Presbyterianism on the Frontiers [pp. 445-469]

Presbyterianism on the Frontiers.
they made their way to Fort Wayne, reaching it late at night.
And yet, the brave man, the next day being the Sabbath,
preached twice in the Fort. Between I822 and tI826 he made
five such missionary tours to Fort Wayne.-(Williams' Fort
Wayne, I3).
This venerable patriarch passed away at Tipton, Indiana,
March I I, I876, aged ninety-two years, having spent more than
half a century in the ministry in this State and Ohio. His,
history is one of singular interest, and his ministerial life was
crowned with unusual success.
When Dr. Post reached Logansport, Christmas day, I829, it
was "a town of thirty or forty families-a community numbering between two and three hundred. Dispersed in the coun —
try were eight or ten log cabins, holding the entire residue of
Cass county. We were literally on the confines where civilized man had overtaken the savage, and they had stopped for
a day and struck hands.... Wild forest and prairie, unoccupied by the white man, stretched away westward over Illinois to'the Father of Waters,' and in the direction of the
Great Lakes to an almost indefinite expanse; toward the
rising sun, and the remote southeast and south were spread
out'the solemn woods.' Some rude fixtures of the French.
trader were found at long intervals on the large water-courses.
On nearly every side lay a wide extent of unorganized territory, and all around was a dark, massy solitude. Out of Fort
Wayne and Logansport there were not in Indiana, north of
the Wabash, 300 inhabitants. From several points of the compass a traveler, day after day, might have taken his course in
a direct line to this place without his eye being cheered with
even the roughest quarters of the backwoodsman." He describes his journey in December, I829, from Madison to
Logansport on horseback, requiring nine days of hard riding, "with roads which were almost a continuous morasslong, weary miles of a deep, half-liquid compound of earth,
water, snow, and ice-roads without bridges, high waters,
impassable fords, and with'swimming horse,' and sometimes
his rider, too, through full angry currents."-(Post's Retrospect, 9, IO.)
If we had time to cull hints and more positive statements
from various sources within reach, we should find that Indiana,
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