USA > Wisconsin > Three chapters in Wisconsin local history > Part 4
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He got the name of "Big Soldier" in the summer of 1840, when Col. William J. Worth was rounding up the Winnebago
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and bringing them into Portage. He was there with his band, good-natured, talkative, and a great favorite with the soldiers. Naturally a clean and dressy Indian, he was fond of finery and of white men's ways, and greatly admired Colonel Worth's regimentals. One day he asked Worth if he couldn't put them on and wear them awhile, around the fort. For fun, Worth consented.
"Yes," he said, "wear 'em every day if you want to."
So the Indian fixed himself up, oiled his hair, put on Worth's uniform, and very proudly strutted about in Uncle Sam's regi- mentals, drawing himself up to full height and grunting out, "Heap big soldier!" He did it so grandly that it brought down the garrison, and they always, afterward, called him "Big Soldier."
Big Soldier hated the Iowa reservation and wouldn't draw his pay out there. He preferred to get his living as he could pick it up, back here in Wisconsin, where he was born. When he went away he had to hide his ponies to save them. We used to keep them for him in our pasture.
Indian Mounds
We learned to talk the Winnebago dialect, and used to ask Big Soldier what the Indian mounds were, and what they were for. He had but one answer, "Winter wigwams."
"What do you mean ?"
"Why, places rounded up high to camp on in winter, where the water will easily run off."
There were trees on some of these mounds, a foot and a half in diameter, yet he always said "winter wigwams." We plowed up in our fields white flint arrowheads and pieces of pottery, which were just as great a curiosity to him as to us. His tribe had no such white flints or pottery. He explained the irregular, effigy-mounds, as having been built so as to run their wigwams off on arms, and not have them on one line, but in various groups. There is no doubt that the modern Indians so used these mounds, and they seemed to know of no other use or origin. Still, some of them did contain burial places.
The Winnebago used to make small mounds to preserve their provisions. When plentiful, they dried fish in the sun till they
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were dry as powder, then put them in big puckawa sacks. The squaws also pieked up bushels of acorns. In deep holes, below frost-line, they would bury their fish and acorns together, twenty bushels or so in a place, and cover them over with a mound of earth. When the deer had gone south, and game was scarce-they dared not eross the river into the timber, for fear of trouble with the Menominee-they would come and camp on these mounds17 and dig up fish and acorns for their winter food, and live on this provender until spring opened or game ap- peared. It was hard work making such caches, with the tools that they had.
Indian Deportation
My father's brother, Oliver Dart, eame to Green Lake two years after we did (1842). One day he took several of us with him and walked over to Portage to see the Winnebago being gathered in to be sent off to Turkey River, Iowa. This was their second removal. Colonel Worth's regiment, that had cut the military road from Calumet to Fond du Lae, was entrusted with the work of rounding the Indians up at Fort Winnebago. They were greatly distressed to know that they were to be de- ported. Some would lie down on the bank of the river, break down and ery like children, and would beg the soldiers to bayo- net them rather than drive them from their homes. Bad whis- key had been their eurse. We traded more or less with them and sometimes one would say he had nothing to sell, but finally would bring out from concealment a fine, big buckskin of three pounds' weight, worth $3, and offer it for whiskey. We never let them have it, but they could always get it at the Portage.
Pioneers
Besides Le Roy there had been a half-breed in our vicinity, undoubtedly the first civilized settler of the present town of Green Lake. This was James Powell, who had 160 acres under cultivation as early as 1835 or 1836, near the present Mitchell's Glen. Part of his land was afterwards occupied by A. Long.
17 Remnants of such mounds are still visible on low ground back of the residence of S. D. Mitchell, near Green Lake .- S. T. K.
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There was a fine spring on the place, since known as Powell's Spring. This great spring and the green-turfed clearing where his plantation stood, are still visible ; he had a rail fence around his place, which was near the Grand Buttes des Morts trail. He was a powerful man, and besides a double log-house had a blacksmith shop, and was one of Pierre Paquette's traders, as was Gleason at Puckaway Lake. He was drunken, ugly, and quarrelsome, and greatly disliked by the Indians, who drove him off about a year or two before we came.18
The Counterfeiters
About twenty rods down a ravine that runs from the north side of Little Green Lake, there was a cave, or excavation. Cut into its side was a crudely-made door, well hidden. This door was down when we come, and within the hole we found a com- plete counterfeiter's outfit, forge and all. It was for the manu- facture of spurious half-dollars, and may have been worked ten years or more. Le Roy told us that there were six or eight of the fellows, and they brought in their supplies and did their work by night. The forgers were not readily caught, because they never spent their bad money where it was made. The smoke of their fire came up as much as four rods from their cav- ern or shanty, in the middle of a very large old stump, around which sprouts had grown up, so that it was perfectly concealed.
These half-dollars would get out at Green Bay, and the In- dians would receive them in their trading change. The authori- ties did not know where to look for their source. They had first-class Indian hunters and hounds on their track long before
18 Henry Burling, now of Ripon, says that in his boyhood he ul derstood that Powell was mysteriously shot or burned in his shanty, and that what was said to be his grave was on his father's farm near Twin Lakes, and that for years his father plowed around the grave and kept it marked, but that later it was plowed under. Richard Dart thinks this was a mistake, and that Powell left the country. He would seem to be the same trader spoken of as William Powell, who was present at the Portage when Pierre Paquette was shot; see Wis. Hist. Colls., vii, pp. 357, 387, 388. Probably he was a half-breed son of Peter Powell, a British trader in Wisconsin in the early part of the 18th century .- ED.
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they were caught, which was about two years before we came. We never knew who they were, nor what became of them.
First Settlers
When we came from Green Bay in 1840, the trader James Knaggs was at Oshkosh, and there were a few settlers at Fond du Lac, and scattered about on isolated farmsteads.19 Waupun and Watertown were but just begun.
I have heard my father tell of his first trip to Milwaukee, through the woods. He borrowed an old horse from Le Roy and followed an Indian trail past Beaver Dam and through the Watertown woods. He had nearly reached the latter settle- ment on Rock River, when about sundown he came to a little shanty and clearing, and found there a sawmill with a per- pendicular saw. The proprietor was Pete Rogan, who offered him the mill-plant at a nominal sum, saying that he was land poor and wanted to get away. Father did not accept this offer, but was afterwards sorry that he did not.
The first election in Marquette County was held in the autumn of 1842 at our plank house, south of Green Lake. There were present Anson Dart, his sons George and Putnam, Pete Le Roy and his son, and William Bazeley, tenant on Beall's place. These constituted the entire polling-list.20
After the failure of Beall's mill on Twin Lake Creek, father built in 1846 on his own account another sawmill, where Dart- ford now stands. Smith Fowler, a half-breed from Stockbridge, and I helped build the dam for this mill, going back and forth daily across the lake in a scow. We built a crib for the dam, and carried boulders in the scow, with which to sink it. Some relies of this mill still remain at Dartford.
The same year, my father sold his farm, increased by that time
19 The Pier family came to Fond du Lac in 1836-37, and John Ban- nister and Mason C. Darling in 1838. The following year, Reuben Simmons built the first house at Taycheedah. Francis D. McCarty came the same season. Meanwhile Waupun had been begun by Sey- mour Wilcox, and the De Neveus were at the lake in Empire town- ship that is called by their name .- S. T. K.
20 J. H. Colton, Western Guide, or Emigrant's Guide. (N. Y., 1845), gives Marquette County in 1840 a population of eighteen .- Ed.
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to 200 acres, to a man coming in from the South, Lowther Tay- lor by name. IIe received $12 an aere, a price that could not have been obtained again for thirty years.
After the sale of the farm, our family went over to Dartford to live. We were thus among the pioneers of the place that was named for my father. In addition to the sawmill, he built a grist-mill in 1850, and took in John Sherwood as partner.
Early Politics
Father was a Whig in politics, and was defeated in an elec- tion for state senator by Mason C. Darling of Fond du Lac, who was of Democratie proelivities. Sometime about 1846 or 1847, ex-Governor Horner sent word up the trail to father, that Dr. Darling was getting a bill through the legislature setting over a tier of three towns-the best in Marquette-into Fond du Lac County. Horner desired father to go down to Madison and de-
at the seheme if possible. Father was interested at once, as he was then locating a county seat for Marquette. He started for Madison and walked nearly all the way. Upon reaching the capital he found Horner's rumor a faet, and in the legislature four Democrats to every Whig. He knew but few of the legis- lators and everything seemed against him. He went to work, however, interviewing and persuading, and succeeded in defeat- ing Darling's scheme in the house; but it was carried in the senate. The next year the bill eame up again and was carried, taking off what are now Ripon, Metomen, and Alto townships from Marquette.21
In 1848 father threw himself with ardor into the presidential campaign, and upon the success of the Whigs received in 1851 the appointment of superintendent of Indian affairs in Oregon, with a salary of $8 per day. Just about this time the village of Dartford was formed and named for him. A lawyer named Hamilton was so angry upon learning of the new enterprise, that he went down to Madison and got the name changed to
21 These three townships, 16-18 of range xiv east, were by the first territorial division in 1836 assigned, through an inadvertence, both to Marquette and Fond du Lac counties. By act of March 6, 1848, they were declared part of the latter county .- ED.
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Arcade; but the townspeople hearing of it in time, sent a dele- gation to preserve the name Dartford.
Father took my second brother, Putnam,22 with him to Ore- gon as his private secretary, and another brother to help him. They each had to pay $700 for fare from New York to San Francisco, by way of the Isthmus of Panama. Mother, my two sisters, one brother and I lived on at Dartford, but father never came back there to live. He had various political appointments, and after coming back from Oregon was in Europe for two years. He died August 12, 1879, at Washington, D. C.
Mother and I were finally the only ones of the family left at Dartford, and she later went back to Williamsport, Pennsyl- vania, where she died at the age of sixty-eight. Of the fifteen or twenty early pioneers of Dartford, all of whom were our friends, not one is now living at that place.
22 The only schooling my brother Putnam had was four or five years in a district school in New York, before we came to Wisconsin. So he took what books could be had, and educated himself. Night after night, after a hard day's work in the field or mill, he would sit by the fireplace with his book, sometimes until midnight. He thus be- came able to carry on all of father's correspondence as Indian com- missioner.
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