THE EARLY SETTLEMENT of Bay Creek country in south Pike county is shrouded in obscurity. It is impossible to say
when the first white settlement was established there. Early historians have essayed to fix the time of the first
settlement and to name the settler. It seems reasonably certain that white settlements existed in the Bay country
many years prior to the earliest recorded by the local historian. It seems probable that there were settlements,
both French and American, in the Bay Creek region long prior to the coming of the Rosses to present Atlas in 1820,
settlements perhaps that had been made and abandoned before Illinois became a state.
It seems certain that a Frenchman, or a French-Canadian, by the name of Ezekiel Romine was living in what is now
Pleasant Hill township at the time Illinois became a state, December 3, 1818. It also seems certain that there
were white inhabitants in what are now Pike and Calhoun counties in the time of the 1812 War. Colonel John Shaw,
the noted "Black Prince" of early Pike county days, who was helping build a fort on or near the site
of present Clarksville at the time of the murder by the Indians of the O'Neal family, above Clarksville, tells
of men from across the river being enlisted in Howard's Rangers, for whom he served as guide and scout.
There is evidence tending to fix Samuel Hardin Lewis's first sojourn in the Bay Creek country as early as 1815.
In the northwestern territories, descendants of Damarius Lewis, a daughter of Samuel Hardin Lewis, had a tradition
that this Lewis daughter, who was born April 2, 1815, was born in what is now Pleasant Hill township in Pike county,
Illinois. Writes Victor Wayne Jones of Seattle, Washington, a great grandson of Damarius (Lewis) Collard: "Some
of my people were early pioneers of Pike county. Among them, the widow Mary Lewis, who came from Missouri. She
was buried in Galloway cemetery, having died in 1868, age 89 years. Her youngest child (Damarius) was supposed
to have been born in Pleasant Hill township in 1815. I am told that this is not possible, as the township was not
settled until 1821."
The writer at first doubted the authenticity of the Pacific coast record as to the place of Damarius Lewis's birth.
But diligent investigation both on the Illinois and Missouri sides of the river has uncovered inferential proof
that the supposition of her descendants in the Pacific Northwest may have been grounded in fact.
Near the crooked Cuivre river and only a few miles back from the Mississippi, dwelt in the fall of 1936 a man by
the name of Matthew Hubbard, who was very old, neither he nor his family having any record of the date of his birth.
He was a descendant of Becky (probably Rebecca) Barnett, who was a child of Joseph. He related that his great grandmother
and her sister, who married Samuel Lewis, had both lived in Illinois in the days of the Territory, and he thought
that both had children born in Illinois Territory. He said they had first located in Missouri, and later, about
the time of the Indian war or near the close of it, had moved to Illinois, returning again to Missouri Territory
about the time or a little before Illinois became a state. He thought that both returned to Illinois many years
afterward and that both died in that state, although he could not be sure just where they died or where they were
buried.
Thus we find among Barnett descendants in Missouri some confirmation of the belief existing in the Northwest that
Damarius Lewis, who was married at Pleasant Hill and who became a pioneer of Oregon Territory, was born in the
Bay Creek country in what is now Pleasant Hill township.
If this be true, then we need to revise much of the hitherto accepted history of the early Pike county settlement.
The recorded date of Damarius Lewis's birth - April 2, 1815 - is seven years prior to May 1, 1822, when Nancy Ross,
daughter of Colonel William Ross, was born at Atlas. Chapman's 1880 "History of Pike County" records
Nancy as the first white person born in this county. She died November 18 of the same year. Her grave at Atlas,
the second county seat, has been marked by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
The 1880 historian, according to Nancy Ross the distinction of being the first white person born in the county,
adds: "Some say, however, that there was a white person born in this county some time previous to this; how
true that is we cannot state authoritatively."
The Samuel Lewis who was with the Zumwalts and others of the Missouri frontiersmen in the battle with the Indians
at Zumwalt Fort in the War of 1812 is believed to have been the same Samuel Lewis who appears in the records as
occupying a Spanish grant on Peruque Creek, near the fort, in 1802. The settlement on Peruque Creek probably was
the first after his marriage to Mary Barnett.
From the time of the Fort Zumwalt battle down to the present day we find the families of Zumwalt and Lewis associated
by a common neighborhood settlement and by intermarriages of the descendants of those who made common cause against
the Indians behind the hewed log walls of Zumwalt Fort. Several of these intermarriages occurred in Pike county,
Illinois, after the removal of some of the Lewis and Zumwalt families from Missouri to the Bay Creek country, more
than a century ago.
That Samuel Hardin Lewis and his family were in the southern part of old St. Charles county (in that part that
is still St. Charles) at the outbreak of the Indian war is therefore known. It is quite possible that in 1815,
the closing year of the war, they removed northward and crossed the river into Illinois Territory. They do not
reappear in Missouri records until a number of years later, when they are found located some 15 or 20 miles north
of the place on Peruque Creek, and in what is now Lincoln county, a part of original St. Charles.
Both Lincoln and Pike counties, in Missouri, have the distinction of being older than their mother, the state of
Missouri. They were established December 14, 1818, at St. Louis, 11 days after Illinois became a state. Montgomery
and Madison counties, in Missouri, were established the same day. Both Pike and Lincoln counties were cut off from
St. Charles county, which in the earlier days of the Lewis settlement had occupied all of the territory between
the Missouri and Mississippi rivers north to the British possessions.
Pleasant Hill township was settled largely by people from St. Charles county, Missouri, particularly from those
areas of the original county that are now Lincoln and Pike. Some came also from present St. Charles and some from
present Montgomery, also a part of original St. Charles.
The 1880 historian credits two brothers, Belus and Egbert Jones, with being the first settlers in Pleasant Hill
township. They came over from Missouri in the early spring of 1821 and erected their cabin on Section 25. They
were not, however, the first settlers in Pleasant Hill. As we have already seen, the region was settled as early
as 1818, with the probability that families were established there as early as the spring of 1815. In Lewis family
history, it is stated that Frances (Smith) Ward, mother of Caroline Ward who married John W. Lewis, came to what
is now Pleasant Hill township in 1817 and that her father was there in 1816. Her son, Hiram Ward, later carried
the mail between Atlas and Quincy when there was only one house on that road.
There was yet no town within what is now Pike county when these first straggling settlers pitched their tents in
the Bay Creek country. Neither were there any towns or trading posts across the river except at St. Charles, in
1815. Louisiana was not founded until 1818 and the plat was not filed until December 10, 1819, a year before the
state of Missouri was organized. A fort had been built on the Alex Allison farm, two miles south of Louisiana,
for the protection of settlers in that region in the time of the Indian war. It was known as Buffalo Fort and more
than 20 families assembled there in 1812 and during the next year took turns guarding and cultivating the crops.
After a while they relaxed their guard and several were slain by the Indians while working in their fields. The
governor later sent a guard and took them all to St. Louis for protection, the trip being made by flat-boat.
Clarksville was established in 1819 but prior to that year there was a settlement there that was called Clarksville,
for the famous American explorer, George Rogers Clark, who, tradition says, between 1815 and 1820 was forced because
of ice in the Mississippi river to stop and winter there. A fort was built at Clarksville at the beginning of the
Indian war. Colonel John Shaw, founder of Coles' Grove (present Gilead, Calhoun county), the first seat of justice
for Pike county and first county seat established west of the Illinois river, was engaged with others of the settlers
in building this fort when the entire family of James O'Neal, a fellow worker on the stockade, was massacred by
the Indians, including a toddling baby girl who was roasted alive in a huge iron pot in the fireplace. O'Neal and
his family of nine had settled near present Clarksville in 1809.
Suggesting the terrors that were ever present in the lives of those who founded a civilization on the two-Pikes
border (Pike county, Missouri, and Pike county, Illinois), we here repeat from John Shaw's memoirs appearing in
earlier chapters of this history: "I was engaged about this time (just before the declaration of war in 1812)
with 18 or 20 men building a temporary stockade where Clarksville (Missouri) now stands on the west bank of the
Mississippi. A party of Indians came and killed the entire family of one O'Neal, about three miles above Clarksville,
while O'Neal himself was employed with his neighbors in erecting the stockade.
"In company with O'Neal and others I hastened to the scene of murder and found all killed, scalped and horribly
mangled. One of the children, about one and a half years old, was found literally baked in a large pot metal bake-
kettle or Dutch oven, with a cover on; and as there were no marks of knife or tomahawk on the body, the child must
have been put in alive to suffer this horrible death; the oil or fat in the bottom of the kettle was nearly two
inches deep."
In 1855, in his blind old age, John Shaw, dictating the story of his life on the Missouri border in the time of
the Indian war, related the above tragedy to Lyman C. Draper, then secretary of the Wisconsin State Historical
Society, the story being now incorporated in Volume 2 of the Wisconsin State Historical Collections. Shaw was at
the time of the narration a resident of Marquette county, Wisconsin, and was in his 73rd year.
Irat Mackey's house, two and three-quarter miles up river from Clarksville, stands on the site of the O'Neal cabin,
scene of the awful massacre. O'Neal, some years after his family's murder, lived for a time in what is now Pleasant
Hill township, as did also a kinsman, John O'Neal.
Some of the pioneering Zumwalts on the Missouri border "squatted" on free lands in what was then Illinois
Territory about the close of the Indian war, possibly coming at the same time as the Lewis family to the Bay Creek
region. Henry Zumwalt, Sr., a son of old Jacob of the original Zumwalt settlement in Pennsylvania, is reputed to
have been a settler there before Illinois became a state.
John W. Lewis, a son of Samuel H. and Mary (Barnett) Lewis, is said in Massie's history to have been born in Missouri,
whence he came in the early 1820s, when he was about 18, to Pike county, Illinois. Here in Pike county he married
Caroline Ward.
The Lewis and Galloway migration from Missouri, which may have been the second such migration for the Lewis family,
occurred in the cold spring of 1832. These families that spring crossed the Mississippi river on the ice at Clarksville,
arriving in what is now Pleasant Hill township on April 28, 1832.