USA > Wisconsin > Sauk County > A standard history of Sauk County, Wisconsin, Volume I > Part 41
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all of his toes. He was confined to the shanty all winter, and, in fact, a year's labor was lost to him and more, for he since was not the iron- sided man he was before. Mr. Christie pushed the logging and made out a fair winter's work at a small expense, but did not get the logs down until next spring. After they were snugly boomed there came one of the greatest freshets the country ever experienced, broke the boom and carried the mill off. Mill and logs were scattered upon the mouth of the river. Mr. Barker sold his runaway logs to some Caledonia farmers for four yoke of oxen. These he took the next winter (1845) into the Lemonweir pinery and banked logs for Captain Joseph Finley for a stipend per M and to take his pay in lumber. In the spring he rafted his lumber. He had made arrangements with John B. Crawford and Wesley Clement to go with them by the overland route to Cali- fornia, Clement to bring the team (horses), and wagon to Galena. He then shipped them aboard the raft, and as they were floating down the river they changed their minds and determined to go via the Isthmus. Wm. Christie took the team and wagon back to Baraboo, and, after selling, they went according to the new arrangement. After arriving at their haven each went his own way.
MINING ADVENTURES
"Mr. Barker worked a placer mine in company with an apparently honest, fine man. This mine proved to be a rich one. They quietly at- tended to their business, burying the dust they accumulated. It was the rule for one to go to town one week while the other stayed working and watching their hidden treasure. One day after his partner had gone to town he looked over their accumulation and found a large share of it gone. He followed him to town and met him and charged him with purloining. He declared his innocence. Barker, with revolver in hand, had him strip from head to foot. He plead innocence so sincerely that he believed him, but that night he left and shipped for Australia. Barker had a wealthy brother in the Australian gold fields, so he made up his mind to follow his partner and visit his brother. He did not succeed in meeting his old partner.
SHIPWRECKED
"He spent one season with his brother, adding some to his 'pile,' then went to Ireland and visited his parents; thence to England and purchased a stock of dry goods, largely silk, and shipped for New York City. While they were off the coast of Newfoundland the ship struck a rock, which opened a hole in her, and she sank. Their signals brought relief from shore, and no lives were lost; even some property being saved. He secured his trunk. He lost about $4,000 in this wreck, as he had nothing insured.
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RETURNS TO BARABOO
"Mr. Barker got back to his Baraboo home in 1854, after a nine years' absence. He now got some of his old claim put under the plow. Leaving John Rowan to take charge, he went onto the Mississippi river and bought and sold farm produce-pork and grain-occasionally com- ing home to look after affairs. From 1854.to 1858 he spent most of his time in this business, still making farm improvements. That proved to be the most lucrative business in the same space of time he was ever in. He invested in real estate about St. Paul. His agent swindled him out of about $4,000.
HIS BEST FORTUNE
"The really best business arrangement the rover ever entered into was made with Sarah Jane Lamborn, of Jackson County, Iowa. An old schoolmate and intimate friend of Mr. Barker's married a sister of Miss Lamborn and in visiting his friend Sarah Jane netted him, and what was better she took him, or he took her, onto his old claim. There he was planted, the rest of his natural life. She was an American woman of German and French extraetion. No more roving or shipwrecks or rob- beries or duels or swindles. A year before his aequaintanee with Miss Lamborn he had erected a comfortable outfit of farm buildings. The same week of the marriage, groom and bride were lord and lady in a well equipped manor; for the last fifteen or twenty years he had man- aged a large dairy of thirty or forty eows, making butter and running a creamery. Here they quietly lived on, to see grow up about them six boys and one girl. He had just purchased the Colonel Vittum place and got comfortably settled when the summons came. One great comfort the mother and children have is to know that they had a husband and father who was an honorable man. His early life was so varied and he so well acquainted with the world and rich in anecdotes and many practical jokes, that it made him always a cheery conversationalist, who will long linger in our memories."
JOHN B. CRAWFORD
Says Mr. Canfield: "John B. Crawford came to Baraboo in October, 1844, with a corps of government surveyors: James E. Freeman, the deputy, or contractor ; Hugh Moore, James Bell and Rodgers, assistants. Freeman was taken sick in eamp. I fell in with them one day while I was coming home from Sauk, and make an engagement to work for them. Moore was using Freeman's compass. I got up a party and com- menced surveying December 11th. My party consisted of James Bell and J: B. Crawford, chainmen, Henry Webster, axman. My cousin,
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Bradford R. Remington, was engaged with us in Hugh Moore's party. This surveying job was a hard one on account of the deep snow. We also had the ill-luck to have our tent burned up, which obliged us to sleep on the snow for a couple of weeks. We would break off oak bushes with the leaves on and lay them on the snow about a foot in thickness and make our bed on them, which was buffalo skins and blankets. While on this surveying job, John. B. Crawford came near losing his life by getting lost in the night. And had it not been for James Bell, who heard John halloo just onee, he probably would have died. But as a piece of good luek, the boys in eamp led by Bell went directly to him. He was holding on to a little tree almost ready to fall down, and partially out of his mind; but after one day's rest was able to go to work again. After the surveying job was finished I hired Crawford and Moore to help me log in Peek's pinery for one month. John wrote to his father to come and see the Baraboo country, which he did, and concluded to remain here. He came on and made elaim of a piece of land one-fourth of a mile north of the Wood-Rowan mill and built a log house on the north side of the river near the bank of the old Indian ford, as is known to this day as the Crawford place. John was an only child; a good and faithful one to his parents. As the country developed, he was an active member in all publie enterprises, especially of a moral or religious ehar- acter. In his two years' trip to California some gold dust stuck to his poeket, besides obtaining the heart and hand of his partner's sister. In a few years thereafter he bought up oxen and a great wagon and did freighting in the mountains in the Pike's Peak gold distriet. He has given his children good school advantages, and is now reaping some re- ward. The father, Alexander Crawford, and mother, Hannah, were universally respected. They were members of the M. E. church and he seemed to love to respond to ideas given out, and that too very heartily. The Amen never came from him with a whisper. His stalwart form and heavy voice would almost shake the building. For a series of years they entertained travelers and new comers. One of our early settlers that was traveling in an emigrant wagon intending to stop at Adams, the county seat, went through the place and did not know it, eame to a log house and there stood a tall, stout-built man. I said, 'Sir, is there a place where a stranger could get accommodations over night?' 'I dis- covered in his features an open, manly expression, and intuitively felt that we were safe. He opened his broad, frank mouth and said: 'Yes, if you will take up with suel accommodations as I have in my little house, you are welcome,' at the same time starting with me towards the house. On entering I found the house unsurpassed for cleanliness- in faet, one of the eleanest I ever had my foot in.' This was the home of Alexander Crawford. The Crawford family have played a pleasant and profitable part in the early settlement of Baraboo."
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W. C. CANFIELD WRITES OF WALLACE ROWAN
L. C. Draper, secretary of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, addressed a note to me some two years ago in which he asked for infor- mation about Wallace Rowan, who lived for a few years at Baraboo, and, believing that a daughter lived near this place yet, said he would like to have me visit her and collect what information I could get of her father's life. I could get very few accurate dates, but learned that Wallace Rowan was a Kentuckian. Soon after his majority he went to Jacksonville, Morgan County, Illinois. He married Elizabeth Metcalf, a North Carolinian. They had here three children born to them, Emila, Archibald and Mary Ann. Then they moved to Platteville, Wisconsin, where Alminda was born. He then moved to the four lakes, in the neighborhood of where Madison now is, and thence to a place called Odds and Ends, afterwards Hanie's-Hanie kept a house of entertain- ment here and now named Black Earth. While here, a new country incident occurred. A difficulty between Hanie and a man named Pelky arose about a claim. Hanie shot Pelky, not fatally; however.
From here Rowan moved to Poynette, where he lived seven years. Three children were born here, Robert, Elizabeth and Clarissa. While there he was obliged to move to Portage on account of the Black Hawk war. From Poynette he moved to a point on the military road from Fort Crawford to Fort Winnebago, fourteen miles from Winnebago and twenty-eight from Madison, on a creek that carried the name of Rowan Creek for many years, now generally known as Token Creek. Mr. Archibald Barker and Rowan went into company in the Indian fur trade business the next year after he moved here. Barker thinks the Rowan family moved to this point in 1837 or 1838. He feels quite con- fident that it was in '37. He built a large double log house and opened a place for entertainment. It proved to be well located for such a house. Often every bed (and he had many) and every foot of floor room would be occupied by sleepers, so great was the travel to and from the pineries.
LIVELY INDIAN TRAFFIC
But Mr. Rowan loved the Indian traffic so much that he turned his attention to it once more, leaving his large family and a hired man to attend to the farm and the house of entertainment. (The whole family could speak Winnebago fluently.) Rowan and Barker had an Indian trading point at Portage and another at Lake Puckaway on Fox River. and one in the Wisconsin pinery. While on the way with goods to the pinery, they had an altercation with the Indians. For a few minutes there was a sharp little battle. One Indian drew a knife and broke the blade in attempting to use it. Some Indians were knocked down. The whites, three in number, soon drove the Indians away. These melees with the Indians were of no uncommon occurrence in this trade.
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PARTNERSHIP WITH ABRAM WOOD
"At Portage Mr. Rowan formed an acquaintance with Abram Wood, a brother Kentuckian, who had a Winnebago squaw for a wife, and entered into eo-partnership with him to build a saw mill at the Baraboo rapids, knowing that there were nice pine groves at the head of most of the branches of that stream. Wood moved onto the claim in the fall of 1839 and commeneed work. Rowan moved his family here in 1841. Mr. Rowan's eldest daughter married a man by the name of Mason, who stayed at their Rowan Creek place for two or three years, when the place was sold to James Enspringer. Mason moved to Baraboo. On August 19, 1844, we had one of the greatest freshets ever known on the Baraboo River. Their boom full of logs, the first ones ever brought down the river, broke, and most of them went over the dam next to the mill. This had the effect to dig out a deep hole beside the mill, undermining it. The mill tipped over into the stream and floated off.
DEATH AND CHARACTER
"Mr. Rowan lived by farming at Baraboo until February, 1846, when he died very suddenly. In the afternoon he was taken with a pain between the shoulders and died before daylight the next morning. We are sorry to say that there are so few exact data in the above sketch, but we believe the incidents are quite correct.
"In some respeets Mr. Rowan was a remarkable man. He was of medium size and well built and possessed an endurance for a pioneer life far, far above, that of ordinary men. A small volume could be filled with relations of privations and hardships he endured. He was always pleasant and very slow to anger. His word was, however, always law in his family. A person that had been long a member in it says he never saw him chastise a child but once. Two quite good-sized lads of his had so serious a difference that they came to blows. He happened to witness the altercation. He stepped in between them, took each by the collar and mildly walked them into the house. The boys, fired up with passion, tried to tell their grievances. But the father said: 'I saw it; say no more.' He stood one on one side of the room and the other on the opposite side. Calling in the family, he told the boys to meet half way and kiss, with their heads up and pleasant. They complied, but very surily and sour. The father said he was not satisfied; they must try again and be more pleasant: which they did, and the father said that was a good deal better and would do. Our informant says that as long as he was acquainted with the boys they were pleasant towards each other. Mr. Rowan's home was always welcome to his neighbors and to strangers. He was very far from being a penny-fisted man in his dealings with them. On his death the neighborhood very much missed
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his genial society. His remains were interred in a pleasant knoll about forty rods northwest of the dam, with nothing to mark the spot, together with some other members of his family and some other early settlers."
DOCTOR QUAIFE WRITES OF BARABOO'S FIRST SETTLER
There has been some doubt as to when Abraham Wood came to Baraboo and as to who the first settler really was. Under date of October 18, 1917, Dr. M. M. Quaife, superintendent of the Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, writes :
"We appreciate your difficulty in determining the time of the advent of Abraham Wood on your river, because of the conflict in the authorities. So far as we can determine, the account in the Wisconsin Historical Atlas seems to be the most authoritative. The sketches in this volume were carefully written, and were obtained from survivors then alive. According to that statement the first man who attempted settlement at the Baraboo Rapids in 1837 was Archibald Barker, who then lived at Portage. He was driven off by the Indians. Meanwhile the treaty at Washington had been negotiated, and there seemed more hope that a settlement might be made. In the spring or early summer of 1839 a man named James Alban discovered Devil's Lake; he went back to Portage and told Eben Peck, first settler at Madison. Peek had just sold out at the latter place to Robert Ream, and he and Alban set out up the Baraboo and marked out a site at the Rapids, including the water power. As Peck was going back (after a stay of some weeks) apparently, he met Wallace Rowan and Abraham Wood, whom he had known well at Madison, coming up from Portage. They staked out their elaim at Lyons, where Wood spent the winter. In the meanwhile James Van Slyke came up from Walworth County in the fall of 1839 and determined to jump Peck's claim. Van Slyke had had his claim at Lake Geneva jumped by other parties, and was in a bitter and retaliatory frame of mind. After staking out his claim to the Rapids of the Baraboo, he went back to Walworth, and interested James Maxwell in a plan for . a mill and persuaded him to furnish irons and equipment. Van Slyke went up in the spring of 1840 and built a dam, which was carried out by the freshet of June. Meanwhile, Peck had brought his claim before the court at Madison and obtained judgment against Van Slyke. The latter had already abandoned the enterprise. Van Slyke sold his irons to Wood and Rowan, who during the summer started a sawmill at the upper rapids.
"There seems to be every evidence that the source of this account was the Peck family, who were in a position to know the facts. If this account is true, we suppose Wood might be called the first settler, since he remained in the vicinity during the winter of 1839-40; but no doubt he lived as the Indians did, if not with them, since his wife was a squaw.
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He was thus not much more of a first settler than Barker, Alban, Rowan, Peck or Van Slyke.
"To return to Wood. We are unable to discover when or how he come to Wisconsin. He was probably a fur trapper or trader, one of the rough frontiersmen of Seoteh descent from the backwoods of Canada. In the course of trade he came in contact with the Decorah chiefs and took to wife one of the daughters of the tribe. He had probably been on the Baraboo often before 1839, since his squaw's native village was near its mouth, and there her father died in 1836. Wood was not then at the Baraboo, since he was wintering near Madison. He was not at this site in 1832, so sometime between that date and 1836 he set up his wigwam at Squaw Point on Third Lake opposite the modern eity of Madison. His neighbor at this place was Wallace Rowan, a rough, good- hearted frontiersman from Indiana with a white wife. There is a good account of Rowan in the 'History of Dane County' (Chicago, 1880), pp. 382-83. Rowan seems to have permitted Wood to place his wigwam, or whatever kind of dwelling he had, on his claim, which he entered with William B. Long in 1835. Wood was on Third Lake during the winter of 1836-37, and during the summer of 1837 he aided in building Madi- son, being employed as a mechanic on Peck's log house. It seems prob- able that Wood spent the winter of 1837-38 at the same place as there is no record of him at Portage before the spring of 1838.
"Probably Wood moved away from Squaw Point, because Rowan that spring sold his claim and improvements to William B. Slaughter. Rowan moved to Poynette and opened his noted tavern. Wood went to Portage, where, no doubt he had often been before with the relatives of his squaw. In 1838 work was begun on the Portage canal, and Wood opened a house of liquid refreshment just below Carpenter's on the Wisconsin river. There probably in the spring of 1839, Wood killed Pawnee Blanc, a noted Winnebago chief. Wood's brother-in-law, John T. de La Ronde, tells the sordid story in 'Wisconsin Historieal Collections, VII, 360.' He does not give the date of the murder; Moses Paquette says (idem, ยท XII, 431) that it was in 1837. Paquette probably remembered that it was after his father's death in 1836; but it could hardly have been in 1837, since Wood was then at Madison. Our inference is that the death of Pawnee Blanc occurred in 1838 or 1839. Wood was probably anxious to leave Portage at this time; moreover, in 1839 Winfield Scott went to Portage and held a council with the Winnebago Indians concerning their removal from Wisconsin. Wood knew the Baraboo valley would soon be open for settlement. He persuaded his old friend, Rowan, to go prospecting with him. But on their way out they found Peck and Alban had been there before them. Wood, not wanting to go back to Portage, spent the winter in the Baraboo woods, and the next autumn (1840) with Wallace Rowan began a sawmill, as La Ronde states (Wis. Hist. Colls., VII, 360).
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"The foregoing hypothesis appears to reconcile all the accounts except Moses Paquette's date of the killing of Pawnee Blane. The record of Wood's trial may sometime come to light. Possibly it may be preserved in the records of the court of Brown County, still kept at the courthouse at Green Bay."
FIRST POMOLOGICAL EFFORTS BY THE CANFIELDS
By W. H. Canfield
"Being solicited by the editor of the Northwestern Hortieulturist to give a reminiscence of our early fruit growing experience, I will give you our 'greenhorn' experience, and to make it more complete must mix with it early settlement reminiscences.
"I am come into the heavy timbered belt in the town of Brooklyn, now Baraboo, on Skillet Creek, in the spring of 1842. My father was a friend of Smith and Thorpe, those large nursery-men at Syracuse, New York. He wrote me relative to starting a nursery to supply demands that would be required as the settlement should grow. My replies were that it was already a fruitful country in many ways. Groves of wild apples and plums were here in abundance and some of the plums were delicious. We have butternuts and hickorynuts. The black and red raspberries and gooseberies, the vine and bush cranberry, leeks, onions, mandrakes, cherries; wild honey so plentiful that a good hunter could sometimes get a barrel of honey in the fall, and we have old Indian sugar bushes to supply us with sugar. Our waters filled with fish, and the air with game birds, and the rock ledges with rattlesnakes, and the woods with large game, such as deer, bear, etc. We have no skunks, Canada thistles or mean men.
FATHER AND SON START FIRST NURSERY
"My father had already settled in two new countries and those let- ters of mine determined him to make one more. So in the fall of 1843 he made me a visit and stayed the winter, and in the spring had his nursery stock shipped to Beloit, thinking to plant it there, but finally coneluded to have it brought to Baraboo. So in the spring I went with my ox team and got it. Of that trip I will only mention two events. One was on my way down. One night I stopped for the night, it being my first 'camp out' in my life. I had got a fire started when a wind cloud came up and blew it entirely away and a heavy rain storm set in. I lost my supper but managed to keep dry through night. It sleeted, rained and froze. In the morning the oxen were coated with ice. At daybreak I 'hitched up' and started and got to Madison, a ten-mile drive, to a 10 o'clock breakfast. On our return trip we had a similar experi- ence. I then had Dick, our black boy, with me. On this occasion I got
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under the wagon with my blanket, and Dick took to a great white oak tree and sat against it, wrapped in his blanket. About midnight we concluded that we might just as well move on. I drove the team and Dick felt the road out with his fect. After all we had some pleasant days.
"At 2 o'clock, Friday, April 29, the first nursery stock that ever came into Sauk county was anchored on Skillet Creek, town of Brook- lyn (now Baraboo). It consisted in main of 200 orchard trees, a barrel of peach pits, a bushel of apple seed and shrubs, etc. We committed it to the earth as soon as possible. The following year we budded peaches, apricots, etc., by the thousands. There were two, three or four favor- able winters on tender varieties of fruit trees; still, within this time we had enemies to contend with. First, in 1845 or 1846 we were visited by the army worm. We fought them as best we could by plowing ditches and using the spade to finish them up, and made pit holes every rod or so in the bottom of the ditch. This saved the nursery mostly. These traps caught the chief rank and file of this army of worms. The next season or two the Aphoid destroyed whole rows of trees. We checked them by making a strong decoction of tobacco, putting it into a shallow basin and bending the young tree over into the fluid and giving it a tobacco bath.
OTHER PIONEER FRUIT GROWERS
"During these mild winters Mr. Alburtus, in Honey Creek, had a peach orchard that gave him two crops of fruit, but at least the winters came that swept out of existence the peach, apricot and quince, and badly damaged apple trees. Still, we found a few of our list of apple trees more hardy than others which we largely propagated and sold, such as Tallmans, Sweeting, Strawberry, Swan apple or Fameuse, Early Richmond Cherry. The fine variety of plums, Bleeker's Gauge, Ball- mars, Washington and Green Gauge, seemed to me to stand the win- ters quite well, but the curculio was so great an enemy we stopped grow- ing them. For several years I' sold a considerable of that fruit. I have had for the past five years quite a desire to send to Syracuse, or Roches- ter and get those noble old varieties and start me a plum orchard. There is no richer fruit raised. Trees are quite hardy and I believe that the curculio could be handily destroyed.
"In 1848 James M. Clark, a gentleman, scholar and an honest man, came amongst us, settling in what is now the town of Greenfield, two and one-half miles southeast of the village, now city of Baraboo. For several years he did quite a large nursery business. George Holah did some business in this line. His large old orchard looks quite well yet. On Sauk, Ransom E. Stone followed close after my effort. Payne and Perkins, also on Sauk, dabbled some in fruits. Charles Hirschinger, a
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