Читать книгу History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, Volume 1 - Berry Robinson Sulgrove - Страница 7

First Period — Early Settlements — Organization of Marion County and Erection of Townships — Erection of Public Buildings — Notable Events and Incidents of the Early Settlement and of Later Years — Opening of Roads — Original Entries of Lands in the County.

Although the treaty of 1818 expressly conceded the occupancy of the " New Purchase," as it was called by the whites, to the Indians till 1821, its profusion of game, its fertility, its abundance of excellent building timber began to allure settlers from the White Water Valley before a year had passed, and from the Ohio River before the reservation had expired. It will give the reader a suggestion of the natural attractions of the country to suggest that Mr. William H. Jones, a leading dealer in lumber in the city, aided when a boy, in 1824, in catching young fawns in the vicinity of the present site of the Vandalia Railroad depot and of the corner of West and Merrill Streets; that Robert Harding, one of the earliest settlers, killed a deer on the area called the " donation" for the first Fourth of July celebration and barbecue in 1822; that as late as 1845 or later wild turkeys in their migrations made a roost in a large sugar grove that covered the portion of the present city site about Meridian, Illinois, and Tennessee Streets above the crossing of St. Clair or thereabouts. As late as 1845 a turkey scared from this roost by hunters ran into the city and into the basement of what was called the " Governor's House," in Circle Park, and was caught there. Lost quail were frequently heard piping in the back yards of residences. In 1822 saddles of venison sold at twenty-five to fifty cents, wild turkeys at ten to twelve and a half, a bushel of wild pigeons for twenty-five cents. An early sketch of the condition of the country says, " A traveler who ascended the river a few years prior to the settlement saw the banks frequently dotted with wigwams and the stream enlivened by Indian canoes. At night parties for ' fire-hunting' or ' fire-fishing' were frequent among the Indians, and occasionally formed by their white successors."

The first settlers drawn to the New Purchase were Jacob Whetzel and his son Cyrus. The former was the brother, the latter the nephew of the noted scout and Indian-fighter, Lewis Whetzel, or Wetzel, distinguished in the bloody annals of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. " The elder Whetzel," says Mr. Nowland, in his " Prominent Citizens," " soon after the conclusion of the St. Mary's treaty went to Anderson, head chief of the Delawares, who lived in the large Delaware town named for the chief and retaining the name still, and from him obtained permission to ' blaze a trace' from the White Water in Franklin County to the Bluffs of White River." It may be as well to explain for the benefit of later settlers that " blazing" was cutting away a large strip of bark and wood from a tree-trunk on the side next to the proposed "trace" or road. Such a mark would remain conspicuous for many months in an interminable forest without a sign of human presence except that, and a series of them close together along the line of a proposed road would be a sure and easy guide to backwoodsmen or any traveler with sense enough to be trusted alone. The two Whetzels came to the Bluff's in the spring of 1819, before the government surveys were completed or commenced in some cases. Their settlement was a little below the present south boundary of the county.

" The first white residents of the county," Mr. Duncan (before referred to) says, " were Judge Fabius M. Finch, his father and family, who came to the site of Noblesville or near it in the spring of 1819, that region being then a part of the county, but separated in a few years. In the fall of 1818 one Dr. Douglass came up the river from below to the Bluffs, and remained there a short time, and in January, 1819, James Paxton came down the river from the upper waters to the site of the city, and came again a year later in 1820. The first settler in the present area of the county will probably remain an unsettled question for all time, as it was a disputed point in 1822, has been ever since, and is more peremptorily disputed now than ever. The prevailing tradition Is that George Pogue, a blacksmith from the White Water settlements, came here March 2, 1819, building a double log cabin on the line of Michigan Street a little way east of the creek, on the high ground bordering the creek bottom, and lived there with his family, the solitary occupants of Marion County within its present limits, till the 27th of the following February, when John and James McCormick arrived with their families and built cabins on the river bank near the old National road bridge. The priority of settlement lies between these families and Mr. Pogue's. Within a few months past one William H. White, of Hancock County, claims that he was born on the city site Oct. 4, 1819, near where Odd-Fellows' Hall now stands, on the corner of Washington and Pennsylvania Streets. Old settlers as early as 1820-21 have no recollection of any account of such an occurrence, and births were too rare in those days to allow the first one in the county or any suggestion of it, however vague or doubtful, to be forgotten. The impression seems to be that Mr. White has been misled by some accidental confusion or by the failing memory of his relatives. He may be right, but he is distrusted by settlers who arrived here within a year of the alleged occurrence, and discredited by. the opportunities of knowing the truth of many who arrived within two years and repel his claim.

In the summer of 1822, a little more than a year after Pogue's death, Dr. Samuel G. Mitchell, the oldest physician in the place, published in the Gazette, the first paper in the place, a discussion of the pretensions of Pogue to the honor of being the first settler, in which he maintained that the McCormicks were the first, and that Pogue came a month later, about the time the Maxwells and Cowan came. No reply was made to this direct attack on the general opinion of the settlers, which certainly suggests a reasonable probability that its statement was indisputable, and that the tradition of a general concurrence in awarding Pogue the credit is ill-founded. But there comes in here the countervailing consideration that the pioneers of the backwoods were little given to glorifying the pen or looking to the papers for instruction. Nobody may have been disposed to take the trouble to contradict what he knew nobody but Mitchell believed, or he may, very fairly, have concluded that in a little two-year-old village in the woods it would be less trouble to contradict the story " by word of mouth" to every man in the place than to attempt so unusual a feat as writing for the papers. But this early and public contest of Pogue's claim by an intelligent man, at a time when there could hardly have been an adult, male or female, who did not know the truth, creates a strong doubt against the current of tradition. The probability inclines to Mrs. Pogue's statement at an " Old Settlers' " meeting in 1854, as Mr. Robert B. Duncan remembers it. She was more than fourscore years old then, but her memory of early events seemed clear and accurate. She said that her husband and family came here on the 2nd of March, 1820, and the McCormicks came on the 7th of the same month. This seems to be final as to the first settlement being made in 1820 instead of 1819, as has generally been believed, whether it settles the question of individual priority or not. Where two or three families arrive at a place in a primeval forest within four or five days of each other, and a mile or two apart, it is easy to see how each set of the separated settlers may suppose itself the first. Virtually they are simultaneous arrivals, and the truth, or at least the probability, of history compromises this long-mooted question by concluding that the Pogues and McCormicks were all first settlers.

Whether Pogue was the first man to live here or not, he was certainly the first to die here. Mr. Nowland's description of the man and account of his death so strikingly exhibit some of the characteristics of the time and country that it is reproduced here. George Pogue was a large, broad-shouldered, and stout man, with dark hair, eyes, and complexion, about fifty years of age, and a native of North Carolina. His dress was like that of a Pennsylvania Dutchman, a drab overcoat with many capes, and a broad-brimmed felt hat. He was a blacksmith, and the first of that trade to enter the ' New Purchase.' To look at the man as we saw him last, one would think he was not afraid to meet a whole camp of Delawares in battle array, which fearlessness, in fact, was most probably the cause of his death. One evening about twilight a straggling Indian, known to the settlers as well as to the Indians as Wyandotte John, stopped at the cabin of Mr. Pogue and asked to stay all night. Mr. Pogue did not like to keep him, but thought it best not to refuse, as the Indian was known to be a bad and very desperate man, having left his own tribe in Ohio for some offense, and was now wandering among the various Indiana tribes. His principal lodging-place the previous winter was a hollow sycamore log that lay under the bluff and just above the east end of the National road bridge over White River. (Above the site of the bridge, Mr. Nowland means, as the bridge was not built for more than ten years after.) On the upper side of the log he had hooks, made by cutting the forks or limbs of bushes, on which he rested his gun. At the open end of the log next to the water he built his fire, which rendered his domicile as comfortable as most of the cabins. After John was furnished with something to eat, Mr. Pogue, knowing him to be traveling from one Indian camp to another, inquired if he had seen any white man's horses at any of the camps. John said he had left a camp of Delawares that morning, describing the place to be on Buck Creek, about twelve miles east, and near where the Rushville State road crosses that creek; that he had seen horses there with iron hoofs (they had been shod), and described the horses so minutely as to lead Mr. Pogue to believe they were his. Although the horses were described so accurately, Mr. Pogue was afraid that it was a deception to lure him into the woods, and mentioned his suspicions to his family. When the Indian left the next morning he took a direction towards the river, where nearly all the settlement was. Pogue followed him for some distance to see whether he would turn his course towards the Indian camps, but found that he kept directly on towards the river. Mr. Pogue returned to bis cabin and told his family he was going to the Indian camp for his horses. He took his gun, and with his dog set out on foot for the Delaware camp, and was never afterwards seen or heard of. We remember that there were a great many conflicting stories about his clothes and horses being seen in possession of the Indians, all of which were untrue. There can be no doubt that the Wyandotte told Mr. Pogue the truth in regard to the horses, and in his endeavor to get possession of them had a difficulty with the Delawares and was killed, at least that was the prevailing opinion at the time. Nothing has ever been learned of his fate to this day, further than that he was never seen or heard of again, though the settlers formed a company to search all the Indian camps about within fifty miles to find some indication that might lead to a clearing up of the mystery." Pogue's Creek, once the pride and now the pest of the city, takes its name from the proto-martyr, if not proto-settler, of the city and county.

Within a week or two after the arrival of the McCormicks, John Maxwell and John Cowan came and built on the high ground near the present crossing of the Crawfordsville road over Fall Creek, very near the site of the City Hospital. During the following three months a number of new-comers arrived, and settled principally in the vicinity of the river. Those best remembered are the Davis brothers (Henry and Samuel), Isaac Wilson (who built the first cabin on what was afterwards the old town plat in May), Robert Harding, Mr. Barnhill, Mr. Corbaley, Mr. Van Blaricum. About the time of the arrival of the last of this first group of pioneers the State capital was located here by the commissioners appointed by the Legislature for that purpose.

When the State was admitted into the Union, April 19, 1816, a donation of four sections — four square miles — was made by Congress for the site of a capital, to be located wherever the State might choose upon unsold lands of the government. No selection had been made or attempted in the four years since the State's admission. The capital, which bad been kept at Vincennes by Governor Harrison during his administration as Territorial Governor, from 1801 to 1812, was removed to Corydon, Harrison Co., by the Legislature, May 1, 1813, and remained there till its permanent settlement here in the fall of 1824. On the 11th of January, 1820, the Legislature appointed ten commissioners to make selection of a site for a permanent capital. They were John Tipton (an old Indian trader), John Conner (brother of William above referred to, and like him reared from childhood among the Indians, the founder of Connersville), George Hunt, John Gilliland, Stephen Ludlow, Joseph Bartholomew, Jesse B. Durham, Frederick Rapp, William Prince, Thomas Emerson. They were ordered to meet at Conner's place (north of the city) early in the spring. Apparently only half of them served, as only five votes were given in determining the selection. But Mr. Nowland says there were nine when the party got to Conner's, Mr. Prince alone being unable to attend. If this is correct there must have been four commissioners who did not like any of the sites examined and declined to vote. A part of them met at Vincennes about the middle of May, 1820, and were joined there by the father and uncle of Mr. Nowland, who were on their way to Kentucky from Illinois, but were persuaded to accompany the commissioners. The party ascended the river to the Bluffs, where the Whetzels had settled the year before and had been joined by four or five other families. After resting a day at this point and making an examination of it, they came on up to the mouth of Fall Creek, and remained a day, some of them expressing themselves pleased with the country and disposed to put the capital here. Mr. Nowland told the commissioners that if the location were made here he would move out in the fall, and do all he could to induce other Kentuckians to join him. The mouth of Fall Creek had been the customary place of crossing the river by the whites ever since the White River Valley had been known to them. Mr. Nowland (the author) says that Lieut. (afterwards General and President) Taylor told him that he had crossed the river here with his force when going from Louisville to the Wabash to build Fort Harrison, now Terre Haute, in 1811. While the force was here Col. Abel C. Pepper, United States Marshal of the State under Taylor, met Tecumseh, who was on a mission to the Delawares, doubtless to induce them to join his combination against the whites. The party went on to Conner's, some sixteen miles north, as before stated, and examined the situation there. One or two seemed to favor it, but the whole party returned here, and after re-examining the country, decided on the 7th of June, 1820, by vote of three to two, for the Bluffs, to locate the capital here. On the 6th of January following, 1821, the selection was approved by the Legislature and the location decided irrevocably.

The commissioners reported that they bad selected Sections 1 and 12, east and west fractional sections numbered 2, east fractional section numbered 11, and so much of the east part of west fractional section numbered 3, to be set off by a line north and south, as will complete the donation of two thousand five hundred and sixty acres, in Township 15, Range 3 east. The Legislature, after approving the location, named the future city and capital Indianapolis, the " city of Indiana." The name was suggested by the late Judge Jeremiah Sullivan, in the committee charged with the preparation of the confirmatory bill. He gave an interesting account of the affair in a letter to Governor Baker, which may be pertinently introduced here: " I have a very distinct recollection of the great diversity of opinion that prevailed as to the name by which the new town should receive legislative baptism. The bill, if I remember aright, was reported by Judge Polk, and was in the main very acceptable. A blank, of course, was left for the name of the town that was to become the seat of government, and during the two or three days we spent in endeavoring to fill the blank there was in the debate some sharpness and much amusement. Gen. Marston G. Clark, of Washington County, proposed ' Tecumseh' as the name, and very earnestly insisted on its adoption. When it failed he suggested other Indian names, which I have forgotten. They all were rejected. A member proposed ' Suwarrow,' which met with no favor. Other names were proposed, discussed, laughed at, and voted down, and the House, without coming to any agreement, adjourned until the next day. There were many amusing things said, but my remembrance of them is not sufficiently distinct to state them with accuracy. I had gone to Corydon with the intention of proposing Indianapolis as the name of the town, and on the evening of the adjournment above mentioned, or the next morning, I suggested to Mr. Samuel Merrill, the representative from Switzerland County, the name I proposed. He at once adopted it, and said he would support it. We together called on Governor Jennings, who had been a witness of the amusing day previous, and told him what conclusion we had come to, and asked him what he thought of the name. He gave us to understand that he favored it, and that he would not hesitate to so express himself. When the House met and went into committee on the bill, I moved to fill the blank with Indianapolis. The name created quite a laugh. Mr. Merrill, however, seconded the motion. We discussed the matter fully, gave our reasons in support of the proposition, the members conversed with each other informally in regard to it, and the name gradually commended itself to the committee, and was adopted. The principal reason in favor of adopting the name proposed— to wit, that the Greek termination would indicate to all the world the locality of the town — was, I am sure, the reason that overcame the opposition to the name. The town was finally named Indianapolis with but little if any opposition." One may well feel puzzled to understand the force exerted by the argument that " the Greek termination of the name would indicate the locality of the town." The termination means " city," and that is all. The other half of the name would indicate locality though, and the combination would fairly enough suggest a State capital, so that its aptness is evident, whether the argument that secured it was sound or not.

By the same act of approval and naming the new capital the Legislature appointed Christopher Harrison (no relative of the general's), James Jones, and Samuel P. Booker commissioners to lay off the town. They were directed to meet on the site on the first Monday of April, 1821, to perform that duty, and make plats or maps of the town, one for the Secretary of State and one for the State agent. They were also to advertise and hold a sale of the lots as soon as practicable, reserving the alternate lots. The proceeds of the sales were to be used in erecting the buildings required by the government. Harrison was the only one of the commissioners who attempted to perform his duties. He was a Mary lander by birth, a very eccentric man, of excellent education and cultivated tastes, who came to Southern Indiana early in the century, and some years after the completion of his work as commissioner returned to Maryland, and lived to a ripe old age. It is said on good authority that he was engaged to be married to Miss Elizabeth Patterson, a noted belle of Baltimore, but the attentions of Prince Jerome Bonaparte overpowered her scruples and her faith, and she married the brother of the great Corsican, only to find herself repudiated by him and excluded from the ambition that had betrayed her. Mr. Harrison came to Jefferson County about 1804, and lived there the life of a hermit with his dogs and books for several years, then removed to Salem, Washington Co., and there his rare attainments — rare in the backwoods at least — and his abilities forced him into public life, and finally into the position of founder of the city of Indianapolis. He came to the little yearling village at the time appointed, and selected as surveyors Alexander Ralston and Elias P. Fordham, with Benjamin I. Blythe as clerk of the Board of Commissioners

Mr. Blythe lived to an advanced age in the city, and was one of the earliest of the enterprising men who laid the foundations of the city's pork-packing prosperity. Of Mr. Fordham little appears to have been known at the time, and nothing can be learned now. Ralston was a Scotchman, a man of marked ability and rare attainments as well as high character. When quite young he had been employed in assisting the laying out of Washington City, and may have got then the preference for wide streets and oblique avenues which he exhibited so signally and beneficially here. He became associated with Burr's expedition, presumably in ignorance of its real character, as most of the conspirator's following were, came West in connection with it, and remained when it failed. He remained in Indianapolis after completing his work, and in 1825 was appointed by the Legislature to survey White River and make an estimate of the expense of removing the drifts and snags and other obstructions to navigation, and reported the following winter. He built a brick residence on West Maryland Street, a half-square west of Tennessee, and lived there till his death, early in 1827. He was buried in the " Old Cemetery," and his grave was long unknown. A few years ago, however, some old residents made a close examination and found it, or were confident they had.

The Indiana Journal of Jan. 9, 1827, contained an obituary notice of him, which from his prominence in the settlement may be reproduced here. He died on the 5th, at the age of fifty-six. " Mr. Ralston was a native of Scotland, but emigrated early in life to America. He lived many years at the city of Washington, then at Louisville, Ky., afterwards near Salem, in this State, and for the last five years in this place. His earliest and latest occupation in the United States was surveying, in which he was long employed by the government at Washington, and his removal to this place was occasioned by his appointment to make the original survey of it. During the intervening period merchandise and agriculture engaged his attention. In the latter part of his life he was our county surveyor, and his leisure time was employed in attending to a neat garden, in which various useful and ornamental plants, fruit, etc., were carefully cultivated. Mr. Ralston was successful in his profession, honest in his dealings, gentlemanly in his deportment, a liberal and hospitable citizen, and a sincere and ardent friend. He had experienced much both of the pleasures and pains incident to human life. The respect and esteem of the generous and good were always awarded to him, and he found constant satisfaction in conferring favors, not only on his own species, but even on the humblest of the brute creation; he would not willingly set foot upon a worm. But his unsuspecting nature made him liable to imposition; his sanguine expectations were often disappointed. His independent spirit sometimes provoked opposition, and his extreme sensibility was frequently put to the severest trials. Though he stood alone among us in respect to family, his loss will be long lamented." Mr. Nowland adds that the old bachelor's house " was kept for him by a colored woman named Chancy Lively," who was the second colored person in the place. Dr. Mitchell brought the first, a boy named Ephraim Ensaw. These were the first colored residents, but a colored man came out with Mr. Maxwell in 1820, and remained here a few months. His name was Aaron Wallace, and a few years ago he returned here to reside .permanently, after an absence of nearly sixty years. " Aunt Chaney," as she was called, was well known to the South Side school-boys forty-five or fifty years ago. Her residence was the northwest corner of Maryland and Meridian Streets. She married a barber named Britton.

On the completion of the surveying force, work was begun at once in marking out the sections and fractions selected by the locating commissioners io June, 1820. The whole donation lay upon the east bank of the river except a fractional section on the west bank, where Indianola stands. A plat of one mile square was set in the middle of the donation, and almost in the middle of the plat the Circle was placed, to be made the site of the Governor's residence. It was not used for that purpose, however, though a large house was erected there in 1827 at considerable expense, some six thousand five hundred dollars. The publicity of the situation made it undesirable as a family residence, and it was used exclusively as rooms for the judges of the Supreme Court, the State auditor and engineer, the State Library and State Bank, and occasionally for local or individual purposes. It was proposed at one time to add wings on each side and make a State House of it. It was sold as old building material in April, 1857, for six hundred and sixty-five dollars, and torn down and carried off in the last days of the same month. The Circle was not put in the center of the donation, because if the center of the town had corresponded with the center of the donation, it would have thrown too much of the central portion of the town plat into the valley of Pogue's Creek. The point where the four sections of the donation " corner" is about ten feet west and five feet south of the southeast corner of the lot occupied by the Occidental Hotel. The Circle was set nearly a square east and two squares north for the purpose stated. A natural elevation at this point, thickly covered with a growth of tall straight sugar-trees, aided its nearly central situation in making it the center of the original town plat. It contains between three and four acres, and is surrounded by an eighty-feet street

Extending north and south from the Circle on a meridian line is Meridian Street, and crossing the latter from east to west is Market Street, both carried to the limits of the city, except the west end of Market, which is blocked at Blackford Street. Parallel with Market and one square south is Washington Street, the main thoroughfare of the city, one hundred and twenty feet wide. The whole plat, one mile square, is surrounded by ninety-feet streets, called respectively, from their location, North, South, East, and West. The area inside these limits is divided into eighty-nine blocks and fractions by nine streets north to south and nine east to west, each ninety feet wide except Washington. The blocks are four hundred and twenty feet square, and are divided into four equal parts, each containing one acre, by alleys fifteen feet wide running north and south, and thirty feet running east and west. All of the streets, except the two central ones meeting at the Circle, the main street, and the four bounding the plat, are named for the States of the Union in 1821. The most marked features of the original design of the city are the Circle and the avenues radiating from it, and starting at the corners most remote from it of the four blocks that adjoin it. These are named for States like the others. The squares are broken by six fractions and three considerable irregular tracts in Pogue's Run Valley, so that the number of completed squares is only eighty-nine. The intersections of the streets would have made one hundred if completion had been possible. Three lots were made of each quarter of a square or acre, giving to each lot of the original plat one-third of an acre. Few of these now retain their original dimensions. They were sixty-seven and one-half feet wide on the streets by one hundred and ninety-five feet deep, being longer where they abutted upon the narrow alleys. The half-mile of the donation lying all round the mile square in the middle of it, except on the river side, was not platted. In 1822 the Legislature ordered the fraction west of the river to be laid off in tracts of five to twenty acres by the State agent, and in 1831 he was ordered to lay off all the remainder of the donation, some nineteen hundred acres, into lots of two to fifty acres, and sell them at a minimum price of ten dollars an acre. These were used chiefly for farming purposes and pastures till the growth of the city began to overrun them. It was never imagined that the city or town would extend to these exterior lots at all, and that they should be covered by it would have been as incredible as an Arabian Night tale. Now the city covers nearly three times the area of the donation. The four streets bounding the old plat — North, South, East, and West — were not in it at first, but were put there at the solicitation of James Blake, who represented to Commissioner Harrison the advantages such streets would be as public drives and promenades when the town grew up.

The act of the Legislature creating the commission to lay off the town required the appointment of an agent of the State at six hundred dollars a year for a term of three years, who was to live at Indianapolis and attend to the disposal of the lots. Gen. John Carr was the first agent. The place was subsequently held by several persons, among them James Milroy, Bethuel F. Morris, Ebenezer Sharpe, B. I. Blythe, clerk of the commission, Thomas H. Sharpe, and John Cook. The duties were finally transferred to the Secretary of State. The commissioners, or rather one of them, having completed the survey and plat, advertised the first sale for the second Monday in October, 1821, and it took place at the tavern of Matthias Nowland, father of John H. B., author of " Prominent Citizens of Indianapolis." This stood near Washington Street, west of Missouri; and at the request of the State agent, Mr. Nowland had built an addition to serve as an office. Oct. 9, 1821, was " a raw, cold day," says a sketch of the city's early history written some twenty-five years or more ' ago; " a high wind prevailed, and a man in attendance came near being killed by a falling limb." The town was very much crowded. Strangers from various quarters had come to settle in the new place or to secure property. The three taverns, kept by Hawkins, Carter, and Nowland, were crowded, and in many cases the citizens were called upon to share their homes with the new-comers till they could erect cabins. The bidding at the sale was quite spirited, and, considering the position and advantages of the settlement, high prices were obtained in some cases. " The reservation of alternate lots was begun by the commissioner by reserving lot No. 1." The best sales were north and east of the bulk of the settlement, which was on and near the river, owing to the prevalence of chills and fever the summer before, when everybody, old and young, was down at one time or another, except Enoch Banks, Thomas Chinn, and Nancy Hendricks. This visitation gave an eastern impulse to settlement, and accounts for the higher prices of lots more remote from the river. The number of lots sold amounted to three hundred and fourteen, mostly in the central and northern parts of the plat, and the total value of the sales was thirty-five thousand five hundred and ninety-six dollars and twenty-five cents. The highest price brought by a single lot was by the lot on Washington Street, west of the Court-House Square, which brought five hundred and sixty dollars. That on the same street, west of the State-House Square, brought five hundred dollars. The intervening lots sold from one hundred to three hundred dollars each. The conditions of the sale required the payment of one-fifth of the purchase-money down, and the remainder in four equal annual installments.

The sales continued a week, and the amount paid down was seven thousand one hundred and nineteen dollars and twenty-five cents. Thomas Carter was auctioneer, and the late James M. Ray clerk of these first sales. Not a few of these lots are now worth one thousand dollars a front foot, some are worth more. " Outlots" that were sold at first for ten, twenty, or thirty dollars could not be bought now for as many thousands, in some cases twice that. Of the lots purchased at this first sale, one hundred and sixty-nine were afterwards forfeited, or the payments made on one lot were transferred to another, under an act passed a little later " for the relief of purchasers of lots in Indianapolis." The early sketch already referred to says, " These forfeited lots and the reserved lots were once or twice afterwards offered at public sale, and kept open for purchase all the time. But prices became depressed, money scarce, sickness caused general despondency, and for several years after the winter of 1821-22 there were but few lots sold. The amount of cash reserved by the State for donation lands up to 1842 was about one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars." This the law made a public building fund, out of which was erected a State-House, court-house. Governor's house (in the Circle), treasurer's house and office, office of clerk of the Supreme Court, and a ferryman's house at the foot of Washington Street.

The settlers brought to the new capital by the report of its selection for that purpose speedily trebled its population, and more. During the summer and fall of 1820 there came Dr. Samuel G. Mitchell, John and James Givan (among the first merchants), William or Wilkes Reagan, Matthias Nowland, James M. Ray, James Blake, Nathaniel Cox, Thomas Anderson, John Hawkins, Dr. Livingston Dunlap, Daniel Yandes, David Wood, Col. Alexander W. Russell, Dr. Isaac Coe, Douglass Maguire, and others unnamed and not easily identified as to the time of arrival. Morris Morris is said by one of these early sketches to have come here in 1819, in the fall (probably inadvertently for 1820), when he came only in the fall of 1821. Mr. Nowland says that James M. Ray, James Blake, Daniel Yandes, the Givans, Dr. Mitchell, Dr. Coe, Dr. Dunlap, Col. Russell came the following spring and summer, 1821, and with them Daniel Shaffer, the first merchant, who died in the summer of 1821, Robert Wilmot, and Calvin Fletcher, the first lawyer. It is impossible now to make a complete list of the settlers up to the laying out of the town and the first sale of lots, but with the help of such records as have been made, and such memories as are accessible, a muster-roll of considerable interest can be made:

George Pogue (blacksmith), possibly, 1819, spring

Fabius M. Finch (lawyer), 1819, summer

John McCormick (tavern), 1820, spring

James McCormick, 1820, spring

John Maxwell (squire), 1820, spring

John Cowan, 1820, spring

Robert Harding (farmer), 1820, spring

Van Blaricum (farmer), 1820, spring

Henry Davis (chairmaker), 1820, spring

Samuel Davis (chairmaker), 1820, spring

Jeremiah J. Corbaley (farmer), 1820, spring

Robert Barnhill (farmer), 1820, spring

Isaac Wilson (miller), 1820, spring

Matthias Nowland (mason), 1820, fall

Dr. S. G. Mitchell, 1820, fall

Thomas Anderson (wagonmaker), 1820, fall

Alexander Ralston (surveyor), 1820, fall

Dr. Isaac Coe, 1820, spring

James B. Hull (carpenter), 1820, winter

Andrew Byrne (tailor), 1820, fall

Michael Ingals (teamster), 1820, winter

Kenneth A. Scudder (first drug-store), 1820, summer

Conrad Brussell (baker), 1820, fall

Milo R. Davis (plasterer), 1820, winter

Samuel Morrow, 1820, summer

James J. McIlvain ('squire), 1820, summer

Eliakim Harding ('squire), 1821, summer

Mr. Lawrence (teacher), 1821, summer

Daniel Larkins (grocery), 1821, summer

Lismund Basye (Swede), 1821, fall

Robert Wilmot (merchant), 1820, winter

James Kittleman (shoemaker), 1821

Andrew Wilson (miller), 1821

John McClung (preacher), 1821, spring

Daniel Shaffer, 1821, January

Jeremiah Johnson (farmer), 1820, spring

Wilkes Reagan (butcher), 1821, summer

Obed Foote (lawyer), 1821, summer

Calvin Fletcher (lawyer), 1821, fall

James Blake, 1821, spring

Alexander W. Russell (merchant), 1821, spring

Caleb Scudder, 1821, fall

George Smith (first publisher), 1821, fall

James Scott (Methodist preacher), 1821, fall

O. P. Gaines (first Presbyterian preacher), 1821, summer

James Linton (millwright), 1821, summer

Joseph C. Reed (first teacher), 1821, spring

James Paxton (militia officer), 1821, fall

Daniel Yandes (first tanner), 1821, January

Caleb Scudder (cabinet-maker), 1821, fall

George Myers (potter), 1821, fall

Nathaniel Bolton (first editor), 1821, fall

Amos Hanway (cooper), 1821, summer

John Shunk (hatter), 1821, fall

Isaac Lynch (shoemaker), 1821, fall

James M. Ray (coach-lace maker), 1821, summer

David Mallory (barber), 1821, spring

John Y. Osborn, 1821, spring

Samuel Henderson (first postmaster), 1821, fall

Samuel Rooker (first painter), 1821, summer

Thomas Johnson (farmer), 1820, winter

Robert Patterson, 1821, fall

Aaron Drake (first mail), 1821

William Townsend, 1820, summer

J. R. Crumbaugh, 1821

Harvey Gregg, 1821, fall

Nathaniel Cox (carpenter), 1821

Some thirty-three years ago the late Samuel Merrill, Treasurer of State at the time of the removal of the capital from Corydon to Indianapolis in the fall of 1824, and charged with the supervision of the work, prepared a map illustrating the progress of the town at different periods, 1821, 1823, 1835, and 1850, to accompany the first historical sketch of the city, prepared by him for the first " Gazetteer," issued in 1850 by Chamberlain & Co., booksellers in the town. The reader, understanding the old plat of the city, and observing that its western boundary at West Street was about a quarter of a mile from the river, will see quite accurately the size and location of the infant settlement of 1821 from a description of the outline on this map. It extended along Washington Street, wholly south of it, to a point a little less than a block east of West Street, and was less than a block in width for a distance equal to two blocks, when it began widening, and at the river reached from about the point where Georgia Street strikes the bank to the old National road bridge. The little settlement of Maxwell and Cowan farther north, near the site of the City Hospital, seems to have been completely detached from the main body of the village. In 1823, the year before the arrival of the capital, the settlement had shifted entirely away from the river, its western extremity being near West Street, and it extended in a narrow line about a block in width on each side of Washington Street to Meridian Street, where a point ran south to Georgia Street on each side of Meridian, while east of it, and passing east of the Circle, another point projected north as far as Ohio Street, and a third point along Washington carried the settlement to a point about half-way between Alabama and New Jersey Streets. The shape of it is an exact cross, with one arm a little higher than the other. In 1835 the town had been under its own government by trustees for two or three years, had established a brewery and several manufactures, besides those for custom service, had been the capital for over ten years, had nearly completed the State-House, had a population of about two thousand, and the county that year, as announced by Mr. Calvin Fletcher in a public address, contained thirteen hundred farms, and had produced one million three hundred thousand bushels of corn. In this condition of things the town formed an irregular figure, much like a balloon, with the neck near West Street, and the " bulge" opening pretty rapidly up north to Michigan Street, reaching east to New Jersey, and then south to Georgia and a little below; at the widest place, north to south, covering seven squares, and its greatest length along Washington Street very nearly covering the mile of the plat. In 1850 it covered all of the plat but the northwest, southwest, and southeast corners, and more than made up for these deficiencies by projecting beyond it on the northeast, the east, and the south along the Bluff road or South Meridian Street.

In May, 1820, in three months after the first settlement, or in any case after the first indications of a possible settlement of more than a family or two, there were fifteen or twenty families on the donation. These increased to thirty or forty during the succeeding year to July, when the sales of government lands in this and adjoining counties began at the land office in Brookville, Franklin Co. Happily for the pioneers of 1820, there was not so much sickness as might have been expected, and nothing comparable to the visitation the next year, and, quite as happily, nature had provided a " deadening," in which they raised with little labor comparatively all the corn and vegetables they needed to make a comfortable subsistence with the abundance of fish and game to be had close at hand and with little trouble. This natural " deadening" lay at the northwest corner of the donation, and contained some hundred or more acres. The trees had been killed by caterpillars, and the pioneers cleared off the underbrush together, and held the field in common, simply marking off each family's share by what Mr. Nowland calls " turn-rows." This was known as the "big field" for several years. Its products were chiefly corn and pumpkins. In addition to this provision for the staples of vegetable food, each family had a truck-patch in the rear of their log cabin, where they raised such vegetables as they required for immediate use, including the " love-apple," or tomato, which nobody dreamed of eating for twenty years afterwards. Little more belongs to the history of this first year of the city's settlement than an account of the condition and modes of life of the settlers, and that being much the same for all the early years of the settlement will be told for all at once

The year 1821 was an eventful one for the infant capital. During the summer the donation had been surveyed and the original city plat made, and a number of the men who were to be most conspicuous in its after-history, in spreading its business, establishing its industries, founding its schools, maintaining its morality, its Fletcher, Yandes. Blake, Ray, Morris, Russell, Dunlap, Brown, Landis, had come or were on the way. It was a year of universal sickness, privation, and suffering. Says an early account, " Towards the end of summer and during the fall epidemic remittent and intermittent fevers and agues assailed the people, and scarcely a person was left untouched. (In another place it is told that Nancy Hendricks, Enoch Banks, and Thomas Chinn were all that escaped.) The few healthy ones were employed day and night in ministering to the wants of the sufferers, and many instances of generous and devoted friendship occurred at this time. The recollection of their bitter sufferings bound the early settlers together in after-life. The new-comers might well be appalled at the prospect before them, and it is no wonder that extravagant stories were circulated of the sickness at Indianapolis. Although nearly every person in the settlement was more or less assailed, and several hundred cases occurred during the prevalence of the epidemic, not more than., twenty-five terminated fatally. As winter approached the health of the community improved, and by the end of the year it was entirely restored. No cause was discovered for the unparalleled visitation, which the old settlers hold to this day in vivid remembrance." The report of this calamity went abroad, and for many years more or less affected the otherwise strong inducements of the settlement to new settlers, and for thirty years malarial disorders came almost as regularly as the seasons. The " sickly season" was as well-known and well defined a period as the " dogdays," and continued so till the general clearing of the county and drying out of low bottom lands and swamps had diminished the sources of malarial influence. The effect of the epidemic of 1821 on the settlement was to force it back from the river, and extend it eastward past the Circle and Court-House Square along Washington Street.

The first death in the settlement, by tradition, was that of Daniel Shaffer, a merchant, who came early in the year, opened a store on the high ground south of the creek, near the present line of South Street, and died in the summer following. The first woman that died was the wife of John Maxwell, one of the first two settlers after the McCormicks in the spring of 1820. She died 3rd of July, 1821, and was buried on the bluff of Fall Creek, near the site of the City Hospital. Eight persons were buried there during the epidemic. Mr. Commissioner Harrison was scared off home by it, but before he went he authorized Daniel Shaffer, James Blake, and Matthias R. Nowland to select a site for a cemetery. " One Sunday morning early in August," says Mr. J. H. B. Nowland, " they selected the place now known as the Old Graveyard. One week from that day Mr. Shaffer was buried there." If his memory is correct Mrs. Maxwell's was the first death in the settlement, and the traditional burial of Shaffer near the corner of South and Pennsylvania Streets, and subsequent removal to the " Old Graveyard," now " Greenlawn Cemetery," is a mistake. Most of the burials during the epidemic were in that first cemetery

Following this visitation came another hardly less intolerable. The universal sickness prevented the cultivation of the " caterpillar deadening," and the influx of settlers at and after the first sales of lots made provisions distressingly scarce. Coffee was fifty cents a pound; tea, two dollars; corn, one dollar a bushel; flour, four to five dollars a hundred; coarse muslin or " factory," forty-five cents a yard. There were no roads into the settlement, nor anything better than cow-paths. All goods and provisions had to be carried on horseback from the White Water Valley, sixty miles away. The nearest grist-mill was Goodlander's, on the White Water. Corn was mainly bought of the Indians up the river and brought down in boats. Later keel-boats brought considerable cargoes of flour, whiskey, and powder, chiefly up the river. The settlers considered each one's stock of provisions the property of all that needed it, and divided with unstinted generosity.

The year 1821 was marked by the establishment of the first business house, the store of Daniel Shaffer. He was followed in a short time by James and John Givan, the latter of whom became a vagrant and pauper, supported by an annuity contributed by the merchants of the city, and died only a few years ago, a very old man, with a marvelous memory of events and persons of that early time. Robert Wilmot began merchandising about the same time, or perhaps a little earlier, near the present corner of Washington and West Streets, in a row of cabins called " Wilmot's Row." Luke Walpole opened in the same business in the fall on the southwest corner of the State-House Square, Jacob Landis on the southeast corner, and Jeremiah Johnson on the northwest corner of Market and Pennsylvania. The first log school-house was built the same year, about where Kentucky Avenue enters Illinois Street, near a large pond. The first teacher was Joseph C. Reed, afterwards the first county recorder. The first log house on the old city plat was built by Isaac Wilson in the spring of 1820, on the northwest corner of what was afterwards the State-House Square. The first frame house was built by James Blake on the lot east of Masonic Hall in the fall of 1821. The timber had been cut during the summer by James Paxton on the donation. This was the first plastered house. That winter Thomas Carter, the auctioneer of the lot sales, built a ceiled frame tavern about where No. 40 West Washington Street is, and called it the " Rosebush," in the old English fashion of naming taverns, from a rough painting of that object on the sign. It was long after removed to a point near the canal, and then to West Street near Maryland. John Hawkins had built a log tavern the fall before on Washington Street, north side, near the middle of the block east of Meridian. It may be noted in this connection, though chronologically dislocated, that the first brick building was erected for John Johnson in 1822-23, on a lot opposite the site of the post-office. It was torn down a few years ago to make room for a better structure. Though the Johnson house was undoubtedly the first brick building in the town, it is not so certain that it was the first in the county. Old residents of Wayne township, like Mr. Slattern and Mr. Gladden, say that a two-story brick residence was built by John Cook in 1821, in what is now Maywood, near the line of Wayne and Decatur townships. In its latter days, thirty-five or forty years ago, it cracked through the middle, and was held together by a hoop of large square logs, notched at the corners and wedged tight, between the lower and upper stories. It was a rare style of repair for a building of any kind, and may still be remembered by old residents on that account. It stood on the northern bluff of a low, level, wet prairie, the only one in the county, of which the now drained and cultivated remains, with possible patches of the original condition, are on the southern border of Maywood, and near the residence of Fielding Beeler, Esq. James Linton built the first two-story house, a frame, in the spring of 1822, on the site of No. 76 West Washington Street. He also built the first saw-mill on Fall Creek, above the Indiana Avenue or Crawfordsville road bridge, and about the same time built the first grist-mill for Isaac Wilson on Fall Creek bayou, now known as " the race," near the line of North Street.

The year 1821 saw the beginning of moral and intellectual culture as well as business. A school was taught by Mr. Reed during the latter part of the year, and Rev. John McClung, a preacher of what was called the " New Light" denomination, preached in the spring, some say in the sugar grove on the little knoll in the Circle. It is a question among the few old settlers who remember the occurrence whether that was the first sermon heard in the New Purchase or one preached not far from the same time by Rev. Rezin Hammond. Mr. Nowland says that if Mr. McClung preached in the settlement that spring it must have been at Mr. Barnhill's, who belonged to the same denomination but lived outside of the donation. An old settler wrote in one of the city papers recently that Mr. Hammond preached near the site of the old State Bank, corner of Illinois Street and Kentucky Avenue, near a pond, which must have been close to the site of the first schoolhouse, while others say he preached in the woods on the State-House Square. Mr. Nowland, years afterwards, met Mr. Hammond at Jeffersonville, and this first sermon was recalled. The party surveying the town, under Ralston, were then at work near the Circle, and they prepared on Saturday evening for the sermon next day by rolling logs together for seats and building a rough log rostrum. Not more than forty or fifty persons attended. " A few moments after the services commenced," says Mr. Nowland, " an Indian and his squaw came by on their ponies. They halted a moment, and passed on towards the trading-house of Robert Wilmot. He was in the congregation, and at once rose and followed them; but before he was out of hearing Mr. Hammond said, ' The pelts and furs of the Indians had more attractions for his Kentucky friend than the words , of God.' There can be little doubt," Mr. Nowland concludes, " that this was the first sermon preached in Indianapolis; it was so regarded at the time." In August of the same year Rev. Ludlow G. Gaines, a Presbyterian clergyman, preached in the grove south of the State-House Square. No church organization was attempted, however, till the spring of 1823. In July it was completed, and steps taken to build a church on North Pennsylvania Street, on the site of the Exchange Block. It was finished, at a cost of twelve hundred dollars, and occupied in 1824. The " Indianapolis Circuit" of the Methodist Church was organized by Rev. William Cravens in 1822, under authority of the Missouri Conference, but Rev. James Scott had preached here in private houses as early as October, 1821, by appointment of the same authority. A camp-meeting had been held in 1822, September 12th, and a second one in May, 1823, after the organization of the circuit, but no house was occupied specially as a church till the summer of 1825, when a hewed-log house on Maryland Street near Meridian was bought for three hundred dollars and used for four years. In 1828-29 a brick building was erected, at a cost of three thousand dollars, on the southwest corner of Circle and Meridian Streets, which became, when replaced in 1846, "Wesley Chapel." The first Baptist Church was organized in September, 1822, but held services in private houses or in a log school-house " on and partly in Maryland Street," between Tennessee and Mississippi Streets, which could be had " without interruption," as a committee reported in May, 1823, till a brick house was built on the southwest corner of Maryland and Meridian Streets in 1829. These were the beginnings of the three pioneer churches in Indianapolis and the New Purchase. They are noted here to present as complete a view as possible of the early settlement and history of the city and county.

In the summer of 1821 the first marriage occurred. The bride was Miss Jane Reagan, the groom Jeremiah Johnson, who had to walk through an unbroken and pathless forest sixty miles to Connersville for his license (this county at that time having no organization), and the walk back made one hundred and twenty miles. He was an eccentric man, witty, cynical, with a fashion of retracting his lips when talking so as to show his yellow, tobacco-stained teeth, giving him something of the expression of a snarling dog. He was full of humorous conceits and quaint comparisons, and a delightful companion for young men when he was " tight" enough to feel jolly, as he frequently was. When the first telegraph line was completed to the city in 1848, " Old Jerry" saw it as ho was passing along Washington Street comfortably " full," and broke out in a sort of apostrophe, " There! they're driving lightning down the road, and with a single line at that!" Anyone who has seen a team driven by a " single line" will appreciate " Old Jerry's" joke. He died very suddenly in 1857.

Among other first events that have traditionally marked this year was the birth of the first child. But the tradition of that interesting occurrence is contested by two living witnesses, who rather confuse 3 one's faith, and leave a slight leaning to the skepticism which would doubt if any child was born at all. The traditional opinion, supported by two or three historical sketches, is that Mordecai Harding was that memorable infant, but tradition and history are both impeached by Mr. William H. White (before referred to) and by Mr. Shirts, of Hamilton, who claims that Mr. Corbaley's son Richard was the first, in August, 1820, at his residence in the western part of the donation. Mr. Nowland denies the donation, says Mr. Corbaley lived west of the west donation line, but concedes the principal fact. Mr. White's claim is disputed by the general opinion of old settlers, but the other seems to be settled.

During the whole of the year 1820 the " New Purchase" formed part of Delaware County, which, then unorganized, vaguely covered most of the northern and central portions of the State, and was attached for judicial purposes to Wayne and Fayette Counties. The residents of White River Valley were sued and compelled to answer in the courts of the White Water Valley, sixty miles away, and the compulsion was costly, irritating, and intolerable. The jurisdiction was disputed and resisted, and the Legislature, to avoid further and graver trouble, passed an act of Jan. 9, 1821, authorizing the appointment of two justices of the peace for the new settlements, with appeals to the Bartholomew Circuit Court. In April, 1821, Governor Jennings appointed John Maxwell, but he retained the office only a few months, and resigned. The settlers then elected informally James McIlvaine, and the Governor commissioned him in October. He is described by the old residents who remember him, and by the sketches that speak of this period of the city's history, as holding court at the door of his little log shanty, on the northwest corner of Pennsylvania and Michigan Streets, with the jury sitting on a log in front, his pipe in his mouth, and Corbaley, the solitary constable, vigilantly crossing the plans of culprits to get away into the thick woods close about, as they are said to have done sometimes in spite of him. The late Calvin Fletcher was then the only lawyer, and the primary court of informal appeal for the easily-puzzled old squire. The positions of counsel and judge are not often consolidated in the same hands, — it is too easy for one to use and abuse the other; but it was never charged that Mr. Fletcher misled his confidant in his own interest.

The first especially exciting incident in the quiet course of the settlement brought the judicial power into a dilemma, from which it escaped by a process that did more credit to its ingenuity than its sense of justice. On Christmas-day, 1821, four Kentucky boatmen who had come up White River from the Ohio in a keel-boat to the Bluffs, thought that the new settlement farther up would be a good place for frolic, and they came and got howling drunk before daylight at Dan Larkins' " grocery," as liquor-shops were called in those days, and frequently were a mixture of saloon and grocery-store. As usual with the " half-horse and half-alligator" men of the Mike Fink breed, the predecessors of the " cow-boy," they began smashing the doggery as soon as they had got all the liquor they wanted. The row roused the settlement, and the gentlemen from Kentucky were respectfully requested to desist and make less noise. They responded with a defiance backed by knives. The settlers consulted. They did not want the whiskey wasted, and they did want a quiet Christmas, or at least to make their own disturbance. They determined to put down the rioters. James Blake proposed to take the leader single-handed if the rest of Indianapolis would " tackle" the other three, and the consolidated remainder of the embryo capital agreed. Blake and the Kentuckian were both large, powerful men, but the Hoosier was sober and resolute, and the Kentuckian drunk and furious, so the rioters were captured and taken to Squire McIlvaine's. They were tried, fined severely, and in default of payment ordered to jail. There was no jail nearer than Connersville, and it would cost as much as their fines to take them there in the dead of winter under guard, so they were kept under guard here, with instructions to allow a little relaxation of vigilance in the night, and the hint was followed by the convenient escape of the whole party.

Notwithstanding the appointment of justices, the courts of Wayne and Fayette Counties still claimed jurisdiction, and doubts were entertained of the validity of the appointment of Maxwell and McIlvaine. To remedy all difficulties the citizens held a meeting at Hawkins' tavern to discuss the matter, and James Blake and Dr. S. G. Mitchell were appointed representatives of the settlement to attend the next session of the Legislature at Corydon as lobby members to secure an organization of the county. On the 28th of November the Legislature legalized the acts of Commissioner Harrison, he having acted alone in surveying the donation and laying off the town. It may be noted here as an indication of the readiness of the Legislature to encourage the growth of the place that on the 31st of December, 1821, an .act authorized Gen. Carr, the agent, to lease to McCartney and McDonald forty acres of the donation for ten years free, to be occupied as a mill-seat. On the same day an act was passed organizing the county, and requiring the organization to be completed on the 1st of April, 1822. It applied the present Court-House Square to that purpose, and provided for the erection of a court-house fifty feet square and two stories high, and appropriated eight thousand dollars to it. The courts that held sessions in the capitol, Federal, State, and county, were to use it forever if they chose, and the State Legislature was to use it for fifty years or till a State-House should be built. Two per cent, of the lot fund was to be given for the founding of a county library. The sessions of court and the elections were to be held at Gen. Carr's till the court-house was built. Johnson, Hamilton, and a large part of Boone, Madison, and Hancock were attached to this county for judicial purposes. Marion, Monroe, Owen, Greene, Morgan, Lawrence, Rush, Hendricks, Decatur, Bartholomew, Shelby, and Jennings Counties were formed into the Fifth Judicial Circuit. William W. Wick, of Connersville, was elected president judge by the Legislature, and Harvey Bates, of the same place, was appointed sheriff by the Governor. They both came on and assumed their offices the following February, 1822. The latter, by a proclamation of Feb. 22, 1822, ordered an election to be held on the 1st of the next April for two associate judges, a clerk, recorder, and three county commissioners. The voting precincts were fixed at Gen. Carr's, in the town; John Page's, at Strawtown, in Hamilton County; John Berry's, Andersontown, Madison Co.; and William McCartney's, on Fall Creek, near Pendleton. Returns were to be forwarded by the 3rd of April.

William W. Wick was a Pennsylvanian by birth, but came to Connersville, in this State, when a young man, and from there came to Indianapolis to assume the duties of his office. Ex-Senator Oliver H. Smith said that in 1824 " he, though a young lawyer, had had a good deal of experience in criminal cases." During his term as judge of the huge circuit, now formed into a half-dozen, he was elected brigadier-general of militia, no unimportant position in those days to an ambitious young man. He was Secretary of State for four years, from 1825 to 1829, then prosecuting attorney, and in 1833 was beaten for Congress by George L. Kinnard. He was successful though in 1839, and served in the House during the memorable " log cabin and hard cider" campaign of 1840. He was elected again in 1845, and re-elected in 1847. In 1853 he was made postmaster by President Pierce, and on the expiration of his term in 1857 he retired from public life altogether. Soon afterwards he went to Franklin and made his home with his daughter, and died there in 1868.

Hervey Bates, who was appointed sheriff by Governor Jennings, was a son of Hervey Bates, who was a master of transportation during the Indian war under Gens. Wayne and Harmar, and chiefly engaged in forwarding provisions and munitions of war from the frontier posts to the army in the wilderness. His son Hervey, the subject of this biographical sketch, was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, and born in that place in 1795, when it was called Fort Washington. When but about six years of age he lost his mother, and, his father having married again, he left the paternal roof, and in Warren, Lebanon County, Ohio, met with friends through whose agency he received a sufficient English education to qualify him for the ordinary pursuits of life. On attaining his majority he came to Brookville, Franklin County, where he married Miss Sidney Sedwick, cousin of the late Gen. James Noble, United States senator. During the year 1816 he cast, in Brookville, his first vote for a delegate to form a new constitution for the State of Indiana. Soon after Mr. Bates' marriage he removed to Connersville, and made it his residence until February, 1822, when Indianapolis, then a mere hamlet, became his home. Jonathan Jennings, the first Governor after. the admission of the State into the Union, appointed William W. Wick president judge of the then Fifth Judicial District, and Hervey Bates, sheriff of Marion County, which then embraced several neighboring counties for judicial purposes, investing the latter with full power for placing in operation the necessary legal machinery of the county. This he did by issuing a proclamation for an election to be held on the first day of April, for the purpose of choosing a clerk of the court and other county officers, which was the first election of any kind held in the new purchase. Mr. Bates was, at the following election held in October, made sheriff for the regular term of two years, but declined a subsequent nomination, having little taste for the distinctions of office. Mercantile pursuits subsequently engaged his attention, to which he brought his accustomed energy and industry, and enjoyed success in his various business enterprises.

Mr. Bates was the earliest president of the branch of the State Bank located in Indianapolis, and filled the position for ten years, during which time it enjoyed a career of unparalleled success, and greatly advanced the interests of the business community. Through the substantial aid afforded by this bank, most of the surplus produce of this and adjacent counties found a profitable market. Mr. Bates was also instrumental in the formation of the earliest insurance company, was a stockholder in the first hotel built by a company, in the first railroad finished to the city of his residence, the earliest gaslight and coke company, and in many other enterprises having for their object the public welfare. In 1852 he began and later completed the spacious hotel! known as the Bates House, at that time one of the most complete and elegant in the West. It was erected at a cost of sixty thousand dollars, and modern improvements added, making a total cost of seventy-five thousand dollars. Many other public and private buildings in various portions of the city owe their existence to the enterprise and means of Mr. Bates. He was a generous contributor to all worthy religious and benevolent objects, and willingly aided in the maintenance of the various charitable institutions of Indianapolis. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher found in him a cordial friend when a resident of the city, and in his less prosperous days. The death of Mr. Bates occurred on the 6th of July, 1876, in his eighty-third year, his wife having died previously. His children are Hervey Bates and Mrs. L. M. Vance, both of Indianapolis, and Elizabeth H., deceased.

While this first election is pending a return may be made for a moment to pick up some incidents of the settlement that occurred between the sale of lots in October, 1821, and the election, April 1, 1822. No clearing of the streets had been attempted when the sales took place. Each little cabin was stuck away in its own little hole in the dense woods, and they were so dense that a man standing near the site of Bingham & Walk's jewelry-store could not see a house half-way down the block on the other side of Washington Street, west of Meridian; so say old settlers and common tradition. Gen. Morris once said that it was just like camping out in a forest on a hunting expedition when he came here with his father in 1821, except that the camping-places were cabins instead of tents or brush houses. One neighbor could not see the next one's house. Hawkins built his tavern of logs cut on the lot in the very center of Washington Street. For many years the less settled streets were more or less filled with trees and brush, and the only way along them was a cow-path. In order to open Washington Street, which the plan of the town had appointed for the principal thoroughfare, an offer was made by the settlers to give the timber to anybody who would clear off the trees. It would have been a very profitable contract a year later. The offer was accepted by Lismond Basye, a Swede, who had come from Franklin County that same fall. The trees were oak, ash, and walnut chiefly, and he thought he had a small fortune safe

When he had got them all down, and the street " to be" was worse blocked than before, and there was no mill to saw them, he gave up the job in despair, and the people burned the superb timber as it lay. In January, 1822, the Legislature ordered the opening of a number of roads, and appropriated nearly one hundred thousand dollars to it, greatly to the satisfaction of the entirely isolated settlers. In the same month the State agent was instructed to lease unsold lots on condition that the lessees would clear them in four months, and this, as a step towards getting the settlement in something like civilized condition, was a gratifying measure. The lessees were allowed forty days to remove their improvements if the lots should be sold during their occupancy of them.

On the 28th of January, 1822, the first newspaper of the settlement was issued by George Smith and Nathaniel Bolton, his step-son, called the Indianapolis Gazette. Mr. Nowland's memoir of Mr. Smith says " the printing-office was in one corner of the cabin in which the family lived," and the cabin was near a row of cabins built by Mr. Wilmot, called " Smoky Row," west of the line of the future canal and near Maryland Street. In the second year the office was moved to the northeast corner of the State-House Square. Mr. Smith learned the printer's trade in the office of the Observer of Lexington, Ky., and subsequently worked upon the Liberty Hall and Gazette of Cincinnati, under the noted editor, Charles Hammond. In later life he lived in a frame house on the northeast corner of Georgia and Tennessee Streets, the ground now forming a part of the Catholic property about the St. John's Cathedral and the bishop's residence. Here about 1840, John Hodgkins established the first ice-cream or " pleasure garden," as it was called, and built the first ice-house, and laid down a little circular railway with a little locomotive to run upon it. Mr. Smith served two terms as associate judge of the county, and was the first man in the place to open a real estate agency, which he did in 1827. Some years before his death he bought a farm at Mount Jackson, which now forms part of the grounds of the Insane Asylum, and there he died in April, 1826, at the age of fifty-two. He was rather an eccentric man, but notoriously liberal to the poor.

He and Governor Ray wore " cues" in the old Revolutionary fashion. .The Governor discarded his in his old age, but Mr. Smith held to his as tenaciously as a Chinaman. Some catarrhal affection, probably, brought a fit of sneezing on him nearly every morning early after he had dressed and got out of doors, and that sonorous sound could be heard by all the neighbors as far and as plainly and about as early as the morning song of his roosters.

Nathaniel Bolton was a book-binder by trade. He became much better known to the Indianapolis people than Mr. Smith. He continued to edit the Gazette after the other had sold out his interest, when he had a larger constituency to speak for, and his wife, Sarah T. Barrett, of Madison, the earliest and most gifted and conspicuous of the poetesses of the State, helped his reputation by the abundance of her own. He was made consul at Geneva, Switzerland, in 1853, whence his wife wrote many letters to the Journal, then under the direction of an old friend, Mr. Sulgrove. In May, 1857, he came back in consequence of failing health, and died in a few months. For several years after he had sold his interest in the Gazette, he and his wife kept a country tavern on the farm that Mr. Smith lived on before his death at Mount Jackson. Mrs. Bolton is now living in a pleasant house in the country about three miles southeast of the city, and still frequently publishes . fugitive verses on passing occurrences that interest her, especially the death of old friends, marked with all the fertility of fancy and grace of style of her earlier poems.

The mechanical processes of the first paper were primitive enough. The ink was partly compounded of tar, and the press-work was slow and hard. Composition rollers were unknown till the secret of making them was brought here just ten years later by the late David V. Culley, for many years president of the City Council. There were no mails at all at first, and when a post-route was established soon afterwards its deliveries were so irregular that the editors had to apologize once for the deficiency of matter by saying that the failure of the mails had left them without any news from abroad or any suitable material. Several post-routes were opened during the spring, in addition to one to White Water, opened a few weeks after the paper appeared first, but they came too late to relieve the urgent necessity of the winter and spring. The incessant and heavy rains greatly obstructed the main mail-route, and compelled the entire suspension of the paper from the 3rd of April to the 4th of May by catching the editors away from home and keeping the streams too deep to be forded. The first number appeared on the 28th of January, the second on the 11th of February, the third on the 25th, the fourth March 6th, the fifth on the 18th, the sixth April 3rd, the seventh May 4th. The growth and changes of the Gazette will be noticed particularly in the sketch of the " Press." The first mail came very closely after the first paper. For nearly two years such correspondence as had been maintained between the new settlement and the older ones east and south on the White Water and the Ohio, had been carried on by the hands of neighbors and occasional travelers. On the 30th of January, 1822, a meeting of citizens was held at the " Eagle Tavern" (Hawkins') to devise means to maintain a private mail. The hope of a government mail does not seem to have been strong enough to be cultivated. Aaron Drake was selected for the duty of private postmaster and mail-carrier. He notified the postmasters all around of the arrangement that had been made, and asked them to forward all letters for Indianapolis to Connersville, where he would get them. " He returned from his first trip," says an early sketch of the city, " shortly after nightfall, and the loud blasts of his horn were heard far through the woods, and the whole people turned out in the bright moonlight to greet him and hear the news." This effort aroused the general government, and President Monroe appointed Samuel Henderson first postmaster in February, 1822. He opened the office the first week in March. A history of the office will be found in its proper place, and nothing more need be said of it 'here, except that the first list of letters awaiting delivery contained five names, one of them that of Mallory, the colored barber, and first barber in the place. For some years, it is hard to say just how long, the mails were carried on horseback, subsequently they were taken in stagecoaches, and Indianapolis became nearly as conspicuous a stage center as it is now a railroad center. For many years the J. & P. Vorhees Company had large stables and coach-making and repairing shops here on the southwest corner of Maryland and Pennsylvania Streets. They were abandoned about 1852, when the advancing railroad lines began to absorb mails and passengers; but the music of the " stage-horn" was long a pleasant sound in the ears of the old settler, for it brought him the principal variation of the monotony of a village life, except the regular winter sessions of the Legislature. For a short time during the administration of Van Buren a mail-route or two was run here on horseback in extra quick time, and called " express mails." The riders came galloping along Washington Street, blowing little tin horns with a din that delighted the school-boys, and for many a week they made night hideous with their horns,

The winter of 1821-22, in spite of the prostration and starvation of the preceding summer and fall, was pleasantly passed in the main. The settlers becoming better acquainted, and frequently rendering each indispensable neighborly offices in sickness and destitution, were naturally well disposed to relieve the loneliness of an unusually severe winter in an impassable forest with such social entertainments as were within reach, so they kept up an almost unbroken round of quilting and dancing parties and other modes of killing time when there was nothing to do to enable them to make a better use of it. " A mania for marrying took possession of the young people," says the early sketch, " and there was hardly a single bachelor left in the place." The snow was very deep, and the river frozen so hard that large logs were hauled across it on heavy " ox-sleds." On the 25th of February the Gazette said that a good deal of improvement had been going on. Forty residences and several work-shops had been built, a grist-mill and two saw-mills were in operation, and more were in progress near the place. There were thirteen carpenters, four cabinet-makers, eight blacksmiths, four shoemakers, two tailors, one hatter, two tanners, one saddler, one cooper, four bricklayers, two merchants, three grocers, four doctors, three lawyers, one preacher, one teacher, seven tavern-keepers. These alone would indicate a population of about three hundred. But these were not alone: there were probably enough more adult males to complete a roll of one hundred, and show a population of five hundred.

The first election was coming close as the protracted winter began to loosen its grip on the iron ground and let the spring blossoms out to the sunlight. Candidates were pretty nearly as numerous as voters. There were two parties, but not separated by national party divisions. This was the " era of good feeling" in national politics. The old " Federal" and "Republican" differences were growing dim and the names unfamiliar. The division in the first election in Indianapolis was geographical. " White Water" and " Kentucky" were the names of might, and the voters took sides according to the direction they had traveled to get here. Just what sort of a compromise was made by the settlers who came in the first place from Kentucky, and resided for a while in the White Water before moving to the New Purchase, there is no indication to direct. The " White Water" leader was James M. Ray, the " Kentucky" chief Morris Morris, father of Gen. Thomas A. Morris, the real general and victor in the first campaign in West Virginia. The candidates for associate judges — there were two — were Robert Patterson, James McIlvaine, James Page, Eliakim Harding, John Smock, and Rev. John McClung. The candidates for clerk were James M. Ray, Milo R. Davis, Morris Morris, Thomas Anderson, and John W. Redding. For recorder there were Alexander Ralston, James Linton, Joseph C. Reed, Aaron Drake, John Givan, John Hawkins, William Vandegrift, and William Townsend. No record is left of the candidates for the three county commissionerships, but it is said there were about fifteen of them. There were no caucuses or conventions or primaries, and no obstruction to the ambition of any man that wanted to be a candidate. The poll in the town showed two hundred and twenty-four votes, a little more than one hundred probably being residents on the donation. In the county three hundred and thirty-six votes were cast, including a good part of all the counties around it. James McIlvaine and Eliakim Harding were elected associate judges; James M. Ray, clerk; Joseph C. Reed, recorder; and John McCormick, John T. Oshorn, and William McCartney, county .commissioners. James M. Ray received two hundred and seventeen votes, which was the highest vote for any candidate.

The newly-elected county commissioners qualified and held their first session on the 15th of April, in the house at the corner of Ohio and Meridian Streets, On the next day they divided the county, embracing the very large area already described, into Fall Creek, Anderson, White River, Delaware, Lawrence, Washington, Pike, Warren, Centre, Wayne, Franklin, Perry, and Decatur townships. The first four were in the territory afterwards formed into other counties. The following are the formally declared boundaries of the townships as first constituted, which have composed the county ever since, with a very few slight changes. Only the "corners" are given, as they will enable any one to follow the lines readily:

" Lawrence" township, in the northeast corner of the county, was given the following corners: The northeast corner of Section 15, Town 17 north of Range 5 east, is the northeast corner of the township; the southeast corner of Section 15, Town 16 I north of Range 5 east, is the southeast corner; the southwest corner of Section 15, Town 16 north of; Range 4 east, is the southwest corner; and the northwest corner of Section 16, Town 17 north of Range 4 east, the northwest corner. The township contains forty-nine sections, seven each way.

" Washington" township, immediately north of Centre, has the following corners: On the northeast, northeast corner of Section 17, Town 17 north of Range 4 east; on the southeast, the southeast corner of Section 16, Town 16 north of Range 4 east; on the southwest, the southwest corner of Section 15, Town 16 north of Range 3 east; and the northwest, the northwest corner of Section 16, Town 17 north of Range 3 east. This township contains forty-nine sections, seven each way, like Lawrence. Three sections were subsequently taken from Pike, in Town 16 north of Range 3 east, so that the southwest corner of Section 16, Town 17 north of Range 3 east, is the southwest corner of the township.

" Pike" township, in the northwest corner of the county, is now somewhat different from the bounds set by the commissioners at this session. The four corners as set by them at this time are as follows: The northeast is the northeast corner of Section 17, Town 17 north of Range 3 east; the southeast is the southeast corner of Section 16, Town 16 north of Range 3 east; the southwest is the southwest corner of Section 16, Town 16 north of Range 2 east; the northwest is the northwest corner of the county. The east and west boundaries were both changed after this, so that the southeast corner is the southeast corner of Section 17, Town 16 north of Range 3 east, giving to Washington three sections; and on the west the bounds of the county were changed, giving the four east halves of sections to Pike, thus making the area forty-four sections, seven miles north and south, six miles on the south side and six and a half on the north side.

" Warren" township, on the east of Centre, was described with the following corners: The northeast, the northeast corner of Section 22, Town 16 north of Range 5 east; the southeast, the southeast corner of Section 22, Town 15 north of Range 5 east; the southwest, the southwest corner of Section 22, Town 15 north of Range 4 east; the northwest, the northwest corner of Section 22, Town 16 north of Range 4 east. The township contains forty-nine sections, seven sections each way, being almost exactly square, and has never been changed.

" Centre township shall consist of the territory included within the following bounds, to wit: Beginning at the northeast corner of Section 21, Town 16, Range 4; thence south on the section line to the southeast corner of Section 21, Town 15, Range 4; thence west to the southwest corner of Section 22, Town 15, Range 3; thence north on the section line to the northwest corner of Section 22, Town 16, Range 3; thence east on the section line to the place of beginning." The township contains forty-two sections, seven miles north and south, six east and west, and has never been altered.

" Wayne" township had and still has the following corners, having remained unchanged: The north-, east, the northeast corner of Section 21, Town 16 north of Range 3 east; the southeast, the southeast corner of Section 21, Town 15 north of Range 3 east; the southwest, the southwest corner of Section 21, Town 15 north of Range 2 east; the northwest, the northwest corner of Section 21, Town 16 north of Range 2 east. The township contains forty-nine sections, being of the same shape and size as Warren.

" Franklin" township is of the same size and shape as Centre, but has its greatest extension east and west. The corners are as follows: The northeast, the northeast corner of Section 27, Town 15 north of Range 5 east; the southeast, the southeast corner of the county; the southwest, the southwest comer of Section 22, Town 14 north of Range 4 east; the northwest, the northwest corner of Section 27, Town 15 north of Range 4 east. This township also has never been changed.

" Decatur" and " Perry" townships were at first given bounds which made them parallelograms, but they have since been so changed that the river forms a boundary line between them. The four corners of " Perry" township were as follows: The northeast, the northeast corner of Section 28, Town 15 north of Range 4 east; the southeast, the southeast corner of Section 21, Town 14 north of Range 4 east; the southwest, the southwest corner of Section 22, Town 14 north of Range 3 east; the northwest, the northwest corner of Section 27, Town 15 north of Range 3 east. This made an area of forty-two sections, the same shape and size as Franklin, seven miles east and west, six north and south. The township now, however, has about forty-five sections, making the river the west boundary line.

" Decatur" township had the following corners: The northeast, the northeast corner of Section 28, Town 15 north of Range 3 east; the southeast, the southeast corner of Section 21, Town 14 north of Range 3 east; the southwest, the southwest corner of the county; the northwest, the northwest corner of Section 27, Town 15 north of Range 2 east. This gave the township thirty-six sections, while it contains now but about thirty-three sections.

" On account of lack of population" certain of the townships were, until other regulations were made, to be united and to be considered as one township. They were Centre and Warren, to be called " Centre-Warren"; Pike and Wayne, " Pike-Wayne"; Washington and Lawrence, " Washington-Lawrence"; Decatur, Perry, and Franklin, all three to be known as " Decatur-Perry-Franklin" township. Each combination was assigned two justices except Centre-Warren, which was given three.

Some of them were soon separated, the first being Decatur township, which was disunited on the 12th of August, 1823. The next separation was of Pike township from Wayne, on the 10th of May, 1824, a petition to that end having been presented by some of the citizens of the township; and the commissioners considering the population sufficient to warrant the order, Warren and Centre townships were separated by an order of the Board, May 1, 1826.

Washington and Lawrence were separated Oct. 6, 1826. Franklin and Perry were separated Sept. 3, 1827, on a petition presented by the people of that township.

On March 3, 1828, three sections in Pike township, 3, 9, and 16, were attached to Washington.

On the next day after the townships were formed the County Board ordered the election of " magistrates" in all the townships, assigning two to the joint townships of Washington and Lawrence, two to Pike and Wayne, two to Decatur, Perry, and Franklin, and three to " Centre-Warren," as it is always written in the records. The 11th of May was set for the election. In Centre-Warren, Obed Foote, Wilkes Reagan, and Lismund Basye were elected, and their election contested by Moses Cox. The case was heard by the Board at a special session on the 16th of May, on a summons by the sheriff, with whom notice of contest had been filed. Some preliminary argument and ruling were made, and the next day the Board decided that the election should " be set aside and held as null and void." A second election was ordered on the 25th of May, eight days later, which was duly held, and the same men reelected. That election was not disturbed.

At the same May session of 1822 the first constables were appointed: for Washington and Lawrence, William Cris and John Small; for Pike and Wayne, Joel A. Crane and Charles Eckard; for Centre-Warren, Israel Harding, Joseph Duval, Francis Davis, George Harlan, William Phillips, Caleb Reynolds, Daniel Lakin, Lewis Ogle, Samuel Roberts, Joseph Catterlin, Henry Cline, Joshua Glover, and Patrick Kerr, — a larger force than the two townships have ever had since.

At the April session, on the evening of the 17th, a county seal was adopted, thus described: "A star in the center, with the letters ' M. C. C' around the same, with inverted carved stripes tending to the center of the star, and ' Marion County Seal' written thereon." On the 14th of May this seal was changed for the present one, thus officially described: " The words ' Marion County Seal, Indiana,' around the outside, with a pair of scales in the center emblematical of justice, under which is a plow and sheaf of wheat in representation of agriculture." The first roads opened or ordered in the county were considered upon the petition of William Townsend and others, and " viewed" by Joel Wright, John Smock, and Zadoc Smith for the one running " to the Mills at the Falls of Fall Creek,"— the old Pendleton road; and by William D. Rooker, Robert Brenton, and George Norwood for the other, running from " the north end of Pennsylvania Street to Strawtown," — the old Noblesville road. The next road was along the line of the present National road, upon petition of Eliakim Harding; the fourth, a road to McCormick's Mills, on White River, upon petition of John McCormick; the fifth, the old Mooresville road, upon petition of Demas L. McFarland. These were all in May, 1822.

On the 17th, continuing the same session, the County Board established the following tolls " on the ferry on White River opposite Indianapolis," which was established by an act of the preceding Legislature:

"For each wagon and four horses or oxen $0.62 ½

"For each wagon and two horses or oxen .37 ½

" For each wagon (small) and one horse or ox .37 ½

" For each extra horse or ox .12 ½

" For each man or woman and horse .12 ½

" For each head of neat cattle .03

" For each head of swine .02

" For each head of sheep .02

" For each footman .06 ½ "

At the same session of the Board the following " tavern rates" were established:

"Each half-pint of whiskey $0.12 ½

Each half-pint of imported rum, brandy, gin, or wine .25

Each quart of cider or beer .12 ½

Each quart of porter, cider wine, or cider oil .25

Each half-pint of poach brandy, cordial, country gin, or apple brandy .18 ¾

Each meal .25

Each night's lodging .12 ½

Each gallon of corn or oats .12 ½

Each horse to hay, per night .25."

The tax-payers of to-day will be interested in the modes and rates of taxation fixed by the County Board in the first year of the county's organization.

At a session of the Board held on the 14th oft May, 1822, the following rates were established for taxation:

"For every horse, mare, gelding, mule, or ass over three years old $0.37 ½

For stallions, once (their rate for the season) ––––

For taverns, each 10.00

For every ferry 6.00

For every $100 of the appraised valuation of town lots .50

For each and every pleasure carriage of two wheels 1.00

For each pleasure carriage of four wheels 1.25

For every silver watch .25

For every gold watch .50

For every head of work-oxen over three years old and upwards, per head .25

On each male person over the age of twenty-one years .50 "

Provided, That persons over the age of fifty years and not freeholders, and such as are not able from bodily disability to follow any useful occupation, . . . and all idiots and paupers shall be exempt from said last-named tax." At the same session in which the tax rates were settled an order was made for the erection of the first jail. The sheriff, Hervey Bates, was appointed county agent to receive bids. The specifications required as follows: " It is to be built fourteen feet in the inside, two stories high, of six and a half feet between floors, to be of hewed logs twelve inches thick and at least twelve inches wide, with two rounds of oak or walnut logs to be under ground;" and "the second floor and the side logs to be of the same size of walnut, oak, ash, beech, or sugar-tree;" and " the third or upper floor to be of logs six inches thick and at least one foot wide." The roof was to be of jointed shingles. There was to be a window in the lower story or dungeon twelve inches square. The grate-bars for it were to be one inch and a quarter in thickness; and there was a window two feet by six inches in the second story, opposite the door by which the jail was entered. This door was four feet by two, of two thicknesses of two-inch oak plank, with a heavy stock-lock between, and also heavy strap hinges. There was to be a ladder leading up on the outside to the door in the second story, and another door, a trap two feet square, in the floor of the second story, leading down into the lower story, which was to be fastened with a hasp and padlock." The contract was awarded to Noah Leaverton, sometime in Mayor June, 1822, by Hervey Bates, and was submitted to the commissioners for inspection, and accepted on August 12^th.

" The Board approve, adopt, and permanently establish the building erected of hewed logs . . . on the Court-House Square, near the corner of Market and Delaware Streets, in Indianapolis, as the county jail." It cost three hundred and twelve dollars. (Pages 27, 28, 29, Commissioners' Record.) The jail looked a good deal like a small, respectable residence, bating the suggestive quality of the heavy iron gratings. In the summer of 1833 a negro came to the town wearing a black cap with a red leather band around it, and leading sometimes, sometimes riding, a buffalo. He made a show of it on the streets occasionally, and was followed by the usual crowd of curious boys, who gave him a name that another man has lately made famous, " Buffalo Bill." He was arrested for some offense, larceny probably, and put in jail. That night he set it on fire to make his escape, and came near being burned in it. The hole in the ground where the two lower courses of logs had lain was visible for twenty years. Jeremiah Johnson was the first jailer. It was succeeded by a brick jail on the east side of the Court-House Square, one end abutting directly upon Alabama Street. In this the jailer was provided with rooms for residence. In 1845 a hewed-log addition was made on the north and used for the confinement of the worst prisoners. It was built of logs hewed to one foot square, and laid in three courses, the first horizontal, the one outside of it and bolted to it perpendicular or oblique, and the third, exterior to that, horizontal. An exterior casing of the same kind, consisting of one vertical and one horizontal course of hewed logs, was put round the first jail sometime after it was built.

In 1852 the present jail, in the east corner of the Court-House Square, was begun and completed in 1854, when the old jail was torn away. Several additions have been made to the present one, at an aggregate cost of near one hundred thousand dollars, but the increase of crime in a city so convenient to scoundrels, from its facilities for escape, and so largely made up at all times of transient residents, has constantly exceeded the county's ability to take adequate care of the criminals. Escapes have not been very infrequent, and grand juries, whenever they make an examination, are pretty sure to report insufficient room.

In this connection may be noticed more appropriately than in the detached accounts following a chronological order, the crimes which have met the extreme penalty of the law in the present jail, as well as the first offenses in the history of the settlement. Until within the last decade no sentence of death had ever been passed upon any murderer in Marion County. Then William Cluck was convicted of the murder of his wife and sentenced to be hung. The sheriff had the gallows built and in place in the jail yard, but a day or two before that set for the execution the murderer got poison and killed himself In the fall of 1868, Mrs. Nancy B. Clem, William J. Abrams, and Silas W. Hartman, Mrs. Clem's brother, were indicted for the murder of Jacob Young and his wife, — a horrible affair, in which the body of Mrs. Young was partially burned after she had been shot through the head, — known as the " Cold Spring" murder, and the woman was convicted of murder in the second degree and sentenced to imprisonment for life early in March, 1869. Just one week afterwards her brother cut his throat in his cell to escape an inevitable death by the halter. These were the nearest approaches made to the death penalty in this county till its first actual infliction in January, 1879. The frequent escape of murderers whose crimes deserved death had stirred a strong feeling into public expression against the weakness of the law as a protection of the community, and the almost certain escape of every offender, whatever his crime, if he could pay well for a defense, had strengthened this feeling. It appeared in the editorials and communications of the papers, in allusions in public speeches and sermons, in social conversation, and, more emphatic than all, in frequent lynchings all about in the State. Mrs. Clem, though twice convicted, finally worried the law by appeals and change of venue and postponement till she was discharged, and this more than any other one thing had set the community hard against any lenity to the next murderer.

In November, 1878, John Achey was convicted of the murder, by shooting, of George Leggett, a partner in a gambling-operation, and sentenced to death on the 29th of January, 1879. On the 13th of December, 1878, William Merrick, a livery-stable keeper on South Street, was convicted of the murder of his wife. She had been a school-teacher, and saved a considerable sum of money. While paying her his addresses he borrowed all her money, seduced her, and only after much solicitation married her. Within a day or two of her confinement he took her out riding after dusk, gave her strychnine in a glass of beer, which caused premature child-birth in the agonies of death, and then drove with the dead bodies to a small wood near the Morris Street bridge over Eagle Creek, where he dug a shallow hole on the creek bank, put the bodies naked in it, and covered them with logs. He burned in his stable the clothing he took from his wife's corpse in the darkness of midnight and the woods, and no discovery was made for several days. Then a boy going along the creek found the bodies, the wife was identified by some physical marks still discernible through the decomposition, and very soon after the husband was arrested. The horrible brutality of the crime, the cool, callous, calculating cruelty in every stage of it, the beastliness of the burial, all provoked so hot an exasperation of popular feeling that for the first time there were serious threats of lynching. He was sentenced to be hung at the same time Achey was, January 29th. Some attempts were made to obtain a commutation for Achey, whose provocation had been great, and would have saved him a death sentence in any other condition of feeling of the community, but nothing was done for Merrick. They were hung on the same gallows at the same instant, Merrick sullen, dogged, and silent to the last, though indicating a desire to speak at the moment the drop fell. Louis Guetig was convicted the same year of the murder of Miss McGlue, a waiter in the hotel kept by his uncle whom he had been courting, but who had discarded him. He shot her in the courtyard of the hotel . while imploring him not to kill her, and imperiled several other girls who were present, and was sentenced to be hung with Achey and Merrick; but his counsel obtained on appeal a reversal of some trivial instruction of the court below, and a second trial followed, with a second conviction and death sentence, and he was hung on Sept. 19, 1879, the anniversary of the murder. These are the only death sentences ever passed or inflicted in Marion County, except that of a colored man named Greenly for murdering his sweetheart. He was sentenced, but the Governor commuted his punishment to life imprisonment.

The first grand jury of the county returned twenty-two indictments by Joseph C. Reed, the first recorder and school-teacher, of which six wore non prossed. They were pretty much all, except one assault and battery, for selling liquor without a license, a class of offenses which has always been a strong one in Indianapolis and is yet. The first sufferer of thousands of lawless liquor dealers through a course of two generations was John Wyant. So many indictments at the first term of court in so small a settlement, with no roads and no navigable streams, and no neighbors but Indians, would indicate the presence of a considerable portion of the lawless element that always mixes itself up with the real pioneer and improving element, though there was much less of it and of a less dangerous quality than that appearing on the present frontiers of civilization. The first felony appears, from Mr. Nowland's recollection, to have been a burglary committed by an old man named Redman, and Warner his son-in-law, on the grocery-store of the late Jacob Landis in 1824. Col. Russell was the sheriff, and a search-warrant enabled him to find the missing goods or most of them. Warner's wife attempted to conceal them under her clothing, but was detected. The offenders were sent to the penitentiary for several years. The first murder was committed long afterwards in 1833, and will be noticed particularly in its place.

The Court-House Square, like all the rest of the town, was a dense wood when the first jail was put there, and a little later when the first steps for a court-house were taken, on the representations of James Blake, the county commissioners made an order that in clearing the square two hundred trees (sugars or maples it was understood) should be spared for a grove. No special direction having been given the contractors they left the largest trees, which, when the surrounding protection of forest had been cut away, had to bear the brunt of every wind that blew, and were soon so greatly damaged that they were cut down and cleared away entirely. The contractors for clearing were Earl Pierce and Samuel Hyde, for fifty-nine dollars. Many years after an attempt was made to reproduce a little shade by a grove of suitable trees, but the saplings were killed by drought or carelessness, mischievous boys or breachy cattle. There has never been any shade worth speaking of in the Court-House Square since the primeval forest was cut away in 1822. With the progress of the present court-house the square has been filled from a shallow depression to a very handsome elevation, and some fine trees would become both.

On Thursday, the 15th of August, 1822, as appears from the " Commissioners' Record" (page 45), the County Board ordered the clerk to advertise in the Indianapolis Gazette for bids for a court-house, to be built upon plans furnished by John E. Baker and James Paxton. The specifications in brief were: The building was to front on Washington Street, to be forty-five by sixty feet, and ninety-four feet high from the ground. It was to be of brick, and two stories high. The foundation was to be of stone, eighteen inches in the ground and three feet and a half out of the ground, and three feet thick. The walls of the lower story were to be twenty-seven inches thick, and of the second story twenty-two inches. There was to be a cupola in the center twenty-two and a half feet high, on top of it a dome five feet high, then a shaft twelve feet, and finally an iron spire with a gilt ball and vane. On the first floor were a court-room forty and a half feet square, and another small room and a hall, each thirteen feet three inches square. In the second story there were to be a court-room forty-one feet three inches by twenty-five feet, two rooms sixteen feet square, the hall and a room thirteen feet six inches square, and an entry eight and a half feet wide. The first story was fifteen and a half feet, the second fifteen feet. There was a " Doric cornice gutter on the roof, and four tin conductors with capitals." The roof was to be of poplar shingles, jointed, five inches to the weather.

At a special meeting held on the 3rd of September, 1822, the commissioners examined bids for building the house, and awarded the contract to John E. Baker and James Paxton for thirteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-six dollars. Operations were to commence before the 1st day of April, 1823, and the building to be completed in three years. The building was inspected by the commissioners, who were still in office, and this was their last official act. It was on the 7th day of January, 1825. Only a little painting and other work remained uncompleted. (Commissioners' Record, pages 45, 46, 47, and 54.) Until the completion of the court-house court was held, as the law required, at the residence of Gen. John Carr, a double log cabin on Delaware Street, about opposite the entrance to the court-house. The first session was held here on the 26th of September, 1822, with Judge William W. Wick presiding, the newly-qualified associates, McIlvaine and Harding, assisting, James M. Ray as clerk, and Hervey Bates as sheriff. After the court was organized it adjourned to Crumbaugh's house, west of the line of the future canal. Calvin Fletcher was made the first prosecutor, continuing for three terms, and followed by Harvey Gregg, Hiram Brown, William Quarles, Philip Sweetser, James Morrison, Hugh O'Neal, Governor Wallace, Governor Hammond, and others more or less eminent in the profession. There were thirteen civil causes on the docket, and twenty-two indictments found, of which, as already related, six were non pressed. Eleven lawyers were present, five of them being residents. The session lasted three days, naturalized an Irishman, Richard Good, licensed John Hawkins to sell liquor, indicted a dozen or more for selling without a license, and established " prison bounds" for the unfortunates arrested and confined for debt, that relic of barbarism being still in mischievously vigorous condition here. The first civil case was Daniel Bowman vs. Meridy Edwards; the first criminal case, State vs. John Wyant, for violation of license laws. The second session was opened May 5, 1823, at Carr's, and adjourned to Henderson's tavern, on the site of the " New York Store." Here appeared the first divorce case, Elias Stallcup vs. Ruth Stallcup. The third session was opened at Carr's, as usual, Nov. 3, 1823, but adjourned to Harvey Gregg's house. The fourth, April 12, 1824, adjourned from Carr's to John Johnson's, and the fifth met at Carr's, Oct. 11, 1824, and adjourned to the partially completed court-house, and never afterwards left it till it was torn down in 1870 to make room for the present one.

This old court-house was practically the only public building in the town from 1825 to 1835. The Legislature made a State-House of it for three months every winter. The Federal Court, the Supreme Court, the County Court, and the County Board all met and did business there. More than this, after the completion of the State-House, and the removal of that portion of public business to its own quarters, the old court-house became the City Hall, the place of conventions, the ready resort of every gathering that could not go anywhere else and could pay for lights there. The county's fuel usually warmed all that got in, whether public charity or private show. Joseph G. Marshall and James Whitcomb, two of the ablest men in the United States in the days of the giants, held their debate there when opposing candidates for Governor in 1843. The eccentric wandering preacher, Lorenzo Dow, preached there in 1827. Professor Bronson gave his first lectures on " Elocution" there. Col. Lehmanowski lectured there on " Napoleon's Wars." Preachers " outside of any healthy organization," as the Southern senators said of Seward and Sumner, who could not get the " Old Seminary," could always get the courthouse. " Nigger minstrels" gave the first of their performances there. A ventriloquist gave a show there. John Kelly played the fiddle there. William S. Unthank lectured there on electro-magnetism as a motive-power more than thirty years ago. County conventions and city meetings assembled there. But a year or two before it was torn down the citizens held a meeting there to take measures to get the Agricultural College, for which Congress had made provision in all the States, located here, against the competition of Lafayette and John Purdue. A Mr. Keeley in 1844 made experiments in mesmerism there, and set half the fools in town mesmerizing the other half. Few buildings in a new country, or any country, have had a greater variety of experiences in as short a life. It was State-House, court-house, occasional church, convention hall, lecture-room, concert-room, show-room, ball-room in forty-five years.

During the time the present court-house was in course of erection, from May, 1870, to July, 1876, the courts were held in a large, cheap two-story brick building at the west gate, near where the west entrances from the street now are. In front, and to the east a few feet, were the old offices of the county, the clerk and treasurer, recorder and auditor, the last two in the second story, the others on the ground-floor. In 1827 the Legislature appropriated five hundred dollars to build a little double-room, one-story brick house at the west entrance of the Court House Square, for the clerk of the Supreme Court, then and for many years afterwards Henry P. Coburn, one of the foremost of the old citizens in all good work. He was one of the first trustees of the town government, one of the first trustees of the Old Seminary, and one of the first three trustees of the city schools, a position in which he contributed as largely as any man to their wise and beneficent establishment. He was always put in for gratuitous public services, and never made any difference in the faithfulness and efficiency of his discharge of them. He was a graduate of Harvard and a college-mate with Edward Everett, came to this place with the State government in 1824, was the father of Gen. John Coburn and Henry, of the firm of Coburn & Jones, and died July 20, 1854, at the age of sixty-four. This little building was torn down in 1855, and the clerk's office was removed to the State-House. The present court-house was completed in six years from the removal of the old one, at a cost of one million four hundred and twenty-two thousand three hundred and seventy-one dollars and seventy-nine cents, a little more than one hundred times as much as the old house of 1823-25 cost. Costly as it was, and recently as it has been completed, it is said to show signs of dilapidation. The State is once more making a capitol of the county's house while waiting for its own building, as it did from 1825 to 1835, but it had a right to the first one, for it paid for it and used it as an owner. It has no right to this one, and must pay as a tenant. The city has found quarters for its offices in the same building, after moving about from the old Marion Engine house on the Circle to any convenient rooms it could get till it found something like a permanent location in the Glenn Block, and another later where the Maennerchor Hall is. It will stay now where it is till it gets a hall of its own. The only other building ever erected on the Court-House Square was a large temporary frame, built by the political parties for campaign meetings in 1864 on the southeast corner of the square. It remained for some time after its special use was completed, and was made a sort of public hall.

Following the incidents of the organization of the first court and the occupancy of the Court-House; Square has carried this narrative beyond the order of time, and it may now return to the further action of the first session of the County Board. On the 16th of April the commissioners, under an act of the Legislature, appointed Daniel Yandes county treasurer, to serve for one year, or till the next February session, which was the regular time of appointment.

Mr. Yandes was reappointed Feb. 10, 1823, to serve for one year, and was reappointed annually till 1829. The following are the dates of his later appointments: Feb. 11, 1824, Jan. 3, 1825, Jan. 6, 1826, Jan. 1, 1827, Jan. 8, 1828. James Johnson was appointed in 1829. Hervey Bates was elected sheriff at the regular State election in August, and served till 1824, when Alexander W. Russell succeeded him, and was succeeded in 1828 by Jacob Landis. Harris Tyner appears from the report of Mr. Yandes to have been the first tax collector. James Paxton was the first assessor, by appointment of the County Board, April 17, 1822. George Smith, of the Gazette, was elected coroner at the regular election in August, but seems not to have served, and the first in service was Harris Tyner, commissioned Sept. 1, 1823. A complete list of county officers will be found in a more appropriate connection. The purpose here is only to notice the first occupants and duties of the officers.

On the 29th of May two keel-boats came up the river, the " Eagle" from the Kanawha, and the " Boxer" from Zanesville, the former loaded with fifteen tons of salt, whiskey, tobacco, and dried fruit, the latter with thirty-three tons of dry-goods and printing material for Luke Walpole, one of the earliest of the merchants, who then had a store on the Court House Square. Stores then and for years after kept dry-goods, groceries, hardware, queens-ware, liquor, everything, as old backwoodsmen used to say, " from scythe-snathes to salt fish, hymn-books, calico, and tobacco," and a strip of red flannel hung over the door was the usual sign

On the 17th of June a meeting was held at Hawkins' tavern, on Washington Street, to prepare for the first celebration of the Fourth of July. It took place on the " Military Ground," which then covered pretty much all the area north of Washington Street and west of West Street, then a country lane, to the road along the edge of the bluff of White River and Fall Creek bottoms, now called Blake Street, and north to Michigan Street. It was heavily wooded, largely with hackberries, whose little black beads of fruit with a mere .scale of covering, as sweet as any bee ever made, were a favorite indulgence of the school-boys of a later day. A few of these old hackberries are still standing in what is left of the " Military Ground" in Military Park. The opening ceremony of the occasion was a sermon by Rev. John McClung, the " New Light" pioneer preacher, on the text, from Proverbs, " Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." Rev. Robert Brenton " closed with a prayer and benediction." Between the two religious extremes there came a brief address from Judge Wick on the events and characters of the Revolution, closing with the Declaration. Squire Obed Foote read Washington's Inaugural Address, with remarks appropriate to the subject, and John Hawkins read the Farewell Address, with suitable reflections. The audience certainly got a better quality of literature and sentiment than they would have been likely to get from a larger infusion of original matter. The more material enjoyment of the day was a deer killed the day before by Robert Harding on the northwest corner of the donation, and " barbecued" in a sufficient hole dug near a big elm. A long table was sot under the trees, and a better feast made than could be got for less vigorous appetites at ten dollars a mouth at a Delmonico's. During the dinner the inevitable speeches were made by Dr. Samuel G. Mitchell and Maj. John W. Redding. The festivities were completed by a ball at the house of J. R. Crumbaugh, just west of the site of the canal near Washington Street.

The observance of the Fourth of July was kept up faithfully for about the third of a century. Then it began to fail in interest, and the war put an end to it. For much the greater part of this long period the celebration was confined to the Sunday-schools almost wholly, only a rare parade of mechanics or firemen breaking the current. Early in the morning the children of each school would meet at the church, form a procession with banners, the least in front, and march, under the superintendent, to some point near the Circle, where all would fall in and make a procession of several thousands in the latter days, always under the marshalship of James Blake, and go to the State-House Square or to some convenient grove, where a platform and seats had been provided, and there bear a prayer, a reading of the Declaration by some young fellow of promising qualities, and an oration of the stereotyped kind from a lawyer or preacher or someone of a pursuit inclining to oratory. Governor Porter achieved his first local distinction by a Fourth of July address in the grove on West Street, afterwards the site of the Soldiers' Home. It was not of the stereotyped, eagle-screaming, sun-soaring style, however. He had a Revolutionary soldier on the platform, and made as effective a use of him, in a less degree, as Webster did of his old soldiers in his speech on Bunker Hill. Another striking address on a like occasion was that of ex-Governor Wallace in the State-House Square the year before, not far from the middle of the decade of 1840 to 1850. The conclusion of the celebration was a liberal distribution of " rusks" and water, and a benediction that sent all home before the unpleasant hour of noon. Since the war the Fourth has been a sort of general picnic holiday, or occasion for a festive celebration by some one of the many associations in the city. For about thirty years it was steadily maintained by the Sunday-schools, from 1828 to 1858.

On the 20th of June, three days after settling upon the mode and means of celebrating the Fourth, the citizens held another meeting at the schoolhouse, near the present intersection of Illinois Street and Kentucky Avenue, to settle the arrangements for a permanent school. Trustees were appointed, and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence selected as teachers. The school was maintained for some years. Mr. Reed, the first teacher in the settlement, did not keep his place more than one quarter, — all schooling was counted by the quarter (of twelve weeks) in those days, — but others succeeded him till this permanent arrangement was made in June, 1822. Who the first trustees were there is no record to tell, and no reminiscence recalls them, but it would not be a wild guess to say that James Blake or James M. Ray or Calvin Fletcher was among them.

The first State election in the New Purchase occurred on the 5th of August, 1822. William Hendricks, uncle of ex-Governor and ex-United States Senator Thomas A. Hendricks, received three hundred and fifteen out of the three hundred and seventeen votes cast for Governor. He served two terms in the National Senate after leaving the Executive chair. This vote would indicate a population of fifteen hundred to sixteen hundred in the county with the enlargement then appended to it. As above noted, Mr. Bates was elected sheriff at this election, and served a full term of two years. George Smith, elected coroner, was succeeded in 1824 by Harris Tyner. In the militia election of the 6th of the next month, James Paxton was elected colonel of the Fortieth Regiment, Samuel Morrow lieutenant-colonel, and Alexander W. Russell major.

The leading events of the three years of the first settlement of the city may be summed up thus: in 1820 the selection of the capital site, birth of first child, cultivation of the " caterpillar deadening;" in 1821 the first appointment of justices, laying out the town, the epidemic and the famine, the first sermon, the first marriage, the first death, the first store, the first sale of lots, the first schoolhouse and school, — a year of first things; in 1822 the organization of the county, designation of townships, measures for county buildings, first tax levy and report, and generally the incidents of the transition of a community from an accidental collection into an organized body prepared to support and take care of itself.

During the remainder of the year 1822 the chief incidents of which any record or recollection remains was a camp-meeting, beginning September 12th, east of the town, presided over by Rev. James Scott, sent here by the St. Louis Conference in 1821, the first of a long series of this class of assemblages held in or about the donation, and still kept up, in an improved form with permanent arrangements, at a convenient point southeast of the city, near the little town of Acton, on the Cincinnati Railroad. The " Military Ground" was a favorite location for some years. Then they were held in the northwest corner of the donation, in & sugar-grove east of the canal, known as the " Turkey Roost," and the general resort of the schoolboys for little sugar saplings for "shinny clubs." The camp-ground was in the western edge of it. For some years a grove near the present site of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum was used, then for a considerable time they were abandoned about here altogether. Their revival and establishment permanently at Acton is an affair of the last decade mainly. For a whole generation the most prominent and effective preacher at camp-meetings was Rev. James Havens, irreverently called by the ungodly " Old Sorrel," a man of rugged and powerful structure, both physically and intellectually, as fearless as the famous Peter Cartwright, and as well able to protect himself from the violence that he sometimes had to encounter or expect from the " roughs" who sought diversion in disturbing the meetings. The most notable incident in all that is remembered of these gatherings about here is his encounter with a man named Burkhart, commonly called " Buckhart," the leader of a lawless crowd brought here by the work on the National road and the Central Canal, and left here idle when those works were abandoned. They lived by digging wells and moving houses, when they did anything but steal, and when they could not do better lived on the corn and potatoes, pigs and chickens of the farms that then covered the greater part of what is now the city. They were called the " chain gang." Two or three met violent deaths in affrays a few years later, but Burkhart left the town, went down about the " Bluffs," and died in his bed at a ripe old age, in better moral condition than he had lived for most of his life. The camp-meeting which was the scene of the incident was held on the "Military Ground." "Old Dave Buckhart" appeared there on the skirts of the assembly pretty drunk, and wandering barefooted in the simple costume of a dirty shirt and pair of pantaloons, his usual style of dress, from one point to another, singing a ribald song, or couplet rather, of his own making. Gen. Thomas A. Morris, the hero of the West Virginia campaign, the credit of which McClellan absorbed, and Hugh O'Neal, one of the foremost criminal lawyers of the State, had learned something of the purpose of the chain-gang to disturb the camp-meeting, and went there expressly to prevent it and punish the rowdies. As soon as Burkhart's singing was seen to attract attention they went to him, and at almost the same instant Mr. Havens came up. A peremptory order of silence was met by a drunken defiance, which the legendary account says was followed by a blow " from the shoulder" by the preacher that knocked the rowdy senseless. But Gen. Morris says he is not sure that Mr. Havens struck Burkhart, and that there was no knock-down. This phase of the story took form from an occurrence the next day, when Burkhart was before Squire Scudder for disturbing the meeting. He was " gostrating" to the crowd attending the trial, and the late Samuel • Merrill, thinking that the most effectual way to "squelch" the leader of the " chain-gang" and hold it in more wholesome dread of the law-abiding community would be to beat him at his own game, and show him that rowdies were not as formidable antagonists as better men, challenged him to wrestle with him. The rowdy was heavily and easily thrown by the sober and muscular lawyer, greatly to his chagrin and the discomfiture of the gang. It was not long after this that he left the town, and never returned except for a brief visit.

An incident of the fall of 1822, still well remembered by the survivors of the early settlers, was an invasion of gray squirrels that came from the east going westward. They were liberally killed, but the massacre made no impression on their countless numbers. They destroyed a large portion of the corn they found in the line they followed as undeviatingly as a bullet, in spite of fences and 'streams and swamps. In 1845 another such emigration occurred, but of less extent and destructiveness. After this last there came a gradual change upon the character of the squirrel population of the county. Previously the " gray" was the only variety known, except a very rare red or " fox" squirrel. Afterwards the latter became the larger, and displaced the other almost as largely as it had itself been displaced. But this sort of game disappeared rapidly after the completion of the first lines of railroad, and now it is rarely seen nearer the city than a half-dozen miles.

The fall of 1822 was signalized by the first attempts to open roads under the act of the Legislature of the preceding session. These roads must be distinguished from the county roads, ordered by the County Board on petition, and examined by " viewers," which constituted so large a part of the care of the county government in early days, and ever since in fact. They were surveyed and some work done upon them under direction of commissioners appointed by the act authorizing them, but little seems to have been accomplished, except to clear away the trees, leaving the stumps nearly as serious an obstruction. The White Water region was that with which the settlement naturally desired the earliest intercourse, and the roads in that direction were first opened, with one southward toward Madison, over which early in the winter a public meeting at Carter's tavern demanded a weekly mail to Vernon, Jennings Co., during the sessions of the Legislature at Corydon. The roads of this period and for many a year afterwards were about as bad as any civilized community ever had to put up with. They were passable for wagons and loads only when dried up in summer or frozen up in winter, and even in these favorable conditions there were long stretches that had to be " cross-layed" with rails or logs, filled in with chunks, to be passable even to a traveler on horseback. Since the advent of railroads, and the diminished reliance of the community on wagon-roads for any but neighborhood communication, these latter have been improved greatly everywhere, and now there are none entering the city that are not well graded and graveled, and as passable at one season as another.

The first change from the primitive condition of the roads was the " macadamizing" of the National road by the government. An effort was made early in the settlement to get Congress to run the line of this then great national work through Indianapolis, but nothing was accomplished till Oliver H. Smith, afterwards founder of the " Bee Line" Railroad, became a member of Congress from the eastern district of the State in 1827. The line would have passed near Columbus, in this State, Mr. Smith says in his " Early Indiana Sketches," but he succeeded in carrying an amendment that brought it here, and along our principal street, then and for a whole generation better known as " Main Street" than Washington. The " metaling" of this road extended through the town and beyond the river to a point a few hundred feet west of Eagle Creek, but it stopped in the town at the eastern end, near East Street, leaving a considerable distance uncovered to a point where a short stretch east of Pogue's Creek was " metaled." The survey of this road was made by the late Lazarus B. Wilson, engineer of the " Louisville, New Albany and Chicago" Railroad. He also planned the wooden arch bridges on the line, which have been in constant use with little repair, except replacing the soft slate of the first stone-work of the river bridge with durable limestone, since 1833. William Wernweg and Walter Blake were contractors for these bridges.

" Cross-laying," as often as otherwise called " crosswaying," was the universal substitute for better roadmaking during the first thirty years of the existence of the city. All the " bottoms" of streams were thus made roughly passable, with frequent repair and replacing of rotten rails and logs. The old Madison road, through Franklin and Columbus, was especially improved or infested with cross-way work. Not long before the Union Depot was built the whole breadth of Pogue's Creek bottom, the head of this road, from Louisiana Street, at the foot of the rise on which the residence of Morris Morris stood on South Meridian Street, to the rise on the other side at the " White Point," built by Dr. John E. McClure, and long occupied by Nicholas McCarty, was a mass of rails and saplings and chunks and swamp-slush, bordered by a willow-fringed cow-pasture on the west side and a corn-field on the east, where the Eagle Machine Works stand. In making the later substantial improvements of this street some indications of the old condition were discovered. The town streets were little better than the country roads for many years. Even after the trees were cut out, — and trees were standing in some streets that are now built solidly for squares as late as 1842 or 1843, — the stumps were left for the wagonway to wander around as crookedly as a " bottom" bayou, reinforced by frequent mud-holes, turned by large bodies of unrestrained hogs into hog' wallows. The fences along each side were " worm-fences," and sidewalks were pig-tracks hugging closely the corners of the fences when a big mud-hole had to be circumvented. But a few of the more central were better.

One of the last incidents of the year was the election by the Legislature, early in December, of Bethuel F. Morris, grandfather of the distinguished young naturalist and Amazonian explorer, Ernest Morris, State agent in place of James Milroy, a non-resident, appointed by the Governor to succeed Gen. Carr, who had resigned. Mr. Morris was subsequently president judge of the Circuit Court, and cashier of the Indianapolis Branch of the State Bank. He died some twenty years ago, after a long period of retired life, at his home near the crossing of Morris Street and Madison Avenue. About the time of his appointment to the agency on the 7th of December, the first sale of lots for delinquent taxes took place. It was a long one, and the fact that the greatest delinquency was but two dollars eighty-seven and one-half cents, and the range ran all the way down to twenty-five cents, showed that money was hard to come by when such small amounts could not be commanded for so important a purpose as the redemption of town lots. Fortunes were going begging then if anybody had known it. Some few may have neither known nor guessed it, but were lucky enough to take " the tide at the flood." With most, however, it was the story of the man who could have got the half of the site of Chicago for a pair of boots, but had not the boots. Some of the largest fortunes in the city date from this tax sale and the condition of general finances it indicated. A proposition to incorporate the town this year was beaten.

The winter of 1822-23 was made a pleasant season, like that of the year before, by social enjoyments and free commingling of all the settlers in pursuing them, though it followed, like the other, a summer of much sickness, and fell in a time of great financial trouble. The county was settling up pretty rapidly. Two hundred and five entries of land had been made in Centre township outside of the donation during the years 1821-22, and many of the purchasers had become residents. In Decatur township forty-five entries were made in those two years; in Wayne, one hundred and sixty-eight; in Pike, twenty-nine; in Washington, one hundred and forty-six; in Lawrence, ten; in Warren, nineteen; in Franklin, fifteen; in Perry, eighty-one. It is noticeable that the townships more remote from the older settled portions of the State, from which immigrants might be expected, received more land-buyers than those on the east side and nearer. Wayne had a hundred and sixty-eight to nineteen in Warren, Decatur forty-five to ten in Lawrence, Pike twenty-nine to fifteen in Franklin. Land-buyers thought the western part of the county, with portions of the central tier of townships, contained the most desirable land.

The first act of the Legislature in the new year of 1823 was the assignment of a legislative representation to the two-year-old county, January 7th. Candidates began to show up with characteristic American promptness at once, and the canvass "of merits was kept up briskly till the election the next August. Early in the spring, as already related in the account of the first religious movements in the settlement, the Presbyterians took steps to build the first church in the town, on North Pennsylvania Street, pretty nearly opposite the Grand Opera-House site, and on the completion of the church organization the following July, Rev. David C. Proctor, of Connecticut, who had been retained as a missionary in 1822-23, was the first pastor, succeeded in September, 1824, by the celebrated oriental scholar and religious " free-lance," Professor George Bush, who was much such another as the more noted Orestes A. Brownson, except that he did not turn Catholic as the latter did. The religious vagaries of no two men in the country, backed by rare abilities and profound scholarship as they were, have attracted so much attention. Professor Bush continued in charge to March 20, 1829. On the 7th of March the second newspaper of the New Purchase made its first appearance under the name of Western Censor and Emigrant's Guide, with the customary ambition of papers in new settlements taking a name better proportioned to its hope than its importance. It was published and printed in a building on Washington Street, opposite the site of the New York Store, by Harvey Gregg and Douglass Maguire. Not much is known of the former now more than that he was a lawyer of good abilities from Kentucky, and appeared in the bar at the first session of the court. Mr. Nowland relates an incident of his first visit here at the time of the lot sales in 1821 which illustrates his characteristic absentmindedness and the solid honesty of the people and the times. He had brought a considerable sum with him to buy land, and had about two hundred dollars in gold left after making his first payments. He missed this one morning, and supposed . he had dropped it from his pocket somewhere where he had been examining land. He gave it up for gone and went home. The following spring Mrs. Nowland found it under the rag-carpet of the room he had slept in with sixteen other men, all of whom might have seen him stick it under the carpet, and probably did, but had no more thought of meddling with it than they would if it had been locked in a dynamite safe. Travelers and moralists have boasted that the Finns have no word for steal, and know no use for locks. The primitive settlers of Indianapolis might have contested the Monthyon prize of virtue with them. It may be enough to suggest that the condition of society has changed in sixty-two years, and it would not be safe to put two hundred dollars under a carpet with sixteen other men in the room, with any expectation of seeing it again. He was second lawyer to settle in the new town. He died early.

Douglass Maguire, his partner, long survived him, and was far better known. He came to the place in the spring of 1823 from Kentucky, was the last State! auditor elected by the Legislature but one before; the Constitution of 1850 went into operation, and was one of the four delegates from this county to the convention that framed that instrument. Governor Wallace being the other Whig, and Alexander P. Morrison and Jacob Page Chapman the two Democrats. Mr. Maguire bore a strong resemblance to Henry Clay both in form and feature, and was to the full as generous and warm-hearted. The Western Censor and Emigrant's Guide was the precursor of the Journal, as the Gazette was of the Sentinel. Like its rival, its first issues were irregular. The second number appeared on the 19th of March, the third on the 26th of March, the fourth on the 2nd of April, the fifth on the 19th, the sixth on the 23rd, after which its issue was regular. On the removal of the capital to Indianapolis in the fall of 1824, the State printer, John Douglass, bought the paper and changed the name to the Journal. The Journal it has been ever since, nearly sixty years now. The old editor, Mr. Maguire, retained an interest for some years with Mr. Douglass, and the firm was Douglass & Maguire, — very nearly a repetition of Mr. Maguire's name.

About a month after the appearance of the second paper the first Sunday-school was organized in the cabinet-shop of Caleb Scudder, on the south side of the State-House Square, April 6, 1823. It proved a very popular as well as wholesome enterprise, mustering no less than seventy pupils the third Sunday. When the weather became bad in the fall it was suspended till the next spring, and was revived a year after its formation in April, 1824. The first Presbyterian Church was completed that spring and summer, and the school taken there. It was never suspended again. In 1829 it celebrated the Fourth of July in the fashion above described, and thenceforward the Sunday-schools monopolized the national holiday till its general celebration was abandoned except as a mere day of idling and making pleasant parties. The average attendance the first year was reported to be about forty, the second year fifty, the third year seventy-five, the fourth one hundred and six, the fifth one hundred and fifty. In 1827 a library of one hundred and fifty volumes had been procured. Up to 1829, when the Methodists completed their first church, all denominations united in this school, and it was thence called the " Union School," superintended and mainly promoted by Dr. Isaac Coe. It may be noted here that in all the Sunday-school processions on the Fourth of July from 1829 for thirty years nearly James Blake was the marshal, if he was at home. In 1829 the Methodist scholars colonized in their own church, and the Baptists followed in three years, as soon as they had a suitable place in their church. But the co-operation of all the schools was secured by a Sunday-school Union, in which all were represented.

There were other indications of the solid growth of the town than the establishment of a second paper and the acquisition of a representation in the Legislature. The agent sold four acres of the donation, at sixty-five dollars and seventy-five cents an acre, for brick -yards. Better structures than the frames that were partially replacing logs were contemplated, though but one brick house, that of John Johnson, already referred to, was in progress. About the 1st of June two enterprising settlers, William Townsend, a pioneer of 1820, and Earl Pearce, later, put a set of woolen machinery in the mill of Isaac Wilson, on Fall Creek race, where Pattison's mill stood for many years in the later days of the town. Following close upon this came two new hotels of a more pretentious character than their log predecessors. The first was a large frame built by Maj. Thomas Carter opposite the court-house, opened on the 6th of October, and the scene of the first Baptist sermon on the 26th of the same month. Though a regular Baptist Church organization had existed from September of the year before, and a Mr. Barnes had been engaged as a preacher in June, third Saturday, 1823, yet the first regular sermon seems to have waited this chance in the house of one of the most devoted and deserving of the members. The hotel was burned Jan. 17, 1825, during the first session of the Legislature, and the proprietor, in the days long before insurance was known in the New Purchase, lost all he had, with no indemnification. Mr. Ignatius Brown, illustrating the folly that sensible men will commit during the excitement of a fire if they are unused to such calamities, says that a squad of the citizens thought to save the sign which swung in country fashion to a tall post in front of the house, and chopped it down as they would a tree, the fall smashing the sign all to splinters, as they would have known if they had not lost their heads. Some months afterwards Mr. Carter replaced the burned house with that of Mr. Crumbaugh near the site of West Street, and kept his tavern there prosperously for several years till his death. The other hotel lived to become by itself and successor the most noted in the town or the State for about thirty years. This was the " Washington Hall," a frame on the site of the New York Store, built by James Blake and Samuel Henderson at the same time as Mr. Carter's house, but opened three months later, Jan. 12, 1824. Mr. Henderson had kept a smaller tavern there previously. The successor of the " Hall" in 1836 was a brick, and made the name famous under the management of the late Edmund Browning. The old frame was moved to the next lot east, and there for a number of years was a shoe-shop in the lower story, and the law-office of Governor Wallace in the upper, where Lewis, his son, — now a distinguished general of the civil war and novelist and minister to Constantinople, — wrote several chapters of a novel in the style of G. P. R. James called the "Man at Arms," a tale of the thirteenth century.

Mr. Ignatius Brown notes that early in the spring of this year — 1823 — three young settlers, named Stephen Howard, Israel Mitchell, and Martin Smith, started for the Russian settlements on the Pacific by way of Pembina. Nothing was ever heard of them, except that they reached Fort Armstrong early in May, and on the 15th of August, three months and eleven days after reaching the fort on the Mississippi, got to Fever River, having seen no white man for twenty-three days after leaving the Vermillion Salt Works, and having been robbed by the Indians and nearly starved. During the same spring the " Indiana Central Medical Society" was formed to license physicians to practice under the law then in force, with Dr. Samuel G. Mitchell as president, and Dr. Livingston Dunlap as secretary, the forerunner of many a medical association and college since. The Fourth of July was celebrated at the cabin of Wilkes Reagin, near the crossing of Market Street and Pogue's Run. He fed the company with another barbecue, and the company included a rifle company, commanded by Capt. Curry, of whom nothing more appears to be known. Mr. Reagin was a conspicuous man, being the first butcher, the first auctioneer, and one of the three first justices elected by the people. Rev. D. C. Proctor and Rev. Isaac Reed performed the religious services of the occasion, and Daniel B. Wick, brother of the judge, read the Declaration, and Morris Morris delivered the address. The September succeeding showed a population, according to the new Censor, of six or seven hundred, with a better state of health through the summer than had been generally believed. The Censor, true to its name, used the occasion to censure the jealousy with which other towns in the State regarded the still unused capital.

The August election for first members of the Legislature resulted in the choice of James Gregory, of Shelby, as senator, and James Paxton, of this county, as representative. There were the usual winter diversions to close the year, but varied, according to Mr. Brown's citation of an announcement in the Gazette, by a theatrical performance of " Mr. Smith and wife, of the New York theatre," in the dining-room of Carter's tavern, on the last night of the year. Mr. Nowland puts this first dramatic exhibition in the winter of 1825-26, and says the performer was a Mr. Crampton, a strolling actor. The difference is of no consequence as long as there is entire concurrence on the main feature of the affair. Music was needed, of course, and there was nobody to make it but Bill Bagwell, a jolly, vagabond sort of fellow, who made the first cigars in the place in a cabin on the southwest corner of Maryland and Illinois Streets, and played the fiddle at the pioneer dances and weddings. Maj. Carter was a rigid Baptist, of the kind called by " unrespective" unbelievers " forty-gallon" Baptists, who, though sober men, were not at all fanatical in their views as to the use of liquor, but he was immovably convinced of the sinfulness of playing or hearing a fiddle. To get his consent to allow Bagwell to play orchestra to the performance, the actor and musician both had to assure him that the instrument of the occasion was not a fiddle but a violin, and the performance of a hymn tune satisfied him of the difference. Mr. Nowland says the major interrupted the exhibition to stop the orchestra in playing the depraved jig called " Leather Breeches," and it required considerable diplomacy and the performance of church music to appease him. The pieces performed, the " Doctor's Courtship, or the Indulgent Father," and the "Jealous Lovers"; tickets, thirty-seven and a half cents. Several performances were given, and the couple returned the following June but failed, and left suddenly, probably helped to the determination by a criticism of the Censor, which rated the performance rather low.

It may have been a mere whim of a couple of oversanguine new-comers, or it may have been a larger promise of prosperity than appears now to have been credible or possible at that time, but it is true, nevertheless, that a Maj. Sullinger opened a " Military School" here on the 13th of January, 1824, for "the instruction of militia officers and soldiers." Nearly at the same time William C. McDougal opened the first real estate agency, though the Gazette shows that its proprietor, George Smith, as before noted, opened a similar establishment a year or two later. The month of January was signalized to the pioneer particularly by an act of the Legislature of the 25th, ordering the permanent removal of the capital – that is, the State offices and records — by the 10th of the following January, 1825, the Legislature to meet that day in the court-house capitol of the new capital for the first time. No doubt the promptness of the passage of this act was due in part to. the delegation from the New Purchase, and the power of two votes to help those who helped the owners. On the return of Mr. Senator Gregory and Representative Paxton on the 21st of February, a public banquet was given them by the grateful citizens, and the occasion illustrated with highly-colored views of the prosperity that would follow the change. Their dreams have been more than fulfilled, but not till all who were old enough to take part in the festivities were in their graves.

The next incident in the fifth year of the settlement was the most startling and alarming that had yet occurred. This was the murder, on the 22nd of March, 1824, of a company of nine Indians of the Shawanese tribe, — two men, three women, two boys, and two girls, — some eight miles above Pendleton, by a company of six whites, four men and two boys. An account of this cruel massacre was given in a sketch of the occupancy of the New Purchase by the Indians, but there may be added here, as illustrative of the early condition of the white settlements, the account both of the crime and the trial made by Hon. Oliver H. Smith, ex-United States senator, who witnessed the trials, and was at the time one of the leading lawyers of the State.

" The Indians were encamped on the east side of Fall Creek, about eight miles above the falls. The country around their camping-ground was a dense, unbroken forest filled with game. The principal Indian was called Ludlow, and was said to be named for Stephen Ludlow, of Lawrenceburg. The other man I call Mingo. (His name appears from other accounts to have been Logan.) The Indians had commenced their season's hunting and trapping, the men with their guns, the squaws setting the traps, preparing and cooking the game, and caring for the children, — two boys some ten years old, and two girls of more tender years. A week had passed, and the success of the Indians had been only fair, with better prospects ahead, as spring was opening and raccoons were beginning to leave their holes in the trees in search of frogs that had begun to leave their muddy beds at the bottoms of the creeks. The trapping season was only just commencing. Ludlow and his band, wholly unsuspicious of harm and unconscious of any approaching enemies, were seated around their camp-fire, when there approached through the woods five white men, — Harper, Hudson, Sawyer, Bridge, Sr., Bridge, Jr. Harper was the leader, and stepping up to Ludlow took him by the hand and told him his party had lost their horses, and wanted Ludlow and Mingo to help find them. The Indians agreed to go in search of the horses. Ludlow took one path and Mingo another. Harper followed Ludlow and Hudson trailed Mingo, keeping some fifty yards behind. They traveled some short distance from the camp, when Harper shot Ludlow through the body; he fell dead on his face. Hudson, on hearing the crack of the rifle of Harper, immediately shot Mingo, the ball entering just below his shoulders and passing clear through his body. The party then met and proceeded to within gunshot of the camp. Sawyer shot one of the squaws through the head, Bridge, Sr., shot another squaw, and Bridge, Jr., the other. Sawyer then fired at the oldest boy, but only wounded him. The other children were shot by some of the party. Harper then led the way on to the camp. The two squaws, one boy, and the two little girls lay dead, but the oldest boy was still living. Sawyer took him by the legs and knocked his brains out against the end of a log. The camp was then robbed of everything worth carrying away.

" Harper, the ringleader, left immediately for Ohio, and was never taken. (He is said by tradition to have reached Ohio, eighty miles away through the woods, in twenty-four hours.) Hudson, Sawyer, Bridge, Sr., and Bridge, Jr., were arrested, and when I first saw them they were confined in a square log jail, built of heavy beech and sugar-tree logs, notched down closely, and fitting tight above, below, and on the sides. The prisoners were all heavily ironed and sitting on the straw on the floor. Hudson was a man of about middle size, with a bad look, dark eye, and bushy hair, about thirty-five years of age in appearance. Sawyer was about the same age, rather heavier than Hudson, but there was nothing in his appearance that would have marked him in a crowd as any other than a common farmer. Bridge, Sr., was much older than Sawyer, his head was quite gray; he was above the common height, slender, and a little bent while standing. Bridge, Jr., was a tall stripling .some eighteen years of age. Bridge, Sr., was the father of Bridge, Jr., and the brother-in-law of Sawyer.

" The news of these Indian murders flew upon the wings of the wind. The settlers became greatly alarmed, fearing the retaliatory vengeance of the tribes, and especially of the other bands of the Senecas (Shawanese). The facts reached Mr. John Johnston at the Indian agency at Piqua, Ohio. An account was sent from the agency to the War Department. Col. Johnston and William Conner visited all the Indian tribes and assured them that the government would punish the offenders, and obtained the promises of the chiefs and warriors that they would wait and see what their ' Great Father' would do before they took the matter into their own hands. This quieted the fears of the settlers, and preparations were made for the trials. A new log building was erected at the north part of Pendleton, with two rooms, one for the court and one for the grand jury. The court-room was about twenty by thirty feet, with a heavy puncheon floor, a platform at one end three feet high, with a strong railing in front, a bench for the judges, a plain table for the clerk in front on the floor, a long bench for the counsel, a little pen for the prisoners, a side bench for the witnesses, and a long pole in front, substantially supported, to separate the crowd from the court and bar. . A guard day and night was placed around the jail. The court was composed of Mr. Wick, presiding judge, Samuel Holliday and Adam Winchell, associates. Judge Wick was young on the bench, but with much experience in criminal trials. Judge Winchell was a blacksmith, and had ironed the prisoners. Moses Cox was the clerk. He could barely write his name, and when a candidate for justice of the peace at Connersville he boasted of his superior qualifications: ' I have been sued on every section of the statute, and know all about the law, while my competitor has never been sued, and knows nothing about the statute.' Samuel Cory, the sheriff, was a fine specimen of a woods Hoosier, tall and strong-boned, with a hearty laugh, without fear of man or beast, and with a voice that made the woods ring as he called the jurors and witnesses. Col. Johnston, the Indian agent, was directed to attend the trial to see that the witnesses were present and to pay their fees. Gen. Noble, then a United States senator, was employed by the Secretary of War to prosecute, with power to fee an assistant. Philip Sweetzer, a young son-in-law of the general, of high promise in his profession, was selected as assistant Calvin Fletcher, then a young man of more than ordinary ability, and a good criminal lawyer, was the regular prosecuting attorney." In another allusion to these cases Mr. Smith mentions the lawyers who were present, — Gen. James Noble, Philip Sweetzer, Harvey Gregg, Lot Bloomfield, James Rariden, Charles H. Test, Calvin Fletcher, Daniel B. Wick, and William R. Morris, of this State, and Gen. Sampson Mason and Moses Vance, of Ohio. These last were defending.

The conviction and execution of the prisoners, except Harper, who escaped, and young Bridge, who was pardoned, are related in the sketch already referred to. Mr. Nowland describes the novel gallows that was used: " A wagon was drawn up the side of the hill on planks, so that the wheels would move easily. A post was placed on the side of the hill, just above the wagon. To this post the wagon was fastened by a rope, so that when the rope was cut the wagon would run down the hill without aid. The two old men were placed in the tail of the wagon, the ropes adjusted, and at the signal the rope was cut, and the wagon ran from under the men. Sawyer broke his arms loose, caught the rope, and raised himself about eighteen inches. The sheriff quickly caught him by the ankles, and gave a sudden jerk, which brought the body down, and he died without another struggle." The extended quotation from Mr. Smith's reminiscences is interesting, not only as an account of an affair of national importance, and especially important to the settlers of Indianapolis and the country around, but as a picture of the primitive backwoods court-house and modes of court business. These executions, as before remarked, are claimed to be the first that ever occurred in the United States as the penalty, judicially inflicted, of the murder of Indians by whites. Hudson escaped once after his sentence, and hid in a hollow log in the darkness of an unusually dark night, but was soon discovered and arrested. Many years ago it used to be told among the old settlers and their children that Governor Ray, in the speech announcing the pardon of young Bridge, June 30, 1825, after his father and Sawyer had been hung, said to the young murderer: " There are but two powers in the universe that can now save your life. One is the Almighty God and the other is the Executive of Indiana." It was probably a joke manufactured after the old Governor's eccentricities had become so striking and notorious that such an imputation could not harm him. He was long a noted citizen of Indianapolis.

Governor Ray was Lieutenant-Governor with Governor Hendricks, and from February 25th, when Hendricks went to the National Senate, he was acting Governor. He was subsequently elected two full terms, and left the office, the last he ever held, in December, 1831. He came to the capital about the time the Legislature met, Jan. 10, 1825, bought property here, and remained here till he died, about 1850. He owned a considerable portion of the square on Washington Street, opposite the courthouse, near where Carter's tavern had stood, and in his later life, when his mind began to be considerably unsettled, he imagined a magnificent railroad system, of which this block of his was to be the center. Radiating lines were to penetrate the country in all directions, with villages every five miles, towns every twenty miles, and cities every fifty miles. Deep gorges among hills were to be crossed on a natural trestle-work, made by sawing off the tops of trees level with the track, and laying sills on these. Oddly enough this very expedient has been used on the Denver and Rio Grande Narrow-Gauge Road, or a road among the mountains in that region. Not less singular is the fact that this " dream of a sick brain," as everybody thought it when it was told and talked about, has proved a most substantial reality, except that Governor Ray's court-house block is not the site of the great central hub depot. In 1826 his influence with the Indians, says Mr. Nowland, when he was a commissioner, with Gen. Tipton, of this State, and Gen. Cass, of Michigan, to procure a cession of the lands of the Pottawatomies and Eel River and Wabash Miamis, secured from the Indians a grant to the State of one section of land for every mile of road, a hundred feet wide, from Lake Michigan through Indianapolis to the Ohio, at any point fixed by the Legislature. It was a most valuable donation, and the " old Michigan road," running through Shelbyville, Greensburg, Napoleon, to Madison, the point selected by the Legislature, was long the best improved road in the State, and never inferior to any but the completed portions of the National road. The Governor's son, James Brown Gay Ray, died when a boy, but a daughter survived him, and continues his abilities, without his vagaries, in some of our best citizens.

The usual Fourth of July celebration was held at Reagin's, as the year before, with Gabriel J. Johnson as orator for the citizens and Maj. J. W. Redding for the militia. Squire Foote was the reader. The August election following showed a change in the lines of parties from the position in 1822, when " White Water" was arrayed against " Kentucky." Now the contestants were two Kentuckians, Col. A. W. Russell and Morris Morris, candidates for sheriff to succeed Mr. Bates. Russell was elected by two hundred and sixty-five to one hundred and forty-eight for Mr. Morris. At the Presidential election in November, Clay received two hundred and thirteen votes, Jackson ninety-nine, and Adams sixteen. Clay had all the " Kentucky" strength and a good deal of the "White Water." The poll in the county was one hundred and two less in the Presidential than in the State election, supposed to have been the result of removals to the adjacent regions in the interval. In April the Sunday-school visitors reported a resident population on the donation of one hundred and seventy-two voters, and forty-five single women from fifteen to forty-five. The voters would indicate a population of about eight hundred. A little more than two years before the Gazette, as before noted, had enumerated sixty-one men of seventeen different pursuits, who were supposed to be about half of the adult male population of the spring of 1822, indicating a total population of about six hundred. This was not increased in the election on 1st of April. So the growth of the town in two years, from April 22nd to April 24th, seems to have been about three hundred residents. It does not fairly show the additional immigration in that time, however, because a good many who came to the town afterwards re moved to the country. A large emigration to the Wabash passed through the town this year. The streets and the lots along Washington Street, and diverging from it in some places, were more or less cleared of trees, the court-house was in progress, the Presbyterian Church well advanced, a school-house built, two or three religious organizations holding regular services, two new and superior hotels advancing, a distillery on the bayou, a woolen-mill and three or four grist- and saw-mills at work, so that there was no cause for serious discouragement, though progress was not rapid enough to excite any very sanguine hopes. The river and all its tributaries were flooded during the spring, and a keel-boat called the " Dandy" came up on the rise on the 22nd of May, with twenty-eight tons of salt and whiskey. This flood is said by the sketch of 1857 and that of Mr. Merrill of 1850 to have been the greatest ever known in the river. It was probably equaled by that of 1828 and 1847, and very closely approached by that of February of this year (1883). The State's revenue from Marion County in 1824 was one hundred and fifty-four dollars and twenty-five cents.

In anticipation of the meeting of the Legislature the citizens formed a " mock" body in the fall of 1824 called the " Indianapolis Legislature," the members of which assigned themselves to any counties they chose, and discussed pretty much the same questions as the real Legislature had discussed, or would when it met. It elected its own Governor about as often as it wanted to get a fresh message or inaugural, which was sure to be a humorous affair, and its debates were not un frequently a good deal better than those of the body it represented. The men who engaged in them were sometimes ex-members, and occasionally actual members of the real body, and the information and arguments elicited in the sham debate more than once decided the result of the real one. The meetings were continued till about 1836. They were discontinued then for several years, but revived for a while during the winter of 1842 or 1843 or thereabouts. In November, Samuel Merrill, treasurer of the State, arrived at the capital with several wagonloads of records and money, and thenceforward the chosen capital was the real one.

During the preceding summer and fall a brickhouse had been built for the residence of the treasurer, with a little brick office at the west side, on the southwest corner of Washington and Tennessee Streets, where the State buildings now are. Mr. Merrill was the first occupant, keeping the place till 1834, when he gave way to the late Nathan B. Palmer, who succeeded him in the treasurer's office by election of the Legislature. He remained here, however, and became one of the men who gave the town its impulse to intellectual and moral as well as material improvement.

Samuel Merrill was born in Peacham, Vt., Oct. 29, 1792. He died in Indianapolis, Aug. 24, 1855. He entered an advanced class in Dartmouth College, but did not graduate, for in his junior year he left to join his elder brother, James, in teaching in York, Pa. There he spent three years in teaching and studying law, having for his familiar associates Thaddeus Stevens, John Blanchard, and his elder brother, James Merrill, all from Peacham, Vt., and all men who have made their mark on their age. At the end of this time he removed to Vevay, in this State, and established himself in the practice of law. In 1821 he was elected to the Legislature for two years, and during his term of office he was elected treasurer of State. In the discharge of the duties of this office he removed first to Corydon, and thence in 1824 to this place. He held the office of treasurer of State till 1834, when he was chosen president of the State Bank. The duties of this office he discharged with the most unwearied fidelity and unimpeachable honesty till 1844, when his public life terminated, with the exception of four years of service as the president of the Madison and Indianapolis Railroad Company. For several years before his death he was engaged in the book trade, still continued by his son. His daughter Kate until very recently was Professor of English Literature in Butler University. Mr. Merrill assisted in forming Henry Ward Beecher's church here, and was all his life after most earnest and devoted in all good works.

The following account of the journey of the capital from Corydon to Indianapolis, written by a member of Mr. Merrill's family, is interesting, not only as the first account of the migration ever published, but as a very graphic description of the condition and ways of life of the Indianians nearly sixty years ago: " The journey of about one hundred and sixty miles occupied two weeks. The best day's travel was eleven miles. One day the wagons accomplished but two miles, passages through the woods having to be cut on account of the impassable character of the road. Four four-horse wagons and one or two saddle-horses formed the means of conveyance for two families, consisting of about a dozen persons, and for a printing-press and the State treasury of silver in strong wooden boxes. The gentlemen slept in the wagons or on the ground to protect the silver, the families found shelter at night in log cabins which stood along the road at rare though not inconvenient intervals. The country people were, many of them, as rude as their dwellings, which usually consisted of but one room, serving for all the purposes of domestic life, — cooking, eating, sleeping, spinning and weaving, and the entertainment of company. At one place a young man, who perhaps had come miles to visit his sweetheart, sat up with her all night on the only vacant space in the room, the hearth of the big fireplace. He kept on his cap, which was of coonskin, the tail hanging down behind, and gave the children the impression that he was a bear."

At the time of the removal William Hendricks was Governor, but was elected to the National Senate that winter, and on Feb. 12, 1825, acting Lieutenant Governor Ray, who had been made president of the Senate when Lieutenant-Governor Ratliff Boone retired, succeeded to the Governorship, and was regularly elected the following August, and again in 1828. The Secretary of State was Robert A. New, from 1816 to 1825, succeeded by W. W. Wick; the auditor, William H. Lilley, from 1816 to 1829, succeeded in 1829 by Morris Morris, who held till 1844; the treasurer, Samuel Merrill, from 1823 to 1834, succeeded by Nathan B. Palmer. The Legislature, which met in January, took the court-house before it was entirely finished, the House sitting in the lower room, the Senate in the upper. The treasurer occupied the building especially erected for him, and the other State officers went where they could. For nearly thirty years after the erection of the " Governor's house'' in the Circle in 1827, as before noted, the Supreme judges had their " chambers" there, and most or all of the State officers were there for a time except the treasurer. His residence and office were abandoned before the late war and rented. It would be useless if it were possible to hunt out all the rooms the State auditor and secretary occupied up to the time they took permanent possession of the building expressly erected for them in 1865, but it may be noted that after the completion of Masonic Hall, in 1850, they went there, and subsequently moved into the " McOuat Block," on Kentucky Avenue, where they remained till their final change. The clerk of the Supreme Court previously had his office in a little building in the Court-House Square, and when that was torn down went to the State House. The reporter of the Supreme Court has never had a public office, and the attorney-general and superintendent of public instruction, after their offices were created, found accommodations where they chose till the " State Building" was erected and enlarged. The State Library was kept in the "Governor's house" for a time, in charge of the State Officers there, but in 1841, John Cook, a bustling, " logrolling," pushing little fellow, recently from Ohio, got himself made librarian, and the library was put in the south rooms, west side, of the State-House. Cook was succeeded in 1843, under a Democratic Legislature, by Samuel P. Daniels, an old resident and a tailor, and he by the late John B. Dillon, author of two " Histories of Indiana," and he, in 1850, by Nathaniel Bolton, first editor of the town, as already related. The adjutant-general's office was hardly a visible appendage to the commander-in-chief of the State's army and navy till 1846, when the Mexican war made it a place of large responsibility and heavy duties, with Gen. David Reynolds as occupant. During the late war it became again one of the most important offices of the State, and was held by Gen. Wallace, Gen. Noble, and Gen. Terrell. It has never been reduced since to the unimportance of its early existence. It and the State Library and the State geologist's office are now in a building opposite the east entrance of the new State-House. The library is now, in addition to its proper use, a museum of relics of the Mexican war and the civil war, while the geologist's office is one of the finest museums of geological and paleontological specimens in the world.

On the 16th of November, 1824, John Douglass, State printer at Corydon, who had come out with Mr. Merrill, bought the interest of Harvey Gregg in the Western Censor and Emigrants Guide. On the 11th of January, the day after the first meeting of the Legislature, the paper appeared as the Indiana Journal, a name it has retained through many changes of ownership, with a reputation and influence as unchanging as its name. Much of the early success of the paper was due to Mr. Douglass.

The first period of the history of the city and county — substantially identical — ends with the arrival of the State capital. Of improvements, trade, political movements, increase of population as accurate a view has been presented.