Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  Among the captivated were two of the original five ministers who left the Presbyterian Church together—McNemar and Dunlavy. And they were indeed ensnared in ruin, for Dunlavy “died in Indiana, raving in desperation for his folly in forsaking the truth for an old woman’s fable,” and the Shakers had a revelation given to them to remove McNemar from their village and take him to Lebanon, Ohio, and set him down in the streets, and leave him there destitute, in his old age.

  Two more of the five ministers, Marshall and Thompson, disliking so much freedom of theological opinion, returned to the Presbyterian Church.

  Through all this, Stone went about preaching and converting with undiminished enthusiasm. If he preached in a house, it was full to overflowing. If he preached out of doors at some country crossroads, men, women, and children walked six or seven miles to hear him. “The darkest nights did not prevent them; for as they came to meeting, they tied up bundles of hickory bark, and left them by the way at convenient distances apart; on their return they lighted these bundles, which afforded them a pleasant walk. Many have I baptized at night by the light of these torches.”

  From Kentucky the pioneers streamed out into other states—into Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa—taking the Christian Church with them. And Stone found himself in charge of a loose association of eighty churches, with thirteen thousand members, thirty-eight elders, and thirteen unordained preachers, over all of whom he denied having any authority. But through a magazine, the Christian Messenger, which he edited and published, and through his firmness of character, he had become the most influential personality of his church, and to all intents and purposes its leader.

  5

  In the absence of statistics, the pioneers believed what somebody told them, and it was said at this time that in Ohio such wheat, rye, oats, and corn grew in the river bottoms as had never been seen before, and that if you threw a hen into a field of grain there was no chance of its ever getting out. Also that when the women went for roasting ears, they needed an ax to cut down the cornstalks.

  In 1813 Stephen England moved north into Ohio, taking his wife and ten children and two sons-in-law with him, and lived there for five years. Then a disease broke out among the cattle. Calves were aborted, the cows gave only a quarter of the usual amount of milk. The disease was of unknown origin, and highly contagious, and had no cure. From drinking the milk of infected cows, human beings developed a fever and other symptoms, such as a headache and sweating, and lost all desire to move. This lasted about two weeks, stopped, and then started up again.

  One day the blackbirds flitting from branch to branch observed a different kind of activity in the clearing. The carpenter’s tools and cooking utensils, the hoes and the log chain, the mattock, the axes, the bedding, the spinning wheel and the big wheel, the churn, the looking glass and the loom and the Bible were stowed away in the wagons. The teams were backed up to the traces. The women and children were disposed, by families and by age. And, leaving the doors of their cabins standing open and the grain nodding in the fields they had cleared with so much labor, my great-great-great-grandfather and his sons-in-law headed for the Territory of Illinois.

  They arrived at Edwardsville, in Madison County, which is a little east of St. Louis, in the fall of 1818, a few weeks before Illinois was admitted as a state of the Union. They didn’t like it here—why I don’t know. It appears not to have been poor country. The first white man to visit the locality was James Gillham, twenty-five years before. He came here in search of his wife and three children, who had been taken captive from their home in Kentucky by a band of Indians. French traders told him that his family was being held for ransom in the Kickapoo village on Salt Creek, near the present site of Lincoln—as far away again as he was from Kentucky—and, with two Frenchmen as interpreters and an Irishman as an intermediary, he managed to get them back. He was so impressed with the beauty and fertility of the region around Edwardsville that he settled here. Perhaps the reason Stephen England and his sons-in-law didn’t like it was that they no longer had the choice of the best land. Glowing reports of the country farther north induced them to set out in the middle of winter on a hundred-mile journey of exploration.

  The contour of the land in the San-ga-mo country amazed them. In Ohio and in southern Illinois there were hills and valleys, as at home. Here it was as flat as a table top and the sky was like an inverted bowl over their heads. As they passed through what is now Springfield, the county seat and the state capital, they saw no signs of human habitation; only the tracks of wild animals. On the south bank of the Sangamon River, a short distance from the southwest corner of what is now Logan County, a man named William Higgins had just built a cabin. They stayed overnight with him. Next morning they crossed to the north side of the river and there paced out, in the timber and prairie, the dimensions of their new farms. To prevent others who might come after from choosing the same ground, they cut some logs, laid them across each other in three piles, and each man cut his initials on a tree to show that the land was claimed. Then they went back to their families. In March they returned, bringing Stephen England’s son David, who was still a boy, with them. A foot of snow fell the night they arrived. Homespun, deerhide, whatever they had on, offered almost no protection against the cold that blows across that country in the wintertime. Three of them were grown men and better acquainted with physical hardship, and what they experienced was only what they expected. They dismissed the cold from their minds, as they did the howling of the wolves. The boy, lying in the shelter of a fallen tree, with his father’s heavy arm around him, was close enough to childhood to be surprised that life was so unkind.

  Stephen England and his son felled trees and cut logs for a cabin sixteen by eighteen feet, and soon had the walls up and the door and the chimney place cut out. Andrew Cline and Wyatt Cantrell still had their materials on the ground when the melting snow warned them that they must start south at once or they wouldn’t be able to get their wagons across the river. They tried to bring their families north immediately, but the teams weren’t equal to drawing the heavy wagons through the mud and slush. They gave it up. Taking two of Stephen England’s grown daughters with them to do the cooking, they went back to Sangamon County in April, completed their cabins, cleared land, and planted crops.

  The first week in June, William Higgins’ wife and two daughters heard the crack of whips and the creaking of heavy wagon wheels. The dogs started to whine and bark. The women came out into the sunshine and stood with their hands shading their eyes, ready to greet their new neighbors.

  That same spring, other families settled nearby and, “the people having planted their crops, wished to have religious services, so Mr. England announced that he would preach at his own house late in June.… Everybody in the entire settlement came. Two women walked five miles through the grass, which was almost as high as their heads. The husband of one of them walked and carried their babe. That was the first sermon ever preached north of the Sangamon River in this county and probably in Central Illinois.”*

  The first year, the three families who settled on the north bank of the Sangamon River got about half a crop, but the following year the yield was nearly sixty bushels an acre. The flies would sometimes so trouble the horses and the oxen that they had to be driven into the timber and a fire kindled to drive the insects away. In the fall nearly everybody suffered from the shakes. You got it from walking through the wet grass. It had a fixed beginning and end, and came generally on alternate days. It was followed by a burning fever, and when that abated, the victim felt “entirely woebegone, disconsolate, sad, poor, and good for nothing.” A woman who went back to Tennessee reported that Illinois was a good place for men and horses, but it was hell on oxen and women.

  Stephen England continued to call the settlers together and preach to them. When the benches and stools were all taken and there was no longer even a place to stand, the women would take their shoes off and get up on the beds—eight to ten of them on a single bed.
As my great-great-great-grandfather warmed to his subject he would pull his coat off. Sometimes there were Indians present. What they made out of the service is rather hard to imagine. The Bible presented no difficulties. It was right there in front of them, and the medicine man made magic with it. But the doctrine of saving faith? Baptism? the doctrine of Atonement? the right of the individual congregation to govern itself? and the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the unbegotten Father and the eternally begotten Son? Was it perhaps simply that the Indians were by nature gregarious, and until they met with a sufficient amount of discouragement from the white men couldn’t see a gathering of any kind without adding themselves to it?

  In 1820 Stephen England formed a church, with himself, his wife, two other men and five other women as members, all of whom signed this agreement: “We, members of the church of Jesus Christ, being providentially moved from our former place of residence from distant part, and being baptized on the profession of faith and met in the house of Stephen England, on a branch of Higgins Creek, in order to form a constitution, having first given ourselves to the Lord and then to one another, agree that our constitution shall be on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, believing them to be the only rule of faith and practise.” Three years later they built a log meetinghouse, and Stephen England continued to serve as minister until he died, of a cancer in one of his ankles. He preached the gospel as long as he could stand, and delivered his last sermon sitting in a chair.

  The inscription on his tombstone reads:

  ELDER STEPHEN ENGLAND

  PIONEER MISSIONARY

  Born in Virginia, June 12, 1773

  Died Sept. 26, 1823

  Settled in Sangamon County in 1819

  He preached the first sermon and organized

  the first church and performed the first

  marriage ceremony in Sangamon County

  On his way to this wedding he passed through a field where a neighbor was plowing and borrowed a pair of shoes from him for the occasion.

  The reason I was so sure I couldn’t be descended from Stephen England was that the Christian Church was the abiding interest of my Grandmother Maxwell’s life. Surely if she was descended from the man Dr. England referred to as a towering figure in the early days of the Christian Church, I’d have heard about it over and over as I was growing up—not only from her, but also from my Aunt Maybel. I still find it hard to believe, though it is a simple fact. I was eighteen when my grandmother died, and so the explanation is not that she did speak of Stephen England and I was just too young to remember or be interested in matters of this kind. What she had to say about later preachers—Brother Hatfield and Brother Cannon, Brother Holton and other men whose sermons she had sat through—did not interest me but I remember their names, even so.

  In a letter to Max Fuller, my Aunt Maybel says, “I am glad you enjoyed the Maxwell genealogy and will be glad to give the letters to you, will put them in an envelope and mark your name on them so should anything happen to me they will be yours. Blinn [my younger brother] is the only other interested in such so will want you to share what you find with him, he has been very interested in my D.A.R. About this Exema, Maxwell, I feel quite sure you never had anything like that but if you remember when you came home from Laurel, Mississippi, you had eaten so much salt pork, your stomach was upset and your skin was very rough but we soon cured that up with proper food …”

  My cousin’s eczema is neither here nor there, but the very breath of her being is in that expression of concern and I could not bring myself to shut her up when I should have. My brother was in high school when this letter was written, and his interest in antiquarianism did not survive the pressures of a busy law practice. My older brother, with his passionate pleasure in horses and guns, is too much a displaced pioneer himself to have much romantic curiosity about them. My aunt’s statement was correct in so far as it applied to me: at that period I was not “interested in such.” Stories, yes, but not dry facts and especially not genealogical details and speculations that would open the portals of the D.A.R. But why did they keep me in such total ignorance?

  Some time in the 1930’s, in Illinois, there was a reunion of the living descendants of Stephen England, at which fifteen hundred people were present. I learned about it from Dr. England. One would almost think they conspired to keep me from finding out about my ancestors. Though my grandmother and my Aunt Maybel and my Aunt Bert and my father all had their secrets, like everyone else, they were not of a conspiring disposition. There must be some other explanation.

  The only explanation I can offer is hurt feelings. My father did not much care who he was descended from. He was by nature forward looking, and disliked everything that was old—old houses with windows that didn’t fit properly and let the cold in, antique furniture that you had to be careful how you sat on, and music not written in his lifetime. “Oh, that’s ancient history,” he would say, about something that was not remote but merely in the past; what happened in the past was of no possible interest to anyone. It is conceivable that my grandmother and my aunt, not liking to have their toes stepped on, stopped speaking of genealogical matters in his presence. Or I may have said something that made them think I shared his prejudice. I don’t think I did, though. The truth is, I am not convinced by any of this reasoning. Their failure to speak of Stephen England remains mysterious to me.

  The other line of descent in my Grandmother Maxwell’s family begins with a James Turley who was born in Fairfax County, Virginia, and who served as a private in the Continental Army when he was sixteen. He married Agnes Kirby, in Virginia, and they had fourteen children, seven boys and seven girls. If he was anything but a farmer there is no record of it. When he was thirty-one he moved to South Carolina. Four years later he moved again—to Kentucky this time, with two of the children in baskets slung on either side of a steady pack horse.

  After twenty years in Kentucky he crossed over into southern Illinois and settled in Union County, which is on the Mississippi River, below St. Louis. Five years later he moved north to Sangamon County, where several of his sons joined him and where he died fifteen years later at the age of seventy-one. The Logan County History says that among the Indians he was a sort of arbitrator, and known as the “Big Chief” and “Big Bostony.” What does the name mean? The list of his goods and chattels offered up for auction includes seven horses, thirty-nine head of cattle, twenty-three sheep, and sixty-five head of hogs. At this auction his son Charles, who was my great-great-grandfather, bid on and got a pair of hatchets, a powder gourd, two barrels of lime, a basket of sundries, a razor, a lot of old iron, a side saddle, and a pair of specktickles. He cannot have had much use of these things, for he himself died that same year.

  Charles Turley was born in Henry County, Virginia, in 1786. His wife, Elizabeth Cheathem, was also a Virginian but brought up in Kentucky. In 1823, when he was approaching forty, he pulled up stakes and went north, to join his father. The route lay through rough country. Swamps and marshes had to be crossed with great exertion and fatigue, and dangerous rivers forded. They could have come in almost any kind of wagon, but it undoubtedly had a canvas cover of some sort and was drawn by oxen, with cattle and hogs being driven alongside, and a horse, and a hound dog.

  Five years later they would have been part of an emigrant train, and the air would have been full of the sound of shouting, laughing, cursing, and cracking of whips, but in 1823 the Turleys were the vanguard, and probably alone. If you could have peered into the covered wagon, you’d have seen six children, the youngest a year old.

  What the children saw must have been like enough to this old man’s remembering (though he is not any old man I am related to): “Riding along the gently rolling prairie, now you descend into a valley and your vision is limited to a narrow circle. That herd of deer has taken fright at your coming, quits its grazing on the tender grass of the valley, and, following that old buck as leader, runs off with heads erect, horns thrown back, their whit
e tails waving in the air, has circled around until yonder hillock is reached, when, turning towards you, they gaze with their dark bright eyes, as if inquiring why you have invaded their free pastures. As you ride along, the rattlesnake is stretched across the road, sunning itself, and the prairie wolf takes to his heels and gallops off much like a dog.”

  Their new home was about four miles from the village of Elkhart, in the extreme southern part of Logan County, and it was probably not very different from the one they left—a log cabin with a deerskin door, a clapboard roof, a puncheon floor, if there was a floor at all, and a stick chimney daubed with clay and straw. The children fell asleep in a room lighted with a rushlight, to the sound of the spinning wheel or the slam, crash of the loom.

  Here they are walking home from school (I am quoting from the same old man): “the road was a path through the high grass and woods, and there were wolves and panthers plenty. They were frequently seen, and you can imagine how we felt when the stars began to shine. The oldest ones would form a front and rear guard, and put the smallest in the middle, and hurry them along, all scared nearly to death.”

  The Logan County History goes on to say that my Great-great-grandfather Charles Turley was a genial, generous-hearted man and had a host of warm friends; that he had his shares of the trials and hardships incident to the life of a pioneer; that he died about 1836, aged about fifty. And that in his last days he allied himself with the Christian Church.

  I suppose one has a right to pick and choose among one’s ancestors. In any case I have a fondness for my grandmother’s great-grandfather, William Higgins.