The Old Settlers' Stock: The Stories Howard Collected

1832–1907 · reminiscences read before the Northern Indiana Historical Society

The collectors: South Bend's pioneer tales come down in a named custody. Timothy E. Howard's History of St. Joseph County (1907) prints, in its early chapters, the reminiscences of the last survivors — men and women who had arrived as children in 1830–1836, telling it back seventy years on, several of them in papers written for or read before the Northern Indiana Historical Society: William D. Bulla's paper on his father Thomas, read in the winter of 1900; John Stull's interview; Hugh V. Compton's recollections, written for the New Carlisle Gazette of 16 November 1906. Howard also prints the institution that kept the telling alive: the old settlers' reunions, where, as he describes them, “the old folks gather in little groups and recount the stories of other days” while the young play, and all come together after to the feast. Four of the stock's tales follow, each in its teller's custody.

The fort that was never built — John Stull's telling: Stull arrived a boy of nine and was interviewed in South Bend, where he had attended school in 1830. Of the spring of 1832 he says: “In 1832 the report of the uprising of the northwestern Indians spread like wildfire. The news was that the Indians were killing the people, driving off stock and burning property. The little settlement became alarmed and action for defense was begun by drawing plans for the construction of a fort to be located on what is now Vistula avenue, about where the water works stand pipe is erected. The plans for the fort were such that all lines of approach could be commanded and swept by the defenders. The fort was to be constructed from small trees cut in such lengths that about ten feet should extend above the ground, the tops sharpened to a point. A ditch was to surround the entire structure. Luckily Black Hawk was defeated, up in Wisconsin, and his followers driven across the Mississippi, and the scare in St. Joseph county was over.” The fort exists only in this paragraph — a set of plans in a boy's memory, preserved because an old man told it to a historian. Stull's memory also keeps the town's two traders face to face: Lathrop M. Taylor in his double log house on Vistula, dry goods in one half and “fire-water” dispensed in the other, and Alexis Coquillard across Center street, who “did not conceal his satisfaction that he had got the advantage of Taylor in the division” of the ground between them.

The first burial — the Greene colony's telling: The first long reminiscence Howard prints is a Greene family pioneer's — one of the forty-four who came down the south bank of the St. Joseph in the fall of 1832 to Sumption Prairie, in Greene township southwest of the city, and who writes in 1905 as one of the last of them alive. His caravan's arrival closes on his father's words at the corner of a lonely cornfield: “At home at last.” Four months later came “the first dark cloud”: the death of Isaac Rudduck, about twenty-one, in January 1833. The telling is in the details a community keeps: William Sumption gave an acre for the burying ground; the narrator's brother John, fresh from a carpenter's apprenticeship, made the coffin of poplar boards hauled forty miles with oxen; the narrator and his brother Nelson were sent to the thick woods to peel basswood bark, boil it and stain the coffin; the body was taken in a lumber wagon, and “the lines of the harness were taken from the team to lower the body to its last resting place.” And the memory he carries out of it is not the coffin but the weather: “the large snowflakes coming down on the little company of neighbors and mourners” — vivid, he says, as the last funeral he attended seventy-two years later, with James Oliver standing at his side.

The prairie childhood — Hugh V. Compton's telling: Compton came to Terre Coupee prairie, in the county's west, in June 1836, aged seven, and wrote it for the New Carlisle Gazette in 1906. His stock is a boy's: the neighbors at the old home in Montgomery county petting the family's pet deer, “with a bell on its neck,” and then setting the dogs on it to see it run; the winter of 1836–37, when “five or six hundred Indians” camped across the road from the church on their way to Detroit to receive the government's pay for their lands, buying everything to eat and making soup of what a hog-butchering had thrown away; the schoolroom where the teacher, told two wrestling boys were fighting, ordered three whips and commanded each to whip the other — Compton refused, the other boy did his part, “and the teacher whipped me because I would not whip the other boy, so I received a double portion”; and the store boy he rode with on wood-hauling trips that fall of 1837, Schuyler Colfax, afterwards Vice-President of the United States, who managed the Sunday school with his mother and stepfather, and whose outgrown clothes were young Compton's fine clothes. A vice-president as a memory of hand-me-downs: that is the scale at which the reminiscence stock works, and why Howard printed it whole.

What Chapman adds, and does not: The county's other great history, Chapman's of 1880, carries the famous pioneer-life matter — “Prairie Fires,” “Wild Hogs,” “Wolf Hunts,” “Bee-Hunting,” “Snakes” — in its table of contents, and a reader might take them for this county's tales. They are not: those chapters belong to Chapman's general History of Indiana, and the same chapters, at the same pages, head the contents of his Elkhart County history the next year. They are Indiana's pioneer stock in a Chicago publisher's binding, printed for every county he sold. The distinction is this section's whole method, stated on an example: a tale belongs to South Bend's file when its teller and its ground are South Bend's — Stull on Vistula avenue, the Greene boy over his brother's coffin, Compton and his double portion — and the wolf hunts stay where Chapman filed them, under the state.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1907), vol. 1, pp. 143–151 — the reminiscences: the Greene colony pioneer's narrative (the forty-four of fall 1832, “At home at last,” Isaac Rudduck's burial, the snowflakes, James Oliver at the last funeral); “Sec. 2 — By John Stull” (the 1832 fort plans on Vistula avenue, Black Hawk's defeat ending the scare, Taylor's double log house and Coquillard's satisfaction); “Sec. 3 — Paper by William D. Bulla” (read before the Northern Indiana Historical Society, winter 1900); “Sec. 4 — Recollections of Hugh V. Compton” (as written for the New Carlisle Gazette, 16 November 1906: the pet deer, the five or six hundred Indians, the double whipping, Schuyler Colfax); “VII. Old Settlers' Reunions” (the old folks recounting the stories of other days).
2. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chicago, 1880) — contents: “Pioneer Life,” with “Prairie Fires 152, Wild Hogs 156, Wolf Hunts 157, Bee-Hunting 158, Snakes 158,” falling in the work's History of Indiana portion; the same chapters and pagination heading the contents of Chapman's History of Elkhart County, Indiana (1881).