James Swan was an early Michigan pioneer to Ingham County and was a notable fiddler in the region, claiming to have “called off the first cotillion ever danced in Michigan west of Detroit.” James was born in New York State in 1824, subsequently immigrated to Michigan, and passed away in 1913.
The following text is taken from a printing of an Ingham County history which reprinted an article from the Ingham County News written by Roy W. Adams.
Pioneer history of Ingham County, compiled and arranged by Mrs. Franc L. Adams, secretary of the Ingham County pioneer and historical society.
Adams, Franc L., Mrs. comp.
Published by Lansing, Mich.,: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford company, 1923-
From the Ingham County News of March 18, 1909.
JAMES SWAN, AN INGHAM PIONEER.
Now In His 85th Year, Hale and Hearty, Had Many Interesting
Experiences in the Early Days of This County.
A remarkable old man is James Swan, of Ingham Township, four miles east of here, who claims the proud distinction of having called off the first cotillion ever danced in Michigan west of Detroit. He celebrated his 84th birthday on the 27th of last October, but his snow white hair and slightly bowed shoulders are the only signs that age has laid on him. He can dance as nimble as any youth in the country, and on a brisk cold winter day not long ago he led his son-in-law, John A. Davidson, with whom he lives, a merry ‘cross country chase on foot over twelve miles of rough country on a hunting expedition. And his hand has not lost its cunning with a fiddle. You have only to hear him play Money Musk, Speed the Plow, or Durang’s Hornpipe, and call off the figures of the Scotch Reel, Lady Washington, or Sicilian Circles to realize what he and his violin must have been to the pioneer settlers in a time when musicians were as scarce as are now the bears and wolves which were then the nightly visitors of the clearings.
Mr. Swan first came to Michigan from Orleans county, N. Y., his birthplace, when he was 16 years old. He came by boat to Detroit, and took the Michigan Central to Dexter, then the most important town in this part of the State. It was the only mill and market for Ingham county settlers, and he followed the thirty mile ox trail through the woods to his brother John’s clearing, close beside the farm which he himself now owns. Stretches of heavy timber alternated here with “oak openings,” rolling sandy country, from which the underbrush was burned off by yearly fires, leaving the great oaks standing with long vistas visible between them. Our York State lad compared the openings to great orchards. The Indians fired the brush each year so that they could better hunt the deer and other game which hid in the thickets. As soon as the settlers fenced the land the underbrush sprang up quickly, and there were no more “oak openings.”
Mr. Swan was here only six weeks this time, but performed a notable exploit. While ploughing for his brother one day he heard an unusual commotion on the other side of a long windrow of felled trees, and seizing some stones he climbed the windrow. A dog was holding a wounded deer by the haunch and he had heard its cry of distress. He struck the deer between the eyes with a stone, felling it to the ground, and after bleeding it returned to his work, expecting the dog’s owner to appear and claim the game. No one came, and after awhile he found the dog crouched on a log in the windrow watching the dead deer. His sister-in-law, Mrs. Harriet Swan, of Mason, then a girl of 17, helped him dress the deer and she collaborates the story. When they cut off the deer’s head the dog seized it and disappeared, and they never saw him again.
Mr. Swan and his brother Reuben returned to the home in New York that winter. They went on foot to Dexter and from there to Ypsilanti, following the Michigan Central. Here they stayed over night, and as they had plenty of gold bought a quantity of “wild-cat” paper money for considerably below par, as the railroad company had to accept it at its face value. The next morning at five o’clock they took the train, riding in a pelting snow storm on open flat cars loaded with flour. The engine frequently uncoupled and ran ahead to clear the snow off the track, and the two young men finally got off and walked to keep from freezing. The train passed them and refused to stop, though their passage was paid to Detroit, but they caught it on a siding and arrived in Detroit at noon. The old Commodore Perry eventually came in and they sailed to Buffalo. The trip took two days and nights and they arrived just before the great storm broke, in which nearly every vessel on the lake went down. During this storm a colored sailor swam nine miles to shore with his captain on his back, and they were the only survivors from the men on their boat.
At Buffalo the Swan boys took an Erie canal packet. After going a ways some of the crew tapped one of the kegs of brandy in the cargo. First they knocked a hoop loose, then bored a hole in the stave under it, and after drawing out a kettle full of brandy plugged the hole and drove the hoop back. The driver left his team on the tow-path and came abroad to get his share, and while running forward to throw potatoes at his horses and keel) them moving he stumbled and fell overboard. A deck hand ran to the rail with a pike pole. “Oh, Mike!” he called, ” aId can ye shwim?” “Sure,” sputtered Mike, “an’ I dunno yit.” Mike was hauled abroad, dripping, shivering and half strangled. “Let me git to thot brandy,” he begged, as he hovered over the cook’s fire, “I want the inside to be as wet as the outside.”
Eleven years passed before Mr. Swan came to Michigan to stay. In that time he made another short visit here and also sailed one season off the Atlantic coast mackerel fishing. On March 4, 1852, he was married to Miss Ann Francisco at Knowlesville, Orleans county, N. Y. He still preserves the marriage certificate, written out on a small sheet of fancy note paper and reading as follows:
Orleans County, New York, Town of Ridgeway, ss.
I do certify that on the 4th day of March, 1852, at the home of D James, in said town, James Swan and Ann Francisco were with their mutual consent lawfully joined together in matrimony, which was duly solemnized by me in the presence of Edward Bellows and Abigal Bellows, and I do further certify that I ascertained that they were of lawful age to contract the same.
Sands. Cole, J. P.
The witnesses did not sign the certificate. Mrs. Abigail Bellows, the bride’s sister, is now living in Lansing as Mrs. Anson Loomis.
The harbor was full of ice when Mr. and Mrs. Swan left Buffalo one night early in May of that year on a boat which they after ward learned had been condemned. They had gone only seven miles when morning came and so many floats were broken from the paddle wheels that the vessel only dared stop once at Erie before running straight to Detroit. They bought their furniture in Jackson where they found brother John with an ox-cart waiting to take them to the new home in Ingham county. Most of the furniture had to be left behind, and when they had settled in the log house on John’s farm and the first meal was on the table Mr. Swan sat on the churn and his wife on the bed. Soon, however, the rest of the furniture was brought from Jackson and in the fall they moved to the farm nearby, bought that summer of an insistent neighbor, where they lived together ever after until the death of Mrs. Swan. Mr. Swan still holds the old deed, dated August 2, 1852, and all his tax receipts. The tax that year on his 80 acres was $2.11; six years later it reached the low figure of $1.66. In 1860, on 116 acres, he was taxed $7.25 as compared with $53.57 for 1908.
The house was a comfortable dwelling with walls of solid logs, hewn smooth on the inside, and with the chinks “mudded up” to make them wind and weather proof. The only sawed lumber in the whole building was used in the door and window casings and these boards were sawed by hand by whip-sawyers. The floors were made of split basswood, puncheons; the same puncheons, hollowed down the middle, were laid concave side up for a roof, and others with the hollowed side down were laid over the joints and the chinks were filled with moss. A great fireplace nearly filled one end of the living room, and at one end of this swung the iron crane on which the pots and kettles were hung and then suspended over the fire.
One night that fall Mr. Swan was asked to bring his fiddle to a dance at Hunt’s tavern, two miles south of his farm. He went and then and there he says was danced the first cotillion ever called off in Michigan west of Detroit. He formed the young people on the floor and taught them cotillions, with their various figures and movements. “Country dances,” which were never “called off,” were all that had been known here, and the news went over the country that a man over in Ingham could fiddle cotillions and call them off. After that he and his fiddle were kept busy, and he played at dances far and near for three shillings and sixpense per couple. Many were the notable gatherings where he played, but the one which he remembers best is the great ball at Squire Linderman’s tavern in Mason, two blocks north of where the court house now stands. The big ball room was crowded, and as for refreshments, “Everything’s all right,” said the doorkeeper, “There’s a bottle in the bed room and a hog in the house. Soon there was not room for the dancers on the ball room floor, and an overflow meeting was started in the dining room of the other tavern, just south of the present court house square. Another fiddler was secured who could play country dances, and each couple, after dancing a cotillion in the big ball room, threaded their way up Main street in the dark, dodging the stumps and hollows, and sought the other tavern, where they stepped through the movements of the country dance until the arrival of more couples notified them that there was room on the floor at Squire Linderman’s. The sun was shining in at the windows when the dance ended, and the dancers, many of whom had come 20 miles or more through the forest on horseback or in ox-carts, went home. Members of Mr. Swan’s family played the organ, dulcimer, ‘cello and other instruments, and with this orchestra he held dances at his home, besides playing all over the country for many years, but with the introduction of modern two-steps and waltzes he quit in disgust. He calls them “baby dances,” and remains constant in his preference for the graceful figures and merry tunes of his younger days.
Mr. Swan tells interesting tales of hunting in the early days. While he was taking the honey from a bee tree he had cut in the forest back of his house one day a big buck came bounding past, and his dog caught the creature by the ear and dragged it down. It pushed the dog along on the ground, however, and Mr. Swan ran up with the ax to kill it before it should press the dog up against a tree or stump and impale him on its antlers. The dog lost its hold just as the man swung the ax, and the deer’s great horns swept up by his face. As he struck at its head the dog dragged the deer down again, and the ax was buried so deeply in the creature’s body behind the fore leg that the man could hardly pull it out. A second blow cut off one of the struggling animal’s hind legs, and then Mr. Swan, forcing his knee between the deer’s other limb and its body, so that it could not draw up and strike him with the terrible sharp hind hoof, cut its throat. He was dressing it when the dog gave warning again, and looking up, he saw a drove of hogs coming at a brisk run. The settlers’ hogs ran wild in the woods all summer. They were savage at any time, and these were especially so now that they had smelt the deer’s blood. Seizing a heavy stick Mr. Swan stood ready, with the dog, to fight them off as long as possible, but after gazing at him a moment the leader, a huge boar, curled his tail, and with a whistling snort wheeled and trotted off into the woods, followed by the others. More bees came flying by while Mr. Swan was dressing the deer, and about that time Chief Johnny Okelnos, a prominent character in Ingham county history, appeared on the scene, carrying a wild turkey over his shoulder, slung from his gun barrel. He “lined” the bees for Mr. Swan, and they soon found the bee tree and cut it, and there were five pails of clear honey and a deer to show for this day’s work.
The settlers’ sheep and other stock had to be yarded every night to keep them from the great timber wolves. Mr. Swan was coon hunting with a party one night when a wolf followed them in the underbrush. Their dog finally attacked the animal, and after a fierce battle the wolf broke away, leaving the dog badly lamed. One monstrous wolf, which had been killing sheep in the neighborhood, was finally poisoned and sent to a museum to be mounted. Bears were numerous but not dangerous, except to stock. Deer roamed the runways in the woods in herds like sheep, and were almost as easily killed. Wild turkeys were as numerous and as easy to shoot as sparrows are now. Mr. Swan went cooning alone one night in the big swamp west of his farm. Reaching Dobie’s lake, eight miles away, he rolled up in the bark of a tree and slept there until three in the morning, when he started home, hunting on his way. On reaching home he found that a fur buyer from Detroit had been waiting over night for him, and he sold that night’s catch of coon and mink skins for $21.
The Indians were always friendly, and used to trade huckleberries to the settlers for provisions. Mr. Swan often visited them and fiddled for them at their favorite camping ground, on a little stream three and a half miles east of Mason, where the Ingham county seat had been formerly located. Some of the younger white men and women went there one Sunday, and although things were not very clean around camp, they could not refuse the maple sugar which the squaws gave them as a mark of hospitality. Dozens of muskrats were roasting on twigs stuck up around the great campfire. The wigwams had pole frames covered with bark, and a big buck strode in from a hunting trip and tossing a woodchuck and other game from his shoulder threw himself down in one of these houses. As he lay there on a bed of black ash bark, covered with deer skins, in full view of the visitors, they were highly amused to see several little blind woodchuck kittens come crawling out of his clothes.
Mr. Swan visited Lansing once in the early history of that town. and after paying fifty cents to be ferried across Cedar river on a raft found only two or three shanties on the present site of the Capital city. He was offered an eighty-acre timber lot, including the spot where the Capitol stands now, for $800, but the land was too swampy to suit him. He would not lose such a chance again, however, he says, as he has noticed that cities in a new country always spring up along good water courses.
With his other activities, Mr. Swan practiced the trade of a collier. Many times he has piled all the timber from six or seven acres of woodland up in a great windrow 100 feet or more long, covered the whole with earth, and then fired it. Then lie would watch it almost constantly, day and night, sometimes for six or seven weeks, covering the holes where the fire would break out, and as the burned logs shrank away, pounding down the earth over them to prevent air spaces. When it was thoroughly burned he would uncover the coal pit and roll out the great maple logs, as perfect as when they were first cut, and ringing like silver when they were broken up with the ax. This coal was the only fuel used by blacksmiths and tinners all over the country for years.
Mr. and Mrs. Swan went to Wyoming to visit their son Reuben in 1890, and the thing which impressed them most there was the enormous herds of elk which he saw in the mountains. He shot three deer from the wagon while taking a 75-mile trip to Snake River, the headquarters of Kit Carson in his hunting trips in that vicinity. Around Alkali creek, near by, he could see every morning a herd of 200 or more antelope and from three to five hundred deer when they came there to drink.
March 4, 1902, Mr. and Mrs. Swan celebrated their golden wedding. Eighty-five friends and relatives were present, and it was a memorable occasion. Nearly three years later, on Jan. 31, 1905, Mrs. Swan died. Two thrifty wild cherry trees, which stood in the door yard and were trimmed and kept for shade trees when the home was first bought, had been cut and sawed into lumber a few years before, and from the lumber three coffins had been made, for Mr. Swan, his wife, and their daughter, Mrs. Ina Davidson. On Feb. 3 Mrs. Swan was buried in her coffin, and the other two are stored away in the old home. Since then Mr. Swan has lived with his daughter, Mrs. Davidson. She is very carefully preserving several phonograph records of violin selections by him, and also has one of an old-fashioned song which he sings, “To Make Me a Beautiful Boy.” He knows a number of these quaint old ballads of Revolutionary vintage, each telling a complete tale in their many verses, set to tunes that have come down from Shakespeare’s time. And, in fact, although he takes a lively interest in things of the present, Mr. Swan longs for the good old days that are past, for the music, the dancing, the wholesome privations and simple pleasures of pioneer days, when the settlers would go as far to church as they would to a dance. Four miles through the woods to hear a preacher was a short walk for them, and all the country for miles around went afoot to Teal’s mill pond to see a baptism. They went to Sunday school at Hawley Corners, three miles away, and while the elders and young people were engaged with the lesson, the children were outside playing marbles with wild gooseberries. Neighbors were more neighborly then. On one night in the week every family in the community would yoke up the oxen and drive to Swan’s to spend the evening. Next night another family would entertain. Wealth and poverty made no social distinctions, and we are the losers, he contends, for having exchanged the simplicity of pioneer life for the conveniences and luxuries of today.
Roy W. Adams
