USA > Ohio > Seneca County > History of Seneca County, from the close of the revolutionary war to July, 1880 > Part 23
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The second count ran thus, and is of interest to show where the dam was once located:
And. also, that the said Josiah Hedges, on the day and year last aforesaid, and on divers other days and times, etc., broke and entered another close of the said plaintiff. etc., situate and being, etc., abntting towards the west on that part of the Armstrong Reservation, so-called, which lies between a place forty poles north of the place called Camp Ball, and the south line of the said Armstrong Reservation, and abutting towards the east on the eastern bank of the Sandusky river, opposite the saw mill on said reserva- tion. and then and there broke down, tore up, etc.
In the fourth count, the dam is located in these words:
Abutting on the western bank of the Sandusky river that lies between the southern section line of the said Armstrong Reservation and a place com- monly called Camp Ball, and abutting towards the east, etc.
The fifth count charges the taking away of the stones, and the con- verting of them to Hedges' own use, and concludes by saying:
And other wrongs to the said Jesse Spencer then and there done, to the great damage of the said Jesse Spencer, and against the peace and dignity of the state of Ohio; whereupon the said Jesse Spencer says that he is injured, and has sustained damage to the amount of five hundred dollars, and thereupon he brings this suit. 1 .!
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Mr. Hedges in his answer denied "all and singular the premises," and defended the "wrongs and injuries," etc., and said that he was not guilty of the supposed trespass laid to his charge, etc., "and of this he puts himself upon the country, and the said plaintiff doth the like;" which means simply that he will submit this case to a jury. To this answer a written notice was attached "that the close in question was the property of the said Hedges, and that he had a legal right to do what he did."
The case was continued until the April term, 1825, when it was tried to the following jury, viz: James Mathers, Jesse Gale, John C. Donnel, William Foncannon, Smith Kentfield, Peter Yeaky, Ezekiel Sampson, Samuel Scothorn, James Cutright, Ezra Brown, Jacob S. Jennings, Elisha Clark, "who upon their oaths do say that the said defendant is guilty in manner and form, etc., and we do assess the plaintiff's dan- ages by reason thereof, at $8.00. The court entered up judgment for that sum. The costs were $26.75. This ended the first law-suit and jury trial in Seneca common pleas.
The point upon which Mr. Hedges was found guilty, was the fact that, at the time the dam was erected, the land along the right bank of the river belonged to the United States; had not then been surveyed nor offered for sale, and Mr. Hedges was not then the owner of the same.
Mr. Ingraham, who had been appointed sheriff, gave bond in the sum of $5,000, and Rollin Moler, Michael Schaul, Joseph Pool and John A Rosenberger were his sureties.
At this court, William Doyle, from Ireland, was the first person naturalized in this county.
Mr. Spencer became so badly involved in numerous lawsuits that the executions against him seem to have swallowed up all his means.
Whenever the weather in winter would permit of out-door work. there was always enough of it to do. Great trouble was often expe- rienced by those that had cattle to take care of. When the winters were open and mild, as was very usual then, the cattle could find grass in the woods and along the banks of the streams; but in very cold winters, with much snow, and no hay on hand, the poor animals suffered very much, and were compelled to subsist on "browse," which was the tender ends of tree-tops. The trees had to be cut down for that purpose, and while this labor had to be repeated every day during the frozen season, it was still very hard living for the cattle. Many died from exhaustion before spring.
Now was also the time to prepare for "sugar making."
For want of
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SUGAR-MAKING. 211
buckets, or other vessels to catch the sugar-water, troughs were made of various lengths and widths, from poplar, ash, sugar, elm, or other wood, by chopping the blocks of the required length, and splitting them once in two. A dish was then chopped into the flat side. Some of the largest of these troughs would hold from one to two gallons. A hole was bored into the sugar-tree some three feet above the ground. and a "spile," made of a one-year's growth from an elder bush, and with the pith taken out, was driven into the hole, in the tree, to conduct the sap into the trough. The sap was boiled down in big iron kettles
suspended on a pole, held up by two forks fixed in the ground at a convenient place in the sugar-camp. The time for this work generally commenced in February, when the frost began to come out of the ground and the sap to ascend. It often lasted away towards the latter part of March, when the ground froze hard during the night and thawed out the following day. This freezing and thawing time was considered good sugar weather. As the sap was boiling down, the impurities were nicely skimmed off, and when the sirup became so thick as to commence granulating, it was stirred with a paddle while . the fire was allowed to go down. Those that preferred the sugar in cake form poured the thick sirup into tin pans, when it became hard in a short time.
The first few weeks of the sugar season made the best sugar. Towards the last of the run the sirup refused to granulate, and was preserved in that form and answered the purpose of molasses. It is . decidedly the richest sweet that nature produces. . Reader! Did you ever eat corn-pone with maple molasses? If you did, there is no use in saying anything further to you about it. Pone could only be baked in a Dutch oven, which was an iron kettle, flat at the bottom, with a flat, heavy iron lid. The oven was placed on coals and the lid covered with coals. It was of great use, and never had an equal.
The Indians learned the art of making sugar from the white people. . but how to be cleanly about it, they never would learn. It required a very strong appetite to eat their sugar. Those who never saw them make it got along with it much easier.
Whenever their sirup was about ready to granulate they would have a raccoon ready to cook, which they would put into the sirup, hair, skin, entrails and all. The coon would get "done" in a short time, when he was taken out and allowed to cool off enough to be handled. A crust of sugar came away with the hair and skin. The flesh seemed nicely done, but the sugar-well !
Settlers that had large sugar-camps built little cabins in the wood .
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to put their troughs into in order to preserve them. Others set up the troughs on end and leaned them against the tree, dish side inward.
The writer has seen good use made of some of these sugar-troughs in seasons of the year when sugar-water did not run. They were rocked in the cabin of the settler with a sugar lump, in the shape of a young "Buckeye," in them. The little fellow was thus not "rocked in the cradle of the deep," but in a substitute much safer. Many noble men and women, now living in Ohio, were raised and rocked in these sugar-trough cradles; and the mother's lullaby, in the cabin, sounded . as sweet as it ever did in the palatial mansion, with plate-glass windows and gilded door-knobs.
It was among the "rural felicities" to see a whole family employed in the sugar-camp on a pleasant day, some carrying sugar-water, some skimming the sirup, others preparing wood, each employed at some- thing; and when night came on, the work was so reduced as to require but little, if any, attention before the next morning. Some of the neighbors would visit the camp, spend the evening and have a good chat. Neighbors seemed to think more of each other then than they do now; at least they visited each other oftener when the distance, the work and the weather would permit.
The time is fast approaching when sugar-making will be considered as a thing of the past, and the coming generation will not know what a sugar trough looked like. Our forests are passing away rapidly, and soon there will not be timber enough left to fence the fields or supply the demand for building and manufacturing purposes. On many farms in Seneca county, the little patches of woodland that are left, are already more valuable than the cleared land. Nobody makes calcula- tions when there will not be wood enough in this county to answer the purposes of the family for cooking and heating, to say nothing about the timber with which to build houses and barns. Why not commence now to start a young forest? Take, say five or ten acres at a time, well fenced to keep out stock, on that part of a farm where the wood lot may be wanted, and plant with acorns, beech nuts, maple seed, or such other variety as may be desired. It will require no further care, and in a few years a young forest will gladden the heart of the owner. The one that plants the patch will not live to see large trees grow there himself, but ere long the purchaser will pay more for a farm that has a young wood lot growing up on it, than he will for one without it.
No attempt will be made to picture to the mind of anybody, the vexations and troubles inflicted upon the frontier by the then great scarcity of money. There was very little to be had for any purpose.
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SCARCITY OF MONEY.
Barter and trade was the order of the day, and while this exchange was all right in some respects, it would not answer for others. Taxes could not be paid in that way, and the merchant, after waiting a long time, had to have cash with which to meet his bills in New York or Philadel- phia. When some pioneer merchant brought on articles that were indispensable for the household, or for farming purposes, there was no money to buy them with. Often, long credits furnished no relief. When a man had anything to sell, it found no market for money. He could trade it away for something he wanted from his neighbor. If a man wanted an article from another, and had nothing to exchange for / it, he paid in work by the day, or agreed to clear so many acres of land for the article. Men bought their cows, their horses or hogs, in that way. Corn and wheat were hauled by ox teams, generally to Mansfield or Portland, now Sandusky City, to be sold for money. Wheat raised under the difficulties described in a former chapter, hauled to a market, from forty to sixty miles away, where it could be sold for only thirty cents a bushel in cash, or for three shillings in trade, was not an article on which farmers became rich very fast. Portland was the principal market for wheat, and many a load of wheat was exchanged there, at three shillings a bushel, for salt at five dollars a barrel, when it took about one week to make the trip.
Getting grinding done at the few mills there were then in the country, was attended with equally great hardship. After the City Mill, now in the first ward of Tiffin, was put up, farmers from Crawford, Hancock and Marion counties came here to get their grists ground, and at times, fifteen, twenty, or more teams waited their turn and camped out a whole week, with the family at home on small allowance, or probably with no bread at all.
To relate all the troubles and inconveniences that pioneer life was subject to, would require volumes, and some of them, only, are here alluded to. The rest must be left to inference, which to most any mind should be easy.
The hardest of all the hardships that the frontier settler had to con- tend with, was the malarious diseases everybody was subject to. The ground was covered with water and decaying vegetable matter; the river and the creeks were clogged with drift-wood and fallen timbers; beaver dams set the water back, thereby covering large tracts of land, while cat-swamps (as they were then called) were very numerous. There were terrible thickets and jungles of brush-bushes of various kinds growing on rich, boggy soil.
The forest held the moist air with a wonderful tenacity, and the
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miasma, produced by the heat of a summer's sun, and thus held in the humid air and breathed constantly, tended to corrupt the blood and derange the functions of the liver. Fever and ague, and bilious fevers were very common, and men were often seen standing on the street on a hot summer day, pale as death, with overcoats on, buttoned up to the chin, their hands in their pockets and shaking so that their voices trembled. The chill was always followed by a fever, and when that was passed, the patient was all right again until next day, or day after. The chills returned again at regular intervals, either next day, or every other day. People seemed to get used to them, and some were not reduced much by the chills, while others, and especially people from Europe, suffered very much more from these diseases. In general, those of European suffered more than those of American birth. Many a stout, robust man was reduced to a walking skeleton in a short time. Y'et this fever and ague was not considered dangerous to life. It was exceedingly troublesome, nevertheless, especially when whole families were taken with it at the same time. It was a sad scene to come, or be called, into a house and see a large family, young and old, in their beds, some shaking, and others burning with fever, and not one of them able to help the other to a cup of water. The only case where death ensued from these chills that ever came to the notice of the writer, was that of an old German who lived on South Jefferson street, in Tiffin, and who died shaking in his chair.
The most serious aspect of these malarious diseases, however, was the various bilious fevers that often defied the skill and care of the physicians, and frequently proved fatal. The terrible heat in fever, the parched tongue, the delirium, followed by extreme prostration; and then the remedies, such as calomel, ipecac, jalap, Peruvian bark, quinine, castor oil, etc., etc., all-diseases and remedies-were simply horrible. Some summers were more sickly than others, but for many years, and until the country became partially cleared up, there was no summer without this terrible visitation.
Oh! how the people waited and prayed for the coming of fall, and for the first sharp frost. A good black frost, that killed the leaves and made the grass crash under your feet, generally put a stop to this mon- ster phantom. The air became purer and more bracing, and it was very encouraging to see, in the faces of all, returning hope and cheer.
Whether the practice of medicine, as a science, has made the progress that its devotees claim for it, will not be argued here; but one thing must certainly be admitted, viz: that a great change has come over the dreams of the practitioner. The poor patient is now allowed the free
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THE PIONEER DOCTOR NOT FORGOTTEN.
use of water. This the practice, forty or fifty years ago, absolutely refused. It was simply cruel to let the poor sufferer burn up with fever. ยท calling for water to relieve him, and have it refused because the doctor would not allow it. It would not do; it might hurt him, might salivate him. and all that sort of nonsense. But they would blister, bleed and cup him, while his physical powers gradually broke down. What a change a few years have brought about! By the art of preserving ice for use in summer, the article has found its way into the sick chamber. where it has proven both a luxury and a blessing. Patients are now allowed all the fresh water they want, and fresh air, also, without fear of being salivated.
One feature in cases of shaking ague, which was not very common, however, and which seems now like a strange phenomenon, should be mentioned here. It was called the "hungry shakes" by some. As soon as the chills began to creep down the back, the bones to ache and the shivering to commence, the patient was taken with a ravenous appetite, and could eat with a wonderful rapacity, while he often shook so hard that the victuals fell from his knife, fork or spoon as he tried to pass them to his mouth. It made bad worse, however, for the fever that followed such a shake, after eating, seemed to be more severe and the headache more distressing.
Thompson township, on account of the openings and purer atmos- phere, suffered less with this plague than any other township in the county. In all the other portions of Seneca county the situation in this regard was about the same.
It was in these trying times that thousands of men were compelled. not by avarice, but by absolute, stern necessity, to find employment on the canals, the only public works then in the state, and the only places where money could be had for labor. It was a sad parting, when the. father left his little ones in the care and charge of the pioneer mother, to go sixty miles or more from home and be gone for months at a time, to work on the canal and himself become subject to these mala- rious diseases. They were even more prevalent along the canals than elsewhere, because they were constructed through dense forests, along the most sluggish streams, and on the most level ground, in order to avoid the expenditure which locks would require and the delay they would naturally cause in the moving of traffic.
Log huts were built on the highest ground near the line of the sur- vey, which were occupied as a headquarters for lodging, cooking, etc. They were as rough as they were temporary, and the contractor or the sub-contractor would spend no more money for the comfort of his men
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than was absolutely necessary. Beds and bedding were of the same character. With a temporary change of clothing, the men brought their blankets with them. A woolen blanket was a better protection against the mosquitoes at night than any other covering. These pests in warm weather formed into a sort of a cloud around their victims, day and night.
It is scarcely possible to find a place anywhere in the world better fitted to produce malarious diseases, than was the country at that time along the line of the Dayton and Michigan canal, and especially along the Auglaize, the Maumee and the Wabash in Indiana.
As the work progressed and the distance to and from the cabins increased, they were abandoned and new ones constructed near the works, in the same crude way. Whisky was cheap in those days, and in very common use. They had no temperance societies then, and every man was constituted a committee of one to mind his own busi- ness; nor had chemistry discovered the art of stretching or adulterating the article with poisonous drugs. Men who could afford the expense kept whisky by the barrel in their houses, and it was simply in con- formity with the general idea of hospitality, then in vogue, to have the bottle and glass set before one when visiting a neighbor. There were then less drunkards, in proportion to the number of inhabitants, than there are now, and the pimpled cheek bones and rum-blossomed nose, so prevalent now among those who drink whisky habitually, were not seen then.
Very often men had to work standing in water all day. There were no rubber boots to be had then, and to avoid getting sick and to keep away the "shakes," it was thought necessary, by both employer and employes, that men should drink whisky so many times a day. In conformity with this generally conceded necessity, it was made a part of the contract with the laborer that, in addition to his pay, he should receive his glass of whisky so many times a day-three times, gener- ally. The "boss" kept a barrel of it on hand, and if a man wanted more than his usual allowance he could have it by paying for it-twenty cents a gallon.
These whisky rations were called "jiggers," a very familiar term along the canals. I am not aware, however, that the whisky secured the object intended; I doubt it very much, for those that drank whisky became sick as well as those that did not. At times there were so . many of the workmen sick in their cabins that less than half of them answered at roll-call.
It is a most wonderful fact, that at all times, among all races of men,
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CHICHA-HOW MADE.
and in all countries, since the time of Noah, who "planted the first vine," people have had their beverages of some sort, liquors or other things that stupefied or intoxicated. For want of liquors they resorted to gums, opium or hasheesh, a gum produced from the exudations of the leaves and stocks of hemp, the smoking of which not only creates a deadly stupor, but fills the bewildered mind with visions of brilliant and supernatural scenes, while it breaks down and prostrates the nervous system of the poor victim, and gradually destroys life. [See Bayard Taylor's Travels in India.]
Along the river systems of South America, along the Orinoco, the Rio Negro, the Itenez, the Madeira, the Rio Beni, the Magdalena, the Matre de Dios and other tributaries of the Amazon; and up the moun- tains from Parma, through Ayacucho, Cazco, Cochabamba, along the lakes Titticaca and Ohuro, throughout the districts of Yungas, Yuracares and Magos,, along the foot of the Illimani and Sorata, the Indians inhabiting these regions, nearly all in abject poverty and ignorance, and so degraded that their type is scarcely traceable, yet all claiming to have been descended from the once noble Incas, make a beverage of their own that beats them all. Of late years, the mongrel whites -Peruvians, Brazillians, Spaniards and Portuguese-that mingled and inter-married with them, have also adopted this revolting South Amer- ican vice.
Along these rivers and mountains, to a certain degree of altitude, is found a bush with very thick, fleshy leaves, resembling in size and color the laurel. These leaves are gathered when they are most juicy and carried to the hut, where the family, young and old, chew them fine and spit them into some vat or vessel fixed for that purpose; when it is full another is filled in like manner, and so on, until the crop runs out or the requisite quantity is secured. These vats are allowed to stand undisturbed for several weeks, for the fermentation to proceed, and when that ceases and some of the elements have been precipitated and others have accumulated on top, the liquor becomes clear and is then drawn off into jugs of earthen ware. In addition to the home consump- tion of this liquor, a certain quantity is required for tithe in kind, or for taxes from the sale of it, so that each family will know how much to produce. This liquor is called "chicha," (pronounced "chicka,") and the bush that furnishes the leaf is called the "chicha bush." Whether the bush gives the name to the liquor, or the liquor to the bush, does not appear, nor is it very material.
When chicha making is over, the Indians of certain tribes are not allowed to touch a drop of it until the chief has his drink of it first.
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On a certain day each family brings a certain quantity of the liquor to the council-house, where, after a short ceremony over it, the chief takes his fill; then the next in authority, then the next, and so on, until the officers are all supplied. Then the common rabble fall in, and a gen- eral drunk ends the festivities.
Of late years, since maize came into use in South America, a chicha is made by masticating the grains in the same way as the leaf, but the liquor made from corn is said to be inferior to that made from the chicha bush; both, however, make people most beastly drunk. Think of it- a lot of old squaws, with decayed teeth, chewing leaves or corn and spitting them into a tub to make liquor of! The saliva produces the sugar that foments into alcohol and assists the work of fermentation. [See Humboldt's Travels in South America, and Herndon and Gib- bons' Explorations of the Sources of the Amazon. The writer's mind recurred to this circumstance when he thought as to the probable origin of the word "jiggers," and reflected whether or not the word "chicha" might possibly have become vulgarized or Americanized into this "jigger."]
The work on the canals commenced as early in the spring as the weather would permit and the frost was out of the ground, and was prosecuted with a will until along in July, when the laborers broke down with bilious diseases, and the work had to be abandoned in con- sequence, until after the few first early frosts in the fall, when it was again resumed and pushed forward into the winter.
During the time the father was at work on the canal and the mother with her little ones alone in the' cabin, miles away from neighbors, no doctor to call to assistance in case of sickness, no one to counsel or help in time of need, the trials and incidents of such a life lead the contemplative mind to sad and serious meditation. Let us try to forget scenes like these, for they will never occur again.
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