I love the stories everyone is sharing. Thank you! Here's one that
started as a biography, but turns into a very interesting history. It
tells how the family arrived in Terre Haute and later settled in Prairie
Creek. It describes early pioneer life there and tells of a disasterous
boat trip down the Wabash. They meant to go to New Orleans to sell
their goods, but the .... well, I'll let the author tell you.
I've omitted most of the early biography, which takes place in Kentucky
(this is very long), but you may see it in its entirety on my webpage:
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/9166
I am not related to the author, but he does mention some of my early
ancestors, who lived in Prairie Creek very early. For those of you who
want an idea of life in Vigo County in those days, read on.....
Kim
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Written in the year 1888 or 1889 by William Henry Harrison Yeager
Note from the writer: "The writer of this sketch is guided mainly by the
facts gathered from his father some sixty or sixty-five years ago
although my memory is tolerably good, perhaps, it may not serve me in
many particulars, especially the precise dates of the months and years
so far back as I refer to.
"My father Nicholas YEAGER was born in the year A.D. 1784 on September
3rd in Washington County, East Tennessee in six miles of the town of
Jonesbrough where his father lived at that time......
"And in the summer of 1817, they decided to emigrate to Wabash County,
Indiana. They commenced to make two pirouges dug out of large poplar
trees, forty or forty-five feet in length, made like a dug out or a
canoe to go by water and after getting all things ready sometime in
September 1817, they got all on board the two pirouges which was built
with siding and a roof on them which made it somewhat comfortable and
resembling a boat. They first launched it in the Big Miami River below
the last mill dam at Enoxes Mills. I will have to refer back about six
months on the second day of March, there was another one came to town in
the person of John Bailey YEAGER who was born March the second, 1817 as
above stated, the first of my half brothers. The family now consisted
of twelve in number, namely Grandfather and Grandmother BAILEY, and
Father and mother and Nicholas and John BAILEY and six children all
told. The BAILEY men were mother's brothers.
"After crowding all the household and kitchen furniture they could get
into the pirouges then the family had to get aboard and you may imagine
we were somewhat crowded and then they bid Middletown and the Ohio
goodbye and which I have never been back to see since in about
seventy-one years. We went down the Miami River to its mouth and there
into the Ohio River. We got along with but little difficulty and with
but little hard work until we got to the mouth of the Wabash River and
there the work began for the older ones to row up the current of the
river. All went on agreeable up the Wabash River until we got up to New
Harmony and there a fatal incident occured, through the wise Providence
of God, Grandfather BAILEY who was growing very feeble and infirm took
worse than usual and they had to tie up in the little town of New
Harmony and laid there some six or eight days when he expired; he was
eighty-five years old. He was buried on the east bank of the Wabash
River near the town. I can not remember the exact date but as near as I
can recollect it was sometime in October and after the burial rites of
my grandfather was performed we all started up currents again and I
think the last of October or first of November, we landed at the town of
Terre Haute. Meeting with no serious accident after the death of
grandfather.
"There was a few log cabins in the place at that time and perhaps one or
two grocery stores. The place looked very hard indeed for a city all
covered with heavy timber and not very much underbrush at that time. No
public building erected yet. I still remember the men that cleared off
the public square of its timber for the first Court House. They boarded
at my father's while doing the work, it was Hamilton REED and George
LISTON. It was pretty hard to get grub for so many in one family most of
all the provisions was brought up from Fort Knox now Vincennes. Either
brought up by Keel boats or pack horses. Game was quite plenty at that
time. Plenty of deer and other wild animals of various kinds which made
a good relish at the time for meat and also plenty of wild fowls of all
description of this northern climate. My father bought a lot on Second
and Poplar Streets to build a house on where the brick warehouse of the
Ralph THOMPSON mills now stands. And built a two-story hewed log house
on it. He put up an old fashioned loom and commenced his old trade
weaving but the time had not quite come in yet for weaving. There was
not enough flax and cotton raised yet. And the seed was an object to get
but in a few years there was plenty of both articles raised which all
the ware in that day was made for both men and women for Sunday as well
as week day. When my father started from Ohio it was the expectation of
getting an office in the town of Terre Haute but he did not get here in
time to gain his residence by law. It was the clerkship of the County he
struggled on in town two and one half years as best he could, his family
being so large it was hard to get support for them all. And there was
another added to the family, James Culvert was born May the thirtieth,
1819 and the next spring of 1820 he concluded to leave town and move out
in the country and make him a farm.
"He bought eighty acres of land on the south part of Vigo County
adjoning Sullivan County, one and one half miles southeast of Middletown
and in the spring of twenty moved to it. Without a horse or cow or any
tools of any kind except an old Kentucky ax and hoe, he built a log
cabin and then cleared off a garden spot and Conrad FRAKES plowed it up
for him. The family soon put in some garden seeds and father went to
clearing a small field to get in some corn and pumpkins. The county was
all heavy timber and it took a great deal of hard labor to clear the
ground but he cleared and made rails to fence six acres and got it all
in truck and he also carried all the rails on his shoulder to fence the
six acres. I can remember he wore through his coat and jacket and began
to wear on the hide when my mother had to make a pad and fasten it on
his shoulder to keep the rails from wearing in to the flesh, but when we
began to raise vegetables we felt much happier. I still remember a
little incident which occured the same spring while father was making
the rails to fence the first field. I was out with him late one evening,
where he was splitting rails, and a large Indian man came to where he
was. I was very frightened to see him, being about the first one I ever
saw before and I sprang between his legs for protection and he said to
me that the man would not hurt me. He begged my father for bread and
something to eat and my father told him that there was none cooked. And
he asked him how far it was to his wigwam or company and he held up two
fingers and a half. He had a gun carrying it on his shoulder. He went
off when he found he could get nothing to eat. I saw the red skins
frequently after that. There were about two hundred of them camped at
one time on the bluff two miles east of Prairieton. After that my father
with the help of the boys kept on clearing some every year, so we raised
plenty to do us and as for a surplus, it would not be worth a man's time
to raise it for you could not sell it for anything.
"I remember when they commenced building flat boats to run their corn to
New Orleans they only got six and one fourth cents a bushel for their
corn delivered in a boat and pork one dollar and twenty five cents to
one dollar and fifty cents per hundred pounds. As for wheat there was
none raised until some years after that. And when we got to raising it
we had to cut it all we raised with the reap hook or sickle. I well
remember when I was learning to use them cutting grass seed. I cut my
hand, I have the scar on my hand yet, where I cut it when I was about
nine or ten years old and expect to carry it to my grave. And after that
when I was in my twentieth year while I was cutting down some wheat up
in Wabash bottom for Jerry RAYMOND, I cut a piece as big as a half
dollar in the same place only a good deal deeper and it bled so much I
got so weak I had to quit after dinner and go and plow for Charley
BENNIGHT who I had engaged to work a half a month for four dollars.
Wheat at one time would only sell for thirty one and one fourth cents
per bushel. And we had to flail it out with a stick three feet long for
the beetle and the handle part six or seven feet long tied to the beetle
with a raw hide string or a string made our of flax or toe or hemp. The
latter was not so plenty as the former. Of a dry spell we sometimes
cleaned off a place on the ground and tramped out our wheat with horses
or oxen. Them that was fortunate enough as to have any kind of them
brutes. And we had to take out corn or wheat about thirty miles to get
it made into meal or flour. Until we got to building horse mills and the
encline wheel or tread wheel and bolt it by turning a crank by hand and
feeding with the other hand and going eight miles to the mill that then
waiting all day for out turn and get hitched on about dark. You bet my
brother and myself had to go once a week with four bushel of grain to
keep up bread stuff for the family, being fifteen in number. We would
want our dinner when we got it. I have built two of those mills in my
time. The first a draft wheel and the other an encline or tread wheel.
On the twenty-seventh of August A.D. 1821 my oldest half sister was born
making eight children in all.
"About the year twenty-three my father concluded to make a visit to see
my grandfather and started in the fall, perhaps in October to Middle
Tennessee and was gone six weeks or two months before returning. And
that was the first time he owned a horse after he settled on his new
farm. Grandfather gave him an iron-gray mare. He had walked all the way
there going. But stopping at my uncle Benjamin YEAGER's in Union County,
Kentucky near Highland, but when he returned he had the little gray mare
to ride home on. And you might guess the boys was well tickled when my
father came back with the mare. We was quite rich then for we could make
one horse useful for many things. And we nursed her like a child and
made a regular pet of her. In five or six years we had horses enough to
get along farming tolerably well.
"And in the time we had a cousin, a crippled man in his back come to see
us, by the name of Joseph MILLS who fetched a small sorrel mare with him
which helped to make out our teams. Cousin Joseph had owned a farm in
Illinois twelve miles below the mouth of the Wabash river and by
exposure in time of over flow had become a cripple. Being very ambitious
as the family still increased, we was still enlarging the farm. On the
seventh of October A.D. 1824, I had another sister born, Clarissa
YEAGER, making nine children besides seven grown persons; the seventh
one was another cousin, one of my mother's sister's sons by the name of
Daniel Lucas Poe MILLS also being one of my aunts sons."
To be continued.......