USA > Indiana > Northwestern Indiana from 1800 to 1900; or, A view of our region through the nineteenth century > Part 23
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* General Packard.
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first and still is first in its manifestations of the re- finement and even of the aristocratic tendency of cities. It has some noble Christian men and wonien, cultivated and refined. It has a good many citizens now of foreign birth. It contains probably alone of all our towns, a Soldiers' Monument.
CHAPTER XXII.
EARLY TRAVELS.
In a little book of seventy-two pages, called "Jour- nal of Travels, Adventures, and Remarks, of Jerry Church," printed at Harrisburg, 1845, belonging to E. W. Dinwiddie, of Plum Grove, some interesting statements concerning a few of our localities are found. The writer, Jeremiah Church, born in Brain- bridge, New York, evidently very eccentric and an adventurer, as he himself allows, spent many years, apparently between 1820 and 1835 or 1840 in various adventures and speculations in the then West and in the South.
He appears to have been honest in his dealings and truthful in his narratives. A little confusion exists in his dates where he gives 1830 after he has given as the year 1831. Considering the latter the correct date, some extracts from the journal are now quoted. In company with his brother he had been speculating in lands at Ottawa, in Illinois, laying out town lots on government land, and he says: "We then prepared to leave, and hired a man with a yoke of black oxen and a wagon, to take us to Chicago, distant eighty miles, which we travelled in two days and a half-two nights camped out. At last we arrived in front of a hotel, in the City of Chicago (which at that time con- tained about half a dozen houses, and the balance
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Indian wigwams), with our ox stage. We stayed there a week or two with the French and Indians, and en- joyed ourselves very well. We then took passage in a wagon that was going to Michigan through the Indian country, without any road. We followed round the beach of the lake; camped out the first night and slept on a bed of sand. The next morning we came to an old Frenchman's house, who had a squaw for a wife. They had three daughters, and beautiful girls they were, and entertained us very well. My brother almost fell in love with one of the fel- low's girls, and I had hard work to persuade him along any farther. He told me that he thought he felt a good deal like 'an Ingen,' and if he had an 'In- gen gal' for his wife, he thought he could be one. However, I persuaded him to travel on."
This place seems evidently to have been Bailly- town, although the Porter County annalist assigns to this family "four beautiful and accomplished daughters" named Eleanor, Frances, Rose, Hortense.
The journal continues : "We went on through the Pottawatomie nation until we came to a place called the door-prairie. There we stopped and tried to buy a piece of land for the purpose of laying out a town at that place. We could not get any title but an Indian one, and we concluded that would not do, so we travelled on." They reached Detroit at length, "a very beautiful place."
This singular traveller and adventurer went back from Detroit after a little time with a man who had a horse and wagon, and he says: "We travelled the same road that my brother and I had travelled
* ** * so that in our route we came to the old Frenchman's house where the Indian girls were, and
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as my brother was not with me, I concluded that I would play 'Ingen' awhile myself."
They staid three days, by permission of the fam- ily, rested, hunted, and then made a new start for Chicago. According to the journal "It was fifty miles from the old Frenchman's house to the Callamink where the first white man lived on the road. He had a half-breed Indian wife and kept the ferry across the Callamink River at its mouth." They expected to reach his house the first day, but their horse was tired out. They camped, sleeping in a broken canoe, and reached the ferry at ten the next day. Jerry Church was almost famished. No food was to be had till a wagon returned from the town. He shot a blackbird. The woman cooked it and made him some coffee. He made out a breakfast. The man would take no pay, but he gave the woman a dollar, and they went on to Chicago.
Business soon again took him back to the door- prairie, and on his return to Chicago he took a slightly different route. He says, "I was then about twelve miles from the Dismaugh Creek, which emp- ties into the Michigan lake where Michigan City now stands. That was in the year 1830." This narrative is evidently trustworthy, but this date should surely be 1831. He now had a horse and peddler's wagon or carriage, and a young man and the young man's sis- ter wished to go through with him to Chicago. The sister was on horseback, the two men in the wagon or carriage. "The first day we cleared a road and got down near to the lake and encamped." So the jour- nal reads. To the young lady the carriage was given for a "bed room," and the two men slept under it. The next day they went on. "We struck the lake
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where Michigan City now stands, ours being the first carriage of any kind that had been there; and there was not a white man living within twelve miles of the place at that time. We then took the beach and fol- lowed it to Chicago. We had to camp out three nights." So this time he avoided or missed Bailly- town.
Yet once more this peculiar man, Jerry Church, peddler, trader, speculator, showman, town and city founder, crossed this strip of then new country. He and his brother were now at Indianapolis. There they traded for three town lots. Then they bought a "cream-colored horse and a small red, square box wagon and took the national road for Michigan lake, the mud about two feet deep, and as black as tar."
"We travelled through a pleasant part of the State of Indiana, so far as land is concerned, until we ar- rived at Michigan City, situate on the lake shore, where three years before I had slept under the wagon, and the young lady who was with us slept in it. There were no inhabitants within nine miles of it at that time, and now it was a considerable town, and called a city." As in August, 1833, the first log cabin, so far as known, was built in Michigan City, this visit must have been in 1834 rather than in 1833, and so the conjecture that 1830, as the date of the first car- riage track made there, should be 1831 is confirmed.
Misprints in dates are by no means uncommon. One more extract, as again Michigan City is a starting point. "We there took the beach of the Michigan lake and followed it to Chicago, and there we found a large town built up in three years ; for it was only three years since we were there with the black oxen
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and wagon, and at that time (1831) there were but half a dozen houses in the place." And here, in 1834, we will leave this singular man, Jeremiah Church, and his interesting journal.
Having found a peculiar traveller crossing, in 1831, the strip of land bordering on Lake Michigan from Chicago to Detroit, and from Detroit back to Chicago; then again, from Chicago to Door Prairie and back once more to Chicago and then, in 1834, from Michigan City to Chicago: next in the order of time come, "Travels of James H. Luther in 1834, 1835, and 1836."
He is writing for "Lake County, 1884," and lie says, "The northern extremity of Lake County had a history before the central and southern portions were hardly known." He refers to travel "along the beach of Lake Michigan" from Detroit to Fort Dear- born before 1834, and then, in 1834, his own narra- tive begins. It is so graphic and so illustrative of pioneer life that it does not seem suitable to con- dense it.
He says: "I, in company with the Cutler boys of La Porte County, travelled with ox teams upon the beach from near where Indiana City was afterwards built to Chicago, and Fox River, Illinois, which was then called the Indian country, was unsurveyed, and occupied by Aborigines. Our object was to make claims and secure farms. I was then nineteen years old."
This must have been sometime in 1834. “We returned in the spring of 1835 for teams and supplies. After the grass had grown so that our cattle could subsist upon it, we, with an elderly gentleman from Virginia, by the name of Gillilan, who had a large
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family of girls, three horses, a 'schooner wagon' filled full, started west, and this time struck the beach at Michigan City. Our first camp was on the beach where, back of the sand ridge, were extensive marsh lands with abundant grass, upon which we turned our cattle consisting of eight yoke of oxen and one cow." In the morning, when hunting up their oxen, one was missing. They found him mired in the marsh and "almost out of sight." They succeeded in getting his legs out of the mire and then rolled him about five rods to ground upon which he could stand.
The narrative proceeds. "We only made about three miles on our way that day. We finally reached the Calumet, now South Chicago, without further ac- cident * * and went into camp. That region was then all a common with plenty of feed. A small ferry was then used there by the single inhabitant living on the north side of the river in a log cabin. After considering the matter well and consulting with the ferryman, we concluded to drive into the lake below and go round the river on the sand bar. After studying and getting our bearings we hitched our friend's lead horse before the ox teams and I, as pilot, led the way, and succeeded in getting the ox teams nicely over. Our Virginia friend and family came next. They had never seen so large a body of water before, and were very timid in spite of all. The only danger was in getting too near the river, not in get- ting too far into the lake. I hitched on to them and started in. They were scared and screamed, and beg- ged me to get nearer land, which I presume I did, and the wheels began to sink in the softer sand near the river and we were stalled. The boys on the other side hastened to us. I dismounted into the cold
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liquid to my armpits ; could hardly keep the precious freight aboard our wagon. But the oxen came, were hitched on, and my horse to lead, and we pulled out all safe and well pleased. This was exciting, but we boys feared nothing, but it was awful to our Virginia friends. But they soon cooled off, settled on a claim near ours, and were happy I drove teams between Chicago and La Porte up to the fall of 1836 and did not know of any other way but via the beach."
"I have not travelled along that beach since 1836, but in the spring of 1837, I started from Valparaiso for Milwaukee * intending to take the usual beach route, but missed it, and came upon what my friend, Bartlett Woods, speaks of as the 'ever-to-be- remembered-by-those-who-crossed-it,' Long Bridge over the Calumet River, at the mouth of Salt Creek, built of logs and covered with poles I had far more fear in crossing this than I had in getting around the mouth of the Calumet River."
This rather remarkable bridge he thinks was built by Porter and Lake counties in 1836. His father, James Luther, he says, was the commissioner of Por- ter County for building it. Constructed, he says, of logs and covered with poles, it was commonly called the Long Pole Bridge, and many probably, supposed that nothing but poles entered into its construction. G. A. Garard says it was sixty-four rods long.
In the same spring of 1837, James H. Luther re- turned from Chicago to Porter County by stage, and the line of travel which he gives as the stage route at that time was, "along the lake banks" "to the Calu- met, which we ferried, thence to the Caluniet again where Hammond now is, thence the road
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ran on between the Grand and Little Calumet rivers via Baillytown * * to Michigan City."
Besides the beach route which was evidently the earliest between Michigan City and Chicago, the traces yet remain of the two other routes of travel in the days of those early stages; the one passing not far from the present Hessville ; the other, south of the Little Calumet, by way of the Pole Bridge and the early Liverpool, along that grand sand ridge where now are Highland and Munster. Old roadways, un- less plowed over and over, leave their traces for many long years.
The next interesting record of travel along one of these lines is of a trip made by James Adams in 1837.
"In the year 1835 James Adams passed through Liverpool on his way to Chicago or Fort Dearborn. He returned in the winter to Michigan. In January, 1837, during the Patriot's War in Canada, he was sent by Governor Mason and General Brady, from De- troit to Chicago, as messenger extraordinary to ob- tain soldiers from Fort Dearborn to aid in the de- fense of Detroit. There was, it may be remembered, a stage route then between these two places. The sleighing was at this time good. Warmly clad, fur- nished by General Brady with a pair of good fur gloves, receiving instructions to make the distance in twenty-four hours, if possible, he left Detroit at 4 p. m., in a sleigh drawn by a good stage horse. At each stopping place, the distance between being about twelve or fifteen miles, he gave the attending hostler a few moments for changing his horse, requiring the best horse in the stable, and dashed on. At 8 p. m., of the next day he entered Chicago; thus making the distance in twenty-eight hours, probably the shortest
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time in which a man ever passed over that route drawn by horse power. He delivered his instructions to Captain Jamison, who chartered the stagecoaches and sent the soldiers immediately to Detroit. T. Adams was allowed to remain off duty for four weeks."
He was at this time a regular stage driver on the line from Detroit to Chicago, and well did he know the road. Distance, 284 miles.
Note: Both James H. Luther and James Adams were for many years well known citizens of Lake County, the former having been county auditor from 1861 to 1869.
In1 1837 I crossed that long pole bridge as many as five times, passing from City West into Lake County and returning to City West. T. H. B.
CHAPTER XXIII.
OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
Said Dr. Lyman Beecher, many years ago, as a man of "the East" speaking of what was then called "the West :"
"We must educate! we must educate! or we must perish by our own prosperity. If we do not, short will be our race from the cradle to the grave." While some of our pioneers were men quite ignorant of books, untrained in schools, true men of the frontiers, understanding well the use of the axe and the rifle, others of them, and many of them, came from the older centers of cultivation and intelligence, from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and other Eastern States; and these very soon after providing for the two great necessities of life, shelter and food, began to lay the foundations for schools and churches. Learning and religion, with them went hand in hand with material prosperity. They understood the mean- ing of those other words of Dr. Beecher, "If, in our haste to be rich and mighty, we outrun our literary and religious institutions, they will never overtake us ;" and "what will become of the West, if her pros- perity rushes up to such a majesty of power, while those great institutions linger which are necessary to form the mind, and the conscience and the heart
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of the vast world? It must not be permitted." And they were here, these intelligent and virtue-loving pioneers, before the Indian mission schools had fully ceased, to see under the Providence of God, that it was not permitted.
Little log school houses were erected by these men, all the pioneers manifesting a praiseworthy in- terest in having school life commence. The authority for some statements, now, is the "History of La Porte County" elsewhere mentioned.
"The first school house which was built in the county was on Lake Du Chemin * * in the year 1829. This was, however, a mission school, in- tended for the Indians ; but it subsequently served for both Indian and white alike."
The second school house was built in 1832, the first pioneer building, erected at a place called then or afterward, Springville. Miss Emily Learning was the first teacher. And in 1833 Miss Clara Holmes taught in a log school house near what became Door Village. In 1833 also was built the first school house in what became the village and town and city of La Porte. In this year the pioneers erected a building for a school near Hudson Lake, which seems to have taken the place of the building of 1829. The teacher here was Edwards.
In 1834 other log buildings were erected for schools, one in the new Michigan City; and in this same year "Elder Silas Tucker, a Baptist minister," succeeded Miss Learning at Springville. In the next three years a few other buildings for schools were erected, and teachers were: Joel Butler, Miss Aman- da Armitage in 1836, John B. McDonald, Miss Elisa- beth Vickory, Ebenezer Palmer, and, in 1837 or 1838,
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William C. Talcott, "then a Universalist preacher," and since then a judge, an editor, a writer.
Before looking for other pioneer schools, the truth of history will surely not suffer from the following statements :
The first school, of which any mention has been found, was an Indian mission school on Hudson or Du Chemin Lake in 1829. It is difficult now to ob- tain all the facts, but no little time has been spent in making research. It is evident that, by some means, the writer of the La Porte County history must have been misled in regard to the "Carey," or as he writes it, the "Cary Mission." On page 400 of his large, in- teresting, and valuable work, he states that "Joseph W. Lykins, connected with the 'Cary Mission,' whose headquarters were then at Niles, in Michigan, es- tablished a mission among the Indians on the bank of the Du Chemin Lake, now in Hudson township." He gives 1829 as the year. On page 402 he says, writ- ing of events in the year 1830, "As stated elsewhere, the Cary Mission, a Roman Catholic enterprise, had established a branch mission at this place among the Indians." The place he names is "Lake Du Chemin." He continues : "This year we find this mission school taught by an Indian named Robert Simmer- well, assisted by his wife, a white woman. At this school white and Indian children come together." "Some of the Indians at this place, under the train- ing and influence of this mission and school, no doubt became most devout Catholics."
The last statement is evidently guess-work.
He once more, on page 431, treating of "Indian advancement in knowledge," refers to this Hudson
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Lake school and to Robert Simmerwell, an Indian, as being in charge of it in 1830, and adds: "It may be further remarked that many of these Indians became devout Catholics under his training." This is very naturally assumed from the supposed facts. But the reader has seen in the second chapter of this book, page 25, that the Rev. Isaac McCoy, a Protestant and a Baptist, established the "Carey Mission" in Michi- gan, and that Mr. Lykins was his assistant. Now it is not probable that there was at that time a "Cary Mission," Catholic, and a "Carey Mission," Baptist ; a Mr. Lykins, Catholic, and a Mr. Lykins, Baptist. Abundant proof of the Baptist "Carey Mission" sta- tion and school can be found in "The Missionary Jubilee," an official work of 500 pages, published in 1865. (See pages 466 and 467). It is there stated, after giving the facts already named, that "the re- moval of the Indians to the West was delayed one or two years, during which a small school was main- tained by Mr. Simmerwell." This school may have been on Hudson Lake. The report in the "Mission- ary Jubilee" further says that "Mr. and Mrs. Simmer- well, who labored for the Pottawatomies at Carey Station in Michigan, accompanied them to their new location, west of the Mississippi." It states, officially, that Robert Simmerwell (page 264) was born at Blockley, Penn., and was appointed Baptist mission- ary to the Indians (see page 265), April 30, 1825, and that he resigned and the mission was discontinued April 8, 1844. There could hardly have been two Robert Simmerwells teaching among these Indians in Michigan in 1830, and this one could not have been an Indian and certainly was a Baptist.
Combining the authorities the unexpected result
·
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OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
is reached, that the first school in northwestern In- diana opened in 1829, in a house "of hewed logs," was a Baptist Indian mission school where white and copper-colored children received instruction from the same teachers. That many of the Indians around this "beautiful lake" became "devout" Baptists as a result of this school is not in the least probable.
Finding that General Packard's excellent and re- liable history of La Porte County gives some state- ments in regard to this school, without, however, sug- gesting that it was Catholic, the following statements, recapitulating in part the gathered facts, are here in- serted :
Rev. Isaac McCoy, a native of Indiana, was ap- pointed a Baptist missionary among the Indians in 1817. He removed from Fort Wayne to Carey in No- vember, 1822. In January, 1823, he opened a school there for the Indians. His labors there closed in 1830. His very full and interesting history, "His- tory of Baptist Indian Missions," was published in 1840.
Speaking of Robert Simmerwell, J. Lykins, and Jotham Meeker, Mr. McCoy says: "For many years we have all labored side by side in our missionary enterprise." The full name of Mr. Lykins is given as Johnston Lykins in the official missionary reports, and he was born in Ohio. According to Mr. McCoy's narrative, Mr. Lykins was sick in the West in No- vember, 1829. On recovering he returned to Michii- gan, to Carey, and in the early part of 1830, selected fifty-eight reservations of land for young Indians con- nected with the mission school which land had been allowed at the treaty of 1826. He then, April 20, 1830, started with Dr. Josephus McCoy for Fayette,
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in Missouri, arriving there June 24, 1830. He left Mr. Simmerwell at Carey in April, 1830, and he himself returned to Carey, leaving Missouri July 27, 1830. He soon after his arrival at Carey attended to the valuation of the mission property, which had been purchased by the government and was now valued by Charles Noble of Michigan and Mr. Simonson of Indiana at $5,721.50. The arrangement was made that Mr. Simmerwell should occupy a part of the mission buildings till he could arrange for another temporary residence not far away, as it was consid- ered desirable for him to remain till the Indians were removed. He and his wife remained at Carey for a few months, the school being discontinued except seven or eight Indian children which Mr. and Mrs. Simmerwell kept with them. Mr. McCoy's narrative says that they "then located in another place in the same neighborhood." It must have been now well along in 1831. Mr. Lykins went to Missouri. The Missionary Jubilee, an official report, says: "Mr. Lykins, the associate of Mr. McCoy at Carey, ap- pointed to labor among the Shawanees in Missouri, arrived on his field on July 7, 1831." That official report also says, "Mr. and Mrs. Simmerwell, who labored for the Pottawatomies at Carey Station in Michigan, accompanied them to their new location west of the Mississippi." That report further says, in regard to Carey, that by a treaty provision "the station was substantially relinquished in 1831." "The removal of the Indians to the West was delayed one or two years, during which a small school was main- tained by Mr. Simmerwell. Again the report says : "Mr. Simmerwell removed to Shawanee, Ind. Ter., arriving November 14, 1833." These reports and the
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narrative of Mr. McCoy leave no time for Mr. Johns- ton Lykins, a native of Ohio, one of the missionaries at Carey Station, to be a resident at Hudson Lake in 1829 or 1830, and the Joseph W. Lykins, a Welsh- man, could not have been "connected with the 'Carey Mission,'" that Lykins who was, according to Gen- eral Packard's authorities, a resident at Hudson Lake in the fall of 1829. That Mr. Robert Simmerwell, a missionary and not an Indian, of whom Mr. McCoy says, "At Albany I found Mr. Robert Simmerwell, with whom I had formed an acquaintance in Phila- delphia," and of whom he further says, "We found in Mr. Simmerwell a persevering missionary brother," ___ that he, with his wife, did have a school at Hudson Lake, between the spring of 1831 and the fall of 1833. may readily be accepted as a fact. One statement more. In "Catholic Missions Among the Indian Tribes," by Shea (see pages 393 and 394), where the Pottawatomies are mentioned and the St. Joseph River, and "the Baptist ministers stationed there," no mention is made of a Joseph W. Lykins, a Welshman, as a Catholic missionary. One missionary is men- tioned as coming among these Indians in 1830, but his name was Reze, and he soon went elsewhere.
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