Starting in the middle of the 19th century, whether compelled by desperation or ambition, thousands of families coursed into the vast center of the country to forge a new life from scratch.
Very often looking down the barrel of an impossible future, they clung to an inner conviction that they could make for themselves, in that blank pocket between soil and sky, a home or a farm or a town.
That’s the story of the American pioneer. It’s the story of Bess Streeter Aldrich’s 1928 novel “A Lantern in her Hand.” And it was the story in evidence at a panel discussion Monday, which saw Clyde Toland, Dick Works, Lavon Johnson and Judy McGraw — decedents of some of the oldest families in Allen County — relay the tales of their pioneer forebears.
The panel was convened in celebration of Aldrich’s book, this season’s Iola Reads selection, and prefigures a public discussion of the novel at the Iola library on Tuesday.
The frontier story is a well-known one, colored by images of sunbonnets and wagon wheels but grounded in the more calamitous nouns of the day: drought, disease, floods, cyclones, grasshoppers, Indian raids, blizzards, isolation, and frequent, premature death.
But the cutout version that comes down through documentary history was enlivened Monday night by a wealth of family anecdote, including some first-hand descriptions of events, which spoke as much to the pioneers’ shared goal of prosperity as to the diverse backdrops from which they fled.
Take R.M. Works, who arrived to the prairie on horseback in the 1850s, alone and penniless. According to his great-grandson, the horse Robert Miller rode in on was the young man’s only remuneration for the 10 years he spent as an indentured servant on a farm in New York. Works wrote of his decade in servitude: Those were very difficult years “being bound to a person greatly lacking in human sympathy and reason.”
Or Toland’s relatives, Samuel and Permelia Hubbard, who arrived in Kansas plump with moral purpose, desiring to see that a territory then vulnerable to the spread of slavery achieved the human victory of becoming a free state.
Though each family saga described Monday night contained lessons of labor and endurance, the discussion was shot through with the importance played by chance.
For instance, at least two accounts warned of the contrary fates that can befall the person who takes the simple initiative of sitting down to rest: For Toland’s great-great-grandfather the act induced a protracted death. For Judy McGraw’s relative, a choice siesta spelled the start of a springtime romance.
Toland: “When I was 14, I became interested in family history. I got much of my information from a great aunt. Without even closing my eyes, I can see her when I asked her the critical question: ‘What happened to Samuel Hubbard? Why did he die at 46?’ … She said that there was a fire in his general neighborhood, near the farm. Samuel had gone with others to help put the fire out. After it was out, he sat down on a stump for a while to recuperate. Well, this was February, in the bitter winter, and he got a cold. The cold turned to pneumonia, and so he died of pneumonia, just like [his wife] would 27 years later.”
McGraw: “At age 17, Bert Wiggins, my grandfather, came to Kansas with his father by covered wagon from Sidney, Iowa, in the spring of 1886. He met his future wife Sadie, who was 13, when the family stopped for a rest at the Edward Cain homestead, near Iola. Bert then went on to settle in Labette County.
“But it is told that Bert fell in love with Sadie at first sight, that day back in 1886, and rode a horse and buggy the 50 miles from Labette County to the Cain farm to court her.” It worked; Bert and Sadie were married in Feb. of 1894, and eventually moved to the Cain homestead, where they raised a large family.
Sadie died in 1955, at the age of 82. Bert followed a year later.
TO THE LIST of dreaded nouns mentioned above could be added another — the scoundrel. McGraw told of how her great-grandfather Edward Cain’s service to the Union cause was repaid by his fellow settlers back home. All four families had ancestors who served in the Civil War, but Cain, who fought in the Battle of Chickamauga and at Missionary Ridge, was especially unlucky in his welcome home.
“While serving the army, settlers back home ‘borrowed’ his fences,” explained McGraw, and walked away with many of the accouterments Cain had lain away for the eventual improvement of his new farm. “Also: a squatter had settled on his claim and [Cain] had to buy him off for a thousand dollars.”
