USA > Missouri > Cass County > History of Cass County, Missouri > Part 22
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In the breath of a new country, there is a certain inspiration, almost intoxicating with physical joy. After my brother, John H. Terrett, and I had been in Cass for about ten years, we answered the call of the new northwest. He has remained and prospered in his ventures. I was stricken down of paralysis and returned home to Cass County. And now, for more than thirty years, I have made my home with my brother- in-law and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Henry L. Ferrell, at their residence in Garden City, excepting during the four years I was at Harrisonville, serving as recorder of deeds.
CHAPTER XLI.
REMINISCENCES, CONTINUED.
SIXTY YEARS AGO.
(By J. B. Wilson.)
There were no organs or pianos in farm houses and they would expel one from the church if he played the violin. We called them fiddles, but nearly every one drank whiskey. There was some one in nearly every neighborhood that kept it for sale. The price was fifty cents per gallon. One couldn't get a house raised, logs rolled or harvesting done without they furnished whiskey. When I was a boy I have carried a jug of whiskey on one side and water on the other side, and the men took their choice. Drunkenness was very common. I saw over one hundred drunk men at one time on election day. It was common for the clergy to drink whiskey. The saloons were called groceries and hotels, taverns. We had a great deal of game-deer, turkey, pigeons, geese, and ducks, in great abundance. I have seen fifty wild turkeys in a drove and flocks of pigeons that nearly hid the sun and it would take them an hour to pass over. They would break the limbs off the trees where they roosted. I have seen thousands of geese in our corn field at one time.
The people visited a great deal. The whole family would all get in the wagon, using chairs for seats. We had no spring seats then, and we often used oxen instead of horses to pull the wagon. Most all heavy loads were hauled by oxen. A great many of the horses were balky.
Our clothing was homemade. They took their wool to the carding machine and had it made into rolls, and the women and girls spun it, and the flax and wove the cloth in hand looms. There were no sewing machines. All the sewing was done by hand and the women didn't com- plain any more about being overworked than they do now. There were very few milliners then. Women didn't wear hats and nearly always her first millinery-made bonnet was her wedding bonnet. Hoops came into
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use about fifty-six years ago. They pleated a skirt and anyone that could raise twenty cents bought rattan and ran it into the pleats, but some of them hadn't the twenty cents and used grapevines, but these caused a great deal of trouble, for the vines were so stiff they couldn't squeeze them together to get through a narrow door. They would have to raise up one side, so they could pass through, and when they sat down, if they were not careful to pull them back, but sat down on the hoops, they would fly up in their faces. People took their cowhides to the tanner awhile before this time and had them tanned. The tanner gave them half, and kept the other half. The shoemaker would come and work them up into shoes. The shoemaker made his own shoe pegs. Most of the people bought their boots and shoes at the store. My father bought me the first pair of boy's boots I ever saw. They had red tops. The women made our summer hats by platting oats straw and sewing the plats together. Men's boots were very clumsy affairs. They were very hard to put on and they had to use a "bootjack" to pull them off. There was a "bootjack" in every house. A few years before this pewter plates were in general use and the tinkers would come around once a year and mend the plates.
All the relatives, and often the neighbors, were invited to weddings and no one was expected to make a present. The boys took the girls in a lumber wagon, or on horseback, to church, but more often on foot. I have often walked home with a girl three miles, and we thought we had a good time. We had preaching every three weeks, on Thursday afternoon. Our public school was in the church. When the preacher came the teacher would tell us to lay our books aside, and when the ser- vices were over we would resume our studies. Our preacher had thirteen different places to preach at every three weeks, and we didn't think they had a very hard time. They were called circuit riders. Single men got one hundred and fifty dollars per year and a preacher with a wife got two hundred dollars and twenty-five dollars for each child, and they hardly ever got all of their salary.
Sunday School would generally start in April and would generally die in August. We used the American Sunday School Question Book, so you see we had the same lessons every year. There was no public school money. They raised the money by subscription, and the teacher boarded with the patrons. One of my teachers was a Quaker and he didn't allow us to sing or whistle in the school house, or on the play ground, but the boys could wear their hats in school and we studied out loud.
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William Orr's father taught our school one winter. We had school six days in the week. The school houses' were nearly all log houses with a large fireplace. I saw one-a double log house-with a chimney in the center and a fireplace on each side. The teacher in this school gave a premium to the scholar that was first at the school house the most times during the term, and a good many had to come three and four miles. I saw them going to school with lanterns. The seats were made of slabs from the saw mill. They bored two holes in each end and put pieces in them for legs. They bored holes in the wall and put in pins and laid a plank on them for a desk. They had very small windows. I saw one school house that had one row of glass in a large crack in the side of the house.
There were no screens on the houses. Flies had the run of the whole house. When they were bad, some one generally broke a bough off a tree and minded the flies from the tables while we ate.
People didn't can any fruit or vegetables and there was none for sale at the stores. We hadn't any lamps. We used candles or put lard in a saucer and twisted some rags together, laid it in the saucer and lit it, and we thought it made a very good light.
We had no washing machines. The women generally carried their washing down to the spring, built a fire there, and heated the water in a large iron kettle.
I remember well when my father brought the first cook stove into our neighborhood. It was called a step stove because the back part of the stove was about ten inches higher than the front part. It had printed directions how to use it. They said to build the fire, turn the damper down, let it burn 15 minutes, then turn damper up, burn 15 minutes, then put the biscuits in. It wasn't long until several of our neighbors bought stoves, and they would have mother come over and stay a day and teach them how to cook. Before this some of them had bake-ovens, made of brick, which they would heat with coals from the fireplace, then draw out the coals and put your bread, pies or meats to bake, but most of them used an iron bake-oven which they would set on coals on the hearth and put coals on the lid of the oven. There were no heating stoves at my earliest recollection. The first ones were called the Frank- lin stove and built like a fireplace, but set out from the wall in the house. They put in a "back-log," had "dog-irons" to hold up the fore stick and balance of the wood and had a crane to hang the pots and kettles on, but
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they cost forty dollars, and that was a great deal of money in those days. That would buy twenty acres of good land. They generally roasted a turkey by suspending it by a wire in front of the fire with a pan under it, and the cook would keep the turkey turning around before the fire and dipping the gravy from the pan with a spoon and pouring it over the bird. When it was done it was fit for a king. It makes my mouth water to think about it.
The postage on letters was five cents, except to California and Ore- gon, which was twenty-five cents, and the receiver of a letter paid the postage when he took the letter out of the office. There were no enve- lopes. They wrote the letter on one side of foolscap paper, folded it and sealed it with a wafer, or melted wax.
Most every farm house had a conk shell, or a long tin horn, some- times a cow horn, to blow to call the men to the house for dinner. No one had a watch, and when it was cloudy they didn't know when it was noon. We set our clocks by a noon mark, which was generally made by the county surveyor. When the shadow reached the mark it was twelve o'clock.
Every house had a rifle, which was a flint-lock. There were very few pistols ; there wasn't any revolvers, or double-barreled shotguns. A few years later they put tubes in their guns and used percussion caps. At my earliest recollection there were very few matches. I only knew one family that used them. When they wanted to start a fire they would put some flax tow with gun powder in the pan of a flint-rock rifle and snap the gun and set fire to the tow and blow it into a blaze, or they would strike a flint with a pocket knife and throw a spark onto a piece of punk to set it on fire, but oftener we would go to a neighbor and borrow fire.
There were no theaters outside of the cities, but we had the circus and animal shows. The churches were opposed to the circus.
They had no scrapers or graders to work the roads, and very few bridges or culverts. There were very few carriages, and no single buggies with tops. There were very few books, but most of them were covered with calfskin. There were very few newspapers. There wasn't one family in ten that took a paper of any kind. There was very little stationery, and what there was, was always foolscap.
They put up no ice and people sick with fever were not allowed to drink water until it was warmed.
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The threshing machine, to separate the chaff from the grain, came into use about this time, but they were still using the beater which threshed out the grain and they would run it through the fanning mill to separate the chaff from the grain.
The two-horse cultivator came into use about 1855. It was a large clumsy affair. The wheels were as large as the front wheels of a com- mon wagon and the driver sat on a seat about four and one-half feet from the ground and a boy followed and uncovered the corn. There were no corn planters until about 1858. They had low flat wheels about eighteen inches high and the runners were about the size of sled runners. When they struck ground that was a little hard, or a large corn stub, it would throw them out and leave the corn on top of the ground. A man would follow with a hoe and cover it.
Reapers came into use about 1853. They cut eight feet and took six large horses to haul them. One man drove and it generally took two men to rake the grain off; one man would rake one round and the other man the next, but there were a few men that could rake all day. Before this they cut grain with cradles and laid the corn ground off with one-horse płows.
We made very little hay. There were no blue grass pastures. There were no mangers or stalls in the stables. We had about ten head of horses and the trough ran through one side of the stable. We threw a basket of corn in and let the horses fight for the corn, which was their principal feed. Part of the time we gave them corn fodder in winter, and we turned them out on the range at night in the summer time. There were a great many horses foundered and had poll evil, big jaw, fistula, sweeney, and stiff joints. We generally fed corn thirty or forty days.
We killed our hogs at home and hauled the carcasses to market. The packers pressed the lard with a hand press and used the cracklings in the furnace for fuel. They sold spare-ribs at one cent per pound and threw the heads and feet away.
Merchants went to St. Louis twice a year to lay in a stock of goods and gave very few orders for goods between times. They bought their goods largely on time and sold on a year's time. Everyone had to settle with cash or note and it was often by note the first of January, and a family of eight that ran a bill of one hundred dollars during the year was considered extravagant.
We had no tropical fruit; I never tasted a banana until I was a grown man.
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If this article will give the people an idea of the improvements in the past sixty years I will feel well paid for writing it.
I often hear old people talking about the good old times, but I don't want any of them. I have often thought I would like to have the town and country to send such people to and let them live there.
The people are a great deal better morally, physically and intellect- ually. I would rather ride in an automobile than in an ox wagon, plow with a gang-plow instead of the homemade twelve-inch plow, harvest grain with a binder instead of the cradle, plant corn with the check rower instead of by hand, and cover with a hoe, live in a modern house instead of the log cabin, start fires with a match instead of the flint and steel, and a thousand other things that I haven't space to mention here. And I predict there will be more improvements in the next thirty years than there has been in the past sixty.
CHAPTER XLII.
REMINISCENCES, CONTINUED. (By T. H. Waller.)
In the month of April, 1954, I was one of a party of fifteen who camped for a day or two in Cass County, on the south side of Camp Branch, about one-half a mile, or so, from the site of the present Men- nonite Church, called Sycamore. We were a party of gold seekers, on our way to California, and driving a herd of beef cattle to sell when we got there. We had started from Cooper County, Missouri. The prairies were green, but grass was short, for it was early in the season. We had come through Rose Hill and across Big Creek bottom, looking out always for good grazing. At our first camping place in Cass we remained for a day or two, because we found no better grass anywhere than was grow- ing on the lands now belonging to Oesch, King, Schrock, and the Mark Beamer farm.
About the third day we broke camp, and drove forward in a north- westerly direction, passing through Harrisonville, which then was a smaller town than Rose Hill, and continuing our northwesterly course, we passed a little to the south of where Belton now stands, and struck our next camp on the banks of the Blue. At the camp on the Blue, I saw my first Indians. They were dressed in Indian style, but they were civilized Indians from the reservation on the Kaw. I was born in Jackson County, at Independence, in 1834. Doubtless the sight of Indians was common enough at Independence, at the time of my birth, but, before the days my recollection began, I was carried to Cooper County, where there were none.
From the Blue we pointed our cattle northwesterly to the Kaw, which we forded at Wakarusha, where we struck the California trail and followed it with little deviation to the end of our destination in the
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Sacramento Valley. Our route ran through South Pass and about eighty miles to the north of Salt Lake. Everywhere the Indians were friendly and in almost every place the grazing was good. Our cattle improved and gained in flesh continually, and were in fine condition for beef upon our arrival in California.
After four years of checkered and varying success, I returned to Missouri in the fall of 1858. I had seen much good country, from the Mississippi to the Golden Gate, and up and down the Pacific Coast; I had beheld visions of magnificence and sublimity, and vales and dells and coves of bewitching beauty, but all things considered, Cass County seemed to suit me better than any other place I had found. Accordingly, in the spring of 1859, I located near Dayton, and planted the first crop I had ever grown on my own account.
In 1854, on my way out, when I first passed through Cass County, already the timber lands had all been entered, and the log houses of pioneers were to be seen along the line where timber and prairie met, but not a single building was visible upon the broad bosom of the gently rolling prairie that stretched away and away on every hand, where deer and antelopes seemed the only occupants. On my return, in 1858, I was amazed to behold the transformation wrought in four short years. Set- tlers and speculators had rushed in, and the last of the prairie lands had been entered. Still the virgin prairies stretched out, for miles and miles in every direction, almost unscarred by the plow; and yet, here and there, on every hand, were to be seen little houses that had sprung up and little fields fenced and broken, and some commodious houses and handsome farms, teeming with abounding crops. Everywhere was to be seen the evidence of the rapid march of the onward rush of conquering civiliza- tion.
The deer and the antelope had fled; comparatively little game of any kind was remaining in the county, excepting rabbits and squirrels and numerous flocks of prairie chickens, and, in the spring seasons and the autumns, tens of thousands of ducks and geese and brants and cranes and swans, as they winged their way North and South. The absence of game, however, was of little significance to me. Although I was reared on the frontier and traversed all the haunts of game in the regions of the West, and had seen, it seems to me, millions of buffalo, and tens of thousands of antelope and innumerable deer, yet never in my life did I kill one of them.
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Shortly after my return from the West, I married. The farm I located on near Dayton was close by the farm of Major Ferrell, who was my step-father, but a real father to me. And from that day to this I have continued here in Cass, excepting in the stormy period of the war when everybody had to leave. Here I reared my children, and here I have buried my wife. When my children were married and had gone out for themselves, and my wife and I were left alone, I sold my farm of four hundred and ten acres, lying one mile north and two miles east of Dayton, and have lived at Garden City nearly all of the time since then, visiting sometimes in Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Cali- fornia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas. But to me Cass County is the middle of the world.
It was only three years from the time I located in Cass County to the breaking out of the war. My sympathies were with the South, but I was opposed to drawing the sword, and I did not go into the army. All of the barbarisms and terrors and abuses inflicted on the Belgians today are no worse than the horrors endured right here in Cass County. The terrible Turk, the furious Hun, the ferocious Bulgar, the fierce Prussian, are no more brutal than we were among ourselves, brother against brother. In Cass, so close to Osawatomie, the seat of John Brown, all of the lingering bitterness and pent up passion and hate and spite of the border feud were added to the ordinary sufferings and cruelties of war. The Jayhawkers and some of the Bushwhackers and some of the Home Guards vied with one another in diabolic ferocity. Conditions grew worse and worse as the terrible months and weary years wore on. Personal safety compelled me to leave Cass before Order Number Eleven drove every man from his home. I moved into Henry County, but, because of my known sympathies, it soon got too hot for me there. I took to the plains and made my way to Colorado, where I remained until peace was re-established and the frenzy of hate had subsided. Then I returned to Cass and rebuilded my home.
During the whole period of the war, I endeavored at all times to be inoffensive, adhering to my own views without obnoxious antagonisms. Once I got into serious trouble. Osceola was occupied by a portion of General Price's army. A squad of men came through my neighborhood, requisitioning wagons and teams, to move supplies. They seized a wagon belonging to my nearest neighbor, a loyal Union man, who, because of my known political sympathies, appealed to me to exert myself to save his wagon, if possibly I could. I went immediately to see the man com-
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manding the squad. It so chanced that I recognized him as a man of another neighborhood of Henry. Although I knew who he was, I did not know whether or not he held military commission. I told him if he had orders from his superior to take the wagon, we had nothing more to say, but if it was taken for any other purpose or by any other orders we refused to let it go. He took the wagon. We learned, in a day or two, it was not delivered to the Confederate Army at Osceola, but had been taken ten or twelve miles away and carefully hid. I knew then that the squad was not Confederate soldiers, but a bunch of thieves, masquerading as Bushwhackers, "requisitioning" supplies for their own use. Thereupon, I went straight after the wagon. The man who had taken it was not at home when I got it, but I told his wife who I was and what I was going to do, and then I took the wagon and delivered it to its owner. And next I reported to the Confederate picket stationed at Grand River bridge on the Osceola road. The pickets, of course, were not authorized to take cognizance. However, I told them who the man was, and what he had done, and how he had fraudulently represented himself to be a Confederate officer, charged with requisitioning wagons and teams for General Price's army. At the same time, I represented that when the Confederates had withdrawn from Osceola, the Southern sympathizers would be held responsible and harried for all the brigandage and depredations of irregulars. But this was not the end of it. The thief who had "requisitioned" the wagon reported me to a command of passing Confederate cavalry, and told them I was a Yankee and had robbed him and taken his wagon. They believed his report. A posse of cavalry was sent after me. I was taken prisoner, searched, and ques- tioned sharply. I told them the straight of the story. They knew there was a lie out and somebody had told it. They believed I was lying, and decided to deal with me severely. My hands were tied behind my back, the slip knot was drawn close around my neck, the rope was thrown over a limb and pulled taut. I thought sure my end had come, especially as some of the men had evidently been drinking. They said they were going to hang me, and I thought certain they would. Everything was ready for the order to swing me up. And the order was given: "Turn him loose and let him go, he's telling the truth !"
It is now sixty-three years since I first stood upon the soil of Cass. I was a young man then. Now I am old. The last of the pioneers will soon be gone. I count them on my fingers-very few. I glance again toward the golden west; the sun is sinking low. I am eighty-three.
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CHAPTER XLIII.
REMINISCENCES, CONTINUED.
(By John L. L. Stephens.)
The writer of this chapter was born in Boone county, Kentucky, September 30, 1836. His father was Hiram Stephens and his mother Harriett Stephens. In 1843 his parents moved to Van Buren (now Cass) county, Missouri, bringing young John, their son, with them. Among the possessions of value brought with them was a bull dog. He was useful to keep the Indians at a proper distance, which he did. Their travel was by steam boat, from Cincinnati, Ohio, down the Ohio, up the Mississippi and Missouri, landing at Lexington, Missouri. The wagon, teams and household goods were shipped on the same boat. Mr. Stephens here tells. his own interesting story:
"At Lexington we met Robert A. Brown who was there with two six mule teams to unload hemp which was a great article of commerce in those days. Brown hauled our outfit to his home near Harrisonville, where we remained for a few days, then moved to Grand River, locating on what is now known as D. W. Duvall's bottom farm. Here we spent the summer of 1843 in a small one room log house. We raised that year the biggest field of corn in the neighborhood, six acres. In the fall of 1843 we moved to the south fork of Grand River on a larger farm, ten acres, with a two-story log house. The house chimney was constructed of sticks daubed with mud. The fireplace was six feet wide. The floor was made of puncheons. There were two doors, a front and back one, one window with one window glass. The doors were made of four foot clapboards; the stairs was a ladder nailed fast to the wall; and the upper floor was loose boards. Visitors were cautioned to be careful, lest they would fall through the floor. The lands generally were government land and subject to entry at $1.25 per acre. Some homesteading was done.
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People settled at what we now call far apart, as early settlers could not thrive close together. As close as three or four miles, was crowding.
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