USA > Indiana > Lake County > A standard history of Lake County, Indiana, and the Calumet region, Volume I > Part 4
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THE MAGIC HAND OF MAN
When Mr. Ball wrote, the Calumet region had not been smirched by any big industry except the slaughter house at Hammond; ice was being cut in immense quantities, but that industry left the waters of its rivers and little lakes clear and pure. A few years afterward, the Standard Oil Company commenced to build its gigantic plant at Whit- ing, and within a decade the whole face of the region was changed, while the past fifteen years have made the Calumet region an industrial checker-board, its hundreds of factories connected by natural and arti- ficial waterways and a network of ironways, every atom of air vibrating with industrial thunders, the waters varicolored with refuse and the sky shaded with a thousand lines and clouds of smoke. Not only great manufactories have sprung from the marshes, but whole cities, and their appearance is forever removed from that of "the sea marshes of Louisiana."
Of late years especially, the transformation has been so rapid that it requires a strong mental effort, even on the part of those who resided
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in Lake County when the Calumet region was hardly touched by the honest, stirring, but dirty fingers of industry, to picture the lonely sand ridges and marshes between Lake Michigan and the Little Calumet. There grew the white pine and red cedar, and several species of oak ; also great patches of huckleberries, cranberries and wintergreen berries. From Tolleston alone, 21/2 miles from Lake Michigan and about the same distance from the Little Calumet, 1,000 bushels of huckleberries have been shipped in a single season. Thirty years ago, the opti- mists of the region even anticipated that these dreary, tangled marshes and sand ridges might be made to produce cranberries in com- mereial quantities. Sassafras was also native to the region, and hun- dreds of old-fashioned housewives were hopeful that something might yet come out of the Calumet region.
The Calumet region was formerly a favorite haunt for dueks-mal- lard, blue wing teal and all the rest-while the northern diver or loon, and rice and reed birds helped to make the marshes lively and endurable.
When the first whites commeneed to settle in and near the Calumet region, the Pottawatomies were unwillingly about to leave it for the West beyond the Mississippi. Not only that tribe, but the Miamis and others. had fished, trapped and hunted in its marshes, streams and lakes. The region was rich in waterfowl, and simply prodigal of muskrats and mink. White trappers succeeded the Indians and until thirty years ago the waterways of the Calumet district shared the honors of the Kankakee region as among the most valuable fur-bearing sections of the Middle West. The greatest trapping grounds were along the Grand and the Little Calumet, near the present City of Gary, espe- cially south of Tolleston. It was estimated by those who had expe- rience as trappers that as late as the fall of 1883 there were forty thou- sand rats on the lands claimed by the Tolleston Club Company and that for some years previously the season's "take" had averaged some thirty thousand.
Huekleberry and eranberry, duck and rice bird. muskrat and mink. have long ago been displaced by man and his artifiees, although there are still thousands of acres of land unoccupied; and we no longer wait upon Nature for the bestowal of pleasure or prosperity in the Calumet region.
THE WOODLANDS OF LAKE COUNTY
South of the Little Calumet, in Lake County, commence what have been called the clay lands, or woodlands, comprising those beautiful openings in groves or forests of oak and hickory. In early times this
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region extended well toward the fringe of the Kankakee marshes in the southern portion of the county. In the edge of these woodlands or openings would often be found a dense growth of hazel bushes, and in other localities, crabapples, plum trees, slippery elm, ash, sassafras, huckleberries, wild currants, gooseberries, blackberries, strawberries, hawthorn, white-thorn, ironwood, poplar, black walnut and rock-maple.
This woodland region extended originally south to Turkey Creek, a western branch of Deep River which drains the north-central portion of the county, and along the eastern edge of the county to Eagle Creek prairie. Toward the west it covered portions of Eastern and Southern St. Johns Township and much of Hanover, while toward the south the woods embraced the central tier of sections in Cedar Creek Township and the northern portions of West Creek Township to a point below Lowell.
THE GROVES
Besides these strips or belts of continuous woodland, there were the four large groves-School, southeast of Crown Point and east of the fair grounds; Southeast, about a mile southwest of LeRoy and west of Eagle Creek; Plum, on the western edge of Eagle Creek Township, some three and a half miles southwest of Southeast Grove; and Orchard, just west of Plum Grove, along the northern fringe of the Kankakee region.
In all this region of woodlands and groves, the clay-soil is quite near the surface. These tracts were, above all, the prolific mother of wild flowers, and in the spring the ground was almost literally covered with such bright blossoms as anemones, spring beauties, buttercups and blue violets.
Meadowlarks, bluejays, wrens, thrushes, sparrows, swallows, hum- ming-birds and woodpeckers, robins, crows, grouse, prairie chickens, wild turkeys, and even eagles, were at home in these central and southern regions of Lake County, and the toads, and frogs, and snakes, too numerous in the marshes of the Calumet and Kankakee regions, were fortunately not adapted to live comfortably in the dryer woodlands and groves.
There are a number of pine groves in Lake County, although by no stretch of the imagination could it be called a pine tree state. The largest and probably the only native pine grove in the county covers ten acres about two miles south of Turkey Creek, in the northwest quarter of section 14, township 35, range 8. Originally the ground was almost a swamp. The grove is several miles distant from any other
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native pines that have not been transplanted, and to account for this compaet body of trees has been a puzzle to botanists, experts in forestry and old settlers.
A number of smaller pine groves are found in the prairie region north of the Kankakee, the trees of which were taken when small from their native sand hills bordering Lake Michigan. North of the center of St. John's Township is a grove of native pines, transplanted to the sand ridge which they now cover, and about five miles south of Crown Point is a tract of several aeres covered with Austrian and Scotch pines. The latter is the largest and finest grove of European pines in Lake County.
THE PRAIRIES AND THEIR PRODUCTS
The prairie tracts of Lake County are in its south-central sections, chiefly between the headwaters of Deep River and those of Eagle, Cedar and West creeks, the former a branch of the Little Calumet, and the latter tributaries of the Kankakee. The soil of these districts is deeper and more productive than the clayey soil of the woodlands, being often of a black mold. From it sprung the true prairie grass, the rosin weed, or polar plant, and the burdock, or dock. In the early times the settlers of the prairies well remembered the fieree fires which swept in from the Grand Prairie of Illinois, feeding, as they did, upon the resin of the polar plant. It grew from five to seven feet high in Central Lake County, and when first attacked by the oncoming flames threw up high columns of dense smoke. The resin plant also served the same purpose as the spruce tree of New England; the pioneer children of the prairies gathered from it a gum which could not be exeelled for purity and, in midsummer, the supply was unlimited. The burdock, or prairie dock, exuded resin, but not so abundantly ; nor was the produet so palatable. Both of these typical plants of the prairie regions of Lake County have almost disappeared.
FLOWERS OF BRIGHT AND VARIED HUE
Again we turn to Mr. Ball for pietures of the prairie lands in a state of nature: "And then, in June, July and August, and until the frosts came, the other plants of the prairies of some forty or fifty specimens at least were in bloom, adding their own beauty to the green and luxuriant verdure. Among these flowering plants, abundant and beautiful, grew in immense beds the phlox, probably of two or three specimens ; also a tall plant with a red flower, onee called from the tuber
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from which it grew, potato plant. There was also the beautiful meadow lily; and there were others, bright and beautiful, the colors very rich, peculiar to the moist or lowland of the prairie, found in the edges of the marshes.
"On Tuesday, October 14th of this year (1884), on a little portion of Lake Prairie Cemetery, where is still the original prairie sod, the writer of this picked specimens of twenty-five different species of the original prairie plants; and there were among them none of those very bright, richly colored blossoms of the lower prairie growth. One close observer of nature, who is accustomed to the wild haunts here, says that the number of prairie plants is two or three hundred. One characteristic of many of these larger plants is a peculiar roughness; and several of the plants are resinous.
GRASSES OF THE COUNTY
"The true upland prairie grass has thus far been recognized. The grass growth of the whole county may here be noticed. Probably from fifty to a hundred species were native here. Some varieties made poor, but many kinds made excellent hay. Some varieties grew about one foot high, some were two and three, some five and six feet in height. Some of the woodland grass was only a few inches in height. Some species had a small, almost wiry blade; some a broad blade: some varieties had a reedlike stem with blades like the blades of maize. The stem of one variety was three-sided. Wild pea vines growing with some of the grass aided in making excellent winter provender. With some also grew wild parsnip. Wild onions and wild parsnip were in some parts abundant."
LAKE PRAIRIE, GEM OF THE COUNTY
Lake prairie was the most famous tract of that nature in Lake County. Westward and southward for miles from the Lake of the Red Cedars, it stretched-first a level floor of emerald green, rolling off in gentle billows into the horizon. Lake prairie has been called the gem of the county, and certainly those who were so fortunate as to become residents on its fertile soil rested there contentedly and admiringly. It takes its name from the beautiful, romantie and historic lake in the southwest-central part of the county, which it partially cloaks.
THE WATERSHED
The ridge or highland which marks the watershed dividing the head streams of the Calumet from those of the Kankakee region enters Lake
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LAKE COUNTY AND THE CALUMET REGION
County in section 36, township 35, range 10, near the headwaters of West Creek. It then bears southeastwardly to a high ridge a quarter of a mile north of Red Cedar Lake. The divide then passes along a low curving ridge which is its most sharply defined section in the county, and thence three miles eatsward over a timbered tableland to a point about two miles south of Crown Point. Thence it crosses sections 17 and 16, through School Grove, and southeastwardly along the east side of old Stoney Creek of the Kankakee system, and in section 31, at what is now the site of LeRoy, the divide reaches its extreme southern point in Indiana, eighteen miles from Lake Michigan. Thence it turns north- ward, around the head of the south branch of Deep River, of the Calu- met system, and passing between that and Eagle Creek it bears in a generally northeastward direction, leaving Lake County east of Crown Point, only about a mile and a half south of its point of entrance.
THE KANKAKEE REGION
The 60,000 acres of lowlands in the southern part of the county, stretching completely across it from three to six miles north of the Kankakee River, embrace the richest of the bottom lands; but as they were generally under water in the early times it is only within a com- paratively recent period that their productiveness has been utilized. But within the Kankakee region was long harbored a wealth of vegetable and animal life which made that section of Lake County quite famous in the eyes of travelers, naturalists and sportsmen. For years it was the paradise of the white and the yellow lily and the cattail, as well as the blackbird, the bobolink and the muskrat. The cranberry was also a native of the marshes. The swamps also had quite a timber growth of ash, elm, sycamore, birch, willow, maple and cottonwood, while on the islands, which are generally sandy, were clusters of oak, hickory, sycamore, beech, walnut and maple. Most of the wooded tracts in the Kankakee marsh are in the southeastern corner of the county, as many as six sections in that region being originally covered with timber, mostly with ash and elm, with some sycamore and gum trees.
THE PASSING OF THE WATER FOWL
The most interesting feature of the Kankakee region, which is by no means a dead letter, is the abundant life of the water fowl. In the '30s and '40s professional trappers and hunters made a regular and profitable business of gathering in the muskrats and ducks and geese by the thousands, some making their homes on the islands and others
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on the banks of the river. Among the best known of these characters was a man named Seymour, whose headquarters were for many years just south of Hebron, a short distance over the Lake County line in Porter. He lived to see the commencement of the twentieth century, and retained his faculties to the last. He thought the white cranes and swan made nests in the marsh region in the early '30s, but was not certain. In regard to the sand cranes, the wild geese, the ducks, the heron and the smaller water fowl, he had no doubt as to their nests.
Many years ago the wild geese made their nests on sections 4, 5 and 18, at the eastern extremity of the county, and the swimming and feed- ing grounds for young and old were given the names of Goose Pond and Hog Marsh. In that locality, as elsewhere in the Kankakee region, the wild geese congregated in large numbers as late as the '80s. In the northeastern edge of the marsh was Plum Grove, and just south was a pretty knoll which seemed to be a favorite observation point for the great migratory flocks. They came in unusual numbers in 1882, and one of the old hunters of the region says: "From four o'clock in the morning until about nine o'clock, different flocks would arrive at this grass knoll until some five acres would be literally covered with these beautiful water fowls, apparently as thickly crowded as they could stand."
The wild geese, brants, ducks, sand-hill cranes, and the other timid fowl of the Kankakee region, have generally deserted that section of the county as breeding grounds and permanent homes. Locomotives and sportsmen's clubs are mainly responsible for their exodus; but the marshes still harbor many nesting places of the blue heron, the bittern, the mud-hen, the snipe and the plover.
THE COMING OF THE SPORTSMEN
Some of the steps leading to the changed conditions in the Kankakee marshes are thus described by Mr. Ball in "Northwestern Indiana": "Several years ago, before the days of steam dredges on the Kankakee Marsh, as that region had been a great trapping and hunting and camp- ing ground for Indians, so it became an attractive region for white sportsmen. Not hunters were they, nor yet trappers, but simply sports- men, killing wild animals for the sake of killing. . Sportsmen's homes were built at different places on the north side of the river, and persons came from various cities to enjoy wild life, to shoot wild game. On section 16, township 32, range 9, there was a beautiful grove. In those years, quite far back, it was an island-marsh, with water all around it. The surface among the trees was quite level and largely covered with
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beautiful moss. Being on section 16, it was called School Grove Island. In these later years it is called Oak Grove. It is still a grove, but not an island.
"Its first inhabitant when it was an island was John Hunter, a true frontier hunter and trapper, living for years that secluded trapper life along the Kankakee, camping on different islands. He at length made this island his home.
"Heath & Milligan, of Chicago, bought some land on the island, and with eight other men built, in the fall of 1869, a house for a sports- men's resort. It was called Camp Milligan. From Chicago and other cities men would come with their guns, spend a few days, register in a book kept for the purpose their success, pay their bills and depart. A regulation of this camp was that no game should be sold. It was not designed for hunters.
"Some records are these: 'Eight men in a few days shot 65 snipes and 513 ducks; four men, days not given, shot 50 snipes and 515 ducks. ' 'September 11th, Sunday; no shooting.
" 'Shooting from September 1st to 17th, except Sunday.'
"Certainly those sportsmen of thirty years ago left a good example for the sportsmen of today, an example which is not very closely fol- lowed. G. M. Shaver (caretaker of the camp) shot in one year 1,100 ducks and water fowl. He, no doubt, could sell.
"In 1871 some Englishmen visited Camp Milligan. One was William Parker, understood to be a member of the English nobility, accom- panied by an older man, Captain Blake.
"In 1872 they returned with a still younger Parker, bought land, laid out quite an amount of money, established Cumberland Lodge, besides a dwelling house and barns, built kennels and brought from England some sixteen very choice hunting dogs of different varieties and other choice blooded English dogs, also some Alderney cows and some horses, obtaining also a black bear and some foxes, and seemed to be laying a foundation for an English country seat.
"The Parker brothers made a very favorable impression, but for reasons not made public disposed of their costly establishment, and probably returned to England. Their place (the name Cumberland Lodge being retained) went into the hands of some business men of Chicago, some of them very gentlemanly, who kept it up for many years as a sportsmen's clubhouse."
DRAINAGE AND DITCHES
Although the drainage of the Kankakee region was commenced as early as 1854, under the State Act of 1852 providing for the draining
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of swamp lands, little progress was made until thirty years afterward, when the steam dredges got to work. Even now there are probably not to exceed a hundred miles of ditches, the construction of which was paid for by a general assessment on the benefited lands. The main courses are known as the Singleton Ditch (named from W. F. Single- ton, formerly agent of the Lake County Agricultural Society), the Ackerman, the Griesel and the Brown ditches. As a result of this drainage considerable areas of rich lands have been brought into use and successfully cultivated to both vegetables and grain. But, taken as a whole, the Kankakee region is the nearest to nature of any portion of Lake County.
DENUDED OF TIMBER
The Kankakee Valley has a main elevation of 90 feet above Lake Michigan and 160 above the level of the Wabash River. Some portions of the lands which lie therein are so raised above the general surface of the bottom lands that they were often entirely surrounded by water and were called islands. Notwithstanding the artificial drainage, this still holds good to a considerable extent. The most prominent of these old-time islands in Lake County were Beach Ridge, Red Oak, Warner, Fuller, Brownell, Lalley, Curve, Skunk, Long White Oak, Round White Oak, South, and Wheeler. Originally they were covered with a heavy growth of timber, but the farmers living on the prairies north of the marshlands stripped them for building purposes, feneing and fuel, and the natural growth has never been replaced. As late as the '80s hauling timber from these islands and from the ash swamp further east was the farmer's winter harvest in the Kankakee region. It was called "swamp- ing," but is a thing of the past; and most of the old-time "islands" are now cultivated and productive farms.
CHAPTER II
RELATED GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
AN HISTORIC SHORT-CUT-INDIAN TRAILS THROUGH THE COUNTY-LA SALLE AND HIS BRAVES-HISTORY AND CONJECTURE-THE POTTA- WATOMIES IN A MAJORITY-SHAUBENEE, THE GREAT-ROBINSON, THE TRADER CHIEF-PEACEFUL INDIAN LIFE OF THE CALUMET-MC- GWINN'S INDIAN VILLAGE-BURIAL AND DANCING GROUNDS-HOW THEY LIVED, DRESSED AND MOVED-LOST INTEREST IN ECONOMY- PIONEER STORES IN THE KANKAKEE REGION-REMAINS OF FIRST SET- TLERS AND TRAVELERS-YIELDING SKELETONS AND HISTORY-WAS THIS A MESSAGE FROM LA SALLE ?- RELICS AND COLLECTIONS-THE CHESHIRE AND YOUCHE ANTIQUITIES.
What is now Lake County was along the primitive highways of travel, which were rudely traced before the coming of the white man, between the populous Indian regions of the Northeast and the North and that grand western outlet toward the Mississippi, the Valley of the Illinois. To use a homely illustration, when you "cut across lots" you instinctively select the path of the easiest grades-the line of the least resistance. So it has always been with the migratory routes across the United States, or any other country, whether selected by Indians or whites, afoot, horseback or in wagons; whether by canal builders or railroad engineers. It is the old story of a study in the saving of labor, which is at the basis of progress and civilization.
AN HISTORIC "SHORT-CUT"
What is now Northwestern Indiana-and to a noteworthy degree Lake County-was a very important section in the Great Short-Cut from the lands of the Chippewas and the Iroquois, from the territories of the Sacs and Miamis and Pottawatomies, to the prairies of the Illini and the Sioux.
As Lakes Erie and Michigan obtruded themselves southward from the Great Chain and the most populous and fertile districts of the East were in a latitude not far from their southern extremities, while the teeming prairies of the West lay in substantially the same zone, it was
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inevitable that the continuous migrations induced by wars and racial pressures should be along the comparatively easy grades. By water and by land, generation after generation, these migrations poured along from East to West, and no strip of soil has been more ceaselessly worn by foot of man and beast than that which lies between the foot of Lake Michigan and the banks of the Kankakee.
INDIAN TRAILS THROUGH THE COUNTY
The most famous Indian route wthin the present limits of Lake County was known as the Sac Trail, and crossed Northwestern Indiana (LaPorte, Porter and Lake counties) in a generally southwesterly direc- tion to Joliet, which marked the western limits of the Sac country. From the main Sac trail a branch struck southward near the Lake of the Red Cedars and across Lake Prairie to the rapids of the Kankakee, at the present site of Momence, Illinois. Another trail came in from the east and hugged the shores of Lake Michigan, leading to Fort Dear- born, afterward Chicago. The last-named was much used by the Potta- watomies. Indians, traders, travelers, scouting parties, military expe- ditions and frontiersmen passed along these trails before the wagons of the pioneers widened them out with their wheel tracks.
LA SALLE AND HIS BRAVES
It is an unprofitable matter of conjecture as to how early the dusky children of the Upper Lakes region commenced to make tracks across the country bordering Lake Michigan on their way toward the Mis- sissippi Valley, or when the Iroquois and other eastern tribes begun to push in along their own trails.
But it is quite certain that the intrepid and executive La Salle, with his companions and followers, was the first white man to test these Indian trails, which even in his time (1680) were old. The waters and the marshes of the Kankakee, alive with water fowl, muskrats and mink, must have been a welcome sight to the chevalier, who had as sharp an eye for the fur-trade as for exploration and discovery. We also remem- ber how he united the tribes of the Ohio and Illinois valleys against the invading Iroquois, and it must have been largely along these trails, not far from the southern shores of Lake Michigan, that the Miamis, Pottawatomies and other tribes of the Middle West migrated, to after- ward gather in the Valley of the Illinois under La Salle's leadership and make such an effective stand against their fierce enemies of the East.
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LASALLE IN THE LAKE REGION
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HISTORY AND CONJECTURE
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