West Liberty History 1838-1938

Source: One Hundred Years of History
* Commemorating a Century of Progress in the West Liberty Community * WEST LIBERTY, IOWA
LOG CABIN HISTORY

Chapter XVII

FISHING

The Wapsie was a notable fishing stream in those days, and many are the " fish stories " told. A couple will suffice to show that, that accomplishment is not an invention of these later times. A venerable fisherman of those days, as well as a successful angler in the forties, tells of seeing a catfish in the Wapsie that was at least six feet in length, and those flexible appendages on the side of its head were like whiplashes. It was slowly making its way up the stream, accompanied by two others of lesser size, one on either side as a bodyguard, and of another that was captured which weighed thirty-five pounds. One day a man well along in years and so crippled with rheumatism that he walked with canes, was fishing along the creek when he saw a large pike lying close to the bank. Someone had wounded the fish with a spear, making a great hole in its back. Our fisherman had a happy thought. He would thrust one of his canes in the hole, and, with a sudden flirt, throw the fish out on the bank. He succeeded in the first part of the programme, but in the latter part there was a misapprehension, for the fish flirted first, knocking the cane from the old man's hands, and he, losing his balance, went headlong into the water. His lusty cries soon brought his son to his assistance, when he was safely landed instead of the fish.

While the settlers by this time were raising grain in abundance for their immediate needs, their mode of harvesting and threshing the same, was primitive in the extreme. The cradle was the usual machine for cutting the grain, and it was raked and bound by hand. One of these farmers tells of harvesting his first crop of wheat, a ten acre patch, with the hand sickle. The scythe and hand rake were the only tools used in securing their crop of wild hay, except the pitchfork, a rude barbarous two-tined tool, fashioned by the local blacksmith, with a handle whittled from a sapling. For threshing their grain, the flail was in common use, but some of it was trodden out with horses. To do this a circular piece of ground was cleared and made smooth and firm as practicable on which the grain was thinly and evenly spread, when a number of horses would be put on it and driven round and round till the grain was trodden from the straw, when the straw would be pitched to one side and the grained cleaned with the fanning mill. Later on a power machine called a " chaff piler " was introduced. This machine knocked the grain from the straw much as do the threshers of the present day, but the chaff and grain was delivered in combination and had to be separated by the fanning mill.

It seems incredible to the young farmers of the present time with all their modern appliances for harvesting and threshing their great fields of golden grain, in which horse and steam power play so conspicuous a part, that there are yet men living among them that used the sickle, cradle, scythe and hand rake in harvesting their entire crops of grain and hay; and who have swung the flail in rythmic measure on many a winter's day. But so it is, so swift has the tide of progress risen in the agriculture of the west.

The only road which connected the settlements with the outside world was but little more than a trail, leading from Moscow, or rather from Rock Island, through Moscow to the Indian trading post kept by John Gilbert on the Iowa river, about two miles below the present site of Iowa City. This trail led through the central settlement, passing across the present site of West Liberty and crossing the west branch of the creek in section 11-78-4 and then bearing northwesterly, running close to the spring in section 10, where was the Mormon cabin, then following the ridge past the homes of Asa Gregg, J. Springer and Robert Harbor, and thence out on the prairie to the trading post. This old trail, afterward widened to the semblance of a road, can yet be traced over hills and through hollows, wherever the plow has not obliterated its meandering way. A peculiar feature of this and other old roads, long in disuse, is, that while the land by the side of them may have grown up thickly to brush and trees, it is rare that the road bed has been invaded; and they can still be traced through pastures and woodland, plain and open as when marked by passing wheels.

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