Marion County, Indiana - Chapter 4, 1884 (part 1 of 2)

Chapter 4

Social Condition of the Early Settlers - Amusements - Religious Worship - Music - General Description of Pioneer Life in Marion County - Diseases once Prevalent - Causes of Diminution.

Thus far this history has followed as closely as any record, or accurate memory, or other authentic account would permit, the course of events in the first settlement and growth of the town and county up to the opening of the year 1825, occasionally pausing to group about some conspicuous locality or occurrence such incidents of the later history as closely connected themselves with it, and presented at a single view a summary of the subject, which would be less intelligible if broken -jip by scattering the points about in chronological order. Brief biographical references also have been introduced with the first appearance of citizens who were then or subsequently became conspicuous for services to the community. But there is a good deal more of the history of any State or town than appears in its public records and the accounts of its material growth and development. How the people lived, worked, and amused themselves is quite as much to the purpose of a faithful chronicle as the building of mills, opening streets, and holding courts. For the first two decades of the existence of the town and the settlement about it the social conditions were so little changed that an account of any part of that period will be no misfit for any other part. The changes towards city development and conditions were not distinctly shown, till the impulse of improvement that ran a little ahead of the first railway began to operate. Therefore the incidents, anecdotes, and descriptions in this division of the work are used as illustrative of a period of substantially unchanging conditions, and not of any particular year or condition. They are substantially true of any year for two decades or thereabouts.

For the first few years the relations of the settlers and Indians were occasional points of interest or alarm. One or two incidents will show that the New Purchase was not different in its chances of Indian trouble from settlements beyond the Missis- sippi twenty years ago, and beyond the Rocky Mountains now. Mr. Nowland describes one of these incidents : " John McCormick kept the first tavern or place of entertainment in the place, and provided for the commissioners a portion of the time when they were here for the purpose of locating the capital. His house stood on the east or left bank of the river, a few steps below where the National road now crosses it. One bright sunny morning about the middle of March my father and I took a walk to the river. When within about fifty yards of the cabin of Mr. McCormick we heard cries of ' Help ! Murder !' coming from the house. We ran, and by the time we got thete several men had arrived. A well-known and desperate Delaware, called ' Big Bottle,' from the fact that he generally carried a large bottle hung to his belt, had come to the opposite side of the river and commanded Mrs. McCormick to bring the canoe over for him. This she refused to do, knowing that he wanted whiskey, and when drinking was a dangerous Indian. He set his gun against a tree, plunged into the river, and swam over, and when we reached the house was ascending the bank, tomahawk in hand, preparatory to cutting his way through the door, which Mrs. McCormick had barricaded. At the sight of the men he desisted, and said he only wished to - scare white squaw.' He was taken back to his own side of the river in a canoe, and admonished that if he attempted to scare the ' white squaw' again her husband would kill him. This rather irritated him. - He flourished his scalping-knife towards her, and intimated by signs from her head to his belt that he would take her scalp."

Not far from the time of this pleasing incident of aboriginal amiability another of a more serious character occurred, illustrating the inevitable proclivity of whites to cheat Indians, and the very probable eflFect of the cheat when discovered. Mr. Nowland is authority for the story. " Robert Wilmot, the second merchant (Daniel Shafier was a little earlier), had a small stock of Indian trinkets, and for a short time carried on trade with the Indians, but a little occurrence frightened him, and he soon returned to Georgetown, Ky., his former residence.

A Delaware Indian named Jim Lewis had pledged some silver hat-bands (there is something to open the eyes of the ' dudes' of 1883 !) to Wilmot for goods, and was to return in two moons to redeem them. He kept his word, but when he came back Wilmot had sold the bands to another Indian, which so exasperated Lewis that he threatened if he ever caught Wilmot going alone to his corn-field he would take his scalp. This frightened him so much that he never would go alone, but often requested and was accompanied by Dr. Livingston Dunlap. His alarm grew so serious finally that he sold out and returned to Kentucky. As it was pretty generally known that Lewis was the murderer of the white man found near the Bluffs, on an island of the river, this threat against Wilmot had a tendency to alarm and put on their guard other settlers."

The Indians had been greatly irritated by the intrusion of the whites into their favorite huntingground, and occasional manifestations of enmity were to have been and were expected ; still, the relations of the races were not always those of ill-will and illservice. The late James Sulgrove, who came to the settlement in 1823, and at his death in 1875 was the oldest business man in the city continuously in the same business, used to tell a little incident of the good feeling of the Indians that may go to set ofi" the less pleasant ones. His father, while riding through the dense woods where West Indianapolis now stands, with a child before him, saw an Indian following at a rapid pace, as if to overtake him. Feeling a little alarmed, he hurried his horse ahead, but saw that the Indian hurried too. Knowing the impossibility of escaping by speed in the deep, miry mud of the river bottom with the child to take care of, he slackened his pace and let the native come up. As he approached he held out a child's shoe in his hand, which had dropped from the foot of the little fellow on the horse, and been picked up by the Indian, who had followed pertinaciously through the mud to return it. Trivial as such an affair is, it is worth noting as an evidence that the Indians then, as now and always, treat the whites in much the same way the whites treat them. If there is no special cause of dislike or hostility, the Indians are as well disposed to be kindly and hospitable as other men. If they are swindled and abased they can hardly be more vindictive, if we may trust the early reports of revengeful white murders.

Of the homes and modes of life of the early settlers some little suggestion has been made in occasional allusions, but a better idea is given in Mr. Nowland's account of the way his father's family settled themselves here in the fall of 1820 on their arrival. He says that a Quaker from Wayne County by the name of Townsend, the same who afterwards joined in putting in operation the first wool-carding machine here, had come out to the settlement and built a cabin and covered it, but had left the sawing out of the necessary openings to a more convenient season and returned to the White Water. Mr. Nowland's father took possession, by the advice of a friend, but, for fear of cutting openings for doors, windows, and a chimney in the wrong place, decided to cut none at all, and made an entrance by the novel process of prying up two corners of the house and taking out the third log from the bottom. A few clapboards taken from the middle of the roof let the smoke out, and the whole affair was about as comfortable as a wigwam. The fire was built on the ground, which was the floor, and rag carpets were hung round the walls to exclude the wind, against which there was no provision of " chinking and daubing." The neighbors, in the generous fashion of the backwoods, all assisted readily in anything that required their help, and a cabin of their own was soon provided for the family. There may possibly be in the city yet one of these primeval cabins weather-boarded over, as a good many were, and made most excellent residences too, as handsome as a frame and as solid as a brick ; but the unhewed cabin, unfaced and left in its native roughness, probably disappeared with the burning of a double log house on the bank of Pogue's Eun, near Mississippi Street, some years before the war. The double cabin was the palatial structure of the early settlements of the New Purchase. A two-story, hewed-log house was sometimes built, but it was as phenomenal as Vanderbilt's marvelous home. There was one on Maryland Street, south side, west of Meridian, near the present east end of the Grand Hotel, that was occupied by a family named Goudy for a time, and afterwards by some of the hands employed on the National road in 1837 or 1838 or thereabouts. It may have been the first house used by the Methodists as a place of worship in 1825, for they did use a hewed-log house on Maryland Street, near Meridian. It disappeared forty years ago. One-story houses frequently made a sort of second story of the garret by a ceiling of loose plank or puncheons and a ladder, and this was sometimes the children's room and sometimes a guest's room. Doors were usually battened, swung on large wooden hinges, and fastened with a wooden latch, lifted from the outside by a string fastened to it and passing through a hole in the door above. The hospitable assurance of a backwoodsman that his " latch-string was always out" can be readily appreciated with this explanation. It meant that his house could be entered at any time by anybody. If the latch-string were drawn in through the hole a person outside would have no chance to get in. A close-jointed hewed-log house was warmer in winter and cooler in summer than a brick, and, except that it would rot, was preferable. Unhewed houses were always more or less subject to the intrusion of vagrant breezes and curious eyes by the falling out or knocking out of the "chinking" and "daubing" that filled the spaces between the logs. This was usually made of blocks of split wood, from six inches to a foot long by three or four inches wide and an inch or two thick, laid in oblique rows between the logs and covered thick with the mud of the country.

Chimneys were usually built clear outside of the house, against a hole eight or ten feet wide by five or six high cut out of the logs or left by measurement when the logs were cut before the raising, as other openings were arranged for frequently. The square of the chimney at the bottom, as high as the fireplace inside, was built of heavy split timber notched like the logs of the wall and heavily " daubed." The upper part was narrowed from the square structure below to the usual size of a smokevent of brick, but made of small split sticks laid on each other in courses of pairs and thickly plastered with clay or mud. As dangerous as such work would appear in such close contact with the huge fires of the backwoods, there was not more danger if the " daubing" was well looked to than there is in the " defective flue" that is the terror of city householders and the pest of insurance companies. Besides, if a chimney should take fire it could be discerned at once, for the whole extent of the flue was as open as the door, and a tinful of water could do all that a steam-engine is needed to do now, and without damaging anything, where the engine would do as much harm as a fire. With all the rudeness and lack of luxuries and even of conveniences, the pioneers of the West had some countervailing advantages even in the structure of their houses.

Log cabins were abundant here when cookingstoves came round, but they had been going out for some years, and there was never any considerable association between the home of the backwoods and the kitchen of the city. The cooking of the cabin was all done in the big fireplace. Mr. Nowland tells how the fires were made. The back-log, cut the full length of the fireplace, was laid at one end on a sled called a " lizard," and hauled into the house by a horse till it was opposite the fireplace, when it was rolled in, and followed by a " forestick" of the same size, and brought in the same way. Smaller wood filled in the space between the two on the heavy andirons, - sometimes stones or smaller logs, - and with proper attention to the small fuel such a fire would last twenty- four hours. The baking was done in skillets, set in front of the fire on a bed of coals, with the lid covered with coals. If it was a "johnny-cake" that was to be baked, it was spread out by hand till it was a foot or so long and half as wide or more by nearly an inch in thickness, and then laid on the "johnnycake board," about like the half of a modern sleeveboard, and set on edge before the fire, supported by a big chip or a stone or anything handy. Nothing more savory was ever made of grain than a "johdnycake." The frying was done like the baking, and not unfrequently with the same utensil. For boiling, an iron crane usually hung in the fireplace, with two or three heavy iron hooks, that could be moved along the lever, like the weights on a steelyard, to find the best spot of the fire. Against the end walls of the big fireplace it was a common sight to see venison hams hanging to dry, or "jerk," as the phrase is now. Pumpkins cut into thin strips and dried were frequent adornments of strings or poles near the ceiling or along the walls. A " smoke-house," to cure the winter's bacon, was an usual adjunct of the cabin, and the family meat was kept there with other provisions. Before there were any mills, or when low water prevented them from grinding, corn was often made into " lye hominy," or, when just hardening from the roasting ear into maturity, was grated on a half cylinder of tin punched outwardly full of holes, the outturned edges of the hole rasping an ear away rapidly in the deft hands of a backwoods housewife. Potatoes were roasted in the hot ashes and embers, and the boy who has eaten them thus cooked, and will not swear that no other cooking is comparable, is " fit for stratagems" and all other bad things.

In the year 1830, Mr. John Finley, of Wayne County, wrote a New Year's address for the Indianapolis Journal, at the close of which occurs so admirable a description of a " Hoosier" pioneer cabin that no apology is required for reproducing it here :

" I'm told in riding somewhere West A stranger found a ' Hoosier's nest,' In other words, a buckeye cabin, Just big enough to hold Queen Mab in. Its situation, low but airy, Was on the borders of a prairie; And fearing he might be benighted, He hailed the house, and then alighted. The Hoosier met him at the door, Their salutations soon were o'er. He took the stranger's horse aside And to a sturdy sapling tied, Then, having stripped the saddle off, He fed him in a sugar-trough. The stranger stooped to enter in, The entrance closing with a pin. And manifested strong desire To seat him by the log-heap fire, Where half a dozen Hoosieroons, With mush and milk, tin cups and spoons, White heads, bare feet, and dirty faces, Seemed much inclined to keep their plaoes. But madam, anxious to display Her rough but undisputed sway, Her offspring to the ladder led, And cuffed the youngsters up to bed.

The application I intended Is from the famous Scottish poet, Who seemed to feel, as well as know it. That * burly chiels and clever hizzies Are bred in sic a way as this is.' "

The nickname of an Indianian, " Hoosier," occurs in this poem the first time that it ever appeared in print, say some old settlers. It could not have been very old or generally known throughout the country if it originated, as the most credible accounts relate, in a fight among the hands employed in excavating the canal around the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. Some big Irishman, after keeping out of the shindy as long as he could stand it, at last went in and knocked down four or five of the other party in quick succession. Jumping up in high glee he cracked his heels together, and shouted, " I'm a husher." The boast crossed the river, and was naturalized by the residents there, and thence passed all over the State and into other States. Except " Yankee," no other State or sectional nickname is so well known, and it is not unfrequently used as a designation of a Western man, as " Yankee" is of an Eastern man. Governor Wright, of Indiana, once told a foreign visitor that the name originated in a habit of travelers calling out when they would ride up to a fence at night with the purpose of staying till morning, "Who's here?" Repetition made one word of it, and finally made a name for backwoods settlers of it, which in some unexplained way was appropriated to Indiana. Another explanation is that Col. Lehmanowski, a Polish officer of the first Napoleon, who occasionally visited this place, and preached here to a Lutheran association and lectured on Napoleon's wars, about 1840 to 1842, started the name by his pronunciation of the word " Hussar," which some " gostrating" fellow got hold of and used to glorify himself. This, however, occurring as late as 1840, will not explain the use of the word in Finley's poem in 1830, except in the fashion of " Merlin's prophecy," made by the " Fool" in " Lear."

Dr. Philip Mason, of White Water, in his " Autobiography," gives an account of the agricultural implements in use on the farms of these "Hoosiers" that will not be uninteresting to the later generation of farmers. " The plow was the common shovelplow mostly, though a few called the ' bar-share' were used. This was a bar on the land side, with a broad, flat share running to a point at the forward end, attached to a coulter with a steel nose in front. The coulter extended up through the wooden beam of the plow. Two wooden handles, one attached to the beam and the bar, and to the bar of the land side of the plow, the other handle connected with a wooden mold-board, which pressed out the dirt and partially turned it. It was connected with the other handle by wooden pins or rounds. Horses were often attached to the plow without an iron clevis. The double-tree was connected with a fixture not unlike a clevis ; the single-tree fastened to the double-tree by a hickory withe, sometimes with a kind of wooden clevis. The horses were mostly geared for plowing with a collar made of corn-shucks ; hames made from the roots of the ash or oak, fashioned as best they could be with a drawing-knife, a hole at top and bottom, so as to fasten with a cord or a thong made of rawhide ; not uncommonly a hole was made with an auger near the middle of the hame to take in the trace, which was made of hemp or flax tow, and spun and made on a rude rope-walk. The trace was run through the hole in the hame and secured by a knot, and looped over the end of the single-tree, on which there was a notch at the back part to keep it in place. For a back-band a strong piece of tow cloth doubled was used. The horses were guided by a bridle with a rope headstall and a rope line, mostly driven with one line. When using two horses they were coupled together by a rope at the bits, sometimes by a stick, with strings tied to the stick and then to the bridlebit. Double lines were seldom used in driving one or two horses. Even a four-horse team was driven with a single line attached to the near forward horse. Salt and iron were obtained at Cincinnati, and fortunate was he who could by any means obtain salt enough to preserve his meat and salt his food. Corn was often sold at six cents a bushel, and wheat at twenty-five cents. Salt was often as high as two dollars and a half and three dollars a bushel."

seasoned. From these I made a high post bedstead, which has been in use ever since till the last seven years." The common chair of the backwoods was the " split-bottom," still made and used occasionally, and superior to anything of the fashionable kind made now. Long thin strips of tough wood that would split in flakes about an inch wide were used to weave the seat. They wore out or broke readily, but were readily replaced. Sometimes buokskin was stretched and tacked to the frame of the seat, and made a better chair than any costly cushioned affair of this day, until it stretched into too deep a cavity, as it always did sooner or later.

An Emigrant Scene

Although the pioneers all had to build their own houses, they were not all nor generally so destitute as to be forced to make their own furniture. Dr. Mason thus describes his labor in this direction : " My next object was to make us seats. For this purpose I went into the creek bottom and selected a suitable blue ash tree, cut it down, then cut notches into the sides, and split off pieces of suitable length and width for benches. With the broad-axe and drawing-knife they were made smooth. Some were made for a single person and had three legs, while the longer ones had four legs. Our next object was a bedstead. I found on the place some black walnjjt rails which were well farmers did a good deal towards making for themselves the appliances and implements they needed. It was often their only chance, consequently it was no unusual thing to see about a farmer's barn or back yard a rough carpenter's bench with a wooden clamp or vise, or a " horse" with a treadle, and a notched head pressed by the treadle down on a stick to hold it fast against the " horse" for the use of the " drawingknife," the universal tool of the backwoods, only less indispensable than the axe. The ready adaptability of the American pioneer was balked by little in the way of wood-work, but blacksmithing was too much, and the blacksmith-shop was universally coeval with the tavern and village store. He made the crane for the fireplace, the " dog-irons" or andirons, the shovel and tongs, the plowshare and clevis, the horse's bit sometimes, the gearing of the wife's loom, the irons of the husband's wagon, shod the horses, sharpened the plows, made the grubbing hoes and the fishing gigs, hammered smooth the battered poles of axes, riveted the blade in the boy's broken knife, and sometimes ventured to repair the broken lock of the hunter's rifle. Pretty much all else the family did for themselves, even to the wagon-making once in a while. The spinning, weaving, cutting, and clothes-making were the good wife's work, with plenty more besides, and if she didn't make as neat fits or graceful drapery as a fashionable tailor or dressmaker to-day, her breeches were sound and durable, her " wamuses" comfortable and convenient, her dresses admirably adapted to the service and situation. Buckskin was largely used for clothing and frequently for moccasins. It is queer that the infinite superiority of the latter in comfort to all other forms of foot-gear for those distressed by the distortions and excrescences of civilization has not reintroduced them, at least among sensible people who care more for comfort than appearances. Buckskin wamuses and breeches disappeared forty years ago, except in rare instances of well-preserved pioneer relics. The deer was driven off into the remotest parts of the county even before that, and the hides becoming scarce, and dear in a double sense, were gradually replaced in saddlery and other manufactures by sheepskin, by no means its equal. Ex-Coroner Dr. Wishard tells an amusing story of Emmanuel Grlympse, one of the first settlers of Perry township. He had been wearing a pair of ill- tanned buckskin breeches, which got soaked in a shower as he was going from home to a school he kept in the neighborhood. They were pliable enough when he ! sat down in them wet, but they dried before he ; attempted to rise, and then they were as hard as sheet-iron, and he had to get water and resoak them before they would allow him freedom of muscle enough to walk. It was much such a case as " Sut Lovengood's" shirt. For a number of years carding machinery was frequently attached to the motivepower of mills to make " rolls" of the farmers' wool, but a farm-house was rarely without its pair of cards for hand-made rolls if an emergency required them. As late as 1832 or 1833 there was a cardingmachine' run by horse-power - a huge wheel fifteen feet in diameter set at a slope with a vertical shaft in the centre, on the lower side of which a horse was in constant motion - on the northwest corner of Maryland and Illinois Streets, and another on Kentucky Avenue near where the first tobacco-factory was situated. These were used for no other purpose, but in at least two mills near the city the same kind of machinery was attached to the water-power. One was on Fall Creek race, the other on the bayou, near the present line of the Vincennes Railroad, in a mill erected by the late Daniel Yandes and his brother-inlaw, Andrew Wilson. Spinning and weaving machinery came, temporarily and uselessly, in a big steammill enterprise some years later, but it failed, and woolen manufacture was left to show itself nearly twenty years later. " Store clothes" were by no means unknown, but a large dependence was held on the mother's skill in the country, and to some extent in the town too, where a good deal of the country life was retained in the woods and corn-patches that surrounded many of the houses. It was not till the settlement was getting into its teens that it began to put on city airs and distinguish itself and its ways from the country.

A portion of the home labors of the backwoods was of a kind that required co-operation, and these were made occasions of fun and frolic, though rarely to the neglect of the real business. Among these were the quiltings" for women and girls, with the necessary attendance of young men later, when the games of the period were zealously kept up as long as it seemed decorous. These were much the same as country games in all parts of the country, of English origin and traditional repute, and rarely mixed up with later inventions till the town and country began to be less closely assimilated. The point or purpose of most of them was a kiss claimed as a forfeit or penalty. The more intellectual entertainments, like making and solving puzzles, were not so popular as those with a little material satisfaction lodged in their conclusion. " Apple-parings" were not so common here as in the East, but they were another kind of co-operative work that was made an amusement. " House-raisins" was a male task with a similar accompaniment better adapted to masculine tastes; "log-rolling" was another. The trees that had been cut down to clear the land for cultivation had to be put out of the way, and no way was so expeditious as to roll them into great heaps and burn them, trunks, chips, limbs, brush, and leaves. So the neighbors gathered to a " log-rolling" as to a "raising," and many a rivalry of strength and skill with the handspike was raised or settled there. There was fighting of course, especially on visits to town and to the "grocery," as the liquor-shop was called then ; but the exhibition at a " log-rolling" was quite as satisfactory proof that a man was a " good man," " stout," " hold his own," and so on, as a successful fight at Jerry Collins' corner. " Sugar-making" was frequently turned into a frolic, though co-operation was not so necessary to it as the other work. The processes were much the same as now, except that the " troughs" were not buckets or crocks, but wooden vessels roughly hewed in the halves of short logs split in two, unhandy, easily overturned, and readily inclined to get dirty. They were visited at regular intervals, and the sugar-water emptied into a barrel on a sled, or in a wagon if there was not snow enough for a sled, and reset, while the sled with its load went back to the fire, usually made between two good-sized long logs, on which the kettles rested. Here the evaporating water was replaced from the barrels till it was sweet enough to finish with, and then came the fun, " the stirring off," and hunting out lumps to eat, or filling egg-shells with thick syrup to harden into a lump like a stone, or pouring a great mass into a pan of sugar-water for the boys and girls to pull at, or making cakes of it, or scalding fingers with it for some favorite to doctor. " Sugar-making" was capable of being made the most entertaining event of the year, and it was often done.

Besides the amusements made of occasions of really necessary neighborly co-operation, the men of both town and country during the first decade of the settlement, or in some cases the first two, contrived amusements that made no pretence of work. The chief of these were "quarter races" and "shooting matches." For some years the portion of West Street along the Military Ground was the favorite race-track, the outcome being near the crossing of West and Indiana Avenue on the Michigan road. Nags taken from the plow or the wagon, and ridden by the owners or by some boy, were the contestants, and the stake was anything from a plug of tobacco to ten dollars, the latter not usually risked on any animal that had not a local reputation. Forty years ago or more these quarter races on West Street took place nearly every Saturday, and were usually decorated with a fight or two.

A conspicuous character concerned in them frequently was a very remarkable man named Nathaniel Vise, who settled and named the town of Visalia, in California. Though constantly associated with drinking men all his life and making drinking-places his principal haunts, he was never known to drink. Though he gambled, he was notoriously as honorable a man as there was in the place. Possessed of phenomenal strength and agility, and living among fighting men, he never fought when he could help it,, and he never fought without whipping his man. His checkered career took him to Texas after he left here, and he became the intimate friend of Jack Hays, the noted " Texas Ranger." They went to California together, and there his amazing strength and skill made him so formidable that not one of the many noted prize-fighters then in San Francisco, like " Yankee" Sullivan and " Country" McClusky, would fight him " rough and tumble" for ten thousand dollars. He was killed but a year or so ago by the fall of a building in Texarkana. He came to this place a mere lad with his father from Kentucky, and grew up here. At one time, about 1839, he had a contract on the Central Canal, near the town, and when the public works were suspended that year he made a pro rata division of all the money he had among his hands. They came to the town and got drunk on it, and were then easily persuaded by a fractious Irishman that they had been cheated and ought to lick Vise. Happening to pass along the street where a group of them was gathered, a little east of Meridian Street on Washington, they assailed him, first with savage language and then with their clubs and fists. He knocked and kicked down a half-dozen of them before he got clear of them. His activity was so great that he jumped high enough to kick both feet in the stomach of one of the mob and prostrate him senseless. He once beat a professional foot-racer in racing costume, without changing a single thing he wore, and beat him so badly in a hundred yards or so that at the outcome he turned and walked towards his antagonist, meeting and laughing at him. He was a cousin of Judge N. B. Taylor, of the Superior Court. So much notice of him is due to the conspicuous place he held among the early settlers and the reputation he left here.

After the abandonment of the canal, its bed south of Pleasant Run, where there was a long stretch of level bottom, was made a race-track by the ambitious residents of Perry township, especially the section of it some half-dozen miles south of the town in the river bottom, called " Waterloo," a region noted for fighting, drinking, betting, and wild frolics of all kinds. Here lived the Snows, the Stevenses, the Fancillers, the Mundys, the Glympses, the Myerses, some quiet and orderly, some a good deal like the modern " cow-boy." All were " drinking" men, however.

" Shooting matches" continued to be a popular amusement till near the time the completion of the first railroad changed the direction of men's minds to the graver occupations of establishing industries and multiplying business. There were two kinds of matches. In one the shooting was done at a target, in the other at the object which was made the stake. In the first case the usual prize was a beef divided into five " quarters," the fifth being the hide and tallow, and worth more cash value than either of the others. In the second case the object shot for - a turkey commonly, sometimes a goose - was set against a tree or stump, with a log rolled before it so as to conceal all of it but the head and upper part of the neck. The contestants stood off an agreed distance, usually sixty yards, and shot at the head " oflF hand." The first to bring blood won it. Each contestant put in enough to make the aggregate a good price for the fowl. The rifle was the only weapon of the time in the backwoods, whether the game were deer or bear, turkey, quail, or squirrel. Small game could usually be hit close enough about the head to leave the eatable portion uninjured. But nobody could shoot a running turkey's head off with a rifle, as one of T. B. Thorpe's apocryphal stories makes Mississippi oldtime hunters do frequently. It might be possible if a turkey were running directly away from or towards a hunter, but barely possible then, and utterly impossible, except by accident, in any other direction. The shot-gun was thought beneath the dignity of hunters and marksmen, and even boys disdained it. The rifle was the weapon of a man ; " shot-guns will do for girls," said an old pioneer once in Mr. Beck's gunsmith-shop. It was not till the German immigration began to affect social conditions that the shot-gun began to displace the rifle. Now the hunter here never uses the rifle, and the shot-gun has become the especial agent even of the humanizing murders of our enlightened land. Several prominent citizens were noted for skill with the rifle. Robert B. Duncan was probably the most formidable of all, but Squire Weaver and Nathaniel Cox and several others were little inferior, if at all. Mr. Cox was one of the conspicuous pioneers of the New Purchase. He was a mechanical genius, and was employed to do all sorts of work that nobody else could or would try. He was carpenter, cabinet-maker, cooper, turner, painter, boatbuilder, anything that was wanted, - a quaint, humorous, generous man, full of queer stories and dry fun, passionately fond of hunting and fishing, and always at it when he had no work to do. In 1842, when he wanted to run for county treasurer, probably, he announced himself in handbills as " Old Nat Cox, the Coon-Hunter." He was the drummer of militia musters, and made his own drums. He lived west of j Missouri Street on Washington for a great many years, and died about 1851. According to Mr. Nowland, he was the prototype of " Sut Lovengood" in drinking the two components of a Seidlitz powder separately and letting them mix in his stomach, an i experiment that he said " made him feel as if Niagara Falls were running out of his head." He was a Marylander, and came here in 1821.

Another amusement of the early settlement of the place was " gander-pulling." This was imported from the South by the settlers from North Carolina and Tennessee, of whom there were a good many. Those who have read some of the sketches of Southern life and scenes by Hooper and Longstreet will know all that can be known about a " gander-pulling" without taking part in it. One of the places - possibly the only one - where it was practiced in this county was at Allisonville, in Washington township, on the road to Conner's place and Noblesville. Here two residents, Lashbrook and Deford, offered an enlightened and Christian public the refined and intellectual entertainment of a " gander-pulling" at such times as promised to make the speculation profitable. An old gander was caught, his neck stripped of feathers and thickly covered with soft soap, and hung by his legs to a strong but yielding limb of a handy tree. The contestants mounted their horses and in turn rode at full speed under the swinging fowl, catching its soapy neck with one hand and holding on with all their might to pull the head off : that was the victory. There is no record or recollection of the frequency of this elegant sport or of the persons that took part in it.

It may savor a little of the extravagance of a joke to suggest that one of the primitive entertainments of the settlement was fighting, and yet the frequency and ready reconciliation of that sort of enlivenment certainly looked that way. Fighting at elections is common now, but it was inevitable then ; and it was a rare Saturday that didn't see a " passage at arms" of the backwoods kind, "a rough and tumble" fight, at some of the " groceries." Occasionally the diversion was diversified by fisticulT duels of a more sedate if not satisfactory character than the whiskey-nurtured rows of street corners and handy open lots. Pretty early in the annals of the village one of these aflFairs occurred between Andrew Wilson, one of the owners of one of the early mills, and a neighbor by the name of Zadoc (universally called " Zedick") Smith. The pair went oflF alone into the thick woods about the mill situated on the " old bayou," near the crossing of the Belt Railroad and Morris Street, and fought out their quarrel, came back roughly handled, and never to their dying day told anybody which was the victor. Not improbably the result was a good deal like that of the fight celebrated in a " nigger" ballad of this period between " Bill Crowder" and " Davy Crockett" : " We fought half a day, and then agreed to stop it, for I was badly licked, and so was Davy Crockett." Another fight of the same secret and undetermined kind took place later between Captain Wiley and Jim Smith, both tailors and " sports," and both unusually stalwart and fine-looking men. They went ofiF to the State House Square, a remote aud rural spot then, and settled the matter, but how they never told. So infectious was this fighting humor that Calvin Fletcher when prosecutor took offense at some action of Squire Obed Foote, and undertook to thrash him in his own oflBce, with poor success, however, which he signalized by informing on himself and having himself indicted and fined. Eye-gouging and biting were practiced in these affairs in the Southern fashion, but never or rarely to the maiming or serious injury of anybody.

Of this period militia musters and militia oflBcers form too important an element to be overlooked. When the county was organized the battle of New Orleans was but seven years old, and that was a militia battle on our side. There was enough military spirit in the people to demand a military system of some kind, and to sustain it till it got to be an old song and the events of the last war with England had faded into legend, and a militia force was organized of all the adult male population with some exceptions, divided into regiments by counties and brigades by Congressional districts. Judge William W. Wick was the first brigadier of this district ; James Paxton was elected the first colonel, Samuel Morrow the first lieutenant-colonel, and Alexander W. Russell the first major, as before stated. Musters were held annually possibly oftener, and the turn-out was expected to embrace about all the able-bodied voting population who were not specially exempted. But it did not, as there were always plenty to look on besides the troops that followed the march. The parade was formed at the court-house usually, with no uniforms except what the ofiScers wore, and no guns but " squirrel rifles," and many without them taking canes, papaw sticks, broken Iioe handles, or pieces of split plank. The march was sometimes out east to a grove, but oftener west down Washington Street and Maryland to the open ground between Georgia and Louisiana Streets west of Tennessee, where the force was put through an hour of drilling and marching, and another hour of idling about and talking and eating apples, and then the parade was dismissed, with about as much improvement of military knowledge and spirit as if all hands had stayed at home. But the parade was a great event. The regimental oflScers made a most inspiriting show. They were in their glory, as a " militia officer on the peace establishment" - as Corwin said of Crary - ought to be at a militia annual parade. It was the day for which the other three hundred and sixty-four were made. They galloped back and forth, their red and white plumes swaying and bobbing, their sword-sheaths rattling, their blades flashing, when they were not rusty, their voices duly husky with dust and duty, while old Peter Winchell and Nat Cox kept the drums rattling till no one could hear more than an infrequent squeal of Glidden True's fife. Little boys ran along and screamed, dogs barked, sedate old hogs in fence corners got up and ran off grunting, women stood in their doors holding up their babies to see the gorgeous spectacle, and for one hour of glorious life the militia officer had a right to feel that he was a bigger man than any man without a commission.

Although the militia system was intended, as Burke said of the feudal system, to be " the cheap defense of the nation," and the military tastes of the people were as strong as those of any people, yet so incessant were the demands of urgent duties and labors that little time was left for such as availed only in remote and improbable emergencies. Thus it came that after the settlement of the New Purchase there was never anything more made of the militia system than an annual show and a little personal distinction frequently used for political effect by the officers. This will explain the reference to it here instead of in the general course of the history, where its infrequency would make it more irrelevant.

Water, which is at once so amusing and so fully illustrative of the condition of the system all over the State that it is reproduced here. Premising that an ambitious young fellow named Lewis had been elected major of the regiment, and that he was possessed by a large idea of the importance of his position, Mr. Smith goes on thus : " The great and memorable day at last arrived. The aide-de-camp of the major came galloping into the field in full uniform directly from headquarters, and halted at the marquee of the adjutant. In a few minutes the order from the major was given in a loud military voice by the adjutant, mounted on a splendid gray charger, ' Officers to your places, marshal your men into companies, separating the barefooted from those who have shoes or moccasins, placing the guns, sticks, and cornstalks in separate platoons, and then form the line ready to receive the major !' The order was promptly obeyed, when at a distance Maj. Lewis was seen coming into the field with his aids by his side, his horse rearing and plunging very unlike ' Old Whitey' at the battle of Buena Vista. The line was formed, the major took position on a rising ground about a hundred yards in front of the battalion ; rising in his stirrups, and turning his full face upon the line, he shouted, ' Attention, the his voice before in the open air, and with the word ' attention' it broke, and ' the whole' sounded like the whistle of a fife. The moment the sound reached the line some one at the lower end, with a voice as shrill as the major's, cried out, ' Children come out of the swamp, you'll get snake bit !' The major pushed down the line at full speed. ' Who dares in.sult me?' No answer. The cry then commenced all along the line, ' You'll get snake-bit I' The major turned and dashed up the line, but soon had sense enough to see that it was the militia that was at an end, and not himself that was the object of ridicule. He dashed his chapeau from his head, drew his sword and threw it upon the ground, tore his commission to pieces, and resigned on the spot. The battalion dispersed, and militia musters were at end from that time forward in the White Water country." The system made a less comical exit in the White River country, but it went out about the same time and as completely. Its offices ceased to be of any value even as means of electioneering for political positions. When it began to be replaced, as it was in ten or a dozen years after the removal of the capital to the White River region, the substitute took the form of voluntary associations, always sure to be more efficient than any statutory system in a country that couldn't enforce, and wouldn't try, a conscription in time of peace.

In the way of ordinary amusements, such as usually divert the inhabitants of towns, there was nothing. A theatrical performance had come and gone, and that was all till 1830, when the first circus, McComber & Co.'s, exhibited in the rear of Henderson's tavern. Such diversions, besides those referred to, as the young capital had to regale itself with it contrived for itself, owing nothing and paying nothing to anybody else.

Thus it came that for the first decade or two the town and country were as closely assimilated in their amusements and general social condition as if the town had never been platted or its streets cleared, and in business and in ordinary duties the separation was little more distinct. The town was merely a little thickening of the country settlement.

Mr. Mason speaks of the scarcity of money in Indiana in the first few years after the State's admission into the Union, and all the survivors of the first dozen years of the settlement of the New Purchase say that most of their trading was barter. Money was hard to come by, and what little was encountered in this region was Spanish almost altogether or Mexican. The old copper cent, as big as a half-dollar, was the only home coin that circulated in any considerable force ; the next smallest was the " fip," or " fipenny bit," a little Spanish coin rated at six and a fourth cents, the sixteenth of a dollar. In later years, after flat-boats began running to New Orleans with our corn and pork and whiskey and hay, we imported the S(}uthern designation and called it a " picayune." The next coin was Spanish too, worth two of the first, and called a " levy," sometimes a " 'levenpence," changed by Southern influence into " bit." Another Spanish coin worth eighteen to twenty cents was called a pistareen. It was so nearly the same size as the Spanish quarter that it was easily passed for that if worn so much as to make the stamp undiscernible. The quarter had the Pillars of Hercules on the reverse, and the pistareen had not. These coins were the common medium of business when money was used at all, except that the dollar coin was frequently Mexican, sometimes a French five-franc piece helped out by a fip, but never an American dollar. If the " daddies" had it, they kept it. Paper money began to show itself with the organization and operation of the old State Bank in 1834. The first American coins, except an occasional ten-cent piece of the old pattern (the first with the seated figure of Liberty) ever brought to Indianapolis, so far as can be now ascertained, were brought in the summer of 1838 by a jeweler named Foster on his return from the East, and by him placed in the corner-stone of the first Christ Church, which was the first corner-stone laid in the place.

The primitive condition of the country and the unsophisticated character of the people can be better judged by a few incidents related by eye-witnesses than by chapters of elaborate description, wherefore it is deemed best to add here some of the anecdotes of the early settlement of the White River Valley, preserved in O. H. Smith's and Mr. Nowland's reminiscences. The latter, in his sketch of a noted character of the early days of Indianapolis, " Old Helvey," tells an amusingly illustrative story of a wedding there. " After the bride and groom had retired the whiskey gave out. There was no way of getting more except at Mr. Landis" grocery. He was present, but there was no pen, pencil, or paper with which an order could be sent to the clerk. Old Helvey suggested that Mr. Landis should send his knife, which would be recognized by the young man, and would certainly bring the whiskey. This was done, and the whiskey came, to the great joy of all present. Mr. Helvey thought the bride and groom must be dry by this time, so he took the jug to them and made them drink the health of the guests."

Another incident related by Mr. Nowland indicates a stronger matrimonial exclusiveness in a portion of the early settlers than prevails now, or ever prevailed in most of the country. This was the first dance given in the settlement, by Mr. John Wyant, at his cabin on the river bank, near where Kingan's porkhouse is, in December, 1821. Mr. John Wyant was the first man prosecuted criminally in Marion County. His offense was selling liquor without a license. There was a charge of twenty-five cents admittance for each adult male, to furnish the fluids, which were the only costly articles used on these occasions. The guests had begun to arrive, and while the landlord was in " t'other house," as the second cabin was called, Mr. Nowland (father), " having been educated in a different school of etiquette from that of Mr. Wyant, thought it but simple politeness to invite Mrs. Wyant to open the ball with him. She gracefully accepted, and they with others were going in fine style when the landlord returned. He at once commanded the music, which was being drawn from the bowels of a dilapidated-looking fiddle by Col. Russell, to stop. He said, ' As far as himself and wife were concerned they were able to do their own dancing, and he thought it would look better for every man to dance with his own wife ; those who had none could dance with the gals.' This order, as far as Mr. and Mrs. Wyant were concerned, was strictly adhered to the remainder of the night. When the guests were ready to leave at the dawn of day they were still ' bobbing around' together." Not a bad example of matrimonial fidelity, which it can do no harm to recall at a time when a divorce is granted about every day in the year in their own county.

Of one of the earliest marriages - the second probably - Mr. Nowland says, " As the two rooms were already full the bride had to make her toilet in the smoke-house, where she received the bridegroom and his retinue." The wedding dinner is thus described : " On either end of the table was a large, fat, wild turkey, still hot and smoking from the clay oven in which they were roasted. In the middle of the table and midway between the turkeys was a fine saddle of venison, part of a buck killed the day before by Mr. Chinn (the bride's father ; the bridegroom was Uriah Gates, a well-known citizen) expressly for the occasion. The spaces between the turkeys and venison were filled with pumpkin, chicken, and various other pies. From the side-table or puncheon Mrs. Chinn, assisted by the old ladies, was issuing coffee, which was taken from a large sugar -kettle that was hanging over the fire. By the side of the coflFee-pot on this side-table was a large tin pan filled with maple sugar, and a gallon pitcher of cream." Delmonico could not have got up a better dinner at twenty dollars a head. Mr. Nowland adds that " the dancing was continued for two days. I remember that father and mother came home after daylight the second day, slept until the afternoon, and then went back and put in another night."

An incident of the first Fourth of July celebration is related in the same interesting collection of reminiscences : " On the morning of the Fourth of July, 1822, my father's family was aroused before daylight by persons hallooing in front of the door. It proved to be Capt. James Richey, who lived at the Bluffs, and a young man and lady who had placed themselves under his charge and run away from obdurate parents to get married. Mr. Richey and father soon found the county clerk, the late James M. Ray, at Carter's 'Rosebush' tavern, procured the necessary legal document, and Judge Wick married them before breakfast. They had scarcely arisen from the breakfast table when the young lady was confronted by her angry father. Capt. Richey informed him that he was just a few minutes too late, and instead of losing a daughter had gained a son. The parties were soon reconciled and invited to attend the barbecue and ball given in honor of the day, which they did."

James Whitcomb, Governor of the State in 1843, and United States senator in 1848, dying 1852, was one of the foremost lawyers in the State, and practiced pretty much all over it, as did his leading cotemporaries. In the New Purchase he and all the bar were in the habit of stopping at Capt. John Berry's tavern in Andersontown (he was the man who blazed out " Berry's trace," one of the first from the South into the White River region) and, as his custom was, the eminent lawyer, who greatly resembled the English premier Disraeli in face and complexion and fastidious taste, changed his shirt at night. Capt. Berry was exceedingly sensitive to any disparagement of his hotel, and this, says Mr. Smith, " was well known to Calvin Fletcher," who appears to have been the wag of the bar as well as one of the most enterprising and beneficent of the founders of the prosperity of Indianapolis. " Taking the captain to one side, he said, ' Do you know, Capt. Berry, what Mr. Whitcomb is saying about your beds ?' ' I do not ; what does he say ?' ' If you will not mention my name, as you are one of my particular friends, I will tell you.' ' Upon honor, I'll never mention your name ; what did he say ?' ' He said your sheets were so dirty that he had to pull oflF his shirt every night and put on a dirty shirt to sleep in.' ' I'll watch him tonight.' Bed-time came, and Capt. Berry was looking through an opening in the door when Mr. Whitcomb took his night-shirt out of his portmanteau and began to take off his day-shirt. He pushed open the door, sprang upon Whitcomb, and threw him upon the bed. The noise brought in Mr. Fletcher and the other lawyers, and after explanations and apologies on all sides the matter was settled. Years afterwards Mr. Whitcomb found out, as he said, what he suspected at the time, that Mr. Fletcher was at the bottom of the whole matter."

Among the fashions of the times was the disfavor of beards. Side-whiskers of the " mutton-chop" style were not uncommon, and occasionally they were allowed to grow around the face, except a couple of inches or so on the throat and chin, but this was the limit. A " goatee," or " imperial," or " moustache" would have been as strange a sight as a painted Indian as late as 1840. A full beard would have been very generally considered a freak of insanity. Even whiskers were held " dandyish," and the wearer of low esteem. Though Judge William W. Wick cherished them when in Congress, he could not make them fashionable. Forty years or more ago Joseph M. Moore laughed at them in some satirical verses in the Journal, and accused him of

The first moustache that appears of record was worn by the then young 'Than West forty years ago or thereabouts, as perpetuated in a young lady's poetical

The best-known wearer of the moustache, however, and the most effective agent of its diffusion in respectable society was Mr. Charles W. Cady, one of the first insurance men of early times. Beards began to " increase and multiply" in area and number before the civil war. That momentous experience was the end alike of slavery and universal shaving.

A case related by Mr. Smith illustrates the slender respect with which the early settlers sometimes regarded the law and its ministers. A grand jury, while Mr. Fletcher was prosecutor, had found an indictment against a man for selling liquor without a license, much the most frequent offense of that time. The foreman of the grand jury refused to sign it ; the prosecutor urged it. " I shall do no such thing, Mr. Fletcher ; I sell whiskey without a license myself, and I shall not indict others for what I do." " If you don't sign it I will take you before Judge Wick." " What do I care for Judge Wick ? he knows nothing about such matters." " The grand jury will follow me into court." In the court-room, " This foreman of the grand jury refuses to sign his name to a bill of indictment against a man for selling wjiiskey without a license." Judge Wick : " Have twelve of the jury agreed to find the bill?" "Yes, eighteen of them." " Foreman, do you refuse to sign the bill ?" " I do." » Well, Mr. Prosecutor, I see no other way than to leave him to his conscience and his God ; the grand jury will return to their room." In the jury-room the foreman said, "I told you Judge Wick knew nothing about such cases." Mr. Fletcher : " I am only taking legal steps to have the bill signed." " What are you going to do now? what are you stripping off your coat for ?" " The law requires the last step to be taken." " What is that?" "To thrash you till you sign the bill." " Don't strike, Mr. Fletcher, and I'll sign." He did, and the jury returned to the court-room. " Has the

Pertinent to this connection is Mr. Smith's account of the hardships of a political campaign. A year or 80 after the removal of the capital to Indianapolis be was a candidate for Congress in the eastern district of the State, then extending the whole length of the State pretty nearly. In a portion wholly unsettled be hired an Indian guide. They swam some of the streams on their ponies, but at last found one they could not cross in that way.

" The moment we reached the river the Indian jumped down, peeled some bark from a hickory sapling, and spanceled the fore legs of the ponies ; I sat down on the bank. The Indian was out of sight in a moment in the woods, and I saw nothing of him for an hour, when he returned with the bark of a hickory-tree about twelve feet long and three feet in diameter. The bark was metamorphosed into a roundbottomed Indian canoe when the sun was about an hour high. The canoe was launched, my saddle, saddle-bags, and blanket placed in one end, and I got in the other. With my weight the edges were about an inch above the water. I took the paddle, and by the use of the current landed safely on the other side," paying the Indian two dollars for his services.

During the rather indefinite period covered by this attempt to present an idea of the condition of the settlement aside from its material changes (loosely put at twenty years), there had been organized some ten churches, - one Baptist, two Presbyterian, two Methodist, two Lutheran, one Christian, one Catholic, one Episcopal, and all had places of worship of their own. The intention here is not to present a summary of the condition of the religious element of the settlement at this time, but merely to notice some of the early fashions and forms of public religious conduct. Until near the close of this first twenty years of the settlement the forms of worship, except in the Episcopal and Catholic Churches, were not so fixed as they are now. They were controlled more by the wish of the preacher or the impulse of the occasion. A written sermon was an unknown performance to many of the pioneers, and to some of them would have looked like a profanation. Choirs were unknown until introduced by Henry Ward Beecher, except in churches with established rituals. Mr. Beecher's brother, Rev. Charles, an accomplished musician, was the first choir-leader of a non-ritualistic service. Among the first choristers were Mrs. Dr. Ackley, Mr. John L. Ketcham, Lawrence M. Vance, A. Gr. Willard, Augustus Smith. The churches generally held to congregational singing, which was led by some man with an approved voice and taste, who could be trusted to select a good air of the right metre, and start it with a pitch that all could readily follow. Not unfrequently the starting was a volunteer eflFort, coming from some one in the body of the congregation with a pet tune for the special metre of the occasion. Familiar hymns were sung right along, with or without books ; but when there were no books or but few, and for a good while after they became common, the preacher would " line out" the hymn, or " deacon" it, as the Yankees called it, by reading two lines and waiting for the congregation to sing them before reading another couplet. This would produce an odd effect now to most hearers, even to those who were familiar with it in childhood and youth, but it certainly in no measure or way affected the solemnity or sincerity of the worship. Sermons, as before remarked, were unwritten, and not unfrequently unprepared, - by no means identical conditions necessarily, but often made so. They were uniformly longer than now, an hour being neither an unusual nor unreasonable duration. Probably they exercised a stronger immediate influence on the feelings of the audience than their shorter, pithier, more methodical and logical successors from the writing-desk do now. There was room for dramatic action and effect, for variety of tone and feeling, for a vigor that comes involuntarily with a fresh thought, and there is not much chance for these agencies of oratory to get at an audience through a carefully thought out and written out sermon of the year of grace 1883.

There were a few hymns so popular from their spirit or the air usually associated with them that everybody knew them. One of the finest of these is still unmatched in sacred hymnology for the pious pertinence of the poetry or the spirited but stately moTement of the music, - " Am I a soldier of the cross ?" Another was " Come, thou fount of every blessing," frequently sung to the air that Rousseau dreamed ; a third was " Come, humble sinner," the air of which was a " minor" evidently adapted from an old Irish air called the " Peeler and the Goat" ; another, sung by John Brown on the scaffold, " Blow ye the trumpet, blow" ; another, " Oh, love divine," to a most spirited and pleasing air that is never heard now. Besides these there were camp-meeting tunes not greatly different from some that prevail among the Southern colored churches now. " Old Rosin the Bow" was one of these, adapted, and thus first named, to a secular and satirical song, " Old Rossum the Beau," wholly Southern however; "John Brown's Body" was another ; and one of them was profanely applied by some " unrespecting boys," about the end of the period in question, to a comic song about " The Great Sea-Snake." Music was not much cultivated in a scientific or systematic way then, though occasional teachers formed classes and gave lessons from the " Missouri Harmony" in the " square note" system. The " round note," or " do, re" system came along about the time that church choirs did, and the diffusion of a taste for the higher kinds of music than ballad airs and dancing jigs came with the influx of German immigration. The adoption of the piano as a piece of fashionable furniture was a coeval movement. Musical improvement made it fashionable, and it made music fashionable.

There has been an almost complete reversal of conditions since the beginning of the period of musical culture. Then the young lady who could play the piano or " sing by note" was the exception ; now the young lady who cannot is the exception. Of classic music very little was known, so little that when Madame Bishop first sang here in Masonic Hall in November, 1851, the first time that a celebrated vocalist had over appeared here, her performance of " Casta Diva" provoked a general smile, and not a few called it " squalling." Now there are few educated ladies in this city who are not familiar with most of the best-known efforts of the great composers. It may amuse them to learn the kind of songs that were usually sung for social entertainment by the young people who are now their parents or grandparents. Along in 1837 or 1838, when work on the canal was going on, a song much liked by the country boys and girls related to that sort of occupation. It began in this way : " I landed in sweet Philadelphia, but being quite late in the fall, I didn't stay long in that city, but anchored out on the canawl." Another, with a touch of broad humor, sang the horrors of a wreck on the " raging canawl" : " We had a load of Dutch, and we stowed 'em in the hold ; they were not the least concerned about the welfare of their souls. The captain went below, and implored them for to pray, but all the answer he could get was ' Ich kan se nich versteh'." Of the amatory kind there was the " Gallant Hussar," the " Minstrel returned from the Wars," " Gaily the Troubadour," " Barbara Allen," some of Burns' songs, popular everywhere, " William Riley," with, a few years later, a profusion of the earlier efforts of the colored muse, and a few as early as 1839 or thereabouts, such as " Jenny, git your hoe-cake done," " Jim Brown," " Clar de Kitchen," and the like. Patriotic songs were popular and far more frequent than patriotic songs now, though far inferior in style and literary qualities, but by no means deficient in the spirit of the airs. One of these was known all over the West as the " Hunters of Kentucky," and celebrated the battle of New Orleans. Another little less popular paid tribute to Perry and his heroes, beginning, " The tenth of September let us all remember as long as the world on its axis rolls round." Another lamented St. Clair's defeat. Another crowed lustily over the victory on Lake Champlain, under the title, " The Noble Lads of Canada." The chorus of the first verses ran thus : " We're the noble lads of Canada, come to arms, boys, come !" that of the last verse, owning defeat, changed tone, " We've got too far from Canada, run for life, boys, run I" Among the settlers from Guilford County, N. C, there was the fag end of a queer old patriotic song touching the French and English wars of the time of Wolfe and the conquest of Canada: " We'll send the news to France, how we made those Frenchmen dance when we conquered the place called Belle Isle," followed by a chorus that appeared to be a jumble of unmeaning French words, or, if ever intelligible, so spoiled in pronunciation as to be mere gibberish. There were a number of comic songs that were frequently sung, of which four or five will serve for samples : " Poor Old Maids," "Near Fly-Market lived a dame," " Sukey Suds, she stood at her washing-tub" (a parody on " Lord Level"), " The Cork Leg," " Billy Barlow," "Three Jolly Welshmen," " I fell in love with a cook." Most of these, sentimental, patriotic, and comic, were contained in some of the collections called " Western Songster" or " Columbian Minstrel," or something of that kind. They are pretty much all forgotten now, except by an occasional relic of old times who retains them as indications of what old times were. People of education and cultivated tastes sang better gongs, of course, but those cited were the favorites, or of the class of favorites of the great mass of town and country people.

During this period of comparatively primitive conditions of life there was a steady increase of both educational facilities and of the disposition to use them. The schools were all private, however, taught for two to four dollars a quarter per pupil, sometimes in private houses, sometimes in churches, and sometimes in buildings erected or altered purposely for them. The elementary course of instruction was much the same as in all schools of that time, and not greatly different from what it is now, - " Kirkham's Grammar," " Olney's Geography," " Pike's Arithmetic," " English Reader" or " School Companion," " Day's Algebra." The " Anthon Classics" and " Davies' Mathematics" came later. " Webster's Spelling- Book" was first seen here about 1833, shortly preceding the other illumination from the great star shower in November. It was blue bound, and actually " in boards." The sides were made of thin veneers of sugar or beech apparently, pasted over with blue paper, and the usual calamity of the textbook was a back split and more or less of it torn off. The blackboard was not generally used, except in the town. Classic studies were rather unusual till the second decade of the settlement was well advanced. Music was taught to the boys in the " Old Seminary" by Rev. James S. Kemper and his brother, and in the female seminaries of course. With the County

Seminary and the rival schools that followed it, and the female schools of higher pretensions than the mixed schools that had preceded them, which also came in the track of the Old Seminary, came a more extended course of study. In not a few cases it covered as thorough a reading of the usual classic authors as any Western college, and the mathematical course ran the whole length of the science, from algebra and Euclid to the " Differential Calculus" and " McLaurin's Theorem." So far in advance of the general mathematical instruction of the period was the course pursued in the " Old Seminary" that Mr. Kemper's class in " analytical geometry" had to copy his manuscript treatise on " Conic Sections," prepared by the late celebrated astronomer, Professor Mitchell, but never published, and study that. A fanciful but by no means idle variation of the usual school course was introduced here about 1843 or 1844 by an itinerant teacher, who made a specialty of geography, and taught it by the " singing" method. A large map of one of the continents was set where all could see it, and the teacher with a long stick would point to one object and another, and call its name in a sort of sing-song or " intoning" fashion, and the pupils would repeat it after him. He would take the bays along the ocean coast, for instance, beginning with the most northerly, and call them over in this singing way in exact succession, going back to the first after each addition, thus keeping the whole series constantly in mind, and repeating it till it became fixed and indelible. Location was, in a general way, conveyed in the order of names, and the teacher's stick helped its definiteness by indicating it on the map as the name was sung. In the same way the capes, lakes, rivers, capitals, principal cities, and other important geographical features were taught more rapidly and effectively than by the humdrum method of ordinary schools. The lessons drew large audiences to the Methodist Church, where they were given. Lessons in penmanship were given by the usual infallible methods in from six to a dozen lessons by wandering teachers ; so was music, and occasionally modern languages. French was always taught in the female seminaries, and was also taught in the " Old Seminary" by Mr. Kemper, and in " Franklin

Gbnekal Description Of Pioneer Life

Institute" by M:^ Marston, but German was never taught at all, or only in a very few unsuspected cases, till about 1848, when Professor Samuel K. Hoshour, afterwards president of Butler University, and one of the most noted teachers of Eastern Indiana, formed a German class here, and Mr. Paul Geiser, a young German of good abilities and attainments, then editing the Volksblatt, the first German paper here, taught a private class for a short time.

The games of the pupils were much the same as now, - tops, marbles, hop-scotch, ball, prisoner's base, shinny. The games requiring room were more common then, because adequate room cannot be had now, and it was all around most school-houses forty or more years ago. Several forms of ball games were practiced, - " cat," with one or two bases, " town ball," very similar to base ball, "bull-pen," "ante and over," " hand up," the last three rarely seen or heard of since the town began filling up. In " bull-pen" four corners were occupied by four players, who threw the ball from one to the other till one saw a chance to hit one of the players in the square, called the " pen," who ran constantly from one part to another, to keep at the greatest distance from the ball. If he missed he was out. If he hit, the boy who was hit or any one in the "pen" who got the ball first threw it at any one of the corner players who was handiest, and if he was hit he was out ; if he was not, the other was out. In " hand up" the ball was knocked against a wall with the bare hand, usually at the "bounce." In " ante and over," or " antuy over," the players stood in two groups, one on each side of the school-house. The one with the ball threw it over the house, calling out " ante and over." If the other side caught it they ran round the house to hit some of the players of the throwing side. Shinny, though, was the king game of the school-boy of the latter part of this period. It was played with a stout club curved at the bottom, - young sugars were usually taken, as their roots ran close along the surface of the ground, - and frequently charred to make them hard and prevent them from splintering in their violent collisions with stones and gravelly surfaces. A ball, usually of wood, a couple of inches in diameter, was the other implement of the game.

The players were arrayed in lines facing each other, their respective goals or " homes" being the limits of the play-ground. The game was for one side or the other to carry the ball " home" against the resistance of the other side trying to carry it to their " home." Two players in the middle began the game by one taking the ball and calling to the other, " high buck or low doe," and throwing the ball in the air or on the ground according to the answer. The struggles were violent always, and the misdirected blows sometimes serious; scalps were laid open, legs lamed, eyes blacked, fingers and noses broken, shins skinned or bruised. A hard shinny player was rarely without a sore or limp or sprain somewhere. Though abandoned long ago by the school-boys of the later generation, i partly from its violence and partly from the lack of convenient room, shinny is still revived at the annual reunions of the "Old Seminary Boys," who, if they did not intend it, made it the ruling game of the time forty odd years ago. And the bald-headed grandfathers who play it now - ^the judges, generals, preachers, editors, doctors, legislators - sometimes exhibit a good deal of the skill they learned before the " hard cider" campaign of 1840. The history and condition of the schools will be treated in a special division of the work. The purpose here is merely to notice such incidental subjects connected with the schools and pupils of early times as will give the reader some idea of them beyond their studies, and that could not be so readily introduced into the body of a work dealing with public afl'airs.

The reference to the occupations and diversions of the school-boy of the first generation would be incomplete if it omitted an account of one almost universal duty and one entirely universal diversion. Driving cows to pasture and home was the duty, and swimming was the amusement. A large portion of the donation outside the old plat of the town was used as farmland and pastures, with no small share of the vacant squares inside the town limits. For a trifle a cowowner, and that was pretty much everybody that had a house and family, could rent one of these pastures, keep a cow from straying, keep her well fed, and have her handy whenever she was wanted. A boy anywhere from six to sixteen could drive her out in the morning after milking and back in the evening after school. It was something for idle hands to do. Cowdriving was a part of every Indianapolis boy's discipline in early times. Of course he got fun out of it as well in gathering nuts, chasing ground-squirrels, or taking surreptitious swims. The chief " swimmingholes" in the creek were Noble's and Morris', the former on the property of Governor Noble, near Market Street and the creek, the latter just south of the house of Morris Morris on South Meridian Street. The spot is now covered by the south side of the Union Depot. In the river the larger boys made their favorite resort at the " snag," near the site of Kingan's upper porkbouse. The " tumbles" of the canal, or rather of the " race" from it into the river, one in the Military Ground at the north end of the basin, the other at the river, where it still remains close to the water-works, were also favorite bathing-places. It is among the amusing traditions of the adventures of the boys in their indulgence of this diversion that one Sunday, instead of decorously betaking themselves to Sundayschool, a dozen or so slipped off to Morris' hole. James Blake found it out, and mounted his horse, called his colored man to follow him, and went down to the " old swimming-hole," The darkey captured the clothes unperceived, and gave them up suit at a time as, his master directed till all were dressed. Then the old superintendent started the darkey ahead, kept the frightened boys close together following, and brought up the rear himself to prevent escapes. Thus the delinquent procession marched up to the old Presbyterian Church, on North Pennsylvania Street, and the " hookey players" were forced to do proper Sunday duty. It was said that the stern old Puritan even ventured to give some of them an occasional clip with his whip as a reminder of their double sin of running away from school and enjoying themselves on Sunday.

James Blake was the son of James Blake who came from Ireland in 1774, and lived to the age of ninety-nine years, being among the earliest settlers of York County, Pa., where his son was born March 3, 1791. He when a youth enlisted in the war of 1812, and marched to Baltimore when that city was threatened by the British forces, serving in the army until the declaration of peace in 1815. He then resumed his trade of a wagoner, and drove a six-horse team between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In November, 1818, he started on horseback for the West, going as far as St. Louis, and returning the follpwing spring to complete arrangements for a final removal thither. On the 25th of July, 1821, he settled at Indianapolis, where he resided until his death. His history for fifty years was the history of Indianapolis, and no citizen has ever been more closely identified with the rise and progress of the city and its philanthropic and benevolent institutions than he. He, with Nicholas McCarty and James M. Ray, nearly fifty years ago built the first steam-mill in Indianapolis, and thus was the pioneer in the manufacturing which is now so vital an element in the city's prosperity. As a surveyor, he assisted in laying out and platting the' city. He was selected as commissioner to receive plans and proposals for the old State-House. He was the first to urge upon the Legislature the importance of establishing a hospital for the insane, and opened a correspondence with the Eastern States on the subject. To him was intrusted the duty of selecting a location for that institution. He was an early friend and member of the first board of directors of the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad, and was also director of the Lafayette and Indianapolis Railroad. He was a trustee of Hanover College, Indiana, and of the Miami University, of Oxford, Ohio, and at his death the Indiana commissioner for the erection of the Gettysburg Monument. For thirty -five years he was president of the Indianapolis Benevolent Society, and present at every anniversary with two exceptions. In 1847 he was the most liberal contributor to the relief of starving Ireland. Mr. Blake was a prime mover in the organization of the Indiana Branch of the American Colonization Society. He was the founder of the Indianapolis Rolling-Mill, and embarked a large part of his fortune in that undertaking, having also started the first wholesale dry -goods house. On all public occasions Mr. Blake was looked to as the leader and manager of affairs. When the people of Indianapolis assembled to pay a tribute of respect to a deceased President, Governor, or other great man, Mr. Blake was selected to conduct and manage the matter.

General Description Of Pioneer Life

When Kossuth, the distinguished Hungarian, visited Indiana, when the soldiers returned from the Mexican war, when the farmers came in with a procession of wagons filled with food and supplies for soldiers' families, when the Indiana soldiers came home from the South, Mr. Blake was the marshal of the day, and no public pageant seemed complete without him. His whole life was crowned with useful labors. There was, in fact, no enterprise or movement appealing to public spirit in which Mr. Blake was not conspicuous, constant, and efficient. He was among the first to organize a Sunday-school in the city of Indianapolis, and was ever foremost in this Christian work. For thirty years his majestic form headed the long and beautiful array of Sunday-school children in their Fourth of July celebration. In the temperance movement as in other matters he was a leader, and his adhesion to the Democracy was first broken by its conflict with his former adhesion to the cause of temperance. He was the patriarch of his church, admired and revered by all. In every relation of life - as head of a family, leader of society, chief of his church, or manager of business enterprises - he was always foremost, always honored, equally for his power and his disinterestedness. If Mr. Blake had pursued his own advantage with half the zeal he devoted to the service of others and the good of the city, he might easily have counted his wealth by millions. His ambition to become a useful citizen and a public benefactor outweighed all other considerations. He was not politically ambitious, and never held public office other than that of county commissioner. His desire for power never seemed to extend beyond the command of a Sunday-school procession or the presidency of a charitable meeting. The city of Indianapolis lost in him a man of intrinsic worth and a useful citizen, and the community a kind and sympathizing friend. Mr. Blake was married in March, 1831, to Miss Eliza Sproule, of Baltimore, to whom were born four children, - William McConnell, James Ray, Walter Alexander (deceased), and John Gurley. The death of James Blake occurred Nov. 26, 1870.

A prominent figure in the memories of most schoolboys of that day is Henry Hoagland, the idiot son of a bricklayer of high respectability and good sense.

Henry was a mere animal, with no human sense and hardly any human expression. He wandered harmles.sly everywhere, bareheaded and barefooted, because he preferred to be, carefully avoided by very small children and carefully followed and incessantly tormented by larger ones, who wanted to hear his queer muddled oaths and gabble. Sometimes he was dangerous when worried by his nimble persecutors too far, and he frequently frightened women in his furious moods and sometimes hurt the boys he caught. He was kept at the " County Asylum" or " Poor-House" for many years after it was put in condition for the care of such inmates, but he frequently got away and wandered into town. Another of later arrival and pleasanter character was John D. Hopkins, who appeared here first in the latter part of the second decade of the settlement, bareheaded and barefooted, with a Bible or hymn-book in his hand, and walking at a brisk pace with a peculiar stiff-kneed step along the streets talking to himself At times he would mount a horse-block or a goods-box, sing a hymn of his own making, and preach a wild, rambling sermon. Very early among his visits here he brought with him a number of sheet-copies of a song he called the " Good Gathering," sung to an old camp-meeting tune. These he sold, and he supported himself on such little gratuities as the crowd that stopped to hear him sing or to joke with him would give him. The song may be judged by one couplet, - the last a refrain to every couplet. During the political campaigns he changed from a preacher to a stumper, and made speeches at five cents apiece on any side the purchaser wished. He was said to have entered the army during the civil war, and died there. At all events he has not been seen here since, and had not but rarely for some time before. He was believed very generally to be careful of his money, and to have bought a good farm with it. At least he was sober, healthy, unusually robust, and when he chose to work few could equal him. His wanderings appear to have been the effect of a sort of periodic mental di.sturbi ance. Another well-known character of this period was " Old Charley," a withered, weak-minded old colored man, who was the first auction bell-ringer here. There was nothing about him to make him noted but the fact that everybody saw him oftener than anybody else who was not in the family. His bent form, his old plug hat with an auction-bill tied in front, his noisy bell, traveling up and down Washington Street, were as familiar to every man, woman, and child as the court-house steeple. Dr. Cool, in his later years, became a sort of public character in consequence of his constant drunkenness. He came here in 1821, an experienced and reputable physician, but bad habits got the mastery of him, and iu his last years he was little better than a vagrant.

Joe Lawson, known to both the early and later generation for his vagrancy, oddity, " dirt," and occasional gleams of wit and sense, figured contemporaneously in part with Hopkins and Old Charley, but not so conspicuously as later. He was the brother of the wife of Dr. Soule, one of the earliest resident dentists, and son of Bishop Soule, of Tennessee. It was said Joe was always dirty, harmless, and goodhumored, too much crippled to work, and too much indisposed if he had not been incapacitated. He usually lived on the " crumbs" of hotel tables, and wore any clothes that anybody gave him. No human being in forty years or more has seen him clean and decently dressed. He used to make great fun for the boys and for members of the Legislature by singing sentimental songs and reciting Shakespeare. He lived at the County Asylum a long time, and was then brought to the city, given a little shanty in Blake's woods, and supported by contributions of old residents. The last of the Indianapolis characters was the late John Givan. He and his brother James came here in 1820, in the fall or winter, opened one of the earliest stores here, and were both among the most prominent and active citizens. John was one of the half-dozen or more candidates for recorder at the first county election in April, 1822. After the death of his brother his business declined, and he became a sort of " old junk" dealer near the courthouse. Then he quit all pretence of merchandising and lived a loose, half-vagrant life, supporting himself mainly by little services for men occupying rooms in connection with their offices, and by serving as nurse to sick men who had no families or home. The last four or five years were smoothed for him by a provision made up by the Board of Trade and other business men, of which a committee used to clothe, house, and feed him comfortably. It was a tribute to the remains of the oldest merchant in the city and the remains of a once honorable and estimable man. Liquor ruined him, but to the last his memory was amazingly tenacious of dates and little events of the early history of Indianapolis, and he was always more than ready to tell them to anybody. He died three or four years ago.

Among the early settlers were a good many from the slave States of the class since widely known as " poor whites," who brought here all the silly superstitions they had learned among the slaves at home. A belief in witchcraft was the most conspicuous of these, with a score of omens and portents and prophetic dreams. Some of this class used to talk of a widow by the name of Myers, whose husband had a pottery where the Chamber of Commerce is, as a witch and having bewitched the cows of several of the neighbors whom she had a grudge against. The persecuted cattle either gave no milk or gave bloody milk, or the milk would not churn to any purpose, - " the butter would not come," as they called it, - and the calves died, or the cows had " hollow horn" or the " tail-worm," all the effect of witchcraft. No one of the set seemed to think it possible the ailments were the effect of natural causes. Some sort of remedy was applied, partly of mild incantation and partly of suitable medicine, but nobody ever learned the composition of either.