Lee Center Township, Lee County, Illinois
Seldom indeed, does one meet in fact or
in fiction a spot around which so much and such intense dramatic
interest has centered.
In the field of human activities, Lee
Center Township has witnessed scenes ranging from the very
highest social and intellectual refinement and culture, as well
as the sweetest religious privileges, down to revolting crimes
and a veritable reign of terror.
Inlet, the first settlement of Lee
Center Township, in section 9, on the banks of Inlet creek, was
the rendezvous of thieves, counterfeiters, fence-men and even
murderers.
The house of one was made a common
hiding place for stolen property. On the broad highway of the
great state road, men came and left by night. Strange horsemen
would alight; their horses would remain tethered in the deep
grove nearby, until the small hours of the morning, when as if
by magic, horses and riders would disappear. The noise of loud
voices would be heard, and behind those doors plans were
concocted for all manner of crime from the stealing of peddlers'
packs to their last crime, the murder of Colonel Davenport, July
4, 1845.
Did a settler at Inlet own a fine team,
the circumstance was learned in Nauvoo, a favorite retreat, very
soon, and very presently the settler's team disappeared. Did the
settler remonstrate, a letter attached to a stone was thrown at
night, through a window, to the effect that any further
demonstrations by the settler would be followed by a hasty exit
of the settler, dead or alive, from the settlement.
The ravages of this banditti of the
prairie extended from Ohio and Kentucky to Iowa, Missouri and
Wisconsin. Inlet being a central and well known point, and
favored by nature as well as by a small number of the first
settlers, it early became a rendezvous of its members. Of those
who at last resolved to take their lives in their hands and make
the attempt to rid Inlet of their presence, were Sherman Shaw,
Charles F. Ingalls, Rev. Luke Hitchcock, Dr. E. F. Adams, Moses
Crombie, Lewis Clapp, Benjamin Whittaker, a Mr. Starks and his
sons, and through their heroic efforts Inlet was cleansed. Those
sturdy pioneers of Lee Center township sent to the penitentiary
at Alton, Joseph Sawyer, Adolphus Bliss and Daniel Miller Dewey,
and the witness who squealed, Charles West, so soon as he had
delivered his testimony, left the country for his country's
good. This drastic action was not taken so soon as the vigilance
committees from Ogle, DeKalb and Winnebago, when in 1841, they
shot the Driscolls; but the very instant the evidence was
secured, that minute the Inlet branch of the banditti was dealt
its death blow.
The heroic bravery required of that Lee
Center Vigilance Committee cannot be comprehended fully today,
surrounded as we are by the highest safeguards of civilization.
The Haskell robbery in June, 1844, and its extraordinary
success, emboldened the thieves to the point of careless
bravado, and in that moment of weakness the opening wedge was
secured by which a conviction was made possible.
Dewey ''got up the sight'' for the
Haskell performance and Fox and Birch did the work; Fox on the
inside of the Haskell house and Birch on the outside. Bonney in
his ''Banditti of the Prairie,'' page 14, second edition,
mentions the matter thus:
''West accused one Fox, alias Sutton,
and John Baker of having committed the robbery at Troy Grove,
and said that most of the goods had been secreted at Inlet
Grove, and subsequently taken to Iowa. He also avowed that Fox
and Birch, alias Becker, alias Harris, committed the robbery for
which Bliss and Dewey were sent to prison, and that the former
was totally innocent, while the latter was accessory, ''having
got up the sight.'' He further stated, that Fox had robbed one
Hascal, a merchant at Inlet, by entering the house during a very
severe thunder storm, and crawling upon the floor till he
reached the trunk, wherein was deposited the money, and having
secured it, left without being heard, although Mr. and Mrs.
Hascal were lying in the bed awake, at the time. To prove this.
Fox subsequently stated the conversation that had passed between
them while he was in the act of rifling the trunk!'' P. 14, 2d
ed. 1881.
The trunk was taken to the blacksmith
shop and there opened and rifled.
Lee County
Townships
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