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ing post and also the government post for the Ottawa Indians, and west a trading post at St. Joseph," nothing else east, west and north, and these only places for bartering furs of the Indians. To the south was Carey Mission1o on the St. Joseph River near Niles. This was established in 1822 in accordance with the provisions of a treaty by General Cass with the Potawatomies in 1821. This mission proved to be the means of opening up the St. Joseph Valley to permanent settlement. The military road leading to Fort Wayne, from thence the trail of Isaac McCoy, the founder of the mission, to the rich valley of the St. Joseph were speedily taken advantage of by 'Squire Thompson, the first settler of Berrien County, in 1823 by Baldwin Jenkins, Cass County's first settler in 1824, and their followers. In 1825 the United States Government laid out the military road from Detroit to Fort Dearborn, Chicago. About the same time the Erie Canal11 was completed, also the steam navigation had commenced on the lakes, thereby stimulating emigration from New York and states farther east. These hardy emigrants came west over the Chicago Road in the southern tier of counties, and over the territorial road, established about 1834, in the second tier, but when they reached the valley of the St. Joseph the choicest locations on the prairies were already occupied by the followers of Boone and coadjutors.

To go back now to the narrative which opened this paper. After viewing the country in the fall of 1832, my father returned home and made preparations to move to the Territory, and June 9, 1833, left Dayton, Ohio, arriving at Little Prairie Ronde July 1st, being twenty-one days on the road, the distance being 234 miles, an average of eleven miles per day, some days going only three miles. He started with two wagons, two yokes of oxen attached to one and a span of horses and one yoke of oxen to the other. Owing to bad roads the horses soon gave

Another yoke of oxen was purchased and the journey finished in that way, except in bad places the teams would all be hitched to one

The Ottawa station near Grand Rapids was called Thomas' mission in honor of Thomas, one of the first Baptist missionaries. This station was established by Mr. McCoy at the Rapids before 1825. In that year buildings were erected. For a time it was in charge of Polke. Then came the Rev. Leonard Slater who served at the mission from 1828 to 1835 when it was abandoned. Kent Co. History, pp. 171-177.

"At St. Joseph, William Burnett had established a trading post on the site of the old French post as early as 1785, and after his death it was carried on by his son James until his death in 1835. Vol. XXXV, pp. 85-95, this series.

1oCarey Mission. See Vol. V, p. 146, this series.

"The impetus given to lake navigation by the opening of Erie canal can be seen in the number of steamboats which appeared on the lakes that year. The Superior which was built in 1822, ran between Buffalo and Detroit and brought many emigrants seeking homes. The Chippewa, built in 1824, carried passengers between Monroe and Detroit. The Henry Clay launched June 9, 1825, and the Pioneer, late in August of the same year brought weekly loads of from 300 to 400 passengers to Detroit during that fall. See daily papers of Detroit for 1825.

wagon. Four cows, several calves and two pure Shorthorn Durham cattle were driven. My father, mother, seven children and three young men who were coming to view the country and help us on the journey, comprised our party, not omitting two fierce dogs for defence against wolves and other wild animals. We generally camped where water and grass could be found, but sometimes in dense forests. Water however was abundant but at times only in mud-holes. We occupied a house but one night on our journey and that was an abandoned one on Sugar Hill in the Elkhart Bottoms. Our shelter was a portable tent at night for my parents and sisters-the rest slept in the covered wagons above the loads. The cooking was done by an open fire, the baking in a tin reflector, by my mother and elder sisters. The different yokes of oxen were strangers to each other, consequently a bell was required to each yoke. No less than seven bells were used and the clanging of them after going into camp at night can be imagined but not easily described. Notwithstanding these precautions, at times half a day would pass in getting ready for a start. At the time of our arrival there were about thirty-five families in the settlement of Volinia Township, including those in Van Buren County. An election in July, 1833, polled thirtytwo votes for delegate to Congress, Lucius Lyon receiving thirty-one votes. My father settled on the north bank of the Little Walk (Dowagiac Creek)-not a wagon track, road or settler on the south side for eight miles to Young's prairie, to the east and northeast Fowerfield and Three Rivers, fourteen to eighteen miles. Nothing but the primeval forest, the surveyors' lines alone distinguishing it from the redman's hunting ground of centuries previous.

As before remarked the first settlements were made on the prairies and known by the name of the prairie where located; Whitman's mills. and Cassopolis in 1833 were the only exceptions. The log cabins were invariably built at the edge of the timber joining the prairie without regard to section lines; in fact the section lines were not run when the first settlers arrived and their claims were guessed at or stepped off. The field notes of Decatur Township say the township boundaries were surveyed by William Brookfield12 in 1827, and section lines by E. H. Lytle, January 7, to 16, 1830. Roads were laid from one settler to the next in as near a direct line as the nature of the ground admitted,

12 William Brookfield and his wife conducted a select school on the southeast corner of Woodward and Woodbridge in 1817. In 1819 they moved to Jefferson avenue to the residence of O. W. Miller. Mr. Brookfield presented one of the first papers before the Detroit lyceum, entitled "English books most proper to be introduced into the seminaries of Detroit." In the Detroit Gazette for Nov. 3, 1820, we find an announcement that Mr. Brookfield has invented a diving machine which resembles a coat of mail. Later, Nov. 25th, comes an announcement that he will give a public exhibition of its possibilities. In 1825 Mr. Brookfield surveyed lands for Judge Woodward and was employed in surveying lands in the interior of Michigan Territory.

STURDY PIONEERS OF VAN BUREN AND CASS

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continually changing as new settlers arrived or a farmer wished to extend his fields. Very few of the original roads first laid out are in existence to-day, and it is doubtful if one in ten of the original building sites is still occupied as such. The houses were invariably log cabins, the logs notched on the under side with the saddle on top, and when additional room was required the double cabin plan was adopted, that is two cabins with the ends eight or ten feet apart and the space roofed over, the cabin doors opening into the hall. The gable ends were of logs and the binding logs used as ribs to support the clapboard shingles, which were held down by weight poles. The chimneys were built on the outside of one end, the jams were made of clay pounded hard and the upper part of the chimney made of sticks daubed with clay. The axe, saw, auger, and froe, to split the shakes, were all the tools needed. No nails were used unless a few wrought ones made by the blacksmith for the door. Briefly this was the pioneer style of log cabin. In 1833, the time of which I am writing, it is doubtful if there was a cabin with rafters and board gable in Cass or Van Buren counties, and for years after you could distinguish the eastern settler from the southern by the board gable with rafters, the logs squared at the corners and the chimney built on the inside of the house without jams and supported on curved timbers of a natural crook. The farming tools of the pioneer were of the simplest kind, hardly differing from their ancestors of fifty to one hundred years before-an axe, iron wedge, bar share plow, which was share and land side combined, to which a wooden mouldboard was attached, shovel plow, sometimes iron harrow teeth, more often wooden ones, a heavy hoe, and for cutting grain a sickle, as late as 1834 in some instances. Grain was stacked around a circular threshing floor of dirt, upon which it was tramped out by horses and winnowed at first, by one man throwing it up in the air while two men flopped a sheet to fan it. The first fanning-mill in the settlement was in 1831. My father bought one in 1834 and that was often lent. The wheat was in poor condition for flour, the smut and dirt mixed with it, and the rude mills of that day had few appliances to clean and scour the grain compared with the complicated machinery of flouring mills of the present time. The result was a leaden colored product much unlike in taste, looks or smell, the snow-white roller process flour of to-day, and the average quality of flour was all that could be depended on, for, owing to the difficulties of threshing on account of stormy weather at times, bad roads and mills a long distance away, settlers were often out of flour and borrowing was the rule and general practice. If a thrifty settler took advantage of favorable weather and used care in threshing his wheat and kept a good supply of nice flour on hand, the natural result was it would be lent out and returned in an article disheartening

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to his good wife and discouraging to his forethought and enterprise. Sometimes even borrowing was unavailable as, for instance once when Dolphin Morris and his brother were gone fourteen days to mill and yet it was only thirty miles to Laceys mill near Niles. Some difficulty of the mill at first, then on returning a severe snow storm set in with rain and sleet, freezing a coat on the snow; consequently they abandoned their loads and wagons except the fore wheels of one wagon with a small amount of flour for temporary use, and even then they were three days in going twenty miles to reach their families, who were out of bread and fearing the worst that could happen to their absent husbands. One more of a different nature might be related. The spring of 1832 was peculiarly unfortunate-the Sac war for one thing, when everyone expected an uprising of the resident Indians and nearly all the settlers were called out to repel the threatened invasion of BlackHawk and his warriors. Happily this scare soon passed away and the settlers returned to their families, but the weather was very unfavorable for crops, the corn having been cut down twice with the frost and no seed for replanting. As a last resort Mr. Morris sent a man and a boy of fifteen with pack of horses to Fort Defiance, Ohio, over one hundred miles, to procure seed corn. This place is at the rapids of the Maumee river, and the site of the battle where "Mad Anthony" Wayne achieved his great victory over the Indians thirty-four years before, August 20, 1794. They were successful in getting two bushels of seed corn, and arrived home late Saturday night. The next day all hands turned out and planted the corn, which was the only corn raised that year in the neighborhood.

The dress of the settlers was of a primitive style as to material and fashion. With the men, the old-time hunting shirt had given way to a garment called wamus, a loose blouse with narrow binding at top in place of a collar with a single button at the throat, the skirts reaching the hips when loose, or to the waist when tied by the corners, as it was frequently worn; the material was linsey, a homespun cloth of cotton and wool, woven plain. Pantaloons were of jean, blue or butternut, with different shades of color as the different skeins of yarn took on a light or dark blue in dying. Occasionally buckskin pants were worn or pants faced with buckskin, fore and aft, as a sailor would say, where the protection would prove most serviceable. Feminine fashions. were at a stand still and it would be presumptuous for me to try to describe them, still it would be an easier task then than now, for as I look on this beautiful scene before me, who could describe the lovely toilets which meet the eye on every side, their style, color and material only eclipsed by the personal charms of the wearer. Suffice it to say that notwithstanding the poke bonnets, five to ten years old, the faces

of the belles and matrons beneath them were worthy of being the mothers and grandmothers of the radiant maidens of to-day.

The chief business of the pioneer was to live. Speculation and making money was not considered, as their locations and first settlements show. An easy place to farm was sought for, hence a choice location on a prairie was taking without considering the distance from Market. Rich lands were available near the St. Joseph River, navigable to the lake and thence east by water, but the emigrant passed on thirty miles, to a prairie even if it took two days to get a barrel of salt. What was time to men whose wants were so few and easily supplied? The woods, swamps and lakes were to them vast storehouses, furnishing them amusement as well as subsistence. Game of many kinds in profusion from the forests, the streams and lakes teaming with fish, wild honey from the woods, huckleberries and cranberries from the swamps and various other fruits in plenty all combined to render life at times a holiday. Not all sunshine however. In addition to drawbacks mentioned the great frost of June 20, 1835, should not be omitted, when the most promising crop in prospect was almost totally cut off, creating almost a famine, a few favored localities protected by lakes, only, escaping. No railroads then, as now, to transport the abundance of one part of the country to the needs of other parts. Transportation was a different affair compared with now. The roads were execrable, especially in the timber lands. Wagons were generally covered and an axe and log chain were always taken on trips of any distance, such as going to mill or market as roads were liable to be obstructed by trees blown down during rain storms or high winds.

13

September 21, 1834, John Shaw, a prominent settler of Volinia, with wagon and team of three horses, and a hired man my father sent with a wagon and two yoke of oxen, started on a trip from Little Parie Ronde to St. Joseph with wheat. First day they reached Paw Paw; second day, Emerson's Prospect Lake; third day in the woods; fourth day reached St. Joseph; fifth day sold loads, made purchases and reached Rulo's,1 a French settler, or nearly there, ten miles from St. Joseph; sixth day got to Paw Paw and the seventh day arrived home. They camped out all the way except two nights at Dodge's tavern at Paw Paw. He had little better than a shanty, having just commenced his hotel. I said camped all the way except Paw Paw, but must make one exception. On the evening of the fifth day, within a mile of Rulo's, a wagon tongue broke and Shaw left his team and went on to the house to get an auger to repair the tongue. Instead of returning at once he talked of their ac

13Rulo (Ruleaux) and Bartholomew Sharrai, a French Canadian, commenced the settlement of Bainbridge Township. History of Berrien and Van Buren Cos., p. 129.