Brighton
Two things that were not there
Published .
The lands in southern Michigan came onto the market years before northern Indiana's did, so that is where people went first. Then they got a look at what they had bought. It was unbroken forest, and clearing it was going to take the rest of their lives.
Word came back that there were prairies down in Indiana where the soil needed nothing but a plow.
The trouble was that the prairie was not for sale yet. So through 1829 a group of families near White Pigeon came down, picked out ground, and marked it. In the woods you marked a claim by blazing trees. On the prairie you plowed a furrow around it.
Amos Barr built the first cabin in the township that autumn. It had no roof and no floor, and it was probably not meant to be lived in. It was there to prove the claim was his.
They spent that winter in Michigan, coming down through the cold now and then to make sure nobody had jumped their ground.
Early in the spring of 1830, William Miller and Benjamin Jones loaded their goods into a wagon, tore the roof off the cabin they had wintered in, put that on the wagon too, and moved their families down to the ground where Lexington would be. They lived in tents until they got cabins up.
The prairie got its name from a conversation. Some men newly arrived from Ohio were standing at Miller's place looking north across it in the autumn, with the oaks and maples turned at the far edge. One of them asked what it was called. Miller said they did not call it anything. The man said it was a mighty pretty prairie, and they might call it Pretty Prairie.
The name went around and it stuck.
By the summer of 1832 there were twenty-five families in the township, and everyone was talking about the Black Hawk War.
That fighting was hundreds of miles west, but there were large Potawatomi camps in this county, and people had worked themselves into wondering whether the same thing would happen here. The county history published in 1882 says the talk prepared the minds of the settlers for what followed.
Two men named Gage and Langdon rode up to a mill in the northern part of Springfield Township. They stayed talking with the miller and some others late into the night, and the subject was whether the Potawatomi would rise. Then they went to bed, uneasy.
After they were asleep, three or four of the men at the mill decided to scare them.
In the morning, while Gage and Langdon stood in front of the mill talking with the miller, a man stepped out from behind a tree with a rifle, raised it, and fired. The miller dropped to the ground as though dying and called out that the Indians had shot him. Two or three more came out swinging tomahawks and yelling.
Gage ran north. Langdon ran south.
Both of them told everyone they passed that the Indians were coming, that everyone at the mill was dead, and that the country was being swept.
Gage got to Lexington. The families there packed the women and children into George Donaldson's blacksmith shop while the men started cutting logs to throw up a fort around it. Families out west of there ran for the island in Cedar Lake and started fortifying that. Langdon reached Brushy Prairie and told them about the massacre at the mill.
Men armed themselves for miles in every direction and went to the mill to put down the uprising. More than a hundred of them got there. For reasons the county history says nobody could later explain, they never organized into anything.
There were about seventy-five Potawatomi camped near the mill.
They watched a hundred armed white men arrive and concluded, correctly, that something was about to happen to them. They put out a white flag.
The county history says the settlers could hardly be restrained from firing on them anyway.
It took a day or two for the truth to get around.
Then the men who had staged it found out what it had cost them. The county history names them: a French trader called Druryeaur, an Irishman named O'Ferrell, a Yankee named Brownell, the German miller, and some men born in this country. It observes that such a mix of nationalities could hardly have failed to produce a sensation.
People stopped trading at the mill, the store, and the distillery. The Frenchman left the country. O'Ferrell disappeared not long after and Brownell sold his property, and the county historian thinks the joke hastened both, if it did not cause them.
Writing in 1920, Ira Ford put it more flatly. It was hot enough for those three men that they were forced to sell out and leave.
Ford also records, in a passage about French traders at Mongo, that two of them stayed until the autumn of 1832 and then left because of the hostility shown them over the scare.
The logs cut for Fort Donaldson lay where they had been dropped for years afterward.
Goodspeed, writing this up fifty years later, seems to have expected not to be believed.
He ends the account with a warning not to say the story has been magnified. When a hundred men assemble armed and ready to fight, he writes, and attempts are made to build forts and garrison islands in lakes, that part of the country is in earnest and means business.
Such are the facts, at least.
Four years after that, two men laid out a village.
Elisha U. Shepard and Bazaleel Alvord hired a surveyor in 1836 and platted a town on Section 25, on the shore of Wall Lake, and named it Vistula. On paper it was a handsome place. Ford says the plat was drawn on glossy oiled silk.
They took it east and showed it around, and several men bought blocks and corner lots.
When those men came west to sell at a profit, or to put up buildings on ground they now owned, they found the lake exactly as it had always been, walled with sand and gravel, and not one house standing anywhere near it.
The county history notes that there never had been one, and never was afterward.
The men who bought lots in Vistula lost money.
The men who ran to Fort Donaldson lost a day and some pride, and left a pile of logs lying in the grass.
The seventy-five people camped by the mill, who had done nothing at all, and who put out a white flag to keep from being killed over a joke, were removed from this county by the government within a decade.
Sources
- Counties of LaGrange and Noble, Indiana: Historical and Biographical, F.A. Battey and Co. Greenfield, Springfield, Lima and Clearspring Township chapters by Weston A. Goodspeed, 1882. Internet Archive
- History of Northeast Indiana: LaGrange, Steuben, Noble and DeKalb Counties, Ira Ford, 1920. Internet Archive, volume 1. Carries the scare under its own heading in the Springfield chapter, the oiled silk plat, and the traders leaving Mongo.
Quotations and figures from the 1882 county history and the 1920 history of northeast Indiana are taken from scanned originals. Obvious scanning errors have been corrected silently. No wording has been altered. The French trader's name is spelled three ways across the two books, Druryeaur in the 1882 Springfield chapter, Druryasur in the 1920 account, and Drury in the 1920 passage on the traders at Mongo. This piece uses the 1882 spelling throughout.