Perry County, Indiana - Chapter 1: Exploration and Organization, 1916

Perry County, Indiana, is one of the first memorials to the fame of the gallant American commodore, Oliver Hazard Perry, of Rhode Island, whose brilliant naval victory over the British fleet on Lake Erie, September 10, 1813, was recognized and commemorated less than one year later by the Legislature of Indiana Territory through the bestowal of his name upon one of two new counties (Posey being the other) organized out of Warrick and a part of Gibson, by an act approved September 7, 1814.

Since, however, all history must have its beginnings with the earliest inhabitants of any country or locality, let it not be forgotten that within the metes and bounds as thus established, some material evidence then existed to give testimony that Perry County was once in possession of the Mound Builders, that singular race of nomads, or semi-nomads, who left traces of their occupancy throughout the entire Mississippi Valley. These Mound Builders being placed by reliable historians as contemporaneous with the early Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians, a speculative discussion of their origin, sojourn and ultimate disappearance would far outreach the plan of this volume, nothing being perhaps more completely shrouded in oblivion than this strange race. Their works form their monuments, and tradition is even more silent than their tombs.

They are called Mound Builders from their custom of building vast accumulations of earth and stone in a variety of forms which indicate that some colossal force with intelligent direction was at work in the fargone and forgotten centuries. Investigators have classified these earthworks by their apparently prob* able diverse uses - military, sacerdotal, ceremonial, memorial, sacrificial or sepulchral, and under the last two heads would come certain remains described by an elder generation as once existing in Perry County. Five mounds formerly stood in the northeastern part of the county, on the old Stephen Deen farm in Union Township, but all were opened long ago by unskilled relic-hunters, and in the lapse of subsequent years have become indistinguishable through washing, plowing and cutting down.

Some of these mounds are said to have contained only deep beds of charcoal resting upon rude altars; one, nothing beyond concentric layers of superimposed soil ; while in another were a few implements of stone or bone, besides some crumbling human bones, mingled with ashes and charcoal. Had these human remains been immediately submitted to expert anatomical analysis, it might have been satisfactorily established whether they were the skeletons of Mound Builders or of Indians, who had to some extent emulated their predecessors in customs of burial, although they knew nothing of them, even by tribal tradition.

If the Mound Builders were the lineal ancestors of the Indians, the ancestry was so remote that not only was all relationship lost, but their respective osseous structure was distinctively modified in the lapse of immeasurable time. Ethnologists have found such structural similarity to the Aryan families of Central Asia that prevalent opinion now holds the Mound Builders to have descended from Asiatics who crossed to the continent of another hemisphere by way of Bering's Straits and overspread all America. This hypothesis gives base to the further argument of some authorities identifying them with "The Lost Ten Tribes of Israel," but practical conditions alone can be dealt with herein, however fascinating the theories necessarily excluded.

Undoubtedly the first white explorers of Indiana were the French voyageurs - missionaries or traders - who chanted pious hymns or caroled love-ballads while paddling their shallow canoes along the mid-western streams; so, by the establishment from time to time during the Seventeenth Century, of widely scattered 'posts,' of which Vincennes was one, all the vast region lying between the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains came under the dominion of France ; although it now seems more a dream than a historic fact that permission to traverse the bounds of Indiana once had to be humbly solicited in Paris, before that supreme voluptuary, Louis Fourteenth, whose lifelong philosophy was epitomized in his phrase, "L 'Etat, c'est Moi," ('I am the State,') or that the right of commerce with naked redskins along the Wabash ever lay in the hand which signed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Louis Fifteenth, his successor.

British supremacy along the Atlantic coast was unquestioned, and England rested content with vaguely claiming the "South Sea" (Pacific Ocean) as the western boundary of Virginia, the Carolinas, Massachusetts and her other colonies. But when her traders began to push beyond the mountains they found themselves everywhere forestalled by the French; so, at length, toward the meridian of the Eighteenth Century, the English government roused to the situation.

Thus was inaugurated the struggle known in American history as The French and Indian War, called in Europe The Seven Years War, of which Thackeray wrote: "It was strange that in a savage forest of Pennsylvania a young Virginian officer should fire a shot and waken up a v/ar which was to last for sixty years, which was to cover his own country and pass into Europe, to cost France her American colonies, to sever ours from us and create the great Western republic, to rage over the Old World when extinguished in the New, and of all the myriads engaged in the vast contest to leave the prize of the greatest fame with him who struck the first blow."

With masterly fidelity and vivid picturesqueness is the stupendous story narrated in Francis Parkman's monumental series of volumes: "France and England in North America," also touched in thrilling verse by the magic pen of Oliver Wendell Holmes :

"Long raged the conflict, on the crimson sod Native and alien joined their hosts in vain; The Lilies withered where The Lion trod. Till Peace lay panting on the ravaged plain."

Under the Treaty of Paris, February 10, 1763, France gave up all the territory east of the Mississippi River, except the town of New Orleans, a political and geographical status which remained until the Revolutionary War, when the Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, October 19, 1781, necessitated a new map of the American continent.

Richmond on the James then became the seat of government, after eighteen years of its administration from London, since the wide region now styled the Middle West was already part of Virginia. The eminent historian, John Esten Cooke, has said : "Her right to it rested upon as firm a basis as the right of any other commonwealth to its own domain, and if there was any question to the Virginia title by charter, she could assert her right by conquest. The region had been wrested from the British by a Virginian commanding Virginia troops: the people had taken the oath of allegiance to 'The Commonwealth of Virginia,' and her title to the entire territory was indisputable."

Richest and most powerful among the Colonies, Virginia v/as the foremost advocate for equalitv and union, to secure whicii she made a willing saciiiice by yielding to the Federal government the noble principality won for her, February 25, 1778, at Vincennes, by General George Rogers Clark, the hero of Foert Sackville. As "The Territory Northwest of the Ohio," it was first organized July 13, 1787, and on July 4, 1800. a new division was created by Congress under the name "Indiana," an appellation coined from the Indians who were its inhabitants.

Notv/ithstanding English control, the heart and confidence of the red men had always remained with the French, and the haughty, domineering policy of the British^government retarded commerce by causing the Indians to despise the English. Beyond a doubt, the foundation of Indian hostility to later pioneers throughout the West was laid in their early antipathy to the Anglo-Saxon people, which when once conceived was skilfully nourished by the proud, unrelenting natives under such crafty leaders as Pontiac, Tecumseh, Black Hawk and others, down to Sitting Bull and Geronimo.

Most of Indiana's area was originally the hunting and camping ground of three different though associated tribes, the Miami, the Wea, (or Ouiatenon) and the Piankeshaw, the last-named occupying nearly all the lov/er Wabash Valley and ranging along the Ohio River also, their extensive possessions making them a powerful factor in the celebrated Miami Confederacy. The boundaries v/hich these people claimed were arrogantly defined at the Treaty of Greenville, August 3, 1795, by Chief Little Turtle in the words : "It is well known to all the brothers present that my forefather kindled the first fire at Detroit, from thence he extended his lines to the headwaters of the Scioto ; from thence down the Ohio to the mouth of the Wabash ; and from thence to Chicago on Lake Michigan."

But as the early tide of immigration poured its flood of European settlers along the Atlantic coast, civilizattion took up its westward march across the Apalahchians. Disdainfully rejecting the enlightment thus brought, the sullen, treacherous savage retired continually farther into the gloom and solitude of his virgin forests. In time, therefore, several different tribes came to dwell in the same territory, the newer arrivals being called 'permitted,' so throughout the whole of early Indiana these wandering strangers were found. Among them may be named Delawares, Pottawatomies, Shawnees, Kickapoos, Wyandottes and Senecas.

The duration or scope of such varied tenure is practically indeterminable, but the period of its close is fixed through the Treaty of Fort Wayne, June 7, 1803, and the Treaty of Vincennes, August 18 and 27, 1804, with all the leading tribes who could by any remote possibility claim the lands.

All the soil of Perry County became under these agreements the property of the United States government, subject to entry for settlement, and within twelve months afterward a sectional survey was made. The extreme northern portion was surveyed by Levi Barber in September, 1804; Range 3, West, by Elias Rector, in June, 1805, Range 2, West, by Stephen Benton, during the same month ; and Range 1, West, by Ebenezer Buckingham, in August, 1805.

Shortly following these surveys the Indians migrated to trans-Mississippi grants, except a few straggling remnants of tribes, isolated families who haunted the woodland countryside, occasionally harassing the earliest pioneers. When the newly surveyed sections were thrown upon the market, settlers appeared, though an interval of some two or three years went by before the first entries of lands taken up in Perry County were officially recorded at Vincennes, as the newcomers were reluctant to undertake at once a further hazardous journey across the trackless wilderness in order to file their papers in the Territorial Land Office, a frame building yet (1915) standing.

boats, or by keelboats from the Old Dominion, and to this early influx of Virginians was largely due that lingering affiliation with Southern political principles which asserted itself sixty years afterward. Along that marvellous "Course of Empire," the Ohio River, they took their westward way, travelling the only commercial thoroughfare then available, a majestic stream with a history of imperishable significance.

Although two Moravian missionaries, Heckewelder and Zeisberger, toward the close of the Eighteenth Century, declared the name to be a contracttion of 'Ohiopeekhanna,' meaning 'the white-foaming river,' the strongest consensus of opinion has always favoured a derivation from the Wyandotte '0-he-yan-de-wa,' abbreviated on early French maps as *Oyo,' and for the French translated by the Indians as meaning La Belle Riviere, the Beautiful River.

Such is the name yet handed down to the descendants of those who traversed its long shining aisle through a fair green world, beneath the sun and stars of a century and a half ago. Reaching high into the foothills of the Alleghenies and the Cumberlands, beckoning to the colonists of Virginia and the Carolinas ; with outspread arms stretching as far as the sources of the Allegheny at the north and those of the Tennessee to the south ; the Beautiful River called through the forest stillness with musical voice, then heard by the pioneers of Perry County and today still faintly echoing its appeal of home in the hearts of all their exiled sons and daughters.