(Sept. 26, cont.) What brought me to this bridge was the following passage from the 1881 history of Champaign County, which says that James McPherson lived here.

Capt. Alexander Black, Moses McIlvain and others from Kentucky, settled on Macacheek and Mad River, in the northern part of Salem, in the spring of 1809; at that time James McPherson, called “Squalicee” by the Indians, (which means the red-faced man), was then living on Mad River, at or near the Kavanaugh farm, and there were several Indian families there at the time; among others, Capt. John Lewis. A chief had in his family a white woman, named Molly Kiser, who was taken prisoner when young, and raised with the Indians.

McPherson was said to have accompanied Simon Kenton that time in 1806 when he went to check out the encampment where Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had gathered their followers. McPherson had married a Shawnee woman (with whom he had two children) and would have known the language. And he would have had his own information sources among the Shawnee. He would have been a good person for such an errand.

By bicycle it was about a 13 mile ride between the Shawnee encampment site and here. I don’t know how much of my route, if any, would have been the path McPherson had taken to get there.

This site is on land that in 1874 was owned by a Kavanaugh. The stream is the Mad River. Not that there is any point in getting hung up on an exact location. Another passage in the 1881 history says McPherson’s place was on the Samuel Black farm:

[In 1809] Judge McPherson, then an Indian trader, lived on what is now known as the Samuel Black farm. This point was first settled by a Frenchman named Deshicket, in 1794 ; he was probably the first resident white settler in what is now Champaign County. … The white woman named Molly Kiser, spoken of elsewhere in this work, resided at this place in the family of Judge McPherson, as a servant or help. Judge McPherson was grandfather or great-grandfather of Gen. McPherson, who was murdered by guerrillas during the war of the rebellion. Sometimes there were five hundred Indians or more camped around McPherson, on Mad River.

The Samuel Black farm may have been a little further upstream from this point, at most a mile away, I’m guessing.

I spent some time looking into the statement that this James McPherson was the grandfather or great-grandfather of Gen. James McPherson. More on that another time, but I think the short answer is no.

The above view is looking south from the river crossing. It’s hard to say what besides the river would have made this an attractive location for McPherson and a few hundred Shawnee. Did they have cornfields here, too? The Mad River forms a broad, shallow valley here, so I suppose it’s possible.

There is a line of hills off to the left (to the east). But I was able to ride south with the wind for a couple of miles before I turned east to climb up out of this valley, and head back into the wind.