And Two Hoosiers Did Come to Dwell in the Land of Wasnos

Early in the nineteenth century two families—the Fingers and the Plesses—migrated by wagon from North Carolina to Indiana. The two families, Mack Williams writes in In Old Fort Worth, met along the wagon trail and traveled on west together. They settled on farms two and a half miles apart in Lawrence County.

There Lewis Finger was born in 1816, the year Indiana was admitted to the Union. Christina Pless was born two years later.

The 1820 census of Lawrence County, Indiana shows father John Finger with one male child under the age of ten. Lewis was four in 1820. John Finger was farmer but also made wagons.

Meanwhile down in Mexico in July 1821 empresario Moses Austin had died, and son Stephen F. Austin had taken over his father’s colony. Stephen Austin painted a rosy picture of Texas in an open letter printed in the Arkansas Gazette. To populate the colony he sought farmers and mechanics “of good character” “to emigrate to this fine country and participate in the advantages secured to my father by this grant . . . but they must be well recommended.”

A less-rosy picture of Texas appeared that same week in the London Times, which reprinted a report of the Louisiana Gazette of New Orleans. Some Americans had returned from Texas and found it to be a lawless, dangerous place: “What a picture does the account from the coast of Texas give us of the condition of that country! Bands of outlaws in arms, tribes of cannibal Indians, gangs of daring smugglers, with hordes of miserable African slaves.”

In fact, the New Orleans newspaper recommended that the United States invade and occupy Texas. The London newspaper not only agreed but also suggested that British “vessels by sea” and “troops by land” assist the American invaders!

Back in Indiana, the Finger and Pless families were still farming. In the 1830 census of “free white persons” in Lawrence County, Joseph Pless (50 to 60) was Christina’s father, although Christina would have been twelve, and no female of that age is listed. Note that Pless is spelled with a long s and a short s.

Three years later Texas had not yet declared its independence from Mexico when the state of Indiana was already building schools and colleges and seminaries, planning a militia, an orphan asylum, and its third statehouse. The state also was building bridges and turnpikes and state and post roads, including in Lawrence County.

Rural neighbors Lewis Finger and Christina Pless had known each other since childhood. The dating pool was shallow in early rural America. People married people who lived nearby: neighbors, members of the same school or church. In 1838—two years after Texas became a republic—the two young neighbors married. They established a farm near their parents.

In the 1840 Lawrence County census, Jonas (30-40) and Jacob (30-40) Finger probably were brothers of Lewis (20-30). John Pless (20-30) might have been a brother of Christina.

In 1840 Indiana had a population of 685,866. The population of the Republic of Texas was about 70,000—in an area seven times the size of Indiana.

In the early 1840s Lewis and Christina, like so many others in the States, began hearing that tracts of land in the Republic of Texas were being given away to emigrants who would settle the land and improve it.

William C. Peters’s Texian Emigration and Land Company was “colonizing vacant lands of the Republic” “between the Brazos and Red Rivers.”

“The lands are all exceedingly rich,” the ad promised, and feature “fine springs” that gave “a superabundance of the purest and most wholesome water.”

The ad suggested both overland and water routes to the colony from the States.

By 1844, of course, Texas—by then a republic—was less lawless than the New Orleans newspaper had described it in 1821, but it was far less developed than Indiana. Mack Williams writes, “Lewis knew Texas was dangerous; stories of Indians who robbed, killed and scalped appeared often in the Indianapolis newspaper to which he subscribed.”

Nonetheless, in early 1847 Lewis and Christina left Indiana with forty other families, collectively known as the “Indiana Colony.”

According to Williams, the trip to Texas took six weeks in horse-drawn wagons—the minivan of the nineteenth century—hauling families, furniture, and supplies.

The 1844 ad says a married man would receive a grant of 320 acres; a single man, 160 acres.

By the time Lewis and Christina and their four children arrived in Peters Colony in 1847, (1) Texas had been admitted to the Union, and (2) the amount of land granted to a married man had been increased to 640 acres (a section, one mile on a side).

The Fingers were among the first white settlers of Tarrant County. In fact, there was no Tarrant County yet.

Indeed, the Fingers had traveled nine hundred miles from a well-developed state to dwell in the Land of Wasnos.

For example, there not only was no Tarrant County, but also there was no Fort Worth—military camp or civilian settlement.

There also

was no road from here to there. Just intermittent wagon ruts over prairie and through forest.
was no Home Depot or Nebraska Furniture Mart. People cut down trees, hewed logs, and built houses and furniture and fences themselves.
was no local source of glass for windows, nails for lumber, shingles for roofs, locks for doors.
was no Tom Thumb supermarket. People grew or killed their food.
was no school system. Children were taught at home.
was no police department.
was no local government.
was no physician. Mothers and grandmothers were the family doctor, practicing folk medicine.
was no indoor plumbing, mail service, public library, fire department, mass transit, artificial ice, air-conditioning, or source of illumination and heat except fire.

In fact, it would be easier to list the wases than the was nos. There

was the threat of attack by indigenous people who understandably had a “There goes the neighborhood” attitude about white settlers.
was the threat of wild animals that long since have disappeared from this area.
was the assurance of backbreaking work from dawn to dusk.

Nonetheless, Lewis and Christina Finger saw the promise of plenty in the Land of Wasnos.

In 1996 Bill Fairley of the Star-Telegram wrote:

“They built their one-room, chinked-log cabin with two doors and two small gunport windows and an earthen floor in the center of their acreage.

“The roof was mostly sod but partially thatched. The family ate, slept, worked, cooked, and played in the single room. Beds were lowered from the ceiling at night. They ate meals on a rough-hewn, split-log table that Lewis had built.”

But a few months after arriving in Tarrant County, Fairley writes, Lewis went to Mexico with Colonel Middleton Tate Johnson’s Texas Rangers to fight in the Mexican-American War. When that war ended in 1848 Lewis was recruited to fight hostile Native Americans along the Texas frontier.

And what did Christina Finger do while her helpmate was away?

Everything.

She continued to perform the gender-traditional chores of a wife. She arose before dawn each day to cook and milk and churn and gather eggs and feed chickens and hogs.

She ground corn and wheat in a hollow log with a pestle.

She spun cloth, carded wool, dyed clothing with crushed herbs and roots. She made shoes from home-tanned leather and shoestrings from rawhide strips. She made candles and soap and patched harnesses.

And she added the gender-traditional chores of a husband. She plowed, planted, harvested, and hauled wheat and corn by wagon six miles west to Archibald Franklin Leonard‘s mill.

She paid the annual headright fee on the Peters Colony grant.

To supplement her garden, she shot prairie chickens, wild turkeys, and wild hogs.

Aided by her children, she cut down trees, split wood, and carried it into their cabin for fuel.

Fairley writes that after Major Ripley Arnold established Fort Worth fifteen miles west of the Finger farm in 1849, Christina earned money by washing and weaving for the fort’s soldiers.

According to History of Texas, Together with a Biographical History of Tarrant and Parker Counties (1895), Christina used the money to hire farm labor—men who could do the heavier work: plowing fields, splitting and hauling rails for fences.

Arista Joyner in Arlington, Texas: Birthplace of the Metroplex writes that Christina Finger was always recognizable by her conservative clothing—either a dotted Swiss or black alpaca dress, adorned only by a cameo pin at her throat. She wore her long, dark hair gathered under a bonnet tied under her chin with a bright ribbon.

Farming on the frontier was a hard life for a couple, even more so for a wife maintaining a farm without her husband.

Lewis Finger was mustered out of the Texas Rangers in 1849 and came home to his family. But he didn’t stay long. Just as free land in Texas had seduced him in 1847, free gold in California seduced him in 1849. Lewis, like Fort Worth’s J. C. Terrell, headed west to the gold fields of northern California.

Christina, with the help of her children, again kept the farm going.

The almost illegible line 29 of the October 1850 census of Weaverville in Trinity County in northern California lists Lewis Finger as a “miner.”

Finger spent several months panning for gold in the mountain streams. He found just enough gold to entice him to keep panning. But the cost of living was high, and miners were vulnerable to attack by hostile Native Americans. By late 1850 Finger was ready to go home.

Years later, Mack Williams writes, Lewis summed up his mining days: “My experience was not the brightest.”

Here is a mathematical puzzler. Finger was in northern California in October 1850 but apparently was back home in time to be included in Tarrant County’s first census in November!

One explanation: When J. C. Terrell went to California by covered wagon in 1852, the trip took three months. But when Mark Twain in 1861 traveled from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento by stagecoach, the trip took only fifteen days. So, maybe Lewis Finger, too, with enough gold to splurge, came home by stagecoach—the four-horsepower Little Deuce Coupe of its day.

Lewis also returned home with enough gold dust to pay for some improvements in the farm, buy more livestock. And Christina was glad to have her helpmate home.

The Fingers still had to be wary of hostile Native Americans.

Mack Williams writes: “Keeping horses was impossible—Indians stole them as fast as they glimpsed them. Conditions improved after Lewis and the other war veterans returned home. Peace of a sort was struck with the Indians. They became more friendly. Straggling bands, it is true, would occasionally cross Tarrant County, raid the settlers and carry off their horses. But the murders of old were not often repeated.”

When the Civil War began, although Lewis was forty-five years old, he enlisted in the Confederate army’s 9th Texas Cavalry Regiment.

And once again Christina, with the help of her children, kept the farm going.

After the war Lewis came marching home, and life for the Fingers settled down, and Lewis and Christina again ran their farm as a couple. And about time: By 1870 Lewis was fifty-four; Christina was fifty-two. Life expectancy in 1870 was forty years. The Fingers in 1880 listed sixty-five improved acres and forty unimproved acres. If that was the total of their land, the Fingers had sold off most of their original 640 acres. Perhaps they were downsizing.

See John Ditto in that 1880 census? I think he was the grandfather of Michael W. Ditto, the first administrator of Arlington Memorial Hospital and the husband of Ruth Ditto, a longtime educator for whom Ditto Elementary School is named.

Lewis Finger—farmer, miner, soldier—died in 1887. Finger had also been a justice of the peace in Arlington. Son George, an attorney, in 1884 became the mayor of Arlington and in 1899 became commissioner of the Texas General Land Office.

Christina carried on without Lewis just as she had when he had been away mining and soldiering.

Most histories say the Fingers settled south of Arlington near Middleton Tate Johnson’s Johnson Station. But county maps of surveys show the L. Finger survey east of Arlington. This map of 1895 shows the Finger survey east of Arlington College, which had just been founded in 1895. Among the founders was the father of Green Berry Trimble.

The Finger survey was just below the Texas & Pacific track, and a creek from Johnson Station passed through the northwest corner of the survey. (See satellite photo below.)

(In the 1800s the creek was known as “Trading House Creek.” Mathias Travis had operated a trading post at Marrow Bone Springs south of Arlington. Middleton Tate Johnson would later found Johnson Station there. The spring may have been the source of the creek. Today the creek is called “Johnson Station Creek” and still flows to the Trinity River.)

By 1896 the Ditto family owned at least 274 acres of the Finger survey.

In 1907 Christina Pless Finger, who had survived the death of one son in the Mexican-American War, three separations from her husband, his death, crop failures, drought, Native American raids, and uncounted callouses, died at age ninety.

She was only person in Tarrant County still living on colony grant land. She also had lived in Arlington longer than anyone else then alive.

Lewis and Christina Finger are buried in Arlington Cemetery not far from where they settled in 1847.

What would Lewis and Christina Finger think of their Land of Wasnos today—173 years later? According to the 1895 survey map, their section of land was the square bordered in white. The curving yellow line is Johnson Station Creek.