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

One Township's Yesterdays Chapter XXI  



WESTWARD HO?


    "All the past we leave behind... Pioneers! O pioneers!"
    ... Walt Whitman. 


WESTWARD, EVER WESTWARD, the white race pressed on ... beyond the old frontiers, establishing new frontiers, then pressing onward again beyond those .., into the wilderness where dwelt the "savage" peoples.

The first corners to Union Township, though many of them did not journey directly westward on the last stage of their migration, were of the westward moving stock. Their forbears came originally from the East and from beyond the waters of the Atlantic.

Where actually did those hardy, venturesome families originate? Who were they? And why did they start migrating to begin with? In answer, one prefers to repeat words that cannot well be improved on ... the words expressed some years ago by PHEBE THOMPSON WILLEY.

Speaking of those who came first to this region, she says that "as all good tales begin, _ Once upon a time _ a long time ago their forefathers concluded they must find a place where they could indulge in freedom of religious convictions as well as develop their best efforts in a material way. So more than one hundred years ago, nearer one hundred and fifty, (now perhaps more than that), a number of them took their small possessions and with their lives in their hands, embarked for the New World--the Land of Promise and freedom.

"From the highlands of Scotland came JAMES BROWNLEE, who married JEAN RANKIN Rankin in Pennsylvania. From these descended the BROWNLEEs of all Indiana and many other states. They were stalwart Scotchmen - James was 6 feet, 4 inches, as was also his son James who served in the first Indiana Assembly. They were Covenanters of the strictest faith and practice.

"From the north of Ireland came PATRICK LOGAN who married NANCY SALLIE HARPER also of Pennsylvania. PATRICK LOGAN was a typical Irishman and brought with him a fiery temper, a rich brogue and abundant wit as the present generation of Logans in this county exemplify. He was a Covenanter, but became a Newlight Christian in Rush County, Indiana, where he is buried. "CHRISTOPHER ELIAS DICKSON, tall and stately left his Jersey Island home for the new west. He married PHEBE LEWIS-BAYLESS. From these are numbered the DICKSONs of this county.

"JAMES THOMPSON, a shepherd lad from the lowlands of Scotland, left his sheep and stole passage to the New World, coming to Maryland in time to help build the White House, as an apprentice. He afterwards became a Baptist preacher. He was drowned in Blue Lick Creek, Kentucky. His wife was ANN PERRY, cousin of OLIVER PERRY.

"JOHN LEWIS added Welsh blood to this Anglo-Saxon mixture. These five pioneers were helpers in gaining independence in the American Revolution. Not satisfied, these people kept pushing westward until they settled Rush and Fayette counties, Indiana. In Ohio they were joined by the MC DONALDs. In southern Indiana the VOREISes from Holland and the HOUGHTONs from England entered the clan. These families married and inter-married until it is a real crossword puzzle to decipher the degree of relationship among their descendants, though it is safe to say very few have married blood relations.

"In 1835 and 1836 again loading their covered wagons with their families and household belongings they, the second generation, began trekking northward, landing in midsummer 1836 near Maxinkuckee lake in what is now Marshall county. The graves of these pioneers are scattered throughout Union, Green and Center townships. Their names appear in all the records of the early days in the county. These names cannot be rubbed out of the stirring records of the past century."

The westward movement began early in the Nineteenth Century. "The first decade of our national history," says KATHARINE COMAN, "witnessed a great wave of migration into the trans-Alleghany [Allegheny] territory. The era of the trapper and the trader, of the ‘long [lone] hunter' and the self-appointed Indian fighter, had passed. The experimental stage was at an end, and now that some measure of peace and security was attained, men of wealth and breeding began to move into Kentucky and Tennessee, taking their families and household goods, together with slaves and capital sufficient to exploit the natural resources of the country. The pioneer farmer gave way to the planter, and tobacco culture and stock raising on a large scale superseded the primitive industries of the back woods.

"Many soldiers of the disbanded army, finding it impossible to regain industrial foothold in the Atlantic states, came into the newly acquired territory to take up their bounty lands and make a fresh start in life; and emigrants from Ireland, Great Britain, and Germany crossed the sea in ever increasing numbers, seeking among the people that had broken free from Old World trammels opportunity to earn a living as independent farmers.

"Speculators, too, crossed the mountains, bearing titles more or less valid to vast tracts of virgin forest, hoping to reap fortunes from the inevitable rise in price."

WASHINGTON had protested against the rage for land speculation. He urged that Congress should "fix such a price upon the lands ... as would not be too exorbitant and burthensome for real occupiers; but high enough to discourage monopolizers."

Agriculture Predominant.


Agriculture was generally declining throughout the North Atlantic section. In Massachusetts, Vermont and New York, the barren hill farms "afforded but a meager reward to labor by comparison with the government lands still available in the Mississippi Valley, and by consequence the young men of energy and ambition were drawn to the West, _ to the fertile prairies of Illinois and Indiana and the alluvions [allusions] of Ohio'.

HARRIET MARTINEAU visited New England in 1835, the year the first emigrants were preparing to locate in the Union Township area. She "heard frequent lamentations over the spirit of speculation; the migration of young men to the back country; the fluctuating state of society from the incessant movement westward; the immigration of laborers from Europe; and the ignorance of the sparse [country] population:"

The quarter section farm tilled by the owner and his sons was the typical enterprise in the free territory north of the Ohio River, but the prospects of the thrifty pioneer were no less brilliant. Miss MARTINEAU was assured that "a settler cannot fail of success, if he takes good land, in a healthy situation, at the government price. If he bestows moderate pains on his lot, he may confidently reckon on its being worth at least double at the end of the year; much more if there are growing probabilities of a market." Cultivated land in Illinois was then selling at thirty dollars or even one hundred dollars per acre.
In this part of the West, means of transportation were then at hand "in the vast system of, lakes and rivers that brought the remotest sections of the great interior valley into communication with the sea. The Great Lakes were inland seas, while the Mississippi River and its tributaries furnished 16,674 miles of steamboat navigation."

Local Settlers.


Those who first carne to Marshall County, or their parents, according to MC DONALD, were originally mostly from Pennsylvania, Virginia and the coast states, and were of Scotch, German, Irish and French descent. "Upon the opening of the great Northwestern Territory, of which this was a part," he says, "they began moving westward, and, striking the Ohio river at various points, floated down on rafts and boats of rude construction to various settlements, such as Marietta, Cincinnati and other points where they could move out into the country both south and north.

"The first settlers here were from southern Ohio and Indiana and northern Kentucky. Butler and Preble counties, in Ohio, and Rush, Fayette, Franklin and Union counties, in southern Indiana, furnished nearly the entire emigration the first eight or ten years."

The ancestors of these settlers were from afar. Some heritage of spirit, originating no doubt in an ancestry dwelling beyond the Atlantic many years before, was brought by these resolute people into the wilderness.

The Rugged Pioneer.


The late Dr. B. W. S. WISEMAN, in his prologue to Culver's celebration of the Indiana Centennial in 1916, pays tribute to "the white settler, coming from across the ranges beyond which the broad Atlantic grieves against the coast. With his fibre [fiber] is knit the conquest of many a wilderness, many a foe. Those feet of his are wide-wandering; in his heart is a thirst of new empire; on his brow and in his eyes of the northern sea's fearless blue or the storm-sky's 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 axe 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, iron shod, 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."

As for the wily red man, he viewed the westward movement of the whites with trepidation. The great migration presented to him a sinister aspect, of which his "untutored mind" was quite aware. He was impressed by the strength evident in the onward marches of the pale-faced people. Something of this feeling on the part of the native is expressed in the lines from Longfellow's "Hiawatha," wherein the red man says:

    " _ I behold the westward marches
    Of the unknown, crowded nations.
    All the land was full of people,
    Restless, struggling, toiling, striving,
    Speaking many tongues, yet feeling
    But one heart-beat in their bosoms. _ "