SKETCH OF EARLY PIONEER LIFE.

BY SHERMAN STEVENS.

[Read June 5, 1884.]

I suppose I am really and truly that somewhat mythical person sometimes spoken of as the "oldest inhabitant," as applied to Genesee county; as I lived there with my father's family some five years before there were any other white people nearer than Waterford. It has been suggested to me that, as I have lived to see the changes and improvements that have occurred since 1825, some reminiscences of early days at Flint and Grand Blanc might interest the people of the present time.

My brother Rufus, for a long time a resident of Flint, left the the parental roof a long time before the Sage of the Tribune began advising young men to "Go West," and came to Michigan. He purchased a lot of Government land near Silver Lake, adjoining the farm of Oliver Williams, who was at that time the only settler north of Pontiac. After remaining there a year he returned to Wayne county, New York, and persuaded our father to sell out and move to his new home.

We came in wagons to Buffalo-father, mother, five sisters, Rufus, and myself. On arriving there we found that the only steamer that had, up to that time, ever navigated Lake Erie, had been cast away and lost. This steamer was called the Walk-in-the-Water, and when she first ran up the Detroit River the Indians supposed she was being towed by sturgeons.

The boat being gone we were compelled to embark upon a schooner, which landed us safely in Detroit in nine days. The family remained in Detroit for six weeks while a house was being built. When this was completed the horses were again hitched up and the wagons were loaded for Pontiac. This journey was a hard one. A narrow road had been chopped out through the heavy timber, but the mud was so deep that every few rods the wagons had to be pryed up, and it was night before we reached Royal Oak. The second day we made Birmingham, and we reached what was to be our home on the third. My father was not pleased with the land at this place; it was lighter-colored, and the trees were smaller, than he had been used to in Western New York. said he did not believe it could be good land when it took two trees to make a rail cut.

He

About this time a military post was established at Saginaw, and more or less persons were looking for homes in that direction. My father, hearing that there was land nearer that like to which he had been accustomed in New York,

concluded to visit what is now Genesee county; and he finally settled at Grand Blanc. We moved there in March, built a log house for the family, and commenced to plow up an old Indian cornfield that had been planted by them for many years, but abandoned at that time for a new settlement at Copinie Conning.

We brought with us from Oakland our cows, pigs, and poultry; but wolves were so abundant that we had a hard fight to save them. We had made of logs a coop for our dozen chickens, and before they had occupied it a week a wolf got in and killed all but the old rooster; and in broad daylight another seized what we expected would soon become the mother of a numerous family of pigs, and killed her within a few rods of the house. My father and brother were both absent, and I was the only one at home who had ever fired a gun. I loaded my little flint-lock smooth-bore, and crawled up as near as I dared to go, while the pig was still fighting for life; but, like the rude boy in the apple tree, whom the farmer undertook to bring down with tufts of grass, my little shot gun only made the wolf laugh, and he kept his hold upon the animal's throat until she was dead. I got but little satisfaction out of the hog thief, but the rascal that gobbled up our chickens came back after the old rooster and found a steel trap in the doorway that held him until I got his scalp.

Soon after we commenced to plow we broke a yoke, and found we had no auger suitable to make a new one. The nearest possible place to obtain one was at a little trading post kept by Jacob Smith, situated a few rods below the bridge that crosses the river in the now city of Flint. I was mounted on my pony and made my way through woods to the post, and, on my arrival, found the banks of the river thronged with Indians. On my way down I had shot a dozen wild pigeons. One of the Indians, then full of whisky, informed me he had been drunk for three days, and that he must have my pigeons to make some nebole (Indian for soup). To this I demurred, and started up the river to where I had left my pony, he following me with one hand hold of my birds, and insisting that he must have nebole. Presently I got him between me and the river, where the trail was near the steep bank, and suddenly ran against him with all the force I could bring to bear and tumbled him over into the stream. I did not wait to see whether he got out, but mounted my pony and made tracks for home with my pigeons intact. This episode served to fix in my memory my first visit to what is now the flourishing city of Flint.

My next visit was some three or four years later, after a few people had begun to settle in Saginaw. Among them was Col. David Stanard, who settled upon the banks of the Tittabawassee, a few miles above Saginaw City. When he moved to that place his daughter, who afterwards became Mrs. Morgan L. Drake, was left in Detroit at school. She afterwards became anxious to join her parents and got as far as Grand Blanc, where she found the roads and the rivers impassable. I volunteered to take her home by water. To accomplish the journey in a single day it was necessary to camp at the Flint, for by that time Smith's trading post had disappeared. A sister, older than myself, went with us there and we camped by the side of a big oak log, near the site of the present bridge. At daylight the next morning Miss Stanard and myself embarked in a dugout for Saginaw, and my sister returned to Grand Blanc with the ponies. We made the voyage as far as six miles up the Tittabawassee river sometime before sundown. I therefore consider myself not only the oldest inhabitant of Genesee county, but the first navigator of its principal river.

Some old friends have suggested that, as I grew up in this remote county

among the Indians, from my boyhood to man's estate, and as my life has been something of an eventful one, these personal reminiscences will not be deemed egotistical, and might be interesting to those who have not seen and known. anything of the early days of Genesee.

It will be readily perceived that, there being no inhabitants in the county, my chances for a school education were decidedly limited, and I remember, some years afterward, being in company with a party of gentlemen who were all graduates of various colleges, being asked where I was educated. I answered them that I graduated at the Green Point Institute, where Professor Sawwabon taught the Chippewa language, and that I ventured to say I had mastered that language more thoroughly than any of them had Greek or Latin, and that, if I could not as readily demonstrate a mathematical problem as they could, I could beat them shooting the bow and arrow.

So thoroughly did I learn the Indian language that I believe I can speak it about as readily to-day as I could fifty years ago. But a few years ago I was for the first time in the city of Portland, Oregon. While sitting upon the piazza of my hotel, I heard an old gentleman, who seemed a little in his cups, reading a newspaper article in reference to the various dialects of the Indians on that coast. Presently he remarked or exclaimed: "I can speak more Indian languages than any other man in Oregon." Thought I to myself, "I will try him with Chippewa." I walked up to him and said: "Appy chee ke ne ba qoy. Ke dinevos ke nistoo tum eshkeetooley?-You talk bravely, but do you understand what I am saying?" The paper dropped from his hands; he arose from the bench trembling in every limb, and, with a frightened look, answered in the same language, saying: "What is that that sounds so sweet?" and, after recovering from his fright, came up to me, determined to embrace me, and declared it was the sweetest sound he had heard in thirty years. He proved to be one of the old Hudson Bay governors, who had crossed the continent from Montreal some forty years before, and, near the headwaters of Lake Superior had married a Chippewa woman. She had now been dead thirty years, and mine were the only words he had heard in that language in all that time. In a little while there gathered about us a hundred people, all wondering what language old McDonell and the stranger could be using. Many of them thought they knew some words of every tribe on the coast, but our conversation was all Greek to them. I find in looking over what I have written, that I have got away from what I started in to relate, Early reminiscences of Genesee County.

I have already related the losses and annoyances occasioned by the wolves. These marauders finally became so abundant that the State, or rather the Territorial Legislature, authorized a bounty of five dollars each for their destruction, and the county of Oakland (of which Genesee was a part) also offered five dollars. The first speculation I ever engaged in was to buy of my brother Rufus a dead cow, which had got her head fast in a stock-pen and been hooked to death by the herd. We both wanted her for the same purpose-for wolf bait. She was worth, alive, about ten dollars; but I gave him fifteen for the carcass, hitched the oxen to her, and dragged her off west of the house a hundred rods or so. I then cut hickory stakes and drove them through her in various places into the ground, so that the wolves could not move her. Then I set steel traps on all sides of her, and the next morning I found no less than five of the rascals fast by their feet, some of them in two traps; and before the bait was gone I had caught three more wolves, and divers other animals.

The eighty dollars in State and county scrip, and the money I got for a lynx

and several fox skins, made me feel that I was a capitalist, and I became ambitious to learn something besides Chippewa and the bow and arrow. I proposed to my parents that I should go to Detroit and attend a school for a term. My mother prepared my rather slim wardrobe and made for me a coat, of which I was proud, out of a three-point blanket, and colored it with butternut bark, and I started for Detroit. On arriving in Detroit I canvassed the city for some days to find a place where they would board me for what work I could do out of school hours. I at last found a place where they would take me upon the condition that I should act as a kind of dry nurse to a couple of children— see them to and from school, carry them over the muddy streets—and, by the by, one of those children became Mrs. A. B. Mathews, of Pontiac, and the brother went to California in 1850, and died there.

I had some trouble with my city school-mates, who were disposed to make fun of the boy from the backwoods with the butternut-colored coat. But ere long they found the butternut coat at the head of the class, carrying with him the respect and good will of the teacher for his industry and application. While at school I found my Indian education of service to me. At times large numbers of Indians came to the city from their hunting grounds to sell their furs and skins, and they would hunt me up to aid and interpret for them. I used to take them to a little wooden building on the corner of Jefferson and Woodward avenues, kept by F. P. Browning, who gave me a liberal commission on all the trade I brought him; and before the school term ended I was enabled to improve the appearance of my wardrobe.

I returned to Grand Blanc and went to work; but soon I tired of hoeing corn, and told my father that with his permission I would try my fortune in the settlements. Although I was the last of four sons to leave the parental roof, he did not object, but he warned me of his inability to "stake' me (as we say in the West). Of this fact I was well aware; but, nothing daunted, at the age of sixteen, I mounted my pony (my only personal property), and started for Pontiac. At that time the principal store was owned by Newberry & Beach, Oliver Newberry, of Detroit, and Elisha Beach, the resident manager. At that time an important item was their trade with the Indians, and my ability to speak the language enabled me to secure an engagement. I remained there about a year, when I was engaged at a larger salary to go to Saginaw to take charge of a little store established by L. P. Riggs, on Green Point, a mile or two above Saginaw City.

While there I made occasional trips to the hunting-grounds with an Indian guide who had lost one arm by amputation, the operation having been performed by himself. A tree had fallen upon him, pinioning his left arm to the ground, breaking the bone, but leaving his body and right arm free. He was able to get out his knife, cut off the fastened arm, and make his way to camp. With this Indian for a guide I started, late in the month of November, crossed the Saginaw River just above East Saginaw, and started for a locality on the Bay, then known as Bucqonikisi, a few miles east of Bay City; and I am told there is now a railroad over the same or near the same ground.

We took no provisions with us, expecting to reach the camp by nightfall. We traveled but an hour or two, when it commenced to rain and it continued through the day. Towards night I began to be pretty weary and lagged behind somewhat. At every little opening where it began to look a little lighter, the Indian would sing out to me: "We are 'most there, it grows lighter." We plodded on until it began to grow dark, when we came up to a bark shanty

made by some hunting party, and, as it would protect us from the rain, we concluded to camp there and fast until morning. The old Indian made a fire and we made ourselves as comfortable as we could until daylight, when we started again, still in the rain. We kept on traveling all day, expecting every rod to see the woods giving out and the bay appearing. Presently the Indian, who was twenty rods ahead, in cheery tones sung out: "Here we are; here are tracks; we will soon be there now." I hurried on and reached him, and sure enough there were fresh tracks where two persons had passed, evidently that day. We followed those tracks, rejoicing in the idea of soon being able to satisfy our intense hunger. I leave my readers to imagine our dismay when, after following the tracks for a half mile or so, we came upon the camp where we had staid the night before, A more disgusted Indian was never seen; and if his language had admitted of it I have no doubt I should have heard dire profanity. He called himself all kinds of opprobrious names, more particularly an owl, and declared that any child old enough to walk should have known enough to steer a northern course; that every tree in a thick woods had guiding marks upon it, and yet he had been traveling round a circle. He begged me not to divulge the fact lest the squaws should laugh him out of camp.

Well, there was no help for it; we were obliged to camp there again and suffer the pangs of hunger. As the sun set it cleared up and became intensely cold. At daylight we started again from Camp Dismay, and, by watching the moss found on the north side of all the trees, had no trouble in steering due north. By nine o'clock we began to see out of the timber and could hear the surf upon the bay. The Indians had built their cabins among a group of sand hills between the timber and the beach, and the hills, some twenty or thirty feet high, prevented one from seeing the immediate shore. As we approached the camp we heard coming from the beach the most unearthly screeching, yelling, laughing, and all the noises human throats are capable of producing. It seemed to me that pandemonium was loose.

On reaching the camp there was but one old woman of the entire village to be seen. On enquiring the meaning of the noises we heard at the beach, she told us the entire village were out on the ice catching fish. We then made known the fact that we were starving, and, while peals of laughter and other evidences of joyous fun were coming up from the beach, I sat anxiously watching the boiling of a big brass kettle, which old Shaboneday had put over the fire with a twelve-pound trout in it the moment we told her we were hungry. It was soon cooked and placed before us, and, although we had neither salt or other seasoning, it was the most delicious repast I ever sat down to before or since; and we not only finished the twelve-pound trout, but we drank the soup, or water in which it was boiled, and Delmonico's chief cook has never made its equal.

As soon as I got through eating, I climbed the sand hill to see the fishing. The night before had been still and cold and had frozen the ice hard enough to bear for a mile. The water beneath it was but a foot or two in depth, with a white sand bottom; and men, women, and children were chasing fish in all directions. They frequently came in collision, knocking each other over, when they would up again and after the fish which, if followed sharply for a hundred yards or so, will give up, turn over on its back, and can then be taken out through a hole cut in the ice.

I have occasionally endangered my reputation by telling this fish story, but there happens to be an old friend still living in Genesee county, E. S. Williams,