Northwestern Indiana from 1800 to 1900A regional history written by Timothy H. Ball . . . .

Source Citation:
Ball, Timothy H. 1900. Northwestern Indiana from 1800 to 1900 or A View of Our Region Through the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, Illinois: Donohue and Henneberry. 570 p.

 

NORTHWESTERN INDIANA FROM 1800 TO 1900

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CHAPTER XXX.

ANIMALS AND PLANTS.

As this is not a scientific work, and as space is quite limited, a short sketch only can be here given of the native, or wild animals, called in the old classification beasts, birds, fishes, insects, and reptiles. And as a good and a full view of the "fauna of Lake County" was prepared by E. W. Dinwiddie of Plum Grove in 1884, and as there are but few varieties in any of the other counties not found in Lake, the salamander, as called in the South and by Webster, "2. A pouched rat (Geomys pinctis), found in Georgia and Florida," seeming to be limited to Newton and Jasper, a kind of abstract of the paper carefully prepared by E. W. Dinwiddie and published in Lake County, 1884, pages 150 to 158, will here be given as including nearly all of the animals native in Northwestern Indiana in the times of the first settlers. The first paragraph is quoted entire: "The peculiar position and varied nature of the soil of Lake County probably render it the natural home of more species of animal life than any other region of similar extent in the United States. Lake Michigan, the Kankakee and Calumet

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rivers and marshes, numerous small streams and lakes, swamps, prairie, groves, loam, clay, and sand hills, make a variety of soil and condition suited to the wants of hundreds of species of temperate zone animal life." Quadrupeds named are: By supposition bison, elk, deer, beaver, opossums, musk-rats, mink, raccoon, squirrels, four species, gophers, two species, chipmunks, woodchucks, moles, skunks, rabbits, badgers, hedgehogs, weasels, wolves, prairie wolves and large gray timber wolves, foxes, wildcats, and two varieties of mice, the field mouse and a white-throated timber mouse.

Birds named are: As a visitor but not probably a native, the white swan; also as visitors, gulls, but as native, among the swimmers, wild geese, brants, ducks, especially "the mallard, blue wing teal, widgeon, wood-duck, spoonbill, and spike-tail", -- and from different data the estimate is reached that in a single year in the county have been killed of these ducks 250,000, one man having himself shot in one season 2,300,  -- loons and mud hens; of waders, white and blue sand-hill cranes, other white and bluish cranes, the former sometimes having been seen in flocks of "two or three hundred feeding on the grass or stubble fields," the latter being solitary birds, "or not more than two together," thunder-pumpers, jacksnipe, sand-pipe, plover, and rail, and of "the dry land birds," crow blackbirds, crows, red-wing blackbirds (a white blackbird has been seen), pigeons, meadow larks, mourning doves, robins, blue-jays, cat-birds, wrens, thrushes," two species of martins, three of swallows, four varieties of wood-peckers, and several varieties of wild canaries," also humming birds, kill-

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dees, whip-poor-wills, "four species of owls, and two of hawks, grouse, called prairie chickens, quails, pheasants, and eagles. Of fishes some fourteen species have been found, including some excellent varieties for food, but their names are here omitted.

Of insects very many are mentioned, but their names (except moths, butterflies, "many of them very brilliant and beautiful," flies, ten species, gnats, four species, musquitoes, four, and bees, three varieties, and wasps and hornets), must also be omitted. Of reptiles are named four varieties of lizards, three kinds of frogs, two of turtles or tortoises, toads, tree toads, and then snakes, rattle snakes, black snakes, and green snakes. And then of small animals many are referred to, as beetles, fifteen or twenty species, five species of spiders, crickets, katy-dids, locusts, and "unnumbered hosts of small bugs and insects and a great variety of worms."

Animal life was certainly abundant.

NATIVE PLANTS.

In the same year of 1884, and published in the same work, Lake County, 1884, a paper was prepared by T. H. Ball on the "flora of Lake County." Something of an abstract of that will also be given, as, with the exception of the heavy timber growth of La Porte, the vegetation in these counties will be found the same. Little will be found elsewhere in this region that is not found in Lake.

Five varieties of growth were marked out. 1. The Calumet Region. Here grew white pine, red cedar, and several varieties of oak, and huckleberries, cranberries, and wintergreens; also sassafras, and some twenty or thirty species of shrubs and bushes

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that cannot be here named. These made parts of the Calumet bottoms, in earlier years, about as impenetrable as southern jungles, filled with so many tangled, running vines, that to pass through in straight lines was quite impracticable. But cities are growing there now.

2. The clay land or woodlands. The original limits of this woodland were marked out, naming especially forty-seven sections besides the principal groves of the county. The growth as named was oak, of several species, hickory, and bordering the prairies "a dense growth of hazel bushes;" also "in some localities, crab-apples, plum trees, slippery elm, ash, sassafras, huckleberries, wild currants, goose berries, black berries, strawberries, hawthorne, white thorn, ironwood, poplar or quaking aspen, and, as stragglers perhaps, red cedars, black walnut, and hard or rock maple." In these woodlands also grew many species of small flowering plants. "Among these are anemones, spring beauties, butter-cups, sanguinaria or blood-root, several species of blue violets, dog-tooth violets, Indian puccoon, lady-slippers, and very many species" whose names cannot here be given. Producing fruit mandrakes and pawpaws.

3. Plants of the prairies. Next to the true prairie grass are named, as characteristic plants, the polar plant (Silphium laciniatum), of which the botanist, Wood, says, "producing columns of smoke in the burning prairies by its copious resin," and from which the children of the prairies obtained pure, nice chewing gum, without paying any pennies, and the prairie dock (Silphium terebinthenacium), also resinous, and with broad leaves, from seven to twelve inches, and from one foot to two feet in length. Then there were,

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in bloom in June, July, and August, some fifty or more species of prairie plants, among them the beautiful meadow lily, and, growing in immense native beds, what the botanists call Phlox. On the 14th day of October, 1884, the record reads, were gathered from a little portion of Lake Prairie Cemetery, where the plow had not been, "specimens of twenty-five different species of the original prairie plants," and their full number is estimated to be from two to three hundred. It need not be repeated that the prairies in summer were exceedingly beautiful.

Some statements in regard to the grasses of the county are here quoted, grasses strictly so-called. "Probably from fifty to a hundred species were native here. Some varieties made poor, but many kinds made excellent hay. Some varieties grew about one foot high, some were two and three, some five and six feet in height. Some of the woodland grass was only a few inches in height. Some species had a small, almost wiry blade, some a broad blade, some varieties had a reedlike stem with blades like the blades of maize. The stem of one variety was three-sided. Wild pea vines growng with some of the grass aided in making excellent winter provender."

4. The wet land growth. First in beauty among these aquatic plants is named the water lily (Nymphaea odorata), of which Wood says: "One of the loveliest of flowers, possessing beauty, delicacy and fragrance in the highest degree." It would not seem that these could grow in greater abundance anywhere. "The yellow pond lily comes next." Then the cat-tail (Typha latifolia), the blue flag, Indian hemp, rushes, sedges, and yet many other aquatic plants.

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5. The Kankakee timber growth. On the islands proper, the soil generally sandy, grow "red oak, black oak, jack oak, hickory, sycamore, maple, pepperidge or gum tree, beech, and black walnut. Also some elm."

Some of the region is swamp.

"In this grow ash, elm, sycamore, birch, willow, maple, and cotton-wood, with a thick growth of underbrush or puckerbrush. Through this latter growth neither man nor dog can travel rapidly."

To the native animals, may be added, for La Porte County black bears and wild turkeys; to the plants, white walnut and bass-wood.

Notes. 1. Mr. H. Seymour of Hebron, who was born February 20, 1808, and who died January 18, 1900, nearly ninety-two years of age, was probably the oldest of the early trappers and hunters, a rather peculiar class of men, who spent many years along the Kankakee marsh. He came, according to his recollection, to the vicinity of the old Indian Town, south of Hebron, in 1833. He was quite active, retaining well his faculties, when he was visited a year or two ago. He said that he thought the white cranes and the swan made nests in the marsh region in those early times, but he was not really certain. In regard to the sand-hill cranes, the wild geese, the ducks, herons, and the smaller water fowls of the region, there was, he was sure, no doubt in regard to their nests.

The wild geese, the brants, most of the different species of ducks, and largely the sand-hill cranes, have gone to places more remote from the foot of man and the noise of steam, to make their nests and rear their young; but in this grand marsh region the nest-

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ing places still remain of the blue heron, of the bittern, of the mud-hen, of various species of snipe, of rail, and of plover. On Red Oak Island are still the nesting places of owls, the large horned owls, and other varieties.

The wild geese many years ago made nests upon sections 4 and 5, and 18, in township 32, range 7 west, the name Goose Pond having been given by the early settlers to a portion of water, at the beginning of the present Brown Ditch, on section 4, where the mother geese and their little ones used to swim and get food. On section 18 they had for their swimming place a bayou which the trappers call Hog Marsh.

On section 7, in this same township and range, is a small island where many nests are still made by a marsh water fowl which the hunters call "squaks."

The year 1882 was noted for a great number of wild geese visitors, no longer natives here.

A certain knoll southward from Plum Grove was very attractive that spring to the Kankakee visitors. "From four o'clock in the morning until about nine o'clock different flocks would arrive at this grassy knoll until some five acres would be literally covered with these beautiful water fowls, apparently as thickly crowded as they well could stand."

Of course, unlike some human creatures, they were too polite to crowd. One man has the credit of shooting fifty-nine here in one day.

On "Little Eagle," a small marsh island, now owned by Hon. Jerome Dinwiddie, there was, many years ago, an eagle's nest, built upon a large elm tree. This island is on section 6, township 32, range 7 west, of second principal meridian, in Lake County. The same pair of eagles, it is believed, made a nest

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or repaired one for some twenty years. They left the island about 1880.

Colton in his great and instructive work, "Atlas of the World," 1856, in describing Indiana as then it was -- or was supposed to be -- says: "Near Lake Michigan the country has extensive sand hills which are covered only with stunted and shrivelled pines and burr oaks." Of cedar trees, of the very fruitful huckleberry bushes and sand-hill cherries that grew on those bluffs, his work makes no mention.

Whatever may have been the growth in 1856, the credit of this region requires the showing that shrivelled pines were not the original growth.

Solon Robinson says, in his Manuscript Lecture of 1847, now in the possession of Walter L. Allman of Crown Point, that the sand ridges along Lake Michigan were "originally covered with a valuable growth of pine and cedar, which has been all stript off to build up Chicago." And he adds, in regard to Lake County: "In the northeast the sand hills are very abrupt and have yet some good pine timber, although very difficult to obtain." And General Packard in his history of La Porte County says: "Formerly the region bordering the lake was well covered with beautiful white pine; but this valuable tree has almost wholly disappeared, being cut off for lumber."*
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*I am glad that I was on those great piles of sand so often and saw with my own eyes the great pine trees, as early as 1837, before the white settlers had made much impression on the vegetation or the sand hills. Large and delicious were the high bush huckleberries that grew on these high sand hills, and very abundant were the fragrant wintergreen berries. Mr. L. W. Thumpson, now living in Hammond, born July 14, 1814, remembers well the pines and the wintergreens, and he thinks the pines in 1837 were twenty inches in diameter as the logs were sawed at the City West sawmill.      T. H. B.

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The largest and probably the only native pine grove in Lake County is quite peculiarly situated. It is nine miles south of Lake Michigan and six miles south of the Little Calumet, almost exactly south of the mouth of Deep River, and two miles south of Turkey Creek. It is on the southeast quarter of the northwest quarter of section 14, township 35, range 8 west, on land now owned by George Hayward, who says that is covers an area of about ten acres. It is on low and, originally, quite wet ground, so wet that years ago it could well have been called a pine swamp. The trees are quite close together, there must be several hundred of them, and the larger ones seem to be of about the same size, as though they had all been growing not more than sixty or seventy years. Although, according to Gray's Manual of Botany, of the white pine species, there are no majestic trees among them, like those tall, wood monarchs that used to be along the southern sand hills of Lake Michigan in 1837, between Michigan City and the Illinois State line, with which some yet living were then so familiar; and another peculiarity of this pine grove is, that the soil is not sand, but peat bogs rather, where these trees grow. They are several miles away from any other native pines that have not been transplanted, and to account for their growth where they are and as they are, would surely puzzle an ordinary botanist.

As the large and valuable pine trees of Lake and Porter counties were soon cut down, perhaps on that account some writers have supposed that no such trees grew along our lake shore borders.

A number of small pine groves may now be found, of that Lake Michigan pine, in the rich prairie region north of the Kankakee River, the trees having been

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taken when small, from their native sand hills many years ago. The largest and finest grove of pine native in Europe, to be found now in Lake County, is on what has been known as the Turner Schofield farm, about five miles south of Crown Point. It covers about four acres of ground. The trees are Austrian pine and Scotch pine with some larch. Here is a noted crow roost. A little west of Schererville is a large pine grove of native pine of about a thousand trees, trees that many years ago were taken from their original locality and set out on that grand sand ridge. 

NAVIGATION OF
NORTHWESTERN INDIANA FROM 1800 TO 1900

FRONT MATTER AND DEDICATION
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 - GENERAL OUTLINES
CHAPTER 2 - THE INDIANS
CHAPTER 3 - THE EARLY SETTLERS
CHAPTER 4 - WHAT THE EARLY SETTLERS FOUND
CHAPTER 5 - PIONEER LIFE
CHAPTER 6 - COUNTY ORGANIZATIONS
CHAPTER 7 - OUR LAKES AND STREAMS
CHAPTER 8 - LAKE MICHIGAN WATER SHED
CHAPTER 9 - TOWNSHIP AND STATISTICS
CHAPTER 10 - RAILROAD LIFE
CHAPTER 11 - POLITICAL HISTORY
CHAPTER 12 - THE WAR RECORD
CHAPTER 13 - RELIGIOUS HISTORY
CHAPTER 14 - RELIGIOUS HISTORY
CHAPTER 15 - RELIGIOUS HISTORY
CHAPTER 16 - SUNDAY SCHOOLS
CHAPTER 17 - TOWNS AND VILLAGES OF NEWTON AND JASPER
CHAPTER 18 - TOWNS AND VILLAGES OF WHITE, PULASKI AND STARKE
CHAPTER 19 - VILLAGES, TOWNS AND CITIES OF LAKE
CHAPTER 20 - VILLAGES AND TOWNS OF PORTER
CHAPTER 21 - VILLAGES, TOWNS AND CITIES OF LA PORTE
CHAPTER 22 - EARLY TRAVELS
CHAPTER 23 - PUBLIC SCHOOLS
CHAPTER 24 - PRIVATE AND PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS
CHAPTER 25 - LIBRARIES
CHAPTER 26 - OTHER INDUSTRIES
CHAPTER 27 - SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS
CHAPTER 28 - THE KANKAKEE REGION
CHAPTER 29 - DRAINING MARSHES
CHAPTER 30 - ANIMALS AND PLANTS
CHAPTER 31 - MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS
CHAPTER 32 - COURT HOUSES
CHAPTER 33 - ARCHAEOLOGICAL SPECIMENS
CHAPTER 34 - BIRTH PLACES OF PIONEERS
CHAPTER 35 - McCARTY
CHAPTER 36 - ATTEMPTS TO CHANGE
CHAPTER 37 - ALTITUDES
CHAPTER 38 - MISCELLANEOUS RECORDS
CHAPTER 39 - SOME STATISTICS
CHAPTER 40 - WEATHER RECORD
CONCLUSION

Transcribed by Steven R. Shook, April 2012

 

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