USA > Iowa > Polk County > Pioneers of Polk County, Iowa, and reminiscences of early days, Vol. II > Part 7
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In 1876, he was selected by the Governor to deliver the address responsive for the State of Iowa at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. It was an eloquent, masterly exposition of the birth, rise and achievements of one of the youngest states of the Union, tersely told, in which he cited the monarchies of the Old World to Iowa as the center of the diadem of new states born of their own
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JUDGE CHARLES C. NOURSE
enterprise and tutored at their own hearthstones. Twenty thousand copies of the address were printed by the state for distribution.
In 1877, Simpson College conferred upon him the degree of LL. D.
In 1884, occurred one of the most exciting events in the history of the state. It was the removal by Governor Sherman of John L. Brown from the office of Auditor of State, and the appointment of J. W. Cattell to the place. Brown, a man of iron will and determi- nation, refused to vacate. The official business of the office became disrupted, for the Governor would recognize no act of Brown, who would listen to no proposition for adjustment of the trouble, which included his onster. The Governor then ordered Adjutant General Alexander to remove him and take possession of the office. The whole body politic of the state was instantly aroused, for the Gov- ernor and Brown were both war veterans, well known and popular.
Alexander called out a company of the National Guard to exe- cute the order and take possession of Brown's office, which was on the second floor of the State House. The Guards were composed of young men, some of them mere striplings, but they obeyed the orders. Brown resisted, but he was seized bodily and carried out of the building, and guards placed at the stairway with orders not to allow him to pass.
One day, I was standing near the guard at the head of the stair- way, when I saw "Charley" slowly threading his way upward, his head bowed in deep meditation of the why and wherefore of the thusness, when he was greeted with a command to halt. Looking up, he saw a little, dapper fellow about five feet high, I think his name was Parker, armed and equipped according to law. "Char- ley" said he was the attorney for Mr. Brown, and must see him, and, with a broad, ironical smile on his face at the ludicrousness of the attempt of the little five-footer to stop him, started ahead, only to look straight into the front end of a big gun, with the warn- ing that he would get its contents if he didn't stop. There was no chance for an argument, and he retired in good order, but he won out in the end, for Brown was finally acquitted of the charges against him.
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He is public-spirited, always ready to aid any enterprise for the public welfare. For temperance and prohibition, he has been a strenuous and powerful advocate.
Religiously, he has ever been a pillar of the Methodist Church ; is a believer in Divine Providence, so firm that he once declared in a public speech that the State of Iowa was the exemplification of the fulfillment of a great and divine purpose-that it was not an accident.
Socially, he is genial, humorous, conservative, loves a good story, spices his speeches often with witticism, sarcasm, and with entendre, or causticity which stings.
During the past few years, he has retired from active business because of an affection of the eyes, which has nearly enshrouded him in darkness, and on his Fern Hill farm, at the north city lim- its, is spending his days in quietude and reflection of a life well directed and approved by a people with whom he has lived.
May Thirteenth, 1906.
ELIJAH CANFIELD
O NE of the pioneers of Polk County who impressed his per- sonality upon its civic affairs was Elijah Canfield. A Pennsylvanian by birth, he came here in 1845, and located a farm on the wild, wide prairie in Democrat Township. In 1848, the name was changed to Camp Township, which then embraced nearly the whole of the eastern part of the county. The only saw mill in the county was Parmelee's, ten miles down the river, and lumber was scarce. He built a log cabin sixteen feet square, with a rude fireplace at one end, constructed of stones gathered in the neighborhood, and a chimney of sticks, the whole plastered with mud clay from the land. Greased paper was used for the windows instead of glass, old boxes for tables and shelving.
The first settlements in the new country were made along the rivers, to get the benefit of timber belts skirting them for logs for lumber, fence rails, and fuel, hence it is the principal cities and towns to-day are along rivers. The prairie settler was therefore deprived of those accessories, added to which was the isolation, his nearest neighbor often being miles away.
With energy and faith in the future, Canfield began to turn up the soil and build a home-he was a home-builder of the true type. So soon as he had completed his cabin, he started a church, and organized the first class of the Methodist Church in that township. So soon as the church was started, Canfield organized a School Dis- triet, the first in the township.
In 1847, he removed to Four Mile Township, and during the Fall, built the first schoolhouse in that township. It was 16x24 feet, a rude affair, but it served the purpose. Each settler fur- nished their pro rata number of logs for it. Benches, desks, and tables were improvised from the native timber. A teacher was employed by voluntary subscriptions, there being no organized school districts.
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PIONEERS OF POLK COUNTY, IOWA
Canfield was greatly troubled by wolves, the timber being full of them. They had a hankering for his pigs and calves, and so frightened his children, they hardly ventured to go to school. There was one large, wild-eyed ferocious brute which became especially annoying, and one moonlight evening he discovered it cautiously approaching a pile of straw in which the pigs were sleep- ing. Taking his shotgun, he stealthily got within a few paces of the thief, so intent upon its quest for pork it did not heed the com- ing danger. There was a puff and a bang, and the pest of the set- tlement was put out of business.
In 1846, the turning up of the prairie soil released the miasma therein, and Fever and Ague was epidemic. There were not enough well persons to care for the sick. It was not uncommon for the doctor who visited families to be taken with chills and have to go to bed with the sick until the paroxysm passed away. To see a strong, robust man shaking so violently as to make the floor tremble -and the experience repeated until he became a physical wreck- was a familiar picture to many of the pioneers.
There were also other menaces to the peace and comfort of the early settlers. Skunks destroyed their poultry, rabbits killed their young fruit trees by gnawing the bark and tender roots, rattle- snakes were so numerous as to make it unsafe to hunt cattle through the tall grass without a club or some weapon for defense. An old-timer relates that he stopped over night onee with a couple of bachelors who had taken a claim on the prairie. They prepared a good supper, but he noticed that they ate nothing, and asked if they were sick. "No," was the reply, "but we killed two hundred and twenty-five rattlesnakes this afternoon, and the smell of them rather upset our appetites."
Cornmeal and flour in those days were the most frequent source of deprivation. Of meat, bacon was the staple, but the timber and groves abounded with deer, turkeys, and wild pigeons; the streams with fish, the prairies with quail and chickens. As late as 1855, Robert Powers drove into Dubuque, in February, with one thou- sand prairie chickens, one thousand quail, one thousand rabbits, eight deer, five wolves, and two bears. It was not uncommon for settlers to shoot game from their cabin doors. The prairie chicken is nearly extinct.
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ELIJAH CANFIELD
"They have scattered from the meadow, They drum no more-
Those splendid Spring-time pickets !
The sweep of the share and sickle has thrust them from the hills.
They have scattered from the meadow
Like the partridge in the thickets ;
They have perished from the sportsman who kills, and kills, and kills."
At certain seasons, the wild, or passenger, pigeons made their appearance in flocks of millions, breaking down trees on which they roosted while making a stop to get food. They have now become extinct in this state. The last flight was in the Spring of 1868. There were lines of them stretching out on the skyline as far as the eye could reach, and lasting for several days. Not only have animals and birds succumbed to Civilization, but some of our trees. I do not refer to those used for lumber or building. All over the city, where lots have been improved by grading, cutting, and digging, you will find the dead and dying Black Oak.
In 1847, John D. Parmelee, who had started a mill about ten miles down the river, to saw lumber for the barrack buildings at The Fort, added machinery to grind corn. Canfield was there when it started, and saw the first bushel of grain ground in Polk County. A year later, stone buhrs were added to grind wheat, but there was no bolting machinery, and the farmer's wife had to do the bolting at home.
In 1850, Canfield sold his farm and took another new one in Clay Township, then a part of Beaver Township, where he estab- lished a home which became one of the finest in the county, and where he passed the remainder of his days. On the farm is the oldest orchard in the county. As elsewhere, his first work in the township was to organize a church and a School District. He was intensely public-spirited and active in civic affairs in the township and county. A man of good, common sense and judgment, busi- ness capacity, and strict integrity, he logically became the choice of the township for places of trust, hence he was repeatedly elected Justice of the Peace, Township Assessor, and Treasurer- in fact,
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he held some public office continually after coming to the county, not because he wanted them, but the people would not let him refuse. His publie duties brought him so frequently to Des Moines, he became a familiar personage, and well known to everybody.
Politically, he was a Whig, but not an active partisan. His neighbors and townsmen waived his politics, however. Had he been a Democrat, he could have had some of the best offices in the county, for he was very popular, but in those days the Democrats did not believe a Whig had any right to hold a public office, and Barlow Granger and his confederates made it certain during the first decade that they did not get any. The devices and schemes to that end were at least peculiar, if not suspicious. If the con- test was close or doubtful, a laggard poll list from a way-back pre- cinct would come in, be counted and settle the majority.
Socially, Canfield was genial, hospitable, and of kindly tem- perament. His home was always the resort of old settlers, where they found warm hearts and generous welcome. He was a highly esteemed member of the Pioneer Settlers' Association. His nobil- ity of character, purity of aspirations, cleanliness of life, devotion to country, and obedience to God, made him a man in the true sense of the word, and of inestimable value during the formative period of county affairs.
March Fourth, 1906.
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JUDGE GEORGE G. WRIGHT
JUDGE GEORGE G. WRIGHT
W HEN the heart pulsation ceased, and the surcease of life came to George G. Wright, the state, Polk County, and the City of Des Moines parted with one more widely known and intimately connected with their history than any other person. Born in Indiana, crippled in early childhood by a severe attack of Rheumatism, cut off from all the sports of boyhood, he found compensation therefor in books. Each county in the state then had authority to select two worthy young persons for free tuition in the State University. They were usually dubbed charity students by the "regulars," and young Wright was accordingly ranked in that class, but, undaunted, he studiously and zealously took on the task before him, graduated with high honors at the age of nineteen, then read law with his brother, was admitted to the Bar in 1840, and in September of that year went down the Wabash and Ohio rivers, up the Mississippi, landed at Burlington, thence by stage to Keo- sauqua, which contained a few log houses, and had just been made the County Seat of Van Buren County. The country was sparsely settled, and presented poor encouragement to a young, ambitious person, but strenuously optimistic, he looked ahead. He was ener- getic, industrious, social, and of that temperament which wins friends, esteem, confidence, and, in 1846, he was appointed by the court Prosecuting Attorney for the county.
In 1846, he was nominated for delegate to the Territorial Council, which made the first Constitution of the state. His oppo- nent was the father of his wife, Thomas Dibble, an old-fashioned Democrat of the Bourbon type, who didn't believe a Whig had any right to hold a public office. The district comprised Davis, Appa- noose and Van Buren counties. Wright was a Whig, and there were not enough Whigs in the district to elect a Corporal's Guard, but his Van Buren friends expected him to pull through, the other counties being sparsely settled. He took the field, made the contest,
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shook hands with the voters, "jollied" the women and children, and returned home declaring he had the promise of every voter in Appanoose County, but was a little in doubt about Davis. When the returns came in, of the twenty-six votes cast in Appanoose County, he received one. He immediately wrote the chairman of the Canvassing Board to send him the name of the man who cast that one vote, declaring he would send him a dress for his wife. He never found the man, but he used to say sixteen different men claimed the dress, and he was ready always to give it to the right person.
In 1848, he was elected State Senator from Van Buren County for four years, which included the Second and Third General Assemblies. Most of the members at both sessions were hard money Democrats, or Loco Focos, as the Whigs called them, from an inci- dent which occurred in Tammany Hall, New York. The meeting got into a furious row, the chairman fled from the hall, and the lights were suddenly extinguished to break it up, but some stand- patters re-lighted the lamps with loco foco, or lucifer matches, which had just come into use. In the Harrison campaign, in 1840, the nickname was universal. A tobaconist got ont a cigar with a match stuck in one end for lighting it, which he called the Loco Foco Cigar.
The Democrats, true to their hard-money proclivities, passed a law prohibiting banking by any person, association, or corpora- tion, or creating any paper to circulate as money, but neglected to prohibit the circulation of foreign bank notes. The result was, the state became flooded with rotten, worthless, foreign stuff, the gold and silver was "salted down" by every person who could get a dol- lar, mechanics worked month after month without seeing a piece of metallic coin, culminating in the financial crash of 1857, which strewed the country with commercial and industrial wrecks.
They also passed the so-called prohibitory law, which abolished saloons, but provided for the sale of whiskey the same as tea, cof- fee, and codfish, by which came the ubiquitous "county grocery" of that day, the authority to keep a grocery being granted by the County Commissioners.
It was at the third session all the un-laid-out portion of the state was parceled into sixty counties and named. The contest for names
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JUDGE GEORGE G. WRIGHT
was spirited, and for once George, who had become quite noted for his parries and repartees to the witticisms of his confreres, got stumped. When "Wright" was suggested as the name for one county, several senators at once wanted to know what "Wright" was intended. Senator Leffingwell, the leader of the Democrats, with a twinkle in his eye, arose and moved that the name "Wright" be stricken out, "for," said he, "I understand the suggestion was made in honor of the Senator from Van Buren. He is a very young man, and we don't know what he may sometime be guilty of." George was stumped, and failed to respond to the remark, when another member announced the honor was intended for a brother of George G.
The most important work of that session was the compilation of the first Code, involving the putting iu statutory form the unwrit- ten law on many subjects, and reconstructing the entire judiciary system. Judge Casady, who was the Senator from Polk County, says Judge Mason and Wright made that Code; that Wright worked day and night upon it, and when, toward the end of the fifty-day limit of the session-their pay was two dollars a day for fifty days and one dollar a day thereafter-opinion was expressed that an extra session would be necessary to finish the Code, Wright took the floor and declared he would never consent to adjourn until it was completed and passed, and he held the members to it sixteen days at one dollar a day. Two of the measures in it, specially pre- pared by Wright, were those abolishing imprisonment for debt, and the homestead exemption, both of which are in force to-day practically as he wrote them.
In 1850, he was nominated for Representative in Congress in that district, which comprised the south half of the state, and over- whelmingly Democratic. His opponent was Bernhart Henn, a good friend of his. They traveled the district together, and slept in the same bed. The Des Moines River Improvement scheme was the all-absorbing subject of public thought; it permeated the whole politics of the state. Every candidate for public office was meas- ured by his zeal in its behalf, so it was the main effort of Henn and Wright to show their superior faith and effort in the project, and many laughable stories they used to tell of their campaign.
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Wright said Henn would wake him up in the night, shouting in his sleep: "I am loyal to the Des Moines Improvement," and one day they were riding along when Henn saw a man at work in the field. Both started after him to get his vote, but Wright being lame, Henn beat him, hurrahing for the river improvement as he went, only to find the man a dummy set up to scare crows. Wright was defeated, and he used to say it was because Bernhart knew every Democrat in the district, could call them by their "front" names, and he couldn't.
In 1854, when not thirty-five years old, his legal ability and popularity prompted the Whigs to select him as their candidate for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His opponent was Edward Johnston, the strongest man in the Democratic party. In the joint convention of the Legislature, that then being the body to fill the place, he received fifty-three votes and Johnston forty-five. He was continuously reelected for fifteen years.
During his service on the bench, the entire judiciary system of the state was changed. The most abstruse and intricate questions, involving vast interests of the state, corporations, and individuals, ever before that court, were solved, and precedents established which have been accepted and confirmed by the highest tribunals of the Nation. In fact, the present jurisprudence of the state rests upon the foundation laid by Judge Wright and his early associates, Woodward, Isbell, Stockton, Lowe, Dillon, and Cole.
The opinions of Judge Wright, running through the first thirty volumes of the Iowa Reports, are deemed models of perspicnity, clearness, and soundness. One of his notable decisions was respect- ing the running of hogs at large. Under an Act passed by the Leg- islature in 1857, the first local option law in the state, a case was taken up to his court on the constitutionality of the law, the appel- lant claiming the law was unconstitutional on the ground that it was class legislation, giving hogs the right to go where they pleased in one county and not in another county. The Judge held that hogs were not necessarily "equal before the law," that is, the law need not affect all hogs alike; that as the law had provided where the people of a county-and every county had the same privilege -had voted for or against hogs running at large, the law was
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JUDGE GEORGE G. WRIGHT
constitutional as a police regulation. That decision established the rule of local option.
In 1855, the Judge came to Des Moines, and soon after, with Judge Cole, organized the Iowa Law School. The first class con- sisted of twelve, and I venture to say no class ever received so com- plete, liberal, and valuable instruction as that. Judge Wright was a favorite of young men, and had the happy faculty, possessed by very few, of expressing his views in attractive form. He strove to impress upon the class his ideal of moral and professional recti- tude, and sound fundamental principles of the science of law. To him, shystering and so-called sharp practice was abhorrent. I recall one day when he said: "While it is the duty of a lawyer to protect the interests of his client and secure the verdict of a jury, with all his power, he should never resort to trickery, but keep within the law and the facts. Above all things, never attempt to deceive the court, for nothing will so utterly degrade you, and destroy your standing." An apt illustration of this occurred soon after, in the United States District Court here, before Judge Sam- uel F. Miller, of the United States Supreme Court, well known to old-timers as a rigid disciplinarian. Every member of that law class, I think, was present. The case before the court was a very important one, involving intricate points of law, multifarious indi- vidual interests, and millions of money. Mr. - , a very promi- nent attorney, in his argument, made a statement to which the Judge quickly retorted : "Mr. - , do you state that as a propo- sition of law ?" The attorney started again, when the Judge curtly cut him off with, "Mr. - , the court knows all the law in this case; take your seat." The effect of the rebuke upon the lawyers present was intensely manifest.
In 1868, the Iowa Law School became the Law Department of the State University, and its graduates alumni of the University. Judge Wright continued with the school until June, 1896, when he gave his last lecture.
In 1870, the Judge retired from the court, and, yielding to the importunities of his friends in the south half of the state, became a candidate for United States Senator. His opponent was William B. Allison, who had been four times elected to the Lower House.
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His friends claimed he was logically entitled to promotion, but the popularity of the Judge was irresistible, and he was elected on the first ballot, which probably no other man in the state could have secured. He served six years, on four important committees, and declined a re-nomination, which ended his public office-holding.
During his many years in public office, he was often pressed into service in civic affairs not political. In 1860, he was elected President of the State Agricultural Society, and during his four terms, by his good judgment and wise counsel, the Society was put on the road to the high place it now occupies.
In 1879, he was elected a director of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad Company, which place he held during his life.
In 1882, he was elected President of the Polk County Savings Bank, and President of the Security Loan and Trust Company, which places he held until his decease.
In 1885, he was elected President of the American Bar Associ- ation, in honor of his nobility as a jurist, statesman, and citizen, and served two years.
He was the founder of the Pioneer Lawmakers' Association, and at its permanent organization, in 1892, was elected its Presi- dent. He held the place so long as he lived. It was in that rela- tion he had the most enjoyment of all the multifarious associations of his eventful life. He knew all the members, called them by their "front" names, and they knew him. At the reunions of those survivors of pioneer days, when were recounted the events of early days, the contests, political and otherwise, the success and defeats, their incidents, and as a body, in genuine good fellowship, all old animosities forgotten and forgiven, the Judge, with his rich fund of anecdotes, witticisms, and happy repartee to the cute thrust of some fellow, made the occasions a source of solid enjoyment.
The very last letter he wrote was to one of the officers respect- ing an approaching reunion, in which he expressed joyous antici- pation of its coming, but the twilight portending the coming night was already about him, and before the assemblage met he had ceased to be.
During the Civil War period, incapacitated from military serv- ice by lameness, he sustained the Government by every possible
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