Myron F's Forgotten Life, Part II
This is Part II of Family, Fort Wayne, and Forgotten Stories: The Life of Myron Fitch Barbour, the story of my third great-grandfather. It is a detour into the family he was to marry into, and the place where he would spend most of his life.
The Taylors, the Suttenfields, and Fort Wayne
William Suttenfield was fourteen years old and just five feet tall when he enlisted in the U.S. Army’s First Infantry as a waiter to officers on December 2, 1802. His army records note that he had blue eyes, light hair, and a light complexion. He was a poor boy from Virginia. Joining the Army meant three meals a day and a set of clothes. It probably seemed better than working in someone’s fields or spending years as an indentured servant/apprentice.
Laura Taylor was born in or near Boston in 1795. She was petite and had clear, light blue eyes, prominent cheekbones and a pointy nose in an oval face. Her family moved to Oneida, New York when she was a baby. On what was reported in the official family accounts as a “business trip” to Mackinac, Michigan with her father Israel Taylor, Jr., both were captured by the British and held prisoner for a time. However, the story makes it sound as if they'd come straight from Massachusetts, leaving out New York or the fact that Israel and his wife had two children born in Detroit in 1811, presumably twins Marshall and Elvira. And why would Israel need his young daughter along on a business trip?
At any rate, according to the family account, they was paroled to the little village of Detroit, where she met the slight U.S. soldier in the Army’s First Infantry. Laura was 16 when she eloped with William Suttenfield.
Decades after their marriage, some of Laura and William’s grandchildren tried to gentrify the family. Their fibs were printed and reprinted, that Laura was from a distinguished Massachusetts family of means, that William was an officer and commander of Fort Wayne. Both were completely untrue.
Accounts of their movements are contradictory, but they lived in Newport, Kentucky, an important army supply depot, where their first baby, William F., was born. They also lived for two years in Upper Piqua, Ohio in the home of Colonel John Johnston. William was still in the army, and worked with by officers John Whistler and Colonel Johnston. He worked as a suttler, or supplier, in charge of a mule train hauling military and Indian stores from Upper Piqua to Fort Wayne. He was described at this time as “short, slender, active and very agile,” often joking that the Indians could not catch him as a result.
In 1814, William brought Laura and their baby son up the St. Mary River to Fort Wayne. They traveled by either pirogue or flat boat. Pirogues – hollowed-out sycamore trees, up to 40 feet in length – were poled up the St. Mary to the fort. They could hold up to five tons, the “propelling power consist[ing] of a man at each end who stood, and with large poles pushed the boat against the current.” If they traveled by flat boat, it too had to be poled up the river.
Fort Wayne was often described later as “an outpost in the wilderness,” a small Army fort built at the convergence of three rivers, including the St. Mary. It was an area surrounded by malarial swampland, forests and Indian threats.
The young family lived in the safe confines of the fort, their days dictated by the military regiment. At the beginning of December 1815, their second child Sophia was born. Sadly, little William sickened and died the day after Christmas. Laura buried a baby while caring for a newborn. Another daughter, Jane was born in 1817.[1] William and Laura would have four more living children, Ann, Asa More, George Walker, who went by “Walker,” and Mary Frances, born in 1832. [2]
When William left the Army, what made him decide to put down roots in this isolated little place in northeast Indiana? The other settlers were mostly French Canadian fur trappers, many of whom had Indian mothers or wives. The land was not yet available for sale, and the economy depended on the fur trade and Indian trading. But this was familiar territory for William. He made a living transporting things to and from the fort. Probably no one imagined that in just a few years the troops would be withdrawn. Something compelled William to want to stay, and he went to the trouble to build the first log cabin outside the fort.
Fort Wayne was as isolated, as remote at this time as Sheldon, New York had been when Roswell and Betsey arrived. The stories of pioneer settlement and hardship are parallel. Betsey Barber and Laura Suttenfield were women who spun yarn, sewed clothes by hand, cooked over open fireplaces, skinned and gutted domestic animals and wild game, and preserved food. They made soap and candles, and boiled laundry in cauldrons outdoors.
They had to. They were not from a class with to servants to do it for them, nor were there workers to hire, and there wasn’t another way to get these basic needs met.
Unlike Sheldon, there was no grist mill in the Fort Wayne area until the late 1820s, so women like Laura used a wooden mortar and pestle to crack corn into a coarse meal from which johnny-cake could be made. One source said a board for making johnny-cake hung from the walls of every cabin, just as every spring, cabins were covered in coonskins, each representing up to $1.00. Another popular dish was “hog ‘n hominy,” consisting of pork boiled with the corn product. At weddings, cornbread was served instead of cake.
Transporting goods into Sheldon and Fort Wayne differed somewhat. Both places weren’t easy to get to. There were no real routes to Fort Wayne aside from the rivers. There was what was called the Wayne trace to Fort Recovery, one towards Chicago, along which the carrier of military mail found not a single “hut or trace of white en route until he reached Fort Dearborn,” or shorter traces that let down to the Maumee River. Winter made the terrain more easily traveled, gliding over bumps and ridges on sleighs.
But Sheldon lacked water transportation, something Fort Wayne had. Still, freight from Toledo cost $3 a ton. There were early calls for a canal that would link Indiana to the Atlantic. But that was a distant dream when William brought his family there to put down roots.
There were some significant differences between the experiences of the Barbers in Sheldon and the Suttenfields in Fort Wayne. However wild western New York seemed, it was in the United States, and had been since 1788. Indiana, when William and Laura settled there, was part of the Northwest Territory. The Indians in western New York were settled on reservations and were little mentioned in Genesee County histories. The Miami and Pottawatomie were one of the reasons for Fort Wayne’s existence.
Of the two settlements, Fort Wayne was by far the roughest. Former army men like William, fur trappers and traders – a rough and tumble sort – predominated. The accounts of the Indians struggling with displacement and alcoholism are painful to read. They came into town for their annuities – annual payments in exchange for signing treaties giving up their land – and were taken advantage of by the traders and alcohol sellers. William was probably in on this exploitation.
There were also more fears of Indians reported in accounts of the early days of the Suttenfields’ years in Fort Wayne compared to the Barbers’ in Sheldon. The 1812 Siege of Fort Wayne was only too recent in memory. In July 1813, Col. Richard Mentor Johnson arrived at the fort with a large group of soldiers and a flotilla of flat boats loaded with supplies. As the last boat came into view of the fort, it was suddenly attacked, and the three men manning the boat were killed. Indians were chased for over ten miles but were not caught. For someone living in the fort in 1814, especially with small children, the threat of Indian attack would seem very present indeed.
Yet another difference for Laura Suttenfield versus Betsey Barber was that Laura was living in a military garrison. Decades later, she described the July 4th celebration of 1814.
The fort at that time contained sixty men of the regular army, all patriotic and anxious to celebrate one day in the year. They made three green bowers, 100 feet from the pickets of the fort ... one bower for the dinner table, one for the cooks and one for the music. Major Whistler had two German cooks and they prepared the dinner....
Our dinner consisted of one fine turkey, a side of venison, boiled ham, vegetables in abundance, cranberries and green currents. As for dessert, we had none. Eggs were not known here for three years from that time. There were but three bottles of wine sent here from Cincinnati; but one was made use of.
Then there were a few toasts, and, after three guns and music, they went into the fort and the ladies changed their dresses. Then Major Whistler called for the music, which consisted of one bass drum, two small ones, one fife, violin and flute. There was a long gallery in the fort; the musicians took their seats there.... A french four passed off very well for an hour.
Then the gates of the fort were closed at sundown, which gave it a gloomy appearance. No children, no younger persons for amusement, all retired to their rooms. All was quiet and still. The sentinel on his lonely round would give us the hour of the night. In the morning we were aroused by the beating of the reveille.
There is surely revisionist history taking place in her memories. One wanted to appear more gentile and conform to the expectations of ladylike behavior in the late nineteenth century when Laura shared this. The Temperance Movement was also very strong by the time Laura was sharing. By every other account, these were hard-drinking people. Even soldiers wives received a daily allotment of whiskey, and it’s doubtful they would have left bottles of wine unopened!
Major John Whistler was still concerned enough about Indian threats to request permission to have the fort rebuilt. Once he obtained the needed permission, soldiers hauled logs from the surrounding forest. Around the buildings a stockade was made with pickets twelve and a half feet long, set in clusters of six, planted in a trench three and a half feet deep. Work was completed in the fall of 1815. Settlers of European descent, like the Suttenfields, looked to the fort for security and legal jurisdiction.
But times were changing. Indiana became a state in 1816. The U.S. government decommissioned the fort. It was evacuated on April 19, 1819 under orders issued by the Secretary of War. There were a total of 96 men – Major Josiah Vose, two captains, a first lieutenant, a post surgeon, five sergeants, four corporals, four musicians and 75 artillerymen and privates, plus a group of women and children. They left for Detroit in pirogues.
The news of the evacuation came as a shock to the few settlers like the Suttenfields, who according to historian Charles Poinsatt, “felt a loneliness as their sense of security gave way for the moment to a realization of the coming days of isolation and possible danger. In every direction stretched unbroken wilderness and while the Indians had been subdued, the abundance of whiskey given them by the traders made them at times a menace to the safety of the village.” The nearest newspaper was a hundred miles away. Indiana’s capital was a very distant 268 miles away.
The fort buildings came under the control of civil authorities represented by an Indian agent. The U.S. government considered the people living outside the fort, including the Suttenfields, squatters. There were about 30 log cabins and two “tolerably decent” frame houses, according to a traveler, Thomas Scattergood Teas. The economy still depended on fur trapping and Indian trading, which involved obtaining as much of the Indians’ annuities as possible.
Contemporary accounts from 1819-1820 paint a very unflattering picture of life in Fort Wayne. James Riley was a civil engineer sent to survey land around the fort belonging to the U.S. government in preparation for its sale to settlers. He saw Fort Wayne as a future center of population, with the advantages of fertile soil and the confluence of rivers that could be connected to canals. But he also warned of the need to get the land sold as soon as possible.
There are now in its immediate vicinity more than 40 families of ‘Squatters’ and traders, besides a great number of young men, each with his bundle or shop, of goods and trinkets; all of whom are depredating on the public lands, for timber for their numerous buildings, for fire-wood, &c., &c.; and as they have not interest in the soil, and little hope of being able to purchase the land when sold, a system of waste and destruction is going on, and is apparently entered into by all.
Riley witnessed the annual distribution of annuities, worth roughly half a million dollars in today’s value. He estimated that at least a thousand people came from Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and New York to take advantage of the Indians.
They have brought whiskey in abundance, which they pretend to deposit with [the] agent, until he shall have finished his business with the Indians, but yet contrive to deal out large quantities from their deposits in the woods, so that the savages are kept continually drunk, and unfit for any business. Horse racing, drinking, gambling, and every kind of debauchery, extravagance and waste, are the order of the day, and night too; and in my opinion, the savages themselves are the most Christianized, and least savage of the two classes now congregated here. Here the whites set example to the Indians too indelicate to mention, and that cannot fail to produce in their minds disgust for the American character.
Rev. J.B. Finney echoed that description:
This was an awful scene for a sober man to look upon. Here were encamped between two and three hundred Indians, and one-third, if not one-half drunk; men and women, raving maniacs, singing, dancing, fighting, stabbing and tomahawking one another – and there were the rum-sellers watering their whiskey until it was not strong grog, and selling it for four dollars a gallon [about $81 in 2018 value], their hired men gathering up all the skins and furs and their silver trinkets, ear-bobs, arm bands, half moons, silver crosses and brooches – giving a gill of grog for a dozen brooches -- and their guns and tomahawks and blankets, till they were literally stripped naked, and three or four were killed or wounded. The reader may set what estimates he please, or call him by what name; yet if there were ever a greater robber, or a meaner thief, or a dirtier murderer than these rum sellers, he is yet to be seen.
Of course, these descriptions were of an event that lasted for a few weeks out of the entire year, attracting people who did not live in Fort Wayne. Still, Riley urged the speedy survey and sale of the land to “hardy and respectable settlers” as the only way to stop the “vice and immorality.”
Major Stephen H. Long, a topographical engineer, visited the village in 1823 when the spectacle of the annuity payments were not in session. Yet he was very unflattering in his description of a “mixed and apparently very worthless population,” most of whom were French Canadian in origin, “all more or less imbued with Indian blood. The confusion of tongues, owing to the diversity of the Indian tribes which generally collect near a fort, makes the traveler imagine himself in a real babel.”
By the time Long wrote this, a young fur trader who would become a pillar of the community, Samuel Hanna, had built a log cabin opposite William’s, and married Laura’s sister Eliza. There were also a few more English speaking white settlers than his account conveys.[3] Still – this was the place where William and Laura were raising their children. And unlike Sheldon, New York, the settlers didn’t rush to establish church and school. A Baptist missionary, Rev. Isaac McCoy, settled in the old barracks of the fort in May 1820 where he operated a school for about 40 Indian children, who tried the patience of the Indian agent with their noise and wear and tear on the former fort’s buildings. He also taught white children whose parents chose to pay him for his services. Jane likely attended his school. Two years later, because of the seeming hopelessness of the Indian’s demoralization, McCoy decided to move his mission one hundred miles north of Fort Wayne.
It was 1822. This was the year that Laura’s sister Eliza married Samuel Hanna, after a visit that became a lifetime stay. Not long after, their parents, Israel and Mary Blair Taylor, moved from Dayton with their other children, Horace, Harriet, Lathrop, Edmund Pitts, who went by “Pitts,” Marshall and William.[4]
Another event important far beyond the family was that a land office was finally established by act of Congress in May of 1822. Sale of land opened in fall of 1823. Two out-of-state investors named Barr and McCorkle came together to purchase a large plat of land, including the land on which William and Laura’s log cabin stood. The state legislature created Allen County, and elections were held. Laura’s brother-in-law Samuel Hanna was appointed circuit court judge. Her father, Israel Taylor, was elected inspector of elections, and later fences.
1822 meant another opportunity for William. The U.S. government established a post office in Fort Wayne in 1820, and in 1822 a mail route from the village to Chicago was established, with William as the carrier. He once completed the Fort Wayne-to-Chicago trip entirely on foot.
William, of course, was forced to buy the land he’d occupied free of charge and tax-free for nine years. Just as Roswell Barber was among the first buyers in Sheldon, William bought one of the first of 36 lots when they finally went on sale on September 18, 1824. Some of the lots, in the heart of what is now downtown, sold for $10.25; the highest for $25. Most purchasers made a down payment of fifty percent.
In 1824, at their first meeting, the Allen County commissioners established an annual license fee of $12.50 to conduct a tavern, with regulated rates as follows: dinner, breakfast and supper at 25 cents, keeping horse night and day at 50 cents, lodging per night at 12 ½ cents, whiskey per half pint at 12 ½ cents, cider per quart at 18 cents. William and his rival Alexander Ewing each applied for the license and paid the fee. William’s “Suttenfield House” became a two-story log structure, the upper floor used as a “ballroom” during parties.
The state paid a bounty on wolf scalps, and certificates issued for the scalps were receivable as tax payments. For the first years, nearly all the taxes in Allen County were paid off in these certificates.
The first session of county court was held at Alexander Ewing’s tavern, Washington Hall, across the street from William. It was considered the better of the two establishments. William and his brother-in-law, Horace Taylor, served on the first jury. The third term of court would be at Suttenfield House.
Records of the first years of county court reveal, as Poinsatte wrote, “the fact that very few of the leading citizens escaped indictment on charges of selling liquor illegally, larceny, assault and battery, gambling, defamation of character, or trespassing.” John P. Hedges won a trespassing suit against William in the 1824 court. William was fined 25 cents. Indeed, Poinsatte noted:
The report of the grand jury, which was received no doubt with complacency by the community, would if duplicated at the present time precipitate official investigations and loss of positions. But it reflects the spirit of the time in early Fort Wayne. Both of the associate judges were indicted for minor offenses. Of the nine defendants charged with the illegal sale of liquors, the large part were men whose names are synonymous with the builders of early Fort Wayne
Returning to the question of why William brought his family to Fort Wayne, and why he chose to stay: It may simply be because he liked it. He liked the rowdy lifestyle, the gambling, drinking, horse racing, brawling, the removal from strictures of a church-dominated society.
Once there was land for sale, new settlers began to arrive, including Samuel Hanna’s brother Hugh, who established the first cabinet and carpentry shop. Villagers were becoming prosperous enough for his services. Samuel, however, who was elected to the state legislature in 1826, imported most of his household furnishings from France. Laura was the proud owner of a table that was featured in A Pictorial History of Fort Wayne decades later. Also in 1824, a brick factory was begun, and the first brick building in town was completed at the end of the year. By 1825, the village had developed into a town of almost 150 people.
Men like Samuel Hanna were in paradoxical positions. They were making a very comfortable living in their dealings with Indians. As long as the Indian agency remained in Fort Wayne, and the annuities continued, they profited handsomely. Removal of the Indians would deprive them of many thousands of dollars. On the other hand, Indian removal would free up land for internal improvements such as canal building. Land speculators – of which Samuel was one – town promoters, merchants and settlers not involved in the fur and Indian trades wanted to see the Indians gone.
The Indian agent Tipton sought to move the Indian agency out of Fort Wayne. In this, he was vigorously opposed by men whose financial interests would not be served in such a move. Three filed charges against him. These men had questionable records, including one who had been indicted several times for stealing horses from Indians. In answering the charges, Tipton wrote that, “Although it is improper for a man to speak of his neighbor’s faults and follies, yet both self defense and truth justifies the assertion that a majority of the citizens of this village are of the lowest order of society, such as discharged soldiers and dishonorable men.” William, Poinsatte makes clear, fell into this category.
Tipton succeeded in getting the agency moved from Fort Wayne, moving to an area that became Logansport, where ironically he and his friends enriched themselves by purchasing control of Indian reserves there. Whiskey became as plentiful as in Fort Wayne, and the Indians were defrauded and exploited as badly.
The removal of the Indian agency was a blessing in disguise for Fort Wayne, however, as Poinsatte explained. Instead of the artificial boom of annuity payments, it now depended on its own natural advantages and industry. It made land available for a canal, and now enthusiasm turned to its construction.
A new era began in Fort Wayne. William’s tavern was probably very lively with newcomers and people passing through on business. People with families were putting roots down in town, people who wanted churches and schools.
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
[1] For whatever reasons, at the time of Jane’s death, it was widely reported that she was the first white child born in Fort Wayne. This simply was not true.
[2] Two other sons, James and Robert, died in infancy. Asa Moore was named for an early surveyor on the Wabash and Erie Canal, who died of malaria in the 1820s.
[3] Some English-speaking white residents who were in Fort Wayne at this time included the Indian agent and sub-agent and their families, John E. Hill, Alexander Ewing and family, William Nesbit Hood and his brother Robert, William Rockhill, James Barnett, Col. Thomas Swinney, and Paul Taber.
[4] The other children were Horace, Harriet, Lathrop, Edmund Pitts, who went by “Pitts,” Marshall, Elvira and William. Lathrop, Edmund and Marshall all worked for their brother-in-law Samuel Hanna. Lathrop is credited with being co-founder of South Bend. The three brothers all spent their lives there, and eventually their father Israel moved there, too. Horace, Harriet and Elvira lived out their lives in Fort Wayne. There was one more Taylor sibling: When Laura Taylor Suttenfield was 42, her father had a late-in-life child with his second wife. Ellen, known as “Nellie,” was four when her father died.
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