Part two of a series
Samuel McPhail, the founder of Caledonia, and a couple of other early 1850s pioneers, while heading to Crooked Creek for water, noticed a large, yellow dog perched near a clump of trees on a hillside of a rocky ridge. They recognized the canine as belonging to a man who had been searching the area for land a few days previous. His owner was likely nearby. While hauling water on the way back, they saw the dog was still there. Surmising the dog might be watching some game, one man or two went up to see what the pooch might have.
They were surprised to discover, mostly hidden by some brush and trees, what appeared to be the entrance to a cave. Going in as far as they could without a light, they found nothing but supposed some game was hiding from the dog. They descended and again headed for home but could not cajole the dog to abandon his post and come with them.
Discussing that situation later that night, the men conjectured the owner of the dog might have entered the cave and met some misfortune. So, the following morning, several men returned to investigate further and found the dog still stationed at the cave entrance. This time, they brought a candle to make a more thorough search but still found no trace of the dog’s master. Had he entered and exited the cave while the dog was away or distracted? Or did the man crawl into some passageway that became blocked or buried by falling rock? T. R. Stewart, who was a boy at that time, later visited that cave many times and believed either of those theories could have actually occurred.
The dog was removed by force and was adopted by a new master. The fate of his previous owner remained an unsolved mystery among the earliest white settlers in what became Houston County. Stewart pondered, “Some eastern family may still be mourning the loss of an absent loved one.”
Due to the presence of many bats, the site was long known as “Bat Cave.” Stewart described it being about “600 feet long, and at the end the outlet is blocked by a stream of running water through a narrow crevice in the rocks. This crevice becomes so narrow that one can go no further.”
Stewart had come west as an 11-year-old boy with his parents and siblings from Massachusetts to the wilderness of Minnesota in 1853, five years before statehood. The family was one of only a half-dozen to spend the winter of 1853-54 in the new settlement that would become Caledonia. A half-century later, he wrote about those early years, including the mystery of Bat Cave.
The Stewart family’s six-day trip west to the Mississippi River began by wagon in the valley of the Connecticut River and then a train ride from Massachusetts to Buffalo, N. Y., where they embarked on a stormy, steamboat passage across Lake Erie to Detroit, Mich. Then it was back on a train to Chicago and then to Freeport, Ill., which was then as far west as train traffic was possible. A stagecoach carried them to Galena, Ill., on the Mississippi River where they boarded a steamboat. “I remember quite a large fort at Prairie du Chien,” said Stewart, “which reminded us that we were nearing the frontier.”
As with many of those pioneers, Minnesota was first viewed by boat on the Mississippi River while approaching from the south the village of Brownsville, which was also known as Wild Cat Landing. (A large stuffed wildcat had been placed on a pole at the landing.) Just before the Stewart family landed, they passed a steamboat that towed a flatboat containing what young Stewart called “a camp of Indians, the first we had seen. One of these was the famous old chief Waukon, who was said to be 104 years old. He stood as straight as any young man could. His hair was long and white as snow,” recalled Stewart some 50 years after the fact. “Somehow, I can remember just how he looked as though it had been yesterday, very tall and straight, and as our boat was passing, he looked up at us, and there seemed to be such a sad look, it has come up before me in afteryears. And I have read in that sad face the thought therein expressed: “My people must give way before the whites; our lands must be their possessions.” I don’t know why, but that has always been my thoughts of the reflection of his face, not imagined and nurtured at the age of manhood, but from the very time I saw it as a boy.”
Brownsville consisted of four shanties built along the side of a hill, among trees and rocks, which Stewart described as “one of the most desolate and lonesome looking places that could be found on the entire river.” He thought to himself, “Could this be the Brownsville that we had been so anxious to reach?” And, “Was this Minnesota, the Eden of the West? Yes, there was no mistake; the (steamboat) captain sang out, ‘Brownsville.’ Our vision of Eden was quite suddenly changed. I don’t think a more disconsolate, disappointed set of immigrants ever landed on Minnesota, that got off that boat Sunday evening, September 11th, 1853.”
But the mood was quickly brightened by the warm reception they received. “The ladies were soon ushered into a hotel, so called, which consisted of a small story and half house, with a small lean-to added, which was a saloon.” The first man they met, Virginia-native James McCann, gave them a ”true Southern welcome, with a kindly shake of the hand and a kind word for each.”
With his oxen and wagon, he helped load their household goods and took them to a place for safe storage. “His kindness … extended to strangers in a strange land was never forgotten by us as a family.”
Source: The Memoirs of T. R. Stewart as published in Caledonia Pride 1854-2004
Leave a Reply