USA > Illinois > Lee County > Recollections of the pioneers of Lee County [Illinois] > Part 35
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a cave on the island served as a postoffice for vessels which put in there to get or leave letters and take in a supply of turtles.
Soon after our arrival a squatter's title to a claim of some five hun- dred acres was bought from C. B. Bush for fifteen dollars an acre. Part of this land had been staked out in town lots, a ferry and a log store had been in operation. The boat was gone and the store empty. We made a stable of it. There were, besides, three large log houses connecting with each other. Into these I moved with my cousin, a brother who had joined us, and a carpenter, well known afterwards as Tommy Scallan, whom we had brought from the east to build a house for us. We bought besides from Bush all his crop of wheat in the stack at two dollars per estimated bushel, oats ditto at fifty cents in the field, corn in the field fifty cents, three acres of potatoes in the ground, two cows and about sixty head of swine, large and small; from another party horses, wagon and harness, three hundred dollars. Behold us equipped as western farmers.
The commercial crisis of the east had not as yet affected Illinois, and the state was undertaking vast and extravagant internal improve- ments. Besides the issue of floods of state bank notes, based on these undertakings, numbers of so-called wild cat banks, with scarce a local habitation or a name, were putting in circulation reams of their worth- less paper. Immigrants were flocking in, native immigrants, and the de- mand for provisions for them and their teams made produce of all kind very high. It was also a year of scarcity in the eastern states, flour was twelve dollars a barrel in New York and beefsteak twenty-five cents per pound. We were importing ship loads of wheat and other agricul- tural products-flax seed, hemp, hides, etc., from the Mediterranean and Russian provinces. The first-comers had claimed large tracts of land - embracing most of the wooded portions aud in the absence of lumber and coal the prairies were uninhabitable. They held these claims higher than deeded land was worth at any subsequent time till 1852, when the rail- ways were approaching us. The next year, 1840, the whole thing col- lapsed like a card house. The state bank failed, of course all the wild cai banks, all internal improvements stopped and immigration with them. Wheat fell from two dollars and fifty cents to twenty-five cents, beef from fifteen cents to one and a half cents per pound; corn, oats and potatoes were unsalable. No kind of produce would bring money; all was barter except the small pittance occasionally procured by hauling a load of wheat to Chicago, or provisions to the mines at Galena; but as the farmers were already beginning to hoard every cent for the land sale,
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even this was withdrawn from circulation. Taxes then were nominal, there being no tax on land for five years after entry. But for a person with mnuch correspondence letters were a heavy drain on the purse; as postage was twenty-five cents a sheet the biggest sheets were used, let- ters were crossed and recrossed and. every chance of sending by private hand eagerly taken. I believe a namesake of mine never quite forgave me for opening a letter of his by mistake in which were two bank notes when he was charged twenty-five cents extra on each note.
In recurring to those days with a merchant here, now comparatively rich, he said "I remember on one occasion my mother had written a letter to me. I was a boy a thousand miles away from home-had had no letter for a long time. I had no money, how to raise the necessary twenty-five cents? I went to the postoffice and turned the letter over and over again, then returned to the store where I was employed, and was sitting there in a kind of a despairing way when a customer came and asked for woolen socks. There were none in the store and the man was going out, when I suddenly thought of a new pair of mother's knit- ting 1 had just put on. Pulling off my boot I held up my foot and asked him what he would give. Three shillings-thirty-seven and one-half cents-I got for those socks, enough to pay for my letter and buy a little tobacco, for which I was starving." He concluded by saying "that was the most satisfactory sale I ever made."
But it was astonishing how well we got along without money. We had but to "tickle the soil with a straw and it laughed us a harvest," there were very few weeds, no rats till a few years later when a little steamer came up the river after a freshet and left a few in Dixon; no diseases among stock or poultry, we lived on the fat of the land, and for clothing each put on what seemed best in his own eyes. How often have I laughed at the appearance presented by a Kentucky neigh- bor to whom I had given a very flowery dressing gown, frayed with much usage, to see him starting ont on a hunt in this garb, supplemented by a coon skin cap with the long, barred tail hanging between his shoulders, a spotted fawn skin pouch, a long rifle and his bare feet, lie could have given odds to Robinson Crusoe.
Another whose costume was very peculiar was a man named Dock- hart, "who had got into a fuss down thar in Kaintucky" and shot a man and had then taken refuge in this cave of Adullam, where he was safe from pursuit. He was a simple, good-natured fellow, who recognized but one law, lex talionis of the Jews, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." He shunned the face of womankind, lived in a little cabin by himself,
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carried on all his farming work unaided and was clothed in the skins of the animals he shot.
It was fortunate that after the prairie soil was once broken the land was so free from weeds and easy of cultivation, for the implements were of the simplest and rudest description, the plow a small light bar with wooden teeth, the forks, rakes and scythes were rather better, but the crowning iniquity was the grain cradle, a heavy clumsy affair with a blade about five feet long and hickory fingers made by native workmen- reapers, mowers, threshing machines were still in the future, the grass was cut with a scythe, raked by hand and stacked in the open air, barns being unknown. To thresh the grain the bundles were laid on the ground and trodden out by horses-then winnowed with a sieve, tho' some had a fanning mill which went the rounds, borrowed from farm to farm. The strong fibrous roots of the original prairie grass were very hard to plow through and the breaking was generally done by professional prairie break- ers who turned the soil over with from four to six yoke cf oxen, charging $3.00 per acre.
When broken from June to September the soil rotted very fast and `made the richest seed bed for all kinds of plants. Thirty acres was con- sidered a fair allowance for each able bodied man to work, twenty in corn and ten in small grain, the corn plowed three times in the row with a common bar plow; those from the south used the Kentucky "bull tongue," a clumsy single shovel.
One blacksmith did all the work of the settlement, mending plows, setting tires, sighting rifles and shoeing horses; but on the approach of winter, when alone the horses were shod, he was a busy man and it was well to be in his good graces, for we had to taketurns in coming to his shop, each furnished with iron for his own shoeing; for as he was only paid in trade he had no money to buy iron and he made his own charcoal. Jem Carley was the sinith of that time, a most excellent and ingenious workman, turning all sorts of iron scraps into any desired shape; but a hard drinking, hard swearing, reckless fellow. He was assisted in his work by a poor, broken down creature by the name of Beach, who was the son of respectable parents in New York. He had received a fair education and the accounts which he kept for Carley were very neat and correct. His bloated face and shock of uncombed hair, covered by an old stove pipe hat through the crown of which some old newspapers gen- erally protruded, was a familiar sight to all the old settlers. Wlien Car- ley got drunk alone, which was rarely the case, he generally beat his wife and children, when he and Beach got drunk together they mauled
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each other. On one occasion a young man named West was riding past Carley's house after dark and heard someone crying bitterly. Checking his horse he called out, "Who is that?" "It's me." "What's the matter?" "'Pa's been beating me." "Come out here till I speak to you." It was Carley's daughter, a rustic belle among the young fellows who in a coun- try like this were ready to see Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. The result of the conversation was that she jumped up on horseback behind him and he took her to Levi Gaston's place where he left her for the night, passing her off in the darkness for a fugitive slave whom he wished to send on to Canada by the underground railroad. This was the more readily done. as light was scarce in those days, when a saucer of lard with a bit of cotton flannel for a wick was the general illuminator. The next morning West took her to Dixon, got the squire to make them one, and set up housekeeping in a canvas tent on the prairie, where he made a liv- ing by putting up hay.
Gaston was one of the original abolitionists at a time when to be one was anything but a title to public favor; ate no cane sugar made by the blood and sweat of negro slaves. A most kind hearted, upright man, to whom his neighbors of all parties and shades of belief gave a farewell banquet a few years ago when he was leaving us to make his home on the Pacific coast-a testimony of good will which I never remember any other Palmyran to have received.
We had a German shoemaker in the town, an excellent, industrious man who afterwards became a prosperous farmer. He was as hard put to it in his business as the smith. He has told me of working up oid saddle skirts into half soles for shoes, of walking to Sterling to exchange a basket of eggs for a ball of shoe-thread. Some idea of what men went through with in those days may be gathered from the fact that he -William Mueller, told me he had fenced his claim of forty acres with rails ail wheeled out on a wheelbarrow.
There was a meeting house at Gap Grove, but no regular religious services were held. The Rev. M. Thummel came occasionally from the southern part of the state and preached, principally to the Germans, and there were circuit riders who sometimes got up a revival: A number of us from the river attended one of these meetings from curiosity. The conductor of the ceremony was hidden in a deep pulpit, while those who had experienced religion were seated on a long bench in front. As each in turn would relate their experience he would pop up from the pulpit like a Jack-in-a-box and call "Now another!" It came to the turn of an elderly man who hesitated for some time and the preacher had to call
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on him by name more than once, "Brother Bidwell will give his exper- ience." At last slowly rising and scratching his head brother Bidwell said, "I'm kind of in a notch," and sat down. It was pathetic, however, to listen to the earnest simplicity with which some told of their strug- gles. But to our great surprise we saw on the anxious bench une of our own boon companions, Captain Whiting. He had been on a prolonged spree, in the course of which he had upset his wife and child from the sleigh he was driving-the child was killed and the mother injured. This had sobered him and in his remorse he had joined the church. On seeing us there he bawled out as if he was hailing the mast head, and shaking his fist at us, "come forrard here you chaps, don't be grin- ning there, and join us," which we declined.' Poor fellow! he was a first- rate sailor and a man of considerable literary ability, wrote pretty good poetry and for some time edited a newspaper, but the demon of drink took possession of him as it did of very many others in that early day, when they were loosed from the restraints of society. He afterwards commanded "The Star of the West," when she was sent to the relief of Fort Sumter, and gained so much credit on that occasion that he was appointed consul to one of the South American republics, but at last he drifted into the Sailors' Snug Harbor, a refuge for destitue sea- men on Staten Island, and there cut his throat in despair at his wasted abilities.
The Episcopal Bishop Chase, who founded Kenyon College in Ohio and a Jubilee College in this state, sometimes came up from his home at "Rob- in's Nest," and paid us a visit. Once in crossing the ferry at Dixon he expostulated with John Neimeyer, the well known ferryman, for charg- ing a bishop for crossing the river. John's reply was "Is dot so, den show me your bapers."
Bishop Chase's foible was a horror of Rome. Visiting at the house of a friend of mine he said, "Mr. B., I would like to talk to your servants" and he went into the kitchen where were an old colored man named Brown and his daughter. Brown, said the bishop, I would like to hear you repeat a prayer. The old darkey, who had been born in slavery days in New Jersey, and been buffeted about afloat and ashore in many parts of the world, began to rattle off with tolerable fluency a singular travesty of the Pater Noster which some priest had tried to teach him. "Ah, Brown! Brown!" said the Bishop, "I fear you are in worse than Egyptian bondage." "Don't know nuffin bout Gipsun bondage, sah, but if him worse nor Jersey bondage, must be bad, sure nuff."
Most of the early settlers, particularly those from eastern states, took
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up claims along the road leading from Dixon to Sterling, and about the Gap, but the two men who took the largest part in public affairs of the town were both Southerners, Squire Morgan, of Kentucky, and Squire Bethea of Tennessee. They both held all the different town offices from time to time. Harvey Morgan was still Squire after he moved to Dixon, where he died not many years ago. Squire Bethea was a man of little education and less pretention, but the people had perfect confidence in him; he had most of the qualities that make for the Kingdom of Heaven, and compromised more disputes than he ever tried cases. When the first school house was built about half way through Sugar Grove he was the first teacher in it.
Squire Tilton was also in the commission of peace for many years and showed considerable enterprise and public spirit. His wife was one of the earliest teachers in the Grove, but I believe Mrs. Michael Fellows was the first of all. It is said that on one occasion she was giving a les- son in geography and telling her class about the wonderful bell of Mos- cow, the number of tons it weighed. "By Jacks," said Martin Fender, one of her scholars, it must have took a powerful critter to tote such a bell as that!"'
It is astonishing, I may say gratifying, to see how women's abilities and their rights to use them are being recognized in the present day; the highest seats of learning and the profession are being thrown open to them. Miss Philippa Fawcett, a daughter of the late Postmaster Gen- eral of England, lately took a double first at the Oxford examination, surpassing all her male competitors; and as a general thing, in the college examinations of both countries, the honors seem pretty evenly divided. If they do not enjoy equal political rights with men they may console themselves with the knowledge that their influence at home has more weight in deciding an election than if they voted.
John Morse, was another old land mark of the town, honest and true. He was the first county treasurer, and afterward sheriff. One Christ- mas eve he joined a party of us who were celebrating the occasion, and fearing he would be rather a wet blanket, we tried various devices to get rid of him; untied his horse and then ran in to tell him it was loose, but he said it knew the way to the corn crib; asked if his wife wouldn't be uneasy, he was an old bachelor living alone in a little cabin; at last told him he would have to sing a song, tell a story or drink a glass of salt and water. He decided on telling a story, though he stuttered so as to be almost unintelligible "Down in York State," he said, "when father was a deacon in the church, I took a fancy one time to sing in the choir
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where all the girls sang; I tried it two or three meetings and thought I was doing first rate, when one Sunday before meeting, the minister came to our house and said, "deacon Morse you will have to keep John out of the choir for the girls say he brays so load that it puts them all out and they'll leave if he don't." 'He was a man wlio regarded no man's attire, still less his own, and came to see me once in the New York custom house where I was temporarily employed, wearing the same old leather breeches by which he was known on the river. To be quite fair, I took him through .crowded Wall street to see my brother in the bank of New York. He was on his way to California, where I believe he made a fortune in fruit trees.
Joseph Wilson, an old Brandywine miller, was the first to make flour for the settlement. The whole town turned out to assist him in putting up a log mill on Elkhorn creek, where he made excellent flour when there was water enough to turn the wheel, but many times the creek ran near- ly dry, and then we liad to take our grist often as far as Aurora on the Fox river, some forty miles,
A Swiss, named Obrist, had a small saw mill on Sugar creek, where after a heavy rain some sawing could be done, but generally all parts of a log house, and there were few others, weregot out by hand. When a new settler came he would cut and haul together a sufficient number of logs for the size of the house he intended to build. He would then call his neighbors together, and every one within ten miles was a neighbor, to assist in putting up his house; four of the best axemen were stationed one at each corner to receive the logs as they were rolled up on skids, notch and saddle them so that they would rest firmly without rocking. When the logs were all up some one was chosen to break a bottle of whiskey over one corner and give the house a name. Generally Deacon Moore or Reuben Eastwood were asked to officiate, as they had the loudest voices and could be heard farther than any of the others. Free splitting timber was then rived into shakes for the roof and puncheons for the floor and door; the puncheons were sometimes dressed down with an adze, weight poles laid on the roof to keep the shakes in place. A chimney built, the fire place of logs notched together, and stone, the upper part of finely split sticks well daubed with clay-the crevices between the logs of the house chinked with pieces of wood and then daubed with clay and the house was complete, warm in winter, cool in summer, comfortable to live in.
Martin Richardson was generally the favorite axeman on these occas- ions, his corner was always the first up and his logs fitted snugger than
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any others. He was a man about five feet five inches in height with a chest deep and broad as a giant's, his hair, the color of tow, stood out from his head like an immense mop. No brick redder than his face, no ivory whiter than his teeth. Born in Massachusetts, he had been taken as a child to Kentucky, and with the energy of the Yankee, he had the improvident liberality of the Southerners. He could do more work and raise better crops than any man in the country, his signature was a sim- ple one. a cross. His early life had been passed as a flat-boat man down the Mississippi river to New Orleans. At a husking frolic his pile of corn was the biggest and his chorus in the negro song the loudest.
There was a mighty old goose sailing on the ocean oh! oh! oh! oh! oh! oh!
I sent for my neighbors and ask 'em how to cook him, ' oh! oh! oh! oh! oh! oh!
Tell him to bi'e him aad toss him in de oben oh its
Nine weeks a biling and six weeks a roastin oh its
Knife wouldn't cut him, fork wouldn't enter and so on. But he dear- ly loved a free fight where any one could take a hand in without ani- mosity, but considered pistols and knives cowardly weapons. Did you never carry a pistol? I asked. "Neyer but once when Bush was postmas- ter and old man Kellogg, up to Buffalo, was his deputy; he was going to settle with him and was afraid he'd cut up rough, so nothing would do but I must go along with him and take a pistol. I never was so ashamed in my born days, the plaguy thing would keep a poking out of my pocket; I thought all the folks would see it but I had no occasion for it. Kellogg, he settled up peaceably." He had a little difficulty with a neigh- bor down in Kentucky which he thus described: "He and old man Bouch - er, father to Jack, had a falling out 'bout an ash kittle, and one day at a log roiling he jumped on to me with a knife. I just took him by the wrists and shook him till he dropped it and then I rolled him over. The boys all hollered to me to stomp him, but he was getting old so I jest got on Chat and rode down to Yallerbanks and sued him afore the squire." "And how did you come out?" I asked. "Oh! the lawyer he got the kit- tle." So, "The lawyer gets the kettle," passed into a proverb with us.
One of our money losing undertakings was the starting of a ferry at my place by subscription. Richardson was made ferryman. On one oc- casion when he was poling the boat and was at some little distance from shore, a young man named Heickus, thinking himself safe, began to abuse him. He jumped overboard and wading ashore ran Heickus down
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and gave him several hearty cuffs. Cited before the squire he was fined $3, which he paid in court, "This," said the young fellow with a grin, as he put the money in his pocket, "will buy my wife a new dress." "Yes," said Martin, "and by ginger, the next time I catch you I'll clothe your whole family."
As I have already said, we bought a farm from C. B. Bush and in September, 1839, my brother, cousin and I took possession of the log house and began housekeeping. Having bought all of Bush's crops, stock, etc., we had the necessaries of life in superabundance; but it was all raw material, and how to convert it into food was the problem. Com- ing fresh from an artificial city life, we had none of the fertility of re- source which is characteristic of most settlers in a new country. Like old man Sales, of Oates Spring, who ground his corn by attaching a heavy stone to a sort of well pole and pounding it against another partially hollowed stone; or the man Gov. Ford tells of in his history of Illi- nois, who one day when plowing corn had the misfortune to lose his horse's collar by the animal running away. After catching his horse again he pulled off his breeches and stuffing the legs with grass, hung it - over the horse's neck for a collar and coolly went on with his plowing. Threshing wheat we gave up at once as out of the range of possibility with corn and potatoes it was simple enough, but the pork! How to butcher a hog? However, we shot a hog in the corn field, only wound- ing it; it ran to the house, we in pursuit, and finally succeeded in dis- patching it with sticks and knives. We then tried to shave off the hair with a razor, which only ruined the razor, then we tried to burn it off and at last skinned it, when it preserted the appearance of fine fat mut- ton. I became in time a sufficiently good butcher, but father and brother up to the time of their leaving the country never made a success and in their last attempt father was to hold the pig, and my brother to stick it; the former knelt on the pig and held it with one hand, shading his eyes from the bloody deed by holding up his hat in the other hand; my brother then-approaching cautiously and turning his bead aside- made a desperate thrust with the knife, calling out, "let go!" With a fearful squeal the pig ran off and neither pig nor knife were ever seen again.
For bread we mixed together meal, salt and water, and toasted it be- fore the fire on a shingle or shovel. There was no lack of potatoes, for having allowed those we bought from Bush to freeze in the ground, a sharp fellow came along one day and proposed I should buy his. "How many have you? I asked. "Oh, about three hundred bushels." "Will
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those be enough for the large family I am expecting to come out?" "Yes, I guess so." I shall never forget the time it took to dig a hole big enough to contain those potatoes, nor the laughter of my better posted friends when I told them of the transaction. And this was only one in- stance among very many where our total ignorance of our new life was taken advantage of, and not only we, but all those who came here ignor- ant of farm life, spent all they had in gaining experience. But in spite of some privations of this kind, which young people make little account of, we were delighted with the life. In the summer the broad prairies were gay with beautiful flowers, wild fruit was abundant, plums, black- berries, and strawberries, wild crab apples and grapes made. very good preserves, and there was no end to the game birds, prairie hens (pinnat- · ed grouse), pheasants (ruffled grouse), ducks of every kind, geese, brant, swans, pigeons, plover, curlews, woodcocks and snipe. Then there were ·. numbers of deer, raccoons, rabbits, badgers, skunks and prairie wolves. The river abounded with fish and it was a favorite sport with us to spear them by torchlight, or sometimes through the ice. A hole was cut in the ice and darkened by hanging a blanket over it; under that the spear man would watch while others would beat on the ice above to set the fish in motion, which were struck as they came swimming sluggishly by. We shared in these sports with the Indians who came here to hunt in winter for two or three seasons after our arrival. They came in large ' bands with their squaws, pappooses and ponies. There was one Indian, Winnebago Jim we called him, who for many years came every sumner to my place to hunt and beg. He brought his squaw and wretched little pappoose which his wife carried about wrapped in a blanket on her back, and while she made mats and baskets of rushes, Jim would paddle over to the island, hang his breeches in a tree and have a fine untrammeled time while hunting.
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