"History of Decatur County and Its People" Volume I

Prof. J. M. Howell and Heman C. Smith, Supervising Editors

The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, Chicago IL, 1915.
 
Chapter XIII ~ Early Settlement of Garden Grove
Pages 142 - 153
By Heman C. Smith
 It appears that what is now known as Decatur County, Iowa, has had attraction for the oppressed, not only of other nations, but of our own. Five years prior to the advent of the Hungarians a settlement was made at Garden Grove by exiles from a sister state. To enter into the merits of the controversy which caused them to be expelled from their homes is not our province. It is the old story of long-established organizations objecting to the formation of new ones, and of protesting to the point of violence. Without entering into discussion of the issues, it will be sufficient to present the condition of this people as they left their former homes and arrived within the precincts of what is now Decatur County. In doing this we cannot do better than to quote from an address delivered by Col. Thomas L. KANE before the Pennsylvania Historical Society, on the 26th of March, 1850:

"A few years ago, ascending the Upper Mississippi in the autumn when its waters were low, I was compelled to travel by land past the region of the rapids. My road lay through the half-breed tract, a fine section of Iowa, which the unsettled state of its land titles had appropriated as a sanctuary for coiners, horse thieves and other outlaws. I had left my steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the lower fall, to hire a carriage, and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the swarming flies, the only scavengers of the locality. From this place to where the deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see everywhere sordid, vagabond and idle settlers; and a country marred, without being improved, by their careless hands.

"It was descending the last hillside upon my journey, when a landscape in delightful contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its bright, new dwellings, set in cool, green gardens, ranging up around a stately dome-shaped hill, which was crowned by a noble marble edifice, whose high, tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city appeared to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the background there rolled off a fair country, conquered by the careful lines of fruitful husbandry. The unmistakable marks of industry, enterprise, and educated wealth everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most striking beauty.

"It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a skiff, and rowing across the river, landed at the chief wharf of the city. No one met me there, I looked, and saw no one. I could hear no one move ; though the quiet everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz, and the water-ripples break against the shallow of the beach. I walked through the solitary streets. The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening spell of loneliness, from which I almost feared to wake it; for plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing up in the paved ways; rains had not entirely washed away the prints of dusty footsteps.

"Yet I went unchecked. I went into empty workshops, ropewalks, and smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his work-bench and shavings, his unfinished sash and casing. Fresh bark was in the tanner's vat, and the fresh-chopped light wood stood piled against the baker's oven. The blacksmith's shop was cold; but his coal heap, and ladling pool, and crooked watering horn, were all there, as if he had gone for a holiday. No work people anywhere looked to know my errand. If I went into the gardens, clinking the latch loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heart's-ease, and lady-slippers, and draw a drink with the water-sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain; or, knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and sunflowers, hunted over the beds for cucumbers and loveapples — no one called out to me from any opened window, or dog sprang forward to bark and alarm. I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered them, I found dead ashes white upon the hearths, and had to tread a-tiptoe, as if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes from the naked floors.

"On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard; but there was no record of plague there, nor did it in any wise differ much from other Protestant American cemeteries. Some of the mounds were not long sodded; some of the stones were newly set, their dates recent, and their black inscriptions glossy in the mason's hardly dried lettering ink. Beyond the graveyard, out in the fields, I saw, in one spot where the fruited boughs of a young orchard had been roughly torn down, the still smouldering (sic) remains of a barbecue fire that had been constructed of rails from the fencing around it. It was the latest sign of life there. Fields upon fields of heavy headed yellow grain lay rotting ungathered upon the ground. No one was at hand to take in their rich harvest. As far as the eye could reach, they stretched away — they sleeping too in the hazy air of autumn.

"Only two portions of the city seemed to suggest the import of this mysterious solitude. On the southern suburb, the houses looking out upon the country showed, by their splintered woodwork and walls shattered to the foundation, that they had lately been the mark of a destructive cannonade. And in and around the splendid temple, which had been the chief object of my admiration, armed men were barracked, surrounded by their stacks of musketry and pieces of heavy ordnance. These challenged me to render an account of myself, and why I had the temerity to cross the water without a written permit from a leader of their band.

"Though these men were generally more or less under the influence of ardent spirits, after I had explained myself as a passing stranger, they seemed anxious to gain my good opinion. They told the story of the dead city; that it had been a notable manufacturing and commercial mart, sheltering over twenty thousand persons; that they had waged war with its inhabitants for several years and had finally been successful only a few days before my visit, in an action fought in front of the ruined suburb; after which they had driven them forth at the point of the sword. The defense, they said, had been obstinate, but gave way on the third day's bombardment. They boasted greatly of their prowess, especially in this battle, as they called it; but I discovered that they were not of one mind as to certain of the exploits that had distinguished it; one of which, as I remember, was, that they had slain a father and his son, a boy of fifteen, not long residents of the fated city, whom they admitted to have borne a character without reproach.

"It was after nightfall when I was ready to cross the river on my return. The wind had freshened since the sunset, and the water seeping roughly into my little boat, I hedged higher up the stream than the point I had left in the morning and lighted to where a faint glimmering invited me to steer. Here, among the dock and rustles, sheltered only by the darkness, without roof between them and the sky, I came upon a crowd of several hundred human creatures, whom my movements roused from uneasy slumber upon the ground. Passing these on my way to the light I found that it came from a tallow candle in a paper funnel shade, such as is used by street venders, and which, flaming and guttering away in the bleak air off the water, shone flickeringly on the emaciated features of a man in the last stage of a bilious remittent fever. They had done their best for him. Over his head was something like a tent, made of a sheet or two, and he rested on a partially torn straw mattress, with a hair sofa cushion under his head. His gaping jaw and glazing eye told how short a time he used these luxuries; though a seemingly excited and bewildered person, who might have been his wife, seemed to find hope in occasionally forcing him to swallow awkwardly, sips of the tepid river water, from a burned and battered bitter-smelling tin coffee-pot. Those who knew better had furnished the apothecary he needed; a toothless old bald-head, whose manner had the repulsive dullness of a man familiar with death scenes. He, so long as I remained, mumbled in his patient's ear a monotonous and melancholy prayer, between the pauses of which I heard the hiccup and sobbing of two little girls, who were sitting up on a piece of driftwood outside.

"Dreadful, indeed, was the suffering of these forsaken beings; bowed and cramped by cold and sunburn, alternating as each weary day and night dragged on, they were, almost all of them, the crippled victims of disease. They were there because they had no homes, nor hospital, nor poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not satisfy the feeble cravings of their sick; they had not bread to quiet the fractious hunger-cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all of them alike, were bivouacked in tatters, wanting even covering to comfort those whom the sick shiver of fever was searching to the marrow.

"These were Mormons, in Lee County, Iowa, in the fourth week of the month of September, in the year of our Lord 1846. The city -- it was Nauvoo, 111. The Mormons were the owners of that city, and the smiling country around. And those who had stopped their plows, who had silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles, and their workshop wheels; those who had put out their fires, who had eaten their food, spoiled their orchards, and trampled under foot their thousands of acres of unharvested bread; these were the keepers of their dwellings, the carousers in their temple, whose drunken riot insulted the ears of the ____.

"I think it was as I turned from the wretched night-watch of which 1 have spoken, that I first listened to the sounds of revel of a party of the guard within the city. Above the silent hush of the voices of many, occasionally rose distinct the loud oath-tainted exclamation, and the falsely intonated scrap of vulgar song; but lest this requiem should go unheeded, every now and then, when their boisterous orgies strove to attain a sort of ecstatic climax, a cruel spirit of insulting frolic carried some of them up into the high belfry of the temple steeple, and there, with the wickedness of inebriates, they whooped, and shrieked, and beat the ___ that I had seen, and rang in charivaric unison their loud-tongued steamboat bell.

"They were, all told, not more than six hundred and forty persons who were thus lying on the river flats. But the Mormons in Nauvoo and its dependencies had been numbered the year before at over twenty thousand. Where were they? They had last been seen, carrying in mournful train their sick and wounded, halt and blind, to disappear behind the western horizon, pursuing the phantom of another home. Hardly anything else was known of them; and people asked with curiosity, 'What had been their fate — what their fortunes?' "

As stated by Colonel KANE, these people whom he visited on the banks of the Mississippi were but the remnant of the people who had inhabited the city described by him, most of whom had already departed for the West.

Iowa, with her magnificent resources, was then but little known. In December, 1853, George William CURTIS wrote to a friend in the East from Milwaukee, Wis., saying: "I have seen a prairie, I have darted all day across a prairie, I have been near the Mississippi, I have been invited to Iowa, which lies somewhere over the western horizon."

It was into this almost unknown region that this unfortunate people launched in those early days to find a resting place where they could again build their homes and enjoy the freedom of which their country boasted.

Several companies had left the City of Nauvoo, taking a westward course into this unknown region. The particular company of which we speak left Nauvoo in the early part of February, 1846. It was composed of several hundred families. They made their first camp on Sugar Creek, a few miles west of the river, where they remained for nearly a month, during which time they had great difficulty in getting sustenance for themselves and their cattle and horses. Orson PRATT who was a leading spirit in the movement, in his private journal, remarks concerning this time that they required many hundreds of bushels of grain daily; but as they had not yet launched into regions altogether uninhabited, they were enabled to buy large quantities of Indian corn from time to time with money and labor.

On March 1st the company moved on. The following day they camped on the banks of the Des Moines River, four miles below the Village of Farmington. Then they proceeded up the east bank of the river until they reached Bonaparte's Mills, where they crossed the river on March 5th. The weather was cold; and it being too early in the spring for grass, their teams subsisted upon the limbs and bark of trees. Heavy rains and snows impeded their progress, while frosty nights rendered the situation very uncomfortable. Their camp was organized thoroughly, with captains of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens; and all other necessary officers. Their condition was made more tolerable by the hunters finding game; and Mr. PRATT says they brought into camp more or less deer, wild turkeys and prairie hens every day.

The real condition of this company can be best described by quoting again from the address of Colonel KANE:

"Under the most favorable circumstances, an expedition of this sort, undertaken at such a season of the year, can scarcely fail to be disastrous. But the pioneer company had set out in haste, and were very imperfectly supplied with necessities. The cold was intense. They moved in the teeth of keen-edged northwest winds, such as sweep down the Iowa peninsula from the ice bound regions of the timber-shaded Slave Lake and Lake of the Woods; on the bald prairie there, nothing above the dead grass breaks their free course over the hard rolled hills. Even along the scattered water courses, where they broke the thick ice to give their cattle drink, the annual autumn fires had left little wood of any value. The party, therefore, often wanted for good camp fires, the first luxuries of all travelers; but, to men insufficiently furnished with tents and other shelters, almost an essential to life. After days of fatigue, their nights were often passed in restless efforts to save themselves from freezing. The stock of food proved inadequate ; and as their systems became impoverished, their suffering from cold increased.

"Sickened with catarrhal affections, manacled by the fetters of dreadfully acute rheumatism, some contrived for a while to get over the shortening day's march and drag along some others. But the sign of an impaired circulation soon began to show itself in the liability of all to be dreadfully frost-bitten. The hardiest and strongest became helplessly crippled. About the same time the strength of their beasts of draft began to fail. The small supply of provender that they could carry with them had given out. The winter-bleached prairie straw proved devoid of nourishment, and they could only keep them from starving by seeking for the browse, as it is called, a green bark, and tender buds, and branches of the cotton wood, and other stinted growths of the hollows.

"To return to Nauvoo was apparently the only escape; but this would have been to give occasion for fresh mistrust, and so to bring new troubles to those they had left there behind them. They resolved at least to hold their ground, and to advance as they might, were it only by limping through the deep snows a few slow miles a day. They found a sort of comfort in comparing themselves to the exiles of Siberia, and sought cheerfulness in earnest prayers for the spring — longed for as morning by the tossing sick.

"The spring came at last. It overtook them in the Sac and Fox country, still on the naked prairie, not yet half way over the trail they were following between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. But it brought its own share of troubles with it. The months with which it opened proved nearly as trying as the worst of winter.

"The snow and sleet and rain which fell, as it appeared to them without intermission, made the road over the rich prairie soil as impassable as one vast bog of heavy black mud. Sometimes they would fasten the horses and oxen of four or five wagons to one, and attempt to get ahead in this way, taking turns; but at the close of a day of hard toil for themselves and their cattle, they would find themselves a quarter or a half mile from the place they left in the morning. The heavy rains raised all the watercourses; the most trifling streams were impassable. Wood fit for bridging was often not to be had, and in such cases the only recourse was to halt for the freshets to subside — a matter in the case of the headwaters of the Chariton, for instance, of over three weeks' delay.

"These were dreary waitings upon Providence. The most spirited and sturdy murmured most at their forced inactivity. And even the women, whose heroic spirits had been proof against the lowest thermometric fall, confessed their tempers fluctuated with the ceaseless variations of the barometer. They complained, too, that the health of their children suffered more. It was the fact, that the open winds of March and April brought with them more mortal sickness than the sharpest freezing weather.

"The frequent burials made the hardiest sicken. On the soldier's march it is matter of discipline, that after the rattle of musketry over his comrade's grave, he shall tramp it to the music of some careless tune in a lively quickstep. But, in the Mormon Camp, the companion who lay ill and gave up the ghost within view of all, all saw as he stretched a corpse, and all attended to his last resting place. It was a sorrow, too, of itself to simple hearted people, the deficient pomp of their imperfect style of funeral. The general hopefulness of human — including Mormon — nature, was well illustrated by the fact, that the most provident were found unfurnished with undertaker's articles; so that bereaved affection was driven to the most melancholy make-shifts.

"The best expedient generally was to cut down a log of some eight or nine feet long, and slitting it longitudinally, strip off its bark in two half cylinders. These, placed aroma the body of the deceased and bound firmly together with withes made of the laburnum, formed a rough sort of tubular coffin which surviving relations and friends, with a little show of black crape, could follow with its enclosure to the hole, a bit of ditch, dug to receive it in the wet grounds of the prairie. They grieved to lower it down so poorly clad, and in such an unheeded grave. It was hard — was it right, thus hurriedly to plunge it in one of the undistinguishable waves of the great land sea, and leave it behind them there, under the cold north rain, abandoned to be forgotten? They had no tombstones; nor could they find rocks to pile the monumental cairn. So, when they had filled up the grave, and over it prayed a miserere prayer, and tried to sing a hopeful psalm, their last office was to seek out landmarks, or call in the surveyor to help them to determine the bearings of valley bends, headlands, or forks and angles of constant streams, by which its position should in the future, be remembered and recognized. The name of the beloved person, his age, the date of his death, and these marks were all registered with care. The party was then ready to move on. Such graves mark all the line of the first year of the Mormon travel — dispiriting milestones to failing stragglers in the rear.

"It is an error to estimate largely the number of Mormons dead of starvation, strictly speaking. Want developed disease, and made them sick under fatigue, and maladies that would otherwise have proved trifling. But only those died of it outright who fell in out-of-the-way places, that the hand of brotherhood could not reach. Among the rest no such thing as plenty was known, while many went in hungered. If but a part of a group was supplied with provision, the only result was, that the whole went on the half or quarter ration, according to the sufficiency that there was among them; and this so ungrudgingly and contentedly, that, till some crisis of trial to their strength, they were themselves unaware that their health was sinking, and their vital force impaired. Hale young men gave up their own provided food and shelter to the old and helpless, and walked their way back to parts of the frontier states, chiefly Missouri and Iowa, where they were not recognized, and hired themselves out for wages, to purchase more. Others were sent there to exchange for meal and flour, or wheat and corn, the table and bed furniture, and other last resources of personal property which a few had still retained.

"In a kindred spirit of paternal forecast, others laid out great farms in the wilds, and planted in them the grain saved for their own bread, that there might be harvests for those who should follow them. Two of these, in the Sac and Fox country, and beyond it, Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah, included within their fences above two miles of land apiece, carefully planted in grain, with a hamlet of comfortable log cabins in the neighborhood of each.

"Through all this, the pioneers found redeeming comfort in the thought, that their own suffering was the price of humanity to their friends at home. But the arrival of spring proved this a delusion. Before the warm weather had made the earth dry enough for easy travel, messengers came in from Nauvoo to overtake the party, with fear-exaggerated tales of outrage, and to urge the chief men to hurry back to the city, that they might give counsel and assistance there. The enemy had only waited till the emigrants were supposed to be gone on their road too far to return to interfere with them, and then renewed their aggressions."

Notwithstanding this suffering, however, they seemed to have been cheerful and devoted to their convictions. Under date of April 5, Elder PRATT says:

"It being Sunday, a portion of our camp met together, to offer up our sacrament to the Most High. After a few remarks by myself and Bishop MILLER, we proceeded to break bread, and administer in the holy ordinance of the Lord's supper. At 6 o'clock in the evening we met with the captains of companies to make arrangements for sending twelve or fourteen miles to the settlements for corn to sustain our animals."

The next day, April 6th, his journal records the following:

"This morning, at the usual hour of prayer, we bowed before the Lord with thankful hearts, it being just sixteen years since the organization of this church, and we were truly grateful for the many manifestations of the goodness of God towards us as a people."

On the same day they sent nine or ten wagons with four yoke of oxen on each wagon to the settlements to obtain corn. These teams were gone two days, returning on the 8th, most of them empty. Great difficulty was found in finding sustenance for teams as they moved slowly westward.

On April 16th they arrived at a grove, which is described by Elder PRATT as "a very pleasant grove which we called Paradise; and about a mile to the south found the grass very good." Here they stopped several days and recruited their teams. Resuming their journey on the 22d they arrived at their temporary resting place on April 24th, 1846. Under that date Elder PRATT records the following:

"Yesterday we traveled about eight miles, today six miles. We came to a place which we named Garden Grove. At this point we determined to form a small settlement and open farms for the benefit of the poor, and such as were unable, for the present, to pursue their journey farther, and also for the benefit of the poor who were yet behind."

On the 27th he records that at the sound of the horn they gathered together to organize for labor. One hundred men were appointed for cutting trees, splitting rails, and making fence; forty-eight to cut logs for the building of log houses; several were appointed to build a bridge; a number more for the digging of wells; some to make wood for plows; and several more to watch the flocks and keep them from straying; while others were sent several days' journey into the Missouri settlements to exchange horses, feather beds, and other property, for cows, provisions, etc.

On May 10th Elder PRATT'S journal records the following:

"A large amount of labor has been done since arriving in this grove; indeed the whole camp are very industrious. Many houses have been built, wells dug, extensive farms fenced, and the whole place assumed the appearance of having been occupied for years, and clearly shows what can be accomplished by union, industry, and perseverance."

The recognized leader of this movement was Brigham YOUNG; but Elder Orson PRATT, and his brother Parley P. PRATT, seemed to come more clearly into the limelight of history during the movement than did Elder Young. They were apparently the leading spirits. Elder Orson PRATT was a scholar of no mean attainments; and during their travels from Nauvoo to Garden Grove, frequently took observations from the sun by the use of instruments in his possession by which he ascertained the latitude of their camp and corrected their time. He ascertained that Garden Grove was in latitude forty degrees and fifty-two minutes. How nearly this agrees with later observations we are not able to say, but it is approximately correct.

Among the leading spirits was also Bishop George MILLER, who was not always in harmony with others of the leaders, in consequence of which he finally left them at Winter Quarters on Missouri River.

Their meeting-house was located on what is now the northeast one quarter of the northeast one quarter of section 33, 70, 24, now a part of the farm of ___ WATERS, and within the present corporate limits of the Town of Garden Grove.

Two farms were fenced and cultivated with an area respectively of 1,500 acres; a mill was erected for grinding corn on the south line of section 28, midway of the section.

The cemetery was located in the southeast part of the southeast quarter of section 28. There are now more than one hundred owners of the realty that w^as originally contained within the confines of these two fields mentioned above.

The leading men remained at Garden Grove but a short time, resuming their journey on May 11th, to pursue their western pilgrimage age and form other settlements for like purposes at what they called Mount Pisgah, in Union County, and at Kanesville (Council Bluffs), Iowa. Such were the people, and such were the circumstances under which the first town was founded in Decatur County. Leaving this place these leading men left behind them a sufficient company to cultivate these fields and raise grain for the sustenance of other parties who were to follow them in the exodus.

The colony was maintained until the spring of 1852, some going and others coming from time to time, and it is estimated that at times there were as many as 300 families at Garden Grove.

Finally they all disappeared, leaving their temporary homes to be occupied by the later emigrants who came to that fruitful land, until now there is no vestige left of the early settlement except the name Garden Grove, which is appropriately perpetuated. During the time of the settlement Garden Grove was a recruiting station for emigrants coming from Europe and the eastern states en route for Utah.
 
 
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