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 7
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 7
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His sermon lasted thirty minutes. Down he stepped, mounted his pony, and in a few moments was moving through the woods at a rapid gait, to meet another appointment. Restitution before claiming a clear
1 Smith, O. H., Early Trials, page 96. Cincinnati., 1858.
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conscience would still be a good doctrine to hold forth. As an example of how primitive the conditions, and unconventional the speakers might be, it is told of one of these circuit riders that he interrupted his discourse, at an outdoor service, by exclaiming, as he gazed upward into a tree, "I want to say right here, that yon- der is one of the best forks for a pack-saddle I ever saw in the woods, and when the services are over, we will get it."
Besides the preachers, there were colporteurs, now long obsolete and forgotten, who went about distribut- ing Bibles and tracts from the publication societies. They were far more welcome to those isolated inhabi- tants than we can imagine, in these sophisticated days.
Next to the ministers, the most accepted nomadic characters were the tinkers, who travelled through wide regions, repairing the clocks. In later times the spinster tailors, and the local cobblers, who came semi- annually, to mend and make clothes and shoes for the entire family, were a regular institution. If one could not get to the shop the shop must come to the customer. These welcome tradesmen had their rounds, and their coming was counted on; not only for the very necessary services they rendered, but for the gossip they brought, from far-off neighborhoods.
A frontier personage who has passed into oblivion with the water-diviner, is the bee-hunter. Sweets were a great rarity. Maple sugar and wild honey were the con- fections of the wilderness. The wild bees made their honey in the hollows of the trees and the bee-man was a wonderfully acute naturalist, who, by long observation of the habits of the bees, could tell in which tree the honey could be found. On his decision, great trees were felled,
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even on a stranger's land, to secure the coveted honey. One long, lank bee-hunter, who looked like a ferret, declared that "on a clear day I can see a bee a mile." In those times peddlers, with packs on their backs, journeyed through the country with "notions and small ware" for exchange or sale.
The frontiersman's most valued possession was a dog; this animal was not only a prized friend and hunt- ing companion, but was invaluable to give warning of approaching Indians.
In these troublesome times, the militia were always being called out for actual warfare against the savages, and there was regular "muster day" and an attempt at regular drill. Muster day was the great gala occasion of the border. People gathered from far and near to visit together. Oliver Smith gives us a hint of the crude equipment with which the men appeared for duty, by the commands given on the parade ground which he rehearses: "Officers to your places. Marshal your men into companies, separating the barefooted from those who have shoes or moccasins; placing the guns, sticks, and cornstalks in separate platoons. Form the line ready to receive the Major."1 They were not a very gallant looking troop perhaps, but they were brave, and wise in the cunning of the savage forms of warfare.
The schooling of this pioneer period in Indiana was of the crudest form. The schoolhouses were like the homes, log cabins with puncheon floors and great open fireplaces into which the big boys must roll in logs for the fire. Those who sat near roasted, and the pupils farther away froze their toes. The seats were logs or benches, without either backs or desks. The 1 Smith, O. H., Early Trials, page 167. Cincinnati, 1858.
-
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theory of instruction was "no lickin' " no larnin'." There was a long writing-bench placed against the wall. It was made of a riven board or a puncheon, smoothed off and supported by great wooden pegs. At this the pupils took turns in copy-book work, writing with a pen made from a goose-quill, and using pokeberry juice for ink. A spelling match on Friday afternoon was an inalienable right of every district school,-an older custom even than speaking pieces, that universal practice which occasioned so much tremor and glory among the pupils. Boys and girls often attended school in the fall long after the hard frosts came, and even after the ice had begun to form, with their feet en- cased in old socks or stockings. Sanford Cox, in his Wabash Valley, draws a graphic picture of juveniles skating upon the ice, some with skates, some with shoes, and some barefooted. The author of the History of Monroe County says that it was then the custom to go to school, winter and summer, bare- footed. That seems unreasonable, but it was done. The barefooted child, to begin with, had gone thus so long that his feet were hardened and calloused to resist the cold by several extra layers of epidermis. He would take a small piece of board, say a foot wide and two feet long, which had been seasoned and partially scorched by the fire, and after heating it until it was on the point of burning, he would start on the run toward the schoolhouse, with the hot board in his hand, and when his feet became too cold to bear any longer, he would place the board upon the ground and stand upon it until the numbness and cold had been partly overcome, when he would again take his " stove." in his hand and make another dash for the schoolhouse. Sometimes a flat, light piece of rock was substituted
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for the board and was much better, as it retained heat longer. Often boys would rouse up a cow and stand in the place she had warmed, to prevent their feet from freezing. To save their shoes, it was very general for people to walk barefooted along the dusty roads, until they approached the "meeting house," and then sit down by the roadside and put on their stockings and shoes.
New homes were sometimes started with very little capital in hand. Many stories are told of these primi- tive weddings. It is recorded that one morning, a certain Esquire Jones saw a young man ride up with a young lady behind him. They dismounted; he hitched his horse and they went toward the house and were invited to be seated. After waiting a few minutes the young man asked if he was a 'squire. He informed him that he was. He then asked the " 'squire " what he charged for tying the knot. "You mean for marry- ing you?"-"Yes, sir." "One dollar," says the 'squire- "Will you take it in trade ? "-" What kind of trade?" "Beeswax."-"Bring it in." The young man went to where the horse was tied and brought in the beeswax, but it lacked forty cents of being enough to pay the bill. After sitting pensive for some minutes, the young man went to the door and said: "Well, Sal, let 's be going." Sal followed slowly to the door, when, turning to the justice, with an entreating look, she said: "Well, 'Squire, can't you tie the knot as far as the beeswax goes anyhow," and so he did, and they were married.
One of the customs in the very first settlement of the territory was that those arrested for crimes and misde- meanors were chained to a tree or pinioned under some logs until trial could be held, if not more summarily
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disposed of by the Regulators! Afterwards there were jails built of logs, as also were the court- houses, and the prisoner worked out his sentence by grubbing stumps to clear the streets of the town.
Sickness was one of the ever-present dreads of the frontier. The very fertility of the soil in Indiana made it miasmatic. Ponds and streams bred mosqui- toes to spread malaria to the-all unknowing-settlers. Exposure in all kinds of weather, and the opening up of the forests, the turning up of the new earth, all contributed to slow fevers, and the shaking ague then so universal. Many years in the autumn season there were more people sick than were well. Sometimes there were scarcely enough in health to care for those who were ill. Quinine bark, calomel, and boneset were the principal articles of commerce at those times.
One of the worst ills with which those people had to contend was what was known as milk sickness. Even scientific men, with all their investigation, have not been able to discover what plant caused this pesti- lence. They only know that with increased cultivation of the fields it disappeared, but in the early part of the Western settlement whole families were prostrated in a week, from using the milk of one cow. Sometimes they would drag around like living skeletons, and finally succumb. It destroyed the value of the lands, as people moved from neighborhoods where it was known cows had got access to it. Sometimes the settlers would move away, on the theory that it was the water.
Whiskey was a remedy in almost universal use against malaria. It did not require a physician's prescription, but the effects were often worse than the malady.
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In Mrs. Blake's Heart's Haven1 there is a pen picture of a typical cabin home on the lower Wabash, and the effect of the deadly malaria and whiskey used as an antidote:
"They were rich in youth, health, and courage, and the young wife's bright spirit turned the difficulties and pri- vations into a romantic experience. She helped to clear the land, build the cabin, and plant the fields. She learned to shoot bears, defend herself from Indians, and kill snakes; to weave, to brew, and to nurse sick neighbors. Every year she brought a child into the world of want and hard- ship, until now there were two little graves in the woods for those who could not stay, and six little creatures in the comfortless cabin, that was no larger and no better, for all of their work and self-denial. The wife was changed, gaunt, sallow, shaken by ague, consumed by fevers, worn by toil, hardened and embittered by life's broken promises. The change maddened the husband. He saw that hard- ship was destroying her,-hardship that he was powerless to help. He could not conquer circumstances, he could only suffer in them, but he could drug his feelings in whiskey,-whiskey which made it possible to counteract the miasma of the middle West; which was the panacea for ague, snake bites, and poisons. It also fortified men for explorations, Indian raids, struggles with wild beasts, and Herculean toil, and it could also make them forget their hard conditions. Alas! it could also instigate foolish- ness and cruelty."
Many tales are told of the doctors, to whose practices the early settlers were subjected. In Mr. Duncan's very interesting reminiscences, he humorously remarks, that they generally provided themselves with a goodly supply of the largest lancets and unmeasured quantities of English calomel. A flaring sign painted on a clap-
1 Blake, Mrs., Heart's Haven, Indianapolis, 1905.
A View of the Ohio River from Hanover College. The Ohio was the front door into Indiana. From a photograph.
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board was hung out, and as opportunity offered they went forth; first to take from the unfortunate patient all the blood that could be extracted from his veins without killing on the spot; then he was dosed with calomel enough to kill a gorilla, confined in a close room, and was to neither eat nor drink. The treat- ment killed quickly but cured slowly. Many of these early practitioners were dubbed "Death on a pale horse." Doubtless the openness of the log cabins, ad- mitting plenty of air, saved many a poor soul racked with fever. Some of these men were educated, but others entered on their careers with the barest prepa- ration possible, and those who brought the profession into contempt often had no knowledge of medicine at all. There were root doctors and mesmerists and all sorts of frauds who hung out their sign and made themselves dangerous to the community. To one ignorant pretender, who had gone into the practice without any preparation, an acquaintance said: "Well, Doctor, how goes the practice? "-"Only tolerable; I lost nine fine patients last week, one of them being an old lady that I wanted to cure very bad, but she died in spite of all I could do. I tried every root I could find, but she steadily grew worse." And still he got patients.
An old pioneer told, in the following quaint fashion, his experience with the early practitioners. About his seventeenth year he was taken ill. The neighbors said he had a kind of bilious fever. The only doctor was living over on Middle Fork, several miles away; he came on horseback with his saddle-bags of medicine, comprising tartar-emetic, calomel, jalap, castor oil, salts, and a thumb and spring lancet. After counting the beats of the patient's throbbing pulse, he proceeded to give him an emetic, then had him take calomel and
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jalap. Returning two days later he administered more emetics and bled him with his spring lancet until the boy fainted. The doctor said he was taking him through a course of medicine to prostrate his system, to break the fever. After continuing his visits for about two weeks, he said he always succeeded in curing by salivating his patients. The boy on the bed was now reduced to a mere skeleton. To be sure the fever was broken, for there was little left to create a fever. "The old doctor believed that the salivation was the salvation of me, but with all due respect," said he in after years, "I believe nature got the upper hand and cured me in spite of his strong medicine, bleeding, and tinkering; but he damaged my tenement irreparably."
Unfortunately, from these old stories, some still as- sociate these early ailments with Indiana at its present state, when in fact it is one of the healthiest sections of the Union. Cultivation of the soil and drainage have eliminated the danger which beset the health of the early settlers.
In later years, when the prairies attracted emigration, another terror of the frontier was experienced by the settlements of the northern part of Indiana. This was the prairie fires. From fall to spring, the season when the grass was dry and Indians or campers' fires might spread disaster, the settlers would sleep with one eye open, to be ready to fight the destruction of their homes and improvements. It was an unequal combat at best. Often the lurid light of the oncoming flame would light the whole visible world. Sometimes the wall of fire would reach from ten to fifty feet in height. A horse could not outtravel it. Snakes, wolves, and deer would run before the advancing heat,
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and frightened birds would fly screaming before the flames. After the fire had passed, the smoke was suffocating, and for months afterwards the charred and blackened waste marked the path of the fire. Often the only shelter of the poor settlers was left in ruins.
Earlier than we should now think possible, when we consider how entirely the Western pioneers were cut off from communication with the older settlements, those hopeful toilers added to their homes more and more of the comforts of life. Many of the large log cabins were covered with weather-boarding, and stood for years as substantial colonial homes. The example of the thrifty helped the more shiftless to improve. Fruits and vines were planted. Houses were added to, and furniture and china were brought up the river. Neighborhood cabinet-makers fashioned cupboards, beds, and bureaus of the wild-cherry lumber, and owing to the honest workmanship they last until this day. All the con- ditions of living constantly improved. Innovations were a source of wonderment to the real backwoods element, and amusing instances happened. In one sec- tion where the Rev. Samuel R. Johnson had brought a piano out with him, when he moved his family from New York, it happened that a parishioner from the Wild-Cat Prairie called to see the Rector. In the parlor of the parsonage she saw, for the first time in her life, a piano, and had no idea what it was. Pianos were square in those days and this one was closed, with the round stool placed in front of it. After looking a long time at the great polished piece of furniture she exclaimed: "Well, that is the biggest work-box and the mightiest pincushion I ever saw." The first stoves that were brought into any section
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drew curious visitors from miles around, to see the new invention for making life easy!
"We are having innovations betokening too much fashion," says an old letter ; "one of our dandies appears daily wearing silver spurs and embroidered gloves!" In those days patterns and styles came ambling at a deliberate pace, to the remote West, one year or the next making little difference.
There was little money in circulation then, and it took very little to sustain life on the frontier. At twenty years of age, a man, afterwards famous, started in as a lawyer in Indiana, with the noble ambition of securing a practice worth four hundred dollars a year.
In the life of privation and toil on the border, there were many homes where the traditions of gentleness and culture were maintained, and every effort to improve their growing children was made.
In writing his very interesting history of the Lake counties, and their early settlement, Mr. Ball says of that section, what was true of the whole frontier: that home life being an important part of true life, and as we have looked into these early homes, we have seen that warmth and light, and industry and thrift were there. In these homes you would find the mother and sisters knitting or spinning, the father and boys, fashioning a new axe handle or braiding a whiplash, and another roasting the apples and mulling the cider on the hearth, while an older sister or the boarding " school-ma'am" reads aloud from Robbie Burns or Bunyan or Shakespeare. We realize that isolation in the forest, sometimes, meant time for culture, as well as toil. If they were shut in to themselves, there was an uninterrupted existence which our rapid trans- portation, with its flittings south in the winter, to the
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sea-shore or mountains in summer, and maybe Europe in between times, may have destroyed; and some of the pleasures of continuous family life may have been lost.
In a country so free and where all had equal oppor- tunity, men were ambitious. Only the most ignorant and benighted were ever content, unless they were increasing their possessions. Work was so honorable that these pioneers ostracized a man who was considered "a little slack in the twist" about avoiding labor. In marked contrast to the dull hopelessness of the Old World from which the foreign settlers had emigrated, was the determined purpose of the people of the West. As has been truly said, through the whole household there shone the light of a fine vigor and bright expect- ancy. The women were as courageous, as capable, and as zealous as the men. They became inured to toil, privations, and dangers. A story is told of one woman on the prairies when the wind was blowing a perfect hurricane, to the great terror of a transient guest : the hostess gently admitted, that the wind "was noticeable." Many a woman, when notified that the Indians threatened a raid, refused to leave her cabin to their desolating firebrands, and they defended their homes by firing through the chinks between the logs, until help came from the settlements. When widowed, they kept their children together, and with the help of their boys they ran the farm in the lonely clearing.
"There are many diseases now, unheard of then," said Mrs. Rebecca Julian who was one of these very pioneers, "such as dyspepsia, neuralgia, etc. It was not fashionable at that time to be weakly. We could take up our spinning-wheel and walk two miles to a 7
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spinning frolic, do our day's work after a first-rate supper, join in some amusement for the evening. We never thought of having hands just to look at." 1 A managing mother would take a probable suitor for her daughter's heart around the cabin and show the bundles of yarn the young girl had spun, and the cover- lids she had woven. The frontier mother's hands were never idle. From flax to linen from wool to cloth, from spinning the yarn to finished stocking, she was the manufacturer for her household. Nor was it possible to accomplish all of these duties by daylight. Back and forth by the firelight of the great open fire which enabled the father and son to shape the scythe handles and cobble their own shoes, the graceful girl passed to the hum of the whirring wheel. Her swift expertness as she deftly turned the thread in her fingers, made a picture of industry and skill, very captivating to the country swain. The spinning-wheel, wrote Judge Ristine, was a stringed instrument which fur- nished the principal music of every household, high or lowly. These home manufacturers dyed their yarns with the ooze from the bark of different trees, and vied with each other in the skill of coloring.
A traveller in 1830, writing of the excellent dames of Brookville, including the wife of the United States Senator, said they, in the exercise of "woman's rights," milked their own cows, churned their own butter, and made their own brooms.
A few extracts from the private journal of a new- comer among these pioneer mothers will give an idea of their lives upon the frontier.
"November 10th-To-day was cider-making day and all were up at sunrise.
1 Personal Reminiscences.
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"December Ist-We killed a beef to-day, the neighbors helping.
"December 4th-I was very much engaged in trying out my tallow. To-day I dipped candles and finished the Vicar of Wakefield.
"December 8th-To-day I commenced to read the Life of Washington, and I borrowed a singing book. Have been trying to make a bonnet. The cotton we raised serves a very good purpose for candle-wicking, when spun."
It seems incredible that the own granddaughters of these toiling women now find themselves on the very same spot, living in a factory age where every article they use or eat may be bought ready-made. Truly, as Jane Addams has pointed out, the present generation of women should feel and show every consideration for the factory hand, who per- forms the labors by machinery which formerly must all be done in the homes. Factory labor has lifted the burden of actual manufacture of every article used in the home from the women of the third generation.
Many a frontier mother, in addition to all her toil, taught her children their lessons, before there were any schools available. Had there been less labor, and no terror of the savages, wild beasts, and snakes, nor anxiety over wasting fevers, still the isolation and homesickness in the wilderness would have been enough to make the stoutest hearts quail before the undertaking.
But the dark side of the picture of early emigration seems to have had an overweaning bright side, which drew the people like a magnet to the West.
In an old-settlers' meeting a pioneer of Milton was called on for his experience. He gave an account of his removal to the region, and the gratification he
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felt in exchanging the red soil, full of flint stones, of his native Carolina, for the black and fertile lands of Indiana. In the vigor of his youth, he regarded not the Herculean labors and hardships which then rose before him, for, to use his own words, he felt that he had a fortune in his own bones. Those from well-to-do Southern families immediately took an interest in politics and gained preferment in office-holding, as well as lucrative law practice. Land speculation was in the minds of those who had some money. It was not only the rich soil, the broad acres, the greater op- portunity for the young beginner, which lured them hither. With many, it was a vision of the greater freedom in the wilderness, the sense of space on the prairies. It is often a matter of wonder to older civili- zations, why these pioneers came to the forbidding frontier. Often they left good homes, friends, families, comforts, safety, and advantages of culture and social intercourse. As Julian Hawthorne has said, pioneer- ing was in their blood, and in their traditions. They had listened in childhood to tales of adventure told by the fireside, half true and half apocryphal. They were familiar with the log cabin, the rifle, and the saddle. They went forth to win an independent footing in the world. It was seldom the hegira of an organized community; each individual or family set forth on an independent basis.
Besides these families of sterling character who came West and made the "bone and sinew" of the nation, we have seen that there were many individuals known as " poor whites," of no occupation, who migrated two or three times in one lifetime. Starting from "Ole Caroline," they came up through "Kentuck," sojourned a year or two in Indiana and moved on westward, until
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their bones finally rested in Pike County, across the Missouri. The story of one of these migratory families, who formed an entirely different class from the real pioneer settlers, is told by a centenarian daughter of one of these men.
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