USA > Ohio > Sandusky County > Pioneer recollections of the early 30's and 40's in Sandusky County, Ohio > Part 1
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REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 02487 2647
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https://archive.org/details/pioneerrecollect00bowl
PIONEER¿
RECOLLECTIONS
OF THE
Early 30's and 40's
IN SANDUSKY COUNTY, OHIO.
Bowland
By James M .: Bowland ...
1903. MUCHMORE & SON'S PRINT. FREMONT, OHIO.
ПУТИОоо умацомда и
БЕСОГГЕСЦІЮИ? МОЛЕЕК *** **
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1912458
JAMES MITCHELL, BOWLAND.
BerSter
Pioneer Recollections.
Narrated to J. Burgner, Stenographer, Secretary of the Sandusky County Pioneer and Historical Society, and written up by him for the Reunions and Picnics of the Society, held at Buckland Guards Armory, Fremont, Ohio, Sep- tember 4, 1902, and September 3, 1903, and Published in the Fremont Journal of September 3rd and 10th, 1903.
Hugh Bowland, Sr., the father of James Bowland, was born in Perry County, Ohio, in 1794, when there were two Indians to every white person in that region. He often played familiarly with the young Indians and learned to talk their language fluently. At the age of eighteen years he went as a substitute for his uncle, James McCormick, to serve as an American soldier in the war of 1812. He served till the close of the war. He was one of the first to strike a lick to build Fort Meigs at Perrysburg. He used to relate a tragedy that occurred during that war. It took place near Manhattan, north of Toledo, and illustrates the character of the Indians. An American officer at Manhattan, recently married to a lady in Detroit, wished his wife brought from Detroit to his post at Manhattan. So he made a bargain with eight friendly Indians who for a certain reward promised to bring her safely to him. One of the most trusty of the band carried a private letter from him to her. She hesitated, but being encouraged by assurances in the letter, entrusted herself into the care of six male Indians and two squaws,
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and undertook the journey of sixty miles through the wilderness. The Indians treated her very kindly until near the end of their journey, helping her carefully through the tangled forests, and carrying her on a strech- er of deer-hide stretched between two poles where the ground was soft and where the water sometimes was knee deep. They camped out three nights. She had a private tent by herself which was as carefully guarded at night, as she was in daytime.
On the last morning of the journey and when they expected in a few hours to reach their destination and re- ceive their reward they began to quarrel about the divis- ion of the prize money; the one who carried the letter and did the managing claiming more than the rest. They were divided into two factions, and failing to agree, one of the factions tomahawked the woman, and leaving the dead body in possession of the other faction, skulked away into the forest. The four Indians in whose care the body was thus left, brought the corpse of the murdered woman into the camp of her husband. The officer was obliged for his own safety to pay the prize money, but he was so horrified at the sight and so grieved at his irreparable loss that he pined away and died a few months later.
REMOVED TO LOWER SANDUSKY.
In the year 1835, Mr. Hugh Bowland, Sr., and fam- ily removed to Sandusky County, Ohio, at the time when the county was still occupied by several tribes of Indians, the Senecas and the Wyandottes. These Indians were al- ways friendly to him and respected him very highly be- cause he could speak their language and adapt himself to their customs. The Indians have very retentive memo- ries, and they seldom forgive injuries or forget benefits.
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The young Indians were very fond of athletic sports. Some eight or ten of them would sometimes run races from Reading to Rushville in Perry county, about five miles, and the last one reaching the place would have to pay for a gallon of whisky for the party. This liquor then cost about 16 cents a gallon. Mr Bowland never lost a race. He was a strong, robust man, and had more endurance than the Indians. He was born in a log cabin about a mile from the town of Reading, on land bought by his father, Robert Bowland, from the United States government.
JAMES M. BOWLAND.
I was born in Madison County, Ohio, March 26, 1824. I came to Lower Sandusky with my parents from Perry County, Ohio, June 19, 1835. We moved here in a large covered wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen, and brought with us a lot of household goods and three milch cows. We traveled along winding roads through the forests about one hundred and fifty miles, and it took us four- teen days to get here. We were detained on the way by high water on the Scioto and the Big Belly rivers. It rained every day but two. We came through Tiffin and took the river road on the west side down through Fort Seneca and past James Moore's mill at Ballville. Mr. Moore gave my father directions which wagon track to take to get to Lower Sandusky, and we arrived at that place and stopped where the Farmer's Bank now stands, on Front Street. There was no building there and the ground was covered with hazel brush.
The first man that my father talked with here was Julius Patterson, of whom he inquired where John Strohl lived. Patterson kindly took us to Strohl's house which
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stood at the foot of the hill northeast of the present res- idence of Col. Haynes, just back of the Hidber block. The house was built of flat stones gathered from the San- dusky river and consisted of but one story. As Mr. Strohl was a brother-in-law of my father, we stopped over night with him, and the next day, June 20, we went out on the place now known as the Mike Long farm, 21/4 miles S. E. of Lower Sandusky. This tract was all woods and very heavily timbered, and had been entered or bought from the Government in 1829, by John Beagh- ler. When we got there we unyoked our oxen and put a cow bell on one of them and turned them out to graze in the bush. We had bought the bell that morning from Ed Whyler for 371/2 cents.
The first work we did was to dig a well, about four feet square and thirteen feet deep, and to keep the earthi from caving in we put in a curbing of sassafras poles and slabs; and I must say that it answered its purpose very well and we had cold sassafras tea out of that well for more than a year. None of us liked it but we had to drink it. During the first week we lodged in our cov- ered wagon and cooked our meals in the bush.
OUR LOG CABIN.
The next work we did was to build a log cabin, which took us eight days. My father took pride in what he did and took pains to put up a better structure than pioneers generally built. It took fourteen men to do the work, as the logs were heavier than those usually put into log cabins. We had to go several miles for the men as only five families then lived within that radius. Our nearest neighbors were Henry Beaghler, Moulton Short, John Glaze, Peter Linebaugh and Adam Brunthaver.
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AN EARLY SETTLER'S CABIN.
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Mr. Glaze was 14 Indian blood, and his wife 34 devil.
CLEARING AWAY THE FOREST.
After completing our log cabin and some outbuild- ings and enclosing a garden patch we made it a rule to clear the timber from about twelve acres of land every year, for farming purposes. It stood so dense that after cutting it down and into logging lengths it lay so thick on the ground that we could hardly find room to start a log-heap. During the second year of our clearing, 1836, we used all the good timber that we could for staves and lap-shingles and shakes or clapboards. Lap-shingles were made in abundance and found a ready sale at $2.25 per thousand. They were made only from straight split- ting timber, sawed into blocks 28 inches long, with a cross-cut saw, then bolted with wedges and axes, then riven with a froh and shaved with a draw-knife to proper shape and thickness.
SALES OF WOOD AND TAN-BARK.
From our clearing we also sold tan-bark, white oak and black oak, at $2.00 to $2.25 per cord, and hickory and white ash wood at $1.00 per cord. Those two were the only kinds of timber that were salable for firewood. The rest would not have been taken as a gift. For a period of seven years I hauled wood, staves, bark, shin- gles, hoop poles, ashes and charcoal, as my father had many contracts to furnish these supplies to town and to the early settlers. I did not pass many churches on Sun- days, for there were none. We also saved from our clearing about four or five hundred bushels of ashes ev- ery year, for which we received three cents per bushel.
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We sold them to Isaac Van Doren, who had the only ashery in this region, bought of Mr. J. R. Pease a few years previous.
Our cabin was built on a sand ridge, right across the old Indian trail which led from Stem Town, (now Green Spring,) to Lower Sandusky, and the Redskins passed by our cabin almost every day or night. My father was always kind to them and learned to talk with them in their language. This pleased them very much, and they regarded him with unusual reverence and profound res- pect. I do not think that the number of Indians, all told, exceeded 150 males and females.
DRUNKEN INDIANS.
The squaws when under the influence of liquor were more troublesome than the males. I once helped to pick a drunken squaw out of the snow and put her on a hand sled to be taken home by her Indian friends, a gang of eight or ten, most of whom were more or less intoxica- ted. The Indians when drunk were very liberal. They would offer my father a pony, even up, for a drink of whiskey. He always declined to trade in that way for he knew that when they got sober they would come back and beg the pony. I remember only two names of those Indians, Shellbark Hickory and I-Whopsey.
BARK CANOES.
The former taught me how to make bark canoes and bows and arrows. To make a canoe he would find a nice black ash tree about a foot in diameter, cut the bark through to the wood clear around the tree, about a foot from the ground, then make a scaffold of poles about 12 or 13 feet high around the tree, and with an ax or toma- hawk cut a ring around the tree above, then strike a
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chalk line perpendicularly and cut the bark down it from top to bottom, then take a spud and peel the bark off around the tree without splitting it; then shape the ends so that when drawn together they will turn up in shape like a sled-runner, then sew together ends with leather- wood bark so as to be water-tight; then cut some staves and set them inside to give proper shape, and leave in the sun to dry a few days. It will get as hard as bone. I made many a one. This leather-wood bark was twice as strong as our ordinary leather and was quite durable and kept the canoes water tight. The Indians were very expert in the use of these bark canoes, but I got many a ducking while learning how to use them. They were very treacherous.
BOWS AND ARROWS.
This bark was also used to fasten their flints on the ends of their arrows. The arrows were made of hickory wood and their bows of sassafras, the latter being very elastic when dry. The wood for the arrow was split at the end about 21/2 inches, the back end of the flint was *slipped in and fastened by winding and tying the bark around it. This leatherwood grew like hazel brush, but it was in such demand that it perished with the using and has become extinct. I have not seen any of it for many years.
OLD INDIAN TRAIL.
I believe I am the only man in Sandusky County who can show the exact place where the Indian trail in- tersected the Pike. It was about 1/4 miles east of Fre- mont, near the present farm home of Abel Franks, on land then owned by John Tyler. The Indians were quite shrewd in finding out the time and place of the white men's house raisings or logging bees, because they
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found out that it was rulable to always have a jug or more of whiskey for the hands. They would come and offer their services, which was usually a hindrance, to get their whiskey free. Oftentimes they would barter for it by offering venison, turkey, pheasant or other wild game.
FIRST WHISKY DISTILLERY.
The whiskey was manufactured by Mr. Ezra Will- iams, who owned and operated a distillery that stood at the foot of the hill just south of the Pike in east Lower Sandusky, on the old Williams homestead, now known as the Lyle property. He always kept plenty of whiskey on hand, of different grades, but the kind most in de- mand went by the name of "Ezra's Best." My father would seldom give the Indians more than one drink, and then he would manage to get them to go away, as he did not want them around him when drunk.
INDIAN VILLAGE.
The principal rendezvouz of these Indians from 1835 to 1838 when they left this country, was about one mile north of Stemtown, where they had huts and tents and ponies and hides and other chattels, and where they had an orchard of natural apple trees. It is said that they were so angry when they had to leave the fine spring at Stemtown that they threw sticks and branches of trees into it, which can still be seen, coated a bright green.
PIONEER GRUB.
Our living in those pioneer days was very frugal. Our milling facillities were very poor. Our rations in- cluded corn bread, potatoes and buckwheat a few years later. The corn was pounded fine with a pouncer, or
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heavy wooden hammer, suspended from a spring pole, (like the old-fashioned sweeps used to draw water from wells,) which was made to strike with force upon the top of a solid oak stump which had been chiseled out into the shape of a wooden bowl or mortar in which the corn was placed. The pounded mass was then sifted and what passed through was used as meal and the rest fed to the live stock.
WILD GAME.
Our meats consisted of venison, wild turkey, pheas- ant, quail, squirrel, rabbit and fish, all of which we had in great abundance. We could then buy a barrel of white bass, catfish or pickerel, salted down, for two dol- lars. These were the only varieties of fish that were salable. We could buy two hind quarters of venison for fifty cents and a good, big wild turkey for 25 cents, and a dozen pheasants for a quarter. Quails were about a cent apiece. Along in the thirties corn sold for 371/2 cents in trade and dull sale. Potatoes begged for buyers at 12 1-2 cents. We had only four varieties; the Mo- hawk Blues, White Pink Eyes, White Neshannock and the Merinos. The last named were the most prolific but not considered the best for use.
FRUIT.
Our fruit consisted of wild red plums, fox grapes, wild mulberries, sarvers berries, black haws and goose- berries. There were no blackberries or elderberries in the woods until the country began to be cleared up. The shade was too dense for small fruits. Our winter sauce included one barrel of pumpkin-butter (made like apple- butter,) flavored with allspice. Canned fruit was then unknown. Some fruit was put up in the new way of
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preserves by boiling down with sugar or molasses. For winter meat we would kill and salt down, late in the fall, say in November, about thirteen hogs and one beef. This supply, with ten in the family, some of whom had appetites like wood choppers, would sometimes not last half the winter, and then we had to fall back on fish and wild game, of which we often got tired.
WAGES.
Wages were then about fifty cents, or a bushel of wheat per day, for a good hand. Money was a luxury and not often in sight. Most of the trading was by bar- ter. About the only means some had to get money was by the sale of deer skins, coon skins or beeswax. . These three articles were considered legal tender in those days. Deer skins brought the fabulous price of 37 1-2 cents a piece, coon skins 8 to 12 1-2, and beeswax 8 cents per pound. The woods abounded in honey bees and we al- ways had a good supply of honey, a wash tub full or more. I became an expert at finding swarms of bees in hollow trees, having adopted David Crockett's method of locating them. There was but little sale for honey. There was a little draw back on our milk and butter.
WILD ONIONS.
There were patches of wild onions, acres of them along the ravines, and the cows would feed on them and it made the milk and butter so rank that many people could not use them. This lasted every summer from the first of May to the first of August. It was also difficult for us to raise poultry, as we could not well keep them in a coop, and had to let them roost on trees, where they would be the prey of hawks and owls.
BIRD THIEVES.
Crows were numerous and blackbirds came in tre-
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mendous flocks, like black clouds, and they would soon devour a patch of corn, if we did not hurry and frighten them away by hallooing and shooting and beating on tin pans. It seemed that eternal vigilance was the price, not only of liberty but of existence, in those days.
The woods were then also alive with the native black or blue rats, but they never gave us much trouble about the houses, as they kept mostly about the barns and out- buildings. They were about one-third smaller than the wharf rats which came here in boats to the wharves, and they gradually became extinct as the wharf rats increas- ed in number and destructiveness.
CHIPMUNKS.
'The woods were also alive with skunks, opossums and chipmunks. The chipmunks were very troublesome about corn planting time, and if not watched would dig up the corn that had been planted, row after row, even after it had bladed. My father used to keep me and my brothers on the watch for these pests, which seemed to be the most numerous along that side of the field where we had picked up some cord-wood. We ran back and forth, along and on top of the wood to scare them, and finding that we could not keep all off, we boiled some corn in strychnine, or copperas water, and put it among the wood piles. They ate the poisoned corn and died by hundreds, till their stench was offensive. It was while watching them from a wood pile that I noticed the fact that they buried their dead. Three live ones would bury one dead one. They would first take turns in pull- ing him about six feet from where he lay, and then they took turns in digging a small grave, a few inches deep, in the sand or muck, and then cover him all up except
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about half an inch of the end of his tail, which they left sticking out as a marker. Then they would run around the grave and sniff the air and go to their haunts. I noticed that their graves were all dug lengthwise in the same direction. One other thing seemed very remark- able, and that was that it always took three live ones to bury one dead one. I saw three at work burying a dead one, when all at once one of them got sick and keeled over dead. The other two did not go on with the burial, but went away, and soon after, six came and buried the two dead ones. If I had not watched these chipmunks in the spring of 1837 I would not have been able to make this contribution to natural history.
SNAKES.
The woods were also alive with snakes of different varieties, some harmless and some poisonous. Our hogs would often scent them and root them out from the sides of logs and other hiding places, and like the man in the show, "eat 'em alive." As the hogs got more numerous the snakes got more scarce, and many of them are seen no more in this region. Some of these were garter snakes. I found a milk snake one time in a hollow tree where it had a nest 70 feet from the ground, and I will have to tell another bee story to get the snake out. I cut a bee tree, at an early day, near the country home of Hon. T. P. Finefrock, in which the opening to the bees was about 70 feet from the ground. When the tree fell it did not break and we sawed it off above and below, to swarm the bees. We had plugged up the hole where the bees went in and out, but they came out at one end that we sawed off, and we tied a handkerchief over the opening and put the log on a sled and hauled it home. After we had left
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it there about half an hour and came back to it, I was horrified to see a milk snake about four feet long crawl out between the gum and the handkerchief. It must have harbored in that gum with the bees. This was in the fall of the year. We tried to save the bees, but they died for us. I often wondered how snakes could climb trees. I examined some and found that under every scale along the belly of a snake there are two rows of little legs, with three claws in each, and as fine as a hair. I told this at one time to Tim Bush, and he called me a great liar. So I watched my chance, caught a garter snake and held it over a fire. It promptly showed its legs and Tim was convinced.
FLIES AND MOSQUITOS.
Among the early pests about the home were swarms of house flies, gad flies, blue bottle flies, and millions of mosquitos. The swales and marshes and other pools of stagnant water afforded a great breeding place for them, as well as for fever and ague, and we often built smudge fires to smoke them out. The cattle were also torment- ed by them and sometimes came running into our fires for relief. The smoke was sometimes so thick as to be almost as great a nuisance as the mosquitos. It was a relief when cold weather put an end to these pests.
FOREST MUSIC.
Then we could lie down and listen quietly at night to the howling of wolves, to the barking of foxes, the noises of porcupines, the snorting of deer, the hooting of owls, especially the laughing owl, the creaking of trees as they rubbed together, and sometimes the re- peated creaking and cracking and final breaking down
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of some monstrous tree in the deep forest which fell with noise like thunder.
FIRST CASE OF INSANITY.
Somewhere in the fifties, a daughter of a Mr. Stew- art, in Townsend township, went insane from fright caused by hearing the hooting of the laughing owl in the dead of the night. She was not as courageous as the old maid who, when she heard the owl cry out "who? who? who?" thought it was the Lord about to bring her a hus- band, and answered, "Anybody, Lord, just so it's a man."
ELKS.
It is not generally known that at an early day there were elks in this region. Evidences were found in Wash- ington township by John Whitmore, who in plowing up a reclaimed swamp of about 40 acres struck many elk horns imbeded in the soil. The plow and harrow struck and pulled out so many that when gathered up they made more than a wagon load. Some were decayed and brit- tle, others in a good state of preservation. An old settler who came here as early as 1814 said that the elk used to come to the marsh to fight the flies, and in doing so in the thickets they shed their horns, which were left near together, as they went in herds. A Mr. Faust, of Riley township, plowed up a large.elk horn, but it soon crumb- led to dust.
BEAVER.
I had the good fortune also to discover evidences that the beaver used to have a home here. In a field about fifteen rods from our cabin eastward, in drawing a
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MAJOR GEORGE CROGHAN. THE HERO OF FORT STEPHENSON.
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furrow to drain a swale, our plow struck the remains of a beaver dam. These consisted of small sticks or poles about four inches in diameter and fifteen inches in length, ingeniously built together and plastered with clay forming a ridge about three feet across and extend- ing cross-wise of the swale for about sixty feet. The ends of the poles showed that they had been gnawed off, even the marks of teeth could be traced on some of them, and it was noticed too that the thickest were shorter than the thin ones, so that their heft was nearly uniform. The timbers near the top of the ground were decayed, but those that we dug up with a mattock from a depth of two or three feet were in a good state of preservation, apparently as hard as horn. This swale emptied into the seven mile ditch, on land recently owned by Jacob Burgner, section 12, Ballville township.
AN OLD FORT.
I might add here that about eighty rods west of our cabin there was a small ridge of earth about three feet high, on an average, and four feet wide, extending in a circular form, enclosing about four acres of ground. In- side this circle there was young timber growing, small saplings about 6 to 8 inches in thickness. Outside the circle were large trees of the forest. None of the early settlers could give an account of it, but supposed it to have been a fortification during the French and Indian
war. Various war-like Indian tribes frequented this region. Some parties dug here for hidden treasures, but none were found. I used to gather flint arrow points while plowing in the fields, and at one time I had half a bushel of them. After I left home they disappeared in various ways. I often wondered how and where the
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Indians got those neatly formed arrow points. It took fine Indian art to make them.
FORT STEPHENSON.
I spent the first half day after our arrival in Lower Sandusky in going all over the grounds of the old fort. The pickets on the north side and part of the east side, where the City Hall now stands, were still standing, but decayed. I dug out one post, which had remained solid in the ground. I split it and made a walking cane of it. Two log houses stood just on the outside of the north line of the fort in which poor families lived. One of the men, William Wire, was a great fiddler; the other, Bill Myers, stood six feet and two inches in his boots.
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