USA > Iowa > Wapello County > The history of Wapello County, Iowa, containing a history of the county, its cities, towns, &c., a biographical directory of citizens, war record of its volunteers in the late rebellion, general and local statistics history of the Northwest, history of Iowa > Part 40
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MAJOR BEACHI'S HISTORY OF THE AGENCY.
We now quote literally from Major Beach's articles, giving an intelligent and very interesting account of the earliest white settlements in Wapello, and also preserving anecdotes of the several chiefs who led the bands of dusky natives :
" The war of 1832 resulted in a treaty which left the Indians no further claim to any territory east of the Mississippi, and, with a later treaty in 1837, obtained for the United States the cession of the beautiful and fertile belt of Eastern Iowa, that extends, in our neighborhood, to within a mile or two of Batavia, and crosses the Des Moines River, at its boundary, at Iowaville. There was a reservation left for the Poweshiek band of Foxes on or near the Iowa River, the purchase of which was the object of a treaty held in the fall of 1836, on a spot now within the city of Davenport, but then belonging to the famous half-blood, Leclaire. Iowa was then attached, for Government purposes, to Wisconsin, and its Governor, the late Henry Dodge, was the Commissioner to negotiate the treaty, and the late Gov. Grimes, then a new settler, was the Sec- retary. This treaty is referred to for the sake of an incident which shows that, whether common or not to the ' Lo' family in general, the Sacs and Foxes, at least, possessed an honorable side to their character.
"The country around was already densely settled, and the Indians could easily have procured an unlimited supply of whisky. Gov. Dodge, in his opening speech at the preliminary council, impressed upon them the importance and necessity of strict sobriety during the negotiations, and expressed his hope that his advice would be heeded. Keokuk and the other chiefs, in reply, said their father's talk about the fire-water was good, and gave their word that none of it should be allowed among them during the proceedings. Immediately the council closed, they appointed a sufficient guard or police of the most reliable braves, to prevent the introduction or use of liquor, at whatever cost. In fact,
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the very bluest blood of the tribes was selected for the duty, and each one instructed to carry a designated badge of his authority.
" Before the conclusion of the treaty, a Sunday intervened, and nearly all the Indians came over to Rock Island to the trading-house. Meanwhile, a steamboat came along and tied up there at the bank. She was crowded with passengers, who were excited at the view of so many savages, and Black Hawk, who was conspicuous, was soon recognized and became the object of chief interest. A passenger soon came ashore, took him by the hand and led him on board, his wish being to invite him to a friendly glass at the bar. But Black Hawk, whether influenced by a sense of personal honor or the presence of the police, would not go there, and soon returned to the shore. Next, the boat began to push off, and Black Hawk's new friend, anxious not to be disappointed of his kind design, had already procured a bottle filled with liquor and stood reaching it out from the guards of the boat. At the last instant, one of the Indian police, with quiet and courteous dignity, took the bottle, and a smile of satis- faction diffused itself over the donor's face, which soon changed to a very differ- ent cast of countenance, for instantly the young brave hurled the bottle upon the rock at his feet, and dashed it into countless atoms, and the poor fellow was glad to slink away in the rear of the stentorian shout that ascended and came echoing back from the opposite bluffs, and in which it was hard to distinguish whether the exulting whoop of the Indians or the less terrific, though no less hearty and derisive shout of the steamer's company, predominated.
" There was a somewhat singular coincidence in regard to names existing upon Rock Island for some time subsequent to the Black Hawk war, and the more so, as Davenport is not as common a patronymic as Jones or Smith. George Davenport, called Colonel, had been for many years the head of the trading establishment there. He was an Englishman by birth, had amassed an ample fortune, and lived hospitably and generously in his pleasant mansion, a short half-mile from the Fort. It will be remembered by some who read this. that he was murdered in his house at high noon, one Fourth of July, by villains who had entered to rob him. Soon after the war, a new Agent was sent out to replace the one who had been killed by the Indians. His name was also Davenport, and he was called Colonel ; and, a few months later, Col. William Davenport, of the First United States Infantry, was sent there to command the fort. These three gentlemen, each a head of one of the three depart- ments pertaining to the Indians, were in no way related to each other.
" Some two or three years later, a change in the organization of the Indian Department transferred Gen. Street from the Agency of the Winnebagoes at Prairie du Chien, which he had filled for several years, to that of the Sacs and Foxes. Gen. Street was fully known for a most uncompromising Whig of the Henry Clay persuasion, yet he retained his office throughout the terms of Gen. Jackson, and until he died in Mr. Van Buren's last year. In 1837, the Agency at Rock Island was abandoned, the fort having been evacuated and dismantled the year previous, though Gen. Street still paid and met the Indians there for some months later. But the inconvenience to the Indians of bringing them so far from their villages, and through the border settlements, now slowly extend- ing, suggested the propriety of removing their Agency into their own country.
" In the fall of 1837, a party of about thirty of the chiefs and head men were taken by Gen. Strect, under orders, to Washington. Wapello had along his wife and little son, and perhaps one or two more women were of the party. The writer, then going to his native State on furlough, accompanied them from Rock Island to Wheeling, and afterward was present with the Indians during .
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nearly the week they were visitors in Boston. They were a novelty in this city, and were received and entertained with great attention and kindness. The mili- tary were turned out to escort them about in their line of carriages and clear the streets of the throngs that filled them. Black Hawk and his two sons, splendid specimens of manly symmetry and beauty in form, were of the party, and nat- urally the most noticed by the multitude, their recent fame as warriors being yet fresh in the popular mind. The party was received, with all due ceremony, in old Faneuil Hall by the Mayor and city government, and welcomed to the city ; and on the succeeding day the Governor, the late Hon. Edward Everett, received them in the State House on behalf of the State. This ceremony was held in the spacious hall of the Representatives, every inch of which was jammed with humanity. After the Governor had ended his eloquent and appropriate address of welcome, it devolved upon the chiefs to reply, and Appanoose, in his turn, as, at the conclusion of his 'talk,' he advanced to grasp the Governor's hand, said : 'It is a great day that the sun shines upon
when two such great chiefs take each other by the hand !' The Governor, with a nod of approbation, controlled his facial muscles in a most courtly gravity. But the way the house came down ' was a cantion" which Appanoose doubtless considered the Yankee fashion of applauding his speech.
" There were two theaters then in Boston, and a struggle ensued between them to obtain the presence of the Indians, in order to 'draw houses.' At the Tremont, the aristocratic and fashionable one, the famous tragedian, Forrest, was filling an engagement. His great play, in which he acted the part of a gladiator, and always drew his largest audiences, had not yet come off, and the manager was disinclined to bring it out while the Indians were there, as their presence always insured a full house. Gen. Street, being a strict Presbyterian. was not much in the theatrical line, and hence the writer, who had recently become his son-in-law, took these matters off his hands; and, as he knew this particular play would suit the Indians far better than those simple, declamatory tragedies, in which, as they could not understand a word, there was no action to keep them interested, he finally prevailed upon Mr. Barry, the manager, to to bring it out, promising that all the Indians should come.
" In the exciting scene, where the gladiators engage in deadly combat, the Indians gazed with eager, breathless anxiety ; and as Forrest, finally pierced through the breast with his adversary's sword, fell dying, and as the other drew his bloody weapon from the body, heaving in the convulsions of its expir- ing throes, while the curtain falls, the whole Indian company burst out with their fiercest war whoop. It was a frightful yell to strike suddenly upon unac- customed ears, and was instantly succeeded by screams of terror from among the more nervous of the ladies and children. For an instant the audience seemed at a loss, but soon uttered a hearty round of applause-a just tribute to both actor and Indians.
" After ceding the belt of country upon the Iowa side of the Mississippi, as heretofore mentioned, and having considerably increased the width of this belt by an additional cession in the treaty of 1837, the Sacs and Foxes still retained a large and most valuable portion of our State. This last treaty was negotiated with the party whose visits to Washington and other Eastern cities we have just mentioned, and was concluded on the 21st day of October. This was the first treaty ever made with the Sacs and Foxes in which the principle was incor- porated that had just then begun to be adopted, of making the sum allowed the Indians for their land a permanent fund, to be held in trust by the United States, upon which interest only, at the rate of 5 per cent, would be annually
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paid to them. Hitherto it had been the custom to provide that the gross sum granted for a cession should be paid in yearly installments. For instance, · $10,000 in regular payments of $1,000, over a term of ten years, would have left the Indians, at the end of that time, destitute of all further benefit from that cession. But now the more humane policy had come to be followed-of saving for them, in perpetuity, the principal sum. For their cession of 1837, they were allowed $200,000, upon which the interest annually paid is $10,- 000; and the treaty of October 11, 1842, that finally dispossessed them of their land in Iowa, pays them $40,000, as the interest upon $800,000, which, together with the payment by the United States of a large amount of claims, and some minor stipulations of a cash character, was the consideration for which that cession was obtained. Under a very old treaty, they were also receiving an unlimited annuity of $1,000, so that now there is the yearly sum of $51,- 000 payable to the Sacs and Foxes, as long as any of their people live to claim and receive it.
"This treaty of 1837 also stipulated for the erection of mills and support of millers ; the breaking-up and fencing of fields; the establishment of a model farm, and other schemes of the pestilent brood of so-called philanthropists who were then beginning to devise their various plans for plundering the savages, and fastening upon them their hosts of vampires and lecches, schemes causing the outlay of many thousands of dollars of the money granted to these Indians for their lands, from which, it is safe to say, they never derived the slightest benefit.
" Appanoose persuaded Gen. Street that Sugar Creek, between Ottumwa and Agency, was fifty miles long, and the General had a mill erected on it. A freshet occurred within the next twelve months or so, sufficient in size and force to wash it away ; but the writer doubts if ever a bushel of grain was ground in it, nor, had it stood to this day, and had the Indians remained to this day, does he believe they could have been prevailed upon to have raised a bushel of corn to carry to it. Another mill was put up on Soap Creek, and when the writer took charge of the Agency, in June, 1840, that also was destroyed ; but as that was a better stream and he was fortunate enough to secure the services of Mr. Peter Wood, a man who fully understood his business, and was honestly disposed to attend to it, a second mill that was erected fared better, but the Indians took no interest in it whatever.
" A large field, cornering where the creek just below the depot at Ottumwa debouches from the bluff, was made and cultivated for one of the villages then located opposite. The field extended in this direction and toward the river. Another was made on the opposite bank near to the villages, and still a third in the same neighborhood, giving one to each of the three villages located opposite and below Ottumwa. A splended wheat erop harvested by the hands employed on the Pattern Farm, was stacked and a very high fence built around until it could be threshed ; but, in a very little time, the young men, too lazy to hunt up their ponies if turned out to graze, and having no squaws of whom to exact the duty, tore down the fences and turned their ponies upon the grain.
"Their farm, which embraced the land now occupied by Mr. Van Zant and David Staubine's farm, as also part of Mrs. Bradley's, and some other tracts, was capable of being conducted in a way to secure to them somewhat more benefit than any of their other so-called inprovements. Yet it was utterly im- possible, and, doubtless, would have been even to the present day, to fulfill with it the chief designs contemplated by the humane simpletons-estimable gentle-
E. E. Bunten OTTUMWA
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man in countless ways, as they surely are-who were then, and still are, busy in devising projects to ameliorate the condition of the Indians. Sad, irretrieva- ble, irremediable necessity may compel a savage to many an act or course that no other pressure could persuade him to attempt; and the patient exercise of sensible discretion and judgment can sometimes effect what it were otherwise folly to undertake. Now, here was a tribe, with hardly an element of its character as yet in the least subdued or toned down from its aboriginal purity. Work, hard manual labor, it was part of their nature to look upon as degrad- ing and contemptible, even apart from the indolence that in itself would disin- cline them to it. The disdainful scorn of their demeanor toward certain half- civilized tribes, in whose vicinity they settled in Kansas, was characteristic. The hybrid styles of dress, neither Indian nor white man, that these fellows had been civilized up to the point of glorying in, were a source of never-ending amusement to the Sacs and Foxes.
" At the time that the Sacs and Foxes were prevailed upon to consent to the expenditure of a portion of the proceeds of their lands, with a view to the introduction among them of all this new machinery of mills, farms and the like, they had not the slightest ground for apprehending that so much of their sub- sistence as depended upon their favorite occupation of the chase could dimin- ish in a long time to come; and their annual cash receipts from the United States were large in their eyes. Under such conditions, not the least motive existed to induce them to labor ; while the design of the farmn was to serve as a model, an exemplar, where they could come and look on, and learn to work by observation, by such practice as they might be willing to attempt, and by the instructions of the skilled farmer and hands employed. The expenses of inain- taining as well as of the original establishment of the farm were taken from their annuities, from the consideration allowed them for the lands they had sold. And the chief benefit that ever accrued to them was, that parties coming in from a distance to get work done by their black and gun smith could sometimes, in bad weather, depend on it for shelter while detained, as well as for provis- ions. And, even here, the farmer was always liable to be imposed upon by the worthless vagabonds of the tribes, who would make it a pretext for indulging their laziness ; and it was also the source of jealousy and discord among the bands .if the slightest charge could be established that one had received the least benefit more than another, requiring constant caution and delicate man- agement to prevent.
" Indeed, the writer never considered these schemes to be anything in fact, although not in intent, but barefaced plunder of the Indians. Since that time, they have doubtless increased in number and in kind, so as to embrace every object out of which a 'job' can be got; and the only chance of justice to the Indian is in their utter expulsion, and the restoration of the entire Indian serv- ice to the War Department, where alone it properly and reasonably belongs, where for years it was conducted to the general welfare and contentment of the Indi- ans, and where, if restored to it, remedies could soon be devised to abate the countless perfidies and iniquities against the savages, to which its first re- moval paved the way. The powerful interests that have already once or twice defeated measures undertaken in Congress for this object, and ren- dered of no avail the most convincing arguments in its favor of those least liable to suspicion of personal interest, are proof enough that the simple welfare of the Indian is not the sole incentive, and also justify the apprehension that venality may not be an unwelcome guest in the patriotic breast of a Con- gressman.
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" The treaty of 1837 having been ratified by the Senate, Gen. Street took early measures, in 1838, to establish the agency within the boundaries, and as conveniently as possible to the villages of the Sacs and Foxes, and at once entered into contract with a gentleman, whose name the writer has forgotten, but who lived not far below Clarksville, in Missouri, to put up the requisite buildings for his family residence and office, the smith's shops, etc. The great length of Gen. Street's service in the Indian Department, and the high consid- eration, both officially and personally, in which he was held, caused the Depart- ment to be more liberal toward him in the sums allowed for these objects than perhaps otherwise it would have been ; for, besides consenting to a house quite substantial and of convenient size, they allowed him, also, a sum sufficient to pay for the breaking-up and inclosing of a large field. with quite convenient stables and other buildings attached to the domicile. The contractor was a responsible person, of considerable means, and when he undertook business was disposed to push it through without delay or vexatious annoyances ; and so, starting from his home with teams, some of his negroes and an ample force of hired mechanics and laborers, he soon had a large company at work upon the ground.
"The writer came out for a couple of days in August, 1838. The old Council House, intended for a place wherein to hold talks with the Indians, was already completed, being the first building put up, with a view to using it as a shelter for the provisions and other perishable stores. Many of the tim- bers for the Agency House were upon the ground, and being continually hauled there, ready hewn. Two heavy breaking teams were at work upon the future field, and wagons hauling on the rails, and the ring of the blacksmith's hammer being quite steadily maintained, quite a business air was imparted to the new set- tlement. As the party of four, of whom the writer was one, rode in, about 11 o'clock, hot and tired with the saddle, from beyond Birmingham, without an intervening house, the hospitable-looking camp of tents and board sheds, close to the Council House, the blazing fire, over which two or three female Africans were busy at the steaming coffee, bacon, biscuits and divers vegetables of the season, excited in his mind an impression of the new agency, the satisfactory contentment of which has never to this day worn off.
" Mr. Richard Kerr was one of this party. He had just been appointed Farmer to the Indians, and arranging with Gen. Street to meet in Burlington, the object of the trip out was to select a suitable location for the Pattern Farm, and to receive his preliminary instructions for commencing operations. The place was selected, and Mr. Kerr set about employing laborers, who were paid, as well as himself, out of the appropriation set apart for agricultural purposes. Mr. Kerr's pay was $50 per month, and his wife received $20 per month as Matron, which, with the free use of whatever was raised, made it a very com- fortable position. Their house, the one now occupied by Mr. Van Zant, was not long in making its appearance. Mr. Kerr understood the art of farming in all its minutiæ, and the Pattern, once under way, was always kept in the best of order and made productive.
" At the Agency, bricks, lime and whatever could be manufactured on the premises, were ready by the time needed, and by winter the contract was about completed and the buildings ready for occupancy. In April, 1839, Gen. Street moved down his family from Prairie du Chien, and took possession. Ere long his health began to fail. and the result was a combination of obstinate maladies under which he succumbed early in May of the next year. For several months, he had been totally incapable of attending to his duties, and the De-
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partment had consented that any of his sons or sons-in-law, of age, might dis- charge them for him-of course his bond being held responsible. He had been out to ride with his brother-in-law, Dr. Posey, of Shawneetown, III., who had been professionally caring for him during several weeks. Alighting from the carriage, he had stepped quite firmly across the stile and yard, and seated him- self within the door, and bade a servant to bring a glass of cold water. As the boy stood presenting it, he sat motionless in the chair. Mrs. Street was there in an instant from an adjoining room, and called to her brother, the Doctor, who had passed up stairs. It was the delay of hardly a minute, but no flow of blood responded to the Doctor's lancet. He had died in his chair.
" The Indians were greatly attached to their 'Father,' as they usually term their Agent, and word of the General's sudden demise reaching the villages opposite Ottumwa, numbers of them came immediately to the Agency. Wapello and his band, especially, were so demonstrative in their grief as to augment the distress of Mrs. Street, and the writer's wife-who had been some weeks in attendance upon her father-and younger members of the family to that extent that it became necessary to have the interpreter kindly explain it to them, and beg them to give expression to their sorrow at some point more remote from the house.
" The writer, who was then living in Dubuque, hastened to Washington as soon as the sad news reached him, the hope being to save the family their home, in which they were now comfortably established, and of which the suc- cession of a stranger to the office would have deprived them. When he arrived there, by a then unusually quick journey of twelve days, he found his nomina- tion already awaiting the action of the Senate, and, in a day or two more obtaining his commission, he came direct to the Agency. At the time of his arrival, about June 1, 1840, the Agency, with its dependencies, was about as follows : In the Agency House was Mrs. Street and the nine youngest of her children, of whom William B. Street, of Oskaloosa, was the senior. Just over the branch, in rear of the Agency, was Mr. Josiah Smart, the interpreter, one of God's noblemen, who combined in his character every brave, honest and generous sentiment that can adorn a man ; and within a few steps of his resi- dence was that of the blacksmith, Charles H. Withington. There was also Harvey Sturdevant, the gunsmith, but, being unmarried, he boarded with Withington, until, a year or so later, he put himself up a cabin, where the writer now lives, August, 1874, and dug that famous old well. As distance (from the rest of us) did not lend enchantment to the view of his bachelorhood, he soon switched on to the matrimonial track. Then there was the household of the Pattern Farm, some half-dozen in number, except in extra times, suclı as harvesting. This was the actual Agency settlement. On the Des Moines, a mile or so below the County Farm, where the bluff approaches nearest to the bank, was the trading-post of P. Chouteau, Sr., & Co., but later more familiarly known as the ' Old Garrison.' This was usually superintended by Capt. William Phelps. And just above the mouth of Sugar Creek, on the creek bank, at the old road crossing, lived the miller, Jeremiah Smith, Jr., with his family. This embraced all the whites lawfully living in the country at the time.
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