(Sep. 28, cont.) At the southwest corner of Thomas W. Parker’s old property, i.e. at the intersection of the Greenville Treaty Line and the Randolph-Wayne county line, I stopped to look for places that the first settler might have picked for his home site. (My bicycle is just barely inside Wayne County. The county line road leads off into the distance.)

The likely site is obvious to me now when I look at this photo, but it wasn’t obvious at the time until I rode down the county line road, across the little creek at the base of the hill (Nolan’s Fork) and then up that hill to the grove of trees.

Here I stopped to look back toward the west. And here it became obvious that this higher ground would have been an excellent farmstead site. There was a source of water not far away, down at the base of the hill. And the creek bottom probably made good cropland right from the start. So I picked this hillside as the place where the Parkers probably built their cabin.

This could have been a good place from which young Jesse could have seen those three wigwams he told about. Maybe they lay just on the other side of the treaty line, on land that had already been ceded to the United States but which seems not to have been ready for sale to settlers yet in 1814.

Jesse would have been about 7-8 years old when his family moved here. In his reminiscences in the 1882 history, just after mentioning his Indian playmates and the three wigwams, he told of how an Indian woman from those wigwams had once given him a scare:

A squaw once scared me nearly to death. I had gone to drive a calf home to its pen. The calf was near one of the wigwarms; I felt skittish (this was before I had become so familiar with them), but the calf had to be brought and I had to do it for children had to mind in those days. So how about the calf? This way–I got around it and started it for the pen, and away we went, calf and boy, when hallo! out popped a squaw full tilt after me! She had jumped behind a tree and stuck out what I took to be a gun, and as I came near she bounced after me. My legs flew, you may guess; I could keep up with the calf with the squaw after me. She chased me home, she was tickled well nigh to death, and I was scared nearly out of my wits. I thought I could feel the ball hit me; but she had no gun, it was only a stick, and she was in fun. But there was no going around nettles then; they flew like sticks in a whirlwind, and she came rushing after me, parting the brush as she came!

After telling this, Jesse went on to other memories of those days. But it must have been a significant event for him, because he later returned to the story:

The squaw who scared me so and chased me through the brush, was so “tickled” at my terrible “scare” that she could not tell mother what she had done, for laughing. She fell down on the cabin floor, and laughed and laughed, and kept on laughing; and to mother’s question, she only pointed her finger at me as she lay there, and burst out laughing again; and I stood there, as mad as a lad of my age could well be, at the squaw, for scaring me so terribly, and then laughing herself well-nigh to death over the fun she had got out of me.

A good place for the nettles he describes would have been in the moist, rich soil near the creek, where the soil would have been disturbed by the hooves of cattle who went there to drink.

I didn’t know until I looked it up that the stinging nettle, Urtica dioica, is an invasive species from Europe. It would be interesting to know if the nettles came here with the settlers, or if they had come ahead of settlers like honeybees had done in their invasion of the continent.

Jesse died just before the 1882 history in which his reminiscences appear was published. It’s too bad the Native peoples had been driven out of this country by then, instead of staying here and living as neighbors with the American settlers. They could have a lot of stories to share for that 1882 history. Though if they were Miami, maybe some of Jesse’s childhood playmates ended up living for a time not so very far from here, perhaps along the Salamonie River. But there were no get-togethers that I’ve ever heard of where the old men got together and swapped stories. It would be interesting to have heard Jesse’s story as told by one of the members of the Indian woman’s family.