Indiana Authors Books

COX, SANDFORD C.: ?-?

Sandford C. Cox arrived in Crawfordsville, Ind., with his parents and their other children, in the fall of 1824, at the very peak of the land speculation excitement and of the only turbulent period that city ever enjoyed. Sandford saw everything: land speculators with phenomenal watch-chains and plug hats, mud, overflowing taverns, recently retired Indian fighters and more mud.

Also the Cox family had stopped at the Falls of Fall Creek in their wagon emigration from Wayne County, Ind., in the Whitewater Valley, long enough for young Sandford to see four men awaiting what was soon to be a multiple hanging for three of them: probably the sole occasion in Indiana on which white men were hanged for the casual misdemeanor of killing Indians.

Cox must have received a reasonable amount of schooling before he came to Eastern Indiana, for within two years he began teaching school and continued the business in Montgomery, Fountain, Warren and Tippecanoe counties during most of his life.

Unlike some of his contemporaries in that profession–whose traditional first interest was tuition money and second and last the jug–Cox always cherished literary ambitions. He wrote long–and most interesting–descriptive letters to his old friends, and by 1833 he had begun to contribute verse to local newspapers. Such contribution indicates a faithful and disinterested wooing of the muse: newspaper editors did not pay for poems then, any more than they do today, and there was more likely to be discredit than glory for the poet in the eyes of his neighbors and patrons.

In October and November, 1859, most of the first of the pioneers having gone on to fairer fields, it occurred to Cox that his own reminiscences of people and events in West-central Indiana might make interesting reading. He had associated with most of the leading men in the four counties in which he had taught and his keen interest in human frailties had prompted him to become acquainted with those citizens at the other extreme of the social scale. Besides, he had seen the "Indian Murderers," as they were called, with his own eyes, and his grandfather, Richard Rue, had told him the otherwise unrecorded story of the captivity of himself, Irvin Hinton and George Holman by a party of Indians under Simon Girty.

The historical contributions he made to the LAFAYETTE DAILY COURIER that fall were published over the signature "In cog." and they aroused sufficient interest to encourage the author to have a small edition of them printed in book form the next year. The book was good; far better, probably, than either Cox or his contemporary readers suspected.

This publication terminated his career as a writer except that, seven years later, he gathered together the best of his poems and published them. The two books are the total output, as far as is recorded, of as observing and as entertaining a writer as could be found in the U. S. of his day.

Cox's Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley, on account of its wealth of detail, pleasing style and the breadth of subjects covered–the "Indian Murderers," middle western settlement, an excellent account of an early Indian captivity, the Black Hawk War, etc.–has long been collected. It is becoming increasingly scarce and is increasing greatly in value.

His book of poems, far more scarce than the Recollections, has attracted interest only as an association item.

Information from Cox–Recollections and deHart–Past and Present of Tippecanoe County.

• Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley. Lafayette, Ind., 1860.

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• The Evangelist and Other Poems. Cincinnati, 1867.

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