(Sep 28, cont.) About 1.5 miles after stopping to take the photo of Martindale Creek, I stopped for another photo for documentation purposes.

I remember that stop. I was standing in a long, gravel driveway that led to a farmplace that was back from the road. I remember deciding not to point my camera in that direction, but I don’t remember why. Instead I took a photo of the church at the top of the small hill to the east.

Now that I’ve looked at the 1882 county history the place is more interesting to me.

My route is shown in light brown on the map above — a map of West River township from that same county history. The stop at Martindale Creek is marked with a red dot on the left, and the stop for this photo was at the red dot on the line between sections 10 and 11.

The father of the Jonah L. Catey who in 1882 owned the land on which I was standing was William Catey. His name is still shown on a county plat map from the 1870s. His farm was the one now owned (in 1882) by J.L. Catey — the one I didn’t take a photo of. On that older map it looks like he used a different driveway back then, one that left the road very near the church at the edge of his property and cut across to the southwest to his place. I suspect it’s because the higher ground was dry enough to make a more reliable road. One can still see traces of it on Googlemap satellite view.

I didn’t find any particularly interesting anecdotes about William Catey or his son, Jonah, but the family got interesting when I found this Rootsweb site that gives some of the genealogy. The interesting part was that one of William’s brothers and one of his sisters had married into a family that had names like Joseph Rippey and Matthew Rippey. Those were familiar names to me. And yes, further investigation shows that it’s the same Rippey family that had settled near Leesburg Indiana, the same Rippey family that produced a Matthew Rippey who lived near Goshen at the time of the Black Hawk war scare. He and a neighbor had made a walking trip down to Kosciousko County, to land not yet ceded by the Potawatomi to the United States, to check on the Indians and their reaction to the Black Hawk news.

Leesburg was the kind of place that got me started on the Black Hawk Slept Here project. It itself had made such a vivid and lasting impression on me (as had many things on that day) that the next year I rode down to visit it and check it out more closely. One of the things I looked for was a big brick house that had belonged to one of Rippeys who had moved there, perhaps (and here I’m guessing) on the advice of the Matthew Rippey who had scouted out the land while he was checking up the Indians. Alas, it had been torn down not so long before, and all that was left was a big pile of masonry and concrete rubble. A gravel and cement operation had begun to take over. I couldn’t remember whether a house had still been standing in 1996.

The last time I rode there was in October 2006. I see that I’ve done only one blog entry about it, here. It has a map showing my route past the Rippey place just south of town.

Ah, good. I see I took a photo of the rubble. The pile may have been pushed closer to the road since 1997, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

So in summary I could say that the church scene in the top photo is now a more interesting place to me because it has a connection to this pile of rubble south of Leesburg. Such excitement one can get from bike touring!

This photo is from October 2006, when we poured the concrete floor in our sun room and garage, about 1200 square feet altogether for the garage and three rooms. What does it have to do with bicycle touring and history? Not a lot, but I like looking at the photo, especially the way our big walnut tree looks when the air is full of snow.

I was going to write about day 3 of my 1996 tour of the Midwest League — about how I rode to Leesburg in Kosciusko County, Indiana, and how that led to subsequent history rides to the area. I came upon the above photo because a few days after we got back from a 3-day tour to the area in 2006, we finally poured the floor, a few years after a contractor had built the shell for us.

The concrete contractor was glad to have a a project like this on a snow day. There was a roof overhead and lighting inside.

I’m still working on this garage and will do so this weekend instead of going for a ride. By dragging the work out over such a long time and working on it in such fits and starts, I’ve made the issue of how to finalize the inspections a bit complicated. The inspectors and the people at the township office are all trying to be helpful, but the sequence in which I’ve done all the work has made things more complicated than usual. Even I have forgotten some of the details over the years. The original building inspector has retired by now and I was trying to explain over the phone to the new one that much of the work is all finished, but there is this small area in the back that just got a rough-in inspection by the electrical inspector yesterday. So I hope the result is that we can get it all sorted out so I can put up the last sheets of 10-foot 5/8″ drywall on the ceiling this weekend while my youngest son is still home to help me. So no bike rides this weekend. Probably not much blogging, either.

On a weekend tour to Koskiusko County, Indiana in October 2006, I went out of my way to ride on roads that had oddly-placed turns, like the one pictured above. Most of the roads that run straight east-west or north-south follow section lines, but there are some, like this one, that do not. It doesn’t follow a quarter-section line, either. The road runs along the southern boundary of what had once been Musquabuck’s Reserve. (Here is a link to the 1832 treaty that created the reserve.) If memory serves, the photo was taken along the part of the road in Section of 14 in Plain Township, shown on the map below — right about where the “14″ is printed.

The base map is from an 1879 atlas of Koskiusko. The image is provided by www.historicmapworks.com. You can click on the map to go to the page containing the original image.

I had started the day’s ride at Middlebury, and reached this part of Koskiusko County late in the afternoon. The route for a latter part of the day’s ride is shown in green.

One destination was the historic Pound Store in Oswego. It was built in 1838, shortly after Musquabuck was induced to give up his four-section reservation. An article in Koskiusko County Historical Bulletin from 1972 contains some reminiscences about it.

I have been interested in a store that predated this building. The 1887 county history says, “”Henry Ossem made his headquarters at the Indian village located on the present site of Oswego and it is said accompanied the Indians to the West.”

Henry Ossem is a name that appears on a number of Indian treaties, as an interpreter. He was also one who submitted claims to the government for debts owed him by the Indians.

Whether his trading post was on this exact spot I don’t know. But Oswego is not a large place. It would have been nearby.

Whether he really went west when the Potawatomi were evicted from Indiana, I don’t know. It sounds as though he may have been angling to get a reserve of his own in 1836 when Musquabuck and other leaders had to give up their reserves and prepare for eviction from the state. (Tipton papers, volume 3, page 534). It may have been the site of Otsego Oswego that he wanted. He didn’t succeed in getting it.

The Michigan State Archives have some information about his trading activities. He got a two-year license to trade from John Hays, Indian Agent at Fort Wayne, on 17-Jul-1822. This license was for trading on the Wabash River. This license allowed him to trade at Fort Wayne and on the Wabash River. He was forbidden from attending Indian Councils or doing whisky trading. Indians who caught him breaking the agreement could take his goods. He was not to say things that would prejudice the Indians against the United States.

On August 19, 1823, he got a license from William Woodbridge, acting Governor of Michigan in Lewis Cass’s absence, permitting him to trade with the Indians at Waw-pe-kan-a-kee on the Tippecanoe River. I presume that is the place now known as Oswego.

There is also a four-page invoice for goods he purchased to trade with the Indians here. Here is a non-random sample:

• 2 dozen playing cards

• 1/2 dozen scissors

• 1 1/2 lb vermillion

• 1 tent

• 1 keg powder 50 lb.

• 94 lbs tobacco

• 9 prs(?) 3-point blankets

• 17 of 2 1/2-point blankets

• 5 of 2-point blankets

• 2 dozen scalping knives

• 2 dozen cartouch knives

• 127 lbs bar lead

There are also a number of fabric items, but I’m having a little trouble reading the handwriting on those.

This part of Koskiusko County is one of my favorite destinations. It’s an area I’ve come back to several times. I like to think about Henry Ossem’s trading activities each time I ride through here.