USA > Minnesota > Douglas County > History of Douglas and Grant counties, Minnesota : their people, industries, and institutions, Volume I > Part 34
USA > Minnesota > Grant County > History of Douglas and Grant counties, Minnesota : their people, industries, and institutions, Volume I > Part 34
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liberty. Not long afterward the landlord of the inn and his wife left the county, with the five hundred dollars that had been paid the wife, and went up into Canada, where they settled. On his deathbed the landlord cleared the mystery of the Paulson case, declaring that Paulson had returned to the inn about midnight of the night he had left with his four compatriots and had demanded more whisky. This the landlord refused and a quarrel ensued in which the landlord killed Paulson. He hid the body in a haystack until the night after the Indians had searched the lake, when, with the assistance of his wife, he carried the body to the lake and cast it in, it therefore having been an easy matter for the wife later to locate the body for the searching party and claim the reward that had been offered by the county. No suspicion was attached to them and after going to Canada they kept their secret well, until remorse compelled the deathbed divulgence of the same.
REMINISCENCES BY A FIRST SETTLER.
During the agitation of the project for holding a "home-coming" week at Alexandria during the early summer of 1916, Mrs. Fanny Van Dyke, widow of J. H. Van Dyke, the first merchant in Alexandria, who came to Douglas county with her parents, as a girl, in 1858, contributed the follow- ing bit of reminiscence to the Alexandria Post-News: "The first settlers were the Kinkaid brothers, Alexander and Will, who came here from Dela- ware. After Alexander our town was given its name. Then came the Joseph James family from Philadelphia. Their child was the first child born here and was named Winona Douglas, after our lake and county. After them our family (the Cook family) came in the year 1858. The house we lived in was built where the von Baumbach home now stands. It was made of peeled logs and was very comfortable, but coming from the busy city of London, as we did, it was a decided change. My father, who was a member of the Hudson Bay Company bought furs of the Indians, but spent much time fishing and hunting. Game of all kinds was very plentiful. With us came the Bedman family, Mr. Bedman being the first blacksmith here. Shortly after this came the N. F. Barnes family and Peter L. Gregory. Then the Darling family came and they were the first people who knew how to be good farmers, and everyone went to them for advice. About this time came also our good old friend, James Dicken, who was a trapper and who told extraordinary stories. Among the many was the following one: Jim wanted some shirts, and goods of the cheapest quality being very expensive at that time, he bought only three yards. When he found this would make but one
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shirt, he said that he knew of a woman in Pennsylvania who could make two shirts out of three yards of material so long that they dangled on the ground and he could pull them up over his ears. He also knew how to make 'stone soup,' which was very rich and tasty. A little later on came the Shot- well and Canfield families in the year 1859. Also about this time came my husband, J. H. Van Dyke. The Cowdrys and Barrs made up some of the early settlers and after that the people began to come thick and fast.
"My father, Charles Cook, was the first postmaster, the 'office' being our dining table. The mail was brought by ox-team from St. Cloud and later a Mr. Evans, the first Scandinavian, brought the mail on horse-back. The town of Evansville was named after him and they built a small log house there for him to stay over night and break the distance of the journey, which was a very difficult one. He was later killed by the Indians.
"The first school teacher I recall was a Miss Jonvier, a sister of Mrs. Kinkaid. The school house was an old log house on the von Baumbach place and belonged to my father. Mrs. Haines was the teacher in the stock- ade and later a Miss Pye taught. Then came Miss Olive Darling, who taught about the time that the Hicks family came. The first doctor was Doctor Andrews, then a Doctor Borden and later Doctor Vivian. Mr. Van Dyke had the first settler's store here, in which he had the postoffice. He also had the land office and was justice of the peace. The mail was quite large at that time, as the stockade had been built and the soldiers had been stationed. there. The mail was brought from St. Cloud by the Burbank stage and was heavily escorted by mounted men. The stockade was situated about where the Aberly brewery now stands and was built in 1862 by 'Company 25' of Wisconsin. It was made of logs, with a bastion at opposite corners to use in case of an attack by the Indians. Many sad things happened there, one being the death of a young soldier, John Hazelton, who died of exposure. He was given a military funeral and his body was later taken to the Kinkaid cemetery, where it now lies. The assassination of President Lincoln hap- pened about this time and caused much sadness among the soldiers, some of whom wept like children. We were ordered to put on mourning and the flag was draped with some black lining I had bought to line a dress with, each soldier wearing a piece of it around his arm.
"The first minister, to the best of my memory, was Bishop Whipple, but several other missionaries came here at different times.
"The spirit among all the early settlers was a kindly one and each one helped the others. Eatables were very high and hard to procure, flour being thirteen dollars a barrel. The poorest grade of calico was twenty-five cents
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a pound and ordinary sheeting was fifty cents a yard, and a very poor grade of white flannel was over a dollar a yard. With all the inconveniences at this time we managed to have quite a little sociability and when one had anything extra nice to eat they always gave a party for the rest. Mrs. Bed- man had invited us all one evening and the feature was to be dried-apple pie. She only had enough apples to make two pies and had set them on a bench near the stove. In her excitement and lack of chairs she sat down on them, much to her sorrow, and ours. The Whitcomb family were also here during the time of the stockade, Mr. Whitcomb being captain of the post. Many of the people who first came here were driven out by the Indians and never came back."
AN EARLY TRAVELER'S IMPRESSIONS.
Among the first settlers in Douglas county were Charles Cook and family, Londoners, who came to Minnesota from Canada in the later fifties and in 1858 settled on the banks of Lake Agnes, the present site of the city of Alexandria. Charles Cook had been an extensive merchant in the fur trade in London, his Hudson Bay establishment on Regent street in that city having been one of the largest of its kind in the metropolis, and it was he who introduced into London the use of seal skin as a luxurious form of outer apparel, his first seal-fur coat having been made for the Duke of Welling- ton, the second for Charles Dickens, the famous coat referred to in the latter's "American Notes," and the third for the Count d' Orsay. Mr. Cook's beautiful and accomplished wife was a Franklin, daughter of Robert Frank- lin, a cousin of Sir John Franklin and of Benjamin Franklin, and a repro- duction of the portrait of her younger sister, painted by one of the most celebrated artists of that day and hung in the Royal Gallery, is known world wide. Charles Cook unfortunately met with business reverses and left his beautiful home in London for New York, where he engaged for a time in business, going thence to Canada, later coming, with his family, into the wilds of Minnesota, in behalf of his Hudson Bay Company connection, but after a few years spent on the banks of Lake Agnes went East and later re- turned to London, where he spent the remainder of his life. In the mean- time his young daughter, Fanny, married James H. Van Dyke, Alexandria's first merchant and one of the most active promoters of the destinies of the new settlement, and remained at the settlement. During the stockade days Mrs. Van Dyke was known as the "Florence Nightingale" of the post, where her husband was running the suttler's store, her kindness to ailing soldiers there endearing her to the whole command. Mrs. Van Dyke, who is still
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living in Alexandria, retains a very vivid recollection of the old stockade days and of the days preceding the Indian outbreak and retains at her pleasant home a number of interesting souvenirs of those days, including the first table and chair made by the hands of the soldiers at the stockade. She also is the possessor of a well-worn and valuable copy of the Franklin Bible, printed in 1813, and of numerous family portraits and works of art, sour- enirs of her girlhood days in London before she became one of the pioneers of the Minnesota frontier. Her brother, Charles Cook, had a good bit of artistic ability and among her cherished possessions are several crayon draw- ings of scenes hereabout during the pioneer days, including a drawing of the old Cook log cabin, the house over on the hill, where now stands the von Baumbach home, where the first school in Douglas county was conducted, and of the old stockade, reproductions of which appear elsewhere in this volume. In her library Mrs. Van Dyke has a bound volume of Harper's New Monthly Magazine for the year 1860, in which appears a wonderfully interesting narrative of an anonymous traveler, the same illustrated by an equally anonymous artist, conveying in vivid language the author's impres- sions of a trip "to Red River and Beyond."
AN IMPRESSIONIST'S VIEW OF ALEXANDRIA.
The narrative of the anonymous magazine writer above referred to opens with a description of the departure of his party from St. Paul on June 10 and of the journey to St. Cloud, the first station, and then takes up the second station of the journey on to Pembina, the reference to the trip across that section of the state comprised in what is now Douglas county being as follows: "On Monday, June 20, the train struck its tents and left St. Cloud; here beginning its experiences of camp-life with a background. So far we had been treading the warp and woof of civilization-now we began to slip off the fringes of its outermost skirts. Our direction was northwest, by the valley of the Sauk river, through the lake district of central Minnesota to the head of navigation on Red River. Such articles as were needed had been added to our outfit, including a boat to cross streams in, which served for a wagon-box on dry land. The second day out all our horses and mules ran away.before breakfast. Half the camp scoured the camp in every direc- tion for the runaways. They were caught four miles away, making steady tracks for St. Cloud and its'possible oats, led on in their desertion by two of the handsomest, smallest and meekest-looking mules in the train. The road rewarded them with retributive justice that day. The sloughs were innumer-
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able, and indeed innumerable they continued to be for weeks and weeks, only approaching the limits of mathematical calculation as we neared Pembina. This may seem strange when it is considered that we crossed the divide between the tributaries of the Minnesota and Mississippi; but, as Joseph said, 'with a general convexity of outline there was great concavity of detail.' The con- vex 'divide,' like a rounded cheek, had a small-pox of lakes, bogs, ponds, sloughs and morasses.
"To give in detail the particulars of this part of our experience would be cruel to writer and reader, though it might gain for the former a seat in the Chinese Paradise of Fuh, where the purgatorial price of admission is to wade for seven years in mud up to the chin. So let me give the spirit of it all, in a lump. The only external indication of some kinds of sloughs is a ranker growth of grass, perhaps of a different color, in the low ground between two hills of a rolling prairie. Again, on a level prairie, where the road seems the same as that you have been traveling dry shod, your horse's hoofs splash in wet grass. This goes on, worse and worse, till you get nervous and begin to draw up your heels out of the water; and so, perhaps, for a mile, whether in the water or out of it you cannot tell, horses up to their bellies trudging through the water and grass, carts sinking deeper than the hubs, you travel at the rate of one mile in 2:40. Very often, however, sloughs put on no such plausible appearance, but confess themselves unmis- takably bad and ruinous to horses and carts.
SOMETHING ABOUT MULES AND MULE DRIVERS.
"It is the wagon-master's business to ride ahead of the train a few hun- dred yards and on coming to a slough, to force his horse carefully back and forth through it until he finds the best place for crossing. I have fished for trout in Berkshire streams so small that, to an observer a hundred yards dis- tant, I must have seemed to be bobbing for grasshoppers in a green meadow ; but the appearance is not more novel than to see a strong horse plunging and pitching in a sea of green grass that seems to have as solid a foundation as that your own horse's hoofs are printing. Some sloughs have no better or worse spot. It is mud from one side to the other-mud bottomless and in- finite, and backing up in some infernal Symmes's hole. The foremost cart approaches, and, at the first step the mule sinks to his knees. Some mules lie down at this point; but most of ours were sufficiently well broken to make one more spasmodic leap, and, though the water or mud went no higher than their fetlocks, then and there they laid them down. This is the moment for
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human intervention, and, on the part of profane mule drivers, for an impreca- tion of divine intervention. The men get off their horses and carts and hurry to the shafts and wheels, tugging and straining, while one or two yell at and belabor the discouraged and mulish mule.
"The census man would have no difficulty at this juncture in ascer- taining the persuasion to which profane mule drivers belong, or, at least, in which they have been reared. Some of their oaths derive their flavor from camp-meeting reminiscences. Another man excels as a close-communion swearer, and, after damning his mule, superfluously damns the man who would not damn him. Other oaths have a tropical luxuriance of irreverent verbiage that shows them to have been drawn from the grand and reverent phrases of the Prayer-book, and still others are of that sort which proves their users godless wretches, with whom, for very ignorance, oaths stand in the stead of adjectives. Belabored by oaths, kicks, whip-lashes and ropes- ends, the mule may rise and plunge and lie down again, and rise again and plunge, until the cart is on solid ground; but it was generally the quicker way to unload the cart or wagon at once, or to lighten it until the mule could get through easily. If this was inconvenient for any reason, a rope was fastened to the axle, and twenty men pulling one way would generally succeed in beating the planet pulling the other. Our Indian ponies got through the mud splendidly. Joseph was heard to recommend a stud of them for the hither side of Bunyan's Slough of Despond. They were too lazy to be other than deliberate in getting out of a hole. They put their feet down carefully, and, like oxen, waddled along, one step or one jump at a time. So they never strained themselves as high-spirited horses would, and yet were not so mulish as to be willing to stay stuck in the mud for centuries, until the branches of future trees would lift them up for fruit like Sir John Mande- ville's sheep.
GLIMPSES OF CLAIM-STAKES AND CLAIM-SHANTIES.
"Three times we crossed the tortuous Sauk, first by a ferry like the one at Rum river. The next time, four days afterward, we had to make our own ferry. One stout fellow swam across with a rope in his teeth, which was tied firmly to stout trees opposite each other. Then the wagon box was taken off the wheels, two or three hours spent in caulking it, launched, and a man in the bow, holding on to the rope which sagged down to within a yard of the water, by bending his body and keeping stiff legs, could head the bow up stream against the swift current and pull himself and the load
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across. A Cree half-breed did this canoeing as dexterously from the first as if he had spent his life on the river. Horses, mules and oxen were then pushed into the stream, one by one, their lariats tied around their noses, and held by another person in the boat, so as to guide them at once to the only place where they could get ashore. Finally, the empty carts and wagons were floated across and pulled up the bank by a rope around the axle. Cross- ing other streams where the current was not swift enough to overturn the carts, and the water only deep enough to flow over the boxes, we cut sap- plings, made a floor on top of the frames, lifted the goods top of that and crossed without unharnessing a mule. The conclusion of all which is, that people on railroad cars don't realize what they have to be thankful for.
"This valley of the Sauk up which we were traveling is one of the garden spots of Minnesota. The new settlers of the last two or three years have many of them taken that direction. Claim-stakes and claim-shanties speck the road from one end to the other. Some of the claim-shanties were built in good faith, had been lived in, and land was tilled around them. Not a few, however, were of the other sort, built to keep the letter of the law; four walls merely, no windows, doors or roof. We often found it con- venient to camp near these edifices, and saved ourselves the trouble of going half a mile for wood when we found it cut so near at hand.
"A terrific thunder-storm came on one afternoon in this Sauk valley to which the average thunder-storms of latitude 40° 42', longitude 74° 41', are two-penny and theatrical. We were drenched, of course, with the lowest cloudful, in a moment ; but the thunder was so near, prolonged and hurtling, that it was enough to make a brave man shiver to remember that his trousers had a steel buckle. All day and night the tempest continued, rain pouring, lightning flashing round the whole circuit of the heavens, and the thunder unintermitted. But the next morning rose as clear-skied as if the preceding had been a June day or old tradition, and not written down in the calendar of the battle-month as the anniversary of Montebello.
THE APPROACH TO ALEXANDRIA.
"Our last day's travel in sylvan Sauk valley took us to Osakis Lake. Here we camped for Sunday, in an opening in a fine forest which sur- rounded the lake. Sunday was a perfect day. With patient sight one might trace here and there the graceful scarf-like shadowy white of the highest and rarest clouds against the pure blue. No lower or coarser forms were visible anywhere from horizon to horizon, and even these would sweep into
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such evanescent folds, and ripple away into such ethereal faintness, that the eye passed them and looked through the blue ether itself. To breathe the pure air was indeed an inspiration. The wind came fresh and clear over the lake. There it lies, surrounded by forests on every side, with only here and there vistas of open prairie. From the level of the roots of the nearest trees, and from the shadows of the rest among their huge trunks, the shining beach slopes down, its white sand the floor where the waves endlessly run up, vis- ible far out and then fused with the surface blue. I gave myself a baptism in this beautiful cold lake, and then finding an old gnarled oak whose spread- ing limbs made a comfortable couch overlooking the water, whiled the still hours away till the shadows of the distant trees lengthened over the lake and touched the hither shore. Osakis lake is twelve miles long and two or three wide; its waters are quite cold and abound with the largest and finest kind of fresh-water fish-wall-eyed pike, bass, perch and other .. The Doctor, our one skillful fisherman, brought in a boat-load, caught in an hour or two's drifting. The rest of the camp spent the day in reading, writing, sewing, fishing, washing, cooking and mending wagons.
"Ten or twelve miles over the very worst road yet, brought us to a place which, when it gets to be a place, is to be called Alexandria. Half of the distance and more was through woods. Look up, and there was gorg- eous sunlight flooding the fresh, young leaves, lighting up old oak trunks, and glorifying the brilliant birch and maple, pigeons flying or alit, robins and thrushes and what other mellow-throated songsters I know not, making the vistas and aisles of shadow alive with sounds; but look down, and your horse was balking at a labyrinth of stumps, where there was no place to put his foot; this extending for ten rods and there terminating in a slough aggravated by the floating debris of a corduroy bridge, and this ending in a mud-hole, the blackness of darkness, with one stump upright to prevent your wading comfortably through it, to transfix your horse or upset your cart.
"The carts and their drivers could not get through by daylight, but were compelled to stay in the woods and fight mosquitoes all night, reaching Alexandria about noon the next day. Joseph and I, on our ponies, 'thridded the somber boskage of the wood' and got to Alexandria before dark. It was slow traveling, but on sure-footed Indian ponies, not very disagreeable. The mosquitoes were our worst torment; we avoided their terebrations by 'taking the vail.' About the middle of the afternoon we caught glimpses through the leaves of a lake at the right of us, and soon came to the short branch road which led to it. Leading our horses down to the water's edge, we (23)
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observed a blazed tree just at the margin, and an inscription neatly written on the white wood, with name and date of the company by whom it had been cut.
"Coming out on the beautiful prairie which is the site of Alexandria, we were surprised to see the wagon and tents of Messrs. Burbank and Blakely's first two stage loads, showing that their road-makers were not far enough ahead for them to follow on. Is it possible that I have forgotten to tell the romance of that stage load? Two Scotch girls, sisters, journeying without any protection save their good looks and good sense, from Scotland to Lake Athabasca, where one of them was to redeem her plighted faith and marry a Hudson Bay Company's officer. Ocean voyage alone, two or three thousand miles travel through a strange country to St. Paul alone, then this journey by stage to Ft. Abercrombie, camping out and cooking their own food, and voyaging down Red river in a batteau, near a thousand miles more, and fired at by Red Lake Indians on the way, then journey- ing with a company's brigade to Athabasca, going north all the while and winter coming on too, and the mercury traveling down to the bulb; but her courage sinking never a bit. Hold her fast when you get her, Athabascan! She is a heroine, and should be the mother of heroes. And the brave brides- maid sister! Where are the 'chivalry?' Letters take about a year to get to Athabasca, gentlemen.
"Three English sportsmen and their guns, tents and dogs filled another stage. They had hunted in Canada and Florida, shot crocodiles in the valley of the Nile, fished for salmon in Norway, and were now on their way to the buffalo plains of Saskatchewan to enjoy the finest sport of all. Purdy rifles, Lancaster rifles, Wesley Richards's shot-guns and Manton's shot-guns, single-barreled and double-barreled: these were their odds against brute strength and cunning. One of them was a baronet, the others Oxford men, and all might have passed a life of ease in London with society, libraries, establishments ; but this wild life, with all its discomforts and privations and actual hardships and hard work, had more attractions for them in its free- dom, its romance, its adventure. Their stories were of beleagured proctors and bear fights, Hyde Park and deer-stalking, Rotten Row rides and moose hunts. Next year we may hear of them up the Orinoco or in South Africa. Better there than wasting away manliness in 'society' or the 'hells,' or in bribing electors; but is there not something else in all England worth living and working for? One of the three was a splendid rifle-shot. With my Maynard rifle, breech-loading and weighing only six pounds, unlike anything he had ever handled, he plumped a sardine-box at distances of 100, 150, 200
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and 300 yards, and hit the small tree, in the cleft of which it was fastened, almost every time in twenty.
HOSPITALITY OF THE WILDERNESS.
"Our tented field was a fair beginning for a town. In fact, we far outnumbered the actual population of Alexandria. Joseph and I were glad enough to be permitted to enjoy more than municipal privileges under the roof of Judge G -- (P. L. Gregory), If pioneers were all of the kind that have founded Alexandria, civilization and refinement would travel west as fast as settlement, instead of being about a decade behind. The house was built of hewn logs, of course; but inside grace and beauty strug- gled with the roughness of such raw materials and came off victorious, and yet nothing was out of place. There was an air about the main room that made you remember that the grandest queen walked on rush-strewn floors not half so fine as these spotless planks-and what wall-paper had such deli- cate hues as the peeled bark revealed on the timber beneath ?- and there was a woman's trick in the fall of the window curtains and the hanging of the net over the spotless counterpane in the corner, and the disposition of things on the bureau, crowned by its vaseful of beautiful prairie flowers. Here we enjoy such dinner-table chat and such long evening talks, W and; I., with Judge G --- and his wife, as made us wish we had known. them in London Terrace ten years ago, though we could regret the absence . of none of the luxuries which they were daily proving a well-ordered life .. could be lived without.
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