Part 35 (2/2)
In 1839 Linn county was organized. The first officers were John C.
Berry, commissioner's clerk or auditor; Hosea W. Gray, sheriff; Dr.
Tryon, clerk of the court; Luman W. Strong, Samuel C. Stewart, and Peter McRoberts, county commissioners. Squire Strong was a potential factor in all Linn county affairs. Mr. Stewart was distinguished for his piety. His wife was a sister of those st.u.r.dy pioneers, the Scott brothers. In 1840 the territory contained 43,000 inhabitants; Augustus C. Dodge was elected delegate to congress, and George Greene a member of the territorial council, or senate, to represent Cedar, Linn, and Jones counties. In 1841 the remainder of Linn county was surveyed by the United States deputies, with all of whom I was acquainted and in their camps--but chiefly with Mr. Welden.
After these surveys were made, claim-making and improving and trading became very lively, and the ratio of immigration increased all the time. There was more disturbance and trouble and fighting about claims than from all other causes put together. I will give only a few instances of the many with which I am acquainted. A man by the name of Wolcott, near Mount Vernon, had his claim entered. He reported it to the claim a.s.sociation. They sent a committee of three men to the intruder and demanded that he should release and cancel his purchase, which he refused to do. Whereupon they procured a conveyance and told him that he must go to Dubuque with them. Knowing the settler's law was against him, he made no further resistance, but went before the register and receiver, cancelled his entry, and his money was returned to him. The matter came up shortly after that before the grand jury at Marion on the charge of coercion and kidnapping. Samuel Hunter, Sr., of Hunter's Cross Roads, was one of the jury, Joseph Williams was judge, P. W. Earle, clerk, and Nathan Peddycord, of Yankee Grove, was another juryman, and I was foreman. William Abbe and Squire Waln of Mount Vernon were witnesses. Robert Smith was secretary of the claim a.s.sociation and Oliver Day or Allison Willits president. No bill was found and the matter stopped and never reached the supreme court.
Another claim case originated in the Dry Creek country, and came to a climax in a rather exciting way. There were a number of us attending an Indian banquet and pow-wow at a place called Wick-i-up Hollow, near the Cedar river, two or three miles south of the Oliphant and Ashlock neighborhood. The regular guests were seated in a semi-circle in the wick-i-up; we were only callers. The exercises consisted of short talks, chants and choruses, each keeping time with a deer's bladder dried and filled with air and some buckshot in it to make it rattle, all accompanied with the music of a sort of home made fife. The banquet or dinner to follow was being cooked by the women. It consisted, as far as I could see, of dried venison, stewed dog meat, beans, and pancakes.
Before the dinner was ready some of our party went outside and renewed a quarrel that had been pending for some time about their claims.
Pretty soon the lie was pa.s.sed, and it was immediately followed by a blow, and directly five or six were in the fight all at once. The struggle and angry shouts of the combatants frightened some of the Indian women who were near and they ran screaming away. This broke up the exercise in the wick-i-up and the braves rushed out, thinking that their women were being misused, for a brave man will always resent an insult to his wife. The fight so disrupted everything that we left without waiting for dinner, especially as some had to withdraw for repairs. The Chambers were in it. William Garrison and some of the Nations were in it, but not Carrie with her little hatchet. John Hunter and, I think, Dyer Usher, were there, but not in the fight. The case came up before his honor, Aaron Usher, a justice of the peace, who fined some of the partic.i.p.ants $1.00 each, which ended the litigation and the claim dispute.
The last claim case I will mention was of much greater magnitude, and out of it originated the Bill Johnson war, in which several lives were lost, including one Indian. It began in Buchanan county. William Bennett and a man purporting to be Bill Johnson of the Canadian patriot war were the principles in the extensive trouble. Bennett was an enterprising, public-spirited man and had a quant.i.ty of workmen and retainers helping build the first grist mill at Quasqueton, on the Wapsipinicon river. He was a man of st.u.r.dy muscular frame, swarthy complexion, dark eyes, strong jaws, a man who would be a good friend or a bad enemy. Johnson was older, tall and angular, with black bushy hair, on whose lips shone no smile, under whose brow lurked treason, stratagem, and spoil. I became acquainted with Johnson in a rather romantic way, which you will excuse me for relating, as it shows some of the perils and hards.h.i.+ps incident to the settling of a new country.
On the 12th of November, 1842, a deep snow fell and remained till the next April, with additions during the winter. It has always since been called the hard winter of 1842 and '43.
During the winter my friend, Anderson Chambers, later a prosperous business man of Muscatine, and I had been up in the country between the Wapsipinicon and the Volga. The snow drifts were so deep and the day so dark that night overtook us several hours ride from any human habitation. Before dark we went into a little scattering timber on a small stream and under the bluff hitched our horses to a bush. We found some dry poles and got some dry rotten wood out of a tree, sc.r.a.ped away the snow with our feet, and with the aid of a flint and some tow and powder, we managed to start a little fire. Matches were not then in use. We cut some brush and laid it on the ground, spread one horse blanket on that to lie on, and with another to cover us and our saddles for pillows, we slept through the long night until daylight, when we resumed our ride. About the middle of the forenoon we came in sight of an improvement in the edge of the timber, and I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled that a frontiersman's log cabin was there. We went into the house, which was neat and clean, and told them of our hard experience during the preceding night and day. They kindly sympathized with us and soon made us comfortable. It proved to be Bill Johnson's place. Kate Johnson and another young lady, Miss Kelso of Davenport, were there. They busied themselves about setting us up a fresh, warm, ten o'clock breakfast. I relished it more than any other breakfast I ever ate, the zest of which was no doubt heightened by being served by so charming a hostess, and me a susceptible bachelor, too.
Johnson explained his being there in this wild region by saying that he had partic.i.p.ated actively in the Canadian patriot war against the Dominion of Canada, that the attempted revolution had failed, that he had lost all his property by it, and had been driven and chased all through and among the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence river in his boat with his daughter Kate, that a reward had been offered for him, that he had given up all hope of success and determined to seek safety and quietude by coming to this country. All this seemed plausible, as I heard the brave deeds of the patriots rehea.r.s.ed in song and poetry. But in escaping that trouble he ran into the jaws of another at the outset.
It seemed that in coming into a strange neighborhood, instead of making the people his friends by conciliation and prudent conduct, he got into trouble at the start by taking possession of the claim of one of the Bennett party. They remonstrated and he promised to pay for the claim, but never did, though Johnson claimed that the trouble was about the location of the county seat. Not long after I was at his place, after giving him notice, they determined to oust him. They took him out in the brush and gave him a very severe flogging, loaded him and all his belongings into sleds and sent him out of the country. He applied for aid at Marion and Dubuque, and Surveyor General Wilson, a New Hamps.h.i.+re man, took him and his daughter Kate to Iowa City, in his fine Boston made sleigh, to interest Governor Chambers in his behalf. When the hostilities came to an end, the result was disastrous to both parties.
Bennett became a fugitive and his mill building was stopped. Johnson was shot. Kate found her a loving, trusting husband. Hosea Gray made considerable money out of it; Ormus Clark, the first permanent settler of Central City, spent a lot of money for defense, and Colonel Preston laid the foundation of his splendid fame and fortune as an attorney from it.
The public land sales had been advertised for this winter and the people were illy prepared to go to Dubuque to enter their claims on account of the deep snow, some for scarcity of clothing, and all for scarcity of money. Many had saved their last 12-1/2 and 6-1/2 cent silver coins and their 5-franc pieces to make up the necessary sums. In view of the difficulties in the way, a ma.s.s meeting was held, and George Greene was appointed a special agent to go to Was.h.i.+ngton City for the purpose of having the land office removed to Marion. He went and saw the commissioner of public lands; he saw Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the committee on public lands, and President Tyler, and came back with an order for the temporary removal in his pocket, which I doubt if any other man could have done. He stood luminous among all the bright men who first settled in Linn county, or the territory either. The people of Linn county, and of Cedar Rapids especially, should ever remember his labors and efforts in those early days which brought them prominence and prosperity. All now acknowledge Linn county to be without a peer and Cedar Rapids is the best interior city in the state, except Des Moines with its immense coal beds.
The land office was located in the first, and then only brick house in Marion. Judge Berry afterwards dispensed boundless hospitality in it.
It was built and owned by William H. Woodbridge, or ”Democ Woodbridge,”
a very enterprising young man. He was one of five from this county who enlisted in the Mexican war. He was with Scott's army of invasion and the Mexicans ”welcomed him with b.l.o.o.d.y hands to a hospitable grave.”
Another of the five, Major McKean, as he was then known, who was a member of the first const.i.tutional convention in 1844, and later a brigadier general in the union army, lies buried in the Marion cemetery. Another of the five, Captain Sausman, who gallantly bore the flag at Chepultepec, died in California. Captain Gray is alone, and alive and likely to be, as you would think if you could see him running an intricate surveyor's line through a section. The fifth one, Samuel D. Thompson, is with us amply provided for in his declining years by a munificent government, in recognition of his military service in nearly all the wars since the time of Anthony Wayne, and as the old song says:
”There is no more work for brave old Joe.
He's gone to the place where all good soldiers go.”
The land sales drew large numbers from all the surrounding country, and made lively times here. Joseph F. Chapman and Oliver S. Hall, Sr., hotel keepers, flourished. Those who had the money got t.i.tles to their lands, and those who had not still held their claims until such time as they could enter them at private sale. In the spring the land office was moved back to Dubuque.
In 1844 the first const.i.tutional convention was held at Iowa City. The const.i.tution failed of ratification. In 1846 another convention was held and the state fully admitted under that with our present boundaries. Iowa was then the most western state, and a line drawn south from Sioux City, its western limit, would have run further west than any other state or territory, except Texas, which was annexed the year before. It now occupies a conspicuous central position in the American union, and a leading one in agricultural productions. It is honored with two members of the president's cabinet and the most influential member of the American senate.
After our acquisition of California the waves of emigration westward began, sweeping over the great American desert, as it had been called, planting agriculture and industry in its path, forcing its way through the mountain pa.s.ses and over the sun-dried plains, to the Pacific ocean at the Golden Gate, where floats the commerce of oriental Asia.
”No pent up Utica contracts our powers; The whole of this boundless domain is ours.”
When I look in the faces of this mult.i.tude I see before me but few who were men and women grown when I first came here. Some of you gray-haired ladies and gentlemen were then, as the Indians called them, pet.i.te squaws or skinneways. Your fathers were Nises.h.i.+n Sh.o.m.oko men.
But I think scarcely more than a dozen are now living in this county who were then men and women. And
”I feel like one who treads alone A banquet hall deserted, Whose music is hushed, whose guests are gone, And all but me departed.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: ISAAC BUTLER Pioneer Resident of Springville]
CHAPTER XX
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