MORGAN COUNTY INDIANA PIONEERS
THE OLD SETTLERS AT HOME
It appears from the land office records and other circumstances that about one hundred and seventy
families, a population of
some eight or nine hundred passed
the winter of 1822-'23 in our county. You may now and then still find one of
that number living. We know
of two, who, if they live until the coming spring, will have passed eighty
years of their
lives in this county.
They are
William Williams and his
brother John, sons of Jonathan Williams, a Tennesseean and a soldier of the War of 1812,
who married at the close of
that war, and, with his bride, started to Indiana, packed on two ponies which were
the proceeds of his army
service. He arrived in Orange county, where he bartered his wedding suit for
corn meal and bacon, and set
up housekeeping in a little log cabin, in the primitive style, with a "continental"
bedstead, some three-legged
stools, slab table, pots, pans, and pewter plates.
How does this compare with the modern manner of beginning housekeeping, provided the young
people have not already
decided that it is in "better taste" to take rooms and board at a hotel? Mr.
Williams and wife were not
the only well-mated pair that started in the wilderness with little more than
willing hands, brave hearts,
and a nerve that would not down, and ended life with an abundance of the good
things of this world. Philip
Hodges, William N. Cunningham, Ephraim Goss, Robert Smith, and scores of
others who came here at an
early day, started like Mr. Williams with less than a cartload of household goods.
They rightly belong to the first class of pioneers. These men chopped and hewed, grubbed and
rolled, plowed and hoed, with
their own hands. If a stranger had
walked into a clearing or a corn field, in that day, he could not have told, from anything he
saw, which was the employer
and which was the employed. All were dressed alike in homespun clothes;
all alike sweaty and sooty.
We talk boastingly of the present "horny- handed" granger.
The place to have found him at his best, a pure thoroughbred, without the taint of
"lily-finger" on him was in
Morgan county in 1830, and several years before and after. Nor were these men alone
or single- handed in their
struggles for supremacy over the wilderness. They were nobly seconded by their wives
and daughters, than whom no
better or purer have lived since
the days of Lucretia of Rome. Women can be pure and good, and not renowned or
learned, and such they were.
Doubtless their great-granddaughters of to-day would regard them as very plain,
and awkward in "society,"
quite ignorant, and possibly they might be ashamed to introduce them to their
friends. Let the "grands" walk
back in imagination seventy years and take a seat at the little spinning wheel
and attempt to spin a thread
from the distaff, or stand up and pull out a roll from the spindle of the big wheel,
or warp a piece for the loom
and throw the shuttle and trip the treadles to weave a yard of cloth, and they will
find where awkwardness
begins. But there is no need of such handcraft now. The great grand -mothers,
if
living, would be done, with
that hard and tedious toil. A more excellent way has been shown us. But at
that time the best educated
women were the women who knew what was best worth knowing, and would do what
was best worth doing. We are
inclined to think this is the highest standard ever raised the only true idea of
education.
What of it, if a man carries a dozen languages, dead and alive, in his head and is himself a
deadbeat? He is as "sounding
brass or a tinkling cymbal." There is such a thing as a "learned fool," but we
are almost certain there was
no such thing in our first settlement.
Fools there were, no doubt, but not of the educated, artificial kind. God, who oft times "works
in mysterious ways his
wonders to perform," never makes the mistake of taking a colony of "dudes" and
"dudesses," clad in "purple
and fine linen," to drive out the wolf and subdue the wilderness for the habitation of man;
but He takes stalwart men and
womanly women, rough diamonds they
may be, learned or otherwise, rude or polite, but who have the powers of endurance and the
determination to win in the
strife. Such, for the most part, were those who first came to our county in
search of homes which they
expected to carve out of a wilderness hitherto the abode of wild beasts and red men. The
red men with their wives and
little ones, had for the last time
been bought off or driven from the soil of Indiana. That fearful struggle between "civilized"
barbarian and savage
barbarian has terminated in favor of the former. The Indian had his choice to be thrust
through with ball and bayonet
or "take up his bed and walk." The question of right was settled by the
question of might. No longer
did the dreams of Kentucky's "dark and bloody ground" disturb the midnight
slumber of the old settler;
he reposed as quietly in his little cabin home, miles from his neighbors, as did the babe
in its sugar- trough cradle.
This was a great gain over all former attempts at frontier settlements westward
from the Atlantic seaboard.
In our county "Old Glory" never waved over a bloody battlefield. The roar
of cannon, the rattle of
rifles, the yells of the charges, and the shouts of victories, these rock-ribbed
hills and fertile valleys
never heard. "But peace hath her victories no less renowned than war." Yea, more: "Peace
is heaven, war is hell." Let
us be done with wars. Our hands are clean of the blood of mobs or lynchings;
murders and manslaughters we
have had too many. Some escaped arrest, others broke jail and fled. Most
of them had fair trials,
while none were sentenced for life, or to be hanged. There have been at least five
premeditated murders in the
county, for which, if the perpetrators had received the sentence of the law,
their last business on earth
would have been "pulling hemp." The victims were a stranger, near the Old Bluffs, John
Terrell and James Carter, of
Washington township, and William Robe and Washington Brown, of Greene
township. There have been
about twenty manslaughters or homicides. Considering that the average population of
the county for seventy-eight
years would be as much as three
thousand souls, this may not be so bad a showing. We are an intelligent and educated people
to-day, who will compare
favorably with the best; but while our boys and young men attend church with a
flask of whisky in one hip
pocket and a revolver in the other, we should not boast of our advancement in
morals and manners, or in
temperance and church work. There is still plenty of room for ministers and
missionaries, at home as well
as abroad. Morality and Bible spirituality have not kept pace with intellectuality
and the material development
of the county, since the
beginning in the memorable
winter of 1822-'23.
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