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 7
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In pioneer days those water courses were clear as New England and Colorado brooks, because the whole county was in grass, that prevented soil- wash, and the infinite maze and mesh of rootlets held back the streams, and freshets were not destructive. As a consequence, and because dams did not obstruct, there were myriads of fishes, good ones, too, ready to rise to the hook whenever sputum was ejaculated on the bait. The pioneers caught speckled trout-what would you think of that? and white perch, black and rock bass, pike, catfish, shad, red and white horse-sucker, muscalonge, stur- geon, eels, etc. Sports were not put off with shiners, minnies, bull-heads and "crawfish."
Game .- There was everything but buffalo; Indians had chased them seventy-five to one hundred miles west of us, but plenty of elk, deer, some bear, squirrels, 'possum, 'coon and ground-hog remained, and vast flocks of wild turkeys, prairie chickens, passenger pigeons, quail and wild aquatic fowl. Men driving from this town, on the Crawfordsville road, shot mallard ducks in a pond about opposite our opera house. There were no panthers or bob cats, and but few gray wolves, but the smaller prairie wolves were native and plentiful. Otters and even beaver still survived, and muskrats and rabbits galore ; venison was a very commonplace dish, and buckskin was worn by most men.
Fruits, Berries, Etc .- A world of these wild things, berries black and straw, and sweeter far than our cultivated kinds. Not everything improves by fussing with it. "Doubtless God could make a better berry than the straw- berry, but doubtless God never did," was said by the Spaniard, not about our modern big sour strawberries, but of the small sweet bits that reddened the ground everywhere. Blackberries stood like grinning pickaninnies in all fields and on the margins of all woods, and a great deal of sparking was done. picking 'em. Girls picked their aprons and sun-bonnets full in a few minutes, and strung raspberries on blue-stem grass stalks six to ten feet tall, such pretty rosaries-the maids could count their prayers by eating off the string a red or black berry, and stain their lips a still more bewitching color. A world, too, of crab-apples, plums, grapes, persimmons, all wild, but suddenly
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tamed into glory by the house-wives. Waste no sympathy on those women for lacking preserves, jams and things. And the wild honey, nectar from hollow trees, flavored with prairie flowers! Why are wild things, whether animals or plants or fruits, so delicious, making all their tame cousins insipid? There was never a more gorgeous display of blooms on the globe than on our prairies, right here in pioneer days. They say bees and hollow trees were invented specially for Tommy Tucker. He gathered in one day one hundred and fifty gallons of honey, thirty pounds from one tree, and one hundred and twenty pounds of beeswax, and sold the honey at fifty cents per gallon and the wax at twenty-five cents a pound. "Can these things be, and overcome us like a summer cloud, without our special wonder ?" Perhaps we think of the Scot, stumped by a whopper, who said, "Aiblins, they may be leears." Did an Ananias club flourish here from '35 to '41 ?
Rock, Clay .- Building rock, rich in fossil crinoids, and good brick clay abounded along Crooked creek, Skunk and English rivers.
On the natural side, the sole discount was lack of coal, but the settlers did not know it. As a rule, they had not burned it in the east. If coal once underlay this county, as is likely, it went many ages ago into the air, dipped out, thanks to the disintegration of the over-lying shales and the erosion of the drift by water, frost, gravity. Coal is found in the next county west, and abundantly in the county west of that. A few pockets of coal were found here and there in this county, and geologists claim that the color of our soil is due to the presence of ancient coal. The sand pits we find are the remains of the sandstones and shales that roofed the old coal beds, and they were pulverized eons ago.
I shall not be foolish enough to deny that the pioneers in the thirties and early forties had many discomforts and privations. Folks have them now, right here. But the hardships have been exaggerated, like the reports of Mark Twain's death. Uncle Billy Moore every year, at the anniversary meet- ings, used to bewail the old hard times, the suffering. Norman Everson denied and laughed at his hard-luck stories, and said that on the whole, the early settlers had a bully and corker of a time, as Roosevelt would express it. We must remember that folk do not miss things they were never used to. It would be tough for a rich family to drop into poverty. But does anyone suppose that Adam Ritchey, David Goble and the Moores and others were put out by the absence of bath tubs, closets, furnaces, cooking ranges, operas, Chautauquas, public libraries? Not a bit-they had never been in a tub, closet, opera house, or a course of lectures and amusements in their lives. To find none of those things here in the brush would be no deprivation or cause of unhappiness. Would they miss steam heat or electric light?
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Absurd! They had been used to fire-places, iron cranes, hooks and pots and kettles. fire-dogs and Dutch ovens, and tallow candles or just wicks soaked in grease in saucers. To get warm at fire-places and cook by them would be familiar sensations. Probably, the main inconvenience in the thirties-and it was a serious and vexations one-was the lack of grist mills, saw mills, roads, bridges. The first mills used no bolts, and there were no fanning mills ; bread was as black as a Derby hat, and gritty, more like a baked black sand heap than the staff of life. But it was not an unwholesome diet. It astonished and acted on the alimentary canal like a King drag on bad roads, that's all.
What with their varieties of flesh, fruits, corn mushes, pones and johnny cake, pies, puddings, cobblers, etc., if any one tells me they did not live well, and feed their tape-worms abundantly, and wisely worship the belly-gods, I am from Missouri.
In the main, the "old settlers" were young settlers, robust, lusty, hearty, accustomed to out-door life and hard work. They were not dyspeptics, much less cadavers. Their blood ran rapidly, and was full of red and white corpuscles. They did not feel cold as we do when we step out of our hot houses. Their cabins rarely exceeded sixteen by sixteen feet, and half a dozen people in such a room would take the chill off from it by the mere radiation of their body heat. They did not often take cold, and their noses were presentable. Handkerchiefs were not the main things in the laundry. They made snuffers of thumb and fore-finger and blew their noses as they snipped the snuff off the wick on a tallow dip. If there are any colds, grippe, influenza going, we degenerates are sure to take them, for that red-hot, oxygen-consuming iron dragon in the cellar has made us effeminate. As fire kept all night in those big fire-places, it was not martyrdom to dress in cold mornings. The brick or stone jambs and hearths exhaled heat all night, and the breaths of the family in the small room that such huge-throated chimneys ventilated, raised the temperature of the room. Of all modern discomforts, since we have quit taking exercise to keep warm, a sense of cold leads. In a frigid room, to shed gown or pajamas and pull on a union suit that is as cold as a horse's frosty bridle bits, is the Ultima Thule of discomfort, unless it be the scud in bare feet over oil-cloth carpet, to a refrigerated bed room. We siffer lots more from cold in our houses than the old settlers did in their small log cabins, where dogs and cats also shed caloric into the general fund. A log house is warmer than our frame houses, made of woods so far from a seasoned state that in a year or two window sash and doors gape and let in cold like a sieve. On the whole, the old settlers did not ask for sympathy. Healthy people dislike to be pitied. What folks, especially in hard lines,
MARY W. ASHBY First Teacher
& NEW YORK PULIRE LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
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need, is the stimulus of good cheer. The old settlers had a good time-all the evidence points that way, as the hearty amusements they enjoyed with mighty relish, the singing and spelling schools, the husking bees plus the red ear, the kissing parties, the gossipy quiltings, the "settings up," the house and barn raisings, the love affairs, and the hilarious country weddings, the hops, the traipsing far to church, to throw sheep's eyes at each other and let the poky preacher go braugh. They had a deal of hard work to do, but no matter how much drudgery there may be in constant work, it does not eat as the rust and acids of the ennui of modern, well-to-do life corrodes the leisure class.
Besides, the old settlers did not know they were uncomfortable. A Kansan truly says that when he was a boy he walked nearly two miles every day in winter to school. across a wind-swept prairie, wore no overcoat and protected his hands only by keeping them in his pockets. Frequently he froze his ears, and occasionally his fingers and toes, but nobody ever sympathized with him, or seemed to think his experiences unusual. "My youngest sister is a sophomore in high school and is equipped with all the appurtenances for fighting the weather. But if it happens to be misting: when she starts to school in the morning, the family worries all day for fear she will catch her death of cold."
Speaking of eels, they were delicious food, and to catch one was good fortune. A woman had a husband who was "no 'count," though a fisherman. He disappeared, and for days it was not known whether he had deserted or was drowned. A corpse was dragged ashore, and while the woman was identifying the swollen body, a lot of eels ran out of the mouth of her deceased. She walked calmly away, and when asked what should be done with the body, she said: "Set him again-he is good to catch eels, and for nothing else-set him again in the river."
IE L, .W. YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
AttOn, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
CHAPTER VI.
GETTING ON-LAND.
The Indian titles extinguished and the Indians gone, or going, the trans- fer of ownership and the plantation of Washington county were made in the thirties, and, as said above, the real pioneer period, the picturesque, inter- esting part of the pioneer era was, in this county, from 1835 to 1841. Emi- grants kept coming in the forties, and the fifties, and even in the sixties, but the real old settlers, the genuine stuff that would be recognized by the Pure Food law, and none genuine unless their names were blown in the bottle, were the men, women and children who can read their titles clear to a place in the Pioneer Book, bearing the imprint of the thirties and the first two years of the forties. It was fitting that picturesque whites should follow picturesque reds. Let us now take leave of the Indians. They were in the child stage of development, their villages pure democracies. Like the whites, they were full of human nature, and were good and bad, believers in miracles and magic, and scoffers, cowards and braves, no more the idyllic creatures that Cooper paints in his novels than are we the superior beings the actors depict in melodrama. Hornady knew the redskins well, and says, "If an Indian is not picturesque, why is he? Ethnologically, he is a squeezed lemon, and is welcome to a long rest. Indian guides are handicaps, and not depend- able-leave you in the lurch, desert you." But they were artists in dress and poets in naming people. Think of Chief Mahaska, lord of seven wives, calling his beautiful favorite "Raut-che-wai-me," female flying pigeon-Jane, for short.
The best thing I know about an Indian is told of Seconodoah, an Oneida chief, who planted apple trees and tended them so well that from 1791 they bore fruit, and were still in good bearing condition, one hundred and twenty years old.
The pioneers came here ostensibly for land, and they came before surveys were made and land offered for sale, and did not wait for surveyors and auctioneers, and staked out claims and improved them, built cabins and fences, broke prairie, felled woods, and, for mutual protection, in making
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and holding claims, formed "claim associations," "land clubs," etc., their constitutions and by-laws and resolutions being for pioneers the law of the land. Our pioneers were orderly, and, though they did form such organiza- tions, it was to keep cut-throats from jumping their claims before the public land sales.
A Few Convenient Dates .- Let us see what was going on in this county before any white owned land. Paste this table of events in your hat.
First Indian treaty for land. September 1, 1832.
Second treaty for land, October 21. 1837.
Third treaty for land, October II, 1842.
First settler, Adam Ritchey, 1835-6.
Birth first white child, Isabelle Ritchey, June 12, 1837.
First marriage, Hulock-Goble, Sunday morning. early in 1837. County named and boundaries set, January 25, 1839.
Washington located as county-seat, June, 1839.
County formally organized, 1839.
First land entered by Matthew Moorhead, September 11, 1839.
First land transfer. C. D. Haskell to Abe Owens, Dec. 31, 1839.
First mortgage, David Bunker-M. Moorhead, Oct. 3, 1839. First chattel mortgage, Dan Powers-Allen Philips, December 14, 1839. First saw and grist mills, Holcomb-Bullock, 1837, 1839.
First mail to Washington, March 10, 1839.
First land sale in Burlington for this county, March, 1840.
First school house, on Tom Baker's claim, 1840, teacher Mattie J. Craw- ford ; followed by Mattie Junkin, children before that going across line to Henry county, to a Miss Smith from New England.
Court house built, July, 1841.
First newspaper, The Argus, 1854.
Celebration of completion of Rock Island road to Washington, Septem- ber I, '58.
What were people doing between Ritchey's coming in 1836 and the first land sale in 1840?
In truth, those organizations and clubs tell the story in a whisper. The settlers took claims, went to work on them, made cabins and fences, broke prairie, slashed the timber, planted and gathered crops, lived, laughed, loved, married, just as if they had bought the land. Now and then a trespasser did jump a claim, but the settler, rousing his neighbors who were fellow-members of those protective associations, made it hot for the intruder. Bloody noses and broken heads were incidents not unknown. Those clubs served just such a purpose as our anti-horse-thief associations in later years.
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حياي
كبير
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WASHINGTON WOOLEN MILL
ILE OFW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOUNDATION
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HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY
The first land sales for Washington and other counties were held in March, October and December, 1840, in Burlington. Big crowds, but little money, and but few pieces were entered in this county, in March, and they by such forehanded men as Holcomb. J. L. L. Terry, accredited to Oregon township, bid them in. In October and December, some of the choicest lands in the south-east and central parts of this county were bought. As it is a good way to learn who was here and who was who, in 1840, the list of buyers is entered here. Some of the men, like John Graham, bought several tracts.
CRAWFORD TOWNSHIP.
John and Wm. Marsden, M. G. Maize, John Hendree, Daniel Hervey, Richard Hudson, Anthony Smith, W. B. Sexton, John and Robert Neal, John Lyen, W. C. Kinnear, Robert Jamison, Wm. Huston, Wm. and James Wooley, W. R. Wallace, James G. P. McElroy, Margaret Denholm, James Woodworth, David Haines, Jesse Botkin, James McCulley, John Crawford, James Colwell, George, Rebecca P., Mary and Catherine Gearhart, Wm. B. Sexton, Matthew Moorhead, James T. Playmate, Solomon and Wm. McCul- ley, W. H. Knott, Samuel Pence, Isaac Waldriss.
OREGON TOWNSHIP.
John Hendee, John Hendel, R. W. Burton, Isaac Mills, Wm. Stronoch, A. and John Hulick, Samuel Stephens, M. G. Mize, David Goble, J. D. Welch, Anthony Smith, Hiram Peabody, Wm. Marsden, Geo. W. Ferguson.
MARION.
Thomas Evans, Benj. Tucker, Baalam Anderson, Sam Hanby, Michael Senff, Mr. Lambreth, J. H. Randolph, James Dawson, J. S. Dill, Adam Ritchey, Henry Williams, John Graham, John Armstrong, Geo. Dill, I. M. Whitsol, Alvin Saunders, Robert Clemens, Wm. and Richard Hudson, Jos. Buffington, Thaddeus Moore, Noah Parrish, Allen Philips, Ezekiel Cooper, Jacob Westfall, Aaron Conger, Wm. L. Essley, Lyman Whitcomb, Claudius Hendrix, Nesley Rumble, Cyrus McMillen, M. Holcomb, Lee O. Plunkett, Wm. I. Springston, Milton Benson.
WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP.
Jos. B. Rodgers, Michael Hayes, Jas. Dawson, Jesse Botkin, John Hendee, Simon Teeple and Richard Moore, commissioners of Washington county, Jas.
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W. Isett, Wm. Conner, Wm. Basey, Nathan and Thos. Baker, Jonathan Wil- son, Jas. DeLong, Jesse Ashby, Wm. B. Thompson, John Graham, Jas. McCulley, Amos Moore, Baalam Anderson.
This first real estate record is still extant, a half quire of foolscap stitched and covered with brown wrapping paper, the first record in it dated October I, 1839, the last April 11, 1840, so that all the real estate transactions in the county for the first six months occupied less than six sheets. J. B. Davis was the first recorder. The first real estate transfer was the English river mill site, December 31, 1839, C. D. Haskell to Abe Owens, one hundred dollars for a third interest. The last entry in that book is in 1840, Thomas and Nathan Baker, conveying eighty-five and seventy-two one-hundredths acres, their claims which were a part of the site of Washington, for four hundred dollars. Acknowledgment before John J. Jackson, J. P., April 11, 1840.
Surveying took a lot of time. The township lines 74 and 75 north, were run before May, 1837, and the details were several years filling in.
Land hunger is supposed to be a keen appetite in the Anglo-Saxon race. But millions do not seem to have that hunger at all, do not own homes, or even lots in the cemetery. Mechanics, teachers, doctors, lawyers, ministers did not care to stake out claims and buy them in, in the sales in Burlington, Iowa city and Fairfield. They did not realize that this vast country could ever be settled, or that the land would appreciate, get scarce, become a thing to conjure with and speculate in. How could folk get here? Boat transporta- tion was inadequate ; they were just beginning to build railroads, but people could not conceive that this continent would be belted by steam roads. Foreign immigration had not set in: horses and oxen could not haul in enough emigrants to fill this great west. The government price of land, one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, was held quite high enough. Had the settlers been told by credible authority that farms here would in that century sell at one hundred dollars to one hundred and fifty dollars per acre, they would have dropped dead of apoplexy in squads, in sheer surprise and shock. So, many were indifferent, and neglected to buy. Why, just see-do half the folk in this city now own their homes, or a lot in the bone-yard, not to mention farms? Probably not, and it is so everywhere now just as it was then, though we know well enough that real estate has not near reached its height, and will double and treble during this century. However, a good share of the comers did want land, and it may be well to tell at once how it was acquired.
In the new states and territories, the lands owned by the federal govern- ment are surveyed and sold under one general system. Meridian lines are first established. running north from the mouth of some noted river, and these are intersected by base lines. The Iowa surveys were made from the same
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meridian and base lines as the Arkansas and Missouri surveys. The fifth principal meridian is a line running due north from the mouth of the Arkansas river, crossing Missouri state and river, running over a part of Illinois and entering Iowa in township 77 north, and, passing through Iowa, intersects the Mississippi river again in township 91 north, where it ends. The base lines from which all townships in Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa are numbered, run west from the mouth of the St. Francis river in Arkansas, cutting the fifth principal meridian at right angles, and from this base line townships are numbered northwardly and southwardly, and all surveyed townships in Iowa number north of the base line. The principal meridian and its corresponding base lines having been formed for a district of country, the surveyor divides · it into townships six miles square ; townships are subdivided into square miles or tracts of six hundred and forty acres each, or sections. Sections are divided into halves by a north and south line, and into quarters by a transverse line. Quarters are sold in equal divisions of eighty and subdivisions of forty acres each. So any settler could for one hundred dollars buy an eighty and get title from the government. Sections or square miles are numbered, beginning at the northeast corner of the township and run west to the range line, then back east to range line, alternately, ending at the southeast corner of township, from I to 36. By this nice system, all divisions are in mathematical forms. When surveyed, government lands are offered at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, cash. All lands so bought are exempt from taxes for five years. The sixteenth section in each township is reserved for school uses.
An old settler saw a desirable tract and took steps to get it ; he broke five acres, which held the claim six months, or built a cabin eight logs high, with a roof, which was equivalent to the plowing, and that held it for six months more ; he stakes out a half section as a full claim, part timber and part prairie -his home is secure from trespass, as the claim cannot be safely jumped. He can sell the claim, transferring all his rights to the buyer. Each township had its societies for dealing with jumpers.
In 1838, congress put Iowa and Wisconsin in one survey district ; G. W. Jones made all the surveys and proclaimed land sales in Burlington November 19. A. C. Dodge register ; twenty-five townships were offered ; in Muscatine three, Louisa one, Des Moines and Jefferson three each, Van Buren six- total, two hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars worth. This, with later public sale entries, private sales and pre-emptions, up to June, 1840, amounted to a million. In eighteen months government sold two and a quarter millions. Only gold, silver, and Missouri bank notes in denomination twenty dollars, United States treasury notes, and military land scrip were received in pay- ment. All the claim-owners in the several townships attended en masse, with
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some one agreed upon to bid off in their own names the land marked and registered to each man. Men camped out and made a time of it. Speculators were there to loan settlers money at fifty per cent. That is, the capitalist would enter the land in his own name and file a bond for a deed. At the end of two years the settler got the land by paying double its original cost. Two men thus loaned one hundred thousand dollars each. There must have been a lot of poor devils.
The land rushes then were just like those made in our time. For weeks and months prior to May 1, 1843, when the last of the redskins were to evacuate the country hereabouts, the border was thick with settlers and their flocks and herds, eager to break for claims, and they and their families made a rush ; from midnight till sun-up, on May Day, the whole country was dotted with claimants, every man singing, "For I'm to be queen o' the May, call me early, mother dear." As early as 1836-7 the roads in Indiana and Illinois were crowded with "long blue wagons" of emigrants, ten, twenty, thirty wagons in a string, hogs, cows, horses, dogs, women, kids trailing behind. Westward the star of empire takes its way ; it never has gone east, always west.
A Land Sale .-- Let's look in on a sale: The set day comes ; settlers from all directions are in, crowding the taverns, sleeping on settles, in wagons, on the floor, in the bar-room, stable, anywhere, sleeping in their clothes. There were no hotels in those days ; public houses were just taverns. Men now eighty and ninety years old habitually say "tavern" yet. The differences between a tavern and, say, Hotel Coronado or Astor or Palmer House are these: The landlord of a tavern is a jolly Boniface in dirty shirt sleeves, a shrewd fellow, a good judge of a horse, and a keen trader, not over-scrupu- lous, smelling of the barn, a straw for a toothpick in his mouth. His manner is free, and he sings out, "Hello, Brown, h're ye, old hoss," as he whacks Brown on the back. He takes a drink, at Brown's expense, and a cigar at Smith's expense, in his own bar room. The dining room is a free-for-all-all the stuff is put on the table at once, and guests are told to "jest fall-to and help yerself." Food is not served in courses at taverns, and there is no napkin or finger bowl. The waitress is busy keeping the flies off you, by waving a bush she broke off a fruit tree in the yard. A cat or two rubs against your leg, looks in your face and remarks Meough! and a melancholy long-eared dog watches the guests shoveling in stuff with case knives shoved to the hilt. In the evening the landlord, who is clerk and all, sees you to bed in a stuffy room, carrying a guttering candle eclipsed with snuff, or a saucer-like dish holding melted grease, and a wick hanging out of it, lolling over the edge like a leather latch string from a log cabin door, or the tongue of a hot dog or ox.
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