The author of the following interesting article, Jacob Platt, was
born in Pennsylvania in 1840, and when two years of age was
brought by his parents, John and Martha (Gettis) Platt, to
Delaware County, who settled in the Dickson Settlement, Colony
Township, in 1843. Mr. Platt was raised in the settlement,
attended school there and experienced the joys and vicissitudes
peculiar to a new country. His relations of the early days are
intensely interesting; and the incidents described give so vivid
a local color to the article as to make it valuable to a work of
this description.
At the request of my friends I will endeavor to commit to paper
my earliest recollections of the conditions of the life of the
pioneers of Delaware County, their hardships, the difficulties
under which they labored and incidents thereto. My father settled
on Section 14, Colony Township, Delaware County, April 2, 1843.
At that time the writer was two years old. I have continued my
residence in the county to the present time -- November 1, 1907,
with the exception of three years' service in the army of my
country during the great rebellion. The lands were surveyed and
open for settlement, the Indian title being extinguished soon
after the close of the Black hawk war. Any person could enter as
much or as little land as they wanted by paying the Government
price of $1.25 per acre. Many persons came and after looking over
the broad prairies, covered with grass and wild flowers, returned
to their homes in the East, rather than endure the hardships
incident to pioneer life in Iowa. The first settlements were made
along the streams and brooks, where there were springs of water.
Timber grew along the water courses and the settler must have
both wood and water for his convenience; the timber was used both
for fuel and to fence his land. This was the reason the early
settler took up the poorer quality of land, instead of the rich,
rolling prairie that was spread out before him. Then it was
easier to burn the brush and clear an acre of land, after the
rails were made on that acre, than it was to haul the rails to
the prairie to be used for fence. There were no roads, no
bridges; our tams were oxen, so that travel was very slow, and it
took a full load for one yoke of oxen to make one rod of fence;
consequently, it was the cheapest and best way to fence the land
that you made the rails on. This was not ignorance on the part of
the settler; it was economy.
A young man came form the East to look up a situation and, while
looking over the land in and near our settlement, he was taken
sick with a fever, became delirious, and in his delirium he kept
saying repeatedly, "wood and water is the main thing,." This idea
was the main question in the location of a farm at that time.
There has been some inquiry as to who was the first settler in
the county, some claiming it was a man by the name of Bennett, at
Eads Grove, about three miles west of Greeley. He was not a
settler, for he only remained there through the winter of 1835-6.
He was a hunter and trapper and did not make any improvement as a
settler.
In the year 1834 Henry Teegardner, a Frenchman, settled and made
an improvement, clearing about four acres of land on the
southwest quarter of section 13, Colony Township, Delaware
County. He lived there two years, during which time he traded
with the Indians. He was also a hunter and sold his furs and
venison, bear meat and wild honey to the miners at Dubuque and
Galena. He moved from there on to the north fork of the
Maquoketa, near where the Town of New Vienna now stands. He was
afterwards killed by the Indians near Fort Crawford, Wisconsin.
His family escaped and two of his children visited the settlement
some years later and told the sad story of the death of their
father. The foundation logs of his cabin did not burn, but
remained there on the ground for a number of years. The land he
has cultivated grew to blackberry and plum bushes and that was
the condition it was in when I remember of seeing it first.
The early settlers of Delaware County were gathered in groups.
Where on man started an improvement, then the next man who came
along sat down by the side of him. These groups of families were
called colonies, or settlements; hence, we have Colony Township
in this county. David Moreland, Van Sicle and Wiltse settled near
the Town of Colesburg and it was called the Colony, the
postoffice bearing the name for many years.
DICKSON SETTLEMENT
The place where I
grew to manhood was called Dickson Settlement. Missouri Dickson
made his first improvement there in the year 1838, coming in the
autumn of 1837. He cut the wild grass and protected it with logs
and brush the he might have it to feed his oxen the next spring.
He also prepared the material for his cabin by cutting the logs
and making the clapboards to cover it. Delaware County at this
time was a veritable wilderness, untouched by the hand of
civilization. The Indians roamed unmolested over its broad
prairies and hunted wild game in its forests, where bear, deer,
elk and antelope flourished and fattened for the untutored savage
that inhabited its boundaries.
EARLY ROADS
Our first roads
were established along the Indian trails, that had been chosen by
the redmen as being the most feasible route between given points,
for Indians travel in single file. These trails were what we
termed paths and were used also by the settlers; some of the were
cut wider and roads established upon them. Some of the roads in
the northern part of the county being thus established remain
upon the same trails today.
INDIANS NOT TROUBLESOME TO
SETTLERS
The Indians were not troublesome.
Quite a number of small bands visited our settlement until they
were moved by the Government to their reservation in Minnesota,
at St. Paul, that being the Indian agency, established at the
head of navigation on the Mississippi. There were but few
depredations committed by the Indians. The different tribes, Sac
and Foxes, Musquakees and Winnebagoes, had become greatly reduced
in numbers by the Black Hawk war and had combined against their
stronger enemies, the great Sioux, so that they were masters of
the situation so far as Indian warfare was concerned. These
weaker tribes courted the friendship of the white man as against
their powerful enemy, the Sioux, and this is the reason settlers
along the Mississippi were not disturbed. If we had had the Sioux
nation to contend with we would have been driven from our homes
or massacred as were the settlers at Spirit Lake as late as 1857,
or those at New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1862, for which crimes
the Government hanged, at Mankato, at one time, thirty-eight
Indians. The Government, in order to establish peace among those
warlike tribes, established a strip two miles wide, reaching from
the Mississippi River and opposite Prairie du Chien to the mouth
of the Coon River, where Des Moines now stands. This was called
the "Neutral Ground." The Sioux were to occupy the territory on
the west and north and the other mentioned tribes were to occupy
the east side of this strip of land. This agreement being lived
up to by the Indians, it ended the warfare then existing between
them. The first map also shows only eight towns in Iowa
Territory. A few cattle were killed by the Indians near Greeley.
A horse was stolen from our settlement and a saddle from James
Rutherford, but the Indians were overtaken in their flight and
abandoned the horse and eluded the pursuers in the Turkey Timber.
