USA > Wisconsin > Rock County > Rock County, Wisconsin; a new history of its cities, villages, towns, citizens and varied interests, from the earliest times, up to date, Vol. I > Part 13
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The first white man who settled in the region contiguous to the present site of Beloit was Stephen Mack. He came from New England as early as 1820, for to settlers who saw him in his home near Rockton, Ill., with his squaw wife and numerous chil- dren, in 1837, he stated that he had then lived with the Indians about sixteen years. Having traded much of this time with various Indian tribes, and, because of his acquired knowledge of their manners and customs, having come to be regarded by them as of superior wisdom, he had finally settled among a tribe of the Winnebagoes as confidential adviser to their chief. His not marrying among them, however, soon caused suspicion of
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his friendship and he was accused of using his influence for the benefit of other white traders and to the disadvantage of the red men. Their distrust finally ripened into bitter hatred, resulting in a plot to kill him. But one of the Winnebago chiefs had a comely daughter, Hohnonega, who had learned to love the vietim of her people's hate, and her timely warning enabled Maek to flee for safety to the military post at Chicago. Various explana- tions and negotiations resulted in his returning to those Indians, only to have the treacherous foes seek his life again. This time the maiden concealed him on an island in Rock river near her home until the excitement had subsided. (Her tribal home, five miles south of Beloit, is now laid out as a summer pleasure ground and called Holinonega Park.) Such devotion touched Mack's heart, and knowing also that their marriage would insure his safety, he promptly married her and was adopted into the tribe. He was living at Maektown, which he had laid out, about a mile northwest of Rockton, Ill., when in the spring of 1837 R. P. Crane and O. P. Bieknell saw him and talked with him on their way to Beloit, or Turtle as it was then called, and Mack himself must have often visited this locality. Hohnonega became an es- timable woman. kind, hospitable, and a good wife and mother.
The first white man to settle within the present site of Beloit was a French Canadian trader and Indian interpreter named Thibault (Tebo), who in 1836 claimed to have been living in this general region some twelve years. There was no human habita- tion in this locality when John Inman and William Holmes vis- ited it for part of a day July 19. 1835, so Thibault's log cabin, which stood at the south end and west side of what is now State street, must have been built after that date. In May, 1836, Caleb Blodgett found him here living with two squaw wives, one about forty, with a grown-up son, and the other, a half-breed, consid- erably younger and the mother of a babe.
Thibault, who was a shrewd man, elaimed all the land with- in "three looks" from his cabin. A "look," the unit of land measurement among the Indians, was the distance a person could see from a certain starting point, so that Thibault's possessions were to be determined by looking from his cabin to some point as far distant as the sight could reach, going to that spot and looking again to the most distant point within the range of vision
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there, and from that second point repeating the process by a third "look."
The trader's son, said to be then about nineteen years old, and reckless yet intelligent, spoke not only English but also sev- eral Indian dialects, and wished to go west and be an interpreter, a plan which his father opposed. In the spring of 1837 Thibault sold his twelve-by-sixteen log cabin to Messrs. Crane and Bick- nell and soon afterward removed with all his family to Lake Koshkonong. Of him and of his tragic fate Hon. L. B. Caswell, ex-congressman, now of Fort Atkinson, Wis., contributes this personal description and record. (Mr. Caswell was then a boy, living in his father's cabin at the south end of the lake, and his statement is of the highest authority. )
"I knew Thibault (Tebo), the Indian trader, well. He had two log cabins about a mile and a half above the mouth of Lake Koshkonong on the south side. He was a Frenchman with two Indian wives, one quite old, the other about thirty and very at- tractive. Thibault was, I should judge, about fifty, quite tall and slender. He kept a stock of goods suitable for his trade with the Indians, such as blankets, ammunition, traps and other ar- ticles, which he exchanged with the Indians for their furs. He was said to be a fur buyer for Solomon Juneau, of Milwaukee, and well off, and we always found him honest and exerting a good influence among the Indians. He kept nothing intoxicating for the Indians and sold them only such goods as they needed. Unfortunately, however, he had a reckless grown-up son named Frank, who gave him no small amount of trouble. Frank and the younger wife were greatly attached to each other. In the winter of 1839-40 the old gentleman disappeared, which fact was not made known by Frank for several weeks, till finally he came to our house and told us his father had been missing for some time, giving no intelligent story about the disappearance. Suspicion at once rested upon both the young people and exten- sive search was made for some trace of foul play. Persons came from a great distance and examined the surrounding thickets and the ice of the lake and tried to discover, if possible, any hole cut in the ice where his body might have been put through into the lake, but without success, and the search was finally abandoned. In the spring of 1840 Frank stored some of their household goods and articles of food with my people and, with the two wives, went
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away west to the Mississippi river. After some months Frank came back and took away his goods, and this is the last we heard of them. Thibault was succeeded by a Frenchman named Ellick LaMiere, who occupied the Thibault shanties for the next eight or ten years."
The first recorded visit of white men to this locality was that made by soldiers of the Black Hawk War under General Atkin- son, including Private Abraham Lincoln, June 30, 1832. On that day they marched through this Turtle village, then deserted by its Indian inhabitants, and camped during the afternoon on the prairie about two miles north. The Indian scout whom the sol- diers saw when they started on the next morning, openly watch- ing them from a high bluff on the west side of the river, was probably standing on the brow of Big hill.
The next white man's visit occurred July 19, 1835, when Wil- liam Holmes, Jr., and John Inman, prospectors who had lost their ponies, walked south across the prairie to the mouth of Turtle creek and found here a solitary wilderness. They left the same day, and by July 23 had returned to Milwaukee, which had then only two white families. In the same month of July, 1835, soon after their departure, Joseph Thibault (pronounced Tebo) came here, and his log cabin was our first building. At this cabin, as they passed through the place on March 9, 1836, in a lumber wagon, on their way to the present site of Janesville, early in the evening, the family of Judge William Holmes, including two women and two girls, stopped a few minutes to warm up. That was the first recorded visit of white women. The youngest girl. Catherine Holmes, born August, 1819, now (1900) Mrs. Volney Atwood, of Janesville, Wisconsin, says she remembers well the dirt floor of Thibault's cabin and its big fireplace, built of sticks plastered over, with a large log burning in it. The Frenchman's two Indian wives took their children and went out of doors, giv- ing up the whole cabin to their visitors. Thus the history of Be- loit virtually begins with an act of hospitality.
As a matter of fact when, about a year later, R. P. Crane bought that hut and cleared it out, he found that the floor was made of slabs but covered so deeply with earth, brought in, that Miss Holmes was excusable in supposing it to be a dirt floor.
Mr. Crane, who kept a diary of those earliest times, says that a grove of heavy timber covered the lower grounds, now the busi-
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ness part of the city, while on the higher were burr oak openings. There were no miasmatic swamps along our beautiful spring-fed Rock river and this whole region, my father often declared, was a natural Indian's paradise. He said to me once, "I don't won- der that Black Hawk fought for it; if I had been an Indian I would have laid my bones here rather than leave it."
And Mr. W. F. Packard, now in his ninetieth year, living at Rockton, Ill., remarked to the editor, May 18, 1908: "People living here today cannot appreciate what nature did for the beautifying of this valley and are insensible to how it looked when I first saw it seventy years ago today. It was a gorgeous garden of natural loveliness and I have several times tried to picture it on paper, but my powers of expression have failed me.".
(Until with comparatively recent years prairie chiekens have persisted in returning every summer to one of their favorite drumming grounds two miles north of Beloit. And I can well remember the clouds of wild pigeon that would literally darken the sky during my boyhood here. Some of those floeks were un- doubtedly a mile long .- Ed.)
From the prairies, lowlands, forests and streams of this fav- ored region such nomadie adventurers as Thibault desired noth- ing, and in them saw nothing beyond the daily supply of their physical wants; our real pioneers, however, inspired with high ideals, impelled by manly qualities, inherited from Puritan an- cestors and nurtured in their New England homes, looked beyond the toils and trials, incident to every new settlement and, with prophetic eye, saw in all these marvelous provisions of nature means for the accomplishment of great ends. To this class be- longed nearly all the first permanent settlers of Beloit and none, perhaps, was more worthy of being the leader than Caleb Blod- gett, whose native qualities eminently fitted him for that im- portant place in its early history.
A native of Randolph, Vt., with meager education, acquired in his boyhood home, Mr. Blodgett had a strong, vigorous mind, clear foresight, restless energy and an indomitable will that noth- ing could daunt. Passing over the events of his earlier manhood, struggles in the then wilds of western New York and Ohio with successes and discouragements and final disaster in the loss by fire of the accumulations of years, we find him in 1835 tem- porarily located with his family in a log cabin at Meacham's
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Grove, twenty-five miles northwest of Chicago, near another of our pioneer families, that of Chauncey Tuttle. The prospects there proving unsatisfactory, in May, 1836, Mr. Blodgett came to the site of the present city of Beloit exploring, attracted by its many natural advantages returned again in June, and spent the summer and fall of 1836 breaking land for a farm and get- ting ready for his family. Then he went after them and came back in December, 1836, accompanied by his wife, Phoebe Kid- der, his sons, Nelson and Daniel, and his son-in-law, John Hackett, who had married Cordelia Blodgett, and who became intimately associated with him in his enterprises. From Thibault Mr. Blod- gett, for $200, bought all his claims on the east side of Rock river, the "three looks," comprising, as Blodgett thought, about ten sections of land, and at once with characteristic enterprise began securing his rights and planning for the future. With the kindly aid of Indian bucks and squaws, who still lingered on the west side of the river, he constructed near the east bank (in the rear of what is now 322 State street) a log cabin of two rooms, sepa- rated by a passageway, one room being for his family, and the other for prospectors and hired help. At this time nearly all the land, bordering on the west bank of Rock river, as far north as the site of Janesville, had been sold by the government, so that Blodgett's operations were confined to the east side of the stream where, after the completion of his home, he began prepa- rations for the erection of a saw mill. Assuming that his claims would in time be protected by government patents Mr. Blodgett, even before getting settled in his new home, for $2,000 sold a one-third interest to Charles F. H. Goodhue who, although a native of Massachusetts, had come here with his family from Canada, he in turn selling half his purchase to some other new- comers, John Doolittle and Charles Johnson. After this sale to Goodhue the saw mill, then being built, was completed by Blod- gett and Goodhue working together; in the spring of 1837 water was turned into the mill race and the first boards were sawed April 15.
(The dam, which Mr. Blodgett had built, was on Turtle creek, over half a mile northeast of his cabin. The raceway was dug along under the south side of the bluff and extended southwest- ward along the south side of what was afterward Race street, now called St. Paul avenue, until it led into Turtle creek at the
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site of his mill, three or four rods west of what is now South State street.)
This brings us to that important event in the history of Be- loit, the coming of the New England Emigration Company.
Horace White, L.L. D., now of New York City, a graduate in 1853 of Beloit college and its most distinguished alumnus, has kindly allowed the editor to insert here his (Mr. White's) per- sonal account of that event, substantially as he gave it at the semi-centennial of the college in 1897.
The Beginnings of Beloit.
I am permitted to tell you something of the beginnings of Beloit and of Beloit college, most of which I saw and part of which I was. Through the kindness of my early playmate and infant school mate, Hon. Ellery B. Crane, now a member of the state senate of Massachusetts and a resident of the city of Wor- cester, I have been enabled to examine an old account book, hitherto unpublished, much of which is in my father's hand- writing and the rest in his father handwriting. This book con- tains the business transactions of the New England Emigrating Company, which was formed in Colebrook, N. H., my native place, in October, 1836, and of which Dr. Horace White, my father, was the agent. The book of which I speak shows that the company consisted of fourteen members, Cyrus Eames, O. P. Bicknell, John W. Bicknell, Asahel B. Howe, Leonard Hatch, David J. Bundy, Ira Young, L. C. Beech, S. G. Colley, G. W. Bick- nell, R. P. Crane, Horace Hobart, Horace White and Alfred Field. The book shows to a cent how much each man contributed to the funds of the enterprise, the whole amount being $7,067.27, and how the lands and other property were distributed, how much and what kind of work each one did and what credits he received for the work done. These fourteen names and no others appear and reappear as copartners in the enterprise, although others are found in other relations to it. These men were not speculators. They had no thought of taking up claims on public land and sell- ing out to somebody else at a higher price. They intended to create an agricultural community like the New England village from which they sprang, and new homes like the old ones which they still loved. They were the kind of stuff that enduring com- munities are made of, as this fair city today attests.
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It was the principal duty of the company's agent to select and purchase a site for the new homes of the emigrating com- pany. In pursuance of his duties as such agent, my father left Colebrook in the winter of 1836-7 on his westward journey. He was then in his twenty-seventh year. The book says that he was to receive $100 per month and all of his expenses, and that the company was to furnish him a horse and cutter. With this con- veyanee he set forth as soon as there was a good fall of snow and drove through Canada, taking that route for the reason that the sleighing was better on the north than on the south side of the lakes. He arrived at Ann Arbor, Mich., on the 25th day of January, 1837, where he found Mr. R. P. Crane (the father of Mr. Ellery Crane). who was a member of the company, and who had started westward somewhat earlier. Mr. Crane had arrived at Detroit by steamer from Buffalo in company with Otis P. Bick- nell and they had set out to make the rest of the journey on foot, not knowing exactly where it might lead them, but keeping in the track of the general emigration of the period. Arriving at Ann Arbor Mr. Crane found his funds exhausted and took a job of finishing a partly-built house at that place for which he re- ceived the sum of $100. It was here that my father overtook and passed him, taking Mr. Bicknell in his cutter as far as Calu- met, Ill. Mr. Crane was one of those benefactors of the human race who "keep a diary" and it is fortunate for us that the his- torical spirit has descended to his son. From this diary his son gives me the following extraet :
"On reaching Rockford, March 3, 1837, Dr. White was there, stopping with Harvey Bundy, who was employed as clerk by George Goodhue, who was proprietor of a small store or trading post. The doctor had been up to the Turtle but had not pur- chased yet. Had already been to Des Moines, Ia., and Quincy, Ill., but did not like it there. The doctor wanted Otis and myself to see the location at the Turtle defore deciding, although he thought well of it. We (Otis and I) arrived at the Turtle Thurs- day, March 9, and Dr. White came up the week following and we three went out three miles northeast to see the landscape. We liked it so well that we (Otis and I) encouraged the doctor to secure an interest here if he could."
This was on the 13th day of March. The only person here at the time who could be called a settler was Caleb Blodgett. who
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had arrived the previous year and had bought for $200 a claim from a Frenchman named Thibault, who was living with one or more squaw wives in a construction of logs near the junction of Turtle creek and Rock river. A bargain was struck with Blod- gett on the following day (March 14) for one-third of his claim. In those days claims to public land were rather indefinite. That of Blodgett was as far-reaching as those which excited the ire of the elder Gracchus in old Roman days. His own idea was that it embraced about 7,000 acres. Purchasers of claims took their chances of being able to hold what they had bargained for. What was paid for in such a case was the chance that the gov- ernment land office would eventually recognize the claim as valid under the preëmption laws, and give a patent for it, on receiving the price of $1.25 per acre. A bargain was struck with Blodgett for one-third of his claim for the sum of $2,500, and patents were issued in my father's name which are now in my possession. This included 100 acres of land already under the plow and ready for a crop, this fact being a moving consideration in the purchase. Blodgett retained one-third of the claim for himself and sold the remaining third to Messrs. Goodhue, Jones and Johnson. The name of Goodhue is an honored one in the history of Beloit. Mr. W. T. Goodhue came from Canada. He erected the first saw mill in the place. He was living at that time in Rockford, but the mill was already under construction and it began to deliver boards on the 15th of April, 1837.
Dr. White returned to Colebrook immediately after the pur- chase was made from Blodgett, to report progress and to dispose of his own property, leaving Crane and Bicknell in charge. Blod- gett had built a double log house on the river bank near the foot of Broad street. In putting the logs in place he had been as- sisted by a band of Indians who were encamped on the west side of the river under charge of army officers. Until the saw mill was completed, so that boards could be obtained, the ground served as the floor of this house. My earliest recollections of Beloit, or of anything, are associated with this old log house, in which Dr. White's family was installed and where they lived until better accommodations could be provided. This was a double house with a door in the center and was generally occu- pied by two families or more. The south end, which we occu- pied. consisted of one square room which served as kitchen. din-
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ing-room, bed-room, sitting-room and doctor's office. The joints in this establishment had not been very carefully closed and hence it was not unusual in the winter time for my parents to find themselves in the morning under an extra counterpane of snow which had sifted through the crevices during the night. There were no streets in the place, only Indian trails through the woods and one road leading from Rockford and following the general line of Rock river from south to north.
I have a letter written by my father, dated Colebrook, May 10, 1837, to my mother, who was then in Bedford, N. H., in which he says that he found the emigrating company in good spirits. "I had requested them," he says, "to raise $1,400 on my return and it was done." He then gives the names of a number of per- sons who would start westward within a few weeks, some being members of the company and some not. He said that James Cass and wife would go out in his employ. This fact explains some of the entries in the old account book where Dr. White receives credit for labor performed by Cass for the company's benefit. Many of these entries possess an economical interest showing how society may get on without money in case of need. Thus we read under date of November 7, 1837 :
"Otis P. Bicknell, Cr.
"By 1 day getting flour and assisting in butchering ox."
As a sequence, two days later we find Horace Hobart credited with "one-half day salting beef" and Horace White credited with the services of Cass in hauling beef and also "some pump- kins." A. L. Field is credited with three-fourths of a day "at business of different kinds for Co." There are several entries in November, 1837, where Horace White is credited with "1 day each for Crosby, Cass and Grimes on bridge over Turtle." The explanation is that Crosby and Grimes were indebted to Dr. White and that they worked out the debt in the company's ser- vice for which he received credit in the final settlement. The current rate of interest is shown in an entry in December, 1837. where Horace White is credited with $15 cash paid to B. J. Ten- ney for the company, "interest 12 per cent." The usual rate of interest when I became old enough to understand such things was 12 per cent, and I think that it was not less than 10 per cent at any time when I lived here.
One more entry in this old account book deserves notice.
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Among the crops produced on the land broken up by Blod- gett and included in the company's purchase, was 200 bushels of oats. This was divided among the members of the company in exact proportion to their interest in it, the name of each one be- ing set down opposite his share of the crop in bushels and pounds.
It should be added that there is no indication in the book or in any letter or memorandum, so far as I have been able to dis- cover, that there ever was any dispute or disagreement among the members of the company touching money matters or the eventual settlement of the joint enterprise. Each one had entire confidence in the good faith of the others and in the correctness of the bookkeeping.
The hardships of this early period can be little understood by those of the present day. We read in the early records that during the first year our pioneers were often in want of food, and that the arrival of Alfred Field in July, 1837, with a team of four oxen and a load of four barrels of flour relieved them from severe distress. Also that on another occasion when the stock of provisions had run low they heard of a whole barrel of pork for sale at Rockford and sent one of their number down there to buy it. The streams furnished a plentiful supply of fish and when Goodhue's mill was completed the flume was converted into a kind of trap by means of which the water could be drained off and the fish picked up on the bottom, but the fish could not be rendered palatable without some accessories, and these were frequently wanting. The hardships of travel in those days were almost beyond conception. Some of these are within my own recollection. It was customary for the stage drivers to carry rails with which to pry the coaches out of the mud when the horses could no longer draw their loads. In this exercise the passengers were expected to take part under pain of stopping for an indefinite time in some unfathomed bog. When a man driving his team alone was stuck fast in this way he must either wait till somebody else came along to pull him through, or take out his load by piecemeal and carry it on his back to dry land so that his horses might draw out the empty wagon. I have wit- nessed many cases of both kinds and have participated in some.
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