I have been intimately acquainted with the Bays family ever since they came to Blue River settlement from North Carolina, and I am going to tell you the story of the sweetest, gentlest nature God has ever given me to know--Rita Bays. I warn you there will be no heroics in this history, no palaces, no grand people--nothing but human nature, the forests, and a few very simple country folk indeed. Rita was a babe in arms when her father, her mother, and her six-year-old brother Tom moved from North Carolina in two great "schooner" wagons, and in the year '20 or '21 settled upon Blue River, near the centre of a wilderness that had just been christened "Indiana." The father of Tom Bays had been a North Carolina planter of considerable wealth and culture; but when the old gentleman died there were eight sons and two daughters among whom his estate was to be divided, and some of them had to choose between moving west and facing the terrors of battle with nature in the wilderness, and remaining in North Carolina to become "poor white trash." Tom Bays, Sr., had married Margarita, daughter of a pompous North Carolinian, Judge Anselm Fisher. Whether he was a real judge, or simply a "Kentucky judge," I cannot say; but he was a man of good standing, and his daughter was not the woman to endure the loss of caste at home. If compelled to step down from the social position into which she had been born, the step must be taken among strangers, that part at least of her humiliation might be avoided. With a heart full of sorrow and determination, Madam Bays, who even then had begun to manifest rare genius for leadership, loaded two "schooners" with her household goods, her husband, her son, and her daughter, and started northwest with the laudable purpose of losing herself in the wilderness. They carried with them their inheritance, a small bag of gold, and with it they purchased from the government a quarter-section--one hundred and sixty acres--of land, at five shillings per acre. The land on Blue was as rich and fertile as any the world could furnish; but for miles upon miles it was covered with black forests, almost impenetrable to man, and was infested by wild beasts and Indians. Here madam and her husband began their long battle with the hardest of foes--nature; and that battle, the terrors of which no one can know who has not fought it, doubtless did much to harden the small portion of human tenderness with which God had originally endowed her. They built their log-cabin on the east bank of Blue River, one mile north of the town of the same name. The river was spoken of simply as Blue.