Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1897 — Those Merry Aguey Days of Yore. [ARTICLE]

Those Merry Aguey Days of Yore.

Ye Old Timer John E. Alter’s Old Settlers’ Day Address. Ladies and gentlemen, Old Fellow Settlers: Kind friends and relatives, I come before you today, not to plead any merits, morals or innocence of my own, noi to tell you something yon don’t know. But to stand by you in whatever you tell to the growing generation—about the old time history of Jasper County. lam a Hoosier by birth, blood relationship and nationality. 44 years ago last Ground hog day, in a little hut on the reedy banks of the rushy Pinkamink, like Moses and Aaron I was born among the bullrushes, a simple child, —but not as simple as I have been several times since. That hut is standing today, and is just the same to me as that little old hut on the Avon River in Stratford, is to Shakespeare. Its my birth place and you can’t help it, and so do I. The first two years of my life were spent in crying and bawling. I had help in these little songs, for the wilderness abounded in whippoorwills, owls, wolves and. bull frogs. The Old Haddix marsh was then one vast morass of swampy quagmire, covered with wild rice, wild cane, blue flag, calamus, bullrushes, cattails andw muck. Wriggling snakes crawled in every direction all over each other. Big snapping turtles paddled theiVway through the mud, looking so/ a soft snap. Little frogs and big frogs hopped and hollowed, both day and night, of every color in tire rainbow and of all sizes, that a frog can grow; we used to eat them, frogs and snapping turtles, and it is nobody’s business either. Well then the prairie wolves, say: one wolf sounds like 4 and I could put ten thousand to flight. I like to hear wolves a-singing, when there ’aint no moon. It makes one feel so solemncolly and good. People nowdays call prairie wolves cow yokes. The hollow black oak trees on them sand ridges had wild bees and honey. You watch the bee when he is getting juice out of the posies; he gets k his craw full: and then circles round and then makes a straight line for his nest and you go straight after him. Then you cut the tree down with an ax and chop a hole in and out comes about a million mad bees. Each one has

a stinger full of stings and they fast fall ou you in clouds and sting you about 100 times, in the face as soon as any other place. Then you take out a little honey, some bee bread and young bees, and eat them up, and go home with both eyes swelled up, and tell your neighbors what a big lie you found out on black oak ridge, with 6 wooden buckets full of honey in it. Five years of my life were spent in the rock ribbed hills of Wisconsin, along the Bluffs of the Mississippi River among the rattlesnake caves with yellow spots and big rattles on and badger dens way back in the rocks. Then we came back to the troubled waters of the Iroquois and spent half a life time eating cucumbers, yankee pumpkins, musk melons and quinine and shaking with the ague. But we had no doctors much to bother with and soon got well. We husked corn and pumpkins and beans and turnip, had corn pone and roasting’ears for dinner and mush and milk for supper, ..after supper we went over to a neighbors and stayed till bed time, and went home happy because we didn’t say anything mean about eomebodyjelse’s folks. On every Saturday night we all got together by the biggest log cabin in the

woods and got a fidler and a lot of girls, boys, and old people, and had a regular break down, Cotillins, french four, double shuffles etc. On other nights we had apple corn husking, pumpkin peelings etc. In day time we had log rollings, huskings bees, house raisings, wood choppings, foot races, wrestling matches and swimming bees. Alas all these things have changed. Everything is made more convenient but not half so handy. We have more sociables, but they are not half so sociable. We have more benevolent institutions and but little benevolence. We have donations, but little generosity. The improvements are good but the habits are bad. There is more money but less means. More people but not so many friends.

BILL BAT.