Mrs. Susan Shields was born in 1830 and was about seven years of age when she came to Linn county. She was married to John Harman March 16, 1848, who died shortly afterwards, and she later married John Shields, a resident of Vinton, Iowa. In an interesting letter on early Linn county days she writes as follows: "There were no white people for a long time after we landed in Linn county; when they did come my mother used to let them come and stay there until they would find a place to suit them; it was always a free home for the immigrants. When we first went there I was but a child seven years old. The men I remember most were Robert Ellis, one of our first acquaintances, and Asher Edgerton, the former being with us a long time when the country was new. Of course we had men come in, such as horse thieves, and my father had some of them chained up in one of our rooms for safe keeping until they could be tried, as there was no jail for some time in Linn county. "I went with my father to Marion, a little place then with one or two houses and a jail. We carried an iron trap door for the jail; it was in two rooms, one upstairs and one downstairs. There were two men in the dungeon at the time; we took the door for this jail. My father was a justice of the peace for awhile; he was also a member of the state legislature when the capital was located at Iowa City. Later father sold our place on Abbe's Creek and purchased another on the old Marion road, of about three hundred acres, further north; there was a lovely creek, a grove of maple trees was on one side and a boundless prairie on the other side. The Indians used to come in the spring of the year to camp and make sugar; I have seen as many as five or six hundred at a time camped near our house in the timber; they always made it a camping ground at our place and they seemed to be very fond of my father, who was kind to them and who spoke and understood the Winnebago language.