Marion County, Indiana - Chapter with an unread heading (no. 3 of those read), 1884 (part 2 of 2)

The jail looked a good deal like a small, respectable residence, bating the suggestive quality of the heavy iron gratings. In the summer of 1833 a negro came to the town wearing a black cap with a red leather band around it, and leading sometimes, sometimes riding, a bu£Falo. He made a show of it on the streets occasionally, and was followed by the usual crowd of curious boys, who gave him a name that another man has lately made famous, " Buffalo Bill." He was arrested for some offense, larceny probably, and put in jail. That night he set it on fire to make his escape, and came near being burned in it. The hole in the ground where the two lower courses of logs had lain was visible for twenty years. Jeremiah Johnson was the first jailer. It was succeeded by a brick jail on the east side of the Court-House Square, one end abutting directly upon Alabama Street. In this the jailer was provided with rooms for residence. In 1845 a hewed-log addition was made on the north and used for the confinement of the worst prisoners. It was built of logs hewed to one foot square, and laid in three courses, the first horizontal, the one outside of it and bolted to it perpendicular or oblique, and the third, exterior to that, horizontal. An exterior casing of the same kind, consisting of one vertical and one horizontal course of hewed logs, was put round the first jail some time after it was built.

In 1852 the present jail, in the east corner of the Court-House Square, was Degun and completed in 1854, when the old jail was torn away. Several additions have been made to the present one, at an aggregate cost of near one hundred thousand dollars, but the increase of crime in a city so convenient to scoundrels, from its facilities for escape, and so largely made up at all times of transient residents, has constantly exceeded the county's ability to take adequate care of the criminals. Escapes have not been very infrequent, and grand juries, whenever they make an examination, are pretty sure to report insuflBcient room.

In this connection may be noticed more appropriately than in the detached accounts following a chronological order, the crimes which have met the extreme penalty of the law in the present jail, as well as the first offenses in the history of the settlement. Until within the last decade no sentence of death had ever been passed upon any murderer in Marion County. Then William Cluck was convicted of the murder of his wife and sentenced to be hung. The sheriff had the gallows built and in place in the jailyard, but a day or two before that set for the execution the murderer got poison and killed himself In the fall of 18GS, Mrs. Nancy B. Clem, William J. Abrams, and Silas W. Hartman, Mrs. Clem's brother, were indicted for the murder of Jacob Young and his wife, - a horrible affair, in which the body of Mrs. Young was partially burned after she had been shot through the head, - known as the " Cold Spring" murder, and the woman was convicted of murder in the second degree and sentenced to imprisonment for life early in March, 1869. Just one week afterwards her brother cut his throat in his cell to escape an inevitable death by the halter. These were the nearest approaches made to the death penalty in this county till its first actual infliction in January, 1879. The frequent escape of murderers whose crimes deserved death had stirred a strong feeling into public expression against the weakness of the law as a protection of the community, and the almost certain escape of every offender, whatever his crime, if he could pay well for a defense, had strengthened this feeling. It appeared in the editorials and communications of the papers, in allusions in public speeches and sermons, in social conversation, and, more emphatic than all, in frequent lynchings all about in the State. Mrs. Clem, though twice convicted, finally worried the law by appeals and change of venue and postponement till she was discharged, and this more than any other one thing had set the community hard against any lenity to the next murderer.

In November, 1878, John Achey was convicted of the murder, by shooting, of George Leggett, a partner in a gamblingoperation, and sentenced to death on the 29th of January, 1879. On the 13th of December, 1878, William Merrick, a livery-stable keeper on South Street, was convicted of the murder of his wife. She had been a school-teacher, and saved a considerable sum of money. While paying her his addresses he borrowed all her money, seduced her, and only after much solicitation married her. Within a day or two of her confinement he took her out riding after dusk, gave her strychnine in a glass of beer, which caused premature child-birth in the agonies of death, and then drove with the dead bodies to a small wood near the Morris Street bridge over Eagle Creek, where he dug a shallow hole on the creek bank, put the bodies naked in it, and covered them with logs. He burned in his stable the clothing he took from his wife's corpse in the darkness of midnight and the woods, and no discovery was made for several days. Then a boy going along the creek found the bodies, the wife was identified by some physical marks still discernible through the decomposition, and very soon after the husband was arrested. The horrible brutality of the crime, the cool, callous, calculating cruelty in every stage of it, the beastliness of the burial, all provoked so hot an exasperation of popular feeling that for the first time there were serious threats of lynching. He was sentenced to be hung at the same time Achey was, January 29th. Some att«mpts were made to obtain a commutation for Achey, whose provocation had been great, and would have saved him a death sentence in any other condition of feeling of the community, but nothing was done for Merrick. They were hung on the same gallows at the same instant, Merrick sullen, dogged, and silent to the last, though indicating a desire to speak at the moment the drop fell. Louis Guetig was convicted the same year of the murder of Miss McGlue, a waiter in the hotel kept by his uncle whom he had been courting, but who had discarded him. He shot her in the courtyard of the hotel . while imploring him not to kill her, and imperiled several other girls who were present, and was sentenced to be hung with Achey and Merrick ; but his counsel obtained on appeal a reversal of some trivial instruction of the court below, and a second trial followed, with a second conviction and death sentence, and he was hung on Sept. 19, 1879, the anniversary of the murder. These are the only death sentences ever passed or inflicted in Marion County, except that of a colored man named Greenly for murdering his sweetheart. He was sentenced, but the Governor commuted his punishment to life imprisonment.

The first grand jury of the county returned twentytwo indictments by Joseph C. Reed, the first recorder and school-teacher, of which six wore non prossed. They were pretty much all, except one assault and battery, for selling liquor without a license, a^lass of ofienses which has always been a strong one in Indianapolis and is yet. The first suflFerer of thousands of lawless liquor dealers through a course of two generations was John Wyant. So many indictments at the first term of court in so small a settlement, with no roads and no navigable streams, and no neighbors but Indians, would indicate the presence of a considerable portion of the lawless element that always mixes itself up with the real pioneer and improving element, though there was much less of it and of a less dangerous quality than that appearing on the present frontiers of civilization. The first felony appears, from Mr. Nowland's recollection, to have been a burglary committed by an old man named Redman, and Warner his son-in-law, on the grocery-store of the late Jacob Landis in 1824. Col. Russell was the sherilf, and a search-warrant enabled him to find the missing goods or most of them. Warner's wife attempted to conceal them under her clotliing, but was detected. The oflFenders were sent to the penitentiary for several years. The first murder was committed long afterwards in 1833, and will be noticed particularly in its place.

The Court-House Square, like all the rest of the town, was a dense wood when the first jail was put there, and a little later when the first steps for a court-house were taken, on the representations of James Blake, the county commissioners made an order that in clearing the square two hundred trees (sugars or maples it was understood) should be spared for a grove. No special direction having been given the contractors they left the largest trees, which, when the surrounding protection of forest had been cut away, had to bear the brunt of every wind that blew, and were soon so greatly damaged that they were cut down and cleared away entirely. The contractors for clearing were Earl Pierce and Samuel Hyde, for fifty-nine dollars. Many years after an attempt was made to reproduce a little shade by a grove of suitable trees, but the saplings were killed by drought or carelessness, mischievous boys or breachy cattle. There has never been any shade worth speaking of in the Court-House Square since the primeval forest was cut away in 1822. With the progress of the present court-house the square has been filled from a shallow depression to a very handsome elevation, and some fine trees would become both.

On Thursday, the 15th of August, 1822, as appears from the " Commissioners' Record" (page 45), the County Board ordered the clerk to advertise in the Indianapolis Gazette for bids for a court-house, to be built upon plans furnished by John E. Baker and James Paxton. The specifications in brief were :

The building was to front on Washington Street, to be forty-five by sixty feet, and ninety-four feet high from the ground. It was to be of brick, and two stories high. The foundation was to be of stone, eighteen inches in the ground and three feet and a half out of the ground, and three feet thick. The walls of the lower story were to be twenty-seven inches thick, and of the second story twenty-two inches. There was to be a cupola in the centre twenty-two and a half feet high, on top of it a dome five feet high, then a shaft twelve feet, and finally an iron spire with a gilt ball and vane. On the first floor were a court-room forty and a half feet square, and another small room and a hall, each thirteen feet three inches square. In the second story there were to be a court-room forty-one feet three inches by twenty-five feet, two rooms sixteen feet square, the hall and a room thirteen feet six inches square, and an entry eight and a half feet wide. The first story was fifteen and a half feet, the second fifteen feet. There was a " Doric cornice gutter on the roof, and four tin conductors with capitals." The roof was to be of poplar shingles, jointed, five inches to the weather.

At a special meeting held on the 3d of September, 1822, the commissioners examined bids for building the house, and awarded the contract to John E. Baker and James Paxton for thirteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-six dollars. Operations were to commence before the 1st day of April, 1823, and the building to be completed in three years. The building was inspected by the commissioners, who were still in office, and this was their last official act. It was on the 7th day of January, 1825. Only a little painting and other work remained (incompleted. (Commissioners' Record, pages 45, 46, 47, and 54.)

Until the completion of the court-house court was held, as the law required, at the residence of Gen. John Carr, a double log cabin on Delaware Street, about opposite the entrance to the court-house. The first session was held here on the 26th of September, 1822, with Judge William W. Wick presiding, the newly-qualified associates, McUvaine and Harding, assisting, James M. Ray as clerk, and Hervey Bates as sheriffi After the court was organized it adjourned to Crumbaugh's house, west of the line of the future canal. Calvin Fletcher was made the first prosecutor, continuing for three terms, and followed by Harvey Gregg, Hiram Brown, William Quarles, Philip Sweetser, James Morrison, Hugh O'Neal, Governor Wallace, Governor Hammond, and others more or less eminent in the profession. There were thirteen civil causes on the docket, and twenty-two indictments found, of which, as already related, six were non pressed. Eleven lawyers were present, five of them being residents. The session lasted three days, naturalized an Irishman, Richard Good, licensed John Hawkins to sell liquor, indicted a dozen or more for selling without a license, and established " prison bounds" for the unfortunates arrested and confined for debt, that relic of barbarism being still in mischievously vigorous condition here. The first civil case was Daniel Bowman vs. Meridy Edwards ; the first criminal case, State vs. John Wyant, for violation of license laws. The second session was opened May 5, 1823, at Carr's, and adjourned to Henderson's tavern, on the site of the " New York Store." Here appeared the first divorce case, Elias Stallcup vs. Ruth Stallcup. The third session was opened at Carr's, as usual, Nov. 3, 1823, but adjourned to Harvey Gregg's house. The fourth, April 12, 1824, adjourned from Carr's to John Johnson's, and the fifth met at Carr's, Oct. 11, 1824, and adjourned to the partially completed court-house, and never afterwards left it till it was torn down in 1870 to make room for the present one.

This old court-house was practically the only public building in the town from 1825 to 1835. The Legislature made a State-House of it for three months every winter. The Federal Court, the Supreme Court, the County Court, and the County Board all met and did business there. More than this, after the completion of the State-House, and the removal of that portion of public business to its own quarters, the old court-house became the City Hall, the place of conventions, the ready resort of every gathering that could not go anywhere else and could pay for lights there. The county's fuel usually warmed all that got in, whether public charity or private show. Joseph G. Marshall and James Whitcomb, two of the ablest men in the United States in the days of the giants, held their debate there when opposing candidates for Governor in 1843. The eccentric wandering preacher, Lorenzo Dow, preached there in 1827. Professor Bronson gave his first lectures on " Elocution" there. Col. Lehmanowski lectured there on " Napoleon's Wars." Preachers " outside of any healthy organization," as the Southern senators said of Seward and Sumner, who could not get the " Old Seminary," could always get the courthouse. " Nigger minstrels" gave the first of their performances there. A ventriloquist gave a show there. John Kelly played the fiddle there. William S. Unthank lectured there on electro-magnetism as a motive-power more than thirty years ago. County conventions and city meetings assembled there. But a year or two before it was torn down the citizens held a meeting there to take measures to get the Agricultural College, for which Congress had made provision in all the States, located here, against the competition of Lafayette and John Purdue. A Mr. Keeley in 1844 made experiments in mesmerism there, and set half the fools in town mesmerizing the other half. Few buildings in a new country, or any country, have had a greater variety of experiences in as short a life. It was State-House, court-house, occasional church, convention hall, lecture-room, concert-room, show-room, ball-room in forty-five years.

During the time the present court-house was in course of erection, from May, 1870, to July, 1876, the courts were held in a large, cheap two-story brick building at the west gate, near where the west entrances from the street now are. In front, and to the east a few feet, were the old offices of the county, the clerk and treasurer, recorder and auditor, the last two in the second story, the others on the groundfloor. In 1827 the Legislature appropriated five hundred dollars to build a little double-room, onestory brick house at the west entrance of the Court- House Square, for the clerk of the Supreme Court, then and for many years afterwards Henry P. Coburn, one of the foremost of the old citizens in all good work. He was one of the first trustees of the town government, one of the first trustees of the Old Seminary, and one of the first three trustees of the city schools, a position in which he contributed as largely as any man to their wise and beneficent establishment. He was always put in for gratuitous public services, and never made any difference in the faithfulness and efficiency of his discharge of them. He was a graduate of Harvard and a college-mate with Edward Everett, came to this place with the State government in 1824, was the father of Gen. John Coburn and Henry, of the firm of Coburn & Jones, and died July 20, 1854, at the age of sixty-four. This little building was torn down in 1855, and the clerk's office was removed to the State-House. The present court-house was completed in six years from the removal of the old one, at a cost of one million four hundred and twenty-two thousand three hundred and seventy-one dollars and seventy-nine cents, a little more than one hundred times as much as the old house of 1823-25 cost. Costly as it was, and recently as it has been completed, it is said to show signs of dilapidation. The State is once more making a capitol of the county's house while waiting for its own building, as it did from 1825 to 1835, but it had a right to the first one, for it paid for it and used it as an owner. It has no right to this one, and must pay as a tenant. The city has found quarters for its offices in the same building, after moving about from the old Marion Engine house on the Circle to any convenient rooms it could get till it found something like a permanent location in the Glenn Block, and another later where the Msennerchor Hall is. It will stay now where it is till it gets a hall of its own. The only other building ever erected on the Court-House Square was a large temporary frame, built by the political parties for campaign meetings in 1864 on the southeast corner of the square. It remained for some time after its special use was completed, and was made a sort of public hall.

Following the incidents of the organization of the first court and the occupancy of the Court-House ; Square has carried this narrative beyond the order of time, and it may now return to the further action of the first session of the County Board. On the 16th of April the commissioners, under an act of the Legislature, appointed Daniel Yandes county treasurer, to serve for one year, or till the next February session, which was the regular time of appointment. On the 13th of November, 1822, he made his first report, and it will be found interesting at this day, when the revenues and expenses of the county are equal to those of the State at that time :

Mr. Yandes was reappointed Feb. 10, 1823, to serve for one year, and was reappointed annually till 1829. The following are the dates of his later appointments: Feb. 11, 1824, Jan. 3, 1825, Jan. 6, 1826, Jan. 1, 1827, Jan. 8, 1828. James Johnson was appointed in 1829. Hervey Bates was elected sheriff at the regular State election in August, and served till 1824, when Alexander W. Russell succeeded him, and was succeeded in 1828 by Jacob Landis. Harris Tyner appears from the report of Mr. Yandes to have been the first tax collector. James Paxton was the first assessor, by appointment of the County Board, April 17, 1822. George Smith, of the Gazette, was elected coroner at the regular election in August, but seems not to have served, and the first in service was Harris Tyner, commissioned Sept. 1, 1823. A complete list of county officers will be found in a more appropriate connection. The purpose here is only to notice the first occupants and duties of the officers.

On the 29th of May two keel-boats came up the river, the " Eagle" from the Kanawha, and the " Boxer" from Zanesville, the former loaded with fifteen tons of salt, whiskey, tobacco, and dried fruit, the latter with thirty-three tons of dry-goods and printing material for Luke Walpole, one of the earliest of the merchants, who then had a store on the Court-

Notable Events And Incidents

House Square. Stores then and for years after kept dry-goods, groceries, hardware, queensware, liquor, everything, as old backwoodsmen used to say, " from scythe-snathes to salt fish, hymn-books, calico, and tobacco," and a strip of red flannel hung over the door was the usual sign.

On the 17th of June a meeting was held at Hawkins' tavern, on Washington Street, to prepare for the first celebration of the Fourth of July. It took place on the " Military Ground," which then covered pretty much all the area north of Washington Street and west of West Street, then a country lane, to the road along the edge of the bluflf of White River and Fall Creek bottoms, now called Blake Street, and north to Michigan Street. It was heavily wooded, largely with hackberries, whose little black beads of fruit with a mere .scale of covering, as sweet as any bee ever made, were a favorite indulgence of the school-boys of a later day. A few of these old hackberries are still standing in what is left of the " Military Ground" in Military Park. The opening ceremony of the occasion was a sermon by Rev. John McClung, the " New Light" pioneer preacher, on the text, from Proverbs, " Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." Rev. Robert Brenton " closed with a prayer and benediction." Between the two religious extremes there came a brief address from Judge Wick on the events and characters of the Revolution, closing with the Declaration. Squire Obed Foote read Washington's Inaugural Address, with remarks appropriate to the subject, and John Hawkins read the Farewell Address, with suitable reflections. The audience certainly got a better quality of literature and sentiment than they would have been likely to get from a larger infusion of original matter. The more material enjoyment of the day was a deer killed the day before by Robert Harding on the northwest corner of the donation, and " barbecued" in a sufiicient hole dug near a big elm. A long table was sot under the trees, and a better feast made than could be got for less vigorous appetites at ten dollars a mouth at a Delmonico's. During the dinner the inevitable speeches were made by Dr. Samuel G. Mitchell and Maj. John W. Redding. The festivities were completed by a ball at the

The observance of the Fourth of July was kept up faithfully for about the third of a century. Then it began to fail in interest, and the war put an end to it. For much the greater part of this long period the celebration was confined to the Sunday-schools almost wholly, only a rare parade of mechanics or firemen breaking the current. Early in the morning the children of each school would meet at the church, form a procession with banners, the least in front, and march, under the superintendent, to some point near the Circle, where all would fall in and make a procession of several thousands in the latter days, always under the marshalship of James Blake, and go to the State-House Square or to some convenient grove, where a platform and seats had been provided, and there bear a prayer, a reading of the Declaration by some young fellow of promising qualities, and an oration of the stereotyped kind from a lawyer or preacher or some one of a pursuit inclining to oratory. Governor Porter achieved his first local distinction by a Fourth of July address in the grove on West Street, afterwards the site of the Soldiers' Home. It was not of the stereotyped, eagle-screaming, sunsoaring style, however. He had a Revolutionary soldier on the platform, and made as efi"ective a use of him, in a less degree, as Webster did of his old soldiers in his speech on Bunker Hill. Another striking address on a like occasion was that of ex- Governor Wallace in the State-House Square the year before, not far from the middle of the decade of 1840 to 1850. The conclusion of the celebration was a liberal distribution of " rusks" and water, and a benediction that sent all home before the unpleasant hour of noon. Since the war the Fourth has been a sort of general picnic holiday, or occasion for a festive celebration by some one of the many associations in the city. For about thirty years it was steadily maintained by the Sunday-schools, from 1828 to 1858.

On the 20th of June, three days after settling upon the mode and means of celebrating the Fourth, the citizens held another meeting at the schoolhouse, near the present intersection of Illinob

Street and Kentucky Avenue, to settle the arrangements for a permanent school. Trustees were appointed, and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence selected as teachers. The school was maintained for some years. Mr. Reed, the first teacher in the settlement, did not keep his place more than one quarter, - all schooling was counted by the quarter (of twelve weeks) in those days, - but others succeeded him till this permanent arrangement was made in June, 1822. Who the first trustees were there is no record to tell, and no reminiscence recalls them, but it would not be a wild guess to say that James Blake or James M. Ray or Calvin Fletcher was among them.

The first State election in the New Purchase occurred on the 5th of August, 1822. William Hendricks, uncle of ex-Governor and ex-United States Senator Thomas A. Hendricks, received three hundred and fifteen out of the three hundred and seventeen votes cast for Governor. He served two terms in the National Senate after leaving the Executive chair. This vote would indicate a population of fifteen hundred to sixteen hundred in the county with the enlargement then appended to it. As above noted, Mr. Bates was elected sheriff at this election, and served a full term of two years. George Smith, elected coroner, was succeeded in 1824 by Harris Tyner. In the militia election of the 6th of the next month, James Paxton was elected colonel of the Fortieth Regiment, Samuel Morrow lieutenant-colonel, and Alexander W. Russell major.

The leading events of the three years of the first settlement of the city may be summed up thus: in 1820 the selection of the capital site, birth of first child, cultivation of the " caterpillar deadening;" in 1821 the first appointment of justices, laying out the town, the epidemic and the famine, the first sermon, the first marriage, the first death, the first store, the first sale of lots, the first schoolhouse and school, - a year of first things ; in 1822 the organization of the county, designation of townships, measures for county buildings, first tax levy and report, and generally the incidents of the transition of a community from an accidental collection

During the remainder of the year 1822 the chief incidents of which any record or recollection remains was a camp-meeting, beginning September 12th, east of the town, presided over by Rev. James Scott, sent here by the St. Louis Conference in 1821, the first of a long series of this class of assemblages held in or about the donation, and still kept up, in an improved form with permanent arrangements, at a convenient point southeast of the city, near the little town of Acton, on the Cincinnati Railroad. The " Military Ground" was a favorite location for some years. Then they were held in the northwest corner of the donation, in & sugar-grove east of the canal, known as the " Turkey Roost," and the general resort of the schoolboys for little sugar saplings for "shinny clubs." The camp-ground was in the western edge of it. For some years a grove near the present site of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum was used, then for a considerable time they were abandoned about here altogether. Their revival and establishment permanently at Acton is an afiair of the last decade mainly. For a whole generation the most prominent and efiective preacher at camp-meetings was Rev. James Havens, irreverently called by the ungodly " Old Sorrel," a man of rugged and powerful structure, both physically and intellectually, as fearless as the famous Peter Cartwright, and as well able to protect himself from the violence that he sometimes had to encounter or expect from the " roughs" who sought diversion in disturbing the meetings. The most notable incident in all that is remembered of these gatherings about here is his encounter with a man named Burkhart, commonly called " Buckhart," the leader of a lawless crowd brought here by the work on the National road and the Central Canal, and left here idle when those works were abandoned. They lived by digging wells and moving houses, when they did anything but steal, and when they could not do better lived on the corn and potatoes, pigs and chickens of the farms that then covered the greater part of what is now the city. They were called the " chain- gang." Two or three met violent deaths in affrays a few years later, but Burkhart left the town, went down about the " Bluffs," and died in his bed at a ripe old age, in better moral condition than he had lived for most of his life. The camp-meeting which was the scene of the incident was held on the "Military Ground." "Old Dave Buckhart" appeared there on the skirts of the assembly pretty drunk, and wandering barefooted in the simple costume of a dirty shirt and pair of pantaloons, his usual style of dress, from one point to another, singing a ribald song, or couplet rather, of his own making. Gen. Thomas A. Morris, the hero of the West Virginia campaign, the credit of which Mc- Clellan absorbed, and Hugh O'Neal, one of the foremost criminal lawyers of the State, had learned something of the purpose of the chain-gang to disturb the camp-meeting, and went there expressly to prevent it and punish the rowdies. As soon as Burkhart's singing was seen to attract attention they went to him, and at almost the same instant Mr. Havens came up. A peremptory order of silence was met by a drunken defiance, which the legendary account says was followed by a blow " from the shoulder" by the preacher that knocked the rowdy senseless. But Gen. Morris says he is not sure that Mr. Havens struck Burkhart, and that there was no knock-down. This phase of the story took form from an occurrence the next day, when Burkhart was before Squire Scudder for disturbing the meeting. He was " gostrating" to the crowd attending the trial, and the late Samuel - Merrill, thinking that the most effectual way to "squelch" the leader of the " chain-gang" and hold it in more wholesome dread of the law-abiding community would be to beat him at his own game, and show him that rowdies were not as formidable antagonists as better men, challenged him to wrestle with him. The rowdy was heavily and easily thrown by the sober and muscular lawyer, greatly to his chagrin and the discomfiture of the gang. It was not long after this that he left the town, and never returned except for a brief visit.

invasion of gray squirrels that came from the east going westward. They were liberally killed, but the massacre made no impression on their countless numbers. They destroyed a large portion of the corn they found in the line they followed as undeviatingly as a bullet, in spite of fences and 'streams and swamps. In 1845 another such emigration occurred, but of less extent and destructiveness. After this last there came a gradual change upon the character of the squirrel population of the county. Previously the " gray" was the only variety known, except a very rare red or " fox" squirrel. Afterwards the latter became the larger, and displaced the other almost as largely as it had itself been displaced. But this sort of game disappeared rapidly after the completion of the first lines of railroad, and now it is rarely seen nearer the city than a half-dozen miles.

The fall of 1822 was signalized by the first attempts to open roads under the act of the Legislature of the preceding session. These roads must be distinguished from the county roads, ordered by the County Board on petition, and examined by " viewers," which constituted so large a part of the care of the county government in early days, and ever since in fact. They were surveyed and some work done upon them under direction of commissioners appointed by the act authorizing them, but little seems to have been accomplished, except to clear away the trees, leaving the stumps nearly as serious an obstruction. The White Water region was that with which the settlement naturally desired the earliest intercourse, and the roads in that direction were first opened, with one southward toward Madison, over which early in the winter a public meeting at Carter's tavern demanded a weekly mail to Vernon, Jennings Co., during the sessions of the Legislature at Corydon. The roads of this period and for many a year afterwards were about as bad as any civilized community ever had to put up with. They were passable for wagons and loads only when dried up in summer or frozen up in winter, and even in these favorable conditions there were long stretches that had to be " cross-layed" with rails or logs, filled in with chunks, to be passable even to a traveler on horseback. Since the advent of railroads, and the diminished reliance of the community on wagonroads for any but neighborhood communication, these latter have been improved greatly everywhere, and now there are none entering the city that are not well graded and graveled, and as passable at one season as another.

The first change from the primitive condition of the roads was the " macadamizing" of the National road by the government. An effort was made early in the settlement to get Congress to run the line of this then great national work through Indianapolis, but nothing was accomplished till Oliver H. Smith, afterwards founder of the " Bee Line" Railroad, became a member of Congress from the eastern district of the State in 1827. The line would have passed near Columbus, in this State, Mr. Smith says in his " Early Indiana Sketches," but he succeeded in carrying an amendment that brought it here, and along our principal street, then and for a whole generation better known as " Main Street" than Washington. The " metaling" of this road extended through the town and beyond the river to a point a few hundred feet west of Eagle Creek, but it stopped in the town at the eastern end, near East Street, leaving a considerable distance uncovered to a point where a short stretch east of Pogue's Creek was " metaled." The survey of this road was made by the late Lazarus B. Wilson, engineer of the " Louisville, New Albany and Chicago" Railroad. He also planned the wooden arch bridges on the line, which have been in constant use with little repair, except replacing the soft slate of the first stone-work of the river bridge with durable limestone, since 1833. William Wernweg and Walter Blake were contractors for these bridges.

" Cross-laying," as often as otherwise called " crosswaying," was the universal substitute for better roadmaking during the first thirty years of the existence of the city. All the " bottoms" of streams were thus made roughly passable, with frequent repair and replacing of rotten rails and logs. The old Madison road, through Franklin and Columbus, was especially improved or infested with cross-way work. Not long before the Union Depot was built the whole breadth of Pogue's Creek bottom, the head of this road, from Louisiana Street, at the foot of the rise on which the residence of Morris Morris stood on South Meridian Street, to the rise on the other side at the " White Point," built by Dr. John E. McClure, and long occupied by Nicholas McCarty, was a mass of rails and saplings and chunks and swamp-slush, bordered by a willow-fringed cow-pasture on the west side and a corn-field on the east, where the Eagle Machine- Works stand. In making the later substantial improvements of this street some indications of the old condition were discovered. The town streets were little better than the country roads for many years. Even after the trees were cut out, - and trees were standing in some streets that are now built solidly for squares as late as 1842 or 1843, - the stumps were left for the wagon- way to wander around as crookedly as a " bottom" bayou, reinforced by frequent mud-holes, turned by large bodies of unrestrained hogs into hog' wallows. The fences along each side were " wormfences," and sidewalks were pig-tracks hugging closely the corners of the fences when a big mud-hole had to be circumvented. But a few of the more central were better.

One of the last incidents of the year was the election by the Legislature, early in December, of Bethuel F. Morris, grandfather of the distinguished young naturalist and Amazonian explorer, Ernest Morris, State agent in place of James Milroy, a non-resident, appointed by the Governor to succeed Gen. Carr, who had resigned. Mr. Morris was subsequently president judge of the Circuit Court, and cashier of the Indianapolis Branch of the State Bank. He died some twenty years ago, after a long period of retired life, at his home near the crossing of Morris Street and Madison Avenue. About the time of his appointment to the agency on the 7th of December, the first sale of lots for delinquent taxes took place. It was a long one, and the fact that the greatest delinquency was but two dollars eighty-seven and one-half cents, and the range ran all the way down to twenty-five cents, showed that money was hard to come by when such small amounts could not be commanded for so important a purpose as the redemption of town lots. Fortunes were going begging then if anybody had known it. Some few may have neither known nor guessed it, but were lucky enough to take " the tide at the flood." With most, however, it was the story of the man who could have got the half of the site of Chicago for a pair of boots, but had not the boots. Some of the largest fortunes in the city date from this tax sale and the condition of general finances it indicated. A proposition to incorporate the town this year was beaten.

The winter of 1822-23 was made a pleasant season, like that of the year before, by social enjoyments and free commingling of all the settlers in pursuing them, though it followed, like the other, a summer of much sickness, and fell in a time of great financial trouble. The county was settling up pretty rapidly. Two hundred and five entries of land had been made in Centre township outside of the donation during the years 1821-22, and many of the purchasers had become residents. In Decatur township forty-five entries were made in those two years ; in Wayne, one hundred and sixty-eight; in Pike, twenty-nine; in Washington, one hundred and forty-six ; in Lawrence, ten; in Warren, nineteen; in Franklin, fifteen ; in Perry, eighty-one. It is noticeable that the townships more remote from the older settled portions of the State, from which immigrants might be expected, received more land-buyers than those on the east side and nearer. Wayne had a hundred and sixty-eight to nineteen in Warren, Decatur forty-five to ten in Lawrence, Pike twenty-nine to fifteen in Franklin. Land-buyers thought the western part of the county, with portions of the central tier of townships, contained the most desirable land.

The first act of the Legislature in the new year of 1823 was the assignment of a legislative representation to the two-year-old county, January 'Tth. Candidates began to show up with characteristic American promptness at once, and the canvass "of merits was kept up briskly till the election the next August. Early in the spring, as already related in the account of the first religious movements in the settlement, the Presbyterians took steps to build the first church in the town, on North Pennsylvania Street, pretty nearly opposite the Grand Opera-House site, and on the completion of the church organization the following July, Rev. David C. Proctor, of Connecticut, who had been retained as a missionary in 1822-23, was the first pastor, succeeded in September, 1824, by the celebrated oriental scholar and religious " free-lance," Professor George Bush, who was much such another as the more noted Orestes A. Brownson, except that he did not turn Catholic as the latter did. The religious vagaries of no two men in the country, backed by rare abilities and profound scholarship as they were, have attracted so much attention. Professor Bush continued in charge to March 20, 1829. On the 7th of March the second newspaper of the New Purchase made its first appearance under the name of Western Censor and Emigrant's Guide, with the customary ambition of papers in new settlements taking a name better proportioned to its hope than its importance. It was published and printed in a building on Washington Street, opposite the site of the New York Store, by Harvey Gregg and Douglass Maguire. Not much is known of the former now more than that he was a lawyer of good abilities from Kentucky, and appeared in the bar at the first session of the court. Mr. Nowland relates an incident of his first visit here at the time of the lot sales in 1821 which illustrates his characteristic absentmindedness and the solid honesty of the people and the times. He had brought a considerable sum with him to buy land, and had about two hundred dollars in gold left after making his first payments. He missed this one morning, and supposed . he had dropped it from his pocket somewhere where he had been examining land. He gave it up for gone and went home. The following spring Mrs. Nowland found it under the rag-carpet of the room he had slept in with sixteen other men, all of whom might have seen him stick it under the carpet, and probably did, but had no more thought of meddling with it than they would if it had been locked in a dynamite safe. Travelers and moralists have boasted that the Finns have no word for steal, and know no use for locks. The primitive settlers of Indianapolis might have contested the Monthyon prize of virtue with them. It may be enough to suggest that the condition of society has changed in sixty-two years, and it would not be safe to put two hundred dollars under a carpet with sixteen other men in the room, with any expectation of seeing it again. He was the

Douglass Maguire, his partner, long survived him, and was far better known. He came to the place in the spring of 1823 from Kentucky, was the last State ! auditor elected by the Legislature but one before ; the Constitution of 1850 went into operation, and was one of the four delegates from this county to the convention that framed that instrument. Governor Wallace being the other Whig, and Alexander P. Morrison and Jacob Page Chapman the two Democrats. Mr. Maguire bore a strong resemblance to Henry Clay both in form and feature, and was to the full as generous and warm-hearted. The Western Censor and Emigrant's Chiide was the precursor of the Journal, as the Gazette was of the Sentinel. Like its rival, its first issues were irregular. The second number appeared on the 19th of March, the third on the 26th of March, the fourth on the 2d of April^ the fifth on the 19th, the sixth on the 23d, after which its issue was regular. On the removal of the capital to Indianapolis in the fall of 1824, the State printer, John Douglass, bought the paper and changed the name to the Journal. The Journal it lias been ever since, nearly sixty years now. The old editor, Mr. Maguire, retained an interest for some years with Mr. Douglass, and the firm was Douglass & Maguire, - very nearly a repetition of Mr. Maguire's name.

About a month after the appearance of the second paper the first Sunday-school was organized in the cabinet-shop of Caleb Scudder, on the south side of the State-House Square, April 6, 1823. It proved a very popular as well as wholesome enterprise, mustering no less than seventy pupils the third Sunday. When the weather became bad in the fall it was suspended till the next spring, and was revived a year after its formation in April, 1824. The first Presby- terian Church was completed that spring and summer, | and the school taken there. It was never suspended again. In 1829 it celebrated the Fourth of July in the fashion above described, and thenceforward the Sunday-schools monopolized the national holiday till its general celebration was abandoned except as a mere day of idling and making pleasant parties. The average attendance the first year was reported to be about forty, the second year fifty, the third year seventy-five, the fourth one hundred and six, the fifth one hundred and fifty. In 1827 a library of one hundred and fifty volumes had been procured. Up to 1829, when the Methodists completed their first church, all denominations united in this school, and it was thence called the " Union School," superintended and mainly promoted by Dr. Isaac Coe. It may be noted here that in all the Sunday-school processions on the Fourth of July from 1829 for thirty years nearly James Blake was the marshal, if he was at home. In 1829 the Methodist scholars colonized in their own church, and the Baptists followed in three years, as soon as they had a suitable place in their church. But the co-operation of all the schools was secured by a Sunday-school Union, in which all were represented.

There were other indications of the solid growth of the town than the establishment of a second paper and the acquisition of a representation in the Legislature. The agent sold four acres of the donation, at sixty-five dollars and seventy-five cents an acre, for brick -yards. Better structures than the frames that were partially replacing logs were contemplated, though but one brick house, that of John Johnson, already referred to, was in progress. About the 1st of June two enterprising settlers, William Townsend, a pioneer of 1820, and Earl Pearce, later, put a set of woolen machinery in the mill of Isaac Wilson, on Fall Creek race, where Pattison's mill stood for many years in the later days of the town. Following close upon this came two new hotels of a more pretentious character than their log predecessors. The first was a large frame built by Maj. Thomas Carter opposite the court-house, opened on the 6th of October, and the scene of the first Baptist sermon on the 26th of the same month. Though a regular Baptist Church organization had existed from September of the year before, and a Mr. Barnes had been engaged as a preacher in June, third Saturday, 1823, yet the first regular sermon seems to have waited this chance in the house of one of the most devoted and deserving of the members. The hotel was burned Jan. 17, 1825, during the first session of the Legislature, and the proprietor, in the days long before insurance was

IcDown in the New Purchase, lost all he had, with no indemnification. Mr. Ignatius Brown, illustrating the folly that sensible men will commit during the excitement of a fire if they are unused to such calamities, says that a squad of the citizens thought to save the sign which swung in country fashion to a tall post in front of the house, and chopped it down as they would a tree, the fall smashing the sign all to splinters, as they would have known if they had not lost their heads. Some months afterwards Mr. Carter replaced the burned house with that of Mr. Crumbaugh near the site of West Street, and kept his tavern there prosperously for several years till his death. The other hotel lived to become by itself and successor the most noted in the town or the State for about thirty years. This was the " Washington Hall," a frame on the site of the New York Store, built by James Blake and Samuel Henderson at the same time as Mr. Carter's house, but opened three months later, Jan. 12, 1824. Mr. Henderson had kept a smaller tavern there previously. The successor of the " Hall" in 1836 was a brick, and made the name famous under the management of the late Edmund Browning. The old frame was moved to the next lot east, and there for a number of years was a shoe-shop in the lower story, and the law- office of Governor Wallace in the upper, where Lewis, his son, - now a distinguished general of the civil war and novelist and minister to Constantinople, - wrote several chapters of a novel in the style of G. P. R. James called the "Man at Arms," a tale of the thirteenthcentury.

Mr. Ignatius Brown notes that early in the spring of this year - 1823 - three young settlers, named Stephen Howard, Israel Mitchell, and Martin Smith, started for the Russian settlements on the Pacific by way of Pembina. Nothing was ever heard of them, except that they reached Fort Armstrong early inN May, and on the 15th of August, three months and eleven days after reaching the fort on the Mississippi, got to Fever River, having seen no white man for twenty-three days after leaving the Vermillion Salt- Works, and having been robbed by the Indians and nearly starved. During the same spring the " Indiana Central Medical Society" was formed to license physicians to practice under the law then in force, with Dr. Samuel G. Mitchell as president, *nd Dr. Livingston Dunlap as secretary, the forerunner of many a medical association and college since. The Fourth of July was celebrated at the cabin of Wilkes Reagin, near the crossing of Market Street and Pogue's Run. He fed the company with another barbecue, and the company included a rifle company, commanded by Capt. Curry, of whom . nothing more appears to be known. Mr. Reagin was a conspicuous man, being the first butcher, the first auctioneer, and one of the three first justices elected by the people. Rev. D. C. Proctor and Rev. Isaac Reed performed the religious services of the occasion, and Daniel B. Wick, brother of the judge, read the Declaration, and Morris Morris delivered the address. The September succeeding showed a population, according to the new Censor, of six or seven hundred, with a better state of health through the summer than had been generally believed. The Censor, true to its name, used the occasion to censure the jealousy with which other towns in the State regarded the still unused capital.

The August election for first members of the Legislature resulted in the choice of James Gregory, of Shelby, as senator, and James Paxton, of this county, as representative. There were the usual winter diversions to close the year, but varied, according to Mr. Brown's citation of an announcement in the Gazette, by a theatrical performance of " Mr. Smith and wife, of the New York theatre," in the dining-room of Carter's tavern, on the last night of the year. Mr. Nowland puts this first dramatic exhibition in the winter of 1825-26, and says the performer was a Mr. Crampton, a strolling actor. The difference is of no consequence as long as there is entire concurrence on the main feature of the affair. Music was needed, of course, and there was nobody to make it but Bill Bagwell, a jolly, vagabond sort of fellow, who made the first cigars in the place in a cabin on the southwest corner of Maryland and Illinois Streets, and played the fiddle at the pioneer dances and weddings. Maj. Carter was a rigid Baptist, of the kind called by " unrespective" unbelievers " forty-gallon" Baptists, who, though sober men, were not at all fanatical in their views as to the use of liquor, but he was immovably convinced of the sinfulness of playing or hearing a fiddle. To £;et Lis consent to allow Bagwell to play orchestra to the performance, the actor and musician both had to assure him that the instrument of the occasion was not a fiddle but a violin, and the performance of a hymn tune satisfied him of the difiBrence. Mr. Nowland says the major interrupted the exhibition to stop the orchestra in playing the depraved jig called " Leather Breeches," and it required considerable diplomacy and the performance of church music to appease him. The pieces performed, the " Doctor's Courtship, or the Indulgent Father," and the "Jealous Lovers"; tickets, thirtyseven and a half cents. Several performances were given, and the couple returned the following June but failed, and left suddenly, probably helped to the determination by a criticism of the Censor, which rated the performance rather low.

It may have been a mere whim of a couple of oversanguine new-comers, or it may have been a larger promise of prosperity than appears now to have been credible or possible at that time, but it is true, nevertheless, that a Maj. Sullinger opened a " Military School" here on the 13th of January, 1824, for "the instruction of militia officers and soldiers." Nearly at the same time William C. McDougal opened the first real estate agency, though the Gazette shows that its proprietor, George Smith, as before noted, opened a similar establishment a year or two later. The month of January was signalized to the pioneer particularly by an act of the Legislature of the 25th, ordering the permanent removal of the capital^-that is, the State oflSces and records - by the 10th of the following January, 1825, the Legislature to meet that day in the court-house capitol of the new capital for the first time. No doubt the promptness of the passage of this act was due in part to. the delegation from the New Purchase, and the power of two votes to help those who helped the owners. On the return of Mr. Senator Gregory and Representative Paxton on the 21st of February, a public banquet was given them by the grateful citizens, and the occasion illustrated with highly-colored views of the prosperity that would follow the change. Their dreams have been

The next incident in the fifth year of the settlement was the most startling and alarming that had yet occurred. This was the murder, on the 22d of March, 1824, of a company of nine Indians of the Shawanese tribe, - two men, three women, two boys, and two girls, - some eight miles above Pendleton, by a company of six whites, four men and two boys. An account of this cruel massacre was given in a sketch of the occupancy of the New Purchase by the Indians, but there may be added here, as illustrative of the early condition of the white settlements, the account both of the crime and the trial made by Hon. Oliver H. Smith, ex-United States senator, who witnessed the trials, and was at the time one of the leading lawyers of the State.

" The Indians were encamped on the east side of Fall Creek, about eight miles above the falls. The country around their camping-ground was a dense, unbroken forest filled with game. The principal Indian was called Ludlow, and was said to be named for Stephen Ludlow, of Lawrenceburg. The other man I call Mingo. (His name appears from other accounts to have been Logan.) The Indians had commenced their season's hunting and trapping, the men with their guns, the squaws setting the traps, preparing and cooking the game, and caring for the children, - two boys some ten years old, and two girls of more tender years. A week had passed, and the success of the Indians had been only fair, with better prospects ahead, as spring was opening and raccoons were beginning to leave their holes in the trees in search of frogs that had begun to leave their muddy beds at the bottoms of the creeks. The trapping season was only just commencing. Ludlow and his band, wholly unsuspicious of harm and unconscious of any approaching enemies, were seated around their camp-fire, when there approached through the woods five white men, - Harper, Hudson, Sawyer, Bridge, Sr., Bridge, Jr. Harper was the leader, and stepping up to Ludlow took him by the hand and told him his party had lost their horses, and wanted Ludlow and Mingo to help find them. The Indians agreed to go in search of the horses. Ludlow took one path and Mingo another. Harper followed Ludlow and Hudson trailed Mingo, keeping some fifty yards behind. They traveled some short distance from the camp, when Harper shot Ludlow through the body ; he fell dead on his face. Hudson, on hearing the crack of the rifle of Harper, immediately shot Mingo, the ball entering just below his shoulders and passing clear through his body. The party then met and proceeded to within gunshot of the camp. Sawyer shot one of the squaws through the head, Bridge, Sr., shot another squaw, and Bridge, Jr., the other. Sawyer then fired at the oldest boy, but only wounded him. The other children were shot by some of the party. Harper then led the way on to the camp. The two squaws, one boy, and the two little girls lay dead, but the oldest boy was still living. Sawyer took him by the legs and knocked his brains out against the end of a log. The camp was then robbed of everything worth carrying away.

" Harper, the ringleader, left immediately for Ohio, and was never taken. (He is said by tradition to have reached Ohio, eighty miles away through the woods, in twenty-four hours.) Hudson, Sawyer, Bridge, Sr., and Bridge, Jr., were arrested, and when I first saw them they were confined in a square log jail, built of heavy beech and sugar-tree logs, notched down closely, and fitting tight above, below, and on the sides. The prisoners were all heavily ironed and sitting on the straw on the floor. Hudson was a man of about middle size, with a bad look, dark eye, and bushy hair, about thirty-five years of age in appearance. Sawyer was about the same age, rather heavier than Hudson, but there was nothins in his appearance that would have marked him in a crowd as any other than a common farmer. Bridge, Sr., was much older than Sawyer, his head was quite gray ; he was above the common height, slender, and a little bent while standing. Bridge, Jr., was a tall stripling .some eighteen years of age. Bridge, Sr., was the father of Bridge, Jr., and the brother-in-law of Sawyer.

" The news of these Indian murders flew upon the wings of the wind. The settlers became greatly alarmed, fearing the retaliatory vengeance of the tribes, and especially of the other bands of the Senecas (Shawanese). The facts reached Mr. John Johnston at the Indian agency at Piqua, Ohio. An account was sent from the agency to the War Department. Col. Johnston and William Conner visited all the Indian tribes and assured them that the government would punish the offenders, and obtained the promises of the chiefs and warriors that they would wait and see what their ' Great Father' would do before they took the mattef into their own hands. This quieted the fears of the settlers, and preparations were made for the trials. A new log building was erected at the north part of Pendleton, with two rooms, one for the court and one for the grand jury. The court-room was about twenty by thirty feet, with a heavy puncheon floor, a platform at one end three feet high, with a strong railing in front, a bench for the judges, a plain table for the clerk in front on the floor, a long bench for the counsel, a little pen for the prisoners, a side bench for the witnesses, and a long pole in front, substantially supported, to separate the crowd from the court and bar. . A guard day and night was placed around the jail. The court was composed of Mr. Wick, presiding judge, Samuel Holliday and Adam Winchell, associates. Judge Wick was young on the bench, but with much experience in criminal trials. Judge Winchell was a blacksmith, and had ironed the prisoners. Moses Cox was the clerk. He could barely write his name, and when a candidate for justice of the peace at Connersville he boasted of his superior qualifications : ' I have been sued on every section of the statute, and know all about the law, while my competitor has never been sued, and knows nothing about the statute.' Samuel Cory, the sheriff, was a fine specimen of a woods Hoosier, tall and strongboned, with a hearty laugh, without fear of man or beast, and with a voice that made the woods ring as he called the jurors and witnesses. Col. Johnston, the Indian agent, was directed to attend the trial to see that the witnesses were present and to pay their fees. Gen. Noble, then a United States senator, was employed by the Secretary of War to prosecute, with power to fee an assistant. Philip Sweetzer, a young son-in-law of the general, of high promise in his profession, was selected as assistant.

Calvin Fletcher, then a young man of more than ordinary ability, and a good criminal lawyer, was the regular prosecuting attorney." In another allusion to these cases Mr. Smith mentions the lawyers who were present, - Gen. James Noble, Philip Sweetzer, Harvey Gregg, Lot Bioomfield, James Rariden, Charles H. Test, Calvin Fletcher, Daniel B. Wick, and William R. Morris, of this State, and Gen. Sampson Mason and Moses Vance, of Ohio. These last were defending.

The conviction and execution of the prisoners, except Harper, who escaped, and young Bridge, who was pardoned, are related in the sketch already referred to. Mr. Nowland describes the novel gallows that was used : " A wagon was drawn up the side of the hill on planks, so that the wheels would move easily. A post was placed on the side of the hill, just above the wagon. To this post the wagon was fastened by a rope, so that when the rope was cut the wagon would run down the hill without aid. The ^two old men were placed in the tail of the wagon, the ropes adjusted, and at the signal the rope was cut, and the wagon ran from under the men. Sawyer broke his arms loose, caught the rope, and raised himself about eighteen inches. The sheriff quickly caught him by the ankles, and gave a sudden jerk, which brought the body down, and he died without another struggle." The extended quotation from Mr. Smith's reminiscences is interesting, not only as an account of an afiair of national importance, and especially important to the settlers of Indianapolis and the country around, but as a picture of the primitive backwoods court-house and modes of court business. These executions, as before remarked, are claimed to be the first that ever occurred in the United States as the penalty, judicially inflicted, of the murder of Indians by whites. Hudson escaped once after his sentence, and hid in a hollow log in the darkness of an unusually dark night, but was soon discovered and arrested. Many years ago it used to be told among the old settlers and their children that Governor Ray, in the speech announcing the pardon of young Bridge, June 30, 1825, after his father and Sawyer had been hung, said to the young murderer : " There are but two powers in the universe that can now save your life. One is the Almighty God and the other is the Executive of Indiana." It was probably a joke manufactured after the old Governor's eccentricities had become so striking and notorious that such an imputation could not harm him. He was long a noted citizen of Indianapolis.

Governor Ray was Lieutenant-Governor with Governor Hendricks, and from February 25th, when Hendricks went to the National Senate, he was acting Governor. He was subsequently elected two full terms, and left the office, the last he ever held, in December, 1831. He came to the capital about the time the Legislature met, Jan. 10, 1825, bought property here, and remained here till he died, about 1850. He owned a considerable portion of the square on Washington Street, opposite the courthouse, near where Carter's tavern had stood, and in his later life, when his mind began to be considerably unsettled, he imagined a magnificent railroad system, of which this block of his was to be the centre. Radiating lines were to penetrate the country in all directions, with villages every five miles, towns every twenty miles, and cities every fifty miles. Deep gorges among hills were to be crossed on a natural trestle-work, made by sawing off the tops of trees level with the track, and laying sills on these. Oddly enough this very expedient has been used on the Denver and Rio Grande Narrow-Gauge Road, or a road among the mountains in that region. Not less singular is the fact that this " dream of a sick brain," as everybody thought it when it was told and talked about, has proved a most substantial reality, except that Governor Ray's court-house block is not the site of the great central hub depot. In 1826 his influence with the Indians, says Mr. Nowland, when he was a commissioner, with Gen. Tipton, of this State, and Gen. Cass, of Michigan, to procure a cession of the lands of the Pottawatomies and Eel River and Wabash Miamis, secured from the Indians a grant to the State of one section of land for every mile of road, a hundred feet wide, from Lake Michigan through Indianapolis to the Ohio, at any point fixed by the Legislature. It was a most valuable donation, and the " old Michigan road," running through Shelbyville, Greensburg, Napoleon, to Madison, the point selected by the Legislature, was long the best improved road in the State, and never inferior to any but the completed portions of the National road. The Governor's son, James Brown Gay Ray, died when a boy, but a daughter survived him, and continues his abilities, without his vagaries, in some of our best citizens.

The u.sual Fourth of July celebration was held at Reagin's, as the year before, with Gabriel J. Johnson as orator for the citizens and Maj. J. W. Redding for the militia. Squire Foote was the reader. The August election following showed a change in the lines of parties from the position in 1822, when " White Water" was arrayed against " Kentucky." Now the contestants were two Kentuckians, Col. A. W. Russell and Morris Morris, candidates for sheriff to succeed Mr. Bates. Russell was elected by two hundred and sixty-five to one hundred and fortyeight for Mr. Morris. At the Presidential election in November, Clay received two hundred and thirteen votes, Jackson ninety-nine, and Adams sixteen. Clay had all the " Kentucky" strength and a good deal of the "White Water." The poll in the county was one hundred and two less in the Presidential than in the State election, supposed to have been the result of removals to the adjacent regions in the interval. In April the Sunday-school visitors reported a resident population on the donation of one hundred and seventy-two voters, and forty-five single women from fifteen to forty-five. The voters would indicate a population of about eight hundred. A little more than two years before the Gazette, as before noted, had enumerated sixty-one men of seventeen different pursuits, who were supposed to be about half of the adult male population of the spring of 1822, indicating a total population of about six hundred. This was not increased in the election on 1st of April. So the growth of the town in two years, from April 22d to April 24th, seems to have been about three hundred residents. It does not fairly show the additional immigration in that time, however, because a good many who came to the town afterwards re moved to the country. A large emigration to the Wabash passed through the town this year. The streets and the lots along Washington Street, and diverging from it in some places, were more or less cleared of trees, the court-house was in progress, the Presbyterian Church well advanced, a school-house built, two or three religious organizations holding regular services, two new and superior hotels advancing, a distillery on the bayou, a woolen-mill and three or four grist- and saw-mills at work, so that there was no cause for serious discouragement, though progress was not rapid enough to excite any very sanguine hopes. The river and all its tributaries were flooded during the spring, and a keel-boat called the " Dandy" came up on the rise on the 22d of May, with twenty-eight tons of salt and whiskey. This flood is said by the sketch of 1857 and that of Mr. Merrill of 1850 to have been the greatest ever known in the river. It was probably equaled by that of 1828 and 1847, and very closely approached by that of February of this year (1883). The State's revenue from Marion County in 1824 was one hundred and fifty-four dollars and twenty-five cents.

In anticipation of the meeting of the Legislature the citizens formed a " mock" body in the fall of 1824 called the " Indianapolis Legislature," the members of which assigned themselves to any counties they chose, and discussed pretty much the same questions as the real Legislature had discussed, or would when it met. It elected its own Governor about as often as it wanted to get a fresh message or inaugural, which was sure to be a humorous affair, and its debates were not un frequently a good deal better than those of the body it represented. The men who engaged in them were sometimes ex-members, and occasionally actual members of the real body, and the information and areuments elicited' in the sham debate more than once decided the result of the real one. The meetings were continued till about 1836. They were discontinued then for several years, but revived for a while during the winter of 1842 or 1843 or thereabouts.- In November, Samuel Merrill, treasurer of the State, arrived at the capital with several wagonloads of records and money, and thenceforward the chosen capital was the real one.

house had been built for the residence of the treasurer, with a little brick office at the west side, on the southwest corner of Washington and Tennessee Streets, where the State buildings now are. Mr. Merrill was the first occupant, keeping the place till 1834, when he gave way to the late Nathan B. Palmer, who succeeded him in the treasurer's office by election of the Legislature. He remained here, however, and became one of the men who gave the town its impulse to intellectual and moral as well as material improvement.

Samuel Merrill was born in Peacham, Vt., Oct. 29, 1792. He died in Indianapolis, Aug. 24, 1855.' He entered an advanced class in Dartmouth College, but did not graduate, for in his junior year he left to join his elder brother, James, in teaching in York, Pa. There he spent three years in teaching and studying law, having for his familiar associates Thaddeus Stevens, John Blanchard, and his elder brother, James Merrill, all from Peacham, Vt., and all men who have made their mark on their age. At the end of this time he removed to Vevay, in this State, and established himself in the practice of law. In 1821 he was elected to the Legislature for two years, and during his term of office he was elected treasurer of State. In the discharge of the duties of this office he removed first to Corydon, and thence in 1824 to this place. He held the office of treasurer of State till 1834, when he was chosen president of the State Bank. The duties of this office he discharged with the most unwearied fidelity and unimpeachable honesty till 1844, when his public life terminated, with the exception of four years of service as the president of the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad Company. For several years before his death he was engaged in the book trade, still continued by his son. His daughter Kate until very recently was Professor of English Literature in Butler University. Mr. Merrill assisted in forming Henry Ward Beecher's church here, and was all his life after most earnest and devoted in all good works.

The following account of the journey of the capital from Corydon to Indianapolis, written by a member of Mr. Merrill's family, is interesting, not only as the first account of the migration ever published, but as a very graphic description of the condition and ways of life of the Indianians nearly sixty years ago : " The journey of about one hundred and sixty miles occupied two weeks. The best day's travel was eleven miles. One day the wagons accomplished but two miles, passages through the woods having to be cut on account of the impassable character of the road. Four four-horse wagons and one or two saddle-horses formed the means of conveyance for two families, consisting of about a dozen persons, and for a printing-press and the State treasury of silver in strong wooden boxes. The gentlemen slept in the wagons or on the ground to protect the silver, the families found shelter at night in log cabins which stood along the road at rare though not inconvenient intervals. The country people were, many of them, as rude as their dwellings, which usually consisted of but one room, serving for all the purposes of domestic life, - cooking, eating, sleeping, spinning and weaving, and the entertainment of company. At one place a young man, who perhaps had come miles to visit his sweetheart, sat up with her all night on the only vacant space in the room, the hearth of the big fireplace. He kept on his cap, which was of coonskin, the tail hanging down behind, and gave the children the impression that he was a bear."

At the time of the removal William Hendricks was Governor, but was elected to the National Senate that winter, and on Feb. 12, 1825, acting Lieutenant- Governor Ray, who had been made president of the Senate when Lieutenant-Governor Ratlifi' Boone retired, succeeded to the Governorship, and was regularly elected the following August, and again in 1828. The Secretary of State was Robert A. New, from 1816 to 1825, succeeded by W. W. Wick ; the auditor, William H. Lilley, from 1816 to 1829, succeeded in 1829 by Morris Morris, who held till 1844; the treasurer, Samuel Merrill, from 1823 to 1834, succeeded by Nathan B. Palmer. The Legislature, which met in January, took the court-house before it was entirely finished, the House sitting in the lower room, the Senate in the upper. The treasurer occupied the building especially erected for him, and the other State officers went where they could. For nearly thirty years after the erection of the

" Governor's house'' in the Circle in 1827, as before noted, the Supreme judges had their " chambers" there, and most or all of the State officers were there for a time except the treasurer. His residence and office were abandoned before the late war and rented. It would be useless if it were possible to hunt out all the rooms the State auditor and secretary occupied up to the time they took permanent possession of the building expressly erected for them in 1865, but it may be noted that after the completion of Masonic Hall, in 1850, they went there, and subsequently moved into the " McOuat Block," on Kentucky Avenue, where they remained till their final change. The clerk of the Supreme Court previously had his office in a little building in the Court-House Square, and when that was torn down went to the State- House. The reporter of the Supreme Court has never had a public office, and the attorney-general and superintendent of public instruction, after their offices were created, found accommodations where they chose till the " State Building" was erected and enlarged. The State Library was kept in the "Governor's house" for a time, in charge of the Stat0»officers there, but in 1841, John Cook, a bustling, " logrolling," pushing little fellow, recently from Ohio, got himself made librarian, and the library was put in the south rooms, west side, of the State-House. Cook was succeeded in 1843, under a Democratic Legislature, by Samuel P. Daniels, an old resident and a tailor, and he by the late John B. Dillon, author of two " Histories of Indiana," and he, in 1850, by Nathaniel Bolton, first editor of the town, as already related. The adjutant-general's office was hardly a visible appendage to the commander-in-chief of the State's army and navy till 1846, when the Mexican war made it a place of large responsibility and heavy duties, with Gen. David Reynolds as occupant. During the late war it became again one of the most important offices of the State, and was held by Gen. Wallace, Gen. Noble, and Gen. Terrell. It has never been reduced since to the unimportance of its early existence. It and the State Library and the State geologist's office are now in a building opposite the east entrance of the new State-House. The library is now, in addition to its proper use, a museum of relics of the Mexican war and the civil war, while the geologist's office is one of the finest museums of geological and paleontological specimens in the world.

On the 16th of November, 1824, John Douglass, State printer at Corydon, who had come out with Mr. Merrill, bought the interest of Harvey Gregg in the Western Censor and Emigrants Guide. On the 11th of January, the day after the first meeting of the Legislature, the paper appeared as the Indiana Journal, a name it has retained through many changes of ownership, with a reputation and influence as unchanging as its name. Much of the early success of the paper was due to Mr. Douglass.

The first period of the history of the city and county - substantially identical - ends with the arrival of the State capital. Of improvements, trade, political movements, increase of population as accucurate a view has been presented as can be obtained at this remote period, but a glance at the settlement of the surrounding townships and at the county business will make it more comprehensive and satis- - factory. Prom 1821, when the government lands in the New Purchase were first opened to sale, till 1824 or the beginning of 1825, when the capital was fully established here, the entries of land in the diifereiit townships, as appears from the " Tract Book" in the county auditor's office, were as appears in the following list. It will be seen that the larger portion of the entries of the first two years were in Centre and the two lines of townships west and about it, the eastern portion of the county attracting little immigration till the central and western were pretty well filled :