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 4
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Of course, we should not expect too much of Indians. They are nature's men and women. They live in the basement, perhaps the sub-basement, of the mind. They speak in terms of nature, as is natural. When they speak, it is as if beavers, bison, muskrats, deer, foxes, woodchucks, snakes spoke. It is not exact to say that what they say is "common sense," but it is "the com- mon sense," that intelligence that is a more fundamental faculty, without any stimulus or embroidery from culture, precisely common to natural men and to animals. The schools have had no part in the making of Indians. An Indian knows wood-craft, weather, and all natural phenomena exactly as bird and
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animal are weather-wise and otherwise. They all went to the same school, and it is the only school they ever did attend.
These folk in our county had summer villas and outings. The summer houses were tents made by squaws when hunts were on, out of eircular rows of willows planted in the ground, tying their tops together. While planting corn and beans, and harvesting, they all staid at home, then took a brief hunt, and left the villages in winter, hunting by families or in small parties- a nomadic life. They hugged the wooded streams for wind-breaks and fuel. On one such trip Chief Kisk-ke-kosh and party invited themselves to stay the night in a white man's small cabin, and in the morning that exquisite kept his eye on the woman cooking the breakfast. He noticed that she did not wash hands or face, or comb her hair, and he left, fasting, in disgust at her untidyness, a result she perhaps counted on. All the party declined break- fast, and told of it as a personal merit.
Way back there the red temperance league had to deal with drunkenness, and their mode was to tie the horrid example by the neck and heels, and roll him like a hoop till the coma of congestion cleared up. The victim had no resentment when he came-to, for that was the natural order of the universe.
Mrs. Rachel Buek told this true incident. Five slaves ran off from Mis- souri and took refuge among our Indians, who had never seen black men. and puzzled over them, and concluded they were a new kind of bear. They led the slaves by thongs around their necks, to the whites, hoping to swap them for fire-water, and they did. The negroes worked well around here for a year or two, till their master heard of them and carried them back.
Disdaining agriculture, as a squaw's side issue, hunting became the re- source as well as amusement of the bucks. They were not vegetarians. They chased elk, deer. buffalo, shot wild turkeys, prairie chickens and pheasants, caught fish, trapped muskrats for both food and pelts. That rat had a wild, musky odor and a nutty flavor like creosote. They lived on a heavy proteid diet, but an active life in the air and sun prevented auto-intoxication in their colons. No one ever heard of a case of liver complaint in an Indian, who rode a pony, chased game, and struck the trail with pigeon-toed feet. Did bare-back riding and clasping the barrel of the horse make them pigeon- toed ? Did the trail incline the toes inward? In the snow, the trail was nar- row, as red men swung each foot around and planted it straight ahead of its mate. A white man's path in snow is double the width of a red man's trek, as the white toes out and does not track. Besides, the white man's foot strikes heel first, while the Indian's grips the ground with the front of the foot ; the toes bite the grit sharper when the toes turn in.
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The Indians were true sports. Their work was play. Happy the man who can earn his living in fun! White men earn their bread in the sweat of their faces, because some one sinned, they say. Thoreau said they must sweat easier than he did, if that was necessary, but the Indian gets and eats his meat and saves his perspiration.
Indians never exterminated game. They did not kill in wantonness, but just for food and hides and for glee. Buffalo would have lasted a million years on these prairies if Indians had been the sole human tenants. It is just as well that both departed. They cumbered the ground. Look at a buffalo: a jack rabbit beats it for steaks, and bison is no good at all for milk, cream, butter, cheese. High in shoulders like camelopard, head like a boulder, it slopes down like a roof to the little end of nothing, such a ridiculous rump! It ate much grass, that would have fared better in the four stomachs of cow or steer. The only way a red or white camper can eat buffalo flesh is to "jerk" it. It took exercise, oxygen, ozone to digest the tough stuff. Such food would have disrupted the alimentary canal of a sedentary white man. Let the bull- headed creature go extinct. Were it not for the zest of the chase of bison, the Indians would better have bred dogs for food.
The Indians were made true sports by the necessity of preserving the game they lived upon. The squaws might have worked, in worsted, in place of the motto, "God bless our home," this adornment of the wick-i-up, "Arise, Peter, slay and eat," if they had had also this motto,
"He who slays and runs away, May live to hunt another day."
It required Americans and the English to exterminate the buffalo, not for any sound economic reason, but to gratify a lust for murder. But neither barbarians nor even savages are butchers like these modern gunners, who kill in sheer wantonness, and are far more brutal than Indians, Bushmen, Hoten- tots and African pigmies. For the latter killed, for food and skins, superflu- ous males, and did not molest female mammals and juveniles.
Our Indians are to be considered children, in process of evolution, rather than cases of arrested development or samples of degeneracy. They had outgrown savagery and taken a step upward to barbarism. They were far beyond the men of the Stone Age ; nomads and hunters still, but capable of several notable things. They were up to the level of Prometheus respecting the offices of fire ; they domesticated the horse and dog, and tamed and made pets of many wild animals ; they tattooed artistically ; and as beginners in agri- culture, they raised corn, beans, squashes, tobacco, plantain, cassava, and were as fond of berries and honey as bears. The supreme virtues of wheat, barley and other cereals than maize, they had not learned. As manufactur-
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ers, they made canoes of bark or tree trunks hollowed out with rude tools and fire; lodges of bark and skins, clothes of skins, basket work, did rude weaving, sewed cloths and skins, carved weapons, pipes, images. The birch bark canoe is a work of art, as perfect and charming a thing as a flaked arrow- head of flint or quartzite.
But were they the aborigines? They themselves held that they were comparatively recent comers. Both the Algonquins and the Iroquois had traditions that they migrated eastward, and the Athabascans speak of migrat- ing across the Pacific.
It has been held by many that there was a much older race than our Indians here, called mound builders, and that the Stone Age creatures antedated them. The redskins have a tradition that their progenitors came from the north-west and drove the mould builders south and south-west. Where did these Indians, migrating in reverse direction, come from? Usually, crowded races go west, with the sun and "empire." Did these savage men come across Behring strait? Were they Malays? It is all silence and vacuum ; there is not even an echo, for there is no history. But this tradi- tional avalanche was powerful enough to sweep away a race apparently much superior except in physical strength. Their works and accomplishments are superior, but they were short and small in physique, and their skulls are far more gorilla-like than those of our Indians, many of whom are splendid speci- mens of manhood, topped with superb heads. It seems to be the accepted scientific opinion now that the mound builders are a hypothetical people, not antedating our Indians in any other sense than that they preceded them in time as ancestors and representatives must -- that that is precisely what the mound builders were, Indians, the ancestors of ours, and not another race at all. The custom of building mounds for mortuary and sacrificial purposes, and also for homes, was wide-spread ; most primitive peoples did it either habitually or at some stage in their development ; the main contents of the mounds are skeletons and ceremonial and other objects buried with the bodies, and the structures are wholly of earth ; in some, home-like structures within are the nucleus of the mound. It is a fair supposition that in a long period of comparative quiet and freedom from formidable attack, they had developed a considerable civilization, as in these mounds are found copper as well as stone implements, pottery, cloth, etc. These earthworks are specially plentiful in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, and they appear in every state and territory in the United States, and of all sizes up to two hundred feet high; from three to four yards to a half mile in diameter ; from one hundred square feet to several acres ; tens and hundreds of thousands of them, most of them tumuli or burial places, and they extend all over our arid south-west and to Mexico,
PUBLIC SQUARE IN 1909
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
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Yucatan, Honduras, and some South American countries. Many were used for temples of worship and ceremonial purposes. In Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa some mounds are shaped in animal forms-mammals, birds and reptiles, suggesting that they stand for the totems of tribes and clans. Iowa is full of mounds, especially the counties of Dubuque, Jackson. Clinton, Scott and Louisa. Some are plainly sacrificial, designed for temples of wor- ship, some for sepulchers, astronomical uses like the Egyptian pyramids, and still others for domestic uses. They are full of skeletons, vessels of cere- mony, pipes nicely carved, the eyes of birds and animals on them set with copper points and pearls. Samples of cloth are found within. In one central cell in a mound near Dubuque were eight skeletons sitting in a row, a large sea shell for a drinking bowl before them, as if it had been a caucus of antedeluvian democrats, populists or republicans, stricken in the midst of their conviviality. A group of ten mounds near Davenport revealed bones, copper axes and hemispheres, sea shells, stone knives, pottery, eleven copper awls and twenty copper pipes, but the tobacco was out. It pains one to realize that these poor heathen smoked the vile weed perhaps fifty thousand years ago just around us. If they had not smoked, they might be living yet. There were also stone altars and tablets of hieroglyphics. In a Muscatine mound was a pipe carved in the form of an elephant, and another traced the shape of the mastodon. The artist must have seen those animals in this neighborhood. Great game, and Roosevelt need not have gone to far Africa. There is a string of mounds in Louisa county, on the Iowa river, many of them showing engineering skill. These folk were not nomads-they cleared forests, made roads, wove cloth, worked metals clumsily, but the aborigines never succeeded in thoroughly smelting ores. They began on the art, and if they had not been molested, they might have achieved it. Anyway, they showed varied skills. The evil day came-they were over-borne, pushed out of their defenses, killed, hustled off, and those who survived and breathed the last sigh of the Moor retreated to the gorges in the arid regions in the south- west to be later called the Pueblo cliff-dwellers. and farther south. For many writers think they originally came north from Mexico, Central Amer- ica, or, perhaps, from Peru where their forebears became scientific enough to trephine skulls. We have the evidence of that feat, in their tombs. But who knows? It is as deep a mystery as how the first grass blade sprang, or the primordial protoplasmic slime fashioned itself into the first amoeba, and starting all animal life in that way. Anyhow, we have had right here all sorts of folks and faiths and customs and habits-heathen, savages, semi-civilized. barbarian, polygamists, communists, and who would not like to know all about them, their origins and careers here? For one, I would rather look at a
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string of films showing those peoples in continuous motion and endless pro- cession, than to know all about the white pioneers from the fabled Argonauts sailing to get the golden fleece, to the last special car-load of land-seekers going to the Gulf coast or to the wheat belt in Canada. For they were so different from us. They give a zest like the contents of a zoo collected by a Hornaday or a Hagenbeck.
There is an interesting speculation as to the origin of these mounds. It is believed that their type was the shell-mound on all our coasts, in British Columbia, Alaska, Greenland, California, Florida, Oregon, Louisiana and New England. Probably the midden came first, as along the shores of European lakes-villages built on piles over water, for protection or ease of defense, and the shells of fish consumed were dumped beneath till a mound arose around the piling, just like filling in a wooden railway bridge. These shell mounds or middens are of great size, and their foundations are food debris, in which all sorts of instruments were lost and are now found when the structures are opened. Shells, bones, refuse, offal, curios are unearthed in great abundance. When the old fish-eaters and clam-bakers moved inland they would, under the well known power of habit and use and wont, make habitations like the old lake dwellings, and the mound, whether for tomb, or altar, or fort, or house, would hark back to the shell mound. Men are such monkeys and sheep. Hold out a rod at a gate-way, and if the first sheep jumps over it, all the rest of the flock will vault at that point, even after the stick is taken away. Just so with fashions-we all follow suit, do as others do-it is the easiest way out of it.
As to the above mentioned Indian village and farm ruled by Chief Pow- eshiek, the Stewart farm-Michael Wilson said it extended from Crooked creek to John Parks' present residence on South lowa avenue, or the Mount Pleasant road. That long strip was by the squaws planted in corn and beans, for succotash. The Reds were very fond of legumes, and they seem to have had an infallible sense of wholesome diet. Food scientists now say there is no food of more excellence than the cereals and legumes-corn and beans. They made a living of it without sow-belly. While the lordly bucks were loaf- ing and enjoying siestas, the industrious squaws were cultivating beans out in the open where the plants could absorb all the wind that was going full tilt across the upland. It is curious that Indians knew as if by intuition how hearty are beans and corn. However, they were nature's children, and were guided by an instinct like that which keeps cattle and other live stock from eating poisons in plants, and which guides sick dogs to eat the particular grass blades that hold the antidotes they need. The average dog, when sick, is a first-class hand at diagnosis.
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CHAPTER IV.
STILL FARTHER BACK.
When Washington Irving set out to write the Knickerbocker History of New York: he began with the creation of Adam, thus securing a vast fore- ground in which to take a long hop, skip and jump. It was whimsical logic, for if Adam had not been yonder, the Dutch could not have taken Hol- land in Manhattan. Inasmuch as Iowa, and particularly Washington county, are a far better country than New York, I need to go much farther back, in order to show that the pioneers would not have come here in the '30s and '40s if nature or the Secular Providence had not prepared our matchless soil, carved the water courses, laid the coal, planted the borders of the streams with timber, in a latitude and longitude that yield the four wholesome, agree- able seasons. Can we get some sort of a picture of the way this splendid furniture was supplied to our hands?
Things, persons, events come in their natural order, and must so come ; impossible to come otherwise. The universe is in the swim, and things hap- pen, as we say, in logical order. Only there's no "happen" about it. It is the old, old necessity-lock-step we go, as in a prison procession, until we drop out in death. Folks sometimes say. "Oh, if I could have lived in the golden Greek days of Pericles," or any other period they may chance to fancy, but they could not. Pericles came in his turn, could not arrive earlier, or post- pone a bit ; he was a speck of protoplasm floating on the bright stream of existence, and at precisely the point where he had to pop into visibility-pushed by all the forces from behind and pulled by all those in front-and grow, and rule in glory, and create, he did pop. and no power could have hindered him or stopped him. Abraham had to come in his appointed hour, and King David in his, and Cæsar later, and Jesus when his divine clock struck twelve, and Napoleon much later, and you, and you, and you when you severally did, just like the fishes, reptiles, worms, insects, birds and animals. We are all in the same boat of necessity. "O, but that is fatalism!" Yes, but Calvinism is fatalism, and so is heredity, and logic, and environment, and much else, all else. How could our old settlers have come here before this wonderful coun-
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try had been fashioned and provisioned for them? They could not, and they did not.
It seems that a little matter of billions of years ago, the swift-rolling sun dislodged a vast mass of fiery matter from its envelope, and slung this red- hot cinder of a nebula into our earth's present orbit, to wheel round its central source, in the cold spaces, and radiate its heat, solidify from the cool- ing crust downwards till it had a solid surface on which rains fell and oceans gathered ; there was three times as much water as land, and that ratio has been maintained ever since. If the yielding crust sank or subsided here and uplifted on the other side of the sphere, the waters would cover this part of the globe, while yonder part would be dry land, and these long alternations caused by subsidence and elevation continued for ages too long to bother about. When the waters were on here, sediment was precipitated to the ocean bed, and strata of rock, clay, shale, sandstone, limestone, whatnot, were deposited, and the weight of the superincumbent ocean compacted them into the dense masses we know. Stratum after stratum was thus laid on the sea's bottom, tier on tier. After thousands of years this part of the globe rose like a whale to blow, shaking brine from its shoulders and flanks, and on the dry land the sunlight and heat grew rank vegetation that fell and turned into coal measures during another long submergence. No one knows how many times the ocean covered this region.
The borers of our artesian well penetrated the earth's crust eighteen hundred feet, passing through successive formations, each slab solidified by the tremendous weight of the water world above. All that had to be before Stone Age man, Mound Builder, Indian could find footing here, before Adam Ritchey and the Gobles and the Moores could take up claims. Of the two, I would rather have seen how all that preparation was made, than to have greeted those pioneers. Really, it is astonishing, to think that all those colos- sal, cosmic things had to happen just to let Ritchey. Goble, Moore et al., get in here on the ground floor at one dollar and a quarter per acre. It seems as incongruous as for the mountain to labor and bring forth a mouse. But that was exactly the logical order.
And when these gigantic slabs were laid, and all finished, and the ocean drained off to cover a depression in the rim of the earth elsewhere, we can- not tell what that ancient landscape looked like. No doubt, a very uneven surface ; hills, mountains, gorges, valleys, lakes, rivers ; a landscape totally unlike the present. The poets from David down, speak of "the everlasting hills," but they are not eternal, by a long shot ; they, indeed, run, and skip, and clap their hands, for they are as fugitive as playful animals and children, as shifting as mists, fog and dew. Nor do the brooks go on forever. Nature
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NEWHALL'S MAP OF IOWA, 1841
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOY ITN
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is fluid ; nothing stays put ; all things are in ebb and flow ; rain, frost, snow, ice, gravity, scale down the mountains, pulverize their granites into soil, and some day Rocky mountains, Andes, Cordilleras, Himalayas will be ground down into farins and garden patches. The ranches, gardens and vineyards in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Montana, Oregon, Washington are mere pulverized mountain, melted and diffused by rivers like sugar in a cup of tea. And not only that, but the offices of glacial ice had to be invoked to grind and mix into paste and smear over the landscape a dump of soil. Five or six times an ice sheet from five hundred to one thousand feet thick came creeping down from the pole, smashing everything before and under it, grinding ledges of rock into fine meal, mixing the elements thoroughly, and spreading this drift, as it was called, over all this area, filling chasms even full, grinding forests into wood pulp, grading all the region. No one knows what started these long cold spells-perhaps an inclination of the earth's axis to the sun, that robbed the north of solar heat and light, shorten- ing the summers, lengthening the winters. The scientists are not agreed as to the cause, but whatever it was, science sees now the beginning of a recur- rence of another glacial age. The ice sheet in Greenland is thickening and advancing southward again, and in many, many thousands of years, our de- scendants may be ousted from here and driven southward precisely as men and animals and plants were forced to retreat ages ago. Anthropologists, geologists and the other "ists" agree that man was present at the last glacial period, that they reckon anywhere from one hundred to one hundred and seventy thousand years gone by. When our posterity are evicted, as was primitive man, not a shred of our civilization, our cities, parks, railways, monuments, buildings will survive the passage of that ice plow and harrow.
There was such a chill in the air in glacial eras that only arctic flora and fauna could exist here, as, in alternating hot epochs, when the tilt of the globe's axis gave the extreme north an excess of heat and light, tropical plants and animals saluted the north pole. Palms grew in Greenland, coal was laid there in the fierce summers, brilliant plumaged birds flew and mated and nested in the balmy air, and conditions were so genial that the mis- sionary hymn, "From Greenland's icy mountains" was absurdly mal-apropos. In those eras Greenland was as beautiful as Eden, and there was not a seal, a walrus, a white bear, a furred Eskimo within ten thousand miles of the pole.
There have been surprising things in Iowa, in Washington county. In what geologists call the tertiary period the flora was tropical; the gayest flowers bloomed and the tenderest trees blossomed and bore fruit from northernmost Greenland to Medicine Hat and the Mississippi valley, and such trees as magnolia, cinnamon, fig, cypress, and palms flourished. And the
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fauna was tropical. Birds, gilded beetles, sun-painted butterflies, as brilliant as bouquets and as flashing jewelry, flew in the air, and Polly wanted a cracker in all woods. In the swamps huge reptiles crawled, unconscious of their ugliness, their ponderous jaws paved with horror and bad intentions, and tremendous turtles, snakes and lizards made the slime and ooze hideous. Animals quite like the rhinoceros walked abroad, and tapirs, and a species of horse with three hoofs on each foot, and three toes on each hoof, and panthers, tigers, monkeys of quite Asiatic type.
What a dangerous place it was to raise children in! Mothers dared not leave them out of sight and care, lest a plesiosaurus, mylodon, or ptero- dactyl should come upon them, even as the automobiles and motor-cycles run over us now. These frightful things scared people like aeroplanes, and in the gloaming bats of enormous spread of pinion flitted about on leather wings big enough to make a buggy top.
This warm wallow and riot of prodigality lasted for ages, and then the climate began to change, gradually grew colder. Folk, if there were any, talked about it : editors, such as were, filled columns with evidences that the winters were changing and growing colder and longer. All their correspondents, signing "Oldest Inhabitant," "Vindex," "Observer," "Old Bore," said ditto. Springs came later ; gardeners could not plant potatoes on Good Friday, either in the light or the dark of the moon ; summers and autumns were shorter- waisted. The flora gradually changed ; trees ceased bearing and flowers blooming in Greenland, and the poet began to write that missionary song about her "icy mountains." The fauna retreated southward ; monkeys scolded about the climate and clustered in knots for warmth, and birds invented migration : parrots could not say enough about the change for the worse, and the animals, bored by their chatter. chided them and bade them ring off. The hides on the rhino and elephant thickened and toughened ; the elephant and mastodon grew an enveloping whisker of wool, and the good sprinters among animals moved south, while others, like bears, several species of squirrels, and snakes, frogs and reptiles in general adopted the cunning expedient of hibernation, and as the autumn came on cold, they gave the drowse free rein and went to sleep to save domestic expenses. Food, fuel, hunting game-all abolished by the strange coma of suspended animation. The earth, year by year, froze to deeper depths ; people could hear it crack, thump and jump in the night, like ice-bound ponds. The stronger animals pre-empted the deep gorges and wooded ravines, out of the blasts, yet had a sad, sour time of it even there. Most animals as well as plants winter- killed, as the snow drifted higher, not melting in the brief summers. The drifts became hills and mountains of snow, and the rains penetrated it, soaked
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