USA > Iowa > Polk County > Pioneers of Polk County, Iowa, and reminiscences of early days, Vol. I > Part 26
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and the barrack buildings were quickly sold, to some who afterward lived in more pretentious and costly houses, but not more contented and happy.
The pioneers were patriotic, and July Fourth, 1846, the day was celebrated with great enthusiasm. Anvils and big logs were substituted for cannon, as noise producers. A procession of men and women from the town and country, numbering about two hun- dred, was formed, headed by two fiddles-brass bands had not materialized-which marched to a small grove-there were plenty of them on the plateau at that time-where Tom Baker delivered an oration, the Major read the National Magna Charta, a big din- ner was served; there were toasts and repartees, and a dance in the evening of a very hot day closed the first event of the kind in Polk County.
The first state Legislature, which convened at Iowa City, in November, 1846, decided to remove the Capital to a more central point, and appointed a lot of alleged Quakers to select eight hun- dred acres of public land, which Congress had donated for that purpose, to be the Capital, which they did, on an open prairie in Jasper County. They platted a town, sold lots, and named the "future Capital" Monroe City. The Major was Clerk of the Com- mission, and his record of proceedings was too exactly precise. It showed that four hundred and fifteen lots were sold on time pay- ments for seven thousand, one hundred and ninety-eight dollars and twelve cents; that one thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven dollars and forty-three cents was received in cash; that their serv- ices and expenses were two thousand, one hundred and six dollars and fifty-seven cents; that two of the Commissioners bid off fifty- two lots and optioned big chunks of land lying roundabout, for future delivery. The whole business was so tainted with "skull- duggery," the Legislature repudiated it.
At the May Term of the District Court, in 1847, the Major was admitted to the Bar of Polk County, and was the first lawyer admitted thereto. He at once became very prominent and successful. On the adoption of the first state Constitution, Polk County was made the Fifth Judicial District, and at the April election, 1849, the Major was elected the first Judge of the District Court.
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JUDGE WILLIAM MCKAY
It is a curious fact that from 1846 to 1849, there was no official record of an election held in Polk County, the only evidence of such election being the record of proceedings and acts of public officers. The first evidence of the election of Judge Mckay is his entries on the court docket at the May Term. It was not until 1851 that intelligible county records were kept. The first-comers were easy-going fellows. They didn't stand much on ceremony. There were not many of them; they knew each other well; they would get together, talk over matters, agree on some line of action, go and do it, and let it go at that. There was, however, ample prior official notice of an election to be held, for there were poli- ticians in those days. For instance, County Clerk Lewis Whitten issued the following election notice :
"There will be elected at our next election [no date given] a state officer styled Superintendent of Public Instruction, a district officer styled a District Judge, and such county and township offi- cers as are mentioned in the advertisement. We hope the Demo- crats will play the Whigs a strong game, and show that we have a majority in the county. It is said the Democratic candidate for Judge is the best lawyer in the state."
The election of Coroner Phillips, the first one elected, is another instance. There is no record to show that a successor was elected to him for sixteen years, yet in the interim the certificates of several persons as Coroner are on file in the county offices. He was an eccentric and somewhat bibulous character, and had an exalted opinion of his office. During the noted "Fleming War," he put the town under Martial Law. He went around to all the stores, ordered them closed and locked, to save the goods from pillage, and everybody to "arm themselves and be ready to act under orders." On another occasion, two Indians came to The Fort, got drunk, and one killed the other. Phillips was called. He came, turned him over, opened his eyes, and pronounced him dead, "dead as h-1." Someone suggested the calling of a jury. "What in h-1 do you want of a jury ?" said he. "He's dead, you know he's dead, and Miss Hays knows he's dead. Bury him, and go about your business."
That occurrence reminds me that the Miss Hays to whom Phil- lips referred was a somewhat boisterous character. She was once
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brought before a Justice of the Peace, charged with assault and battery. The record of the case shows the following:
"On the oath of , warrant was ishued on the 23d day of december. Warrant Returnd on the 27th day of december, and the defendant braught, a vanire ishued and jury braught forth- with, and after the jury was sworn and thare names called as fol- lowes to wit Thomas Leng, henry Spong, J. P. Taylor, Samuel hays, Aron Smith, Stephen gosse, and witness Swor and examend the jury retired and braught in a verdick of gilty of manslawter and judgement accordingly and commitment ishued and the defend- ant sent to the county jail.
"Justice of the Peace."
In April, 1850, when Fort Des Moines Lodge Number Twenty- six, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, was organized, the first instituted in the county, McKay was installed its Warden, and he was a prominent and influential member.
He was a firm believer in the religious creed of the Baptist denomination, and in February, 1851, at a meeting of fifteen of the faith, held in the Court House, he assisted in organizing the First Baptist Church, and he was elected one of the deacons. In January, 1848, the County Commissioners donated a lot to the church, conditioned that a meeting-house be erected thereon within two years, the lot to be held in trust by the Judge. The times were hard, the house was not built, and, to prevent reversion of the lot to the county, the Judge purchased it, and later, when ready to build, he donated the lot to the church.
The Judge was an ardent teetotaler, and avowed his temperance principles on all occasions, even in his political campaigns. In 1852, when North Star Lodge of Good Templars was organized, he was one of the charter members.
He loved the beautiful, whether in animal or still life. He fore- saw, in the broad prairies, running streams, and healthful climate of his adopted state the possibilities for horses, cattle, and grain. In 1853, a movement was inaugurated for the organization of the State Agricultural Society, and for holding the first State Fair, Iowa then being the only Free State not holding such a Fair. The
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Society was organized in December of that year, and the Judge was elected one of the three directors to represent Polk County.
In 1854, his second term expired, and he was a candidate for reelection. The Know-Nothing craze was rife, and the political atmosphere was breezy. P. M. Casady was the Democratic candi- date. The district comprised the whole northwestern part of the state. MeKay had become very popular during his four years' service. The fight between the East and West sides over the loca- tion of the State House was on, with "blood on the moon." Grimes was running for Governor against Curtis Bates, a prominent Demo- crat at The Fort, and the outlook portended a close contest. Casady having been State Senator two terms, and largely instrumental in securing the removal of the Capital to Des Moines, was widely known. He was not so good a talker on the stump as Mckay, but he got close to the plain people, with his heart-to-heart talks and earnest, logical, convincing way of putting things. The situation demanded strategy-there's nothing like strategy in war. It was anything to beat the Whigs. Marshall County was in the throes of a county-seat contest. W. W. Miller and two others had been appointed to select a place for the county-seat, and they seem to have got in "cahoot" with one John B. Hobbs, for speculative pur- poses, and located it at Marietta. The court was held in a log building, one side of which was divided into horse stalls, so that Judge Mckay's horse quietly munched hay and oats while court was in session. Marshalltown wanted the county-seat, and old "Hank" Anson, father of the well-known baseball player, inaugu- rated a movement to get it, invited Casady to assist, to which he responded, with the explanation to Des Moines friends that he was going up there to "visit among some old friends." He was received with great cordiality, given "the best in the house," and his horse put up in the "Court House stable." He hobnobbed with the old settlers, chucked the babies under the chin, while he told Miller and his confederates that they had made a mistake-Marietta was too low, wet, and undesirable for a county-seat. Marshaltown won the county-seat, and Casady won the judgeship, but immediately after his election he was appointed Register of the United States Land Office, carrying a better salary, and he resigned the judgeship without holding a court.
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After his defeat, Mckay returned to the practice of law, in a court presided over by a Judge, the very antithesis of all his moral sentiments, a Judge so eccentric in his habits as to become notori- ous-the well-known McFarland. Every lawyer of that day was loaded with incidents of his peculiarities. On one occasion, General Samuel A. Rice had an important case before him. The Judge came into court so groggy he couldn't see straight, and in ill-humor. The first business was the hearing of motions, which were pre- sented by the lawyers, every one of which the Judge very curtly denied, without reason or explanation. When Rice's turn came, he very quietly presented his motion with the remark that he did so merely to "save a point," but as his Honor was overruling every- thing, he could not expect an exception in his case.
"No, you don't, Sammy ; no, you don't," said the Judge, arous- ing himself from his somnolent condition. "This Honorable court has investigated that point, and you are sustained."
As the motion covered all the points he wanted to save, Rice won out.
Soon after his defeat, Mckay was appointed a member of the River Land Commission, to represent the state in the final settle- ment of the tangled affairs of that master project of public improve- ment and river obstruction.
In 1857, he went to Kansas, where he died in 1859. In all his relations with civic or social life, he stood for the betterment of all.
July Thirtieth, 1905.
MRS. P. M. CASADY
PIONEER WOMEN
M Y reminiscences of pioneers and old settlers-the pioneer claims a little distinction because he was "first in"-has been confined mostly to the men, but the wives and mothers should not be forgotten. While they did not build houses, business blocks, churches, and schoolhouses, make laws, and lay the founda- tion of civic government, they did lay the foundation of what is most essential to good government, to a successful, progressive, and prosperous community. They were the home-builders, the mould- ers of child life. They left to succeeding generations a heritage in the character of their children (was there ever a settler's cabin pre- sided over by a childless woman), who have, with fidelity to their early training, perpetuated the nobility of their maternity upon the county and town, so that the character and influence of the pio- neer matrons is woven into the warp and woof of our civic life.
It was the mother who bore and cared for the babies, cared for the house, looked after the garden, milked the cows, and made the butter, dressed the fowls, gathered and preserved the wild fruit, did the family knitting and sewing, fried out the fat for and dipped the candles, helped in the fields, and did the thousands of things a good mother finds to do from four o'clock in the morning until night hours, when all others of the family are in bed asleep.
It required courage and self-abnegation for those women to turn their faces from homes and kindred in the more civilized communi- ties, many of them homes of plenty, and environments pleasing to woman's nature, to make new homes, and endure the hardships, sickness, want, and unending toil during the best years of life, to build up a new civilization.
There were also the trials and discouragements of housekeeping with meager facilities or improvised substitutes.
Their first experience was a log cabin, often one room, which was parlor, living-room, bedroom, and kitchen, with oiled paper
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windows, puncheon floor, and so well ventilated the stars could be seen through the openings. For water, a hole in the ground, with- out wall or curb, or a far-off creek or river.
Cooking was done by fireplaces of rude construction. For bread- making and biscuit, an iron skillet was heated over coals on the hearth, the dough put in, a heated cover placed over the skillet, and covered with live coals. A Dutch oven was sometimes used, with an open front, and set before the fire. Coffee was boiled in a vessel on coals drawn out on the hearth. Meats and vegetables were cooked in iron pots and kettles. Corn bread was usually cooked on hot pone-cake boards. Corn bread, pork, and rye coffee were the staple foods. Sometimes there was no flour nor corn meal ; mills were far away, roads impassable, rivers flooded and unfordable. Meal could be had only by pounding up the corn, or "jinting" it, which con- sisted of turning a carpenter's plane bottom up and shaving off the corn from the cob. There were many occasions when whole fami- lies went to bed hungry because "father" was delayed in getting home from the mill.
The experience of the pioneer of the town and country was much the same, the difference being in their nearness to each other. In the country, isolation was a saddening condition for the pioneer woman, the story of which could be found in the records of an asylum for the insane.
Mrs. Judge Casady probably has not forgotten her introduction to pioneer life. Raised in comparative luxury, the daughter of a well-to-do physician, F. C. Grimmel, she arrived here in a covered wagon, after a long and weary journey from Ohio, in August, 1846, at ten o'clock in the night. There was not a vacant place in which the family could unload the wagons, and the night was spent in camping. The next day, the abandoned log Guard House, with its iron-barred windows and doors, was secured, and there, at Vine and Third streets, the Summer and Winter were spent. The next year, her father bought one of the Government warehouses, made of plank, tore it down, and made a small dwelling-house of it, near the corner of Sixth and High. In 1848, she married the Judge, who built a small frame house on the corner now occupied by Clapp's Block, where she lived a few years, and adapted herself to the con- tingencies of the times and place. There were no sidwalks nor
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MRS. ISAAC COOPER
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pavements. In wet weather, and on rainy days, the mud was deep, and passable only by donning the Judge's boots. It was the habit of the pioneers to adapt themselves to circumstances and conditions. She will pass her eightieth birthday the Nineteenth of the present month.
The little community at The Fort often got hungry ; the larders got bare; provisions got scarce. When the soldiers retired, and the surplus of the commissary stores of the garrison were sold, it was a great boon, for there were many families with little or nothing to eat in the house. Rice was sold for two and one-half cents per pound ; pork, three cents ; eggs, three cents a dozen, and sugar less than one-fourth price.
Said Mrs. J. M. Griffith to me one day: "I never knew what it was to want for anything, or be hungry, until I came to Fort Des Moines. It was not because there were not means to procure it, but it could not be found. I was often hungry from scarcity of food supplies. I also got so satiated and tired of corn bread, bacon and dried apples, I thought I could not endure them, but I got used to them-I had to."
Mrs. Isaac Cooper also braved the trials and vicissitudes of life in a cabin, and its scanty comforts. There was but one chair for all, sufficient when there were no "callers." To supply the defi- ciency, Isaac fashioned one from a Black Walnut tree, and the bark of Linnwood. Her children wore out their shoes, as children pro- verbially do. There was no shoemaker-he had not arrived-and the father again came to the rescue by making some shoes from the leather of saddles the soldiers had discarded. While they were not as fashionable as the "Sorosis" of the present day, they did good service. Mrs. Fred. Hubbell doubtless has a vivid recollection of those shoes, and the exquisite pleasure of "breaking them in."
Mrs. Nancy Barns was born in Virginia, May Twenty-fifth, 1820, and when a child, her parents removed to Miami County, Ohio. In 1855, with her husband, William S. Barns, she went down the Ohio River, thence up the Mississippi to Keokuk, thonce' by wagon to Fort Des Moines. She has a memory replete with reminiscences of the trials and deprivations of the early days. Her husband for many years had a general store on Second Street.
VOL. I-(23).
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PIONEERS OF POLK COUNTY, IOWA
When they came to The Fort, the only way to get a house was to buy a lot and build. He went to Summerset to get lumber for a house. The mill owner could not furnish the lumber, would not rent the mill, so he bought the mill and some trees, sawed the lum- ber, hauled it to The Fort with oxen, and built a small house, "out on the hills," at what is now Tenth Street, and there Mrs. Barns still resides. In the early days, she took an active part in the social life of the town. Despite her eighty-five years, she is as young in spirit and vivacity as most persons half her age.
The severest trials and deprivations were among the settlers in the country, hardly conceivable now, when is seen the beautiful homes and magnificent farms of the present occupants.
George Beebe, who started the well-known "Beebe Settlement," a few miles north, built a cabin in 1846. There was no chinking between the logs, and the wolves would come in the night and stick their noses through the cracks, badly frightening Mrs. Beebe and the children when her husband was absent. In the Summer time, snakes would crawl into the cabin, only to be discovered by the ter- rified shrieks of a little tot, or when turning down the bedclothes to lay him away to sleep. Prairie fires in the Fall would sweep around the cabin, the flames leaping high in the air, threatening destruc- tion of everything in their path, the mother and children watching with terror lest it sweep away their home. Often the flour was scarce, and the primitive mills, just starting, had no appliances for bolting it. Mrs. Beebe contrived one by using a box, on one side of which she fastened some coarse woven cloth, in which was put the flour, and the box shaken back and forth on slats laid on stools or chairs.
Elijah Canfield, who became a prominent and wealthy farmer in Camp Township, started out with a log cabin sixteen feet square, with stick chimney and fireplace of small stones. Wolves and rat- tlesnakes were a constant source of terror to Mrs. Canfield and the children. During the Summer of 1846, there was an epidemic of ague in the settlement, seven of the family were sick, two died, and only the father, himself enfeebled, was able to attend the funeral, neighboring farmers performing the duties of sepulture. During the sickness, the supply of flour and meal was exhausted, and the
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MRS. NANCY BARNES
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father started to Oskaloosa to get them. While absent, he was pros- trated with sickness. There were no mail facilities, for getting information respecting his delay, and his family were very greatly alarmed and distressed by his long absence and the need of supplies. The mother, worn out with care and worry, debilitated by sickness, was unable to look after the cows; they wandered away, went dry, and there was great suffering.
Isolation was one of the most serious burdens of the pioneer women. With few or no amusements, or little to divert the mind from constant toil, they sometimes broke down completely.
While the pioneer women suffered much, they also enjoyed much that will never be duplicated in Polk County. They had a monop- oly of life, near to Nature, with all its experiences, advantages and privileges which will not come to any succeeding them.
The present generation can hardly have a conception of the evo- lution from the wild, blank prairies and river valleys to the mag- nificent farms, thriving, progressive cities and towns; from the "prairie schooner," horseback mail carrier, and stage-coach to the electric car, telephone, sewing-machine, electric light and power, all of which were unknown to the pioneers.
August Sixteenth, 1905.
LEVI J. WELLS
LEVI J. WELLS
A LTHOUGH not a pioneer, according to a strict construction of the code, Levi J. Wells came early enough to be entitled an "Old Settler." He hove into Des Moines in 1856, with intent and purpose to do something, but there was little or nothing doing. The town was small, times were hard, and money was scarce, and what there was of it was of the "wild-cat" variety, and of doubtful paternity.
The first job he struck was hauling brick for "Jim" Savery, who was building what is now the Kirkwood House. He was a good carpenter and master workman. By industry and economy, he had accumulated about two thousand dollars, a part of which he invested in some of Alexander Scott's acres on the East Side, south of the Capitol. The remainder he planted in the historic A. J. Stevens' balloon bank, which went up in the air soon after, and with it all of Levi's hard-earned dollars. A little thing like that did not feaze him.
In 1860, Alexander Williams and John J., his son, well known to citizens of the present generation, purchased the old dilapidated flour mill and flood-beaten dam at First and Center streets, and with the practical help of Levi, rebuilt the mill and dam. It was exclusively a "toll" mill, the amount of toll being regulated by the compunctiousness of the miller, but I never heard of John being suspected of exorbitant toll. The old mill was a big benefaction to farmers and the community at large for more than thirty years, but it finally succumbed to the progress of events.
After the completion of the mill, Levi resumed business as builder and contractor during the war period, with the consequent disturbance to all business enterprises during those four years of tumult and strife.
In 1864, it became evident that Polk County was short its quota of enlisted men, and that a forced draft was the only means of
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supplying the deficiency. When, later, it became a certainty, there was a sudden hegira of able-bodied men to a more congenial and healthful climate. The whole community was greatly stirred up. Heroic efforts were made by the city wards and townships to secure their quota of men called for, but some of the townships failed, and the unlucky man with money who got spotted paid a good price for a substitute. In the city, all the wards but the First furnished their quota, and when the dragnet was thown out, Levi was caught. He made no effort to "dodge," but promptly presented himself at headquarters for a physical and mental examination. The doctors thought he was a good catch, but on going over his anatomy, found the thumb and two fingers missing on his right hand, which had been fingering with a buzz saw. Though, much as Uncle Sam needed men, he would not take emasculated specimens, and Levi was dropped with thanks.
Immediately after the close of the war, business of all kinds began to thrive. There was a great demand for food products. The whole country had been denuded of them, and Levi decided to speculate a little on the shortage. He bought one hundred barrels of pickled pork, threw it on the wrong side of the market, pocketed a dead loss of eight hundred dollars, and decided to make no further effort to help Iowa farmers by building up the pork industry. That cured pork cured his speculative symptoms for all time.
In 1866, he leased the old "Grout House," so called, built of small cobblestones, coarse gravel, and cement, which stood for many years at the northeast corner of East Sixth and Walnut, and was a popular home for Legislators and state officers, ex-Governor Gue making it his abiding place for some time. But Levi was not built for a Boniface, the life was too sedentary, and after a year's experi- ence, though profitable, he retired and began building houses in a small way on some of his East Side holdings.
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