Local History Topics

Cheyenne Valley

Museum Notes

by Kristen Parrott, curator
for the week of February 9, 2025

Our archives contains several copies of a memoir written by Harriet Markee Eastman Harris (1848-1934), who as a young girl moved with her family from Ohio to Burr Ridge (or Pleasant Ridge) in the Town of Forest, Vernon County. They arrived in November, 1855, at the start of winter. The family lived in a rough shanty for a few weeks as they quickly built a cabin. On the day that they moved into the cabin, a memorable day, a “colored boy” came and asked for shelter for the night.

The Markees were white, and had settled in a multiracial area now generally referred to as Cheyenne Valley. The boy said that he had been living nearby with the Barton family, who were black. The book Black Settlers in Rural Wisconsin, by Zachary Cooper, refers to this family, and to the boy: “Wesley Barton, born in Alton, Madison Co., IL, in 1818, was among these pioneers [of Cheyenne Valley], arriving in the Town of Forest in August of 1855, accompanied by a slave boy. In bringing the boy north to Wisconsin and freedom, he said, ‘This was the only thing I ever stole.’” According to our records, all of the other pre-Civil War settlers of Cheyenne Valley were free, and not escaped slaves.

The boy explained that he and Wesley Barton had quarreled, and that he’d been forced to leave the Barton home. The Markee family took him in, in exchange for his labor on their new home. He said his name was David Dangerfield Fonteroy Craigwell, but that people just called him Danger.

Harriet’s story says that Danger stayed on with her family until spring. “He had no relatives in this country,” she wrote, “I think his people were all slaves”. This was shortly before the Civil War, and the Markees were abolitionists, opposed to slavery. Harriet herself was named for the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

A school had not yet been established in the area, so the Markee children studied at home. They discovered that Danger was illiterate, as enslaved people were usually prevented from learning to read and write. Seven-year-old Harriet became his teacher, and taught him as much as she knew.

Danger isn’t mentioned again in Harriet Markee’s story, and I’ve wondered what happened to him. A quick online genealogy search reveals a David F. Craigwell who might be the same person. David, a Black man, was born in Mississippi about 1840. He appears on a Civil War draft registration record in 1863, although there is no evidence that he served in the military. This record lists his home as Sauk County, Wisconsin, which like Vernon County was also the site of a sizable African-American community in the late 1800’s.

After the Civil War, David Craigwell moved to Chicago. His name is on voter registration records for 1888 and 1890, and he did vote. He also appears in newspaper stories about a crime he witnessed in 1896. We can glean from the story that David had an Irish-born wife, Maggie, and that they lived in a multi-racial neighborhood in Chicago.

Over the years he worked as a laborer, and a janitor, and a farmer, these being among the few occupations open to Black people at that time. David F. Craigwell died in 1923 in southern Illinois, alone in a field, age 82. Maybe he remembered that he had once been a boy called Danger.