History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 14

Author: Sulgrove, Berry R. (Berry Robinson), 1828-1890
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts & Co.
Number of Pages: 942

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In the year 1830, Mr. John Finley, of Wayne County, wrote a New Year's address for the Indian- apolis Journal, at the close of which occurs so admirable a description of a " Hoosier" pioneer cabin that no apology is required for reproducing it here :

" I'm told in riding somewhere West A stranger found a ' Hoosier's nest,' In other words, a buckeyo cabin, Just big enough to hold Queen Mah in. Its situation, low but airy, Was on the borders of a prairie; And fearing he might he benighted, He hailed the house, and then alighted. The Hoosier met him at the door, Their salutations soon were o'er. Ile took the stranger's horse aside And to a sturdy sapling tied, Then, having stripped the saddle off, He fed him in a sugar-trough.

The stranger stooped to enter in,

The entrance olosing with a pin, And manifested strong desire To seat him hy the log-heap fire, Where half a dozen Hoosieroons, With mush and milk, tin cups and spoons,

White heads, harc feet, and dirty faces, Seemed much inclined to keep their places. But madam, anxious to display Iler rough but undisputed sway, Her offspring to the ladder led, And cuffed the youngsters up to hed.

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

Invited shortly to partake Of venison, milk, and johnny-cake, The stranger made a hearty meal, And glances round the room would steal. One side was lined with divers garments, The other spread with skins of varmints; Dried pumpkins overheard were strung, Where venison hams in plenty hung; Two rifles placed above the door, Three dogs lay stretched upon tho floor. In short, the domicile was rife With specimens of Hoosier life. Tho host, who centered his affeetions On game and 'range' and 'quarter seetions,' Discoursed his weary guest for hours, Till Somnus' all-composing powers Of sublunary cares bereft them. And then- No matter how the story ended, The application I intended Is from the famous Scottish poet, Who seemed to feel, as well as know it, That ' burly chiels and clover hizzies Are bred in sic a way as this is.'"

The nickname of an Indianian, " Hoosier," oeeurs in this poem the first time that it ever appeared in print, say some old settlers. It could not have been very old or generally known throughout the country if it originated, as the most credible accounts relate, in a fight among the hands employed in excavating the eanal around the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. Some big Irishman, after keeping out of the shindy as long as he could stand it, at last went in and knocked down four or five of the other party in quiek suecession. Jumping up in high glee he eraeked his heels together, and shouted, "I'm a husher." The boast erossed the river, and was naturalized by the residents there, and thenee passed all over the State and into other States. Exeept " Yankee," no other State or sectional nickname is so well known, and it is not unfrequently used as a designation of a Western man, as " Yankee" is of an Eastern man. Governor Wright, of Indiana, once told a foreign visitor that the name originated in a habit of travelers calling out when they would ride up to a fence at night with the purpose of staying till morning, " Who's here ?" Repetition made one word of it, and finally made a name for backwoods settlers of it, which in some unexplained way was

appropriated to Indiana. Another explanation is that Col. Lehmanowski, a Polish officer of the first Napoleon, who occasionally visited this place, and preached here to a Lutheran association and lec- tured on Napoleon's wars, about 1840 to 1842, started the name by his pronunciation of the word " Hussar," which some "gostrating" fellow got hold of and used to glorify himself. This, however, oe- curring as late as 1840, will not explain the use of the word in Finley's poem in 1830, except in the fashion of " Merlin's prophecy," made by the "Fool" in " Lear."

Dr. Philip Mason, of White Water, in his " Au- tobiography," gives an account of the agricultural implements in use on the farms of these " Hoosiers" that will not be uninteresting to the later generation of farmers. "The plow was the common shovel- plow mostly, though a few called the 'bar-share' were used. This was a bar on the land side, with a broad, flat share running to a point at the forward end, attached to a coulter with a steel nose in front. The coulter extended up through the wooden beam of the plow. Two wooden handles, one attached to the beam and the bar, and to the bar of the land side of the plow, the other handle connected with a wooden mold-board, which pressed out the dirt and partially turned it. It was connected with the other handle by wooden pins or rounds. Horses were often at- tached to the plow without an iron clevis. The double-tree was connected with a fixture not unlike a clevis; the single-tree fastened to the double-tree by a hickory withe, sometimes with a kind of wooden clevis. The horses were mostly geared for plowing with a collar made of corn-shucks ; hames made from the roots of the ash or oak, fashioned as best they could be with a drawing-knife, a hole at top and bot- tom, so as to fasten with a cord or a thong made of rawhide; not uncommonly a hole was made with an auger near the middle of the hame to take in the trace, which was made of hemp or flax tow, and spun and made on a rude rope-walk. The trace was run through the hole in the hame and secured by a knot, and looped over the end of the single-tree, on which there was a notch at the back part to keep it in place. For a baek-band a strong piece of tow cloth doubled

SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE EARLY SETTLERS.

was used. The horses were guided by a bridle with a rope headstall and a rope line, mostly driven with one line. When using two horses they were coupled together by a rope at the bits, sometimes by a stick, with strings tied to the stick and then to the bridle- . bit. Double lines were seldom used in driving one or two horses. Even a four-horse team was driven with a single line attached to the near forward horsc. Salt and iron were obtained at Cincinnati, and fortu- nate was he who could by any means obtain salt enough to preserve his meat and salt his food. Corn was often sold at six cents a bushel, and wheat at twenty-five cents. Salt was often as high as two dollars and a half and three dollars a bushel."

seasoned. From these I made a high post bedstead, which has been in use ever since till the last seven years." The common chair of the back woods was the " split-bottom," still made and used occasionally, and superior to anything of the fashionable kind made now. Long thin strips of tough wood that would split in flakes about an inch wide were used to weave the seat. They wore out or broke readily, but were readily replaced. Sometimes buckskin was stretched and tacked to the frame of the seat, and made a better chair than any costly cushioned affair of this day, until it stretched into too deep a cavity, as it always did sooner or later.

From this account of a pioneer it will be seen that

AN EMIGRANT SCENE.

Although the pioneers all had to build their own houses, they were not all nor generally so destitute as to be forced to make their own furniture. Dr. Mason thus describes his labor in this direction : " My next object was to make us seats. For this purpose I went into the creek bottom and selected a suitable blue ash tree, cut it down, then cut notches into the sides, and split off pieces of suitable length and width for benches. With the broad-axe and drawing-knife they were made smooth. Some were made for a single per- son and had three legs, while the longer ones had four legs. Our next object was a bedstead. I found on the place some black walnut rails which were well

farmers did a good deal towards making for themselves the appliances and implements they needed. It was often their only chance, consequently it was no un- usual thing to see about a farmer's barn or back yard a rough carpenter's bench with a wooden clamp or vise, or a " horse" with a treadle, and a notched head pressed by the treadle down on a stick to hold it fast against the " horse" for the use of the "drawing- knife," the universal tool of the backwoods, only less indispensable than the axe. The ready adaptability of the American pioneer was balked by little in the way of wood-work, but blacksmithing was too much, and the blacksmith-shop was universally coeval with

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

the tavern and village store. He made the crane for the fireplace, the " dog-irons" or andirons, the shovel and tongs, the plowshare and clevis, the horse's bit sometimes, the gearing of the wife's loom, the irons of the husband's wagon, shod the horses, sharpencd the plows, made the grubbing hoes and the fishing gigs, hammered smooth the battered poles of axes, riveted the blade in the boy's broken knife, and some- times ventured to repair the broken lock of the hunter's rifle. Pretty much all else the family did for them- selves, even to the wagon-making once in a while. The spinning, weaving, cutting, and clothes-making were the good wife's work, with plenty more besides, and if she didn't make as neat fits or graceful drapery as a fashionable tailor or dressmaker to-day, lier breeches were sound and durable, her " wamuses" comfortable and convenient, her dresses admirably adapted to the service and situation. Buckskin was largely used for clothing and frequently for moccasins. It is queer that the infinite superiority of the latter in comfort to all other forms of foot-gear for those distressed by the distortions and excrescences of civil- ization has not reintroduced thein, at least among sen- sible people who care more for comfort than appear- ances. Buckskin wamuses and brecches disappeared forty years ago, except in rare instances of well-pre- served pioneer relics. The deer was driven off into the remotest parts of the county even before that, and the hides becoming scarce, and dear in a double sense, were gradually replaced in saddlery and other manufactures by sheepskin, by no means its equal. Ex-Coroner Dr. Wishard tells an amusing story of Emmanuel Glympse, one of the first settlers of Perry township. He had been wearing a pair of ill-tanned buckskin breeches, which got soaked in a shower as he was going from home to a school he kept in the neighborhood. They were pliable enough when he sat down in them wet, but they dried before he attempted to rise, and then they were as hard as sheet-iron, and he had to get water and resoak them before they would allow him freedom of muscle enough to walk. It was much such a case as "Sut Lovengood's" shirt. For a number of years carding machinery was frequently attached to the motive- power of mills to make " rolls" of the farmers'

wool, but a farm-house was rarely without its pair of cards for hand-made rolls if an emergency required them. As late as 1832 or 1833 there was a carding- machine run by horse-power-a huge wheel fifteen fcet in diameter set at a slope with a vertical shaft in the centre, on the lower side of which a horse was in constant motion-on the northwest corner of Maryland and Illinois Streets, and another on Ken- tucky Avenue near where the first tobacco-factory was situated. These were used for no other purpose, but in at least two mills near the city the same kind of machinery was attached to the water-power. One was on Fall Creek racc, the other on the bayou, near the present line of the Vincennes Railroad, in a mill crected by the late Daniel Yandes and his brother-in- law, Andrew Wilson. Spinning and weaving machi- nery came, temporarily and uselessly, in a big steam- mill enterprise some years later, but it failed, and woolen manufacture was left to show itself nearly twenty years later. "Store clothes" were by no mcans unknown, but a large dependence was held on the mother's skill in the country, and to some extent in the town too, where a good deal of the country life was retained in the woods and corn-patches that surrounded many of the houses. It was not till the settlement was getting into its teens that it began to put on city airs and distinguish itself and its ways from the country.

A portion of the home labors of the backwoods was of a kind that required co-operation, and these were made occasions of fun and frolic, though rarely to the neglect of the real business. Among these were the " quiltings" for women and girls, with the necessary attendance of young men later, when the games of the period were zealously kept up as long as it seemed decorous. These were much the same as country games in all parts of the country, of English origin and traditional repute, and rarely mixed up with later inventions till the town and country began to be less closely assimilated. The point or purpose of most of them was a kiss claimed as a forfeit or penalty. The more intellectual entertain- ments, like making and solving puzzles, were not so popular as those with a little material satisfaction lodged in their conclusion. " Apple-parings" were

AMUSEMENTS.

not so common here as in the East, but they were another kind of co-operative work that was made an amusement. " House-raising" was a male task with a similar accompaniment better adapted to masculine tastes ; "log-rolliog" was another. The trees that had been cut down to clear the land for cultivation had to be put out of the way, and no way was 80 expeditious as to roll them into great heaps and burn them, trunks, chips, limbs, brush, and leaves. So the neighbors gathered to a "log-rolling" as to a " raising," and many a rivalry of strength and skill with the handspike was raised or settled there. There was fighting of course, especially on visits to town and to the "grocery," as the liquor-shop was called then ; but the exhibition at a "log-rolling" was quite as satisfactory proof that a man was a "good man,". " stout," " hold his own," and so on, as a successful fight at Jerry Collins' eorner. "Sugar-making" was frequently turned into a frolic, though co-opera- tion was not so necessary to it as the other work. The processes were much the same as now, except that the " troughs" were not buckets or crocks, but wooden vessels roughly hewed in the halves of short logs split in two, unhandy, easily overturned, and readily inclined to get dirty. They were visited at regular intervals, and the sugar-water emptied into a barrel on a sled, or in a wagon if there was not snow enough for a sled, and reset, while the sled with its load went back to the fire, usually made between two good-sized long logs, on which the kettles rested. Here the evaporating water was re- placed from the barrels till it was sweet enough to finish with, and then came the fun, " the stirring off," and hunting out lumps to eat, or filling egg-shells with thick syrup to harden into a lump like a stone, or pouring a great mass into a pan of sugar-water for the boys and girls to pull at, or making cakes of it, or sealding fingers with it for some favorite to doctor. " Sugar-making" was capable of being made the most entertaining event of the year, and it was often done.

Besides the amusements made of occasions of really necessary neighborly co-operation, the men of both town and country during the first decade of the settlement, or in some cases the first two, contrived

amusements that made no pretence of work. The chief of these were " quarter races" and " shooting matches." For some years the portion of West Street along the Military Ground was the favorite racc-track, the outcome being near the crossing of West and Indiana Avenue on the Michigan road. Nags taken from the plow or the wagon, and ridden by the owners or by some boy, were the contestants, and the stake was anything from a plug of tobacco to ten dollars, the latter not usually risked- on any animal that had not a local reputation. Forty years ago or more these quarter races on West Street took place nearly every Saturday, and were usually dec- orated with a fight or two.

A conspicuous character concerned in them fre- quently was a very remarkable man named Nathaniel Vise, who settled and named the town of Visalia, in California. Though constantly associated with drink- ing men all his life and making drinking-places his principal haunts, he was never known to drink. Though he gambled, he was notoriously as honorable a man as there was in the place. Possessed of phe- nomenal strength and agility, and living among fight- ing men, he never fought when he could help it, and he never fought without whipping his man. His checkered career took him to Texas after he left here, and he became the intimate friend of Jack Hays, the noted "Texas Ranger." They went to California together, and there his amazing strength and skill made him so formidable that not one of the many noted prize-fighters then in San Francisco, like " Yankee" Sullivan and " Country" McClusky, would fight him " rough and tumble" for ten thousand dollars. He was killed but a year or so ago by the fall of a building in Texarkana. He came to this place a mere lad with his father from Kentucky, and grew up here. At one time, about 1839, he had a contract on the Central Canal, near the town, and when the public works were suspended that year he made a pro rata division of all the money he had among his hands. They came to the town and got drunk on it, and were then easily persuaded by a fractious Irishman that they had been cheated and ought to lick Vise. Happening to pass along the street where a group of them was gathered, a little

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

east of Meridian Street on Washington, they assailed him, first with savage language and then with their clubs and fists. He knocked and kicked down a half-dozen of them before he got clear of them. His activity was so great that he jumped high enough to kick both feet in the stomach of one of the mob and prostrate him senseless. He once beat a pro- fessional foot-racer in racing costume, without chang- ing a single thing he wore, and beat him so badly in a hundred yards or so that at the outcome he turned and walked towards his antagonist, meeting and laugh- ing at him. He was a cousin of Judge N. B. Taylor, of the Superior Court. So much notice of him is · due to the conspicuous place he held among the early settlers and the reputation he left here.

After the abandonment of the canal, its bed south of Pleasant Run, where there was a long stretch of level bottom, was made a race-track by the ambitious residents of Perry township, especially the section of it some half-dozen miles south of the town in the river bottom, called " Waterloo," a region noted for fighting, drinking, betting, and wild frolics of all kinds. Here lived the Snows, the Stevenses, the Fancillers, the Mundys, the Glympses, the Myerses, some quiet and orderly, some a good deal like the modern "cow-boy." All were "drinking" men, however.

" Shooting matches" continued to be a popular amusement till near the time the completion of the first railroad changed the direction of men's minds to the graver occupations of establishing industries and multiplying business. There were two kinds of matches. In one the shooting was done at a target, in the other at the object which was made the stake. In the first case the usual prize was a beef divided into five " quarters," the fifth being the hide and tallow, and worth more cash value than either of the others. In the second case the object shot for-a turkey commonly, sometimes a goose-was set against a tree or stump, with a log rolled before it so as to con- ceal all of it but the head and upper part of the neck. The contestants stood off an agreed distance, usually sixty yards, and shot at the head " off hand." The first to bring blood won it. Each contestant put in enough to make the aggregate a good price for the

fowl. The rifle was the only weapon of the time in the backwoods, whether the game were deer or bear, turkey, quail, or squirrel. Small game could usually be hit close enough about the head to leave the cat- able portion uninjured. But nobody could shoot a running turkey's head off with a rifle, as one of T. B. Thorpe's apocryphal stories makes Mississippi old-

time hunters do frequently. It might be possible if a turkey were running directly away from or towards a hunter, but barely possible then, and utterly impos- sible, except by accident, in any other direction. The shot-gun was thought beneath the dignity of hunters and marksmen, and even boys disdained it. The rifle was the weapon of a man; "shot-guns will do for girls," said an old pioneer once in Mr. Beck's gun- smith-shop. It was not till the German immigration began to affect social conditions that the shot-gun be- gan to displace the rifle. Now the hunter here never uses the rifle, and the shot-gun has become the cs- pecial agent even of the humanizing murders of our enlightened land. Several prominent citizens were noted for skill with the rifle. Robert B. Duncan was probably the most formidable of all, but Squire Wea- ver and Nathaniel Cox and several others were little inferior, if at all. Mr. Cox was one of the conspicu- ous pioneers of the New Purchase. He was a me- chanical genius, and was employed to do all sorts of work that nobody else could or would try. He was carpenter, cabinet-maker, cooper, turner, painter, boat- builder, anything that was wanted,-a quaint, humor- ous, generous man, full of queer stories and dry fun, passionately fond of hunting and fishing, and always at it when he had no work to do. In 1842, when he wanted to run for county treasurer, probably, he announced himself in handbills as " Old Nat Cox, the Coon-Hunter." He was the drummer of militia musters, and made his own drums. He lived west of Missouri Street on Washington for a great many years, and dicd about 1851. According to Mr. Now- land, he was the prototype of "Sut Lovengood" in drinking the two components of a Seidlitz powder separately and letting them mix in his stomach, an experiment that he said " made him feel as if Niagara Falls were running out of his head." He was a Marylander, and came here in 1821.

AMUSEMENTS.

Another amusement of the early settlement of the place was " gander-pulling." This was imported from the Sonth by the settlers from North Carolina and Tennessee, of whom there were a good many. Those who have read some of the sketches of Southern life and scenes by Hooper and Longstreet will know all that can be known about a " gander-pulling" without taking part in it. One of the places-possibly the only one-where it was practiced in this county was at Allisonville, in Washington township, on the road to Conner's place and Noblesville. Here two resi- dents, Lashhrook and Deford, offered an enlightened and Christian public the refined and intellectual en- tertainment of a " gander-pulling" at such times as promised to make the speculation profitable. An old gander was caught, his neck stripped of feathers and thickly covered with soft soap, and hung by his legs to a strong but yielding limb of a handy tree. The contestants mounted their horses and in turn rode at full speed under the swinging fowl, catching its soapy neck with one hand and holding on with all their might to pull the head off : that was the victory. There is no record or recollection of the frequency of this elegant sport or of the persons that took part in it.

It may savor a little of the extravagance of a joke to suggest that one of the primitive entertainments of the settlement was fighting, and yet the frequency and ready reconciliation of that sort of enlivenment certainly looked that way. Fighting at elections is common now, but it was inevitable then; and it was a rare Saturday that didn't see a " passage at arms" of the backwoods kind, " a rough and tumble" fight, at some of the " groceries." Occasionally the diversion was diversified by fisticuff duels of a more sedate if not satisfactory character than the whiskey-nurtured rows of street corners and handy open lots. Pretty early in the annals of the village one of these affairs occurred between Andrew Wilson, one of the owners of one of the early mills, and a neighbor by the name of Zadoc (universally called " Zedick") Smith. The pair went off alone into the thick woods about the mill situated on the "old bayon," near the crossing of the Belt Railroad and Morris Street, and fought out their quarrel, came back roughly handled, and

never to their dying day told anybody which was the victor. Not improbably the result was a good deal like that of the fight celebrated in a " nigger" ballad of this period between " Bill Crowder" and " Davy Crockett": " We fought half a day, and then agreed to stop it, for I was badly licked, and so was Davy Crockett." Another fight of the same secret and undetermined kind took place later between Captain Wiley and Jim Smith, both tailors and " sports," and both unusually stalwart and fine-looking men. They went off to the State.House Square, a remote aud rural spot then, and settled the matter, but how they never told. So infectious was this fighting humor that Calvin Fletcher when prosecutor took offense at some action of Squire Obed Foote, and undertook to thrash him in his own office, with poor success, however, which he signalized by informing on himself and having himself indicted and fined. Eye-gouging and biting were practiced in these affairs in the Southern fashion, but never or rarely to the maiming or serious injury of anybody.

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History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 14

Author: Sulgrove, Berry R. (Berry Robinson), 1828-1890 Publication date: 1884 Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts & Co. Number of Pages: 942

Author: Sulgrove, Berry R. (Berry Robinson), 1828-1890
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts & Co.
Number of Pages: 942