The Terre Coupee Anti-Horse-Thief Association: the township's own law

1853/54–1880 and after · a mutual-insurance constabulary

For a quarter-century the most effective law-enforcement body in Olive Township was a private association of its own farmers, and it published its books. The Terre Coupee Anti-Horse-Thief Association was organized in 1853 or 1854 — Chapman gives the alternative years and this section prints both — "for protecting the property of its members against the depredations of thieves, and for detecting and apprehending parties guilty of horse-stealing." Its first charter bound it to recover a member's stolen horse or indemnify the owner. When the charter expired at twenty years, the association reorganized "on the plan of a mutual insurance company": it pays two-thirds of a stolen horse's value thirty days after failing to find it, and if the horse is afterward recovered the owner may return either the horse or the money. Its published record, as of 1880, is this section's centerpiece statistic: "During the 25 years of its existence, not as many as 30 horses have been stolen within their jurisdiction, and all have been recovered but two." Membership stood at 120. Its jurisdiction, "at first unlimited," had settled to Olive and Wills townships in this county and Hudson township in La Porte County. And its enforcement arm had the state's own authority: "each 'rider' [is] authorized to act as constable for the association's purposes by state law" — private horsemen with public power, the prairie's answer to a crime that could outrun a county sheriff.

The officers print whole, at both dates Chapman gives, with his one internal conflict left standing. At organization: H. Reid, President; T. L. Borden, Secretary; T. J. Garoutte, Treasurer — "the latter has acted in that capacity ever since." In 1880: I. N. Miller, President; S. C. Lancaster, Secretary — the same Samuel C. Lancaster who headed the town's incorporation petition in 1866 — and the treasurer printed as T. G. Garoutte, in the current list and again in the committees. The initials stand both ways in the same article (T. J. at organization, T. G. in 1880) and this section does not merge them: the Garoutte of the township is Thomas J. in his own sketch, and the association's 1880 initial is either his misprint or another man. The Managing Committee of 1880: Granville Woolman, Eli Wade, Wm. P. White, H. B. Knight, Charles Ivins. The Committee on Communications: J. H. G. Garoutte. The riders of 1880 — the sworn constabulary itself — were T. B. Fawcette, J. G. Druliner, Wm. H. Deacon, Joseph Burden, Wm. P. Lane, L. H. Rush, H. V. Compton, Charles Ivins, D. M. Curry, Milton Thompson, John Ackerman, T. L. Borden, Eli Wade, W. W. France and James Nickerson. Read as a roll, it is the township's establishment in the saddle: its banker, its doctor, its richest men's sons and its future postmasters, riding posse for one another's horses. The association's later course — Indiana's anti-horse-thief associations famously outlived the horse — is not carried in the records read and stands as a named gap, settled by the association's own minute books and the county's later histories.

Sources

1. Chapman (1880), Olive Township chapter, pp. 769–770, the association's article read whole and first-hand (all quotations, officers, committees and riders as printed there; the treasurer's initials at both printings).
2. Government leg's file (S. C. Lancaster and the incorporation petition of 7 June 1866).