| In this
connection might be named one other pest to the
new settlements. Yellow rattle snakes
largely abounded to the great annoyance and
peril of the people. The country in many
portions was underlaid with a strata of shelly
rocks, which upon abrupt acclivities of the
surface and at heads of springs would crop out,
and these cropping points afforded these
pestiferous reptiles commodious caverns or dens,
in which, in some localities, vast numbers would
collect for winter quarters, and in the early
spring would leave the caverns to mask in the
spring sunshine in the vicinity of their
head-quarters, and sake hunts were common in
some neighborhoods. I remember to have
heard of a raid being made upon some of these
dens a short distance west of Warren, which
resulted in the destruction of immense numbers
counted by the hundreds in one day. But
as I do not design to tell a long snake story, I
will give a few facts, which may seem at this
day to partake of the Munchausen type.
My father built his cabin near a very fine
spring, which headed in a depression bounded on
three sides by an oval circular rock bench, some
four or five feet higher than the surface of the
spring; his cabin had not been furnished when he
moved into it in the early Spring, and was not
fully chinked; necessity compelled the occupancy
of it in that condition, intending soon to
finish it, and in the mean time to furnish it
temporarily in the most primitive mode of that
day; his bedsteads were in this style - one
crotch or post of proper height, fastened
upright, to rest the ends of transverse straight
suitably sized poles upon, inserting the other
ends into the interstices between the logs of
the cabin, putting in other cross sticks, upon
which to rest clapboards, to hold up the bed and
bedding. Upon these rustic bedsteads, with
appropriate couches, the family enjoyed that
sweet repose which they needed after their daily
toils; all went on charmingly, until one morning
my mother, in making up the bed in which she and
my father had slept, in drawing off the feather
bed in order to shake up the straw-
Page 27 -
tick, discovered to her consternation and terror
a large rattlesnake gliding away between the
logs, which was supposed to have ensconced
itself between the two ticks the day before; and
during the night had remained so quietly still
as not to have disturbed its bed fellows.
I remember another incident that occurred
afterward in the same locality. My now
only sister Mrs. Jonas Cummings of
Illinois was an infant, beginning to sit alone,
and my mother having some work to do in the
house yard, to pacify the child placed it upon
the grass plot with play things to amuse it.
While attending to her domestic duties she
observed that the child manifested most ecstatic
glee, and looking in that direction, she was
horrified upon seeing the child about to clutch
a huge yellow rattle snake. She ran and
jerked away the child, and her excitement
emboldened her to hunt a club with which she
suddenly dispatched his snakeskin.
There were many rattle snake adventures of varied types
and phases, but let the above suffice. It
may howeve rbe said that many persons became
reckless and were the victims to their own
folly; others were unavoidably bitten, but as a
general rule the Indian remedies were resorted
to, and generally were effectual in their cure.
In some few cases, however, the bite proved
fatal; one instance can be given that was a sad
one; and by way of introduction to the sequel,
the remark may be made that there were persons
and not a few, who seemed to lose their terror
of the reptiles from their familiarity with the
abundance and it was a very common practice to
be provided with a stick two or three feet long
with a prong at one end, which they would use
when an opportunity offered, by throwing the
fork or prong upon the neck of the snake, and
pinning it down to the ground for the purpose of
teasing it, as young kittens will a mouse before
killing it, and when they have satisfied
themselves with this amusement, they seize the
serpent by the tail, lift off the yoke, and give
a sudden backward jerk and break its neck.
A very fine young man in the neighborhood who
was greatly esteemed, by the name of McMAHAN,
who was about to be married to a daughter of
Judge HUGHS, (who was uncle to Mrs.
William WARD of Urbana) espied a large
rattle snake, and attempted to capture it in the
mode above described, but it slipped away from
him and glided into a small hole in a stump, and
before it had drawn in its whole length he
seized it by the tail to draw it back with a
sudden jerk and break
Page 28 -
its neck, but unfortunately the aperture was
large enough for the snake to coil itself back,
which it did, and bit him among the blood
vessels of his wrist, which to the universal
regret of the community caused almost immediate
death. The introduction of swine into the
country, relieed the people in a great degree of
this pest in a few years. It is averred,
though I will not avouch its truth, that even
the timid deer was a great snake killer, that
when it came in contact, it would with its fore
feet stamp the reptile to death. This
branch of the subject here closes with this one
remark - the rattle snake ahs one redeeming
trait, when let alone it will never attempt to
bite without giving notice by the rattles.
This settlement continued to progress in the direction
of improvement. Log cabin churches,
school-houses mills and other indispensable
utilities were erected, and furnished the people
with the usual facilities of society, their
granaries and larders were replenished, and they
began to realize all the comforts that
persevering industry always brings in its wake.
All were happy and contented up to about 1810,
when that mania among the first settlers of a
new country, in the shape of new
adventures broke out in all its most virulent
types. The most glowing descriptions of
new localities westward in the State were
circulated, the new counties of Wayne, Stark,
and especially a place still further west under
the general term of the Mad River Country,
attracted the deepest interest as a land
"flowing with milk and honey," interlarded with
game and wild hogs in great abundance, about
which the most extravagant hyperbolical
declarations in jest were made, such as that
roasted pigs were running at large with knives
and forks stuck in their backs squealing out
"Come and eat."
This agitation in the end, culminated in the exodus of
about forty families, more at that time than
two-thirds of all the old settlers of Brookfield
township, who in their frenzy, sacrificed to new
comers, the results of their toils for years;
not then, even dreaming of the hidden trasures
under their feet, in the shape of inexhaustible
coal fields and rich mines of iron ore, that
have since been the source of unbounded wealth
of iron ore, that have since been the source of
unbounded wealth to that community, making
improved lands then sold for three or four
dollars an acre, worth, upon an average, one
hundred dollars an acre at this time.
As I have elsewhere said not less than forty families
began to prepare themselves for this movement,
and strange as it may now
Page 29 -
appear, not less than thirty of them selected
the Mad River Valley, and within a year or two
all of them settled in what at that time was
Champaign County, and my being so mixed up in
these scenes, must be my excuse for connecting
my pioneer life in Champaign County, with its
incipient stages in Trumbull County, It seems to
me from my stand-point, I could not separate
them so as to confine myself alone to this my
present locality, for the reason that my old
associates in a large degree were my new
comrades in early pioneer life in this part of
the State. And the scenes from 1806 to
1811 are now endeared to me, and can not be
eradicated or separated from the scenes of
pioneer life in Champaign County, but must be me
be treated as one of the parts of my early life
in Ohio. I can well adopt the language of
Tupper in his veneration of old haunts; his
portraiture in the following lines vibrates upon
very chord of my early reminiscences, and
vividly renews all those early recollections
which I have attempted to delineate in varied
sketches. IN view of all these surrounding
circumstances am I not justified in their
connection?
|
Old Haunts.
I
love to linger on my track,
Wherever I have dwelt
In after years to loiter back.
And feel as once I felt;
My foot falls lightly on the sword.
Yet leaves a deathless dint;
With tenderness I still regard
Its tenderness I still regard
Old places have a charm for me.
The new can ne'er attain -
Old faces now I long to see,
Their kindly looks again.
Yet these are gone - while all
around
Is changeable as air.
All anchor in the solid ground.
And root my memories there! |
Page 30 -
The
sentimentality of these lines after a lapse of
more than a half century, has one two or three
occasions induced me to revisit the locality of
these scenes of my boy-hood. The spring
near my father's cabin; the site of the old log
school-house; the place where stood the old
church to which my father and mother led me, all
claimed my first attention. The "deathless
dint" was there, but the "old faces:
were not there; these were "gone," I
shall never see "their kindly looks again."
A deep veneration for these sacred spots can
never be erased. Memory cherishes them,
and the judgment endorses the description that
all is vanity.
I have already stated that a general stampede among the
settlers was about to take place, and which
ended in its consummation. My father and
his brothers Samuel and Johnson
PATRICK caught the contagion, the two latter
moving in the fall of 1810 and settled on Beaver
Creek, in what is now Clarke County, and
afterward moved into what is now Logan County.
But my father remained in Brookfield until the next
spring, and during the winter entered into an
arrangement by which five of his neighbors
untied with him and built a boat, about two
miles above Sharon on the Shenango River, of
sufficient capacity to contain six families with
their goods, and was made ready to be launched.
It was no doubt the first, if not the last,
enterprise of the kind so far up from the
confluence of the river into Big Beaver.
The boat being ready, it was after the first
sufficient rise floated over three now mill-dams
down to the mouth of Big Yankee creek and
moored, and side oars and rudder being attached,
was ready for the embarkation of the families of
Richard KRAMER, Jacob REEDER, William WOODS,
Josiah WHITAKER, Isaac LOYD, and Anthony
PATRICK, with their goods when after a
sudden spring rise in the river were all on
board in due order as above indicated, when the
cable was loosed, and this band of immigrants
numbering about twenty souls set sail and were
gently wafted with the current down the Shenango
to Big Beaver, and down falls of the latter,
when the boat was again moored and the crew and
their effects were by wagons employed, conveyed
to the foot of the rapids. The boat was
put into the hands of a pilot to navigate it
over the falls which was done with great speed,
but through the unskillfulness of pilot, was
greatly injured upon the rocks and had to be
refitted at some expense, and made sea-worthy,
after which she was again duly laden, and the
voyage renewed by running with the
Page 31 -
current from the falls to the confluence with
the beautiful Ohio River, and thence down to
Cincinnati without noting the daily stoppages
and delays after about a three weeks voyage,
interspersed with many incidents which will be
now passed.
Cincinnati was then a little town under the hill.
Here these old family wayfarers seeking new
homes separated, after selling their boat for
about twenty dollars and dividing the proceeds,
intending to meet again in the Mad River Valley,
which was ultimately realized, as all of them
became settlers in old Champaign County as
bounded in 1811, embracing what is now Clarke,
Champaign, Logan, Hardin, &c. &c., north to the
Michigan Territory line.
My Father moved his family to Lebanon, Warren County,
arriving there on the evening Moses B. Corwin
was married, remaining there and working as a
journey-man cabinet maker until August, when he
moved to Urbana, arriving there the 9th day of
August, 1811.
NOTE: I have attempted to describe a log cabin raising,
in its multiform delineations from the standing
forest to the completed structure. An in
doing so have committed myself to the criticism
of many yet living, who would be more capable of
the task I have assumed. I am aware that
my attempt has many defects in point of accuracy
of description, that will likely be pointed out
as needing amendment. But my motive was
not the enlightenment of the present generation,
but was attempted from a desire to hand down to
posterity the primitive structures up to 1820,
believing that before the year 1920, this mode
of building will have become obsolete, and
unknown. As the new settlers of this day
do not resort to the log cabin, but to the frame
house or hovel, the idea of the original log
cabin as already said will be unknown, hence the
reason of my feeble attempt.
|
