Northern Indiana is a land of many lakes. From the Rowe place and in our immediate vicinity we could name and count dozens of them. The one that was the closest was Smalley lake. It was less than a quarter of a mile from the Rowe house where we lived. We became intimately acquainted with this lake. It was a small lake of a little less than a mile in length and about one half as wide as it was long. It was of relatively shallow depth and flat regular bottom.
The lakes in this area were the remnants of earlier larger bodies of water. The water table of the entire area had been lowered by a net work of drainage ditches. This had left some areas of previous lake beds drained. These areas had grown water weeds and mosses for many many years prior to the time that these ditches caused the water level to recede. The growth of this vegetation was seasonal and each year the weeds grew and matured and fell down to decompose before the next years crop of weeds and moss came on. These successive years of vegetation build up created a black soil that we called "muck."
Muck soil was extremely rich and productive. It was an excellent soil for almost any crop. Corn grew twice as tall and produced twice as much as high ground corn. But muck was especially good to grow onions in. It also produced an excellent crop of peppermint.
The muck soils were sometimes more than twenty feet deep. The depth of the muck soils depended on the length of time the thick vegetation and mosses grew up and decayed in the cycle of soil building. It was necessary that the lakes be shallow so that the sun could provide the necessary photosynthesis for plant growth. The time lapse of this water and shallow lake condition was such that great areas of muck lands were made in northern Indiana.
Muck was really just decayed vegetation. The carbon of the plant growth that remained after the decay of the vegetation was all that remained. It was black as the ace of spades. The muck soil was soft and fluffy. It was handled in many instances with our feet. When you stepped in the muck field your feet sunk in well over your ankles. In fact we had to use Belgian horses to plow these fields. Belgians have big round hooves and the added square inches of their hooves keep them from sinking in too far. They would sink in almost ten inches to a foot but the Percheron's with their smaller hoof diameters would sink in knee deep. Percheron's and Belgian's weigh almost the same, about seventeen hundred to two thousand pounds each. It was the difference in hoof diameter that made the difference on where they could be worked. The Belgian's were shorter legged than the Percherons. The Percheron's stood a couple hands taller than the Belgian's but I was always partial to the Belgians.
The muck bottoms, as these old lake beds were called, had a peculiarity that I thought interesting. This soil was a stage in the evolution of a bed of coal. If the lake bottom had been covered with a soil and then subjected to pressure and heat a bed of coal would have been formed. The soil was an organic carbon just like that found in the coal mines of Ohio and Kentucky. It was interesting that care had to be taken to see that the soil did not catch fire. In late summer when the soil had dried out you could not burn weeds or piles of crates or brush on these lake bottoms. If you did the soil would start to burn.
It did not catch fire easily. For instance it was rare for a cigarette to cause a fire. But when a muck field did catch fire it was extremely hard to put it out. A muck fire does not burn rapidly. It just lays and smolders. The heat is intense and the muck burns very slowly in the absence of an abundant oxygen supply. When the burning occurs under ground the oxygen supply is limited. But the muck field has a tendency to burn straight down as much or more than it does to burn laterally. If the muck field is twenty feet deep or more that is how deep it will burn if the conditions are right. Damp soil does not stop the progress of the burning soil. The heat from the fire just drys out the soil and after it is dried it is then burned. Burned muck soil is turned to ashes and they are completely useless to grow anything in. Burning the soil destroys it completely. The loss is for so long it can almost be called permanent. The soil turns to a gray ash that is of much less volume than the soil itself. So the area that has been burned appears to have sunk. The areas along the margin of the burn appear normal and slope off into the ash pile. Muck fires have been known to burn for years. They are sometimes started by lightning. A tree will be hit and a fire started in the wood. The wood will burn into the roots and the roots will set the muck on fire. Then if something isn't done that fire will continue for a longtime. Perhaps it will destroy a whole lake bottom.
I remember a muck fire that was alongside the road on the way to Wolf Lake. I went to high school at Wolf Lake. I traveled this route on the school bus every day. Sometimes a muck fire will go out by itself. If conditions are not entirely right they will go out. This one had burned for several months and it just wasn't going to go out. Besides it created a hazard.
The fire was located in a low level section of the road. In winter the conditions were often such that we had thick low fog. This happened often in the area of this burning muck field. The smoke and haze from burning muck added to the fog in such a way that they combined to create a real hazard. Sometimes it became necessary for some of us to get out of the school bus and lead the way through this area by walking beside the bus and giving verbal instructions to the driver as to the whereabouts of the road.
The only way to put out a muck fire is to flood it out. It does not do any good at all to pump water on top of a muck fire. It just evaporates the water and goes right on burning once it has got it's good start. It is slow to generate this much hear but once it does it is hard to stop.
The best way to stop a muck fire is to dig a trench around it. You outline your ditch at least a few yards ahead of where the fire is now burning. Dig your ditch a couple of feet wide so a man with a shovel can work in it. There weren't any back hoes in those days. The ditch must go below the ground water level. When you get a couple feet below the ground water level your ditch will be full of water to that depth. The entire fire has to be circled with his kind of ditch. The water will completely encircle the fire and the water table will stop it in the bottom of the burn. The extra two feet you have allowed in your ditch allows for some variation in the water table and you will not lose the battle by the fire crossing your ditch. I saw many muck fires stopped in this manner.
Smalley lake was a slightly lower lake than the muck bottoms that were being used to grow crops at that time. It was adding layers of mosses and weeds to it's bottom every year. Perhaps in some future time that lake level will be such that it too will be used to grow the food supply.
But in thirty-five and thirty-six it was a lake to be explored and to be enjoyed. It, like many other lakes in that vicinity , had a fish population that many people made use of. Smalley had good blue gill fishing. There were crappies and catfish. There was both large and small mouthed bass. An occasional gar was caught.
Most people fished for blue gills. Blue gills just a little larger that my hand were quite common. Almost as common and almost as equally prized was the sunfish. It was easy to see why they called them sunfish. When one of them took your bait and got himself caught he would take off for parts unknown. They could pull pretty hard too. Every little while you would see a flash in the water when the sun shone on the bright yellow of their breasts. When they broke the water that yellow was like dripping butter. They were good eating too. The blue gills were a dark blue on their top sides, almost blue black. They were slab sided somewhat the same shape as my hand turned on edge. The top part of this slabside was what was so dark. The blue gill stays on the bottom of the lake and apparently the enemy fish that would eat him swim over the top of him. Since he has this dark blue color and he is just above this coal black bottom of the lake he is hard to see. His enemies miss him and he grows to be eating size for me. It helps to know that he loafs just off the bottom of the lake. That way when I go fishing I measure how far it is to the bottom of the lake. I put my bobber on the line so it will hold my bait eight of ten inches above the bottom. That's right in front of his face and he can't resist going after my worm.
In the early spring when the drainage ditches are flowing good they often carry fishworms into the lake. At this time blue gills go for fishworms with gusto. Later on in the season when the flow of the drainage ditches are substantially reduced the blue gill is not getting fishworms naturally from the inflowing waters. He gets real fussy and won't hardly take the fishworms that you offer him either. He knows that something is wrong and that fishworm hadn't ought to be there. He gets suspicious and turns his nose up at your fishworm. It is at this time that you can offer him a cabbage worm and he will go for it right now. Cabbage worms are tough. They are about one inch long if you have a big one. They are tough enough that you can catch several blue gills on one worm before it wears out or get swallowed.
When everybody else is patiently fishing away with fishworms and not having very much luck, you can create quite a bit of excitement by starting to pull in the big ones with your secret weapon, a cabbage worm. I found this out on Smalley lake.
I had my first business at Smalley lake. I dug and sold fishworms. I had located a place that was all woods and brush at the south end of Smalley lake. The ground was low and semi-marshy. The ground was damp. I dug fishworms in this damp soil. I would sell them for fifteen cents for one hundred fishworms. I would put a little damp moss in a tin can and count one hundred worms and put them in the can. I always added eight or ten worms to make absolutely sure I had more that the one hundred in my count in case anyone ever made a count on me. I never failed to add my extras. I turned over a lot of dirt digging for those fishworms.
One day, as I was digging, I dug into an old cowpie. A cowpie was a pile of cow manure where a cow had stood in one place and went to the bathroom, number two. As soon as I dug into the cow pie I discovered a half dozen or so worms. I flipped the pie out of the way and underneath it was a hundred worms or so. I had a field day picking up worms. I got the idea of hunting for these old cow pies and turning them over. They always had lots of worms under them and I soon had an ample supply to sell. As a result of this discovery my chore of digging fishworms became a lot easier and a lot faster.
The entire east side of Smalley lake was a summer resort. It had been laid out in lots along the lake. It had streets laid out to fit the contour of the woods. The blocks were not square. The streets were gravel only. There were homes all along the lake shore and many were back as far as a block or two from the lake front. This entire side of the lake was wooded and the roads and the homes were located in the woods. It was primarily an oak woods though there were some other species. The homes were of various designs but they were summer homes. Screen porches were in evidence everywhere. Most homes on the lake had piers running out to deep water and boats were moored alongside. Most of the owners of the homes were city dwellers and they came to the country to stay in the summer.
One of these that I came to know very well was another family of Hardsocks. This made three families of Hardsocks that we knew. Pat and Eloda, our school teacher from over at the Brinegar farm, the Hardsocks with a farm just past the north end of Smalley lake. They had the two daughters Jean and Elberta and this family that had their summer home on the southeast side of Smalley lake. This Hardsock family had a young lady of twelve or thirteen in their family group. I liked "Busy" Hardsock very much and considered her a girlfriend. Busy's father was one of those city dwellers. He was a draftsman and designer by trade. He and his family lived and worked in Detroit, Michigan. He had help design a car known as a Terraplane. That car and company was consolidated into the General Motors Company. Those were exciting days in automotive design. We were just giving way from the boxy square design of cars into something they called streamlining. The theory was that the air caused a drag on cars and by designing smooth surfaces to go through the air it would take less fuel to do it. I guess their theory was right.
This group of city dweller almost all seemed to enjoy fishing. They provided me with my market for fishworms. I would take my cans of worms through the resort and peddle them for fifteen cents per can. I soon had a regular repeat clientele that I sold too. I got rid of a lot of fishworms.
When the weather got hotter and the fish began to get fussy about biting I discovered the fact that they would go for cabbage worms. Since we had a big patch of cabbage at home and it was my job to pick off the cabbage worms anyhow it turned out to be a real plus when I found I could sell them. It was not hard to sell cabbage worms right out on the lake. I would get my fish pole, put on a cabbage worm and start hauling in fish. There would be people coming to see what I was using right away. I sold cabbage worms for fifteen cents per dozen. That's per dozen not per hundred like fishworms. Word of mouth did it and I didn't even have to demonstrate cabbage worms any longer. I was kept busy gathering and selling worms for sometime.
I had an experience about this time that I'll have to tell you about. My Dad had gone back to Kentucky for some reason. It may have been that his mother or father was ill or something. Anyway he left us at home and went back to where he had grown up. Mom didn't go with him. I fished on the lake quite a bit at this time. Maybe I was getting in more fishing time and less time in the onion patch since Dad was away.
One day I had been fishing for blue gills with cabbage worms. I had caught all I wanted and was headed back to the pier in my row boat. I had laid my cane pole down alongside the boat and was rowing with the oars when I saw a big splash right beside the stern of the boat. Next thing I knew the cane pole under my right oar was sliding out the stern of the boat. I grabbed the pole before it got away. I had a fish on. He ran and he jumped He was a big fish. He splashed. I hung on. He bent that cane pole something fierce. I hung on. He jumped and he dived for the bottom. He'd pull the pole tip clear into the water. I'd pull. After a while he tired out and I was able to lead him to the edge of the boat where I grabbed him by the mouth. I was able to lift him into the boat. I had me a big large mouthed bass. My cabbage worm and hook had fallen overboard when I started to row for home. Apparently the cabbage worm was in the water alongside the stern of the boat. I was trolling with oars when the old bass struck. He measured nineteen inches long when I got him home.
My kid sisters looked my fish over. They were proud of him too. But then one of them noticed that my bass had one blue eye and one gray eye. They said he was blind or I would never have caught him. They had to tell Dad about the blind bass I caught while he was gone. I was thirteen at the time and was pretty proud of the biggest fish I had ever caught.
One day Rose and I were down at the swimming hole that was just below the bridge where the road crossed the inlet ditch into Smalley lake. Hardsock's house was a couple hundred yards past this bridge. This was another Hardsock. But they were relatives of Pat and Eloda. This Hardsock had two daughters. Jean was sixteen and Elberta was eighteen and they too ran paper routes just as their father did. They drove all over the country delivering the Sentinel into their bright yellow mail boxes. But that's another story.
The swimming hole below the bridge was not very deep. I expect it might have reached four feet deep at the deepest spot. The ditch flowed through it and we were looking for a place to fish for catfish. It was not far down to where the ditch ran into the lake. I expect that the cat fish cruised up this ditch looking for stuff to eat. The lake was home base but the ditch provided a source of food for them. We would go down to this spot after it got dark in the evening. It was close enough to the road that we could find our way from the bank up to the road without a light.
My Mom was an expert at cutting up fryer chickens to cook for supper. She had lots of experience at it. She would save the entrails and other parts of the chicken that would normally have been thrown away so that we could use them for catfish bait. Chicken liver made good bait but we seldom got to use it because someone would want to eat it instead of catfish. We would sit or stand on the bank and fish for catfish for hours on end. Mosquitoes and knats were a problem but be fought them off with willow leaves and sometimes netting. We would occasionally have trouble with catfish. They have a tendency to swallow the hook.
But a string of cat fish was not hard to obtain and we caught many a string. Catfish are different that other fish. A catfish is hard to kill. They stay alive for sometime out of water. I would take a catch of catfish to the back yard. There I had a block of wood set on end. It was tall enough to be comfortable to reach. A catfish would be put on the top of the block of wood and held firmly while a sharp nail was driven through his head and into the block of wood. A sharp knife would then cut the skin completely around the head of the catfish and then a straight slit would go from the head to the tail. Next a pair of pliers would catch the edge of this skin where the slit had started from the head. The entire shin of a catfish could then be stripped from its body. The nail held the catfish tightly and the pliers gripped firmly and the skin came off in one smooth piece. The head was then cut off and the rest of the cleaning performed. A couple nice catfish fillets was the result.
This particular day when Rose and I arrived at the swimming hole we spotted something in the grass about twenty feet from the ditch. It soon became apparent that we had stumbled onto a big old grand daddy of a soft shelled turtle. Rose and I held a quick conference and decided we would capture this creature because we might be able to sell it for turtle soup as I had done before with snapping turtles.
The turtle meanwhile had made up its mind to leave by way of the ditch. The ditch was about twenty to thirty feet wide with considerable water in it. The soft shelled turtle headed for the water. Rose and I tried to stop it but it was too strong. It was able to make some progress while we were trying to hold it back. Those legs would keep threshing and moving toward the ditch. Finally I climbed up on the softshell's back and we found that he couldn't pack me. I was too heavy for him. As soon as we learned this I told Rose to go to the house and get a gunny sack. She ran all the way to the house and got a feed sack that had been emptied in feeding the old holstein milk cow. When she returned with the sack we opened the mouth of the sack directly in front of the soft shell. When I stepped off his back he walked right into the sack. I then threw him over my shoulder and made my way to the opposite side of the lake to the summer resort. It was not long until we found a buyer for the soft shell turtle. We realized twenty-five cents for that turtle. Almost like money from Heaven.
The ditch that had been home to this old soft shelled turtle was also used by us kids as a swimming hole. It had a couple drawbacks however. One was that it wasn't very deep. In late summer the water flow was quite sluggish. The entire bottom of the ditch was covered with mosses and weeds of various kinds. When we waded through this stuff we almost always got a bunch of blood sucking leeches on us. You had to pull them off before they got a good hold on you or they would attach themselves and begin to fill up on your blood. We didn't like those sports at all.
This ditch that I spoke of ran cross country to the next lake on this chain. In World War One they had had a need for rope. They brought in a plant called hemp. This plant grew long fibers that could be processed and woven into rope. Hemp rope was pretty common. I'm told that hemp is of the marijuana family. It grew wild along this ditch bank when I caught the old soft shell there. I never knew of anyone using marijuana in those days.