Lake Maxinkuckee Its Intrigue History & Genealogy Culver, Marshall, Indiana

One Township's Yesterdays THE PIONEERS A Tribute  



    "Q restless restless race! Pioneers! 0 pioneers!
    -Walt Whitman. 


THE OLD FOLKS ... those who are still with us to tell us about things as they used to be and what happened in the days of long ago ... a toast to them'.

How we love them and admire them for their "grit" and for their "spunk" to carry on against odds that would have downed the best of us? With minds that are still keen, though the years they have lived may be beyond and on the sunset - side of the prescribed three score and ten, and with memories that scarcely are blunted by the passage of time they still are with us, a dwindling few, to recount for as the story of the vague and obscure years of the early settlements.

Bough, harsh years those were, years of toil and sacrifice and privation but nevertheless happy years for the old folks, when they backward roam along memory's trail and relive 'them. Happy years they were, because they were so filled with faith and with hope for the future. Up-building years, marking a great age of construction. Though they had but little to do with, other than strong hearts and hands, those pioneers builded [built] well, and what they accomplished has endured for generations and will endure for many generations to come.

Out of the dim mists of the past; into the dim mists of the future so came to us the heritage they created and so will go on that heritage on and on, no one knows, no one can know, how long.

Today, perhaps we think our times tha [the] hardest. They may be hard, but for all that they are not the hardest. They only seem so. Only by comparison do they seem so, not by comparison with the times of the pioneers, but by comparison with our own earlier lives when the well-oiled wheels of civilization moved smoothly. We may backward look ... but not far enough. We do not realize how hard times were ... in those very early days when the pioneers toiled in. the wilderness that the wheels of later days might the more smoothly run.

So, of the pioneers we say today, "God bless them."

"And by their works ye shall know then.."

-E. R. C.