INTRODUCTION The Princeton University Press offers a worthy contribution to the centennial celebration of Indiana's admission to statehood by issuing a Centennial Edition of the "New Purchase" by Baynard R. Hall. This work has been pronounced "one of the best books ever written concerning life in the West." Its reproduction will be appreciated by all who are interested in western history. It makes available a handsome reprint of a volume long since out of print, the original edition being now very difficult to find and expensive to buy. This reprint contains the original copy without modification or expurgation. There is certainly no more valuable book on early Indiana. Judge D. D. Banta, himself very thoroughly informed on early Indiana life, has called it "the best and truest history of pioneer life and pioneer surroundings in Indiana that can anywhere be found. Hall evidently entered with zest into the life and scenes about him, and he writes graphically of all he sees and hears." It is my privilege in this Introduction to speak of the man and his workthe man who has realized his youthful ambition to be enrolled among the earliest literary pioneers of the romantic west and the book which has long since been recognized of such acknowledged excellence and historic value. In 1818 the United States Government obtained by treaty with several tribes of Indians what is known in the history of the Middle West as the "New Purchase". In that year Governor Jennings, of Indiana, Benjamin Parke, then Federal Judge for the District of Indiana, and General Lewis Cass, Territorial Governor of Michigan, acting as a commission of the Federal Government, met the representatives of the Indian tribes at St. Marys, Ohio. The Weas, the Kickpoos, the Pottawattomies and the Miamis were there in the persons of their chieftains and their spokesmen. The Pale Face Commission succeeded in purchasing nearly all the land east and south of the Wabash not previously relinquished by the Indians. This new acquisi, tion may be described as the tract of land bounded on the north and west by the Wabash river, on the south and west by what is known as the "ten o'clock line",-a line going in the direction a shadow would fall at ten o'clock forenoon, running from a point in Jackson County, Indiana, to a point on the Wabash in Vermillion county. The eastern line of the Purchase was the uneven boundary line of the counties already formed in the State in the White Water region. The Delawares agreed to take a grant of land west of the Mississippi, and the other tribes, all having claims to the ceded territory, agreed to withdraw to the north of the Wabash, The Delawares were to have three years in which to gather up their property and leave the State. "In the fall of 1820 the remnants of this once powerful tribe whose ancestors had received Henry Hudson (1610) took up their western march, the disheartened train passing through Koskaskia about the middle of October." Thirty-seven new counties were made, in whole or in part, from the lands embraced in the New Purchase. As the Indians. went out the pioneer settlers came in. When the Indian titles were extinguished and the new lands were opened to settlement the immigrant tide of humanity began to pour in. The Government land was offered at $2.00 an acre. It was lowered to $1.25 an acre after 1820 which proved to be quite a step for the encouragement of western settlement. The preemption system had been put into operation in 1801, by which a settler who could not pay cash for his land might "preempt" it and pay for it by installments after he had settled on it and begun to work it. The homestead policy, instituted later, was even more liberal to the home-seeker, but the fact that one could preempt good, cheap land and have a chance to own it in fee simple brought many enterprising and hopeful men to a region which was heralded in the East as an Eldorado of rich and productive lands. Some shiftless and worthless "movers" and "squatters" came; many came who had not much of worldly goods; and some came who had once lived a favored life under Fortune's smile but who had lost their all in the contraction and hard 1 Esarey, History of Indiana, p. 229. times following the war of 1812. Among the latter were the Halls and their relatives. (See p. 56). There were others like them, cultivated people, some imbued with the missionary spirit, some moved by spirit of adventure, and some endowed with a fair amount of worldly goods, who, while seeking new homes and better fortunes for themselves in a new country, were capable and desirous of helping to build the new commonwealths for the American Union in the promising west. True, most of these western settlers were poor, and most of them were ignorant; but most of them, also, were men and women of the fundamental virtues, courage, honesty, hospitality, and of self-reliant manly independence. Hall was sensitive to these noble qualities, and he was unstinted in his tribute in honor of the backwoodsmen, "the open-hearted native-born westerner." "Ay, the native Corncracker, Hoosier or Buckeye, and all men and women born in a cane-brake and rocked in a sugar trough,all born to follow a trail and cock an old fashioned lock rifle,—all such are open-hearted, fearless, generous, chivalric!" (p. 369). When Hall came into the midst of this backwoods life, Indiana was but a little over four years old. It had a population of about 150,000 souls, by far the greater number of these being below the Old National Road. The greater part of Hall's life in Indiana was to be given to education, and in that noble service he was certainly one of the earliest of our pioneers. In 1820, two or three years before he came, the Legislature at Corydon created what was named in the act as "The Indiana Seminary." This in 1828 became the "Indiana College" and in 1838 the "Indiana University", by legal title. The Constitution of 1816 had decreed that the State should provide, as soon as circumstances should permit, "for a general system of education ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a State University, wherein tuition should be gratis and equally open to all." The act creating the "Seminary" in 1820 was saved in the State Senate only by the casting vote of the Lieutenant Governor Ratliff Boon and it was signed by the first Governor of the State, Jonathan Jennings. Six Trustees were appointed and they selected a site for the Seminary, a quarter of a mile due south of the little village of Bloomington, then but a clearing in the woods only two years old. Log cabins, whether of hewed logs or round, could be put up in short order by the pioneers of the early days, but it was more than three full years before there could be completed the two small brick buildings with which the "Seminary" began,one a house for a professor at a cost of $891, the other the Seminary building itself, at the elaborate cost of $2400! This old State Seminary opened its doors for students in May 1824. In the fall of 1823, as the buildings were nearing completion, the first professor was elected. This was the author of our book and the hero of our story. It was altogether likely that it was the prospect of this new State Seminary that had influenced Hall to come to the New Purchase. There was an advantage of being at hand when a new teacher was needed. Mrs. Hall's mother was living with her son, John M. Young, near Gosport. Besides these relatives, Hall had another brother-in-law living near Bloomington, and serving the various settlements round about as a missionary. This was Rev. Isaac Reed, one of the early pioneer Presbyterian ministers of Indiana. Dr. Maxwell, one of the founders and a devoted friend of the Seminary and the President of its Board of Trustees, was also an ardent Presbyterian. Reed recommended Hall to Maxwell, and these connections may fairly account for Hall's election as the first professor of the Seminary. Presbyterian ministers were likely to be educated men even in those days and there were not many men in the Indiana woods so well educated as to be deemed qualified for a professorship. For a Princeton man to be on the ground was, indeed, a decided advantage. So when the time came for the opening, Hall was here ready to be placed in charge. Baynard Rush Hall was born in Philadelphia in 1793. He died in Brooklyn, N. Y. in 1863. In his childhood he was left an orphan and he had to hew out his own way in the world with what assistance could be afforded him by friends and distant relatives. He became a type-setter in his youth and worked at the printer's trade. He was one of "the boys of ink and long primer," working at the printer's desk, still in his teens, |