Pilot Rock And Cherokee House

 Carter's mom looked outside and there he was sitting in a tree; again! She smiled and yelled out, "Hey, Carter, do you want to go to Marleewood? We have an invitation to go listen to Grandma Lu tell a story. She has already started so we have to be quiet. I think you might like it. She is telling about the olden days and how people got to Missouri and Iowa. Would you like to go?"

Carter liked to listen to stories so he crawled down and got in the car. His brother and sister were busy so he got to have a special treat that day. It was fun to go places with his mom. 

When they got to Marleewood there were quite a few people there, but there were two seats just waiting for them. When he looked to the front there was an older lady that grinned at him. She waved, but kept on going with her story.

Grandma Lu said, "Remember what I said about landmarks and saving Nell's wagon train? Well this is what happened. Robert Perry, one of the ten men had traveled ahead of the thirteen wagons. He had found a huge rock. It was called a glacial rock. Thousands of years ago the earth didn't have grass and trees it was covered with ice. It had happened several times as a matter of fact. Hard to imagine isn't it? But the ice accumulations were called glaciers. They were huge bodies of ice that constantly moved. Well when they moved they would leave behind a rock sometimes. People call them them glacier rocks. It was huge. It was twenty feet high and forty feet wide and sixty feet long. It was so big it was called a boulder. The Indians called it a woven stone. It would later be called Pilot Rock.

Mr. Perry settled south of Pilot Rock and my great grandfather settled his colony a few miles away. It was called the Banister Colony. All in all only fifty people had settled in this area. Mr. Corbett and Mr. Perry planted two acres of potatoes and corn and a house called the Cherokee House that was not quite as big as our garages are now, but with an upstairs called a loft. They soon ran out of provisions in their wagons and slowly but surely had to move into the Cherokee house. They sent two men to Iowa City for provisions, but they didn't come back until the next year because of the bad weather.

Avery and Finnley had been making and frosting cupcakes for the group. They were happy to help Grandma B and Grandma Lu by making snacks.

Grandma Lu stooped over and got into her purse. "Guess what while we take a little break and look at the pictures of what we now call Pilot Rock, I'll tell you something fun. I grew up just a few miles from there on a farm. My great grandfather was one of those ten men. Isn't that fun? This is a picture of him and his fellow trail blazers. He is the stern looking one sitting down on the right. It still seems strange to me that my great grandfather actually helped settle the town where I was born and my grandfather farmed the farm that my grandmother and him got for a wedding present. That's where I lived for eleven years."

"When we get done with our snack I'll tell you what happened to those people that ended up living in the Cherokee house and how they survived. It's a really fun story, one we can't even imagine doing nowadays. Maybe Nell was one of them," Grandma Lu smiled.