We never found his dog that day. Later that same evening we noticed our cat, Lucy, had disappeared too. Lucy was actually a male cat, but when we found him as a little kitten we assumed it was female because it was a Calico. It seemed kind of bossy like Lucy from the comic strips. Lucy couldn’t have been even six weeks old when we found him down by the Green Waters Bottoms. The Bottoms is what we call the two acres or so in the middle of our property that we don’t own. We bought these 23 acres in Rosewater County about 5 years ago when my wife and I decided we were tired of Indianapolis and wanted to find a simpler, country life. When we first looked at the property, the former owners showed us the bottoms and explained that the area wasn’t included in the property. They didn’t go into much detail, but mentioned something about a government easement. It wasn’t until we had lived here for almost two years that the locals began to tell us all the stories about The Bottoms. Apparently the government did own the two acres. There was supposed to be some sort of mineral spring there that was important when the county was first settled. On certain cool evenings you can detect a sulfur smell when you got near The Bottoms. That’s probably how the other stories got started. Some old-timers claim that The Bottoms was the spot of a very early French settlement that mysteriously disappeared. This settlement was home to about 30 fur trappers that didn’t last a year. The official story says that scarlet fever wiped out the whole settlement, but others speculate that it was something a little more ominous. According to these stories one of the trappers, Jean-Louis, kept a diary that was later found by the German immigrants that settled the area in the mid-1800s. No one can say where that diary is now, but there are quite a few tales about what’s in it. -->Next Page