Til the Coal Train Hauled It Away: A Memoir of the Rise and Demise of a Small Town

By Timothy Crumrin

In 1910 West Terre Haute, Indiana was the fastest growing town in the United States. Its population increased by an astonishing 376 percent from the previous decade. Its growth was spurred by the rich natural resources, coal, clay and gravel, that surrounded it. In essence, West Terre Haute's success was built on holes in the ground. When those resources were depleted, a downward spiral began. This book is an intimate look at the people, events, triumphs and tragedies of the town written by a native son. But it is not just the story of this Indiana town. It is representative of all the areas that relied upon a single industry or resource, from the New England mill towns to the steel towns of the Rust Belt, This book looks at the lives of people who took on life as it came.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781546204169

Timothy Crumrin

Timothy Crumrin is an award-winning historian and writer. He has written or edited over 35 scholarly publications and documentaries. His career includes serving twenty-five as a historian at Conner Prairie Museum. He is currently the President and Principle Consultant of the Historiker Consulting Group, a historical consulting firm dedicated to telling the STORY of history. In 2014 he received the prestigious Eli Lilly Lifetime Achievement in Indiana History Award.. He lives in Terre Haute, Indiana with his wife Robin, daughter Brynn and four dogs who share his office while he writes.

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Published by AuthorHouse 08/15/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0417-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0415-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-0416-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017912729

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This book is dedicated to…

My wife, Robin and daughter, Brynn, Who are my life

My mother, JoAnn Chrisman Crumrin, Words cannot convey…

My grandparents, Ray and Hilda Hants Chrisman, Who inspired me to be an historian

Hildy, Hank, Huwie and Beau, My constant companions

And

The people of West Terre Haute, Indiana: Past, Present, Future

Previous Works by Author

Non-Fiction

Voice of the Hammer: The Art and Mystery of Blacksmithing

Indiana Alma Maters: Student Life at Indiana Colleges, 1820-1860 [Co-Editor]

Building a Home, Preserving a Heritage [Contributor and Co-Editor]

A Hoosier Miscellany [Contributor and Editor]

Delaware Indian Language by C.C. Trowbridge, Edited by James Rementer [Contributor]

Gardens of the Early Midwest [Editor, 2nd Edition]

Fiction

A Sky Held Captive

CONTENTS

Foreword

Begettings

Pioneering

The Road To Macksville

Of Corn, Hogs And Black Diamonds

A Coming Together

Darkened Skies And Bluer Horizons

A Time Of Strange And Ominous Events

Stage Setting

Beyond The Bottoms: The Ward Lynching

Boomtown

Beyond The Bottoms: A Hoosier At The Birth Of Hollywood

People Of The Dump

Plateau And Decline

Darkening Decade

War Years

Beyond The Bottoms: A Story That Haunts

Me, Not The Beaver; West Terre Haute, Not Mayfield

FOREWORD

I AM A CLASSICALLY TRAINED HISTORIAN. However, this book is not primarily meant for my colleagues, though I hope they will find it useful. Instead, it is meant for the interested general reader. It does not contain scores of endnotes per page, as it might were it meant purely for other scholars. Instead, it assumes a general knowledge of American history, and footnotes are used to cite sources specific to the story.

I must admit that when I began this project I anticipated the resulting book would be a more traditional history. I expected that a significant amount of primary documents, such as letters, diaries, photo, and memoirs, would be available for my research. Sadly, I found that only a few such items, if they once existed, survived their time.

For that reason, I have interjected myself and my family into the narrative at times. This made the historian in me uncomfortable, but ultimately I believe it better allowed me to put a human face on the stories of people whose lives are rarely noted. Also, I feel my family was very representative of the majority of those who lived in West Terre Haute, working class people who faced life as it came.

Finally, though this is the story of one small town, West Terre Haute, Indiana, it is reflective of many other places in the United States. The foundation of West Terre Haute and its growth was built on natural resources. In this case, it was coal, clay and gravel. It was a supplier economy. And when those resources became depleted a downward spiral began. Much the same can be said of New England mill towns or the steel mill towns of the Rust Belt. Their individual stories may differ, but their experiences were similar.

CHAPTER ONE

Begettings

F OR MILLENNIA MAN DID NOT choose the places he dwelt, nature did. Until at least the coming of the railroads, it was easy access to streams, creeks, rivers and oceans that mainly determined where people settled. These were riverine peoples. Water was of the essence.

In this story it is a river. The Wabash.

And the river was the reason. In my memory the Wabash is a turgid, brown, slovenly ribbon of water that once swallowed my inebriated uncle’s snappy blue Buick convertible, and with it my new catcher’s mitt. It is a river too long silted with sloughed-off soil, a century of hog entrails, untold gallons of chemicals, and human waste.

But it was not always that way. Once it flowed with a blue grandeur. Streams of fish swam and surfaced in its cool waters. Sky-darkening flocks of birds flitted along its winding course. Mastodon, deer, bear and buffalo drank from its shores.

Eventually, so too did man.

But first, nature had to make them a place. There was the time of the glaciers. They ebbed and flowed across the continent. They brought with them rock, soil, weight. That primordial mass pushed down upon the earth beneath it. So heavy was it constricted, pushed with such force, that it forged a new underworld.

And then the world continued to warm. Achingly slowly, the ice melted. Inch by inch the southern borders of the glaciers crept backward to old boundaries. The low spots dug by fingers of ice became rivers, streams and lakes. In the new warmth towering trees and plants that would awe the eyes of modern man grew and died. In the wet places bogs filled with this decayed plant matter, called peat, formed. There, pressure and heat formed a new substance, coal.

Like much of Indiana, this land, my land, was shaped by these masses of ice and what they left behind, both above ground and below. The stage was set.

Finally came the people, their times spanning centuries. They came from other lands. They gathered around them, perhaps, whatever spirits, whatever gods they believed in. Maybe they offered up a kind of prayer, placating, pleading, seeking, a guide or protector for their journey.

Best current thought says they migrated across a newly revealed land bridge near present-day Alaska. Against unseemly odds they spread across harsh, forbidding continents. To modern eyes they would seem frail beings who could be so easily vanquished by weather, disease, and hardier animals seeking soft prey. But relentlessly, stubbornly, they came. Something, something within them, call it instinct, drive, a forged innate will to survive drove them beyond what they knew into the unknowable. They followed the spoor of the beasts that fed them, clothed them: mastodon, deer, bison. The animals that fed them, kept them alive. They spread, some going one way, some another. They would come to lands without names, without borders drawn on a map. Some, after unknown centuries, came to Indiana.

They were smaller in body, tinier in brain than we. They dwelt upon the land for ten millennia.

They are the people lost to us now.

Looking backward modern man, as is his wont, sought to categorize these peoples, define them in ways the modern mind could better understand. They came to be defined by their years, tools, advances in culture. Archaic, Woodlands, Misssissipian. They discovered a new way to live. They learned to cultivate the plants that grew wild around them. By doing so they also found a more recognizable thing, something called home. Home was where the water was.

Their descendants were known as Wea, Miami, Delaware, among others. The land was something that provided, something gave them life. It was not to be claimed as anyone’s property. But they soon lost their foothold on a land they believed given to all. Soon came those with other ideas.

The Wabash and its fertile valleys, teeming with enough life to feed all, with soils just begging for seed, with more water than could be drunk in centuries, became a battlefield between two worlds. In their heart everyone knew there would be only one victor, the newcomers with pale skins and strange ways.

The Wabash. It is also a river that is a border. In some areas you can live on wrong side of the tracks. Along this section of the Wabash you can be perceived as living on the wrong side of the river.

How that came to be is the tale.

CHAPTER TWO

Pioneering

P IONEER IS A POWERFUL, IMAGE-PROVOKING word in the American lexicon. The ideal/myth of the pioneer is one of the bedrock foundations of how the United States views itself. We are descended, goes that sentiment, from the sturdy individualists who tamed the ever-moving frontier. The land was there for the taking. It was waiting for the hardy, the ambitious, the civililizer, the pioneer.

Contrary to what many might think, great migrations in American history did not take place during hard times. Though one might recall the Dust Bowl days of the Joad-like poor making their exodus to California, most of the great shifting of people took place in more prosperous times. That is logical as potential movers needed funds. They had to sell their homes and properties to finance the move. They had to have money to purchase land in their new home.

But certain things had to happen before these large movements west could occur. The most important was the ending of what can be called both the first world war and the first American civil war. Both conflicts were a series of shifting alliances among, the French, the British, and finally, Americans. The French and Indian War (1754-1763) was a struggle between Britain and France for control of the Ohio Valley that merged with the world-wide conflict between Britain and France (and their allies) called the Seven Years’ War.

The end of those conflicts in 1763, which ceded control of the Ohio Valley to Britain, led to a 50 year-period that can be characterized as a civil war. Again this was a period of shifting alliances. The constant in these conflicts was they were always the losing side. Their last hope was the uprising led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, one of the great, but little appreciated, leaders in American history. When American forces finally defeated Tecumseh and his British allies at the Battle of Thames in Canada in 1813 the fate of the Ohio Valley was sealed.

The first large-scale migration took place between 1814 and 1819, called appropriately enough the Great Migration. There were many factors that resulted in this early mass movement of people. The economy strengthened at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the final defeat of the British and their Indian allies in the War of 1812. The victory allowed for the legal extinguishment of all but a few Native American titles of land in the Midwest.

An often overlooked spur for migration is the advertisement of the west. Early settlers wrote back home to extoll the richness and availability of cheap land, describing it as well-watered with deep productive soil. It was a New Eden thought some. Such word of mouth from those they knew often led to a figurative licking of lips and a steely determination to follow them as soon as possible.

Also important were traveler accounts, like that of David Thomas. A Quaker with an intense interest in horticulture, Thomas made an extensive tour of the new states in the west in 1816. His book, Travels Through the Western Country in the Summer of 1816, provided a mine of information about…the country, its plants and animals.

There also were expelling forces that drove people to depart. For those in the more crowded East land was less affordable and more difficult to find. Families that had lived on their own land for generations had so subdivided their acres to give sons their own patch found that there was not enough left to support a rising generation. Years of farming had further depleted the hard scrabble, rocky soil in the Northeast. Migrating west became the shining hope for those left with too little of the family land.

Some left for other reasons. Until Eli Whitney’s revolutionary cotton gin, which greatly facilitated cleaning the cotton bolls, some thought that cotton growing (and with it slavery) was on the wane. But the gin not only led to an explosion of cotton industry and slavery, but further entrenched the plantation system all over the South. This caused many small, yeoman farmers to realize that they could not compete with plantation owners and their legions of slaves. Knowing this, many decided to head north into states like Indiana.

In a time when income and other modern taxes were all but unknown, public domain land sales (in this case the lands north of the Ohio River and westward to the Mississippi) were the primary funders of the federal government. Revenue from land sales funded government operations, the military and infrastructure needs. But, perhaps more vital to this peopling of the new lands in the west was a series of legislative acts that made land more accessible and affordable to the common man.

Initially land sale criteria like minimum purchases of a section of land (640 acres) that had to be paid for in cash favored the wealthy or land consortiums. These speculators (like the future Terre Haute Land Company) purchased public domain lands at minimum prices and resold them in smaller lots at a profit. The average person seeking to purchase new lands was too often cut off from the process. The outcry against this was especially loud in the west.

Congress responded with a series of acts meant to liberalize land sale procedures and make the dream of land ownership more achievable to the ordinary citizen. The first of these was the Land Act of 1800, also known as the Harrison Act. William Henry Harrison, the congressional delegate from the Northwest Territory (which included the future Indiana) was a prime mover in the legislation. Harrison was well used to being harangued by those unable to afford land in the west and became their champion. He knew that better terms were needed to prevent squatters and make the peopling west a more fair and orderly process.

The 1800 act was the first step. Though it maintained the minimum price of $2.00 per acre, it reduced the minimum purchase from 640 acres to 320. More importantly, it allowed credit purchases. Buyers were now only required to put 25% of the purchase price down within 40 days, and then had four years to pay the balance. This provision attracted new buyers who hoped to make their land a going concern that would allow them to pay off their mortgage.

But it was not enough. In 1804 An Act making provision for the disposal of the public lands in the Indiana territory, and for other purposes was passed to spur further settlement. It once again liberalized purchase terms by lowering the minimum price to $1.64 an acre and minimum purchase to 160 acres. This too attracted more buyers, but land sales did not really surge until after the close of the War of 1812 and the final removal of Native Americans from southern and central Indiana. Then began the boom, as Indiana’s population more than doubled from 65,000 in 1815 to 145,000 by 1820. Among those newcomers were the pioneers of Sugar Creek, who were drawn to the lands in the valley of the Wabash.

The Wabash is the longest free flowing river east of the Mississippi. It began in Ohio and snaked its way through the Indiana, etching its way through nearly 500 miles. It drained nearly two-thirds of the state and served as a vital trade route. After a rather leisurely course across the north central part for 250 miles, it takes a sharp southward turn as it moves toward its eventual meeting with the Ohio River.

Sixty miles into its southern course it had carved out a high bluff along its eastern bank. The French called these high bluffs terre haute, or high land. On the western shore were stretches of oft-flooded bottomlands that were miles wide and two or more miles deep. The area made a pleasing prospect to potential settlers.

But it could be a mighty struggle just to get to where you intended to go. It is difficult now to understand just how densely forested Indiana once was. Travelers or settlers from England were astonished at the sight of dense green forests in the state. Much of England had long since been cleared of its timber. That is why their homeland had fences and houses made of the abundant stone there, not with wood. Not so in Indiana. An early Hoosier settler travelling through the southern part of the state wrote in awe of the dense forests, On each side of this road was an impenetrable wilderness, so dense and dark…. The small specks of sunshine that pieced their way through [the trees] looked like stars glimmering on a dark lake.

The town of the high land was founded in 1816 by the Terre Haute Land Company, a group of investors mainly drawn from southern Indiana and Kentucky. They purchased thirteen tracts of land on the River Wabash, in the vicinity of Fort Harrison. One of the proprietors was Abraham Markle, a former distillery owner in Canada. Markle was a fascinating character originally from the Niagara Falls area who once served in the Canadian Parliament. After being imprisoned for treason and then released, he switched sides and fought for the Americans in the war of 1812. He then made his way to Indiana, settling on the prairie near Fort Harrison. Markle was perhaps the only investor who viewed the purchase as a future home. For the others the land was strictly an investment.

Accordingly the town of Terre Haute was platted in October, 1816, with the first sales coming within a month.¹ The tracts were covered by timber interspersed with prairies. Naturalist David Thomas, who visited the area earlier in the year wrote that "the blackness and depth of the soil excite our admiration. It made for eager suitors for the land.

The Terre Haute that the first Sugar Creek² settlers encountered looked less like a town and more like a few clearings in the woods. Stands of tall oak trees dominated the vista; beneath them was a straggly carpet of thick undergrowth had to be cleared to ease passage for residents and travelers. Roads were little more than rutted, stump filled paths that turned into muddy swamps after rains. The woods still abounded with wolves, dear and the occasional bear. Great swarms of flies, gnats and mosquitos darkened the sky and feasted on flesh.

The first buildings were made of logs hewed from stands of timber that covered the area. By the early 1820s the town boasted of about fifty dwellings, still mainly log, but with a smattering of frame buildings and those which combined both. There was an early slaughterhouse along the river. Blacksmiths, carpenters, painters and merchants eked out livings in a town they hoped would flourish.

And, of course, there were the inns and taverns catering to both the locals and travelers, some looking to find land and settle, others just passing through on their way to a hoped-for future. Along the river was the Eagle and Lion Tavern. Its owner sought an air of respectability by covering the log frame with weatherboarding. On the corner of the tavern, hung from two posts, was a sign that depicted an eagle tearing the eyes out of a prostrate lion, symbol of America once again besting England.

Two blocks east stood another tavern. In 1817 or 1818 Samuel McQuilkin had a log cabin built to serve as an inn. He later expanded it into a large two-story building (it was common to build frame structures around the original log building). It was known as the Light Horse Tavern, due to its sign that showed a rearing, caparisoned war horse looking as if impatient for someone to mount and ride it into battle. McQuilkin was born in Pennsylvania in 1793, lived briefly in Ohio, and migrated to Terre Haute in 1816.

The Light Horse offered many amenities: lodging for man and horse, food, drink and a bed to weary customers. At any one time it might house 15 to 20 lodgers a night (when it was not unusual for 3-6 strangers to share a bed). The 1820 census enumerated 15 guests staying at the inn. It offered three meals a day (at an average of 37 ½ cents for breakfast and starting at .50 for dinner). A favorite spot for guests was the taproom, where beer, whiskey and other potables were on offer, starting at 12 ½ cents for a bracing half pint. Rooms cost .50 per night. Stabling a horse cost 37 ½ cents a day, with feed another .25 per half pint.

The Light Horse did a steady business. It was a stopping off point for many of the pioneers of Sugar Creek Township across the Wabash. Crossing the river was no easy task. There were a few areas to ford the river when it was low, but a boat was essential in most times. To accommodate the increase in travelers the first commercial ferry in Vigo County opened in 1818. For a fee of ten dollars one Touissant Dubois was given a license to establish a ferry across the Wabash November, 1818. To retain the license he was required to procure and keep constantly in good repair a flat-bottomed boat sufficient for the transportation of loaded wagons and four horses, and one good skiff for the transportation of people. For doing so he was allowed to charge fees of 25 cents to $1.00 for a wagon and one to four horses. It cost 6 ¼ cents per head of cattle, and sheep and hogs required a 3 cents per head fare. Several more ferries began operating within a year.

The first settlers in Sugar Creek were among those taking advantage of the ferries. Part of the waves during the Great Migration, they crossed the river from Terre Haute in 1818-1819, attracted by the promise of the newly opened lands. Among them were John Crews, Micajah Goodman, and Henry Kuykendall. All chose land on the higher ground in the western part of the township, away from the marshy bottom lands along the Wabash. Crews settled on land that bordered the Illinois state line. The Kuykendalls were his neighbors in the section immediately east of him. The Goodmans were also within six miles of him.

The original survey for Crews’ land noted it was "middling good for farming and covered with hickory, oak and tulip poplar trees. Goodman’s and Kuykendall’s land was much the same, with branches of Sugar Creek running through then providing a ready water source. There area was one of those most touched by the historic forces of nature. Meandering hills and hollows snaked through the entire section. Interspersed among the hollows were broad swathes of land that would yield large farm fields to their axes and plows.

Crews, a tall, dark, energetic man, migrated to Indiana from Knox County, Tennessee. He was the son of James Madison Crews, a Quaker who had been read out of the faith for serving in a Virginia regiment during the Revolutionary War. James later moved to Tennessee. There he further distanced himself from his Quaker upbringing by owning a slave.

Like the majority of early Indiana pioneers, John Crews was from the upland south. This was a simple fact of geography and access. There was a tall barrier for prospective settlers from the north and east, the Allegheny Mountains. Before the advent of the National Road and Erie Canal, it was simply much more difficult for Yankee pioneers to reach the new lands.

It was much easier for southerners to cross into the state. Many roads and waterways provided jumping off points for those from Tennessee and Kentucky and they took advantage of them. For these reasons Indiana was settled from the bottom up, like a glass (which the outline of the state somewhat resembles). In 1820, 84% of the population resided in the lower third of the state.

Goodman, his wife Melinda and son William settled in Sugar Creek in the fall of 1819. He had served in the Indiana militia during the War of 1812. The Goodmans were part of an interrelated cohort of families known as the Liston group that had previously settled near Vincennes. This was a familiar pattern in which families or groups of neighbors would decide to move to the same area. It gave a certain comfort in numbers during the move and formed a mutual support group in adjusting to new surroundings.³

This safety in numbers was particularly important to those who had lived in southern Indiana prior to the War of 1812. They carried haunting memories of the strife with Native Americans, conflict that saw atrocities and reprisals by both sides. Though in the area had been subdued and their last sputtering hope for retaining their homelands had died with Tecumseh on a Canadian battlefield in 1813, some decimated tribes still remained. The 1818 Treaty of St. Mary’s (Ohio) set up the process for the removal of Indians from central Indiana. But the actual mass removals did not begin until the late summer of 1820.

Thus fear of Native Americans remained a part of the daily lives of many pioneers. They were always wary of any encounter with (and vice versa). An incident Micajah Goodman had shortly after settling was an example. Like all pioneers, he let his hogs roam through the woods to feed. Going in search of his scattered hogs he scuttled through the timber when something caught his eye. Instinct told him to raise his gun and proceed carefully. Moving closer he saw an Indian kneeling over a carcass with knife in hand. Goodman thought the man had happened upon one of his hogs and was bent on making it his own. Crouching behind a tree he sighted his rifle, whether to scare off or shoot the Indian criss-crossed his mind. As Goodman’s finger found the trigger the Native American rose. He showed Goodman a hide. He was skinning a deer, not the pioneer’s hog. A breath exhaled and a small mutual wave signaled a truce. The Native American finished his task as Goodman went on his way. A crisis was avoided. It is possible that had Goodman killed the Native American an isolated war could have broken out in Sugar Creek.

But also within this vignette is a tantalizing glimpse of what could have been, a sign that the land could have been shared, that one race need not be rudely ejected so another could take its place. Instead, the government had systematically poisoned, murdered, and thrust ever further from their homelands of centuries. But gone they were, and others took their place.

No matter where they came from, whether singly or in groups, pioneers shared certain aspects of their new lives.

One was isolation. They were often far from their neighbors. They might not see another human being for days on end. Towns could be quite distant, and roads were usually little more than rutted pathways through the wilderness. Streams or rivers without bridges had to be crossed. Getting to Terre Haute meant a slog through the bottoms, if the waters were not so high and roiling as to make the journey a lost cause.

For John Crews this meant he was hundreds of miles from the family and friends he left behind in Tennessee. When he first settled his land he was four miles from his nearest neighbor. It was not just physical isolation. Pioneers too often lived in an information vacuum. They were unaware. What was going in the country? What was the news? Was there a war, who had been elected to what? More important, there was a lack news from home. Who died, or was born, or got married? Because of this post offices kept mail nearly forever and would post lists of names in newspapers of those who had mail waiting for them. The reason for this courtesy was that postage was not paid by the sender, but by the addressee and only when the mail was picked up did the postmaster get his money. Not knowing of their family left behind made life seem all the more alone, the sense of separation acute. For some, loneliness was a cloak they donned each day.

Another shared aspect was shelter. The log cabin has long been the abiding structure that built the American ethos. But this simple house, which actually originated in Scandinavia, was not necessarily the pioneer’s first concern. More important was to begin clearing the land for crops. Hoosier history abounds with tales of settlers pitching tents, living in caves, or even roughly housing themselves in the trunks of burnt out trees. Some sufficed with a brush house, a rudimentary shelter in which a pole was attached to two closely aligned trees and covered with brush, branches and leaves. Henry Kuykendall, with wife Sarah and young daughter Mary, lived in a lean-to for months while he prepared the land. It was in that rude dwelling on a sweltering July day that Sarah gave birth to the first white child born in Sugar Creek Township, a son named Daniel.

While Sarah struggled to care for a newborn and the rest of her family in harsh conditions, Henry made his land ready. Ideally, the pioneer wanted his land to contain both water and timber. Trees were needed to provide wood for fires, logs for houses, boards for furnishings, and rails for fencing, but too many were also an impediment to securing arable land for farming.

The first task was to clear out timber to reveal the farm land that lay beneath it. Some early settlers would visit their tracts in the fall and girdle the trees, cutting into the bark around the trees to deaden it. They would return the following spring to drop the weakened timber.

Some set fire to the trees, hoping to control the blaze enough to clear land, but not lead to a forest fire. But the main tool was a sharp axe. It was a slow arduous task. Even a man with a well-whetted axe and a strong back could usually only clear one to four acres in a year of swinging and hauling. While the men cleared the land, women and children were busy in caring for the first planted fields.

Once the fields were made ready, a pioneer could look to building his first real home. Building that archetypical log cabin was often the epitome of two seemingly contradictory pioneer characteristics, individualism and cooperation. An individual pioneer could start the process, but eventually he would need help from others.

Technically a log cabin could be built with as few as two tools, an axe and broadaxe, and the building supplies found on the farmstead, wood, stones for a foundation, and straw and mud.⁴ Nails or spikes were not needed. Ideally the plot for the cabin was located on higher ground, to facilitate drainage, and in a sunny clearing. Felled trees were cut into logs with an axe or saw. A broadaxe was used to prepare and shape the log. Notches were cut on either end of the log to facilitate the stacking.

This could possibly be done by a man alone, but building the cabin required extra hands. And that meant cooperation among neighbors, who would come to help erect the building. They placed the logs in layers to build the walls, later cutting out openings for windows. The roof and stone chimney for the fireplace were added. Mud and straw were then mixed to chink logs to provide a sort of insulation. Glass was usually hard to come by and too expensive anyway, so greased paper was used on the windows.

While the sound of an axe biting into wood echoed, a life still had to be wrenched from their land. With few roads, great distances, and no stores, they had to fend for themselves. Most brought as much with them as possible, including livestock. It was not unusual to see settlers trundling along the rough roads with wagons piled high with barrels of corn meal and salted pork. Behind the wagon, if they were lucky, a cow or two struggled to keep pace. But those commodities might soon run out. Soon it was a battle for survival.

Dr. Richard Mason traveling through the state in 1819 left behind a telling account of the precariousness of early pioneer conditions:

Travelled twenty-five miles through the woods and passed but four houses…In the midst of one of those long and thick pieces of wood, we passed on of the most miserable huts ever seen—a house built of slabs without a nail; the pieces merely laid against a log pen such as pigs are commonly kept, a dirt floor, no chimney… This small cabin contained a young and interesting female and her two shivering and almost starving children, all of whom were bareheaded and with their feet bare. There was a small bed, one blanket and a few potatoes. One cow and one pig (who appeared to share in their misfortune) completed the family, with the exception of the husband, who was absent in search of bread.

Being isolated also meant that Crews and the others had to be self-sufficient. Fortunately, the woods teemed with rabbits, squirrels, deer and other animals that could shot or trapped to feed a family. Wild boars skittered through the forests feeding on the mast. Fish danced enticingly in ponds, lakes and streams. Wild turkeys and pheasants flitted or flew through the countryside. Wild fruit dangled from branches. There was bounty to be had, but it had to be found, caught, or killed.

There can be no disputing just how hard the challenges of daily life were for pioneer families. Each day was a catalog of physical and psychic toil just to survive. Think of a typical day. Families like the Goodmans and Kuykendalls rose at dawn, or before. While the father and a child old enough to help went out to check on the stock or crops the wife would start a fire to prepare breakfast. The pioneer diet was heavy on starches. Breakfast might be cornbread or mush, perhaps some pork if they had some salted away, washed down by water or milk, if they had a cow.

The rest of the day was a combination of trying to ensure the future and survive the present. There were trees to clear and wood to be chopped for fires or fences. Unlike later periods, fences were built not to keep animals in, but to keep them out of growing crops. In timber-rich Indiana fences were worm or snake fences. Timber was cut into rails (a job that the old rail-splitter Abraham Lincoln was noted for as a youth in southern Indiana) 6 to 8 feet long and stacked in a zigzag pattern around a field. They had the advantage of being easy to construct without using scarce items like nails to fasten them. The design made them extremely portable. They could be easily expanded as the field was enlarged, or moved to another when one field was left fallow.

Livestock had to be fed and watered. Or as in the case of Micajah Goodman and his encounter with the Indian, they would check the woods to make sure their hogs had not strayed or been lost. Water had to be drawn from creeks or springs and that heavy load carried back to the cabin. Once the daily chores were done came the daily hunt for food.

In the woods around them were deer, squirrels and rabbits that could add to the table. They had to be hunted, killed and dressed for future meals. The same was true of pheasant, quail or pigeons, but you took what you could get. If you were hungry enough a possum, ground hog or turtle might not exactly please the palate, but it was food. Fishing was often a daily source for the larder. In season, there were apples, berries, pawpaws or other fruit to gather.

If all these foods were available on a daily basis one would think that pioneers enjoyed a healthy organic diet, but that was not the case. Their diet was not a balanced one. It was heavy in fats and starches. Average fare included large amounts of cornbread, potatoes, peas and pork. Each meal featured foods not particularly well prepared as they were fried in fat.

This was just one of the many reasons that disease was rampant in pioneer Indiana. Swarms of insects carried diseases. Poor sanitation brought with it diseases. They drank polluted water and ate tainted food. They lived side by side with their waste. Pioneers often complained of fevers and flu-like symptoms they called ague. Sick persons were seldom quarantined, so they easily passed illnesses on to other family members. And due to the need to get up