lock all his life; hence, the choice of the old Baptist preacher for a leader. And as the old captain has long ago gone to his rest, and the most of the brave volunteers he commanded have gone too, it may not be amiss, for one of the very few who remain, before he too goes where they are, to put upon record some of the services and doings of that brave captain, and his equally brave compatriots, in the campaign of 1834. It was in the month of April (says the narrator) that rumors became rife, that the followers of the prophet, Jo. Smith, who had been expelled from the county the preceding autumn, were being strongly re-enforced from New York and Ohio, and would, in a short time, re-possess themselves of their former homes, and of the whole of Jackson county. About the last of that month, at a meeting of the citizens of the Big Creek settlements, at the house Hezekiah Warden, a company of volunteer minutemen was organized, with James Savage, captain, Wm. English, lieutenant, and Andrew Wilson, ensign, and each volunteer was enjoined to keep his horse and gun in readiness. Each week the rumors became more alarming, as to the preparations making on the north of the river, to cross over and exterminate the Gentiles on the south. Our patriotic captain resolved to see for himself, and passing himself as a horse hunter, he crossed the Big Muddy, entered the enemy's camp, made his observations, returned and reported: that the enemy was already strong, and growing in strength; that the Mormons were much better provided than the Israelites were, in the days of Saul, for they had of blacksmiths quite a number, and that those smiths were busily engaged in repairing guns, and in making swords, spears and other dire and dangerous weapons of war; that he had not only penetrated the enemy's camp, but had entered the house of one of the principal elders (Partridge), and, by leading his wife to believe him a brother, had learned from her that large re-enforcements were shortly expected, and that the promised land would soon be possessed. The whole county of Jackson was now in arms, and the adjoining one, Lafayettee, was appealed to for help. General Samuel C. Owens was appointed commander-in-chief and generalissimo of the army of occupation and defense; and he was notified that the Big Creek battalion-Captain James Savage-was at his service whenever needed.

There being no post-offices or post roads, the news was brought from the seat of war every few days by couriers, mounted upon swift-footed horses and mules and thus the citizens were informed of what was transpiring. The failure of the Peace Congress at Liberty, to which General Owens, Judge Fristoe, Smallwood Nolan and Smallwood V. Nolan, with other prominent citizens of Jackson had been sent. Also how an attempt had been made to drown those delegates on their return. How the ferry boat was scuttled and sunk in crossing, and Lynch, Bradbury, Carey, and two others drowned; and how narrowly the other delegates and passengers escaped by good luck, and by good swimming. At length on the morning of the 20th of June, David Dealy, Jun., arrived with a dispatch to the captain, calling for his promised battalion. By three o'clock it was assembled at the house of the captain, and soon after fifty strong commenced its march to Independence. Through the almost pathless prairies, it wended its way; night came, and by the light of the moon the march was continued. Arriving at Independence late at night but no army of occupation was there, not even a sentinel, to halt us as we approached. The town seemed wrapped in sleep, with no one to bid us welcome, or hail us as deliverers come to their rescue.

Some demonstration being made by the trampling of horses, or the murmur of disappointed soldiers, a man in night dress appeared on the street and demanded whence we came. He was soon recognized as L. W. Boggs, Lieutenant-Governor, and afterward elected Governor of the State. He informed us that the army was at the river guarding the ferries and crossings, to prevent the crossing of the enemy; but that the commander, General Owens, was then in town and at his home. To the commander's house then, our Lieutenant and Orderly (Wm.

H. Moore) repaired to report and receive orders; but all the orders they received were to let him sleep and not disturb his repose. Then there was some grumbling; and some of the boys said if they were at home, they would stay there; which, no doubt, has been said by many a volunteer soldier before and since.

Our officers then ordered us to mount and ride back on the road we came. About this time the moon which had shone brightly all the night began to refuse her light, and it became darker and darker, until we were in total darkness. It was a total eclipse.

Two miles from town the battalion went into camp in Daniel King's woodpasture. Each soldier hitched his horse and lay down on his blanket to sleep, or not to sleep as it might happen. Next morning, after going through a short military drill by our stuttering Lieutenant, we rode again to Independence, and received a more cordial reception. The commander apologized, and excused himself on the ground of his unremitted labors and want of sleep. The citizens spread their tables and opened their corn cribs, and to us was assigned the post of honor, the defense of the town.

In the afternoon the cheering intelligence reached us that a treaty of peace had been concluded, by which the elders of the Mormon faith had agreed to desert from their threatened invasion and leave the people of Jackson in quiet; and in a short time the army of defense arrived from the river, and marched into town with their six pound cannon, which was drawn up on the square and fired several times to announce the war ended. The volunteer allies from Lafayette received the thanks of the officers, and the whole army was discharged and disbanded, and Captain Savage and his battalion returned home; and that gray haired veteran lived and died without receiving a land warrant or pension for his services either in this or the war of 1812.

As has been said elsewhere, he was preacher and pastor of the first Baptist church ever organized between Little Blue and the Osage River, and for that and other churches growing out of it, he continued to preach until about the year 1847, when he moved to Grayson county, Texas, where he died and where some of his family yet live.

Daniel Graham was the second person to settle in the township, and continued to live on the farm he first settled until after the war of the rebellion, increasing the number of his acres, the number of his slaves, and other personal effects. The war, however, and its effects took away his slaves, and much of his other possessions, and in 1866 he sold his valuable farm to P. S. Alexander, the present live stock man of the township, and moved to Texas. There he met with losses and misfortunes and moved back to Cass county, where losses and misfortunes still followed him; till now in his old age with a large family by a second wife, he is living in the northeast corner of Cass county, about six miles from his old home in straitened circumstances, but with a memory stored full of incidents of pioneer life in Jackson county. He has two sons, David and Ambers, living and doing well on a part of his old homestead, sold or given to them before the David claims to have lived longer in the township than any other person living or dead.

war.

Charles Hopper, or Big Charley, was among the first to locate near the lone tree. He selected his home there in 1830 and moved to it in 1831; and like Graham, continued to add to it, until he became a large landholder, as well as one of the greatest hunters of the country. It was said he could kill more deer than any one man in this or the adjoining counties. He was one of the prominent men among the pioneers, and a leading member in society, and of the First Methodist church in the township. In 1835 Greenville Crisp, Anthony Bledsoe and some other Big Creek boys returned from hunting and trapping in the mountains, with Walker Sublette and others, and told such marvelous tales of California, and the mountain life that Big Charley took the California fever (the

first that had ever had it in the county).

It stuck to him, and a few years after with Col. Bartleson's company he crossed the plains and the mountains to the Pacific, and after some months spent in exploring, returned, but not to remain. Some years after he sold out his farm to John Darniel, and moved to the land of gold before that gold was discovered, and is yet living there a wealthy man.

Jasper Hopper, who was an uncle to Big Charley, and also his father-in-law, with his sons, Little Charley, William and Tuck, were all among the early settlers, all of them like Nimrod-mighty hunters, and all of them gone to California. Uncle Jasper (as he was called) died there a few years ago at the age of 100 years, and it is said was a hunter almost to the last. In his younger years he had spent some time in hunting and trapping in the mountains of New Mexico, and with trading with the natives at Santa Fe, and could tell many a cranky tale of his life among the Spaniards and Arapahoe Indians.

Peace to his memory (says the narrator). Many hundreds of miles he reposes, from that hospitable home where I first knew him, but his companion in that home, the wife of his youth, reposes just across the field, in plain view of my door, and some of his children, companions of my youth are there too.

William Crawford moved to the township in the spring of 1831. He was the son of an Irish widow woman of New York City. He there entered in the regular army of the United States, served his five years and was discharged at Fort Gibson about the year 1828. He there became acquainted with young Daniel Graham, who had wandered out there after his mother married Butterfield, and when Dan returned to his step-father's cabin, on the head of Big Creek, Crawford came with him and the two somehow became acquainted with and married two widowed sisters in Lafayette county. Their names originally were Celia and Leah Hicklin. They had married two brothers, Richard and Edmundson, and after the death of the brothers, transferred their affections, their slaves and other possessions to the two friends, Graham and Crawford, and with them came to the vicinity of the Lone tree. Crawford's wife died many years ago, and he sold his farm (the one on which Wesley Yankee lives) to Lion Bradley, and moved to Bates county, where he died in 1878. He was not of the ordinary class of backwoods hunters, but a man of intelligence, and better read than most of the early settlers were.

David Dealy, though not the oldest settler in the township, was an older settler in the county than any of the others. He had settled in the Six Mile, near Fort Osage, and as soon as he was permitted to do so, came west of the Little Blue, he being one of the first to plow the rich soil "between the Blues," and is said to have sowed the first wheat in that locality. He afterward settled south of Blue Springs, on the old Cowherd farm; and in 1834 came to the farm where he died, four miles northwest of Lone Jack. He was the father of twenty-six children, all of the same mother, some of whom yet live in the county. He died in 1878. Few men in the county were possessed of more muscular power than David Dealy, and very few retained it to the age that he did.

Thomas Hamlin built the first cabin on what is called the Rheems farm Sec. 25, Tp. 47. R. 30, or at least he was the first to live there. Wm. Adams entered the land on which it stood, but exchanged with Hamlin for lands in R. 31. Hamlin moved there in 1832, and opened a farm, and the first plowing that the writer of these recollections ever did in Missouri was on that farm, when he hired to work for Hamlin for ten dollars per month. Hamlin was one of

those plain, hard working men, who after marrying in Tennessee, resolved to come west and grow up with the country. An old friend, Joab Powell, assisted him in the selection of a home in the new settlement. He did well for a few years, when, like many others desiring to do better, he sold his farm to John Daniel, and moved to Arkansas.

John Daniel came in the spring of 1836, enlarged the farm, and built the

large brick house which is still there. He also built the first tread wheel mill in the township, which was considered a great help to the citizens, and a great advantage to the country; and for many years that mill supplied a large scope of country with its meal and flour. The great drawback was that each customer, when he went to mill, had to take the motive power with him in the shape of a team, four or five horses or oxen being necessary to make the mill go. It was more reliable, however, than the water-mills of the county, as they always stopped when the rain ceased. In 1856 Daniel sold his large and well improved farm to Wm. Robinson, and moved to the farm which he had bought from Charley Hopper. At the commencement of the great civil war he was the largest landholder and taxpayer in the township. As a result of the war he lost his slaves and much other property, and afterward divided among his children the greater part of what remained. He died in 1879, at the residence of his son-inlaw, John Shanhan, on the old Charley Hopper farm. His widow Rachel, (a) daughter of John Beeler,) resides there with her daughter, and she and her sister Orleana Yankee, and her aunt Rachel Noel, have lived longer in the township than any others, except, perhaps, David Graham. They came from Tennessee in the fall of 1832; he was born in the township in the spring of the same year.

The oldest man living in the township on the 1st of March, 1881, is John Hunter, aged ninety-two years. He emigrated from Surry county, N. C., in 1835, and located near Lone Jack, in the spring of 1836, on Sec. 29, Tp. 47, R. 29, where he has resided ever since, with the exception of eighteen months during the great civil war, when, with others, by the mandate of Order No. 11, he was expelled from his home and left it under circumstances distressing indeed, being compelled, on the day that he left, to assist with his own hands in burying his two only sons, a son-in-law, a grandson and two other near neighbors, who, on that day, Sept. 6th, 1863, met a violent death at the hands of armed men.

The oldest lady in the township on March, 1, 1881, was Mrs. Mary Rice, who died March 11, 1881, aged eighty-nine years, widow of Enoch Rice, who came from Tennessee to Jackson county in 1833. Those two aged persons (Mr. Hunter and Mrs. Rice), have made their homes on adjoining farms, and have lived within three hundred yards of each other the principal part of the time since 1836.

PHYSICAL FEATURES, ETC.

The features of the country is diversified with prairie and timber land. The elevated ridge or table land dividing the waters of the Missouri from those of the Osage, passes through the township from east to west near its center. On the south are the head branches of Big Creek, and on the north those of Sni-a-bar; and on these streams is an ample supply of timber for farming and other purposes, the timber and brush lands of the Sni-a-bar, being considered the best tobacco lands of the county, if not of the State.

Van Burren has no railroad completed in its territory. The Lexington, Lake & Gulf Railroad, for which the township in 1870 voted $50,000 in bonds, has been graded and bridged from Lexington to Butler, since which, nothing more has been done.

It is said, however, now that there is a prospect of its completion and extension to the coal fields in Bates county.

The population of the township is twenty-five hundred; amount taxable property, $400,000.

CHAPTER XIX.

PRAIRIE TOWNSHIP.

Organization and General Features of the Municipal Township-Early Settlers of the TownshipLee's Summit laid out in October, 1865, by W. B. Howard-Lee's Summit in 1869Incorporation as a City-City Ordinances-List of City Officers-The Business and Public Enterprises-Churches and Schools-Business Directory-Greenwood College-Cemetery.

By order of the County Court, June 4, 1860, Prairie township was organized and laid off from the west part of Van Buren township, a copy of the order having been given in this work under the head of "Organization of Jackson county.'

This township is situated in the southern central portion of the county, and is bounded north by Brooking, Blue and Sni-a-bar townships, east by Sni-a-bar and Van Buren townships, south by Cass county, and west by Washington and Brooking townships. It is watered by Big Creek flowing south into Cass county, and by Clear Creek east of Little Blue and Sni-a-bar creeks flowing north. The surface is generally level, more so than any other township in the county.

Prairie township is the most central in Jackson county, east or west, containing one hundred and twelve square miles, or 71,680 acres of land, nearly all of which are under a high state of cultivation, about one-tenth of which is covered with a very fine growth of timber skirting the water courses.

These lands are beautiful rolling prairie, some of which are a mulatto soil, the majority, however, a rich black loam from eighteen inches to six feet in depth, underlaid by spongy sub-soil that make them peculiarly adapted to resist extreme drouth or readily absorb superabundant rainfalls.

There are three hundred and ninety farms in this township under cultivation, averaging one hundred and sixty acres each, the largest of which is owned by John R. Blackwell, containing 1,910 acres. The home farm has 1,480 acres, nine hundred of which is in blue grass, timothy and clover.

More than usual attention is given to the raising of blooded stock, and some of the finest herds, containing strains of the best families to be found in the county, if not in the State, are within the limits of Prairie township. Another important industry overlooked in many places is fruit growing, and the extensive nursery of Blair Brothers, the West Missouri Nursery, owned by James A. Baylis, Robert Watson & Co and J. B. Bailey & Co., are worthy of special note.

The Missouri Pacific Railroad runs northwest and southeast, through the center of the township, furnishing superior accommodations for freight and passengers.

Among those who were early and prominent settlers in Prairie township are: John Fristoe, W. B. Howard, Zachariah Cooper, John A. Moore, Frank Fisher, John Boggs, R. G. Wilson, Zachariah Park, Charles Cowherd, Edmund Cowherd, Rev. J. W. Wallace, Isaac Hockaday, P. N. Grinter, Travace Moore, A. J. Stone, J. N. Hargis, Josiah Collins, Thomas Moore, C. A. Moore, William Moore, Thomas Hickman.

Francis K. Cowherd was the father of Edmund and Charles, and one of the oldest citizens of Prairie township. He lived in the eastern part of the township. John Shepherd was one of the early pioneers of this section. He lived about two miles north west of Lee's Summit. He died a few years ago.

Thomas Constable lives about two miles northeast of Lee's Summit, where he has resided many years.

Nimrod Chrisman and Abraham Chrisman were pioneers. William Allen,