CHAPTER IV. _________ THE INDIANS All that is known of this strange people has been learned since the discovery of America by the Europeans. Theories, plausible and otherwise, have been advanced relative to their origin. At a very remote period of time there existed in parts of Iowa, human beings with some degree of intelligence and constructive skill, as shown by the mute testimony of the ancient mounds and their contents; such as rude engravings on stone showing images of elephants and of other animals not now native of this country. It is idle to speculate as to the time when and the purpose for which these mounds were built or who were the successors of the mound builders. The white man and the untutored Indian are equally in the dark. The ancestors of the American Indians may or may not have been the mound builders. We are content to write, not of his origin, but of his modern history, and in brief and fragmentary manner, to discuss his occupancy of Iowa and Montgomery county. The great question why God made some races inferior in intellectual or moral endowments to others, why He has ordained that all races begin their history as savages,~~or why the whole history of mankind is one of evolution from the chaos and anarchy of barbarism to the orderly arrangements of an organized civil society, in which the power of the oppressor is limited by the power of the people, is foreign to the purpose of this chapter. There were two great families, or divisions, of the American Indians~~~Algonquins and Sioux. The former occupied the territory along the New England coast~~~the latter the region of the Rocky mountains. The Norsemen found the Algonquins Page 31 in possession of the New England country when they landed at Cape Cod in the year of our Lord 1000, and they were still there after the lapse of five hundred years when John and Sebastian Cabot landed on the same coast. Their star of Empire, like that of their white brother, moved westward. The water of the St. Lawrence and the great lakes was the route by which in the process of time they gained access to the north Mississippi valley. They were identified by their language, which was radically different from the eight "tongues" spoken by the other Indians of this continent. Here they met that other great family~~the Sioux~~who had in a similar manner followed the waterways from the Rocky Mountains, down the great Missouri and its branches, into the Mississippi valley. It was here the two great forces met and contended in a bloody strife for supremacy~~the usual method pursued by civilized people. Caught between these fierce combatants, it is possible the mound builders were crushed as between the upper and nether mill stones. It is known that bitterness and hatred has always existed between the Algonquins and the Sioux. "The Sioux, civil and bold, the Algonquins (Sacs and Foxes) crafty and brave." The former played the most conspicuous part in Indian history on Iowa territory. Especially was this true in the south half of the state. The "Iowas," though a tribe of the Sioux or Dakotas, were not on friendly terms with them owing to the treacherous murder of their chief on the Iowa river. The "Iowas" were at one time identified with the Sioux, but later became a separate tribe and were in possession of the southern part of the state when it was penetrated by white men. They were brave and intelligent and had villages in many of [t]he eastern counties; one at Iowaville in the northeastern corner of Van Buren county, and still others in Davis, Wapello and Mahaska counties. But race prejudice, the bane of civilized as well as savage facing page 32 Page 32 men, existed; and without apparent or sufficient reason, Black Hawk, the chief of the Sacs, with a large force completely surprised them a short distance from their village (Iowaville) and practically exterminated them. At the time the Iowas were engaged in sports and, unaware of the near appearance of their enemies, were without weapons and had left the old men, women and children, at the camp unprotected. The Sacs fired one general volley upon these defenseless men, mowing them down in indiscriminate slaughter, and completing their destructive onslaught with tomahawk and scalping knife. The wives and children who had been spared were prisoners and their arms in the hands of the victors. The disaster was so appalling and complete that they never rallied their shattered forces. Their spirits were broken and they became helpless wanderers. This massacre took place in 1823. About twelve years thereafter, according to Judge A. R. Fulton, and Indian antiquarian, in his history of the Northwest, (page 53) says; that Mahaska (White Cloud) a chief of the Iowas, was treacherously slain on the banks of the West Nodaway, north of Villisca, somewhere in Washington township, and that after his death "all surviving wives" went into mourning and poverty, according to the custom of the tribe, except one named Mis-so-rah tar-a-haw (female deer that bounds over the prairie) who refused to be comforted even to the end of her life, and so died in sorrow because "her lord was a great brave and was killed by a little dog." Mahaska county was named after this chief. Some two years before this incident, a tribe of the Algonquin family~~the Pottawattamies~~were removed from the shores of lake Michigan to the southwestern part of Iowa, of which Montgomery county is a part, and for fifteen years this was their reservation, where they roamed at will, hunting the wild turkey, elk, deer, antelope and buffalo. Game was then plentiful. Places were pointed out near the timber, under the shade, where the prairie Page 33 sod was tramped out by the sharp hoofs of the bison~~called buffalo wallows. The removal of this tribe occurred eighteen years before the government survey of Montgomery county. On the fifth day of June A. D. 1846, the year Iowa was admitted into the Union, the lands of the Pottawattamies were exchanged for a reservation thirty miles square in Kansas, although large numbers of them returned annually for ten consecutive years to visit the graves of the dead and to hunt~~all kinds of game being still abundant. White men appropriated the hunting grounds and by menace and sometimes by force caused them to yield to their intimidating request to return no more. Their favorite camping places were near Arlington and Grant, on the Nodaway river, and at Coe's grove between Stennett and Elliott. Mr. Allison Becknell relates that he has seen five hundred in camp at the latter place, with their tents and ponies constituting a veritable Indian village. The young Indians would be engaged in athletic sports, sometimes being joined by white boys who considered it great sport to shoot with them at a mark with a bow and arrow. On one occasion an Indian came riding into camp with a deer thrown across his pony. Upon throwing it down the squaws immediately commenced to take off the skin and prepare the carcass for cooking. At the same time other squaws would be dragging up brush to make a fire~~such work being beneath the dignity of the braves. These camps were maintained for months during the hunting season. The pathways, or trails, leading to them, made by the Indians and their ponies going in single file, marked the line of travel along divides and to river fords. These trails were sometimes used as guides by the first white settlers until vehicles came into use. Mrs. Charles Stennett (whose father, A. G. Lowe, was the first County Judge of this county and made the first land entry at the government land office in Council Bluffs, locating it three miles north-east of Villisca) though a girl of ten years of age, distinctly remembers seeing Indians singly and in bands. Page 34 Their usual method of making calls at the settler's cabins was to approach silently, making their presence known by standing by a window or in the doorway until noticed. "Well do I remember," relates Mrs. Stennett, "that my sister and I were playing back of our little shanty when we were startled by someone saying, 'How, How.' We turned quickly and saw six large Indians dismounting from their ponies. We ran to tell mother, who was at that time sick in bed, they following us in and greeting her in a friendly way. They then began to investigate the cause of mother's illness. They would shake themselves and say 'Ugh'ugh,' asking in that manner if it was the ague. One of them looked around the poor little shanty that served for a house, while we were building a better one, and pointing to the open cracks between the logs said, 'Poor wigwam, squaw heap sick.' We had at that time our first cook stove. One of them took off his hat and put it on the stove. Mother said, 'No! No! too much skoto (fire.)' He snatched it off and laughed." The name Pottawattamie means "makers of fire," an illusion that they were a free and independent people and had their own council fires. The government agency for this tribe was at a place on the east shore of the Missouri river in Mills county, called Traders' Point, afterwards known as St. Marys, with a sub-agency at Council Bluffs. Their reservation in south-western Iowa embraced five million acres, and their agent, Davis Hardin, built a mill and opened up a farm and built a block house of logs above which he kept afloat the stars and stripes. Two companies of United States troops were quite sufficient to police the reservation containing three thousand Indians. Here dwelt one eighth as many as the historian Bancroft estimated were contained in the region now embraced in the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa, when American was discovered. Supposing these seven states were of the same size and the population equally distributed, it would give Iowa thirty-five hundred and Montgomery county no more than thirty-five. Page 35 One hundred and eighty years later this whole region was still sparsely occupied. At "Traders' Point" lived Peter A. Sarpy, from St. Louis, who sold to the Indians ammunition, blankets and tobacco. He was very popular with them and his popularity increased when he chose an Indian maiden for his wife. He was small of stature, swarthy, pock-marked and of wiry frame. On one occasion, having fallen ill a long distance from medical assistance, his faithful wife, no larger than himself, carried him on her back for many weary days to where needed help could be obtained. The writer had an interview with him at St. Marys in the spring of 1857 and much interesting data was obtained. ONe of the counties in eastern Nebraska was named in his honor. He was an acquaintance and friend of the late P. B. Tracy, of Red Oak, who was for many years before the advent of the railroad, the agent of the Western Stage Company. It is not improbable that the roving bands of the Sioux, whose favorite resorts were on the head waters of the Des Moines and Iowa rivers and around the northern lakes, penetrated as far south as Montgomery county, as evidenced by the fact that the Sioux placed their dead in trees or on scaffolds. The first settlers saw bodies thus placed near Stennett in a receptacle made of bark from trees and suspended from the limb of an oak tree twenty feet from the ground. The Algonquins buried their dead, and their graves are in several places in this county; notably on the east side of the West Nodaway, near Morton's Mill. Indian skeletons have also been found in the railroad cut and at the old stone school-house near Stennett. The Sacs and Foxes lingered long in Iowa after white settlement, and fortunately many of their musical names came naturally to be adopted. Indian names abound in the state in connection with counties, towns and rivers. The names of twenty counties in the state are of Indian origin and hundreds Page 36 of local names are derived from the same source; as an instance, the two principal rivers of this county, the Nodaway and Nishnabotna, Nodaway meaning fordable, and Nishnabotna meaning not fordable or crossed with a canoe. These Indian names are our principal inheritance from the aborigines with which there is not associated a sense of greed or dishonor. J. Fenimore Cooper, in his romances, Longfellow in his Hiawatha, and Helen Hunt Jackson in Ramona have done much to popularize them. The latter was, of all American writers, the greatest benefactor of the Red Man.
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