Chapter 2: First Paleface Comes To Niles Township
John Jackson Ruland plodded westward.
The ship that couldn't find Chicago in 1834 had landed him some ten miles up the lake shore. If his starting point was as far north as the present downtown Evanston area he slogged through a wooded swamp until he struck the rise to Ridge Road.
From there to what is now Crawford he had easier going, for it was a treeless stretch to be known later as East Prairie. After a mile of that he hit swamp again until he came to the next ridge, now Cicero Avenue.
These ridges and others represent the successive retreats of ancient Lake Chicago which, after the glacial period, covered a large portion of northeastern Illinois and as far south as Valparaiso a matter which didn't interest Mr. Ruland.
Within the memory of persons now living in Skokie, the area from Cicero to the canal was a swampy forest they called Lauderbach, which afforded good duck hunting. In the spring, say some of the older people, it was sometimes so filled with water that a rowboat could be used, and at the highest it could be rowed even to the junction of the canal with the North Branch of the Chicago River near Kedzie and Foster. At such times it was not unknown for lake sturgeon to come up the river into the swamp.
But on this day in 1834 John Ruland was looking for drier land and pushed on through the dense oak and maple forest to the next ridge, our Lincoln Avenue, which was a well trod Indian trail. Still westward he trudged as the afternoon sun flickered down through the branches, until he came to a sandy bank beyond which the Milwaukee Railroad now crosses Oakton. There he called it a day's journey and made himself a dugout for a shelter.
Shoots a Wolf
There is a story that when he finished it he took his gun and started to hunt for fresh meat. He had gone only a few rods when a huge wolf rose from behind a log close at hand. He leveled his gun and fired, then dropped it and ran for his cave. Next morning he came cautiously back to look for his gun and found the wolf dead some 25 feet from where he had shot him.
He should not have lacked for food, for the woods abounded in deer. Even twenty years later they formed a staple winter's meat for the settlers. Buffalo still existed in the region. Prairie chickens and quail were plentiful, and ducks and geese and even swans were upon the rivers and ponds, and fish of many varieties in the waters.
For two or three more decades, berries could be gathered by the bucketful in a short time. One has only to look into the Cook County forest preserves in the spring when the fruit trees are all abloom to know what an abundance they must have provided of apples, wild pears, plums and other fruits. A Skokie citizen remembers that along Lincoln Avenue grew wild oranges as large as our commercial ones.
Of predatory animals Mr. Ruland's wolf did not lack for companions. There were the bear, the panther, fox and wildcat. Along the streams were otter, mink and beaver. The museum in Lincoln Park preserves for us the wild life of the region in its natural setting.
Indians, Too
Mr. Ruland may soon have been called upon by his red neighbors. Though the treaty of 1833 had evicted them, many remained. Their villages were scattered along the rivers. A large one centered a little south of Devon and Cicero, while another was at the present Village of Golf. The nearest on the Des Plaines River were at Irving Park Road at Park Ridge, and north of Des Plaines village. In Skokie, near Lincoln and Laramie, was an established camping ground; another in Morton Grove was north of the railroad station, and yet another lay in the southwest corner of Niles, east of the river.
Indian trails were the earliest roads. Ridge Avenue follows the old Green Bay Trail. Lincoln Avenue was a trail that branched as now, one fork going to Gross Point up the Lake Shore, the other turning west. St. Peter's Catholic Church now occupies the vantage point of this fork.
All these cut diagonally through forest and prairie to the big Indian village at the mouth of the main river, just as they do today. In fact, all our present main highways converging upon Chicago from westerly directions are built upon old Indian trails.
However, Ruland already had a few white neighbors, too. The nearest was Joseph Curtis who had come in 1831 or 1832 and settled on Section 17 in Morton Grove only little more than a mile from the dug out. He built a rude log house and later kept a tavern.
The following year John Dewes (also recorded as De Wees) located a half mile north of Curtis. Dewes had come from England, Ruland from the East. John Schadiger and Julius Perrin built on the North Branch, the first house within the present limits of the village of Niles. The story is told that it was a house with no windows and only one door. Schadiger soon moved to Wisconsin, but Perrin lived in Niles until his death in 1873.
'Dutchman's Point'
In 1834 came John Clark from Chicago, and Christian Ebinger and his brothers John and Frederick from Wurtenberg, Germany. For some years Christian had been manager of the flower gardens of King William of Wurtenberg.
He had come to America in 1831 and now built the second house in Dutchman's Point, as Niles soon came to be called. He was a farmer and a local preacher in the German Evangelical Association. His son Henry at one time owned the entire area of Edison Park.
In 1832 Mark Noble had come from England and bought 160 acres in the township and enough were in the town of Jefferson to make up 600. He got it all for $2.50 per acre.
The next we hear of John Ruland, his circumstances were much improved. He was no longer in his dugout but had moved over to join the settlement on the North Branch, now consisting of the Ebingers, Perrins, Clark, and Noble. He had built a house and had his wife and two children with him.
But Curtis and Dewes gave up the hardships of pioneer life and returned to England, thus reducing the population of our future township to the five families over in the southwest corner. We wonder not at the two Britishers' discouragement, but at the tenacity of the others.
One day Ruland and the Ebinger men started for Chicago to buy seed potatoes. Over the muddy trail the journey to the city with oxen and empty wagon could scarcely be made in one day. They bought their load at $1.25 a bushel and began the slow return to Dutchman's Point, but bogged down in the mire and were two days getting home.
Skokie Settler
In Skokie the very first white man to build a house was an Irish bachelor by the name of O'Brien. It was a little log cabin on what is now the lawn of the Blameuser house in Oakton west of the Northwestern tracks, across from the Public Library. Apparently he did not stay long for that is all we know of him, but his cabin was still standing when, about the turn of the century, Peter Blameuser brought his bride Clara Hoffman to the big house.
Skokie's first permanent white settler, Nicholas Meyer, came from Alsace Lorraine in 1835. He later was one of the first merchants in the township. Though he died in 1857, the stories he passed on have come down the century by word of mouth.
He described the beautiful hardwood forests and how pigs roamed at large in them fattening on the acorns. (The rendered lard sold for three cents a pound!) As many as fifteen deer hung at one time from the rafters of the barn. He told, also, of his closest early neighbors: Samuel E. Ferris, the first permanent settler in Morton Grove who came in l839; toward Gross Point, Lyman Butterfield, and two miles or so east Schneider and Huffmeyer, the first two men on East Prairie.
Hardy Pioneers
There were still others within an easy day's walk, for the first pioneers had come to Jefferson Park and along the Des Plaines. In 1836 Abraham Hathaway built where the Evanston park is now, and Philip Rogers arrived the same year, put up a log house farther south and began the business of burning charcoal. Rogers Park was named for him.
Along the ridge between Rosehill and Evanston came many of the first settlers, who built on it to keep clear of the water which fully half the year rose over the adjacent lands. In 1840 Benjamin Hall, after whom Hall Road was named, built the old tavern at Dutchman's Point.
With a dozen or more log houses in little clearings in this and our neighboring townships, the area was really booming. In the meantime the new town at the mouth of the Chicago River was booming, too, with about 1,000 inhabitants. But as yet it had not cast its shadow this far.
In between lay some 15 miles of forests with winding trails and fallen timbers, with streams to be forded, and of open prairies with high, tangled grass. The great barrier, however, was the deep, rich, black Illinois mud into which the weary oxen sank above their hooves and strained against wagons mired to their hubs. This for many years held back the new settlements from contact with the city.
- Originally published in The Villager, Thursday, May 22, 1958, pp. 20-21
Return to top of page