"An Interesting Early History of Decatur County"

by Mrs. O.N. Kellogg
 
Chapter Two

PROSPERITY ON SUGAR CREEK-REMOVED TO THIS COUNTY-MRS.SCOTT
TRADES WITH THE INDIANS-ANNUITIES-SCOTT INDICTED-RESIDENCE IN
FOUR COUNTIES AND TWO STATES WHILE IN THE SAME DOMICILE
 
On Sugar Creek they prospered exceedingly and were able in a short time to bring to this county, besides their teams and household goods, three cows and forty hogs. The grass lay on the ground shoemouth deep and the hogs, having a range of several miles undisturbed on the Grand River bottom, were a constantly increasing source of revenue. He always had pork and lard to sell to immigrants and settlers in the county besides selling to the Indians who wintered here. They paid cash when they had it and when they had none their credit was good to the amount of their annuity. They also received from the government groceries and dry goods which they made a practice of swapping for the products of the farm. Scott went with them to draw their annuities, the Sacs receiving theirs at Fort Des Moines, the Pottawattamies at Council Bluffs. He traded with the Indians for ten years. He raised great crops of corn, potatoes, turnips, squashes, pumpkins, all of which he sold for cash or goods at reduced rates. The first crop was raised without a fence around it, there being nothing but his own stock to bother it and they of course had to herded.

Honey was so abundant for several years that it was worth only two or three cents a pound. Plums and crab apples were the principal fruits but strawberries and blackberries came in after cattle and hogs began to range through the woods and hazelbrush.

Mrs. Scott was no longer terrified by the though of Indians being around but could trade and traffic them, talking by signs and making them bargains that remunerated here somewhat for her former offerings and hardships. She bought her tea, coffee, sugar, calico, and almost everything for her family in exchange for butter, honey, cornmeal and whiskey. Flour and meal were very scarce in consequence of the entire lack of any kind of mill nearer than Trenton, Missouri, where there was only a horse mill and the only road was a bee-trace down the divide. Trenton was also the nearest post office and there was not even a blacksmith shop nearer for some time.

In 1846 Scott was able to set up a store, blacksmith shop and horse mill. There was about this time a few families who settled in Goshen, Missouri, twenty miles south; the nearest east were on Soap Creek about eighty miles, while north and west there were absolutely no white people except in forts, nearer than the British Possessions or the Sea Coast. Scott was indicted in Grundy County, Missouri for selling liquor to the Indians; the penalty being three hundred dollars fine and five years imprisonment. To escape this he employed the county surveyors of Grundy and Davis Counties to run their line and see which county he was in. The line proved to be one-half mile east of him throwing him in Davis County which cleared him from the indictment on a question of jurisdiction; the cost of the transaction being three hundred dollars equaling the amount of the fine but releasing him from the five years' imprisonment.

He had paid taxes in Gallatin, Davis County, Missouri three years when the county was divided and Harrison was organized. In Harrison County he paid taxes until the State Line was permanently located in 1849, since which time he paid taxes in Decatur County, making four counties and two states in which he performed the duties of citizen and householder without change of residence.

When Scott came to this County there was no road across the territory and he reached his present location by a circuitous rout from the eastern part of the territory of Iowa going south in Missouri, thence west. He has never had a shake of ague and there but three deaths have occurred in his house, although his family at one time numbered thirty-six persons, old and young, and has always been large until within a few years past. Brison Miller, Mrs. Scott's father died there aged 86, and an infant son, George Washington Scott, aged thirteen months, and also a bright little daughter-scalded.

In the settlement of our frontier it has been usual for some particular families in every neighborhood to be noted far and wide for hospitality. It is generally where the man of the house is a good talker and his wife a good cook and it is all well enough, since they are compensations in one way or another while the country is new and everything is shifting and changing but after it becomes thickly settled and all the old ways of making money are gone by with the passing years, and infirmities and losses hover like a cloud over the spirit where in former days all was buoyancy and hope, what kind of friendship is it that would lead a neighborhood to congregate Sunday after Sunday, to sit and talk until after dinner, then return to their home but little wiser leaving their friends considerably poorer.
 
 
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