Vigo County, Indiana - Chapter 13, 1891

_L Peace had also been permanently established between the whites and Indians in the Wabash valley, and the restless spirit of American pioneers had found another outlet.

This year may be fixed as that of the real commencement of the grand movement of pioneers to Yigo county. The war with En¬ gland was over - the second war for American independence; the dispute with the Canadians as to the title to the lands in this region was also settled; the Indian problem was practically solved and their last claim to the soil adjusted permanently, and then, too, the soldiers of the war of 1812 had returned to the older settlements and fully informed their friends all about the new and beautiful country of the Wabash valley. From the Carolinas, passing up through Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, on to Pennsylvania, New York to Maine the restless and adventurous were disturbed like the fields in the early spring's sprouting, in the advance to the upper Mississippi valley, so soon to be the garden and granary of the world. It had started all along the line, and in the few years we see the transcendant wonder of 25,000,000 people with all those elements of the highest civilization and wealth, take the place of waste, the wild beasts and savagery. There is nothing parallel to this in the entire annals of mankind. In the life-time of people who came here nearly grown and before their eyes has passed this tremendous drama. A very little band of those living witnesses to all this are still with us, and I, for one, confess that I look upon these venerable few with an interest, almost an awe, that to my mind attaches to no other person or persons in the world.

The old or medimval ages when a boundless fete day and wild joy and adoration attended the return of the nation's warriors from their expeditions of victory and conquest, the honored and glorified guests of all the nation, are now read of by our youths with all the intense interests and imagery of a healthy and active boy's soul. Their excited imagination can recall the scenes in the parks and groves about Rome and Athens that were consecrated to the honor and entertainment of the nation's returned heroes. And the ac¬ counts of the triumphal processions engage deeply even the older and more sober heads. These great occasions were well calculated to expand the bud of young patriotism to fullest bloom, and there is nothing that the people can bestow upon their sun-bronzed war¬ riors but that is freely given.

They had conquered a city and brought home their beautiful captives chained to their chariots as the triumphal procession passed along the streets, and the great lords killed thousands of cattle and fed their dependants, and rolled out tierce after tierce of strong drink that the people might rejoice to their full. In their expedi¬ tion and war they had added perhaps territory to the empire, but as often had besieged the city and starved them and then assaulted and put the people to death and burned the town as a penalty for their long and stubborn resistance.

The civilization of that age recognized only as great victors those of the sharp and bloody sword. At that time transplanting peoples that new nations and new civilizations might be budded and might grow and spread their benign influences over the world, the one instrument of culture was the flaming sword of the plumed knights of battle - the mailed warrior was the husbandman, and the fruits he garnered were the captives and slain - slavery and death.

Place this wonderful movement of the northwest by the side of the great historical war eras of the past, and the full import of the saying that " Peace hath her victories as renowned as war," will come to you with tremendous force. "As renowned," indeed! There really is nothing to compare between them. One is simply waste and death, the other is the better and higher life and all its joys and boundless blessings. One converts happy homes into waste places and mourning, the other reverses this in all things and makes the waste places ring with joy and creates the millions of happy homes, and lifts up the poor, wretched and ignorant and develops the earth's greatest and best.

To my mind these venerable few of the early pioneers now left to us are the nation's guests; being its foundation builders they are the great and all-conquering heroes, a part and partakers of the greatest victories won since the dawn of creation. It matters not how humble the part they played in the wonderful drama, yet here they are, all that is left to us of the men and women whose old eyes when bright and young helped work out the supreme prob¬ lem, partook of it, and saw it all come step by step. Seat them then in honor in the great triumphal car at the head of this proces¬ sion of 25,000,000 of happy and joyful people, whose captives are their children in the golden chains of love. This is the fruits of their victories. This is the triumph that we see. Could you bor¬ row their vision and their memories, you would look back and see their comrades and companions whose bones have moldered in their unmarked graves many years. The rough sandstones at the head of others' graves placed there by loving hands that have long since ceased to pulse with life - that are tumbled and broken and the rains and the winds have nearly erased the crude lettering that so briefly told their short history upon earth. Living or dead, their supreme work sanctifies their immortal names. Their resources at the hour of commencing their great work were their bare hands and stout hearts. No martial blare of trumpets, no applauding world looking on, no bugle blasts or fluttering flags to fire their souls to frenzy, but in the solitudes, the storms, the pathless, un¬ known lands, where lurked dangers and death to rise up in unseen waves to confront and destroy them, they moved on to the supreme victory.

In a very little while it will be only the printed page that will be left to tell posterity anything at all of these men, women and children, who came and saw and conquered. Everything in this world perishes, passes away forever, except the impressions of the types upon the virgin paper. Wars and their effects, empires and principalities, civilizations and religions, nations and their works may come and go, but these live on forever, bearing the seeds of their ever-renewing life of their own immortality without the loss of a syllable or letter, "they are," as Lord Bacon has well said, "as ships that sail between the vast seas of time, making one nation a partaker of the knowledge of other nations."

The arrivals of the year 1816 and something about them - such as can now be collected from the records and from the few left of those who came that year and commenced to make their homes in what is now Vigo county - is the immediate purpose of this chapter. In this list we can now enumerate the following:

The above names are taken from the oldest official record that lefeis to the people of Vigo county. These are the land records, not only the entries, but the deeds and any other recorded docu¬ ments or papers. It is not certain that some of these did not come sooner than this, but it is certain that they were here at that time, because the record says so.' But after the most diligent search there eau be no evidence found that is proof that any of these came earlier than the year given. The tombstones, obituaries and recol¬ lections of those who knew them while living have all been con¬ sulted to the utmost, and they have therefore been put among the arrivals of 1816.

Joseph Richardson, wife and seven children - four sons and three daughters. Richardson brought far more wealth than the average pioneer. He entered as much as twelve sections of land. Govern¬ ment land then sold on credit at $4 per acre, and afterward, when the price was reduced to $1.25 per acre in cash, this caused a great temporary loss to Mr. Richardson, so much so, indeed, that it was much the work of a life time to regain it. This is but another instance of the wrongs coming of the ignorance and folly of states¬ men in trying to dabble forever in the private affairs of the people. If those men who then made the laws could have anticipated or realized a little of the present, they would have given these people homes simply for occupying them, and then have limited the amount that each person could possess the fee simple title to, say, 160 acres, and probably each head of the family 320 acres. The truth was, this land was the people's. They had to earn and get it before the government could have any claim to it. All the right a good gov¬ ernment can have to the soil is that of a few simple regulations tending to prevent the monopolizing of it by the strong and greedy - simply, in some measure, to see that the weak are not crushed by the powerful. The men who "want the earth" always have the most plausible arguments about " developing," etc.

Andrew Brooks was a gunsmith, and it is not known what year he came, but it was among the very first. He repaired guns in the fort for both whites and Indians. He married one of the May girls, and for a long time repaired all the guns in this portion of the country. He was a good workman and could make a gun complete; a quiet and respectable citizen. Joseph Richardson had married Mary Burnett. He died in York at the age of seventy-five years. She died there in 1851.

Maj. Abraham Markle brought his second wife when he came to Yigo. His sons were William, Abraham, Henry, George, Fredrick, Joseph and Buonaparte. The Markle family, John Dickson and family, Isaac Lambert and family settled on Otter creek. These two men were brothers-in-law, and they built the first water-mill in the county on Honey creek, south of Terre Haute. Before they put up their mill the people had to go to VinceDnes or pound their com meal in a mortar, sometimes in the fall of the year grating it on a tin grater. This grater was a simple enough affair. It was made of a piece of tin punched with many holes and bowed and tacked to a board, the rough side out. After the corn became too hard for roasting ears, and before becoming flinty dry, it grated very well, and if you were very careful to keep your knuckles off the tin you could soon prepare enough for the family meal.

Joshua A. Olds came with the Markles in 1816. They came down the Alleghany and Ohio and disembarked at Evansville, and came by land to Vincennes. His family was wife, son George, Elizabeth, Saiah, Electa and Emily. Isaac was born after they came to the west. He is the only surviving son, and Mrs. Lester Tillotson is the only surviving daughter of the Olds family. Isaac li\es in Kansas. Mrs. Tillotson lives in Terre Haute in the house where she and her husband lived, at the corner of Second and Swan streets, over fifty years ago.

Joshua A. Olds was a valuable acquisition to the pioneers. He was a skilled millwright, and could do much and very clever cabi¬ net work. He made most of the first chairs ever seen in Vigo and the surrounding country, as well as built the first mills in this and Parker counties. He was a native of Salem, Mass. His wife was Mary Lanburner, a native of Canada. Mrs. Olds died in 1819. He died in Montezuma in 1848.

Sarah Olds (Mrs. Lester Tillotson) was thirteen years old when they came to the old fort. She distinctly remembers that there was one house in Evansville, the point where they disem¬ barked to go across the country to Vincennes. This one house seemed to be the whole of the town, and was residence, store, town hall and general rendezvous for Indians and whites who had anything to tiade. The mental inventory left upon her young mind is that the entire store consisted of three barrels of hickory nuts. With such a fair start in the world - all these nuts in stock, surely the young and ambitious city might say with Tam O'Slianter:

Mr. Olds built his round-log cabin, and the first year only attempted to put a puncheon floor under that part occupied by the beds. The other part of the room was a clean and well-swept dirt floor. 1

Of all the people who came to Vigo county in 1816, as old or older than Mrs. Tillotson at the time, she is the only one surviving. She was born in February, 1803, and is now well along in her eighty- eighth year, tall, straight, and as active, mentally and phys- ically, as the average woman of fifty. Seated on one of the chairs made by her father sixty odd years ago, she told the writer her recol¬ lections of the past seventy-five years, when she was a good big girl thirteen years old on her Avay with her father's family to the Wa¬ bash country. Her mind seemed to be no more at fault in going back over that three-quarters of a century than if it were all the happenings of a few weeks or days ago.

She remembers that the mill of Lambert & Dickson on Honey creek was built on a sandy foundation, and the raging waters came and it was partially wrecked, was repaired, but again it was de¬ stroyed totally.

Maj. Markle's mill was built on Otter creek, and this was a bet¬ ter mill and for some years was the dependence for bread for the people for many miles around. That then her father went to Rose¬ ville to build the mill at that place for Chauncey Rose. Thus when still a young girl she came to see much of Mr. Rose, and tells of that gentleman offering to sell to her father a tract of land now almost in the very heart of the city of Terre Haute - sell it for a very small sum and all on credit, with the assurance that he could take his own time and convenience to pay for it. That her father feared debt that he could not meet, and of course never dreamed that it would be of much more money value than at that time.

She told about her husband buying the lot where she now lives, paying $100 for it; then in the very center of fashionable residence property, that for the same money he could have bought probably any forty acres now in the fashionable residence part of the city.

As she talked on, these things in their realization seemed to come to her much like a dream. Where the post-office now stands was then "away out to the cemetery" - how could the city go there? Thus the graveyards of to-day are the heart of the throbbing city to¬ morrow, and the splendid city of to-day is the ancient and buried ruins to-morrow.

In this New York colony was the Redford family. The father died on the way, and was buried, and the widow, four sons and a daughter came on, and made Vigo county their home. The sons were Henry, Richard, Moses and James. The daughter, Sarah, married John F. King. The Redfords settled on Fort Harrison prairie.

There was also the family of Capt. Daniel Stringham, with his houseful of boys. It was a son of Daniel Stringham who had run away to sea when a lad before the family came west, and became the eminent Rear Admiral Silas Horton Stringham. The Stringhams settled in the lower end of Fort Harrison prairie. One of the daughters of Daniel Stringham became Mrs. Jane Wedding - mar¬ ried Judge Randolph H. Wedding. They lived near where is now the Orphans' Home. Jane Stringham was Judge Wedding's sec¬ ond wife. Of this union there was no issue. Admiral Stringham, who died in Brooklyn, was the last of the Stringham family. He was born in Orange county, N. Y., in November, 1797, and entered the navy at the age of thirteen. Mrs. Jane Wedding had preceded her only brother to the grave some years.

Mrs. Tillotson remembers there was the Fitch family also in the New York colony of 1816. They stopped a short time at Fort Har¬ rison and then went to York, Ill., and made their home. They came in Markle's boat.

A paper of 1866 gives the following: On Tuesday, June 12, there was a gathering of the remnant of the old settlers that came from York State to Vigo county in Capt. Daniel Stringham 's flatboat at the residence of Judge Wedding, two miles east of Terre Haute, on the National road. It was in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the boat-load of emigrants to locate in Vigo county. It was a family boat (flatboat) under command of Daniel Stringham. Maj. John Bond and Col. Webb's family were on the boat. Webb settled in Gill's prairie, Sullivan county. The boat landed at Fort Harrison June 12, 1816.

Of these three families on Stringham's boat there survived at that time (1866) the following: Zebina C. Hovey's wife of Bloom¬ ington, Iowa; Mrs. Judge Wedding, of Vigo county, and Mrs. Gilkey, of Crawfordsville. These were all the children of Capt. Dan¬ iel Stringham. Of Maj. John Bond's family were Mrs. Jones, of Fayette township, and her neighbor, Mrs. Johnson. Of the Webb family there were none living.

These five persons were then the only survivors of the three fam¬ ilies that came here in Stringham's boat. [Particulars of Judge Wedding are given in the next chapter. Settlers, 1817 - Ed.)

Ezekiel Buxton, John Earle, Lewis Hodge, Dr. Charles B. Modesitt, Bobert Carr, Abner Scott and Henry Bedford were of the com¬ ers of 1816 who settled in Terre Haute. Bedford has already been mentioned as one of the Bedford sons whose father died when on the way with his family.

Dr. Modesitt had come alone to look at the country, particularly the new town of Terre Haute, and at the sale of lots he made sev¬ eral purchases and then returned to Virginia, and on horseback brought his wife and child to their new home. This child, then four years old, afterward became Mrs. Cliauncey Warren, who is still spared to her family and wide circle of friends.

Dr. Charles B. Modesitt had been educated for a physician. In the language of Capt. William Earle, who wrote so cleverly of his boyhood recollections of Terre Haute and its people: "He was one of those rare old gentlemen that we meet but once in a lifetime - tall, erect, with hair as white as snow, he was the very embodiment of 'old Virginia,' ay, even Culpeper county itself. He was ex¬ tremely polite, would say ' Sir 5 to old or young, white or black, man, woman, boy or girl. He was very kind to us little boys, and kept an orchard of sour apples on purpose for us to rob." Capt. Earle wrote this when an old man, on board his ship, at the other end of the world. The picture is so clever and true that it merits immortality. Dr. Modesitt was a man of extensive affairs, and such was his public spirit that the history of the founding of the city where he made his permanent home, and its rise, is his history, and the two are inseparably blended together. In the practice of his profession he traveled night and day over all this part of the country. He established the first ferry on the river. He built his two-story log house on the corner of Third and Poplar streets, where his son, James A., was born in 1821. He died in 1847. His family of children surviving were Frances Anna, Welton M. and James A. Modesitt. Caroline and George died young. James A. was born, as stated, in September, 1821, and died April 15, 1880. Welton M. was born August 27, 1815. He attended school at the State University, and attended Judge Walker's Law School in Cin¬ cinnati, where he graduated and practiced law two years in Terre Haute; joined the Congregational church and attended the Beecher-Stowe Theological School, and was ordained a minister. The next eight years he ministered to two churches in Vigo county, on Otter creek. He went to New York in 1859, near Buffalo, at Akron. He was in the army one year, with Banks, then with Grant on the Potomac. After the war he took charge of the church at Leroy, near Buffalo, where he is now in charge. He resides with his daughter in Buffalo, N. Y.

Frances A. married Chauncey B. Warren in 1832, and still sur¬ vives, and with her family resides at the old homestead on Sixth street. Particulars of her are given in the sketch of the Warren family in another part of this volume.

John Jenckes may well be ranked with the settlers of this year, although he did not get his family housed in the little log house prepared for them until 1818, yet he was to all practical purposes a " settler " here two or three years before that. He was born at Providence, R. I., in 1790, and died in Terre Haute in 1860, lack¬ ing but a few days of his seventieth birthday. When a lad he went to sea on the ship "Ann Hope," belonging to his brother, and at that time the largest vessel that ever had sailed from Rhode Island (a thousand tons burden). In this vessel he made a trip to the East Indies, the vessel's return cargo being silks and teas. The youth made two other voyages in other vessels, going to Pernam¬ buco, Rio Janeiro, the Bermuda Islands, St. Helena and the West

Indies. When the war of 1812 broke out he desired to enter the navy with his cousin, as a midshipman under Commodore Perry, on Lake Erie, but was prevailed upon by his mother not to do so. In 1814 he left Rhode Island for Kentucky, and resided about one year in Paris, of that State, engaged in sheep-husbandry. In Oc¬ tober, 1815, in company with Prentiss, Sawyer and Shaw, he left Lexington on horseback, with a guide and tent and packliorse, crossed the Ohio river at New Albany, and came up to Vincennes, and from there along up the east side of the Wabash, carefully ex¬ amining the country along Honey creek up to Raccoon creek, and east as far as Eel river. He made his selections in Vigo county in anticipation of the land sales to take place soon. He returned and spent some time attending the land sales, and bought several tracts in the county, and these he held mostly to the time of his death. April 6, 1818, he took possession, with his family, of the little round-log house that Thomas Puckett had built for him, about three and one-half miles south of Terre Haute, and there he lived forty-two years to a day.

He immediately planted a quarter section of his land in wheat, and raised a large crop, but this article was so plentiful in the country, and there being no markets, that the surplus was worth but little more to him than the straw.

Judge Jenckes was one of the associate judges in the first court in Vigo county, his associates being Demas Deming, with Hon.' Thomas H. Blake as president judge. Mr. Jenckes was elected State senator, and served his term at the then capital of the State, Corydon, in a two-story log house, for capitol. The senate occupied the upper room and the house the lower room. The difference now in the quality of State houses and then is as greatly in favor of the modern architecture as was the old superior to the modern in those virtues of the members that were, as Caesar would have his wife, " above suspicion." Judge Jenckes never joined any church, his life was honorable and exemplary as the end was gentle and peace¬ ful.

The Pound family settled on Prairie creek, in 1816. The reli¬ able evidence on this point is found in the address of Elijah Pound at the old settlers' meeting, September 11, 1877. The following is the speech in full as reported: " I left Ohio with my father and fif¬ teen of the family in the fall of 1816. We 'landed' on Prairie creek about the first of November. I never got much learning and never got much sense. [Laughter.] We had all the honey, veni¬ son and turkey we wanted, but our bread -stuff was very hard to get. If we had continued to live as we did then we would have enjoyed life much more than we do now. I have ten sons born to me; my sons and sons-in-law all vote the Democratic ticket." [Laughter.]

Here are sixteen arrivals in one family in the year 1816, that settled down on Prairie creek, and commenced their lives in their new homes. If each one of that family did as well as Elijah, who tells us of his ten sons, with a general lumping of his sons-in-law, then they were the kind of people to come to a county where nearly everything was in abundance except people. They were, judging by the expressions of Elijah Pound, an old-fashioned, hard-working, honest people. It was Thomas and William Pound, brothers, that came with their large families in 1816. And Joel Kester and family about the same time as the Pounds came, and settled in the same neighborhood. Thomas and his wife, Sarah Pound, had the following children: Will¬ iam, Elijah, Joseph, Sarah, Rebecca, Eunice, Malissa and Eliza¬ beth.

This Elijah Pound is the son mentioned above, and who said at the meeting that his "ten sons and his sons-in-law [not enu¬ merated] all voted the Democratic ticket." The Pounds and the Kesters intermarried, and it is therefore not to be wondered at, as you travel through that part of the county, nearly every place you come to on your way belongs to one or the other of the branches of these families.

One of the important accessions to the county was the Ezra Jones family, originally from Vermont. Mr. Jones, wife and nine children, in the winter of 1815, came in sleighs to Olean Point, on the Alleghany river, and then floated down that river and the Ohio, to Brandenburg, Ky., to which place his brother, Oliver, had pre¬ ceded him the year before. The families were left at that place, and the two brothers came across to Louisville, and thence to Vin¬ cennes, on horseback, and then followed up the east side of the Wa¬ bash, to Fort Harrison, prospecting for homes. Of course they were entirely satisfied when they examined Vigo county and the surroundings of the fort. Spending a short time here they returned, and the early part of 1816 came with their families. Oliver Jones had three sons-inJaw: James Chesnut, John Chesnut and James Wilson, and one brother-in-law, Elisha Bentley. These five fami¬ lies settled on Honey Creek prairie. Ezra Jones located on Fort Harrison prairie, near the south limits of the present city. These were prominent people, especially Ezra Jones, who soon became known as one of the leading men of the county, and took an active part in the county's formation. He was a good mechanic, mill¬ wright and architect and builder for that day, as well as an efficient farmer, and he was in all ably assisted by his four sons, who were then young men. He kept in his employ a number of men, and his home was therefore of itself quite a colony. Such families count up rapidly as voters and " hands " to work the roads, as well as rap¬ idly build up and improve the country generally. Mr. Jones built the Otter creek mill for Maj. Markle, and was the first to engage in building flatboats and shipping to New Orleans, at that time the only accessible market for the Wabash valley products.

He put up a fine frame barn, the first one erected on the prairie. His residence, outbuildings and extensive young orchard made his improvements the most conspicuous in the county. He was commissioned associate judge of the circuit court by Lieut. - Gov. Radcliff Boon, acting governor at Corydon, and was one of the first commissioners of the county. He had a good education for that time, and was fond of reading the current literature of the day; temperate, frugal, industrious and widely respected by all. His second wife's maiden name was Lucy Allen. Her father was one of seven brothers, among whom were Ethan and Ira, both con¬ spicuous in the Revolutionary war. Her brother, Heman, was presi¬ dent of the United States branch bank at Burlington, and minister to Chili during John Quincy Adams' administration. His eldest son, Ezra M. Jones, was sheriff of Yigo county in 1835-36. He, in 1838, removed to Iowa, and from there to Santa Fe, N. M. Ezra Jones, while engaged in his New Orleans trade, was on a trip in 1825, and on his way home was taken sick and died in Natchez at the age of forty-eight years.

I was shown a private letter, dated 1820, in which occurs as the then common political battle cry, "Down with the Canadians!" The letter ran on in the usual tone and hoping for a brilliant out¬ come of the campaign. The whole had but little meaning to a stranger at this remote time. Further investigation brought the meaning of the expression. March 5, 1816, congress granted land bounties as extra pay to certain Canadian volunteers in the war of 1812-15. These land warrants were brought here by some of the Canadian immigrants and laid on land on the Wabash in Yigo county. A conspicuous instance was that of Maj. William Markle, who was one of those men who is always a leader. He was active and aggressive in the politics of that time, and this cry of "down with the Canadians" was chiefly a dart hurled at Markle and his fol¬ lowers by the followers of Col. Hamilton, a strong leader opposed to Maj. Markle.

In the county records may be seen a deed from Maj. Markle to Joseph Walker, dated September 20, 1817, which, after describing the tract conveyed, recites that the land was conferred to Markle by a patent from the general land office, "pursuant to an act of con¬ gress, entitled, an act granting bounties in land and extra pay to certain Canadian volunteers, passed March 5, 1816."

Maj. Abraham Markle was born in Ulster county, N. Y., in 1769, of one of the most prominent families in the county. When a very young man he emigrated to Upper Canada, where he soon acquired fame and fortune. He bore a conspicuous part in opposi¬ tion to the rule of England in the dominion and the oppression of the people by English rulers. He became a member of the provin¬ cial parliament, and on all occasions gave unmistakable evidence of the spirit of freedom and independence that had culminated in the independence of the colonies. Immediately on the declaration of war between England and the United States, in 1812, he returned to his old home in New York and entered the army with the rank of major. In his command were his two sons, William and Abra¬ ham. When the war was over he came at once to Fort Harrison with his family of seven sons and two daughters.

For his action in the war the English authorities confiscated all his property in Canada, and then it was that the congress of the United States granted him a large quantity of scrip and extra pay to partially compensate him for his sacrifices for his country. These land warrants he proceeded to locate on Wabash lands as soon as he arrived. He thus became the owner of several sections in and about Fort Harrison; among these tracts were the lands on and about where is now the Union depot, and he became the owner of the land on which stood Fort Harrison.

Maj. Abraham Markle died March 26, 1826, aged fifty-seven years. He was a large man physically and mentally, and would have risen to prominence anywhere or any time, as his command¬ ing military figure would arrest attention in any gathering of men. His energy of character was great, and he bore down all ordinary opposition by a slight effort. His temperament was fiery and chivalric, impulsive, but as warm and generous of heart as any man that lived. He would go to great trouble to meet a foe that he thought was hunting for him, and twice as far to meet a friend who wanted his assistance. His nature was social and jovial, and a beautiful woman only could divide his affections for a fine horse. Courtly in manner, he drew his friends around him, and his hospitality was generous and graceful. His love of fine horses always assured his presence at a noted horse race or "an agricultural horse-trot." Liberal in all his ideas, with a high sense of honor, he was born to command men and not to follow.

His eldest daughter married Nathaniel Huntington, noted as the first lawyer who opened an office in Terre Haute. A man of fine abilities who soon ranked among the ablest in the profession, and who was only cheated of great eminence by his early death. Col. Huntington loved military affairs. He was in command of a militia regiment, and often had drilled his men in the open ground where is now the Terre Haute House.

There was quite a brisk little colony settled in what is now Prairieton township in 1816, under the general superintendence and direction of Moses Hoggatt. This was the Quaker settlement every one in it was noted for honesty and industry. Of these were Enoch Harlan, David M. Jones, James Wilson, Ezra Jones, David M. Jones and Harvey E. Bentley. The last named was a typical, rough pioneer, but of shrewd, quick sense, and soon became an in¬ fluential man in the county. He was sent to the legislature, and it is remembered that he filled the place with fair ability.

Enoch Harlan settled on Section 1, in the southeast part of the township. He was a native of Davis County, N. C., born December 19, 1800. His wife was Catharine Pope, of the same place, and came with her people to Yigo county in 1820, and was married two years after. This couple reared a family of six childien. Mi. Harlan spent his life on the 200-acre farm which he had entered from the government. He prided on telling how he brought the first clock (a very tall old wooden clock) to the township. He was present at the treaty with the Indians in Parke county, and would graphically describe the feasting and drinking and general Indian drunk that followed the final acts of the treaty. He was a soldier in the Black Hawk war. He remembered all about the Indians stealing the child of John Campbell, who lived on the praiiie east of Prairieton; how Campbell spent much time, and about all his means searching far and wide for his child, but never found it.

The same year and a little before the above named settlement, came what was known as the Ly kin's settlement. They were David Lykins, Josiali Wilson, William Armstrong, and probably two or three single men. They settled on the old military road, near the Ly kin's cemetery.

The Baldings, Isaac and Henry, and Jacob and David Lyon, from Ohio, settled in Otter Creek township in 1816, and Mr. Briggs had then settled in the southern part of the township. They all settled along the old Terre Haute and Lafayette wagon and packhorse road that ran nearly due north from Terre Haute into Parke county. This was one of the oldest roads regularly laid out and traveled in western Indiana, being the northern extension of the Vincennes road. It was following up this road to Otter Creek that decided Maj. Markle to build his mill at that point in 1817.

William Adams was the lone settler in what is now Nevin's township in 1816. He came with his family from Kentucky and built his house in Raccoon bottom in the heavy timber.

All the world, that is just here, knows much about Thomas Pucket, "the man what fit the Iuguns and druv the bear," but they don't all exactly just now remember what year it was that he be¬ came a good and loyal Yigoau - it was 1816. Ask any old citizen or the descendant of any of the early settlers about Tom Pucket, and he will at once tell you there is no mistake about it - -"he did actually drive the bear into town it is not a fish nor a bear story, but a cold fact. As the bear never disputed it, why should we in¬ cline to carp at it?

The current story is that Pucket was hunting bear one day about twenty miles south of Terre Haute. He had been hunting cows the day before and started up a bear, but having no gun he left it to wait until he could go home and get his rifle and return and kill it. If he had made any positive arrangement with the ani¬ mal it forfeited all claim to integrity by running away before he got back to the trysting place. This provoked the man to go out the next day in the general hunt for bear. He finally came across one lying on the sunny side of a hill sleeping. He got close enough to examine it and was amazed at its size and corpulency. He re¬ flected that if he killed it where it lay that he could not get it home, and it was doubtful if he could even carry the hide. Being a man of quick conclusions and having the courage of his convic¬ tions, he approached the sleeping monster and woke him up with some general observations about the weather. The bear raised its head, gaped widely, winked at him with its off eye, licked out its tongue in a friendly way, and laid down its head for another snooze.

Pucket now spoke in a deep stern bass voice and ordered bruin to rise and start for town, and backed this language with a punch with the muzzle of his gun. The bear was soon on its feet, but was either perverse or didn't know the way to Terre Haute, and started off in a graceful fat-bear waddle toward Vincennes. Pucket headed him off and made him reverse ends, but there was much zig¬ zagging on the way, yet the general trend was about right. But these by-plays of the animal made him travel nearer forty miles than the twenty he could have made it in if he had gone as the crow flies. The result was that when with in seven or eight miles of town the bear laid down for the last time, and neither moral nor any other suasion could make him budge an inch. He was then ruth¬ lessly slain and skinned, and the immense hide was seen by nearly every one of the then settlers in Vigo county, as a confirmation of the story. There are no other fossil remains now left of this " bar story," except the country over which he drove it, and most of this is fenced up. The reader must draw his own morals from this "bear story," because Tom Pucket was a harmless, inoffensive man, who was a rough carpenter that could build round-log houses with clirt floor that were a credit to the guild of contractors and builders. He had his little odd ways, and sometimes they might be termed eccentricities, yet they were a necessary part of the man - without them it would not have been Tom Pucket, and the verity of history would not have been compelled as now to place this little laurel bud upon his obscure grave. He has long since gone where they neither drive bears nor are driven by them. He died intestate - much in the same Avay he had lived out his days.

" Old Tom Pucket," so every one called him, died at the resideuce of his son-in-law, Dr. Thomas Parsons, Douglas county, Ill., in 1867. As early as 1839 it got to be too thickly settled on the Wabash for Tom, and so he emigrated to Texas and became a jolly cowboy. Texas was then a Republic, and the old Vigo bear driver was out of the United States for a short period of his life. He " fit " the greasers, and when Texas became a State he engaged in driving Texas cattle to the north. Finally, when very old he drove up and the hardships were too great for him, and he was stricken with his first and last sickness.

This and the preceding chapters account for over 100 families as being located in Vigo couuty by the close of the year 1816. From the numbers of young men who must have come as employes, and from the size of the families, so far as we can learn on this point, it is safe to estimate that there were about 500 inhabitants in the county, and at least four-fifths of these came in the year 1816.

At the old settlers' meeting here in 1877 all those who had been here fifty years and over were thought to be about old enough to be enrolled in the society. There were not so many of these all told as there were people here in 1816, the first year really of the set¬ tlement in the county. We can imagine it did not take so long then to pre-empt the claim to "old settler" as it did in 1877. As an evidence of how the claims to first settlers were often con¬ tended for, there was a case near Prairieton, where a man had put up a cabin and returned to the older settlement in Kentucky for his family, and soon after he went away a family of movers came and found the empty cabin and moved in and put it on record that they were the first settlers in that township - at all events they were the first family that had staid over night in a cabin. The family not only warmed the new house for the man, but staid in it until they built their own near by, and were in it before the owner returned with his family. This was something of the kind of intro¬ ductions of family to family that were not uncommon in those days.

We can but faintly understand the ties that drew these pioneer families together, when chance caused them to meet in the new wild country; as the young and giddy now are apt to sneer at the warmth of feeling always exhibited when these few remaining old pioneers chance to meet, and shake hands, and at once commence again to live over their lives of fifty or sixty years ago, because they know nothing about it, and they do not reflect that it is their own ignorance of history that disqualifies them of all proper understanding of the case.