History of Kent County.

HISTORY OF KENT COUNTY

71

to finish it. While this was being done, a part of the summer we lived
in a new barn near, and as soon as a few rooms were done we moved in.
This summer of 1836, on pleasant Sundays, we used to cross the
river to attend services at Mr. Slater's Mission Chapel, he preaching in
the afternoon in English. Occasionally he came over to the east side
and preached in a house built by a Mr. Lincoln.
This summer Miss Page, afterwards Mrs. Judge Bacon, of Monroe, at the importunity of several families who had small children,
opened a school in a new barn a little to the rear of the now Morton
House, being built of boards set up endwise, and floors of boards just
laid down without matching. No school committee was vexed with
the matter of ventilation. Here I had my first struggles with Webster's spelling book. One of the events of that year to be remembered,
was the Indian payment on the other side of the river. It came in
October. They were some two or three weeks in gathering and waiting for the specie to come. The great amusement of the white people
was to go and visit them. Father took us children to see them. Their
campfires, wigwams, the men decked out with paint on their faces,
feathers in their headgear, strings of tin cut in round pieces, or beads
around their necks; the squaws, many of them with fine broadcloth
blankets with leggings to match, handsomely embroidered, and their
pretty moccasins, with the lovely autumnal landscape, made a picture
well calculated to remain in the memory. This payment was kept
up for twenty years, and from fifteen hundred to two thousand Indians
came every year, and we came to know many of them and looked for
them. The squaws were often beautiful needle women-their petticoats were often embroidered a quarter of a yard deep, with narrow
ribbon and beads, and most neatly done, and their bead and porcupine
quill work was often a marvel of ingenuity. It is a great pity more
really fine specimens of their work has not been preserved.
Indians were a familiar sight but I do not remember any serious
apprehension of trouble from them. A seat by the fire when they were
(chich-es-sol) cold, or a generous slice when they were (buck-a-tab)
hungry, generally insured a friendly feeling.
That summer of 1836 seems to my recollection a long one. The
arrival of so many strangers, the rapid changes, the hurry of people
to get some place to live before the cold weather, the funny ways
people did live, the feverish excitement of speculation crowding so
many events into the space of a few months, seems now like so many
years. To recall the state of things, I extract from a letter of my
father's to a brother-in-law, dated April 23, 1836. "I have applied for
fine lots of pine land up Grand river, but there is such a press of
business at the land office, one cannot know under six or eight days
whether he can get it or not, and if two men ask for the same land, the
same day, they must agree which will have it, as it is set up at auction.
There has been four or five hundred people at Bronson for a Week past,
all waiting to get land. If I get the pine land it will cost about $2.25
per acre, and a great bargain at that. If land buyers increase as we
have reason to expect when navigation opens, there will not be a good
lot in the territory at congress prices, and then I see no reason why land