This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Hendrickson, Kingsbury, Feaster, Queen, Chambers, Hildreth, Miller Classification: Biography Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/ok.2ADE/1780.1 Message Board Post: THE COUNCIL BLUFFS DAILY NONPAREIL. July 12, 1876. "Hamburg. Iowa, July 10, 1876".-- (The following is a portion of a letter to the editor which appeared in that paper.) "....On the 6th instant I was at Bartlett in this county ......Among the old Settlers of the vicinity of Bartlett are John Hendrickson, who dates his residence from 1846; H. C. Kingsbury has returned to New York; Cornelius Feaster has moved to Missouri; Reuben Queen is now living at Bartlett; and Samuel Chambers who died last winter. "In 1846 Mr. Hendrickson spent about two weeks on the present site of Council Bluffs. He says a Frenchman, named Hildreth, had about twenty acres of as good corn as he ever saw near where the court house now stands. He sold his claim that year in to a saint named Alexander Miller. "Mr. Hendrickson says that French and Indians of pure and mixed blood, of the Pottawattamie tribe, lived about Bartlett from 1838 to 1847. He worked for the half breeds, and found them honest and friendly, if you pleased them. They cultivated the land in patches. He traded a yoke of oxen and a wagon to a half breed for a cabin, seven acres of corn, a cow, fourteen hogs, seven bee stands, an old wagon, and all his plows, hoes and empty barrels. This claim was on Hendrickson's present farm, a quarter of a mile north of Bartlett. " At one time in 1846, Hendrickson was out of flour, and short of funds, but made a raise by taking a wagon load of watermelons to an Indian payment at Trader's Point. In those days the feathered tribe was extra plentiful; swamp black birds came in clouds, cranes, pelicans, geese, swan; magpies, abounded. The growing crops had to be guarded against the raids of blackbirds and geese. The cattle lived on the rushes in the winter time, and the grass started early in the spring. "Hendrickson says that Mr. Kingsbury and himself were the first and second tax-payers in Fremont county. The receipts were issued at Austin, three miles north of Hamburg. Mr. Hendrickson is sixty-seven years of age; he is opposed to the whole I. O. U. policy, has never given a note or due bill in his life. I mention this merely as a fact; I do not cast any reflections on that venerable Benevolence, that candidate for the Presidency--Peter Cooper......"