On the second of November, 1829, John Green and a number of others,
with their families, left Newark, Licking county, Ohio, for what is now La Salle
county. The outfit consisted of one four-yoke ox team, three two-horse wagons,
and one carriage. The streams were high and the roads were almost impassable. In
some places they had to cut their way through brush, and the roads were very
bumpy. In one place a man holding a child was thrown out of the wagon, the man
having three ribs broken. The streams were so high that they had to go around
them.
They traveled five days before they came to Parish's Grove,
Iroquois county, Illinois. They followed an Indian trail to Hubbard's trading
post. Here they bought about eight bushels of corn and a canoe. They loaded it
with about thirty hundred pounds of their goods. The crew consisted of Jacob
Kite, Joseph Grove and Samuel Grove. They gave them instructions to work down
the Iroquois river to the Kankakee river, and through that to the Illinois
river, where they were supposed to meet them. This was necessary because the
teams were tired and thin and the roads were almost impassible. On the trip
Joseph Grove was so badly chilled that he never fully recovered.
They
crossed a prairie, which had no bottom — at least, they didn't find any. The
second day of the trip they came to a river which they couldn't cross and they
had to fell trees on each side until it made a kind of a bridge. They got the
things over all right. One of the women was afraid to go across, so John Green
took her on his back and made his way over on his hands and knees.
As a
heavy rain came on, they encamped in a small grove of trees. They were obliged
to cut up some of their boxes to make a fire. One of the women lay down on the
bottom of one of the wagons and tried to sleep but she was frozen fast so she
couldn't rise in the morning.
It took them three days to reach the mouth
of the Kankakee river, a distance of thirty miles. Those in the canoe were about
to give up in despair when they heard the familiar voice of one of the other
party calling one of his favorite horses. Those from the canoe made their way to
the others. They had to get their goods across the Illinois river, so they took
them in the canoe. A friendly Indian showed them a ford, and they got the wagons
over without difficulty.
Their corn was giving out and the teams were
getting thin because of nothing to eat, except dry grass, and not much of that,
for the prairies were mostly all burned off by prairie fires.
In the
afternoon of the 5th of December they came in sight of a grove of timber, and
John Green believing it to be Hawley's (now Holderman's) grove, started ahead on
horseback. His expectations were realized and he found Messrs. Hawley and
Baresford butchering a beef. He harnessed one of Baresford's horses to a wagon,
and taking a quarter of beef and filling the wagon with corn, he started for
Nettle Creek, where he supposed the party would stop. There was great rejoicing
in camp when Mr. Green arrived with the corn and beef, as they were about
starved.
The next day about four o'clock they arrived at their
destination. They expected to find those who had gone in the canoe to be there
before them, and as night grew nearer they began to think they had met with some
serious accident. Their anxiety was soon relieved for they had made the canoe
fast on the rapids of the Illinois river near Marseilles and started across the
prairie, not knowing where they were going. They saw the light in the cabin and
went to it. There was a great rejoicing in the camp because the lost were found
again.
Their next object was to secure some provisions, as they had a
large family and good appetites. They bought twenty-four hogs at Markly, then
went to Tazewell county and bought thirty bushels of wheat at four shillings,
and eighty bushels of corn at three shillings.
They went to a place
where Washington now is and had their grain ground into flour. The provisions
were scarce before they produced a crop. They frequently lived on beef, potatoes
and pound cake, so called being made of corn pounded into a mortar. They went to
work improving in the spring and by July 4th they had 240 acres fenced and
nearly all broken, and had built a sawmill, dam and race, and had a run of
boulder mill stones in one corner of the sawmill grinding wheat, the first
ground on the Fox river. The stones were made from boulders.
Of the
company of twenty-four that came out in the fall of 1829, two returned to Ohio;
of the twenty-two who remained, only seven died in forty-one years.
Extracted 08 Nov 2018 by Norma Hass from Stories of Pioneer Days in La Salle County, Illinois, by Grammar Grade Pupils, published in 1932, page 64.
| Lee | DeKalb | Kane |
| Bureau |
 |
Kendall |
| Putnam | Grundy | |
| Marshall | Woodford | Livingston |
