea." meaning the sparkles and smiles on its face. Indian oratory is as close to nature as muscle to bone, and how tense, terse, concentrated, poetic it is. Our red brother was a poet without the jingle, but with the sea-water swing of rhythm, and he had an eye for simple beauty, and to him nature is all symbol. That beautiful speech of Logan, and Black Hawk's thumb-nail cameos, and Keokuk's, are above praise as literary gems. So short, so pithy, like Lincoln's immortal little classic at Gettysburg. These speeches have all the depth of color and light that floats in the heart of an opal or diamond. or in the clear eyes of a child or woman.
We might expect this finished sort of oratory from red men, if we study ,their splendid faces, especially in profile. Such impassive, inscrutable faces, keen, steady eyes, even if cruel, all the lines indicating poise and supple strength, nature's man every inch of him, a medieval American, savage in frame, bearing, presence, and novelty of personal adornment. His words must keep all that in countenance.
Black Hawk was soon released and went to Fort Armstrong. humiliated because his hated rival. Keokuk, had risen on his downfall. Keokuk was the shrewder politician. He had adopted the peace policy because there were too many whites. His young braves were on fire to join Black Hawk, when Keokuk poured cold water on them in this canny way-could it be improved ?
"Warriors: I am your chief. It is my duty to lead you to war if you are determined to go. The United States is a great nation, and unless we conquer them we must perish. I will lead you against the whites on one condition, that we shall first put all our women and children to death, and then resolve that when we cross the Mississippi we will never retreat, but perish among the graves of our fathers rather than yield to the white men."
Thus deftly he rubbed a big chunk of ice down their feverish spines.
At the fort Keokuk was in fine fettle, in gay dress of buckskin, volu- minous cloak, bunches of feathers, fringes, scepter, necklaces of bear claws and teeth, wristlets, and tufted electrical hair, posing and strutting as chief of the Sacs and Foxes, as glorious as a drum-major in toggery that make him look like God in the eyes of wondering children. This peacock had supplanted Black Hawk, who drank then and there the cup of humiliation to the dregs. But Black Hawk retired with dignity and pride, with his one faithful wife, two sons and one daughter. to the Des Moines river near Iowaville, the scene of his treachery and cruelty, and he made garden, raised corn, melons and vegetables, and sorrowed as he saw his tribe giving away
35
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
their lands for a song and sinking the proceeds in saloons. At a celebration in Fort Madison, July 4, 1838, he made this swan-song speech :
"It has pleased the Great Spirit that I am here to-day. I have eaten with my white friends. It is good. A few summers ago I was fighting you. I may have done wrong. But that is past. Let it be forgotten. Rock river valley was a beautiful country. I loved my village, my cornfields, and my people. I fought for them. They are now yours. I was once a great war- rior. Now I am an old and poor man. Keokuk has been the cause of my downfall. I have looked upon the Mississippi since I was a child. I love the great river. I have always dwelt upon its banks. I look upon it now and am sad. I shake hands with you. We are now friends. I may not see you again. Farewell."
Can that bit of homespun pathos, coined right out of nature's heart, be surpassed ?
He died October 3, 1838. almost seventy-two years old, and was buried on a spot he had selected on the shore of the Des Moines river, near the north-east corner of Davis county, Iowa. A bill is in this legislature to erect a monument above his fiery dust.
His face is striking, but more refined than strong. Some Indian faces are superb and right royal in their lines.
After the surrender of Black Hawk, he was taken to Washington and other eastern cities, and at this time the colonization of the negroes was being agitated. Black Hawk was asked to give his opinion of the best way to solve the race problem. After reflection he said that the question was easy of solution, and that the following would be, in his judgment, the best plan : "Let the free states remove all the male negroes within their limits to the slave states ; then let our Great Father buy all the female negroes in the slave states between the ages of twelve and twenty, and sell them to the people of the free states, for a term of years, say those under fifteen until they are twenty-one, and those over fifteen, for five years, and continue to buy all the females in the slave states as soon as they arrive at the age of twelve, and take them to the free states and dispose of them in the same way as the first, and it will not be long before the country is clear of the black-skins, about which I am told they have been talking for a long time, and for which they have expended a large amount of money."
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.