Culver's Indiana Centennial Celebration - Part 2

Citizen, Aug 3, 1916
WAS GRANDLY DONE
Culver's Centennial Celebration Set a Mark Small Town Efficiency.

The people of Culver have reason on to feel proud of the centennial pagleant held last Thursday.

It was easily the greatest "show" the town has known.

When it is realized that the work of staging such an exhibition was new to most of those of having it in charge, and that there a dearth of willing workers, the was: achievement stands out greater.

The Sunday school people also did their part in fine style. The results of organization were seen in the numbers and character of the turnout, and many compliments were heard as the parade passed.

The afternoon parade had hot weather to contend with, and to this cause was due the absence of what would have been its most imposing feature - the naval battalion of the academy. It was thought best to permit only cavalrymen to participate.

However, there were other features to make the parade interesting.

The working out of the various spectacles and exercises intended to reproduce in panoramic form something of the events and changes of the past 100 years of Indiana was certainly skillfully done.

The Battle of Tippecanoe reproduced with historical accuracy by cadets from the academy was an exciting episode.

This was followed in quick succession by views of pioneer cabin and Indian wigwam life. In reproducing these scenes the I. O. R. M. and the Degree of Pocahontas made a most picturesque showing.

The Burr Oak Gleaners gave their beautiful flag drill, and a drill by the Pocahontas was something worth going a long way to see.

Among the platform exercises the songs written by Mrs. Eugenia Mc Farland McDonald of Knox brought applause from the crowd.

The academy contributed further interest in sending some of the woodcrafters to give a war dance under the direction of Ernest Thompson Seton.

The Culver band added zest and entertainment to the afternoon and the evening.

Mrs. George Overmyer as the originator and promoter of the celebration, Mrs. G. B. Eisenhard as the pageant mistress, Mrs. C. D. Behmer who had charge of the vocal music, and Martin Heminger as the artist and designer who made so much of the display effective, are entitled to special notice and remembrance for their energy, perseverance and skill in the great production.

The Sunday Schools.

The eleven Sunday schools which took part in the morning parade each had a float representing some feature of Sunday school work.

The Culver M. E. school had the Township float, a decorated automobile carrying a banner of the Union township Sunday schools and pennants with the name of each school of the township.

The Cradle Roll and Beginners' float, prepared by the Burr Oak U. B. school, represented a large cradle which was filled with members of that department.

The Culver Evangelical school had the Primary and Junior float, a decorated wagon carrying a load of happy youngsters.

The Secondary department was presented by the Maxinkuckee school. They had an auto across the back of which was the name Secondary Department.

One of the most unique floats was the Training float prepared by the Zion school. A wagon was decorated with yellow bunting, the training department color, and bore several training department flags and mottoes, the chief one being "Training for Service" on a revolving wheel in the center of the wagon.

The Adult float consisted of a wagon decorated in red on which rode a number of adult pupils. This was prepared by Hibbard

. Washington Sunday school had a missionary on a large wagon surrounded by children of every nationality, a good representation of the Missionary department.

The Publicity wagon carried Miss Publicity whose clothing was covered with newspapers. The mottoes displayed were: "The Sunday school that does not advertise may know what it's doing, but no one else knows. The advertised school is a growing school."

The Poplar Grove school had the Temperance float, a wagon decorated with white. On the four corners of the float were. these pennants: "Purity," "Conquer," "Victory" and 'Triumph."

The Extension float was well presented by the Culver Christian school. Uncle Sam drove the wagon, from the center of which children of different nationalities carried streamers, representing the Sunday school reaching to all parts of the earth.

The Rutland school had an auto enclosed with purple bunting, a good place to carry the old and feeble folks who belong to the Home department.

The Prologue.

W. S. Wiseman was heard by a comparatively small number owing to the size of the amphitheater and the noise and confusion incident to a large crowd.

Believing that this was a disappointment to many and that it is worthy of preservation we herewith hand it on to our readers:

Cromwell said, three centuries ago, "What are all histories but God manifesting Himself, shaking down and trampling under foot whatsoever He hath not planted ?"

Tacitus, the Roman historian whom the best critics concede to have been the greatest man, in the field of letters, of all the ages, wrote: "This I hold to be the chief office of history--to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them."

Macaulay made this statement: "A people who take no pride in the achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything to be remembered by remote descendants."

On this basis we might formulate an analogue: A commonwealth whose citizens take no interest in the accomplishments of their antecedents is fit for a state of vassalage only, and deserves the fate that will ultimately reduce it to that condition.

No doubt, what was true of that part of the Mississippi valley, within its latitude, was likewise true of our own state of Indiana, in the dim ages of the past. From the encircling summits of southern hills one might have seen the dark green robe of the wilderness undulating away for scores upon scores of miles to the north. that wondrous vesture, So many ages in weaving, is rifted at last - threaded by highways, rent and displaced along the length and breadth of every fertile lowland by fields and orchards, dotted with distant farmhouses.

Somewhere, no doubt, in dawn of time, these hills and glades and broad prairies quivered to charge of the awful mastodon resounded to his trumpetings. Yet they who vanquished and drove out from this cherished region looked, beside his bulk, a feeble folk prevailing only by weight numbers, conquering by craft -- the earliest stirrings of that merciless supremacy of reason.

No doubt, swarms of human beings, naked or skin-clad, brown hairy almost as the animals they brought down with flint-tipped spear or arrow, roamed over the fair area in that forgotten twilight of the race.

Over their vanished towns, and forts and graves have grown the oaks of thousands of years, whose leaves now whisper to the murmuring rain somewhat of all their mighty roots have learned, groping deep in the dust of secrets obliterated past deciphering.

But we may know that no sooner had these hordes begun to divide into tribal organization than the struggle for possession leaped again to the fore.

Centuries later, in the dim majestic forest, or on the broad prairie, hoar with time, silent now and filled already with the brooding pathos of ruin past, the Indians take and hold the coveted land.

Whether exterminated by war, or absorbed by intermarriage, the brown men are not; Shawnee and Kickapoo, Miami and Pottawattomie - unreckoned generations of red hunters now contend for right of way. Their canoes come down the rivers like flights of minnows, and at bend or camp the shallows run red where, fighting hand to hand with ambushed warriors, they make their way to shore.

Nothing seems more certain, aside from recorded history, than that this gracious country has been strewn, over and over, with bodies of the slain; that its soil, constantly reclothing itself with tenderest green, has been soaked, hill and valley, forest and plain, with the red of the heart.

And last of all, into the primeval woods, rich lowlands and wide expanse of prairie- -studded here and there with beautiful lakes which glisten like diamonds in their setting, there enters a new and more terrible fighting - the AngloSaxon, the white settler, coming from across the ranges beyond which broad Atlantic grieves against the coast. With his fibre is knit the conquest of many a wilderness, many a foe.

Those feet of his are wide-wandering; in his heart is thirst of new empire; on his brow and in his eyes of the northern sea's fearless blue or the storm-sky's a steel gray are the look of victory. He knows no dread of loneliness, nor winces in the thick of carnage; the twisted, gnarled and rooted fastnesses of the Western jungles daunt him no more than did the wildest foam and fury of the sea. There is no possibility of turning him back. He is fate. He is as inevitable as moonset or the approach of day.

His small scattering bands are the first restless ripple of that oncoming tide of civilization whose might and power are urging him forward. He is clothed in staunchest homespun; he carries knife and ax and rifle; wife and child he brings. His jangling household gear is on the back of the horse beside which he walks warily - the mount of the last cavalier that picks its way through the trackless forest, lifting broad hoofs, ironshod, over jutting ledges and matted roots of trees.

And still those elder wars bequeath him their heritage of battle; he strives with a lurking foe that crouches in the shadow 'round his path, or he bands together to drive out the possessors of the soil.

Here in this broad domain red men and white contend fiercely, setting the pride of barbaric paint and plumes against the stern ruggedness of riflemen, and afterward against the pomp of banner and sabre and warlike dress.

They fight - the white man as one upborne by the consciousness of power irresistible; ; the Indian desperately, for his home, clinging tenaciously to his native hunting grounds. And soon, pathetically soon, it seems, looking back upon those days from the comfortable study in some fair city street, or the quiet living room of a peaceful, well-defended farmstead - the slaughter is over.

The red hunter is gone, and the fair-haired home-lover stands unquestioned owner, last of the long train of conquerors, brute and human. All time past, since the subsidence of "the waters" has wrought less apparent change than has he in the short while since his advent. Inexorably the forest falls beneath the steady ringing of his ax; his roads stretch from village to village, worn smooth under myriad footfalls; his clearings are gay in spring time with tinted froth of bloom, they redden with fruit, or wave with golden grain; and smoke ascends from hundreds of gray-roefed cabins. His wife smiles over the growing patterns in her loom; his children play i in the dust of alien graves.

An imaginary resume of the remote past with its array of obsolete tongues, extinct peoples and unknown customs, much of the actual history of which is preserved only in the forms of undecipherable hieroglyphics, is shorn of much of its interest if deprived of its pathos.

As the grandeur of vietory is often measured by the sacrifices by which it was purchased, SO life must have woven into it somewhat of melancholy, that we may be enabled to appreciate its joys and triumphs. There are types of sadness that touch the soul so deeply as to be devoid of pain and that serve to impel us to commune more closely with ourselves.

When we contemplate the measure of life's brief span, and, in imaginary retrospection, the vast throngs that through unnumbered ages have peopled our continent, we are furnished with additional evidence of our inability to appreciate and understand, in their colossal entirety, the workings and designs of the Infinite; and the writer knows of no more appropriate way to close this humble effort than with the words of the immortal bard, William Cullen Bryant:
*The hills, rockribbed and ancient as the sun--the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods--rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and poured 'round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste
Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of Man.".

Part 1