The Taming of the Wilderness

MY GREAT GRANDMA ACENATH SMITH EDWARDS – the sixth of the eleven children of Durant and Elizabeth Smith – was born in 1838 in a log cabin in the wilderness near the embryonic village of Winchester in east central Indiana. We’ll hear more about the enterprising soul Durant Smith later. Like him, great grandma was a staunch, birthright Quaker who spoke in “thees” and “thous.” She often talked to me when I was a young lad about her life as she grew up in the Indiana wilderness. At age 94 she couldn’t remember what she had had for breakfast, but she retained a keen recollection of things that happened when she was a girl. And she loved to tell about it! I was fascinated by her stories about the bears and wolves and other creatures of the wild.

After great grandma had passed on, as a boy in the 1930s I used to take my dog, a hatchet and a hand-me-down .22 caliber rifle, go back to the woods on our farm and play like I was a pioneer. I would cut some small trees – brush, really – trim off the branches and build a camp. From that out-post I would scout for Indians and hunt wild game. My biggest take ever was a couple of cotton-tail rabbits, but never mind. In my imagination I was recreating life as it had been in Indiana 100 years before. Or, so I thought!

What was it really like?

Who were the people who had the vision? What was their vision? Were they escaping an intolerable situation in the South or did they reckon that life in the West would in some way be better?

One wonders: What could they possibly have seen as a future in this god-forsaken, swamp-ridden, Indian-infested wilderness?

The very early pioneers – those who came while Indiana was still Indiana Territory – were the intrepid ones. Not a prayer existed for a cash economy – of getting farm produce to distant markets – for at least a generation. They could scarcely have foreseen that steamboats and canals were a possibility, let alone railroads, so that one day they could produce – and market – surplus corn, wheat, cattle, and hogs. But, for whatever reason, they came.

Jeremiah Cox, great uncle to Acenath Smith Edwards, was among the very first pioneers to settle in east central Indiana, in 1806. A decade later he was one of 43 delegates who drafted and approved Indiana’s first Constitution.

Chapter 20. End of An Era: The Pioneers’ Visions Are Realized

My Mother, who was born in 1901 and died in 1999, often reflected with amazement at the change she had witnessed during her lifetime: From riding to school in a horse-drawn hack as a young girl, to flying jet planes in later years to such faraway places as India, Barbados, and Jerusalem, to marveling at the astronauts having made trips safely to the moon and back.

Yet, her great-grandfather Durant Smith, who was born in 1802 and would have lived to nearer the end of the nineteenth century had he not been killed by a train at age 80, must have been at least as much in awe. From having lived in log cabins among wild animals in the “howling wilderness,” where the family literally lived off the land and the chase, to having witnessed the taming of the wilderness, he progressed to the point that he was able to give each of his many children a well-developed 80-acre farm. From that farm the produce, grown by such modern contraptions as one of John Deere’s plows pulled by a steam-powered traction engine and harvested by one of Cyrus McCormick’s reapers, could be sent by speeding trains to distant and lucrative markets. More change had taken place during Durant Smith’s lifetime than had occurred since the beginning of time!

The transportation revolution was the single most important physical ingredient in the nineteenth century transformation from wilderness to commercial agriculture and its supporting industry. The early settlers knew intuitively that better transportation was the key to achieving their objectives. They agitated early on for roads, then canals, and finally for railroads.

The driving force that brought about the transformation were the pioneers – those early settlers who had the vision and who were willing to toil endlessly to make it happen: the Jeremiah Coxes; the Jonathan Edwards; the Durant Smiths; and the Paul W. Ways. George Washington, Anthony Wayne, Thomas Jefferson, and William Henry Harrison, each from his unique vantage point, gave much needed support, but in the end it was the men who toiled with ax and musket, together with their faithful wives who endured unending hardships, who bridled the wilderness and ultimately tamed it.

Those who paid the supreme price were the Native American Indians who, faced with a combination of arm-twisting, coercion and merciless force, ceded their hunting grounds so that the paleface adversaries could transform the wilderness to their liking. May the red brothers rest in peace in the land of the Great Spirit.

If there be a Wilderness in Heaven, one can be assured that Uncle Jeremiah has staked out a claim astride the Jericho River where he has built a water-powered grist mill and is grinding corn into meal for all those who are around him. That good old Quaker is not out of his element there!