| Rinnah Wells Sr. |
| " There was a tract owned by Rinnah Wells. The two-story house of concrete blocks along the street car line is in the N.W. corner of that land. In the Black Hawk war Wells had this sown to wheat, and the soldiers were coming from Rock Island toward the Watch Tower. They were riding three or four abreast but when they came to this wheat field the officer had them double so there were six or eight abreast and they crossed from the N.W. corner to the S.W. corner of the field, it was just before the wheat was ready to harvest. The question was why they done it. It looked as though they wanted to destroy it. Rinnah Wells didn't get along very well with the Indians, but why the soldiers should want to destroy his wheat, and he was a Black Hawk was soldier himself. Ben Goble told me this. " Also, why shouldn't them soldiers have shown a little more respect for the settlers. The Indians' trail went nearly from the Watch Tower point and on through where Well's fieldwas, but after Wells took the land the Indians started a new trail, but the soldiers crossed through the wheat. "The matter of how do we know? How could we locate Vandruff's ferry--John Spencer was a partner with Vandruff once. As for that ferry, Ben Goble showed me, and his wife who was one of the Vandruff daughters ahowed me and my wife the location of the old ferry and the old Vandruff residence. Mrs. Goble was born there. This is the house where Black Hawk spilled out the whiskey. Ben Goble told me about the whiskey incident. "The oldest son, Henry Vandruff, and John Vandruff, Henry died a bachelor, but John raised a family, both died in Kansas. John lived a neighbor to me when we came here in 1867. He lived in Lowell where we took the picture of the cut stone which had been taken from the old 1837 canal (we took the picture, it show a girls sitting on the steps of the house). We moved on to Vandruff's Island on the 1st of May, 1867. I lived in the old Kalbaugh house. Father at that time built the house on top of the Watch Tower hill where Steveson, the manager of the Inn, now lives. Henry and John Vandruff gave me the location of Joshua Vandruff's cabin and ferry and the Rinnah Wells ferry. "The Vandruff's were frontier people, very sociable, always ready to accept favors, not very ambitious. I was liberal to them. They showed me all around, kind of boylike: our natures are not all alike, some take interest in old history and relics, and some take no interest in them. Those people were interested. Ben Goble was very fond of my father. He thought there was no one so great as my father and he couldn't do enough for him, and he (Ben) assisted father all he could and he went around with me and told me the things that had happened, etc., and in this way I leared the history. " At this time the Council Lodge mound was higher. To have a person say to you, 'Now here's the site of the Council Lodge. It looks like a little potato heap'. Then it was a nice big knoll. Well, now, I never heard anybody suggest that it was originally a mound builder's mound. "We were led to belive the Looney mounds were of mound builders' make - not our Indians. There's another question in regard to that pottery. Take vessels like that pitcher, plowing the land at first I used to find pieces one-third as large as that pitcher. The question was, did our North American Indians make pottery? I've heard historians say our Indians never made pottery. "Nearly all our squaw corn was calicoed, almost always three colored. They had a certain time when all of them picked their corn together, not each one going to suit himself. "Have you read Mrs. Julia Mills Dunn's history of early Moline? She made lots of errors. There are lots of interesting features that were neglected. If you get early Moline and don't get D.B.Sears in it you haven't got it. He's in it (industrially, commercially, etc.) from the time he got there until he left, in all of it. |
| This story is by David Sears, at his residence in Sears, Nov 5, 1917 |
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| More to come on Rinnah Wells, and his family SOON. |