Wells County, Indiana
From Black Hawk Slept Here
Early settlement
Wells county and its twin, Adams County, lie just south of Allen County, which is dominated by the city of Fort Wayne. Wells and Adams are of nearly identical shape and latitude. Adams, adjacent to Wells on its east, can be thought of as a county of the St. Mary's River, and Wells as a county of the Wabash River.
The two rivers lie close together year, but flow to very different destinations. St. Mary's flows eventually into the Great Lakes and the Atlantic ocean, while the Wabash is part of the Mississippi drainage basin, with its waters flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.
A continental divide separates the two drainage basins, not that this divide is the boundary between the counties. Wells doesn't lie completely in the Wabash drainage, nor does Adams coincide with the St. Mary's. The counties are rectangular in shape, oriented according to the points of the compass, like much of the new organization that was imposed on the terrain by the coming of the United States to the Old Northwest.
The continental divide isn't a physical barrier like a mountain range. A modern traveler can hardly tell where it is without the help of signs to point it out. But in the early 19th century it was difficult to travel from the Wabash River to Fort Wayne at the mouth of the St. Mary's. A county history writer of the late 19th century pointed out that for people living along the Wabash in Wells County, it was easier to travel south to Cincinnati, a distance of about 125 miles, than to travel the 25 miles across marshy land to Fort Wayne.
The St. Mary's drainage had once been part of Lake Erie, when the level of that lake had been higher. When the first European-American settlers came, it was still wet and marshy, and formed a formidable barrier to travel. In the mid(?) 19th century, agriculturalists started digging drainage ditches to make it possible to farm the land.
But at the time of the Black Hawk war, this process had not yet begun. The first settlement was near the river, near the present-day community of Murray.
Some questions to which I don't yet know the answers:
- Was the land along the Wabash a transportation corridor before the 19th century settlers came?
- The land southwest of the Wabash is very flat, too. Was it also swampland that was drained in the 19th century?
- Why the site Murray rather than Bluffton?
