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 25
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
Let's amble back to the early candle lighting era. Ever make tallow candles, cut wicks, pour, make the cooled candles crack in the moulds? Ever make a tin lantern by punching holes in it ? If candles can't be afforded, use a lard dip, or put melted lard in a saucer, hang a rag over the edge, like the tongue of a lolling dog or ox, light it, and you will have an electric pear.
Or suppose we return to the malarial age when ten per cent of the settlers shook with chills and burned with fever, and men were doped with quinine. calomel, boneset tea, and kids with castor oil, sulphured molasses,
ENOCH ROSS
Member of Constitutional Convention of 1844-5
WILLIAM MeGAUGHY At ninety-seven years of age
-
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
391
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
root and yarb teas, nasty decoctions for worms and things, and their heads were daily fine-combed for creeping things and the hair plastered down with a candle-roller, and water was denied in fevers, and sick adults and sick horses were bled by the quart and gallon- do you care to go back there to live in such a cheerful, intelligent state, when doctors knew much less than they do now and did more guessing ?
Now I know why you are so eager to go back there-it's to sleep in a high- post bed, corded with rope that was tightened with a big wooden or iron wrench such as the rural doctors pulled teeth with. When a jerk-water M. D. got one of those appalling things out, wrapped in a cloth, and fumbled for your sick molar, there seemed to be as much apparatus in it as in a guillotine or gallows. When a bed rope was fetched up taut, if you turned over in bed, a neighbor a quarter-mile away could hear the doleful creak. Those beds did protest too much. When the tick was crammed with straw, it was as pudgy and corpulent as a Dutch housefrau, and one needed to be scotched on either side to prevent rolling out, in sleep. Some beds had canopies and curtains, to assure ventilation, and there was always a valance that looked like a petticoat sunk too low under a dress skirt. Under the bed was, perhaps, a trundle bed for a kid, etc.
Perhaps you would like to "break" a prairie farm. It was about as severe a stunt as to clear a timbered farm in Indiana and Ohio. Hitch six to eight yoke of oxen to a plow twelve to fifteen feet long, the front end of the beam run on trucks, the share cutting eighteen to twenty-four inches. The ground was covered and matted with blue-stem grass as high as a man's head and as thick as hair on a dog, and when the driver yelled to Buck, Bright and the rest of the lolling quadrupeds and swung his g'ad, and talked anti-Sunday school jargon to the motors, they went crashing through the tule grass and hazel bushes, and robins and blackbirds had picnics in the grubby furrows. In the first years, indeed up to the coming of the railroad in '58, farmers did not need much plowed ground to grow corn on. The price of corn was too low. It was easy to cultivate, as weeds had not then got a foothold. Besides, hogs wanted nothing better or more fattening than the abundant mast in the woods, that is, nuts. A pioneer hog was abreast of the hygienists now. A nut is as concentrated and rich as an egg. Squirrels thrive on nuts. A Boston dietist says pie prolongs life, and if one eats nuts one will live a thousand years. Don't, therefore, eat too many nuts. Why raise corn to fatten hogs when mast abounds? In Florida, the best bacon in the world is cut from hogs that live on mast. Those rail-splitters have a snout, head, neck and shoulders that constitute two-thirds of the dredger animal. They are built to unheave mast, and chemistry transmutes nuts into sowbelly and "sweet ole ham" that are
392
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
divine. The pioneers needed corn only for oxen and johnny-cake. With plenty of eggs so cheap they were fed to the hogs by the bucketful, and with milk and honey flowing, butter selling at three cents a pound and barrels of honey retailing at twenty cents per gallon, and wild turkeys, prairie chickens, ducks and deer galore, and an infinitude of berries, crab apples, plums, grapes, haws, cherries, all these a drug at from six to fifteen cents a gallon, women bringing them to market, barefoot, putting on their stockings and shoes at the edge of the town, and swapping them for sugar and coffee, why should men plow much ? Why plant corn to raise stock, when a colt would make its good living on the common, and a three-year-old steer sold for ten to twelve dollars, fat wethers at two dollars a head, and hogs, dressed and hauled to market, brought two and two and a half cents per pound? It is odd, the only kick the farmers made then on the country was, "It would be all right if it could grow fruit and grass."
You see there was not a blade of blue grass then ; that has clothed our roadsides, meadows and lawns only in very recent years, say twenty-five to thirty years, with its lovely tresses. Nor was there timothy or clover : just wild grass. blue stem, slough grass, the jungle stuff that they had to fire in the fall to make travel possible. Or, if it went over till spring, and, when dry again, was burned, the blackened prairie was white with myriads of prairie hens' cooked eggs, pearly white as if laid by a brooding hailstorm. There is but one field of the ancient wild grass in this county, it is said, on the Page place. Blue grass has taken the country, and no one knows when or how or why it came, but it came like "the kingdom of heaven, without observation."
Would you like to hike back to the ancient style of shopping? Groceries showed no novelties. There were no canned goods but oysters, peaches, sar- dines : nor granulated sugar, but the A sugar, like our light brown stuff, nine or ten pounds to the dollar, that would dry out as hard as stone, and New Orleans sugar, as black as the coons who made it, and as damp as Venirs scooting from the bath. Coffee was not roasted; women had to parch it and grind it in a mill nailed to the wall, as well as spices; coffee so high it was mixed with rye, and was poor stuff to moisten your clay with. Most stores were eclectic, selling everything. Thus, Hugh Kendall's father, Wm. W., was the first druggist here, on the east side, selling out to Dr. Chilcote in '55. Cook & Sherman have some of his preparations yet, quite likely. He also sold dry goods, groceries, boots and shoes, hardware and other universally needed bric-a-brac.
Perhaps you would like to go back to the time when all cattle wore horns, and not a single mooley in the county, or state. In the wild state, and even on the range, they need horns for defense. A horn was always a sign
393
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
of power, and that is the reason why Michel Angelo put two nubbin horns on the head of "Moses" in his gigantic statue. But domesticated cattle, herded in sheds, stables and pastures, do not need horns ; indeed, horns are a nuisance and menace, and fifteen to twenty years ago Mr. Haaf began dehorning, and most all farmers dehorn now. It improves the beauty and temper of cattle, and sort o' Christianizes 'em. The act seems cruel. So dehorn chemically, with lunar caustic. The pain is almost nil. Pure bred cattle may keep their horns, as a rule, but stock for the shambles and dairy are better cropped. But the pioneers lived in a forest of horns, and crowned them with brass nuts, to prevent goring.
Perhaps you would like to be set back into that furry period when the skins of mink and otter were plentiful and stood for good money's worth. Farms were paid for in furs. Trappers, day after day, brought in ten dollars to forty-five dollars' worth of skins, each, including muskrat, when two dollars and fifty cents would buy an acre of Iowa land. It seems queer, but then counties paid a fifty-cent bounty on sand-hill cranes, as they devastated wheat fields. These birds were as 'cute as crows, knew a gun, posted sentinels, ate under guard, heeded signals. Furs persist in Iowa yet. Jackson Roberts, thirty years ago, probably made more money on skins he bought than on groceries he sold. There are still Iowa firms that handle yearly fifty thousand dollars to one hundred thousand dollars' worth of skins.
Really, I'd like to go back there for several reasons. I. To get the prime maple sugar the Indians made. Even Chief Black Hawk, after his downfall, and his wife and daughter made sugar to sell. The girl was handsome and smart, fell in love with Joe Walsh, of Baltimore, a clerk in Fort Madison, and he went daffy on her, and spent Sundays with her, talking Indianese, but a chum disillusioned him, the engagement was broken with mutual consent, and she fitly married a red buck, and they probably lived happily ever after? The whites traded flour for Indian sugar. 2. To see the unaffected hospital- ity, the true democratic sentiment, the total absence of caste and class feeling. A family would in winter bundle up and visit a neighbor, staying to dinner- not a modern fashionable call, but stay all forenoon and into the afternoon till it was time to go home and do the chores. It was "a regular corker of a time," as Teddy would say. There was no big head, no one put on airs, all was simple, sincere, genuine, "the days that are no more," alas! 3. To see the parrots. What! Don't you know flocks of painted parrots came into the southern counties of Iowa in the spring, and, perching on leafless trees, clothed them with hues of rainbows? It is a fact. It is no more singular than that tropical humming birds should "Gee-whiz" about us -- that is what the hum of their swift wings sing out in spelling school. That vernal scene
394
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
must have been like the display of colors parrots make on the west coast of Africa. The late Missionary Charles MeCleary told me that when the vast forests there bore flowers on their tall tops, parrots would feast there in myriads, the sounds deafening, but the colors gorgeous beyond description.
Would you relish going back to a time when potatoes were so scarce that no one planted a whole one, but used the peelings for seed at a cost of two dol- lars a bushel? To a time when the wags said the main undergrowth was rattlesnakes? To a time when a gristmill was the-rendezvous for candidates, politicians, claim-traders, horse-tracers. wrestlers, swimmers, fishermen et al ? All these fellows could get in their work while patrons waited their turns at grinding. A mill was a general clearing-house for gossip, axes-to-grind, jobs, etc. There were no bolts in those mills ; wheat was merely cracked in them, and the grist was soot-black, and the pioneer bread was as black as a coal.
How about going back to honey-hunting, when men not infrequently found three to four score bee trees in a day ? Every one of the millions of bees had the instinct to gobble honey as soon as it smelled the hunter's smoke, for they had been doing that for millions of years. It is the only way to handle them yet in hives. Take the top off a hive and puff in smoke, every insect goes to eating like mad and forgets to sting. It feels it may be a good while before it can get at another hoard of sweets, and is so intent on gorging that you could comb its hair-it will not dagger you. Early Iowa, when the cows came home, was indeed a land flowing with milk and honey. Honey, eaten by humans in moderate quantity, is a powerful food-it stands for ninety- eight per cent of pure energy. Don't eat too much. mind. but take an inch cube of comb every day, perhaps at each meal- nothing is more wholesome.
If we should visit an early Iowa Sunday school, we should likely see the teacher teaching tots their a, b, c's, and reading and spelling, using spelling books and testament as text books. More sensible, too, than teaching cate- chism theology, not?
An early prairie would not look like the present expanse. It was thickly covered with the bones and horns of elk, buffalo, deer, slain for meat and pelts. And in June behold an infinite carpet of blue-stem, lilies, sweet william, prairie rose, lady slipper near the woods, wild tiger lily, etc., as brilliant colors as in oriental rugs, carpets and tapestries.
Or would you prefer to see how the pioneers, who were mostly young people, amused themselves, courted, married? They went round from house to house, debating fool questions that raise no issue, such as, "which is better, art or nature?" Then picnics, spelling and singing schools, schemes devised to give the boys a chance to go home with the girls, rail-splitting contests,
ELIZABETH KIRKPATRICK BAILEY Who returned to Ohio in 1843 on horseback, carrying James, her eight months old son. She had five sons in the Union Army
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
397
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
log-rollings, kissing parties regardless of germs which had not been in- vented then, house-raisings, men going ten miles to get a chance to lift and hit booze. As the cabins were one-roomed, the sparking was slily done in the dusky corners of the fireplaces that took in four to five-foot wood. If the old folk fussed about it, the pair eloped. If he had a pair of blue jeans and a row of brass buttons on each side of a coat front, and she had a new calico dress, that was trousseau enough-they had each other, what more did they want but a preacher who never charged a cent, for no one had money-all he wanted was a wedding dinner. The average preacher is the hungriest crit- ter in the jungle, always was, ever will be : he is an organism built up round a stomach, just as a model house is a shelter constructed around a Webster's Unabridged Dictionary and a bath room.
Or we'll look in on a country dance back there, in a room sixteen by eighteen when the furniture is set out doors, and the Jakes and Janes grab each other and "sashay." Our Abe Essley used to fiddle for them. The girls would walk miles, chewing a gum snatched from resin weed, to a cabin, barefoot, wash their feet in a run or in dew instead of butter, as in Scripture times, and put on stockings and shoes, and the swains did likewise, then at it, and the ambi- tion was, to hold out the longest. No fancy program, pencil, autograph, white gloves, loop for the skirt to slip on an arm-no silly "horse" of that sort, or Beau Brummell and Lord Chesterfield manners-just homespun ways and natural, spontaneous fun.
There were other forms of fun not so innocent, as card-playing by a club of bad boys during divine service in Snake Hollow church, in '53.
An amateur preacher weighing over three hundred pounds was asked, in this city, long ago, to help at an Ainsworth revival. It was a hot day, and he was in decided undress, and very dirty, but he agreed to go and stop a gap in the preaching force if given a clean white shirt and a pair of decent breeches. He squeezed into them, and held forth without coat or vest. When in full action, there was a loud crack, as if some one had split a bolt of muslin, but it was only his tight shirt. A fearful gesture, forceful enough to knock the devil off a culvert, ripped it open in the back. Though it gave the good man much needed ventilation, it was embarrassing. He was a typical pioneer ex- horter. That class had so much to do, they rarely did anything well. Robert Collyer, the famous ex-blacksmith Unitarian divine, in his book. "Augustus Conant, Illinois Pioneer and Preacher," quotes this from Conant's diary :
"May 2. Wrote a sermon.
"May 3. Sunday. Wrote poetry.
"May 4. Made shelves and split rails.
398
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
"June 3. Made a table, and borrowed six bushels of potatoes to be paid back with interest in the fall.
"Made a coffin for H. Dougherty.
"Dressed pig and calves torn by wolves. Dug a well.
"Unwell, and so studied algebra.
"Made a sun-dial.
"Unwell, so wrote temperance address.
"Temperance meeting : delivered my address ..
"13. Got my oration published, and paid for.
"Made a plan of a sermon on the prodigal son, a pair of quilting frames, and an argument at the Lyceum against capital punishment.
"Read the Methodist Disciple. Helped my wife to wash.
"Finished sermon. Made soap."
That fellow was a jack of all trades and good at none.
One does not have to go back far to reach this practical joke, perpetrated here some thirty to thirty-five years ago, and it was as outrageous as anything done in the reckless olden time. A queer fellow got full in a south side joint one Saturday night, and when asleep wags put him in a coffin exposed in the front window, and he lay in state all Sunday forenoon, for church passersby to look at, a horrid example.
Knighthood was in flower in Washington in 1842, but it was a chivalrous sell. At that date Indians still held a bit of land in Lime Creek township, that had not been included in the former purchases. A good many Reds camped at Wassonville, fishing while waiting the grinding of their grain. Dr. Lee re- ported here that they were holding a white girl prisoner. He worked on the sympathies of our leading citizens, who snatched arms and mounted thirty horses to rescue the maiden, and more men would have leaked sympathy if there had been more nags. When Mr. Churchman, a lawyer, saw the reds in force, he wheeled and ran home ; he may be running yet. The others inter- viewed the chief. "Yes, she is white ; they had taken her from the Sacs and Foxes who abused her ; you can take her if she wants to go, and if you will give bonds to treat her well and educate her." In good English the girl thanked them for their interest, but she preferred to stay with her benefac- tors ! Knighthood chased itself all the way back to town. The folks never got tired of guying the turned-down knights, among whom were such men as Joseph Keck, Jonathan Wilson, M. C. Kilgore. J. E. Malin et al.
Queer characters back there. One was our surveyor, Daniel McFarland. His plat book in the county offices is a good record. He opened it August 31, '44. with this inscription : "Now commences the labours of the Snake Charm- er, D. W. McFarland." He lost his life in the streets of St. Louis, showing
399
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
timber and prairie rattlesnakes. On a cold morning he hauled them out of a box rather roughly, and one fastened its fangs in his thumb. It took so long to detach it, he could not suck out all the poison. That was his remedy-he never used whisky-it is a humbug. He had an adventure at Wassonville with Iowa City armed troopers who officially came there to drive off to their boundary six miles away, a band of Musquakies who had come to the mill to get corn ground. They knew they were technically trespassers, but they were friendly with the whites and would leave as soon as they got their grist. The fool lieutenant meant to scourge them back. McFarland told the chief to toss him his blanket ; he threw it round his shoulders and told the soldiers, "I am chief now, these Indians are friendly, and he would give them fifteen minutes to start back to Iowa City," at the same time raising the Indian war-whoop. The red warriors looked savage as yellow-jackets, and the troopers at once put spurs to their horses.
It was "boys" who saved the Union in the '6os, and it is young fellows who emigrate, colonize, open new country, build society, for it takes en- thusiasm, hot blood, strength, hope, pluck to do those things. So it does not surprise to learn that the vanguard of the pioneers were largely single men, coming on foot or horse-back. with gun, ax, auger, etc., and at the nearest trading post buying buckets, tin cups, plates, knives, forks, Dutch ovens, coffee pots, skillets, and as much meal, bacon and sugar as they could pack, stake out a claim, build a hovel, and on going to work leaving food in the cabin for any wayfarer who might come along, hungry. He would not be a tramp, anyhow. It was an universal custom thus to make the cabin a cache. All the recompense asked for was, the autograph of the guest chalked on the door.
The first cabins were simpler than later ones, being a cross between "hoop-cabins" and tepees or bark huts. Strictly, there were no cabins till there were enough settlers for a raising with shouts of "Heave o' he," and John Barleycorn's aid. In human dens, windows with sash and glass were rare, greased paper being used. Door latches were wooden, a deer skin string hung out-pull it and come in! No electric buttons then to get out of order.
The "bul!" plows were equally primitive, the mould-boards made of wood. or half wood and iron.
Before gristmills, hominy blocks were fashioned out of sections of a tree trunk eighteen to twenty-four inches in diameter, hollowed out at one end and hardened by fire. They resembled druggists' mortars. Pestles of wood with an iron wedge attached, big end down. One block served a neighborhood.
100
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
As there were few taverns, the cabins were crowded ; anybody, every- body were taken in to lodge over night ; the first family to arrive took the back part of the cabin, and it was a case of progressive bedding toward the door. Young men slept in wagons. Those nearest the door got up first and went outside to dress. It was handy. Meals of corn bread, fat pork, butter- milk, occasional coffee, were served at the ends of wagons. On Sundays an extra ration-wheaten bread ; the grain threshed on the ground under the feet of horses or oxen, cleaned with a tossing sheet, and mashed by hand.
They say the loneliness of pioneer life made people so bashful they did not know how to behave after a good many came. Solitary herders of stock go insane, not bashful, and of late years many isolated farm women get crazed by their awful loneliness.
It is said the early settler women paid scant attention to flowers and did not have posy beds or try to keep winter plants in bloom. The woods were full of flowers, and the prairie was painted with their hues as brightly as the winter night sky with stars.
For some years horses were few, and they were kept for riding. R. T. McCall says there were not a half dozen horses in Crawford township in the early '405. Oxen did the farm work. One man might own a horse, a neigh- bor another, and thus a wagon team could on a pinch be conjured up.
Let's take a look at the Indians: they sometimes dissected the bodies of their dead, if they could not be transported; they cleaned the bones, dried them in the sun and boxed them in vessels of bark. The skeleton was the unit, as with the Chinese in this country ; "John" lightly regards what he calls "the meat." and loads fleets of ships with celestial bones to be buried at home where ancestral worship may be made to the "remains."
Indians and hunters fired the tall dry prairie grass annually-an impen- etrable, impassable jungle, else.
Many things that were necessities way back there, long since gone into in- nocous desuetude, now stock museums as curios-go look at 'em and let your sore heart ache for our forebears-grain cradles, baby cradles, scythes, trundle beds. spinning wheels, hetchels, candle moulds, looms, boot-jacks, candle- sticks, rude lamps, dasher churns, "slices," valises made of glazed stuff that cracked into as many wrinkles as seam the faces of Mexicans and Indians apparently a thousand years old, or made of flowered carpet cloth, trunks bound in pelts, the hair left on, studded with brass nails, but the hair worn off in use, as on the flanks of a horse worked between tugs, and the trunks seemed crying for wigs. Is there anything more doleful looking than such a lot of discards? With these might fitly go a list of abandoned practices and industries. Folk used to make their inks with logwood, etc., and dyes from
1
MRS. ALMON MOORE Came to county in 1839
MRS. JESSE ASHBY Mother of Nathan Littler
26
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
403
HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
madder and the juices of other plants, but now corporations make dyes from coal tar cheaper and better than any one could do alone. And our forebears were eternally trying to substitute the products of maple sap, sorghum, etc., for sugar, now abandoned as commercially non-economical. Flax and hemp were grown and worked for clothing and cordage, but they have lapsed. Corporations can beat the individual. And foods have changed. Wild rice in Minnesota and Wisconsin feeds twenty thousand Indians, and in Oregon wet lands and marshes the seeds of water lilies nourish many Reds, and the wild berries and fruits that sustained Indians-all that we modern whites disdain, though our pioneers rated them luxuries and necessities.
We should not like to be set back there without labor-saving machinery, matches, tooth-brushes and mouth lotions, disinfectants, court plaster, break- fast foods, railroads, telegraphs and telephones, phonographs, plays, sewers, water under pressure, hospitals, nurses, "comfy" houses, nice furniture, prompt and cheap mail facilities, cheap postage, cheap books and magazines, opera houses, music, art, luxurious travel with sleeping and dining cars, hair mattresses, lawn mowers, automobiles, electric fans, billiard tables, golf, tennis, croquet, gymnasiums, gas and electric light, ready-made clothing of all sorts, street cars, refrigerators and ice, banks and safety boxes, cheap and pretty watches and clocks-O. well, why extend the list? We could not be hired to swap our lot for theirs.
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.