Chapter II—
Life and Culture on an Old Landscape:
Cis-Appalachian Antecedents

One early September day in 1847, John Courtney, who had settled on a small creek in the Calapooia Valley a year earlier, left his claim to make the seventy mile journey to Oregon City to obtain supplies. While in Oregon City he met friends, the Rinearsons, who had taken a claim nearby. They needed help in clearing their land, and Courtney was a good man to ask for assistance, since he operated a small sawmill in the Calapooia and had experience felling trees. On 12 September, Courtney and some other men used hot rocks to burn the trunks of trees targeted for removal on the Rinearson claim. That day Courtney's experience failed him, for when one particular tree began to fall, he became confused and ran in the wrong direction. "As a consequence he was struck by the falling giant of the forest and instantly killed."^[1]

We do not know just how John's wife, Agnes, better known as Nancy to friends and neighbors, heard and took the news of his death. Documents do reveal, however, that she continued to reside on her and her late husband's claim in the Calapooia Valley on the creek that would later bear the Courtney name. Eventually she even obtained title to her property under the Oregon Donation Land Law.

Before coming to the Calapooia, Agnes Courtney had spent her life in the Ohio and eastern Mississippi valleys, a region referred to in this chapter as cis-Appalachia. Born 11 May 1795 in western Pennsylvania, in 1809 Agnes headed west with her parents to Ohio. In 1812, in Clarke

County, Indiana, she married her first husband, Alexander Findley. Widowed with no children in 1817, Agnes married John Courtney the following year. Their first four children were born in Indiana between 1819 and 1828. By 1836 Agnes had given birth to three more children in Illinois. In 1843 the Courtney family migrated to the Willamette Valley from their residence in Missouri.^[2]

Agnes Courtney's origins, her general migratory pattern down the Ohio Valley before proceeding to the Far West and settling on the Calapooia, and thus her experiences on the cis-Appalachian landscape typify those of other early settlers of the Oregon Country. To understand the cultural-environmental baggage these pioneers brought with them to the Willamette Valley in the 1840s and 1850s, and therefore their physical and psychological responses to its environment at this time, this chapter briefly sketches and analyzes their origins in, and their experiences on, the landscape of cis-Appalachia.^[3]

Of the 174 individuals who filed land claims under the federally sponsored Oregon Donation Land Law on the Calapooia between 1850 and 1855, we have birth records for 161 (table 1) and complete vital information (birth, marriage, death, and children's birth dates and places) for 65 claimants and 56 of their spouses (or a total of 121 people). Of these 121 claimants and spouses, 21 percent had birthplaces in the older eastern regions and states of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The younger cis-Appalachian states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana were the birthplaces of a majority (55 percent) of these claimants and spouses. The still more recently settled areas of Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa supplied only 19 percent of the total number of settlers for whom we have biographical information. The other 5 percent were born in Oregon, Michigan, and foreign countries.^[4]

The marriage places for the sixty-five claimant couples for whom we have information and the birthplaces of their children were farther west than were the birthplaces of the claimants and their spouses themselves. Sixty percent of these couples married in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Oregon, and only 29 percent married in the older states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. Only two marriages took place in the eastern seaboard states. Birthplaces for the 174 children born to couples before coming to Oregon centered even farther west than their parents' marriage places. Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa were the birthplaces of

114, or 66 percent, of these children, while 39, or 22 percent, were born in Indiana, and only 16, or 9 percent, had birthplaces in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. The other 3 percent were born in other states.

In general, then, the adult population of the Calapooia during the initial stages of settlement had been born in the upper southern states of Kentucky and Tennessee, some others in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas, and a mere handful in New England and New York. These people grew up in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. They married in Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, had their first children in the latter two states, and then moved on to Oregon and settled on the Calapooia.^[5]

Although the life of Agnes Courtney fits perfectly this pattern of westward movement to the Calapooia, the rapidity with which she left a mid-Atlantic state and made her way to Oregon—during a single lifetime—was atypical. Most Calapooia settlers descended from families who took several generations to make their way across the cis-Appalachian region before coming to Oregon. For example, Nancy Shields, who settled on the Calapooia in the early 1850s, came from such a family. Her grandfather John was born in Maryland in 1755,

married Mary McCollum in the 1790s, and died in Tennessee in 1833. John and Mary's son William, Nancy's father, was born in Jefferson County, Tennessee, in 1799, moved to Indiana in 1819, and there married three times. His third marriage was to Judith Bybee, who had been born in Kentucky in 1810. They had eight children in Indiana and Illinois before emigrating to the Willamette Valley in 1851. Similarly, Abraham Wigle's great-grandfather, John Wigle, came to Pennsylvania from Germany during the latter part of the eighteenth century. After residing in Pennsylvania only a short while, he "went to Kentucky when that country was a wilderness and inhabited by savage Indians." There he married Margaret Wolf. They remained in Kentucky only a few years before moving to Missouri, settling in Cape Girardeau County. In 1827 the Wigle family moved back across the Mississippi River to Adams County, Illinois. In Illinois, John and Margaret's son Jacob, who had been born in Missouri in 1807, married Nancy Hunsucker from Kentucky. It was their son Abraham who finally completed the Wigles's westward trek when he crossed the plains to Oregon and settled on the Calapooia in 1852.^[6]

Settlers like Courtney, Shields, and Wigle came to the Calapooia with a culture defined in the mid-Atlantic seaboard states and tempered on the upper southern and midwestern landscape. In Kentucky, Tennessee, and especially along the eastern Ohio River, the western immigrants encountered a landscape of hardwood forests similar to what they had left behind in Pennsylvania and Virginia. These forests included oak, hickory, beech, maple, cherry, walnut, ash, and other deciduous hardwoods, whose growth indicated to settlers soil fertility. Historian Arthur K. Moore describes the forests of Kentucky as open, "not altogether treeless but with trees wide apart." Among these trees and in the open canebrakes of central Kentucky, settlers found excellent grazing; after clearing the land there, they raised corn. In Kentucky's woodlands, a cultural continuity of forest living between the eastern seaboard and cis-Appalachia remained unbroken. Historian Allan G. Bogue comments that for "generations pioneers had slashed out their farms from rolling woodlands. . . . [S]uch pioneering was the common heritage of most farm boys, well known, if not experienced on their fathers' farms." The prairies that these settlers and their descendants eventually encountered in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, however, tempered this forest experience before immigrants came to the Willamette Valley.^[7]

Woodlands offered settlers of the eastern Midwest and upper South a

comfort in cultural continuity, but these same forests provided homes to Native Americans who had very different ideas about Euro-American settlement of the Ohio Valley. As land-hungry Americans poured over the Appalachians, Native Americans met them with fierce resistance throughout the region. In Tennessee, settlers faced an ongoing battle with the Cherokee through the 1780s. John Mack Faragher estimates that during the 1780s along the Ohio River, "Americans lost some fifteen hundred men, women, and children, and over twenty thousand horses to Algonquin guerrillas." In the early 1800s, Indianans faced Tecumseh and his Shawnee warriors. Hostilities continued in Illinois with the 1832 Black Hawk War. The constant battling with natives of the Ohio Valley during some sixty-plus years of settling there led Faragher to dub the pioneering period a "paramilitary experience."^[8] Pioneers of the Ohio Valley took with them to the Calapooia their fears of, and learned militant behavior toward, Native Americans. But their experience with the natives there proved quite different from what it had been in cis-Appalachia.

In addition to their difficulties with natives who tenaciously held on to their homelands, Ohio Valley settlers often had to vie with each other for these same lands, primarily because of problems of speculation and the confusing nature of the metes and bounds system of land survey applied in parts of the early cis-Appalachian West. Coming to Kentucky and Tennessee out of the colonial Virginia experience, the metes and bounds system of surveying used natural features of the landscape, such as streams, trees, ridges, and stones, for land-claim markers and bound-aries. In selecting property, furthermore, the claimant could choose to include what appeared to be the best meadows, timber, and streams without any particular regard to regularity of shape or continuity of claim boundaries to neighboring properties. The use of natural features of the landscape as markers and the claiming of oddly shaped pieces of property led to disputes.^[9]

In Tennessee, but particularly in Kentucky, this relatively unsystematic or nonrational survey system created serious problems. As Kentucky opened for settlement in the 1770s, Virginians and Carolinians poured over the Appalachian Mountains. The abundance of "open" land led to unprecedented speculation and fraud, and the survey system permitted numerous overlapping claims. Historian Paul Gates has commented that after Kentucky joined the union, its government granted enough land to cover the state four times over and that new settlers to

Kentucky usually found they had to deal with several different owners claiming the same parcel of land. After they had dealt with all apparent previous claimants, they often found themselves facing "ejectment proceedings wrought by persons having prior rights to their tracts." The difficulty encountered in claiming land motivated many Kentuckians to move north of the Ohio River.^[10]

Settlement north of the Ohio had already begun in the 1770s, and earliest settlers there also took out claims using the traditional metes and bounds system. The Northwest Ordinance of 1785, however, initiated the rectangular land survey partly designed to alleviate some problems encountered in older states such as Kentucky. Under this newer, more "rational" system of survey, officials could easily account for, dispose of, and identify claims. Surveys began in Ohio in 1785, in Indiana in 1798, and in Illinois in 1804. Initially settlers could purchase only full sections (640 square acres). In 1800, half sections became available; in 1804, quarter sections; in 1820, half-quarter sections (eighty acres); and finally in 1832, quarter-quarter sections (forty acres). Thus, as settlement progressed across the Midwest, land claims took on smaller rectangular forms, departing greatly from more irregularly shaped claims in older parts of cis-Appalachia—Kentucky and Tennessee—and the eastern seaboard states. While land-claim shapes gradually changed, the same old desire for the best lands continued, producing a tension between the imposed system of order on the land and the settlers' aspiration to include the best features of the landscape in a claim. Cis-Appalachian emigrants took order and their desire to enjoy the bounty of nature with them to the Calapooia. There, a historical-environmental process resolved the tension between nature and order through the alteration of both humans and landscape.^[11]

After leaving Kentucky and Tennessee, settlers moved into Ohio and Indiana and then into Illinois. Although forests covered most of the former two states, they each contained parcels of prairie lands, which settlers later found to be much more extensive in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. As settlers moved into midwestern regions of mixed woodland and prairie, they avoided the latter in preference for the former. Scholars have given a host of reasons why midwestern settlers avoided the open prairie. First, evidence shows that settlers believed winter weather too severe on the prairies to permit human habitation. Second, in summer the tall grasses of the prairie dried and became highly flammable, thus creating a great fire danger. Third, a lack of wood and

water, both resources essential to daily survival, inhibited settlement on the prairies. Fourth, settlers feared wet prairies, which they believed bred diseases. Fifth, before the improved technology of steel came in the 1840s and 1850s, the midwestern prairies resisted the plow. Another popular explanation for avoidance of the prairies is that their treelessness indicated low soil fertility. In addition, some scholars have suggested that the open prairies did not provide, as did the forestlands, psychological security to a people who had lived among trees for two hundred years. Finally, since the earliest transportation routes—navigable waterways such as the Ohio and Mississippi—in the upper South and Midwest also happened to be surrounded by forests, it is not surprising that settlement initially concentrated there.^[12]

Although the extent of open prairie or mixed prairie and woodland for each midwestern state varied, the process of settlement in the Midwest usually began in the deep forests along the mouths of waterways and then followed the banks of these streams to areas of mixed prairie and woodland. Settlement in the latter area occurred along the edges of the timber belt, with cabins built just inside the tree line, to take advantage of the availability of stream or spring water as well as wood. Fields and pastures extended out from the cabin onto the prairie. Abraham Wigle, who settled on the Calapooia in 1852, remembered an experience from his youth in the 1820s and 1830s in Adams County, Illinois, which readily depicts this pattern of settlement: cabin among the trees and fields away from the timber. Wigle reflected, "Our house was in the edge of the timber and we had a dog that frequently went out hunting by himself." One day Wigle and his mother, who were at the cabin, heard the dog "baying something" in the woods. Abraham "wanted to go see what he had treed," but because his mother was afraid, she instead sent him "to the field where Father was at work . . . that he might come and kill whatever it was. It proved to be a large wild cat."^[13]

To the woodlands and prairies of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri of Wigle's youth, the upland southerners of Kentucky and Tennessee brought a generations-old lifestyle of hunting and livestock rearing. Scholars have used these different customs of cis-Appalachian settlers as evidence to support their conclusions that these people were either backwoodsmen fleeing into the wilderness to escape other incoming settlers or materialists bent on recreating a market economy in the American wilderness. Regardless of interpretation, the fact remains that upland

southerners who settled in the Midwest during the very late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had a predilection for both hunting and livestock raising.^[14]

Settlers geared their settlement patterns to maximize an economy based on these two practices. Prairies afforded an excellent place to graze cattle in the summer, while timber offered them protection from the elements during winter. The woodland edges, with their profusion of leaves, nuts, and roots, not only attracted an abundance of wildlife but also provided a fine place to run hogs, probably the most important nonvegetable food source for settlers of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Faragher notes for a community he studied in Illinois that "farmers paid little or no attention to breeding, and their swine did not fatten as well as improved stock, reaching a maximum weight of only some two hundred pounds; but the most important consideration was the ability of these feisty 'razorbacks' to survive on the forest provender, with a little occasional corn in the farmyard to keep them some what connected to their owners." Faragher also found that the "carnivorous appetites" of the typical Illinois pioneer family required a herd of about a dozen swine, "although some farmers built up herds of fifty or more."^[15]

Not only did swine provide a nearly ideal food source for western families who lived just above the subsistence level, but they also proved useful as currency. And since settlers had limited transportation to get products to market, livestock such as swine and cattle were a good commodity, since they could walk on their own legs. Livestock, however, also "ran at large, and in so doing caused an unusual amount of trouble" for settlers' crops and fences.^[16] Settlers took this culture of swine and cattle raising, with all its headaches and benefits, to the Calapooia Valley.

The vital role that livestock played in the early culture and economy of cis-Appalachia warranted the necessity of having both timber and prairie together. This desire to have access to two ecosystems was so embedded in the midwestern settler's mind by the mid nineteenth century that it spurred concern about emigrating to the Oregon Country. A Mr. Smith of Indiana believed this necessity so great that while contemplating a move to the Willamette Valley in 1852, he wrote to his friend Thomas S. Kendall, who had taken up a land claim through which the Calapooia River flowed. Smith asked, "Is there in the timbered part of

the country [where you settled] sufficiency of grass for cattle to live on?" and, "In the open or prairie part of the country is not good timber very scarce?"^[17]

In addition to raising livestock, the early midwestern settlers did undertake some cultivation. Their primary crop, corn, provided winter food for cattle and hogs. Corn was, in the words of the historian George F. parker, "from the eastern borders of Ohio to and including Missouri and Iowa . . . the foundation of industry and prosperity. . . . [It was] the means for developing and making a new country." But settlers also grew wheat and oats for family consumption. At first settlers found the prairies they encountered in the Midwest unamenable to cultivation because of the thickly intertwined root masses of native grasses. This prairie sod of the Midwest broke wooden and even cast-iron plows. Faragher relates that some people in the Illinois community he studied found the sod so impervious to the plow that they had to dig holes in it with axes and plant seeds individually by hand. Not until the 1830s with the prairie plow, and especially in the 1840s and 1850s with John Deere's steel plow, did improved technology finally permit easier cultivation of the midwestern prairie. Even at that, farmers sometimes still required several yoke of oxen to turn the prairie sod.^[18]

In summary, life on the cis-Appalachian landscape was composed of the cultural experiences of plowing tough midwestern prairies; battling fierce Indians for life and land, and sometimes fellow settlers for the same parcel of property; adjusting to a new system of survey; raising hogs and other livestock; cultivating corn; and attempting to balance one's home between woodland and prairie. Pioneers carried this culture out of cis-Appalachia to the new landscape of the Willamette. A major theme in following chapters is how this culture both accommodated to, and simultaneously caused changes in, the Willamette Valley environment.

Scholars have given various reasons to explain why these pioneers left their homes on the banks of the Ohio and Mississippi and undertook a six-month, two-thousand-mile journey across sun-parched plains, deserts, dangerous rivers, and one of the highest and the most extensive mountain ranges in North America to take up new residence in the Willamette Valley. Motivations included zeal for adventure, hope for economic improvement, the lure of free land, a wish to be rid of slavery and its inherent problems, political and patriotic considerations,

a frantic quest to escape natural disasters plaguing the Mississippi Valley, and a desire for better physical health.^[19]

Settlers of the Calapooia have left records indicating that a variety of these reasons played a role in their decision to travel west. Abraham Wigle wrote, "Father wanted to go to Oregon that his children might secure homes and settle near him." Timothy A. Riggs, who came to the Calapooia in the late 1840s, noted:

As to the motive for coming to the Willamette Valley at that early date I hardly know how to answer, unless it was the love of adventure, as the question of sovereignty had not been settled between the United States and England when I came here. True, the United States senate had been discussing the matter of giving each settler in Oregon six hundred and forty acres of land, and we rather expected that would be done, but we had no real assurance that such would be the case.^[20]

Actual settlers of, and planned emigrants to, the Calapooia left numerous documents indicating their overriding concern with disease and health. For instance, in 1852 an Indianan wrote to Thomas Kendall asking about prospects for settling on the Calapooia; because the writer's Wabash neighborhood suffered from "miasma," which annually filled the "grave-yards with multitudes of the slain," the subject of health was the very first question that he posed. Abraham Wigle mentioned that in Missouri his father's family had suffered "considerable sickness and consequently he had a good many doctor bills to pay." On 9 August 1852, Lucy M. King of Louisville, Clay County, Illinois, wrote to her cousin James Swank of the Calapooia Valley, "The cholera has not been to our ville yet, though it has been within 32 miles of us." She went on to inquire as to "the description of the [Calapooia] country, whether there are any good schools there, and if you like to stay there." But she quickly added, "Let me know whether the cholera is in your region or not." Less than six months later, on 22 January 1853, William McHargue of Chariton County, Missouri, before moving to the Calapooia, wrote to his brother James McHargue, who had settled there in 1847, that Missouri "has been a very healthy place to live in this last year, but this year it has been very sickly, with much winter fever, typhoid fever and many other complaints." Jonathan Keeney and his family, who settled on the Calapooia in 1846, had suffered greatly in the Midwest, losing three brothers to tuberculosis in the five years before emigrating from Missouri.^[21]

While midwesterners emigrated to the Willamette Valley of Oregon in part to escape the disease-plagued Ohio and Mississippi valleys, they unwittingly, as explained in the last chapter, sent their diseases ahead and wiped out the Willamette's native population, thus making their own settlement there that much easier. Moreover, in the process of migration, midwesterners still brought their diseases with them. However, their new home on a new landscape proved healthier than the one they had left behind.

The pioneers from cis-Appalachia brought with them to the Willamette and Calapooia valleys a preformed culture. As the following chapters argue, in the process of molding this culture to the valley of the long grasses, they found that the environmental conditions in the Willamette resembled and differed from the landscape from which they had come and therefore that some of their old practices were not always appropriate in their new home. In introducing and attempting to shape their culture to new environmental conditions, and simultaneously attempting to reshape the environment to their old cultural habits, Ohio Valley transplants developed an intimate connection with the landscape of the Willamette Valley and also altered the ecological balance of the region. One of the results of this process was the development of a settlement culture indigenous to western Oregon.