The History of Peru

by Henry S. Beebe

The writer indulges in the hope that he will be pardoned for the following digression, which, though forming no part of the "History of Peru," is so connected with it as to induce the belief that it will be not altogether uninteresting to its citizens, or to the general reader into whose hands this little book may fall. The present residents, as they turn their eyes over the beautiful State they inhabit, and behold it dotted with towns, cities, and cultivated farms, where the presence of its original inhabitants is as rare as in Europe, where churches, schools and libraries are strewn broadcast over the land, where the arts, embellishments and accessories of high civilization are everywhere present and pervading, and where rail road and telegraph lines intersect in every direction, may find it pleasant, for a few moments, to drop the present and turn their thoughts to the remote past, and briefly follow up the chain of events, in chronological order, to the period which immediately preceded the settlement of the town. A brief notice of events which occurred in the neighborhood, of the surrounding localities, and of the individuals who inhabited them, whose characters were marked with strong and original peculiarities, may also not be uninteresting.

Looking backwards three years before the commencement of this History—twenty-five years ago—we behold the site of Peru occupied as an Indian village. The very spot where is now the residence of the writer is said to have been an Indian burying ground. Northward, the nearest residence of the white man was at Dixon's Ferry, and westward, at Princeton, excepting, perhaps, the Hoskins family near the Bureau. South of the river were some settlements. Along the timber towards Hennepin lived George Ish and Henry Delong; at Cedar Point, Nathaniel Richie; on the bluff, near the old Fort, John Myers; at Bailey's Point, Lewis Bailey, William Seeley, William Groom, Joel Alvord, Asa Holdridge, William Haws, and perhaps a few others; at or near Hennepin, the Willises, Stewarts, Thompsons, Durleys, Donlevys, Shepperds, Zenors and Dents; at Utica, Simon Crosiar; at Ottawa, the Walkers, Browns, Covills, &c.; at Dayton, John Green and William L. Dunnavan; at Indian Creek, the Halls, Davises and Petegrus; and further eastward, the Hollenbecks and Holdermans. At Bloomington, seventy miles distant, was the nearest mill, and thither all the people went to get their corn and wheat ground, until Green built one at Dayton, in 1833 or 1834. As late as 1837, as related by Mrs. Lockwood who then lived with her father, Isaac Manville, at Manville Hollow, in Cedar Creek bottom, two miles south of Peru, when a new mill was erected and it was announced that bolted flour could be obtained on a certain day, the people flocked around it in crowds; and so eager were they to enjoy that luxury, that they employed Mr. Manville's family to bake cakes for them, keeping them thus engaged nearly the whole night, and standing around the kitchen fire—it is not to be supposed that the other apartments were very spacious or numerous—with watering mouths and excited palates, ready to appropriate the delicious pasty, as it came smoking from the pans. Mrs. Lockwood says she was nearly exhausted, and thought the people never would get enough. The frame of this mill was afterwards removed to Peru where it was set up, and is now occupied by Capt. Lewis Goodell as a livery stable. We will now turn our attention nearly two centuries backwards.

The word, Illinois, is a French corruption of Leno. The Indians told the early French settlers that they were Leno-Lenapes—we are men—meaning, we are brave or masculine men, in contradistinction to cowardly or effeminate men. To an imperfect pronunciation of the first word, the French added the termination peculiar to their own language—hence Lenois, and ultimately, by a further corruption, Illinois.

It has been often remarked that the topography and climate of Illinois bear a strong analogy to those of some portions of France. In its primeval condition, there was, in its landscape and atmosphere, the spirit of gay and joyous life, and of soft and luxurious repose which distinguish the Gallic Empire. The broad plains were free from the enervating influence of the Tropics, on the one hand, or the stern and rugged landscape features which nurse the restless Norseman, on the other. These may have been among the reasons which tempted the Frenchman, after their existence had been made known by the explorations of his countrymen, to take up his abode along the streams and groves which diversify them. At any rate, French settlements were made immediately in the footsteps of Marquette, La Salle, La Hontag and other explorers, who carried the Holy Cross of the Church and the Fleurs de Lis of France into these wilds, as early as the reign of the Grande Monarque, Louis XIV. in the latter part of the seventeenth century.—Settlements were made at Peoria, Kaskaskia and Cohokia, to which were transferred the arts, customs, manners, faith and costumes of France, at the period, and where they flourished and were conserved, with very little innovation, until the approach of the American Goth—the rude and semi barbaric pioneer. Little jealousy and few feuds appear to have existed between these intruders and the tawny children of the forest and prairie, by whom they were surrounded, and upon whose hunting grounds they were trespassing. The imposing ceremonies of the Catholic faith, and the simple, frank and conciliatory manners of the strangers charmed the senses and soothed the passions of these children of nature. The French rule in America was, in the main, marked by the absence of those terrible and prolonged conflicts which almost always accompanied Anglo Saxon settlement, in which the amenities of civilized, or even barbaric warfare, were entirely ignored, and each party strove to out do the other in acts of revolting atrocity. The stern, cold hauteur, the rude, coarse insolence, and the grasping, insatiable cupidity of the latter inevitably aroused every demon in the Indian breast. The English colonists knew no arts of Indian conciliation. Their tactics were limited to fire water in advance, and the sword in reserve to avenge the acts of madness excited thereby. The race has not degenerated at all, in these respects, since the marauding Saxon scourged the Baltic shores of Britain. In support of this, witness the efforts of England to force an interdicted and demoralizing commerce upon the passive Chinese; witness her success in saddling the spawn of her aristocracy upon the necks of the subjugated Hindoo and Sepoy, compelling the worshippers of both Vishnu, and Mahomet to bow before crosier and mitre; witness the long and cruel oppression of her Celtic neighbors; witness how we, shoots from the same scion, have carried the bible in our hand and the whisky bottle in the other, while in the rear came the rifle of the backwoodsman to enforce all arguments with the untutored savages; witness how volunteers have rallied around the stars and stripes, and pushed the original possessors of the soil backwards, ever backwards, until a new wave comes rolling from the Pacific coast upon his rear; witness the cruel and inglorious wars—if by that name they may be dignified—in Florida and Oregon, excited by mercenary and unscrupulous jobbers for the sake of a chance of plunder from the National treasury; witness the bullying of and final conflict with the mongrel races of poor, decrepit, imbecile Mexico, whereby the auriferous valleys of California and the sterile wastes of New Mexico were wrested from her nerveless grasp; witness the filibustering forays in Central America; and witness the undisguised lusting after the Gem of the Antilles, and the unblushing announcement made at Ostend, by dignified statesmen, claiming, in the nineteenth century, to be Christians, and representing, not cannibal savages or outlawed pirates, but a people who profess to acknowledge the divine injunction, "do unto others as you would that they should do unto you," and to believe that the command, "thou shalt not steal," is as imperative now as it was in the days of the great Jewish law giver.

But to return to the Acadian settlements of the French in Illinois. The manners and customs of the seventeenth century, as before mentioned, were cherished and conserved by these communities, isolated as they were in the heart of a wilderness continent, until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Passing from French to English rule by the treaty of 1763, they finally came under the jurisdiction of the American Confederation by the treaty of 1783. After the treaty of Ghent in 1814 the restless American pioneer began to make encroachments. The contrast between these two representatives of their respective races, thus meeting face to face in the wilderness, was even more marked and decided than between the same races, separated by the English Channel. The Frenchman represented a by-gone age, softened and subdued by the influences of more than a century's sojourn, in aggregated communities, among the quiet, sylvan glades of le belle terre. The American, originally imbued with the heartless and licentious voluptuousness of the Cavaliers of the times of Charles II. or the morose, ascetic manners of the Commonwealth, was in either case, transformed and remoulded, but with many of his original characteristics yet clinging to him, by more than a century's residence upon a wilderness frontier, where "no pent up Utica confined his powers," where the most unbounded freedom of thought and action were enjoyed, where the wants of nature and the requirements of taste were gratified in the rudest, simplest and most primeval manner, and where, surrounded by the stern and gloomy grandeur of forest life, continual conflict with savages and wild beasts had produced characteristics which, transmitted from one generation to another, had culminated in a character original, unique and interesting. The salient points which distinguished him were unhesitating self reliance; reckless and chivalrous daring; imperious and resistless will; cool and imperturbable self possession; spasmodic and startling energy, contrasted with intermittent, if not habitual indolence; strong, masculine sense, undiluted with any poetry, sentiment or superstition; scorning wilds and strategy, but always prepared to circumvent and baffle them; hospitable to friend or stranger, and ever ready to share his wolf or bear skin, his hog and hominy, his tobacco and whisky, with all comers; to his enemies bold and defiant, but generous and forgiving; to his friends faithful and true, deeming desertion of their fortunes, in trouble or danger, the most aggravated of delinquencies; possessed of physical powers of endurance which mocked privation and fatigue; eye, nerve and brain steady and true in all emergencies; migratory in his habits as a Bedouin Arab; ready, at all times, to drink or fight, run or wrestle; unlettered and untutored as the savage who had been his companion or his foe; and uncouth and repulsive in action, manners and habits as the bear with which he had coped in a hand to paw and knife to fangs conflict.

Thus were the offshoots of the two greatest and most cultivated and refined of modern nations, vis-a-vis, in the heart of the American continent. Soon the song of the voyageur,

"Such as at home, in the olden time, his fathers before him
Sang in their Norman orchards and bright Burgundian vineyards,"

as he floated with the stream, or propelled his batteaux against the current, with pole, and line, and oar, and sail, was hushed forever. Soon the panting of the steamer awoke the long silent echos of the bluffs and startled the aquatic fowl from lagoon and bayou. Soon the swelling tide of a more advanced civilization rolled westward over the prairies, and the "common" of the rustic village, upon whose verdant sward and beneath whose branching elms, enamoured swains and blushing maidens,

"Wearing their Norman caps, and their kirtles of blue, and the ear rings
Brought in the olden time from France, and since, as an heirloom,
Handed down from mother to child, through long generations,"

had been wont to "trip the light fantastic toe" to rude and simple music, was illumined with the camp fires and whitened with the wagon covers of the Saxon emigrant. Soon the alloted arpents which, in the exercise of "squatter sovereignty," had been appropriated by each family as a home lot, were surveyed, divided, staked and sold, and an embryo city was rising thereon. Soon the quaint and moss covered church, where Vesper, Matin and Mass had erst been said, chanted and sung, gave place to the "meeting house" of another creed and faith.