History of Vigo county, Indiana, with biographical selections, Part 4

Author: Bradsby, Henry C
Publication date: 1891
Publisher: Chicago : S.B. Nelson & co.
Number of Pages: 1032

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Loess forms a capping to the drift on the high ridges, and is from twenty to twenty-five feet thick.

Building Stone .- The sandstone above and below Coal L is sometimes found of good thickness and sufficiently firm and durable to be used for making foundations to small buildings. Good dura- ble building rock is found in the bluffs of Coal creek, Fayette township; it underlies Coal L. It is bluish-gray, fine grained sandstone, and was at one time quarried by Mr. McQuilkin. The layers are thin, seldom reaching a foot in thickness. The stone has a fine ring under the hammer, and would look well in a building.

An impure limestone is found above Coal N and below L. It has no commercial value.

Brick and Fire Clay .- The clay found under the coal seams in the county is suitable for making coarse jugs, milk crocks, roof tile and drain tile.

Clay, suitable for brick, may be had almost everywhere, but is especially good on the ridges or uplands.

Petroleum .- Three wells were bored for oil in the early seventies. Oil was found in the upper Niagara beds. The second well furnished from two to four barrels of moderately heavy oil in twenty-four hours. It did not flow from the top, and the low prices caused the well to be closed. The third well was on the bank of the river in the city limits, but little oil was found, but it discharged a vast column of sulphuretted hydrogen water, similar in quality to that which flowed from the first well in the yard of the Terre Haute House. The temperature of the well of Mr. Miller, on the river, was 81º Fahrenheit. It is a saline sulphur water, contains a large amount of common salt, some glauber and some epsom salts, lime, magnesia and iron. There is a copious escape of carburetted hydrogen, car- bonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen. It possesses fine medicinal properties, and is particularly beneficial in diseases of the skin and some forms of rheumatism.

Iron Ore .- The bluish-gray shales over Coal L, on the west side of Wabash river, have disseminated through them irregular layers of clay iron-stone. Where the stratas have been laid bare by the

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

washing away of the soil on the sides of the hills, the iron-stone drops to the bottom of the ravines, where it is found in quantities. Iron-stone is very abundant. The old Indian furnace in Vermil- lion county, when in blast, obtained its supply of iron from these shales.

Timber .- Vigo county contains the usual varieties of tree growth found in this latitude.

From Prof. E. T. Cox's geological reports 'we learn that the coal fields of the State cover an area of 7,000 square miles, with a total depth of twelve seams, ranging from nought to 300, and aver- aging eighty feet below the surface. Five of these seams, wherever met, are workable, varying from two and a half to eleven feet thick. Block or splint coal prevails in an area of 600 square miles. This coal is used in the blast just as it comes from the mine, no coking required. It is rich of carbon, free of sulphur and phos- phorous, and suited to making Bessemer steel and the highest metallurgic processes. It burns without coking, in a ruddy flame, much after the manner of hickory wood, to a minimum of white ash. The economical geology is more fully treated in the part of this work treating of the resources of Vigo county.

CHAPTER II.

PRE-HISTORIC RACES IN VIGO COUNTY.

THE MOUND BUILDERS-THE TOLTECS-THE FLORA AND FAUNA-THE BUFFALO-THE PRAIRIES-INDIANS.

TN the Old World modern man is busy uncovering lost cities. Dim tradition of some of these connect them with what may be called the more modern peoples, who lived their day upon the earth, grew and flourished and then passed away, leaving only these indistinct marks behind them, concerning which we may only con- jecture. We now, by these discoveries, begin to realize that with the lost nations are to be classed the lost arts. Whether these un- known people reached a civilization that petrified and thus slowly became extinct, or whether some cataclysm of nature struck them in the zenith of their glory and progress we can not know. There are some evidences that such are the laws of nature that when any portion of the earth's surface reaches a certain point in animal life,

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

that nature relieves itself by destroying all life, and then com- mences at the foundations to again build up anew, simply follow- ing the inevitable law of change, and evolving that particular vege- table and animal life that the changed environments demand.

In the marches of the army, 1861-65, through Tennessee, there were some interesting evidences of the natural order of the changes in vegetable life. Here were forests that may be considered among the oldest on the continent. At one point a cyclone had cut a swath about 300 yards wide and had mowed down the old and the young nearly as clean as a reaper cuts the wheat. Some of these wind storms had been so long ago that the track of the storm could only be followed by the distinct and different tree growth that had taken the place of the primeval forests, and this was only visible to the close observer.

At other points the early settlers had denuded large sections of the forests, converting them into charcoal for their primitive iron mills. Here none of the old growths of the forest sprouted up, and the young took the places of the old, but in every instance noticed, where had been oaks, elms, walnut and the usual hardwood growths as well as vines, were found pines and different growths of the evergreens as though the ground had been carefully pre- pared and these seeds had been sown broadcast.

The processes of nature are slow, but is it not possible that it is ever toward change-the beds of the seas to become mountains and the tall mountain peaks to again become the ocean beds.

The archeologists say that there were races of men on this con- tinent before the Indians. This is their general conclusion, yet there are some who insist that the mounds and the discovered forts, battle-grounds and cities, were all the work of the ancient Indians, and when we found them in the thirteenth century they were in the slow processes of decay, and had the white man never come, the Indians would in time have been extinguished. We found in every tribe traditions, but these were the idlest whims and silly figments of the brain as a rule. Their mental horizon was so limited that their imagination could not conceive of any other existence than on this earth, and their future or heaven was the "happy hunting ground " just over the next hill or mountain.

Without entering upon this discussion, it is enough to say that the best authorities tell us that there was a people once here, dis- tinct from the Indians, and they called them the " Mound Builders." Exactly what they erected them for is unknown, or at least conject- ural.

The chain of mounds, commencing in Canada, run in a south- westerly direction into South America. There are evidences, espe- cially in the larger ones, of the same methods of construction, and

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

whether for worship, war or the glory of their chief rulers, the same general idea may be followed out in them all.

In nearly all are found human remains, and at one time the con- clusion was quite general that they were built for burial purposes. But the fact that the modern Indians found them well adapted for this purpose, they no doubt appropriated them with the same indiffer- ence as to the original design that the pioneer farmers plowed over many a one and planted his crops thereon. A lone grave may now be seen on one of the noted mounds west of this place in Illinois, surrounded with a neat white painted picket fence, where the family buried their boy who was killed by a runaway horse a few years ago. And had not this mound become private property in actual possession, there is but little doubt that the early pioneers would have first used it as a burial place for their dead, as the surround- ing country at that day was flat and marshy.

· Again, there is no sufficient evidence that all the ancient forts, mounds and parallels were constructed by the same people or in the same age. In lower Wisconsin and upper Indiana and Illinois are mounds-generally small however-that were, no doubt, made as de- fenses in war by the Indians found here when America was discovered -that is, their ancestors,

The first of these discovered in Vigo county were near Fort Harrison, and are mentioned in Pidgeon's history of the fort. They were soon occupied by the farmers, and being small were plowed down until now the place they occupied can only be pointed out as . gentle swells on the surface of the land. People pass and repass over them, wholly unconscious of their ever existing as artificial mounds. These were in the prairie just north of Terre Haute. In Fayette township and along the east line of the county are mounds, and many interesting remains have been found.

The accounts of the Toltecs as found by the Spaniards in Mexico, their customs and manner of the mound building have led some of our archeologists to conclude that originally that was the dominat- ing people of the Western Hemisphere, and that from the tropics they made excursions, and finally held possession of the country northeast to the Atlantic. A group of noted mounds in Arkansas, a short distance below Little Rock, on what was once the bank of the Arkansas river, but is now several miles from that stream on Horse Shoe lake, is called the Toltec mounds, and the railroad sta- tion near it is Toltec. There are two very large mounds as the cen- tral figure and clusters of smaller ones about their bases, with dis- tinct canal or water-way marks enclosing in a circle of seven miles the mounds. All are situated and constructed with due reference to the points of the compass and geometric lines.

The only evidences to my mind furnished us by these great

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

works are that they were made by a people of a low grade of civil- ization, and that here was once a numerous population mostly sunken in gross ignorance and slavery. These works, representing so much labor to construct, are the evidences that it was all unpaid labor. The same lesson can be read in the pyramids and the sphynx and the more modern Alhambra and the Kremlin, intended to per- petuate the immortality and glory of some ruler who was simply a vile usurper and who sacrificed the liberty and lives of the people in order to perpetuate his miserable memory on earth. But time has been more kind to their fame than were the tyrants to themselves. Their huge monuments still standing, it has blotted their names completely from the human mind, and to us they are as insignificant as that of the poorest slave that toiled upon these mounds. That is about all the moral or lesson there is to the most of these great useless works or mausoleums found in the world and so much written and spoken of in modern history. The most of them are the evidences of slave-labor-nothing more-the people sodden in the ignorant be- lief that their ruler is such by the divine order and by the same token they are properly slaves. Educated to this hard fate from the cradle, they toil and perish, and educate their descendants as a high religious duty to follow in their footsteps.

Some able archæologists believe there are indications about the largest of these mounds and earthworks that point at least to three different races of men who have had to do with them. These are in the human remains that have been buried in them. Those of this faith do not believe the Indians or any of that nomadic race had aught to do with their building. The engineering, as well as the tools that must have been used, indicates a degree of civilization never reached by any known tribe. The evidences of patient and persistent labor and the skill in directing it tend to establish the theory that they were made by a sendentary people, with consider- able knowledge of agriculture. They believe that at least two of these races of men are pre-historic, that they have passed away, total wrecks on the stream of time, without word or script to their successors except the mute story of crania, implements and mounds. Who were they? What were they? And when did they live? Are questions we may ask in vain.

Mammoth and Mastodon .- In nearly all parts of Indiana have been found the remains of the mammoth, the greatest abundance in the central and southern portion. So long has it been since these tropical monsters lived and flourished here that only the most com- pact of their bones, such as teeth, jaws and thigh bones are the ones time has not destroyed, although these are all found in marshy and miry places, some of them in peaty ground, and it is wholly owing to this fact that we have any traces at all of these giant land

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

animals. They too, like the most ancient of the Mound Builders, all came after the glacial period. In the stomach of one found recently in Illinois were the evidences that it was a cotemporary of the present flora of this part of the country. The careful exami- nation of the contents of what must have been in the animal's stom- ach when it died, demonstrated this fact. This animal must have lived long after the others of which we find some of the tusks and teeth much decomposed, as there was found in place several of the larger bones of the body. Some thirty different animal remains of these monsters have been found in the State. In the close dark clays where these remains were preserved through the long lapse of time are the evidences that the preserving deposit was made in the Lucustral epoch, which followed the glacial period. At that time the fresh waters covered the greater portions of the continent, and the great sluggish rivers were the channels of the rainfall-far greater then than now-in its course to the ocean-something after the manner of the Amazon as now to be seen in South America. In these great streams were vast eddies and whirlpools, and these de- posited the peculiar clays in which were preserved the remains not only of the mammoth, but of the megalonix, bison and the caste- roides.

Some of the best preserved teeth of the mammoth were found in Vigo county, the smaller teeth weighing five and six pounds. The position of the remains when found, as well as the boggy soil. plainly indicated that these monsters in their search for water had sunk in the mire and perished.

Animals of such immense proportions-giants indeed-are of course always comparatively few in number. And then too how general conditions here must have changed from then to now. The great rainfalls and the deep tangled jungles that were necessary to furnish such animals the quantities of food daily necessary for them. If there were no other changes than in the vegetable growths we can well understand with the vegetable world we now have these monsters would soon have perished of hunger. They browsed mostly upon the trees and shrubbery, and with the wet and shaky nature of the soil at that time it must have been true that the earth trembled as they walked upon it.

The remains that we find of these animals are enough for the skilled anatomist to tell us all about their size and their food and habits; even to draw satisfactory pictures of them.

Glaciers .- These slowly flowing rivers or seas of ice were once constant visitors to even Vigo county. Our idea of ice generally is that it is something hard and brittle, with no more flow in its nat- ure than there is in a standing tree, house or rock, and yet it is a fact that the glaciers are flowing rivers or oceans of solid ice. The

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

glacial rocks, that is rocks worn and ground into smooth rounded form, are found plentifully in this part of the country. In Mr. Scovill's office I was shown a glacial rock, and inquiring as to the peculiar ridge or undulating form of wear its surface presented, I learned that it was a wall rock. On the prairies are found fre- quently large and small specimens of a rounded and worn hard rock, which is the common bowlder. These were seized by the mov- ing ice in the northern lake regions and carried to where the south- ern sun unlocked them and they were left where found. Some of these rocks have been beneath the vast body of moving ice and pushed along over the country until one-third of the stone has been worn away and presenting a smooth flat surface.

In the northern temperate zone nearly all over the earth is found these glacial rocks. One was found just west of this in Illinois twenty-two and a half feet below the earth's surface. It is proba- ble that where it lay was the ground's surface when it was dropped there by the ice.

There are moving glaciers now in Switzerland, and these have been studied with much interest by Prof. Tyndall. He measured the annual flow of one of these and found it moved at the rate of over sixty feet in a year. It is estimated that in some cases the ice was as much as a mile in thickness, and the tremendous power nec- essary to move such an immense and resisting body is wholly incal- culable. It must have been something like nature's resistless power of expansion and contraction.

These crystal ships were the first that ever came to this part of the world. No commander walked their glittering decks. How their sides gleamed and sparkled in the winter sun, as beautiful as they could be remorseless as they pushed and ground and crushed all in their way. They literally reformed the face of the earth in their progress, making river beds where once had been the mount- ain rocks, and changing the course of rivers. Just across the river west from Terre Haute is the noted gravel bank of the Van road. This has furnished the road ballast nearly from end to end, and the supply is far from being yet exhausted. This was brought from the far north, and at this point the ice melting, the gravel was dropped, and over the great bed is the slowly accumulating soil. This was a part of the cargo of the crystal ship-appropriately enough it may be considered the ship's ballast.

These ice visitations were no doubt a necessary part of the slow preparation of the earth for the coming of man. But as there are no evidences that they in any of their trips passed south of the Ohio river, the necessary part they performed in the preparatory work is not so manifest. They moved from north to south, and before their coming it is probable that the great rivers mostly flowed east or

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

west. At least the beds of dead rivers so far found are crossed by the present streams at right angles, showing how complete af some time the topography of the country has been changed.

One of the conclusions that follows an investigation of the gla- ciers, is, that it not only takes a long time to make and finish off a world, but there is a great deal of work in the operation from first to last. If we had to hire men to do it, like we make railroads and other things that we consider great works, the task, even when the finishing touches were only left to do, would be quite appalling to man's feeble efforts and abilities. For instance, when a man has a piece of mechanism either in wood or metal, at that stage that the real work is all done, then he proceeds to polish, smooth and finish it. These last deft touches, while they add nothing perhaps really to the value of the thing itself, yet they give its chief beauty to it. Let us suppose the glaciers were the sand paper and pol- isher of a completed world in the rough. At this stage our little whirling globe looked at from our nearest neighbor planet, no doubt would have appeared very nice and smooth, and one of us, had we been commissioned to accept or reject the work, and make a final settlement with the contractor, would have found nothing omitted, nothing further required to fit it for man's appearance. But fort- unately there was a Great Architect who knew far better than could we, even with all our books and education. It was really a very dreary world in fact. For instance, there was, it is said, a geolog- ical age, in which it rained all the time. The waters came in cease- less torrents, and striking the hot earth, immediately ascended as vapor, and cooling formed again into rain, until it was one unceasing round of vapors going up and rain descending. Men in such a shower would in a few generations at least become web-footed. These rains beat upon the rocks-the first land that was uplifted above the waters, and commenced the work of wearing them down, pulverizing their particles and carrying them off into the waters. This was the way the beginning of the soils now resting upon the earth's rocks had their commencement.

But long after the rains had ceased their constant down-pour, the waters had begun to recede from the land, when the continents had risen dripping from the waters somewhat in the form that we know them on our maps, the land was nearly covered with great slug- gish streams, so immense that our greatest rivers now would be to them as mere rivulets, and immense fresh water lakes and dreary miles of water-covered lagoons were on every hand. It was to change, or perhaps better it did change, these conditions and reform the rivers' channels, narrowing and deepening their beds, and accelerat- ing their flow, that was chiefly, no doubt, effected by the operations of the glaciers.

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

It seems that there was one age of the world that has not been properly separated as a distinct period by the learned investigators. There was a time when the waters and the land seemed to vie with each other in the production of animals of immense size-the levi- athans of the deep and the mammoths of the land. As life com- menced in its lowest and most ephemeral form, infinitessimal in size but infinite in numbers, it continued in its progress and slowly passed from the water to dry land. This was the order of develop- ment. The higher order took to the open air for existence, while the waters continued to experiment and evolve new forms, some to gradually leave the water, and others to reach certain degrees of advance but remain in the water. The earliest forms of life seem to have made up for their insignificance in their rapidly mul- tiplying numbers. The waters being by so far the greater portion of the earth's surface, it is but natural to find in them animals of greater size than were ever produced on the land. And yet, as we have seen from the remains found in Vigo county, these land ani- mals were of immense size. The one that had tusks nine feet long, for instance, and his smallest teeth weighed five pounds, would, no doubt, if stood up by the side of Barnum's Jumbo, have made that prize monster sink into the comparative insignificance of a yearling calf. And yet, this monster in turn, by some of the sea monsters, would have shrunken about equally to Jumbo in his contest in size.

When the limit in size had been reached, it seems that then nat- ure had satisfied itself in this respect and commenced the work of a better and finer animal organization. This improvement must have been in time in the nervous systems given, as the lower we go in animal life the less and less do we find these developed. The nerves were gathered into ganglions and finally they were perfected into the brain, and in time came thought from this brain organization, until we find the perfected animal structure in man-the fruitage of all these ages and ages of the earth's preparation for his recep- tion.

The Buffalo .- When our continent was discovered, these were the most important animals found. They seem to have come as a necessary part of the prairies and savannas of the west. They have faded away, much like their congener, the wild Indians, before the ever advancing step of the white man-that busy destroyer as well as builder, with his tireless energies and sleepless vigilance.

One characteristic of the buffalo was its nature to gather in such vast herds in their yearly migrations from the south to the north- west and back again. Moving over hill and plain in countless num- bers, what a magnificent spectacle they often presented. With heads erect, their strongest bulls bravely leading, knowing their course in their long travels, and nothing could swerve them from

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

their line of march. These leaders never looked back, but knew their trusting legions were closely following, and by their very numbers were as resistless as the angry sea. For some years after the building of the Union Pacific Railroad it was no unusual oc- currence for a train to come in contact with one of these migrating herds. As they moved along in solid column, looking neither to the right nor the left, simply following their leaders, the train of cars simply had to stop and give them the right of way, and could again go forward only when the last one had passed the track.

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History of Vigo county, Indiana, with biographical selections, Part 4

Author: Bradsby, Henry C Publication date: 1891 Publisher: Chicago : S.B. Nelson & co. Number of Pages: 1032

Author: Bradsby, Henry C
Publication date: 1891
Publisher: Chicago : S.B. Nelson & co.
Number of Pages: 1032