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The old Dunkard preacher and his wife came into the county in 1856, their wagon full of what they had imagined in Indiana they would need in the new land. It was a good load, and, once across the Mississippi—in Hannibal, Missouri—Gabriel Jacobs traded his horses for oxen, powerful but tractable beasts that would graze where horses would not, animals born to pull eastern chattels into the West. Traveling with Gabriel and Elizabeth were three daughters, a son, and two sons-in-law, and waiting for them along the creek that would soon bear their name was the eldest boy, who had arrived the year before. Why Gabriel at seventy-three headed west no one knows now, but one countian wrote, They must have heard some glorious and promising story about Kansas. The first Sabbath after the Jacobses arrived in the creek hollow, they observed the Dunker custom of mutual foot washing, and Gabriel took as his sermon text Nehemiah 2:20. “The God of Heaven, he will prosper us; therefore we his servants will arise and build.”
While living out of the wagon, near a spring just above the creek, Gabriel built a two-story log house of walnut and oak (furniture woods today) with a fieldstone fireplace, and he built animal pens and broke the ground and sowed corn, cane, and buckwheat, and Elizabeth planted vegetables. The crops did indeed prosper the first two years, and then there was nothing you could call rain for a year and a half, and, in the autumn of 1860, old Gabriel fell ill, and in October he died, done in by the long drought. His sons built a walnut coffin from a tree on his farm and fastened it with wooden pins, and then, since his death was the first in the settlement, they had to set out a cemetery. He died intestate, and William Holsinger, another Dunkard preacher and the administrator of Gabriel’s estate, filed an inventory of Jacobs’ possessions.
I’ve seen the movies and paintings, and I’ve looked closely at those portrayals of prairie schooners making their cumbrous way into the West, and I’ve always wondered just what the hell really was in those things, what precisely it was that broke their hickory axletrees. Then and now, when people travel through unknown territory, their baggage is a packing up, an assembly, of their fears as much as of their expectations. Gabriel Jacobs died only forty-two months after riding behind his oxen into the nearly uninhabited land, so it would seem his estate inventory is very much a listing of the burden in that wagon and of several things he must have made soon after arrival, and it is also, with some dreaming, a tour of the Jacobs farmstead: the things hung, shelved, stacked, and set in some order in the kitchen, the bedroom, the barn.
The inventory, kept in a third-floor room of the courthouse, is a tidy, inked script on six sheets of narrow paper glued end to end like a scroll. I give it exactly, adding only a few clarifications:
In addition to the animals, there are nearly two hundred items here, a complete household except for Gabriel’s personal effects. But I wonder about the absence of chickens and chamber pots; and, from the spellings, repeated on the more carefully written appraisement, I wonder, did they pronounce kettle as “keetle” and coverlet as “coverlid”? Not a single object is superfluous, nothing an amenity or luxury. I’ve seen little else in the county that so quietly speaks of austerity and the fight to survive and the interminable toil in a small nineteenth-century prairie household where there is not one thing to ease a long winter day, fill a quiet hour, not a single book (other than the presumed Bible), not a fiddle, not so much as a jew’s-harp. Of course, a bucket can suggest the drudgery of milking or a fine afternoon of berry picking, a bridle plowing or a Sunday ride. About the Jacobs place was no frippery or frillery, and of their possessions, by my reckoning, there are only a half dozen you wouldn’t commonly find on a Chase County farm today if you consider descendants of the older tools and implements.
The appraisement valued these chattels at $515.65; the sixty-five cents is important because it represents a half-dozen items. The hammer was valued the lowest at a nickel and the two yokes of oxen the highest at sixty-five dollars each. Elizabeth apparently kept all of the food and kitchen items and two beds and coverlets and the spinning wheel and four washtubs and two cows and calves, but she sold the log house and went to live with her children up on the creek, where she disappeared into the anonymity of plain life.