CHAPTER V.

PIONEER LIFE-1830 to 1850.

From the year 1830, or rather as early as 1829, when the first families of early settlers came in among Indian residents and Indian owners of the prairies and woodlands, down to the year 1840, when but few of the children of the wilds remained, the white families that here made homes were true pioneers. They led the true American pioneer life; but different in one respect from the pioneers of the Atlantic sea coast colonies, and of the South, and of some in the farther West in later times, inasmuch as the Indians, among whom for a time they were, remained on friendly terms, and there were no massacres of families no wakeful nights when on the still air came the Indian warwhoop, no need for building barricades or resorting to forts or stockades for the preservation of life. A few, it is true, there were, in the neighborhood that became Door Village, who had settled as early as 1832, who thought it needful to build a stockade fort when the Black Hawk War in Illinois broke out; but they soon found that there was no need. The days of peril from Indians east of the Mississippi, and of perilous excitements had passed, before much settlement was made in North-Western Indiana. Some settlement had been made in White County, and some alarmed families left their homes when the rumors

reached them in regard to Black Hawk. More settlement had been made in La Porte County before the Black Hawk War of 1832, and the opening events of that war did cause some alarm and some preparations for defense. In May, 1832, information was sent to Arba Heald, near Door Village, from whom in 1831 Sac Indians had stolen some horses, that hostilities had commenced at Hickory Creek, in Illinois, and immediately the inhabitants of that settlement, forty-two men among them, erected earthworks, dug a ditch, and planted palisades around an enclosure one hundred and twenty-five feet square, located half a mile east of Door Village. About three miles further east a block house was built. General Joseph Orr, a noted La Porte pioneer, who had received a commission as Brigadier General, from Governor Ray in 1827, reported the building of this fort to the Governor of Indiana and was by him appointed to raise a company of mounted rangers for service, if needed. This company he raised, reporting to the commandant. at Fort Dearborn and also to General Winfield Scott. Mrs. Arba Heald refused to repair to the stockade, but obtaining two rifles, two axes, and two pitchforks, determined to barricade and defend her own home.

For the rangers, although they did some marching or scouting, there proved to be no need. The chief, Black Hawk, was soon captured and the alarm in La Porte County was over.

The alarm could not extend over those then unpurchased and unsurveyed lands where there were no white families, and in La Porte and White counties it caused but a little break in the quiet of pioneer life.

Although the pioner period has, to quite an extent, been placed between 1830 and 1840, during

which time some of the Indians remained and some settlers were still "squatters," yet the real pioneer life in its general aspects continued, and will thus in this chapter be viewed, until the first half of this Nineteenth Century was closing; and as the second half of the century opened, the era of railroads in Northern Indiana commenced, when modes of life rapidly changed. This gives us pioneer or frontier life till 1850, or for a period of twenty years.

What was this life? In all our land, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there is not much to be found that is like it now. It is difficult to picture it vividly before the minds of the young people of the present.

Hon. Bartlett Woods, of Crown Point, in an article on "The Pioneer Settlers, Their Homes and Habits, Their Descendants and Influence," prepared for the Lake County Semi-Centennial of 1884, gave some fine pen-pictures of this variety of life.

In a history of Indiana forty pages of a large volume are devoted to a description of it. A more brief view will be given here.

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1837

There were then, it should be recalled to mind, no railroads leading out from the Eastern cities, from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, across all the great Valley of the Mississippi. The mountain ranges and the dense forests were great barriers then between New England and New York and the Indiana and Michigan Territory. Territory. Until Michigan was not a state. There was in that year a canal from Troy to Buffalo. Some steamboats were running on Lake Eric. There was a short horse-car railroad extending out from Toledo. Some vessels passed around, it was said "through the great lakes," and took freight to the young Chicago. Some

schooners sailed on Lake Michigan. Here, in this northwest corner of Indiana, there were in 1830 no roads, except Indian trails, no bridges, no mills, no stores, except, perhaps, some Indian trading posts, no workshops of any kind. All the necessities and conveniences of our modern civilization were then to be made. The families came in strong covered wagons drawn sometimes by horses, but often by oxen. The men brought a few tools, especially axes and iron wedges, hammers, saws, augurs, gimblets, frows, and some planes. The women brought their needles, scissors, thimbles, pins, thread, yarn, spinning wheels, and some looms. Especially the men and boys brought their guns and bullet-molds, for on the grand Indian hunting grounds they were entering, and that game, which had been so abundant for the Indians, was as free and as abundant now for them. Game laws then were not.

A few cooking utensils these pioneers brought with them, tea-kettles, bake-kettles, skillets, fryingpans; also a few plates, cups and saucers, knives, forks, and spoons. Their household furniture, tables, chairs, bedding, were very simple outfits for housekeeping in the wilderness.

After a location was chosen, and that must be near water, the erection of a log cabin was the first work, and then a little clearing was made, for these first settlers staid by the trees. They built few cabins in the open prairie. In the heavy timber of our eastern border and in the groves or woodlands skirting the prairies, along the Tippecanoe and Iroquois, and near to Lake Michigan, and on the borders of the little lakes, here and there cabins were erected, and what was called "squatter life" commenced. It was a wild,

a free, in some respects a rich, a delightful life. The land like the game was free to all. Each one could go when he wished, locate wherever he chose, take whatever he could find on the prairie or in the woods, provided he interfered with no Indian and with no other settler's rights. He could cut down trees, pasture his few cattle, cut grass for his winter's hay, plow and plant the soil anywhere, careful only not to infringe on any other who was a squatter like himself. Largely was each man a iaw unto hinseif. It was a large freedom. And weli was it that these squatters brought with them the power of self-restraint acquired in their eastern homes. Well was it that they kept in practice where scarcely any law but that of God was over them, their moral and religious principles, and so formed virtuous and religious communities.

From at first a dozen and then a score of pioneer families, there gathered in several hundred families. scattered over this region before 1840 came, and for ten years there were some Indians left among them.

But now we may, to some extent, look at their modes of life and see them in their homes, in their schools, at their social and religious gatherings, and at their work.

After the cabin was erected, the main tool used in its construction having been "the woodman's axe," the few articles of furniture from the wagons were placed within upon the "puncheon" floor, and the rude bedstead was constructed by boring, if one was fortunate enough to have that very needful frontier tool, an augur, a hole in one of the logs, about six feet from one corner, the proper height from the floor for a bedstead, and then another four or five feet from the corner, in a corresponding log that formed a right