_____________
It's
Still
the Lake Water
by
John
Wm. Houghton
Anniversary
Weekend
I'm
pleased that The Editor has invited me to return to the Citizen,
for which I guess I must by now be a Senior Correspondent.
Thirty-four
years ago, when I proposed to start a monthly local history column
for the paper,
one of my first stops was at the immaculate house across from the
elementary school where Culver's most distinguished journalist,
Robert K. Kyle, lived. Bob was a Marshall County native who had
worked for some of the big papers and covered some of the big
events—he was present, for example, for the 1925 "Scopes
Monkey Trial." What he thought of some wet-behind-the-ears
college student proposing to write a newspaper column I can just
about imagine, but he was not only polite but encouraging, and soon
enough Tom and Bernadette Zoss (the Citizen's
publishers at the time) were running my pieces, under the title "I
Remember...", right there in the same paper as Bob's weekly
reflections, entitled "It Must Be the Lake Water." A lot
has changed in almost four decades, and I'm conscious myself of
slipping across the border from being a local historian to just being
local history: but even now, there's something distinctive about
Culver, and I'm increasingly inclined to think Bob may have had it
right all along. So, in his honor, I propose to call this occasional
contribution, "It's Still
the Lake Water."
*
The
Editor and I had breakfast the other morning in a certain highly
decorated dining spot on South Main Street. (It's always interesting
to me to see how long it takes, from any particular booth, to look
amongst the various graduation photos and souveniers of this place to
find a relative, but on this particular day, I actually saw two
living cousins, one each from the Deck and Hughes branches of the
family, before I even sat down.) In
any case, the Editor and I were discussing what sorts of things might
appear in a column, and it occurred to us that we would soon be
coming up on one of the town's most important annual remembrances,
the anniversary of the pioneers' arrival at Lake Maxinkuckee in 1836.
We looked at each other over our morning caffeine, and the same idea
occurred to both of us: The Shell.
English-speaking
settlement of this area dates back as early as 1832, but the real
beginning goes back to the completion of the Michigan Road (now
Highway 31), the separation of Marshall County from St. Joseph, and
the sale of public (that is to say, formerly Pottawattomi) lands out
of the office in Laporte—all of which came together in 1835-36. An
advance guard, composed of the heads of settler families from the
Union County area in south-eastern Indiana, came to the future Union
Township in the fall of 1835 to begin clearing land and building
cabins. On the twelfth of July in the next year, the families
themselves set out on the northward road: Blakeleys, Brownlees,
Dixons, Houghtons, Lawsons, Logans, Morrises, Thompsons, Voreises,
and an assortment of others. Although they did not have to wait for
red lights on the Kokomo Bypass, the trip was slow, hot and
difficult. Daniel McDonald, the county's pioneer historian, himself a
three-year-old boy in the party, wrote in his Twentieth
Century History of Marshall County:
The household goods
of the members of the caravan were carefully packed away in the
wagons, leaving room for the women and children and the supply of
eatables prepared for the journey. The wagons were covered with
sheeting for protection against rain and the hot rays of the
sun....The roads most of the way were through swamps and over log
bridges, and much of the way was but little better than Indian
trails....[The Michigan Road] had only just been opened through this
part of the state, and that only to such an extent as to make it
passable by cutting down the trees and bushes along the line and
bridging over the worst places with brush, poles and logs. The
country through which the road ran at that time was for the most part
thickly timbered, and all along was an abundance of wild game and
fruits of all kinds, which the hunters of the little band brought
into camp.... There were seldom any springs along the way and the
water for drinking and cooking purposes was mostly from stagnant
ponds and small streams which were not much better. Every night on
the way they camped wherever darkness overtook them, slept in the
wagons and under the trees, the cattle and horses browsing about the
camp and resting from the day's toil as best they could. (67-68)
McDonald says that
"the tired and worn-out caravan" arrived at the lake late
on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 26. They camped at, roughly, the
intersection of Queen Road and Highway 10, where a monument bearing
some of the family names still stands. The first order of business
was to notify Vincent Brownlee, one of the advance party who had
remained behind, that the main body had arrived. A signal had been
arranged before the leaders went south to pick up their families.
And this is the
point that the Editor and I were thinking of. These settlers
signalled to Mr. Brownlee not with a good loud yodel, nor with a gun
shot (which was, I think, what Brownlee used to respond), nor even
with a biblical ram's horn. Here in the middle of the wilderness,
hundreds of miles from the sea, the settlers signalled their arrival
by blowing a conch shell. And, indeed, a conch-shell horn was used to
signal the opening of old settlers' meetings for many decades
thereafter. So if you hear, this weekend, some faint sound that
reminds you of Hawaii
Five-O or
The
Lord of the Flies,
spare
a thought for the weary band getting their first view of a
Maxinkuckee sunset 172 years ago.
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