History of Vigo county, Indiana, with biographical selections, Part 5

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

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The buffalo was the Indian's pilot to the richest lands and green- est pastures, and they furnished him the food for his subsistence, while their hides were his comfortable bedding and clothing. The buffalo, too, was the white man's unerring engineer, pointing to where he was to found his greatest cities and the natural seats of empire. In crossing the mountains it surveyed the natural routes for the conti- nental railroads, and in crossing the streams, such were its habits, that it would select always the best place to cross, and reaching this point in their voyaging, if the stream were a large one or swollen, they would stop on its bank and apparently go into camp. They would bathe in the river, and loved to wallow in the mud, much after the fashion of our domestic hogs. A mud bath was a great pleasure to a buffalo, and one of these huge animals would work out his mud- hole and roll in it, and finally emerge covered entirely with several inches of the mud plastered over his whole body, except his eyes. This was probably, besides the pleasure to the animal, one way of destroying the parasites on their bodies. Some of the prairies in Texas are known as the hog-wallow prairies, because in traveling over them you are all the time passing from one ancient wallow to an- other. They are so numerous they touch each other for many miles uninterruptedly. Some observers think these hog-wallows were, when the prairies were mostly covered with water, buffalo-wallows. On the great streams and lakes it was the habit of buffaloes to gather in vast herds some time before starting on their migration. As remarked, when they reached a river in their course they halted, apparently dreading to make the plunge to cross. In time hunger would compel them to bestir themselves, when a sudden commotion would call them together, and they would commence to move in a circle, the inner ones, every time they came opposite the water, would crowd the outer ones nearer and nearer, until finally, some bolder one, already pushed into the water, would strike out for the opposite shore, when all would unhesitatingly follow. These tryst- ing places, so to speak, as well as the halting places on the banks of the rivers, have in nearly every instance become the eligible points for men to gather and build great cities. The Indian, in order to gain food, learned to follow the buffalo, and his great pow-

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

wows were in time where that animal had bivouacked, and civilized man, in his movements over the continent, learned that his true civil engineer had been the buffalo and the Indian, and seeing these places, he said, " Here I will stick my Jacob's staff and dwell for- ever."

The buffalo, so important to human life at one time on the con- tinent, has now practically faded away. The great plains no longer are his, his bleaching bones are being gathered and railroaded to the fertilizing factories. Where the buffalo grazed the tall weedy grasses of the glades gave way to the more nutritious buffalo grass, a far superior growth to the original grasses that he found on his first visits. These native animals then had their mission in pre- paring our continent for what it now contains. He has filled that mission, and with little or no protest has gone from the earth. Ex- cept in the menageries or zoological gardens, or in the pastures of some of the western ranches, where may be seen some rather scrawny, unkempt and drooping specimens of his kind, there is but little else to remind us of this once important and numerous species of American animals. Even the buffalo robes once so im- portant a part of a sleigh ride with Katie and Johnnie, will soon be but a memory, remembered and told over by the fire-side by grandmother Katie in her fondest recollections of the days when Johnnie would a-courting-go. Thus in turn everything has its place and time and mission, and then gives way to the coming changes for which it has helped to prepare the way.

The Prairies .- As these were seen by the earliest pioneers to this part of the world, they, too, like the glaciers, buffalo and Indian are rapidly disappearing from the face of the earth. The prairies when they were known only to the buffalo and Indian, in the prairie State of Illinois, and also in Indiana have undergone such changes as would make them an unknown land could one of these ancient denizens revisit the glimpses of the moon. They were vast solitudes of beauty and grandeur. In great level stretches, or anon gently rolling, like the lazy ocean's swells, clothed in their tall waving grasses over which ran the wind waves in sportive moods, the gen- tle rustling of the dry grass as the happy purring of the kitten ca- ressed, with banks of wild flowers rising in ascending parterres, and in the distance a lone tree, as noted in the waste and solitude as the Rock of Gibraltar is to the mariner-the tree a most noted land-mark and guide, by which future comers could direct their course with the same certainty that they were going to their friends in the new country as that that guides the sailor in his course when he looks toward that star that never sets. These prairies are not, as is often done, to be confounded with the glades and savan- nas of the south and of South America. The true prairie extends

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

from the Gulf to the northern limit of the United States, pursuing a northerly course along the Mississippi valley. You may ride for days and weeks over where was once the great prairies of Illinois and Indiana without seeing even a spear of the prairie grass that was once their most distinctive mark. Standing upon the highest elevation you can find, and in every direction you may see grasses, shade trees, orchards, fences and houses, villages and towns, mills with their tall chimneys, factories and great railroad trains scream- ing in their flight, with the long trail of smoke and steam stream- ing out behind. Around you is the busy teeming world, but to your shortened view, where was once the unobstructed expanse is now to be seen nothing of the original prairie land. There was nothing in common in the verdant prairies and the hot and dreary sand deserts of the Old World, where was the quiet of death, save when the sand-storm came with its destroying sweep. In the spring of the year the entrancing vision broke upon the adventurous pioneer. The soft velvet sheen stretching away beyond the vision where it meets the bending horizon; a herd of buffalo in the distance to the left, browsing in picturesque groups; over there is an immense herd of the fleet and graceful deer, the heads of their outlookers thrown high in the air on seeing the approaching white man, and when he comes too close, and all have satisfied their curiosity, they turn and show their short white tails and gallop away, even more graceful and beautiful now than ever. Their soft and liquid eyes have for . the first time looked upon the face of their exterminator-the white man. The air is vocal with the loud trumpeting of the flocks of cranes, either sailing in such close military order or holding their annual spring dance near the borders of the lake, where they court and mate in such fantastic and even comic manner. The wild geese, the swans, and the innumerable ducks, all clamoring their joy over their return from their far distant southern winter quarters to these beautiful trysting places, or mayhap, when his eyes first beheld the true prairie, it was at the hour of one of those witching sunsets so often seen in this western country where all nature seems to be so enlarged and expanded. Of such a sunset the eyes that have ever looked can never forget. The burnished sky and the mottled, fleecy clouds seem to have caught fire with the prairie 'landscape beauties, and the vast painted curtain of heaven is being slowly unrolled, and at the end of the vision the beauties of heaven and the prairies are interwoven and mingled until the beholder is lost in a dream that he would fain have linger on forever.

No wizard of the pencil has ever painted the primitive prairie. He never saw them in their pristine grandeur, and surely never saw added thereto a grand sunset. If he did he turned away awe- struck and heartbroken, because here was nature that defied him, mocked him in even his highest efforts.

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

Utilitarian man came, and with ruthless hand destroyed these incomparable beauties of nature. He has not, of course, interfered with the sunsets, but such was the primitive prairie that its beauties stretched out in such expanse that they met in the vision the bend- ing heavens, and herein was destroyed a large part of the finest effects of the old-time sunsets of the west.

Fires .- In respect to the old-time prairie fires, there is the same complete change that there has been in the general face of these richly carpeted landscapes, of which modern people will, or perhaps have, lost all accurate knowledge.

Judge Beckwith, in his history of the Wabash valley, under- takes to say that the most of the accounts of the terrors of these fires is fiction, or rather exaggerations; that the fires, as a rule, were tame affairs, and if a man had plowed around his field, or there was a beaten, bare road about it, the fire was about as harm- less as a political torchlight procession. A good deal of this is true after the native grasses had gone and the short grasses had taken their place, and at the same time there were no strong winds prevailing to send the great sheets of ragged flame scurrying over the tops of the grass, and every moment were adding force to the crackling, roaring furies.

I was an eye-witness to the second great Chicago fire-1874. I have also seen prairie fires in Illinois and in Kansas. Here was the burning of a great city on one hand, all its horrors intensified by the presence of thousands of people fleeing there in motley crowds, bearing on their backs such of their effects as they could snatch up as they ran, but far more horrible still were others caught in the tops of tall buildings and the eager flames rushing upon them, more pittiless even than dancing devils-the cries of distress shrieked out above the din and roar-the weeping mothers parted in the rush from their children, angry men struggling and trampling upon the weaker, the wild and the drunken, the slums and the sewers, the thugs and the thieves, the refined and delicate, all emptied into the streets together to fight for life or to add to the horrors of the moment. A burning city is indeed a grewsome sight. I was riding with a friend in a buggy near the town of Wellington, Kas., on a beautiful sunny day in the fall of 1879. The usual southwest Kansas zephyrs were racing over that prairie State at something like about the pace of fifty or more miles an hour. In that region of the country, for days and weeks and months, with a clear, brassy sky, the winds do "blow and crack their cheeks." At the time spoken of above it was doing probably a little better than usual, and the sear and yellow grasses were ready for the fiery sacrifice. We noticed two men plowing and burning cornstalks or rubbish in a small field we were passing, when my friend observed that it was

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

dangerously windy to be using fire in the open air. But between the fire and the grass was plowed ground of nearly a hundred yards in width, and then came the road, which at that point was very wide, at least 200 feet. We had hardly passed when a blazing shuck had burned loose from the stock, and caught up by the wind was carried to the grass, which caught instantly. The man saw it, and unhitching one of the plow horses, without even taking time to put on a saddle, he mounted and at full speed started for his neighbor toward whom he knew the fire was moving. It was a race between the man and the horse and the scudding great flame tongue that was licking and blackening the face of the earth. When the man reached his nearest neighbor, about a mile distant, the fire had just leaped up the sides of his neighbor's grain stacks, and soon everything, excepting the cabin containing the family, was a part of the blackened ashes in the fire's course. The wide space of bare ground around the house enabled the family to save themselves and some of their domestic animals.

But a few miles from where I saw this prairie fire start I was shown, just below the northern line of the Indian Territory, where a prairie fire had surrounded a large drove of horses, and all per- ished in the holocaust. The topography of the country, the varia- tions of the winds and the course of the streams, would shape the action of the fires often. In cases like that mentioned, the spot where the fire starts, a long tongue of flame seems to shoot out like a race-horse at the tap of the bell, but this more slowly widens at the base, and where it burns against the wind it is very slow in its movements, and hence the great conflagration in one place is speed- ing away like a fiery rocket; in the other it may lazily smoulder or flare up here and there, but everywhere it is gathering energy, circling and winding as the winds may compel, and sometimes a wide circle is thus formed that all at once will flare up like angry fire demons and rush together at a common center with a roar and anger be- neath whose hot breath nothing can live a moment.

Among the early settlers in the prairie country, every family, in the dangerous seasons of the year from prairie fires, stood guard and watch for this destroying angel. They made roads, and also plowed about their farms. These roads and furrows were chiefly valuable, when the warning came, as a base from which to fight fire with fire. One party, with a wisp of burning grass, would set fire to the grass on the side of the furrow toward the coming fire, while others, with wisps of hazel-brush, generally, would follow to beat out any of the fire that was not burning toward the wind. At those points, too, where the fire was not running straight before the wind, the people, with boards or brush wisps, could often fight out the fire and prevent it from slowly working around to a point of vant-

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

age, where it could again start with the wind and go seething and roaring away like mad demons. The prairie fire-serpent, as though filled with devilish cunning, is full of deceit and deceptions in its various movements.

The " burnt prairie" were spots frequently designated in the old- time descriptions of the country. A prairie burned somewhat late in the spring was the chosen pasture-ground of the domestic stock and the deer, and where but a few weeks ago was such blackened and desolate ruin, the warm spring rains have washed away, and the earth's surface is fretted with multitudinous sprouting of the velvet sheen that is again to cover and beautify nature. How mother nat- ure binds up the ugly wounds of war and covers the fire-ruins, and the dews, the sun and the winds kiss again and again the new life in the new and beautiful world.

Waters stood upon the broad prairies-wide expanses, covered by the rainfall and a wide, sluggish, shallow stream at the roots of the grass, could be only noticed by the traveler by the different grass-growths. Ponds of standing water of wide extent, and on the hillsides sipes (pronounced "seeps ") were frequent. Some- times in the wet spring you could walk on the tough sod, and by jumping on it could shake the apparently floating surface for many feet around. As civilization mastered the wild nature of the coun- try, a natural drainage was formed, and the prairies have continually become more and more dry and free of standing water. The most of the ponds are gone, and places where now old men were wont when boys to fish and swim-taking the plow-horses sometimes, and muddying the waters and thus catching the fish, are now plowed over and crops are grown. In the conditions they were found by the first settlers they were supposed and were uninhabitable. Their value as feeding grounds for domestic animals was well understood, but for men, these old fellows wanted dry land. The change that was soon brought by occupation invited the experiment of the bold- est to venture out upon them and commence their little improve- ments-sometimes in sod houses and often with sod fences. The people dreaded the winter winds on these unsheltered prairie seas, and at first they probably supposed that an ordinary house would not protect their families. They soon learned better, and the little " clearings " that were the marks of the earliest comers were soon deserted for the prairie farms.

The great pests of the prairies were the air-darkening swarms of "greenheads "-a terrible blood-sucking parasitic fly, that at certain seasons would rise up from the grass and in great numbers light upon a horse or cow brute, and in a few hours kill it unless the animal could reach the timber, where they would not follow. These flies, with their bright green heads, were not much larger than a

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

honey bee-a little longer, though not so heavy. They did not fly after sundown, and never in the morning until the dew was gone. Travelers often would have to camp in the edge of the tim- ber and wait for night before they could attempt to cross the wide prairie that was before them.

Origin of the Prairies .- As to the origin or cause of the prai- ries there is a divided opinion, one side holding that the fires had driven back the timber growth, and as firing the grass was one of the favorite modes of hunting by the Indians and the first white hunters and trappers, this theory has much of good reason to back it. On the other hand, for it seems the better reason, it is held that it was the waters and not the fire that made the prai- ries. It was natural that these beautiful meadow lands should excite much curiosity, and in time speculation as to their producing causes. The famous "old ranger," Gov. Reynolds, and Chief Jus- tice Caton, both of Illinois, and early settlers and close observers, espoused the cause of fire, while on the other side was the more scientific and able investigator, Prof. Lesquereux. The latter gave much time and travel to his investigation of the subject, and in his published works he sums up as follows: " All the prairies of the Mississippi valley have been formed by the slow recessions of waters of various extent; first transformed into swamps and in the process of time drained and dried, and that the high rolling prai- ries and those of the bottoms along the rivers as well are all the result of the same cause and form one whole, indivisible system." The professor maintained that the ulmic acid in the prairie soil prevented the timber from ever encroaching on the prairie bound- aries, even after the fires had long ceased to play their part; that a flowing stream of water is always higher in the center than at the edges and this would cause the coarse particles in the water to be deposited at the sides and this coarse material favored tree growth; that the immediate banks of a stream are usually higher ground than that back a short distance and these two causes readily account for tree growth along the banks of the streams. He found prairies along the northern Mississippi and confluent streams in every stage of formation, and could easily trace out every step of the slow proc- ess; that all this part of the world is a recent appearance above the waters, and from being all prairie at one time the appearance of timber growths always commenced along the higher banks of the river amid the coarser deposits and extended from there, first in the form of stiff and woody grasses and vines and then the small shrubs and the hazel and the sumac; that while it is true the transplanted trees will all flourish in the prairies, yet simply to plant the seed there without disturbing the soil, they could not grow; that in the undisturbed peaty prairie soil the roots of the tree could get no air

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

and would smother. I was born on the edge of one of the great Illi- nois prairies more than fifty years ago, and I knew of no locality where in the natural operation the timber has perceptibly en- croached upon the prairie domain. My recollection and observa- tion do not tally with those of Gov. Reynolds or Judge Caton en- tirely, and yet I can remember where the hazel thickets have spread under heavy pasturage by domestic animals. Possibly these in time would develop the true timber growths. After following both sides and calling up my own recollection, I would incline to the judgment that there may be truth on both sides, and that nature so bountiful in all she does, may have used both methods in perfecting her marvelous works. It is not at all necessary that because one theory may be true that the other must perforce be false. Nature apparently in most things wastes her forces as well as resources, but this is evidently only apparent to our imperfect understanding.

The Indians .- Almost identically with the spot occupied by Terre Haute was once a Wea Indian village. These were here in 1811 when Gen. Harrison came with his army of occupation, and probably this fact determined the location of Fort Harrison.

The Indian knew nothing definite of his remote ancestors. He had his traditions and wild, crude legends, and some of them he perhaps believed himself and others he cherished chiefly as we do epic poems. They were the exploits of great hunters and scalpers, something, no doubt, of the crude idea of our school boys in their Friday afternoon piping declamations about " Alexander's paw ! "- as they would gather up their pudgy fists and beat the air in the belief that that man-slayer went at his bloody work with bare fists. The In- dians were merely wild children, their history was unwritten, and was but dreams of fighting and killing their fellow-man. Their highest pleasures were in the prolonged and most exquisite torture, not necessarily of their enemies, but of their captives-simply be- cause they had them in their power, and after the victim was tor- tured to death, then to eat him was the crowning privilege. Their women were mere slaves and drudges, somewhat lower in their es- timation than their mangy dogs. These Indians that stand so patiently in front of tobacco shops are much cleaner and more in- telligent looking than the originals as found running wild all over this country when the white man came.

All over the habitable world are evidences of the coming and passing away of nations. Birth, growth and final decay it seems is much the history of peoples as it is of the individual. All roads once led to Rome. And although this was in comparatively modern times, yet now these great works, paved highways and stone bridges are but wrecks and broken remains of that once powerful nation. The angel of death, it seems, extended his shadowing

HISTORY OF VIGO COUNTY.

wings and the "mistress of the world " bowed to fate, and the owls beat upon the casements of their palaces, and the wild beasts lick their cubs where once was only the busy feet of men. In the sweep of time the nations come and go as the ripples chase each other on the resting waters. Birth and death and a little short in- tervening struggle for existence is the be all and the end all, until existence itself is but change.

The numerous as well as powerful tribes of red savages found in possession of the continent have practically gone forever. The original wild Indian is now a memory. He has not passed out from his wild state and been civilized into a changed and higher exist- ence, but before the pale faces he has been pushed from the Atlan- tic to the Pacific and has sung his death song and laid down to die. Some few miserable remnants of once great and dominating tribes have mingled their blood with the strange white races, and after being driven from place to place are now in the Indian Territory-the nation's wards and dependants. Those that clung to their clouts and blankets and refused the clothes and fashions of civilization were driven to the lava beds of the western mountain fastnesses and shot down like dangerous wild beasts or hemmed in and starved to death.

What a numerous race of Indians was here but a century or two ago. How little will soon remain to mark their ever having existed ! The white man met their cunning warriors in the track- less woods and slew them. When the last miserable, dirty beggar of them has departed what will there remain, except the words of the historian, to perpetuate his memory? Nothing. As a people they had petrified in their ignorant savagery. He could neither lift himself up, nor could his nature be elevated to that higher plane where lives a nobler humanity. He has left behind no thought, no invention and no work of any value to the world or that deserves preservation. He was nothing, and therefore has left nothing. Ignorant, cunning, cruel and excessively filthy, he was neither useful nor beautiful. His wild nature could not be re- claimed, except by adulteration of his blood with other races. Born in the wild wood, rocked on the wave, his one redeeming trait was his unconquerable love of liberty. He loved his wild liberty far better than life. He would not be a slave. Had he preferred existence and slavery to death, he might have lived on in peace with the white man. Indeed, he might now have had the ballot in his hand and enjoyed the fawning of our demagogues, a very hero indeed about election times, instead of the wandering beggar in rags as we see him. But this was not his nature. He would be free as the eagle of the crags, and in his choice between slavery and extinction he never halted. He met his fate with an

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History of Vigo county, Indiana, with biographical selections, Part 5

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