USA > Indiana > Historic Indiana : being chapters in the story of the Hoosier state from the romantic period of foreign exploration and dominion through pioneer days, stirring war times, and periods of peaceful progress, to the present time > Part 14
USA > Indiana > Historic Indiana : being chapters in the story of the Hoosier state from the romantic period of foreign exploration and dominion through pioneer days, stirring war times, and periods of peaceful progress, to the present time, centennial ed. > Part 14
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"Yet this man was the most notorious counterfeiter that ever infested the country, and he carried on his nefarious art to an extent which no other person ever attempted. His confederates were scattered over the whole Western country, receiving, through regular channels of inter- course, their regular supplies of counterfeit bank-notes,
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for which they paid him a stipulated price-sixteen dollars in cash for one hundred in counterfeit bills. His security arose partly from his caution in not allowing his subordi- nates to pass a counterfeit bill or do any other unlawful act in the State in which he lived-measures which effect- ually protected him from the civil authority."1
But he became a great nuisance from the immense quantity of spurious paper which he threw into cir- culation; and Studevant, though he escaped the arm of the law, was at last, with all his unprincipled con- federates driven from the country by the enraged people. As late as 1840, a man who had been passing counterfeit money, in payment for labor, supplies, and implements, made a narrow escape from the officers of the law. They had traced the offence to some passenger on the boat which had landed at the last town and they boarded the canal boat. Immedi- ately the guilty one recognized the officers, and before they could identify him he slipped into the hold of the boat, and secreted himself in the part where the mules were kept. As soon as it was dark, so that he could not be seen by the passengers on deck, he slipped into the water, unfastened the belt from around his waist, in which the false coin was secreted, and dropped it silently into the waves. This done, and no traces of his guilt remaining, the man swam to shore and disappeared in the shadows of the forest. The officers of the law were baffled; the guilty man reappeared later, and pursued his career of amassing wealth.
Travellers in those early days travelled overland on horseback, or later by driving. They almost always carried their funds with them, in the form of coin
1 Howe, H., The Great West.
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or currency, as there were few banks to honor checks or drafts. This fact was well known, and often promp- ted highway robbery. The well-known stage driver, Winslow, once had a large sum in coin to carry over- land. When stopping at the tavern for dinner, he took off his overshoes and slipped a sack of gold into each shoe. He carried the shoes in his hand into the dining-room, placed them under his feet at table, where he could feel the money safely resting, and no one was the wiser of his treasure. The bandits generally plied their trade in twos and threes. They would often stop at the same tavern, with the man of business, learn the direction he was going, and ride on ahead, or join him socially as he was leaving. When well out of hearing of any settlement, or in some lonely spot, the thief would be joined by a confederate, and after a struggle they would secure the booty. Sometimes mine host of the inn was in partnership with the outlaws, and many a citizen has lodged where he would not allow himself to fall asleep for fear of an attack. Travellers in those days always provided for such alarms by wearing a brace of pistols and a bowie-knife; the money was carried in a belt about the waist, or in the saddle-bags. Hardy frontiersmen were often as good shots as the freebooters, and de- clined in vigorous fashion to surrender their posses- sions, and there would be one less robber on the highway after such an encounter. Prairie bandits infested Newton and Jasper counties, within the memory of some of the citizens now living in those sections. Many of the streams in Indiana were spanned by heavy wooden bridges which were covered, both on the sides and roof, to preserve the timbers. These long tunnel-like structures are now fast dis-
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appearing before the modern iron bridges, but they were almost universal in an earlier day. They proved a refuge in time of storm, and a source of terror to many a faint heart who had heard tales of high- way robbery committed in their dark interiors.
One of these stories is so typical that it must be re- counted. A well-to-do citizen, had sold his cattle in the great market at Cincinnati, and was feeling so good over his returns for the year that he bought some "store goods" for the goodwife at home, had a round game of poker at the tavern, and started homeward. It was later than he would have had the hardihood to attempt had he not imbibed a drop too much over the friendly game. Owing to these circumstances the farmer did not reach the inn, where he was ac- customed to "put up for the night " on his regular trips. The darkness fell when he was emerging from the hills, and where the lands were so poor that no one was very prosperous. Consequently, the land- lord of the log tavern was not above suspicion. But convivial indulgence had limited the hours of day and determined the stopping-place for the night. Our traveller entered the hostelry with suspicion, which turned into foreboding after supper was over, and he surveyed the groups about the bar-room. A lame peddler asleep on his pack was the most innocent guest about the fire, and he looked like a cutthroat. The keeper of the road-house was playing a desperate game of cards with some men who turned out to be confederates of his in waylaying travellers. The man of means slept with his pistols ready and arose weary in the dawn to resume his journey. Against his wishes, two of the men who were at the card- table the night before rode out of the stables, as he
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was leaving, and hallooed him as a fellow traveller. They rode along but a few miles when they said they must turn off at the crossroads, and, much to his relief, bade him adieu. Five miles down the road, where the way narrowed into one of those long bridges, a bear ran across from a thicket, pursued by three hunters. Our traveller's horse shied at the animal, ran into the bridge, and threw his rider heavily against the timbers, just as the highwaymen thought he would. But the man was not so unconscious from the fall as they had hoped. When they were absorbed in rifling his saddle-bags, he raised on one arm, and drawing his big horse-pistol shot two of the thieves, and was wounded by the third. With this one he then entered into a life-and-death struggle. Both men were so furiously engaged that they did not hear the approach of a settler who had heard the shots, and, knowing the presence in the woods of the gang of outlaws, had crept up to the entrance of the bridge to see what was going on. Realizing the desperate straits of the traveller, he clipped off the brigand with his rifle and ended the life of the last one of the thieves that had infested the neighborhood for months. The bear was part of their plot to take travellers at a disadvantage, for he was a pet and had often been used. One of those who lay dead was the landlord of the tavern. The two others were his guests of the night before, all disguised as half- breed Indians.
Along the Wabash there were many rough-and- tumble fights among the belligerent Irish who were brought in to dig the canal. These immigrants were in no sense highwaymen, their "ructions" were gen- crally en masse, a free-for-all fight without warning,
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An Old Indiana Bridge. These picturesque old bridges are fast giving place to modern iron structures. From a photograph.
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and generally without any provocation-unless it was cheap whiskey. A misunderstanding was enough to set them all at loggerheads, and soon the whole gang would be using their shillalahs. An old citizen of the Wabash tells the following incident, which is so very characteristic of these laborers from Erin that it may be accepted as typical of scores of other occurrences. In 1834 there had been a freshet suf- ficient to float a steamboat as far up the river as Peru and Chief Godfrey's village. The steamboat was just leaving the little town of Peru for the return trip. He tells the tale in this wise :
" I made haste to get on board, and just as I was step- ping on board the plank that led on to the boat, a fight commenced between a party that came up from Logans- port and some Peruvians, which blocked up the gangway so that I could not get on the boat. The excitement ran high throughout the crowd. The Logansport party was about to prove too hard for their antagonists, who began to sing out for help. There were several hundred Irish- men near at hand, working on the Wabash and Erie canal, who, observing the foray, and considering it a free fight, could no longer resist the temptation to pitch in; and gathering their picks and spades, they rushed in platoons upon the belligerents, and soon vanquished the party that had proved strongest in the mêlée, compelling them to betake themselves to the boat, in double-quick time, shouting, 'The Greek, the Greek.' On looking up and down the line of the canal for a mile and a half in either direction, Irish recruits were seen pressing for the scene of action, with picks in their hands and wrath on their faces. 'We will sink your d-d dugout, be jabers' rung like a knell upon the ears of the astonished boat crew, who at the Captain's command pulled in the plank and pushed off into the river, to keep the enraged Hiber-
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nians from demolishing his vessel. At first the boat dropped slowly along with the current, and the Captain motioned for those who had failed to get on board to follow along the shore where he would land and take them on." 1
From the time that Indiana came into the Union a free State, there were crimes committed continually in the kidnapping of free negroes within the State, and selling them into Southern slavery. Sometimes the ignorant blacks were persuaded to go aboard river boats to work, in some instances they were carried forcibly by outlaws across the river, in all cases, when once over the line, they were taken in bands to the Cotton States and heard of no more. This lucrative iniquity, as Captain Lemcke termed it, was very profitable, and the guilty bands of desperadoes would cross from one State to another, eluding pursuit. It is said that they were regularly organized, having rendezvous and passwords, leaders, and methods of distributing the spoils of their trade in human suffering. As late as 1833, an attempt was made to steal two black boys from a field as far north as the Wea plains. After the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was passed, there were great numbers of slave-hunters raiding the border States under the authority of that obnoxious statute. It continued to be a disastrous time for negroes, who were enticed from their own masters, then claimed as runaway slaves and sold by their persecutors into slavery; some negroes were resold three and four times at a thousand dollars apiece. Fortunately the abolition of slavery ended these crimes.
1 Cox, Sanford C., Recollections of the Wabash Valley, page 145. La Fayette, 1861.
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Immigration was so continuous and the population increased so rapidly that Indiana very early passed from the condition of a border State, and excepting the outrages by isolated bands of white-cappers in the hill counties, the crimes peculiar to a frontier country ceased.
CHAPTER XI
1
THE TRAIL-FROM BIRCH-BARK CANOE TO ELECTRIC TROLLEY
T HE pirogue of the French coureurs des bois gliding athwart the Indians' birch-bark canoe, on the gently flowing Ouabache, is the earliest picture of the first modes of travel in Indiana. It was only on foot or by boat that there was any way of penetrating the wilderness, for many decades following its exploration. The American aborigines had no horses at the time of the discovery, and when they first saw the Spanish soldier on horseback, the natives thought horse and rider were one, and im- agined they were gods. When the Indian learned the usefulness of the horse in covering distances with- out the fatigue of long marches, it became his most valued possession, and appealed to his cupidity to secure by any means in his power, be it theft or mur- der. The deftness and skill shown by the Indians in fashioning their birch-bark canoes and dugouts indicated the experience of ages of savage ancestry. Into the Indiana region, birch canoes must be brought from the north and east, but the natives there made canoes of hickory or elm bark turned inside out; and their dugouts were fashioned from the trunks of large
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trees, hollowed out by burning and scraping, and the ends pointed with their stone axes. These pirogues were long and strong, and as claimed by a traveller, "required us and everything in them to be exactly in the bottom and then to look straight forward and speak from the middle of our mouth, or they were other side up in an instant." The rivers could tell many tales of adventure, of battle, and of romance, but they are all silent about the long procession of French fur- traders, Spanish merchants, British soldiers, and American settlers, whose primitive barques have glided down the Indiana waters into oblivion. There are many old settlers still living, who recount lively tales of the commerce by boat when the homes were being pre-empted along the streams. When the American colonists opened up the forests for farming, they brought beasts of burden to their aid. There was only a "blazed traice " through the trees for many years, and the universal means of transportation across the country to the river landing was by horse- back. The Indian understood so thoroughly the topography of the country, that the white man could rarely improve on the routes which his stealthy foot- steps had traced through the forests for ages. Along those narrow defiles, on horseback, until the boat was reached, the commerce of the West was carried for more than a century and a half. The early Amer- ican settlers in Indiana followed the same natural outlets to the sea that the French had before them. They brought rowboats with them, and the shaping of canoes was learned from the Indians; but the settlers soon astonished the savages by a new craft. These were the flatboats, which were shaped like scows, sometimes having a shed over the centre of
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the craft. Of these useful boats, so well adapted to the shallow streams, it was quaintly said that they drew about as much water as a sap trough. There was a long steering oar at the stern of the boat, and a sufficient number of side oars to propel it, with the help of a pole, which was handled by a man who stood in the stern, to push over sand-bars and ob- structions. Wags used to say that these boats, in going down-stream, managed to keep up with the current. Coming up-stream, the boats were cordelled, as the French boatmen had named the process of towing by hand. There was scarcely a man of large undertakings but shipped his fleet of flatboats, rafts, and scows down the Mississippi to market. There he sold his produce, bartered for supplies for his neighborhood, and came back by rowboat, or mayhap walked the entire distance home, as did Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Henry T. Sample, a veteran pork packer, told the writer that he had walked from New Orleans to the Wabash country sixteen times.
Before a merchant left on one of these tours, weeks and months were consumed in bartering for his cargo of grain, pelts, venison, bear's grease, lard, flour, and pork; also in gathering the great rafts of logs, to be taken down and sold for their lumber. Pork-pack- ing for export to the seaboard was, during the win- ter season, the most lucrative industry of river towns, and it laid the foundation of many early for- tunes. Three hundred barrels of pork was the usual load for the average flatboat, and that product was one tenth of the export trade, and another tenth was lard. Corn was the great crop of Indiana, then as now, and from five to ten thousand bushels of corn could be carried on one of these boats. Cattle, horses,
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oats, venison hams, hickory nuts, and walnuts made up the balance of the annual $1,000,000 trade by flatboat.
Many boats were collected to make up these fleets. It took nearly a month to pole this type of craft to New Orleans, and the merchant capitalist generally accompanied his cargo and crew. The flatboats were generally sold or abandoned at the end of the journey. A return cargo of sugar, tobacco, rice, furniture, and dry goods was brought up the river on the return trip, in rowboats, or keel boats poled and pulled by oars or sweeps, at a snail-like pace. These boats made a long hard journey up-stream, and the labor was excessive. By avoiding the swift current and keeping close to the shore, and employing oars, poles, and a cordelle or tow line, a distance of six miles was all that could be made in a day! "I shall long remember," writes Captain Lemcke, "the low-lying islands, tedious bends, long reaches, treacherous cut- offs, and bristling snags; the confusing fogs, and the sombre density of the unbroken forests." 1
The first line of "Packet Boats " on the Ohio River, in which Indiana people were carried to their new homes, was advertised in 1793. These were flatboats for hire, to accommodate passengers. They were to leave Cincinnati every Saturday for Pittsburgh, and one month was the required time for a round trip! In the advertisement of the new line of transports, we have a picture of the border life. The management stated that no danger could be apprehended from the enemy, as every person on board would be under cover, made proof against rifle or musket balls, and
1 Lemcke, J. A., Reminiscences of an Indianian, page 142. Indian- apolis, 1905.
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that there were portholes for firing out! They were also amply supplied with ammunition and strongly manned with choice hands to fight the Indians! A separate cabin was to be portioned off for the accom- modation of the ladies. This enterprising line of up- to-date boats did not always go on schedule time, as there is a record extant that the packet which was to leave November 30th did not get away until De- cember Ioth, and the passengers had to await its departure !
From twelve to fifteen hundred flatboats a year went from the White River, and the Wabash country, to New Orleans. The Emigrants' Guide, published in 1832, said that at least one thousand flatboats entered the Ohio from the Wabash in one month in the previous spring. When a fleet would be ready, all the village would assemble on the bank of the river to see it de- part on its long journey, and be there again to welcome the weary boatmen upon their return.
We can imagine the lively interest taken in the contents of the return load, with its barrels of syrup, sacks of coffee, quaint Chinese boxes of tea, its sugar loaves, and all its suggestions of the outside world, so remote from their wilderness home. China and silks from France, mahogany and silver from England, found their way, as time went on, into the river hamlets of this far West.
During these days, the travel across country being on horseback, the invariable outfit of the traveller was a pair of saddle-bags which could be thrown across the horse, to carry the rider's wardrobe and papers. His limbs were always wrapped in leggins of heavy green baize cloth, now no longer sold; these were to protect his clothing from the mud. If it
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were wintry weather he wore a buffalo overcoat and coonskin cap. The early preachers and lawyers, whose calling made it necessary for them to "ride the circuit," came to know the best trail through the woods, just how their horses would ford the streams, and where the most hospitable cabins were located, from whose occupants they could ask a night's lodging.
A new epoch dawned in transportation for the inhabitants along the Ohio River when they hailed, with eager curiosity and delight, the first steamboat, which was run from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, in the year 1811. It was built by a relative of the President, Nicholas J. Roosevelt, and made the trip in the wonderful time of fourteen days. For several years there were other small steamboats ply- ing on the river, but flatboats and barges continued to be the principal means of transportation, as the small rivers were always too shallow to make it prof- itable to use steam for propelling their craft. Mr. Dunn says that no steamboat ascended the Wabash until the summer of 1823. When it came the villagers gathered on the river banks to welcome the new- fashioned transport,-the wonderful new craft which could go up-stream as well as down! How was the flatboat to stand against such a competitor? Now prosperity would bless the frontier!
Mr. Condit tells us in a graphic way the effect upon the savages:
"The barge or keel-boat, and the skiffs, though they had surprised the Indians, yet they neither alarmed nor offended them, but upon the first appearance of the steam- boat, breathing out its white steam, black smoke, and belching forth its red fiery sparks, the poor affrighted
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Indian fled as from a huge unearthly monster. Even after explanations and assurances were given, and he had become somewhat acquainted with its working, he was still superstitious and fearful, and persisted in believing that this ugly, threatening creature was an offence to the gentle river." 1
To the white man, it was a wonderfully advanced method of reaching the outside world, and brought a great increase in population and prosperity; and soon regular packet boats had their appointed days of arrival and departure. When Nathaniel Bolton's mother came west in 1820, she refused to travel on the steamboat, thinking it a dangerous-looking craft, and her husband secured transportation on a timber boat. Upon this, her daughter records, the family floated down the river quite comfortably. The rude craft had fireplaces at each end, in front of which they did their cooking. In a few years it came to be a regular event for a fleet of steamers to be seen wending its way up the Wabash, laden with passengers and merchandise. When the boats from New Orleans would pull up at the wharf at La Fayette-which was the head of navigation for the larger steamers- the whole landing was the scene of liveliest interest. Barrels of sugar, coffee, molasses, and tobacco would be unloaded, and rolled up along the side of Main Street, for blocks away. The odor of teas and savory spices pervaded the air. Mysterious bales and boxes, suggestive of new fashions and fabrics, lined the ap- proaches to the wharf. The names of some of these old steamers are still remembered; as, the Paul Pry,
1 Condit, Blackford, D. D., History of Early Terre Haute, page 26. New York, 1900.
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the Daniel Boone, the William Tell, the Facility, and many whose names suggested the frontier, and whose whistles could be recognized a mile away by all of the small boys along the shore. The youth of the river towns aspired to the career of being steamboat captains. As Captain Lemcke recalls, from an early day, it was the ardent wish and nightly dream of every barefooted boy on the banks of the rivers to be or become the commander of one of these fiery dragons with glittering interior.
In the towns located on the rivers were great ware- houses, generally owned by the leading capitalist of the town. They were built as places of storage for every kind of river merchandise, and costly freight and furniture that had voyaged, said William Tark- ington, from New England down the long coast, across the Mexican Gulf, through the flat delta. They had made the winding journey up the great river a thousand miles; and almost a thousand miles more up the great and lesser tributaries. There was in this cargo cloth brought from Connecticut; and Ten- nessee cotton, on its way to Massachusetts and Rhode Island spindles. These imports lay there beside huge mounds of raw wool, from near-by flocks, ready for the local mills. Dates and nuts from the Caribbean Sea, lemons from the tropics, cigars from the Antilles, tobacco from Virginia and Kentucky were on the wharf; and most precious of all, the farmers' wheat from the home fields. This was the commerce of the Indiana rivers, as carried on in the packets and steamboats, before the days of railroads. The first steamboats were little, ill-smelling, craft, with a single dining-cabin, around which was a row of berths, hidden by faded curtains. Early in the forties,
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however, there were announced the splendid three- decked monarchs of the rivers, surpassing in luxury any sea-going vessel. The most picturesque life was then on the river. Taking trips by boat was a novelty. Society often went afloat, and the proven- der was fine. There was always music on the big boats, and an almost permanent feature was the singing of the crew as the steamer landed or resumed her course in the channel. One of the favorite songs of the deck hands was:
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