The Troutman Saga

Chapter XX

In the very earliest years of our country, a company of German immigrants set out from the eastern seaboard in a wagon train to establish their homes in Maryland.  The train was attacked by Indians and all were massacred except a boy of 12 by the name of Troutman and his older sister.  They had hidden among the bundles and trunks in their wagon.  The Indians found them and held them in captivity.  This story has been handed down from father to son and much of it is recorded in the Memorial and Historical Record of Iowa, published in 1898 by the Lewis Publishing Company of Chicago.  Further facts were given to this writer from personal records in the family by Lou Troutman of Chariton.

The girl is said to have married an Indian Chief and spent her life with them.  The boy was with the Indians two years, setting himself diligently to learn their wiles, their subtleties and tricks, the furtive eye and the stealthy tread, while at the same time watching his chance to escape.  One day he went out to pick huckleberries with two of the Indian bucks.  He worked his way around the patch of trees and bushes until he was within reach of their tomahawk and Bowie knife, which they had laid down.  He picked up the tomahawk and ran as fast as he could, jumping into the river, which was at flood, out of banks, and about a quarter of a mile wide.  They heard him running.  They grabbed the Bowie knife and took after him.  The one with the knife was gaining on him in the river.  He turned and dealt a telling blow with the tomahawk on the head of his pursuer.  The other one, having nothing to fight with, turned back.

The boy, knowing that the word would soon spread and they would be after him, ran all the rest of the day, wading small streams, climbing the banks and taking the rock ledges, careful to leave no trace or sign of his getaway, just as he had learned from his captors.  He traveled for days by night, hiding out in the daytime and finally came upon an army post.  The officers set out at once to rescue the girl but the Indians denied any knowledge of her.  The soldiers searched he camp but the girl was never found.  The tomahawk has been handed down through the Troutman family and is now in the Lucas County Museum.

At least one descendant of this boy was born in Maryland and lived to age 101.  A later descendant migrated to Pennsylvania where he married Hannah McClellan, daughter of Andrew McClellan, an officer in the War of 1812.  Her grandfather was an officer in the Revolutionary War.  The family moved to Ohio where they lived some 13 years, then moved to Iowa and lived for a time in Ft. Madison.  The father made the acquaintance of the warden there who gave him the broad ax that was used in building the old log prison there.  This broad ax is now in the Lucas County Museum, given with the afore-mentioned tomahawk by Mr. Lou Troutman.

The family moved to Union Township, Lucas County in 1849.  It was the custom in that day for all older boys to work out as farm hands and help their families financially.  Andrew McClellan Troutman in early life showed a deep interest in adventure.  He was industrious.  He owned a horse and a saddle.  One morning as he was riding in the Goshen area, the limitless, untrammeled serenity about him seized him with the impulse to yell for an echo.  "Hi there!" came at the top of his voice.  He got a double echo! – one from the Chariton River valley, the other from Whitebreast.  That day or shortly after he met up with a wagon train headed for California.  The rule was that anyone joining the train must be 21 and must share guard duty at night for they had heard that the Indians were on the warpath all across Nebraska.  Andrew wanted to join but he had only $3.60 in his pocket.  Said the wagon master "That's more than most of us have!"  This was on the Goshen road, a favorite trail for the wagon trains because it followed the ridge.  It was here that some years before, Lafayette Sherwood had been killed by an ox team and whose grave was the first in Last Chance Cemetery.

Reaching California, Andrew worked as a stone mason until he heard about the cordwood cutting in Virginia City, Nevada.  He went there and made $8 a day cutting pitch pine cordwood for the quartz mines.  He stayed in the far west a few years and netted $1,800 in gold with which he returned to Iowa, coming all the way around by water except the Isthmus of Panama, where the crossing was on land as the canal had not been built.  He returned to Union Township where he bought 80 acres of land and married Martha Westfall, daughter of Granville Westfall, a Virginian and one of the early pioneers of Iowa.  He continued to buy land until he finally owned 777.77 acres all in Union Township.  He loved to hunt, fish and trap.  He moved off of his prairie home to a location in a piece of timber-land that he owned because he loved the woods and streams.  One day, while hunting, he came upon an 80-acre tract, which joined his and had three acres of hickory trees suitable for hoop poles.  He bought the 80 to get the three acres of poles.  He hauled them home on a pin sled, split and shaved them and cut into eight and ten foot lengths suitable for keg and barrel hoops and shipped a carload out of Lucas to a barrel manufacturer.  The money from the poles paid for the 80.  He had 103 colonies of bees and at one time he, with a neighbor, one Jim Spencer, shipped a carload of section honey out of Lucas.

The barn on his farm is worthy of mention.  It was 36 x 60 feet with an eight-foot basement built entirely of one rock – a red granite boulder, which, when broken by heat from burning driftwood, yielded enough to build a whole wall 18 inches thick.  Another feature on another Troutman farm was an enormous oak tree, four feet and one inch in diameter, for which one of Lou Troutman's brothers traded a fine cow.  The tree was quartered at the saw mill – a tricky job – and it yielded 2880 board feet of two-inch lumber – enough for the floor of the barn 36 x 40.

Tuberculosis was one of the fearful scourges among both children and adults in that day.  In the Troutman lot at Last Chance, as in so many family lots in all early cemeteries, the numerous monuments and head stones attest sorrowfully to the long distance to be covered by medical science on behalf of persons afflicted with these dreadful diseases.  The age of preventive medicine and treatment was still beyond the horizon.  Happily, much of the distance has now been covered and the Angel of Death has changed his busiest workshop from homes to modern highway and air lanes.

Pages 82-84