History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 2

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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Mineral Springs .- Although they form no con- spicuous feature of the topography of the county, and have never been used medieinally, except by the neighbors, it may be well to note that there are a few springs of a mineral and hygienic character in the county, where the underground currents of water rise through crevices in the overlying bed of elay. One

of these, called the Minnewa Springs, in Lawrence township, a mile and a half northeast of the little town of Lawrence, was talked of at one time as ea- pable of being made a favorite resort, and some steps were taken in that direction, but nothing came of them. Another very like it is within a half-mile of the same town. Southwest of the city is one on the farm of an old settler that has been famous in the neighborhood as a " sulphur spring" for fifty years. A couple of miles nearer the city is another on the farm of Fielding Beeler, which Professor Brown says is the largest in the county. " It forms a wet prairie or marsh of several aeres, from which by ditehing a large stream of water is made to flow." The water of all these springs contains iron enough to be readily tasted, and to stain the vessels that are used in it, and this peculiarity gives it the misname of sulphur water.

Swamps .- There were onec considerable areas of marshy land, or land kept wet by the overflow of ad- jacent streams, but many of these have been entirely drained, and considerable portions of others larger and less convenient for drainage. With them have measurably disappeared the malarial diseases that in the first settlement of the city, and for a good many years after, came baek as regularly as the seasons. There is not, probably, a single acre of land in the county that is not cultivable or capable of being made so. Between three and four miles southwest of city lay a swampy tract, nearly a mile long by a quarter or more wide, entirely destitute of trees, which was long known in the vicinity as " the prairie," the only approach to a prairie in the county.

Geology of the County.1-Marion County rests on three distinct geological members, two of them be- longing to the Devonian formation and one to the Carboniferous. Neither, however, shows itself eon- spicuously on the surface. Upon these lies a deposit of drift, or transported material, from fifty to one hundred and fifty feet thick. This forms the surface of the country, and moulds its general configuration. But the roek foundation, in spite of the depth of the

1 Condensed from Professor R. L. Brown's Official Survey, in the Report of Professor Jehn Collett, State Geologist.

GEOLOGY OF THE COUNTY.

drift upon it, affects the face of the country some- what, most obviously along the line where the Knob sandstone overlaps the Genesee shale. The line of strike dividing the geological members traverses the county on a line from the south thirty degrees north- west. This linc, as it divides the Corniferous lime- stone from the Genesee shale or black slate, passes between the city and the Hospital for the Insane, two miles west. Borings in the city reach the lime- stone at a depth of sixty to one hundred fect. . It is the first roek encountered in place. At the hospital forty feet of shale was passed through before reach- ing the limestone. This shows the eastern part of the county as resting on the Corniferous limestone, and the western on the Delphi black slate or Gon- esee shale. Under a small area of the southwestern corner of the county the Knob or Carboniferous sandstone will be found covering the slate. On a sand-bar in the river, a short distance north of the Johnson County line, Professor Brown noticed after a freshet large pieces of slate that had been thrown out, indicating that the river had laid bare that roek at some near point. This gives the level of the bed of the river in the lower half of its course through the county. But a short distance west of the west linc of the county some of the small tributaries of White Liek lay bare the lower members of the Knob sandstone. There are indications both on Pogue's Run and Pleasant Run that the limestone lies very near their beds, but it is not likely that stonc ean ever be profitably quarried in the county. Geo- logical interest attaches to the deep deposits of drift that cover the stratified rocks.

Drift .- The drift that covers our great Western plains, continues Dr. Brown's Survey, is foreign in character and general in deposition. It is not a pro- miscuous deposit of clay, sand, water-worn pebbles, and bowlders, like the Eastern glacial drift. These are all found in it, but with nearly as much regu- larity and order as is usually found in stratified rocks. At the base of this formation is almost iuvariably found a very compact lead-colored clay, with but few bowlders, and those invariably composed of quartzite, highly metamorphoscd or trap rocks. Occasionally may be found thin deposits of very fine gray or yel-

low sand, but they are not uniform. Between the clay and the rocks on which it rests is generally in- terposed a layer of coarse gravel or small silicious bowlders, from three to six feet thick. Sometimes, but rarely, this is wanting, and the clay lies directly upon the rock. In Marion County this clay-bed ranges from twenty to more than a hundred feet thick, and is very uniform in character throughout, except where the light strata or fine sand occur. Chemically it is an alumina silicate in a very fine state of division, and mechanically mixed with an exceedingly fine sand, which shows under the micro- scope as fragments of almost transparent quartz. It is colored by a proto-sulphide of iron. A small por- tion of lime and potassa and a trace of phosphoric acid can be discovered by analysis. Above this is generally found a few feet of coarse sand or fine gravel, and on this is twenty or thirty feet of a true glacial drift, of the promiscuous character of the glacial drift described by Eastern geologists. In and upon this drift are large bowlders of granite, gneiss, and trap, which are not found in their proper place nearer than the shore of Lake Superior, whence they have been carried, as is attested by the grooves and scratches in the exposed roek surfaces over which they have passed. In this upper drift are the gravel terraces, from which is obtained our best available material for road-making. The mass of it is a yellow or orange-colored clay, with a considerable quantity of sand, and lime enough to make the water passing through it hard. There is an astonishing number and size of bowlders in and upon this clay-bed. Two were measured by Dr. Brown which were nearly ten feet long by five wide, with four feet exposed above ground, and nobody knows how much below. In a few places bowlders are so thickly scattered as to ob- struct cultivation. In the central and northern por- tions of the county they are almost invariably of granite, in the south generally of gneiss or trap.

Gravel Terraces .- The gravel terraces are gen- erally found in a succession of mound-like elevations, ten to fifty feet above the level of the surrounding plain, and usually rest on a compact clay. They are frequently arranged in lincs running north, a little northeast and southwest. North of these mounds is

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

generally found a considerable space of level and often swampy lands, indicating the position of a mass of ice, under which a torrent has rushed with great force, excavating the elay below, piling up tlie heavier gravel and sand, and carrying the lighter elay and finer sand to be distributed over the country. When the ice disappeared the excavation would be a little lake, finally filled up with the lighter material borne from other terraces farther north. These ter- raee formations, or " seeond bottoms," bordering the river on one side or the other nearly everywhere, have almost the same character and history as the gravel-beds of the uplands. They consist of deposits of gravel and coarse sand, resting on the lower blue elay, into which the river las eut its present channel. Formerly these plains, frequently three or four miles wide, were regarded as lake-like expansions of the river which had been silted up by its sediment, but an inspection of the material shows that the water from which the deposit was made was no quiet lake, but a current strong enough to bear onward all lighter material, leaving only the heavier gravel and sand behind.

Lower Blue Clay .- The Official Survey coneludes that the lower blue elay was deposited before the strata of elay, sand, and gravel that rest upon it, and are clearly traceable to glacial action, and that the conditions of its deposit were very different from the rush and tumult of water pouring from a melting glacier, though evidently deposited from water. The greater part of the material is very fine, and could have come only from very quiet waters, and from very deep waters too, as its compaetness and solidity prove the existence of great pressure necessary to the pro- duction of those qualities. Besides the superposition of the glacial strata, the precedent deposition of the lower blue clay is indicated by the fact that the glacial action, exhibited over the whole surface of the country, made excavations in it by undermining eur- rents from dissolving glaciers which now forin the small lakes so numerous in the northern part of the State. The southern end of Lake Michigan rests on this clay, and is excavated into it to an unknown depth. Another fact attesting the deposit of the lower clay anterior to the grinding and crushing era

of moving mountains of ice, is the discovery at the bottom of it of the unbroken remains of coniferous trees, probably eypress or hemloek. In digging wells in the county logs ten to fifteen inches in diameter, well preserved, have been found. Glacial action ac- companying or following the deposit of these trees would have crushed them. Dr. Brown suggests a theory of the deposition of this elay-bed. If the glacial era was preceded by an upheaval that raised the region of the Arctic Circle above the line of per- petual congelation, there would necessarily have been a corresponding depression south of the elevation, which would be an inland sea of fresh water. During the whole period of the progress of this upheaval north and sinking south (in our region) torrents of water loaded with sediment would have rushed down and filled the huge hollow. As the waters became quiet the sediment would be slowly deposited. The color of the clay, caused by the combination of sul- phur and iron, proves that these waters were originally charged with sulphurous gases prodneed by voleanic agencies. The presence of these gases explains the absence of life in this fresh-water sea till the sulphur- tainted sediment was entirely deposited, when the in- creasing cold would cover it with an impervious erust of iee, cutting off all access of air and the possibility of life. There are no fossil remains in the clay. With the end of the Ice Age came a reversal of conditions, the northern regions sinking, those about here rising and pouring their waters southward into the Gulf of Mexieo in furious torrents strengthened by the melt- ing of great masses of ice, thus furnishing much of the material of the Mississippi delta, and leaving marks of denudation on the hills of Kentucky, Ten- nessee, and Alabama.

Economical Service of the Clay-Bed .- This lower elay stratum when exposed to the air for a few years undergoes chemical changes which make it the basis of a very fertile soil. Frost breaks down its adhe- siveness and makes it a mass of crumbling, porous earth. The oxygen of the air converts the sulphur into an acid which unites with the potash and lime accessible to it and makes slowly-soluble salts of them, which supply valuable elements of fertility for years of cultivation, needing only organic matter to be

GEOLOGY OF THE COUNTY.

available at once for use. It is an excellent absorbent owing to the fineness of its material, and might be advantageously used in composting manures, as it would retain ammonia as sulphate. Of greater value, at least to the city, than its fertilizing quality is its action as a filter, securing an inexhaustible supply of pure water in the bowlders and gravel beneath it. In a region as level as Marion County, and as prolific of vegetation, the surface water must become charged with organic matter, which the porous upper strata of soil, sand and clay, but imperfectly retain, so that the water of springs and shallow wells is rarely so pure as to be suitable for domestic use. These im- purities arc, of course, increased in the vicinity of residences, barns, and stables, and still more in cities, where there are large quantities of excrementitious matter. Surface water more or less tainted in this way is readily absorbed by the porous soil, and may reach the bottom of wells of twenty feet in depth. Against the inevitable and incalculable evil of a cor- rupted water supply, as that of Indianapolis would be if there were no other resource than the surface water of shallow wells, this blue clay stratum is an ample and admirable provision. It acts as a filter to the reservoir in the gravel and bowlder bed beneath it. The water there is free from organic matter, though always sufficiently tainted with iron to be easily tasted and to color vessels used in it. This iron taint is an invariable characteristic of the water filtered through this blue clay, and gives the popular reputation of mineral water to springs of it that rise through fis- sures in the clay to the surface. The best known of these springs have been already referred to. In the city and several places outside of it wells have been sunk to the sub-clay water throughi sixty-seven to one hundred and cight feet, the water rising to various distances from the surface from eight to forty feet. The blue clay stratum runs from eight to sixty feet in thickness. The reservoir of water under this clay has no outlet except through openings in the clay, and in consequence can never be exhausted by natural drainage. To a large manufacturing centre like In- dianapolis the power derived from water in stream or steam is indispensable, and that, says the Survey, " we have under every acre of land in Marion County."

Character of Soil .- The glacial drift furnishes the material for a soil that meets every demand of agriculture. Says the Survey, " Being formed by the decomposition of almost every variety of rock, it holds the elements of all in such a state of fine divis- ion as to give it excellent absorbent properties, and enables it to retain whatever artificial fertilizers may be added. In its natural state the soil of the county generally has but one prominent defect,-the very fine material of which it is made lying so ncarly level is casily saturated with water, and having no drainage below, except by slow filtration through the clay, is kept wet longer than usual. This necessitates the escape of a great part of it by surface evaporation, and this, especially in spring, delays the warming of the soil and its early preparation for summer crops. The condition of saturatiou has an unfavorable effect on the vegetable matter in the soil, excluding it from free contact with the air, and arresting its rapid de- composition, often changing it into humic acid, a chemical product injurious to crops. In the first and second bottom lands this defect is remedied by a stratum of gravel or coarse sand a few feet below the surface, which rapidly passes the water downwards and relieves the saturated surface. The same effect is produced on the clay uplands by a system of tile drainage.

Ideal Section of the County .- The following measurements of the different strata of an ideal scc- tion of the county are given by Dr. Brown from natu- ral sections, borings, and excavations made in different parts of the county. Beginning with the most recent formations, we have :

Transported Material.

1. Alluvium, or bottom land .... from 10 to 20 feet.

2. Terrace formations, gravel and sand .. from 50 to 100 feet.

3. True bowlder clay (glacial). from 40 to 110 fcet.

4. Blue sedimentary clay and sand. from 20 to 120 feet.

5. Bowlders and gravel. from 5 to 15 feet.

Rock in Place.

6. Knob sandstone (Carboniferous). 25 feet.

7. Genesee slate (Devonian). 80 feet.

8. Corviferous limestone (Devonian). 50 feet.

HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.

The corniferous limestone has been penetrated fifty feet, but its entire thickness at this point is undetermined, as its eastern outcrop is concealed by the heavy drift deposit. Nos. 1, 2, 6, and 7 underlie only portions of the county ; the other members are general in their distribution.

The Indian Occupation .- The State of Indiana formed the central, and largest portion of the terri- tory " held by the Miami Confederacy from time im- memorial," as Little Turtle, who led the Indians in St. Clair's defeat, told Gen. Wayne. There were but four tribes in this Confederacy, the leading one being the Miamis, or, in early times, the Twightwees ; but divisions of four others quite as well known by his- tory and tradition were allowed entrance and resi- dence,-the Shawanese, Delawares, Kickapoos, and Pottawatomies. The Delawares occupied the region in and around Marion County, but the abundance of fish and game made it a favorite hunting-ground of all the tribes from the valley of the White Water, or Wah-he-ne-pay, to the valley of the White River, the Wah-me-ca-me-ca. On this account it was ob- stinately held by the Confederacy, and only surren- dered by the treaty of St. Mary's, 1818.1 One of the principal Delaware towns stood on the bluff of White River, at the Johnson County line, where, says Pro- fessor Brown, was the residence of Big Fire, a lead- ing Delaware chicf and friend of the whites. A blunder of ignorance or brutality came near making an enemy of him in 1812, as Cresap or Greathouse did of Logan in 1774. A band of Shawanese, an affiliated tribe of the Confederacy, but residing far- ther south, between the East Fork of White River (the Gun-da-quah) and the Ohio, acting doubtless on the hostile impulse imparted by the great chief of the tribe, Tecumseh, massacred a white settlement at the Pigeon Roost, in Scott County, in 1812. The Madison Rangers in revenge penetrated to Big Fire's town, on the southern line of the county, and de- stroyed it. It would seem that there should have been little difficulty, to men as familiar with the loca- tions and modes of warfare of the Indians as these rangers, in ascertaining whether the war party of

the Pigeon Roost massacre came from the north or not ; but whether there was or not no discrimination was made, and it required all Governor Harrison's diplomacy to keep Big Fire and his tribe from joining the forces against the government. " But few remains mark the site of this ruined town," says the professor.

In Washington township, on the east side of the river, tradition places the site of another village older, -how much it is impossible to say or guess, further than the vague direction of conjecture by the fact that the place is overrun by a wood of sixty years' growth. Near the river is an old cemetery of the tribe, and near it are some unique remains of Indian residence, both uncovered occasionally by floods. These remains are " pits or ovens excavated in a very compact clay," as Professor Brown describes them, about two feet and a half in diameter and the same in depth, and burned on the inner surfaces like brick. In them have been found coals and ashes, and around them fragments of pottery. Their condition and con- tents would indicate that they were a sort of earthen- ware kettle, constructed by the ready process of dig- ging out the inside clay and burning the surface of the outside, instead of taking the clay for each in a . separate mass, and moulding it and burning it and putting back in its new shape in the hole it came from in its old one. The Indians of this fertile region all cultivated corn and beans and pumpkins, and made sugar of " sugar water" in the early spring, by freezing it during the night and throwing away the ice, which contained no sugar, afterwards boiling it down and graining it. Flint arrow-heads, stone hatchets, chisels, and other implements of the "Stone Age" are found occasionally in the soil and gravel, especially in the southern part of the county, near Glenn's Valley, and these are said by Professor Brown's Report to be made in many cases of talcose slate, a rock found no nearer this region than the Cumberland Mountains or the vicinity of Lake Superior. The eurious forms of some of them make it impossible to determine their use. The Official Survey reports no mounds or earthworks of the mound-builders or other prehistoric race in the county except these relics of the "Stone Age." There may be none now, but forty-five years ago

1 With a reservation of occupancy till 1821.

THE INDIAN OCCUPATION.

there were two considerable mounds in the city near the present line of Morris Street, one near the inter- section of the now nearly effaced canal and Morris Street, and the other a little farther east. The exca- vation of the canal opened one of them, and some complete skeletons and scattered bones and fragments of earthenware were found and taken possession of by Dr. John Richmond, then pastor of the only Bap- tist Church, as well as a practicing physician. The other was gradually plowed down, probably after being opened at the same time the first was, but no record or definite memory settles the question.

For a number of years the ageney of the Indians of Central Indiana was held at Couner's Station, some sixteen miles north of the city and about four beyond the present county line. William Conner, the first settler of the White River Valley, established himself there about 1806, after spending most of his youth and early manhood among the Indians, a num- ber of whose dialects he spoke fluently, and whose names and customs and modes of life he understood as well as if he had been one of the race. He was well acquainted with all the chiefs of the Shawanese, Miamis, Delawares, and other tribes, and was fre- quently employed as an interpreter and guide by Gen. Harrison. He was the guide of the army in the campaign that ended with the battle of Tippe- canoe, and in that made memorable by the "massacre of the Raisin River." He accompanied Gen. Har- rison in the march into Canada that was triumphantly eoneluded by the battle of the Thames and the death of Tecumseh, the greatest of all the Western Indian leaders, except possibly Pontiac.

This particularity of reference to him is not im- pertinent, for his settlement was closely connected with that of the county, and he was long in active business as a merchant in the city. It may, there- fore, be apt as well as not uninteresting, to present the reader a fact almost wholly unknown in connce- tion with the death of Tecumseh. Vice-President Col. Richard M. Johnson, of Kentucky, was long credited with the honor, such as it was, of killing the Shawanese hero, but it was later claimed for one or two others, and the famous question " Who struck Billy Patterson ?" was hardly a burlesque on the idle

babble, oral and printed, that worried the world as to who killed Tecumseh. Mr. Conner could have set- tled the question if he had been disposed to thrust himself in the face of the public. But he was not, and the information comes now from Robert B. Dun- can, a leading lawyer of the city, who was elerk of the county for over twenty years, and when a lad lived with Mr. Conner as early as 1820. To him Mr. Con- ner told what he knew of the death of Tecumseh. He, as usual, was Gen. Harrisou's guide and iuter- preter. After the battle of the Thames was over the body of a chief, evidently of great distinction from his dress and decorations, was found, and Mr. Conner was sent for to identify it. He said it was Tecum- seh's, and he knew the chief well. The situation, as he described it to Mr. Duncan, showed that the chief had been killed with a very small rifle-ball, which fitted a small rifle in the hands of a dead youth, who apparently had been an aid or orderly of a major who lay dead near him, killed by a large ball, appar- ently from Tecumseh's gun. The solution of the case was, probably, that Tecumseh had killed the officer, the boy had killed the chief, and one of the chief's braves had killed the boy.

The payments made to the Indians of this county and the adjacent territory by Mr. Conner at his agency were made in the spring, always in silver and always with striet honesty, but not always with ade- quate security, or any at all, against the payments getting back to the agent's hands in four prices for buttons and beads and calico, and more for whiskey. The process of payment was peculiar and curious. The Indians sat in a circle, eachi family in a separate group. The money came in due proportions of amount and denomination to pay the man in dollars, the wife in half-dollars, and the children in quarters, each getting the same number. Each recipient was given in advance a number of little sticks equal to the number of coins he was to get, and as he received a coin he was to give back a stiek, and when his sticks were all gone he knew he had got all his money.

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History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Part 2

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