Dark Bend
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Re: Dark Bend
karenjfink (View posts) Posted: 14 May 2008 2:19AM GMT
Classification: Query
Here is the article. Dark Bend is located in southeastern Jasper County, Illinois. Some of the Dark Bend is in Crawford County and perhaps some is in Richland County. I wish I had a date for the article, but it appears that I do not.
The HISTORY SHOWS DARK BEND LEGEND BASED ON FACT NOT FICTION
From the Robinson Daily News, by Doug Lawhead
In its day, “law abiding folks” avoided the Dark Bend. The Bend is generally recognized as the portion of the Embarrass River Bottoms north of the river in southwest Crawford County and southeast Jasper County.
Legend has it that in the early days of Crawford County, the Bend was a safe haven for thieves, murderers, counterfeiters, and moon shiners. In this case legend is backed up by fact, says Eldon Skaggs, 79, of Stoy who was born and raised in he bend.
Although Skaggs was born long after the last Bend gang broke up, he recalls that people still had to be careful about what they did, and who they “crossed” in the Bend when he was a child. “It was still Dark then, plenty dark,” he said.
In the book, It Happened in Southern Illinois, author John W. Allen said the area got its name from the dense swampy woodlands. The area was difficult to build in, and construction of roadways was impossible. Government surveyors neglected the area until after Illinois became a state.
Allen says the surveys were not completed until 1839 and none of the land was sold until the 1840s. Due to this squatters moved into the area. Most were criminals who used the area as a hideout. To protect themselves from the long arm of the law, the squatters developed a kind of mutual defense fraternity, writes Allen, that thwarted the arrest and conviction of its members.
“It was almost impossible to convict a Dark Bender,” Allen says. “These groups continued to be an annoyance for many years. One group about Chauncey remained active until after 1856. “The stories you heard were probably true,” Skaggs says. “They took care of themselves down there. Lawmen stayed away from the place.” He said the Dark Bend name came from the thick timber, the criminal element, and the lack of lights at night.
“We had a lot of horse thieves travel through,” he said. “You might buy a bay horse from one of them and next spring you’d have a gray horse. What they did was steal a horse from you neighbor, dye it, and sell it to you.”
Moon shiners liked the Bend, too. “We had moon shiners’ stills there, hither and yonder. I’d name some of them, but a lot of them still have relatives down there. There was one that sank his still in the dredge ditch to keep the Feds from finding it. When they left the country, he pulled it out and went back into business.”
Skaggs said occasionally a stranger would wander into the area and be seen fishing. The moon shiners would follow the stranger around to make sure he wasn’t a Fed looking for stills.
Any livestock that wandered off the farm into the Bend was assumed lost. Often, though, the thieves did not wait for the livestock to wander off the farm. “Once a guy tried to drive off Mom’s turkeys. She caught him and hit him in the head with a fence rail, and that took care of that,” Skaggs said.
“There was one woman down there, if she ran out of meat she’d go hunting. If she found a hog, she’d shoot it and take it home on her horse,” Skaggs said.
“Some of them didn’t farm or didn’t work. A lot of them didn’t even have a garden, but they’d have a horse and buggy and got along just fine. Some of them were spin-offs (of the squatters) and some would rather be outlaws than honest.”
Murder was common. Once, a young man disappeared. Several years later his bones were found in a well. “One other time, a boy disappeared and they found his body in a fodder shock,” Skaggs remembered. “Once at a baseball game in Pierceberg—they had a ballpark on the southwest corner of that intersection down there—a fight started and one man ended up killing another man with a knife.”
“You didn’t invade their territory. They played for keeps down there. They let you know who ran the place,” he said.
The end of the Bend began when Joseph Piquet from Alsace, France, founded what is now Ste. Marie. Picquet bought several thousand acres of land, which he in turn sold to his family and friends from France.
About 1850, German immigrants began to settle around the fringes of Dark Bend. Although their houses and barns frequently burned mysteriously, they stayed and eventually tamed the Bend, writes Allen.
“That was still pretty rugged country down there, when I was a kid,” Skaggs said. “You had to be rough or you didn’t exist.”
(A large part of the Dark Bend is in Jasper County. However, now law is in force there, but the river and mosquitoes are still there.)
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