# A House on a Truck ## Preface I embarked on this genealogy journey back in February 2012, over 14 years ago. It’s like a treasure hunt, an addictive pursuit of clues to piece together the missing puzzle pieces. Regrettably, I wish I had taken more interest in genealogy before my grandparents passed away. While research provides hard facts, it also misses a lot of the vibrant colors of life that were never captured. It’s incredibly frustrating to look at photos of ancestors without any identification, wondering who they are. Fortunately, my mom Charlotte has been incredibly helpful, allowing me to paint a much more comprehensive picture than I could have on my own. There will always be more story to tell, but I had to start somewhere. I suspect I will update the book someday as I continue to uncover new information I hope you enjoy this brief history of the Petrie family. Darren Petrie  August 2026 ## Introduction I struggled for a long time on how to write this book. I tried my best to write it in a way that went beyond the dry facts of birthdates, marriage dates, and deaths. It was a slow process until I started using AI to help craft narratives around the tidbits of information I had, weaving research and family stories together into something I could then edit and finish. This book traces my family story back four generations, sixteen interconnected families and beyond —from their European origins to their lives in frontier America, and eventually into towns and cities of the Inland Northwest. I wrote a story about their journey and how they all came together into one person, me.  Going back four generations to my 2nd great-grandparents, only four out of sixteen people were born in the US. The rest were immigrants. Looking at the nationalities of the fourth generation, I found eight Germans, five English, two Czechs, and one Swede.  - Germany — Daubel, Helbig, Metzelt, Petrie, Raisch, Riel, Rudolph, Streib - England — Cooper, Lanphere, Newman, Spence, Strong - Bohemia — Bartosh, Riha - Sweden — Anderson The four US lines of Cooper, Lanphere, Strong, and Newman have a long history in the US, dating back to the 1600s and the Puritan migration to New England. Among them are ancestors who served in the Revolutionary War and Civil War. ![[Genealogy Publish/A House on a Truck/Pasted image 20260816132044.png]]  **Figure 1**. Four generation family tree Each chapter follows a family group, moving from their origins to the US and the Pacific Northwest, where the lines eventually come together. To help identify direct ancestors, I have bolded their names throughout. ## Chapter 1 **_Hopewell_** **to a New World** Strong Beginnings Strong • Lane Every family that traces its roots deep into American soil eventually arrives at a first crossing — a name attached to a ship, a year, a port of arrival. For the Strongs, that name is Elder John Strong, and the ship is the _Hopewell_. His descendants would spread across the towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and generations later the Strong line would join, by marriage, with a family whose service reached back to the Revolution itself. This chapter follows two of those founding threads — the Strongs from their arrival in 1635, and the Lanes of New Jersey, whose daughter Eleanor Jane carried her father's patriot legacy into the Strong household of upstate New York. **Elder John Strong** The Strong line in America begins with Elder John Strong, a tanner by trade, who was born about 1610 in Chard, Somerset, England. In 1635 he sailed to the New World aboard the Hopewell, accompanied by his first wife, Margery Deane, daughter of William Deane. It is through this marriage, and their son John Strong Jr., born before 1634 in Chard, that the family here descends. Margery did not long survive the crossing. She died about 1635, and a second child born to the couple lived only two months, dying that same year in Hingham, Massachusetts. That year John married again, taking as his second wife Abigail Ford, daughter of Thomas Ford and Elizabeth Chard Cooke. Abigail had been baptized on 8 October 1619 in Bridport, Dorset, and had come to America in 1630 aboard the _Mary & John_ with her own family. She and John had a large family of sixteen children, born across three decades and three colonies — from Thomas about 1636 in Hingham through Jerijah in December 1665 in Northampton — a spread of births that traces the family's own migrations through Hingham, Taunton, Windsor, and finally Northampton. Those movements can be followed closely in the surviving land and civil records. John Strong first received a grant at Hingham on 18 September 1635, five acres on North Street near Ship Street in the Plymouth Colony, and was made a freeman there on 9 March 1636/37. By 1638 he had settled at Taunton, holding a house lot on Dean Street west of the John Dean house; he became a freeman of Plymouth Colony on 4 December 1638 and served as the town's first constable in 1638 and 1639, and as a juror in 1645. In February 1647 he acquired land at Windsor, Connecticut — a purchase, made jointly with Thomas Ford, that included a house, outbuildings, yards, orchards, and gardens totaling about two acres, along with nearly two more acres of meadow at the foot of the hill. He was made a freeman of Connecticut on 15 May 1654. It was at Northampton, Massachusetts, that John Strong's standing reached its height. He was ordained and made Elder of the church in 1663 — the title by which he is remembered. There he assembled considerable holdings, buying several parcels from John Webb in October 1660 and receiving grants from the town, among them a tan yard on King Street Brook. That yard, a quarter acre in size, was central to his working life: the town directed by vote that all hides be brought to him to be tanned at his own price, a mark of the trust his neighbors placed in his honesty. His home lot, purchased from John Webb at the corner of Main and South Streets, remained in the family for 103 years. In his later years he began passing his lands to his sons, giving the tan yard and half of a Manham Meadow lot to his son Ebenezer in December 1688. Abigail Ford died on 16 July 1688 in Northampton, and John outlived her by more than a decade, dying on 14 April 1699 in the same town. The two are buried together in the Bridge Street Cemetery in Northampton. **Matthias Lane, Revolutionary War Soldier** Five generations of Strong descent would pass before the family line crossed with that of the Lanes — and that crossing brought with it a direct link to the founding of the nation. **Matthias Lane** was born on 19 May 1759 in Freehold, Monmouth County, New Jersey, and was baptized soon after, on 24 June 1759, in the Dutch Reformed Church of Freehold and Middletown. He was the son of **Matthias Lane**, born before 1712, and **Catherine Polhemus** — the Polhemus name an old and established one among the Dutch settlers of Monmouth County. Matthias grew up within a close network of families bound by the Reformed faith, by farming, and by shared descent. In January 1777, not yet eighteen, Matthias enlisted in the cause of independence. His service — recorded decades later in Revolutionary War pension file S.23297 — was that of a private, or trooper, in a company of light dragoons, mounted militia raised in Monmouth County to guard the New Jersey coast. His was state militia duty rather than Continental Line service, a distinction that would later shape both the scrutiny his claim received and the difficulty of documenting it. The pattern of his service was typical of the New Jersey coastal defense units. He entered the ranks in the spring after the British took New York City, serving roughly every other month — out in the field through the spring, summer, and fall, home through the winters — with the total credited service aggregating to the two years required under the Pension Act of 1832. His duties were to guard the Monmouth shoreline against Tory raids launched from Staten Island and Long Island, protecting horses, cattle, sheep, and property from being carried off to the enemy. His company ranged among Freehold, Tinton Falls, Middletown, Shrewsbury, Long Branch, Manasquan, and the Highlands, with headquarters at Tinton Falls, Middletown, and Freehold. Over the course of his service he served under Captains Conover, Randolph, William Remsen, and Jacob Covenhoven, and under Colonels Daniel Hendrickson and Asher Holmes, with General David Forman in overall command — officers all documented in the historical record of the New Jersey militia. Two episodes stood out in his own account. While under Captain Remsen, his unit marched from Monmouth County through Allentown and Trenton, crossed the Delaware to Bristol, and there met Congress retreating from Philadelphia; pressed into service as an escort, the company guarded Congress back through Trenton, Easton, Moravian Town, and Reading before being dismissed and returning to guard the shores. He was also present at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778: arriving at Monmouth Court House to find his company already moved on, he fell in temporarily with Colonel Morgan's Riflemen and was drawn up in line of battle near John Richmond's mill, though on account of General Charles Lee's disobedience of orders his unit did not engage. That he made no claim to combat there is telling — a restraint that speaks to the honesty of his testimony. That testimony was hard-won. When Matthias first applied under the Act of 7 June 1832 — appearing in open court at Farmersville on 8 March 1833, aged seventy-four — the Pension Office returned his papers on 30 July 1833, objecting that his claim rested on "traditionary evidence" without direct affidavits or documentary discharge papers, though such papers were rarely issued to militiamen. His neighbors Francis E. Baillet and Ezra B. Strong had certified that he was reputed and believed to have been a soldier of the Revolution, and his nephew Timothy Lane — a deacon of the Baptist church at Farmersville — swore that he had known his uncle for thirty years and had heard from the now-deceased Joseph Mofford that the two had served together. Timothy also attested to a difficulty that the Pension Office would come to weigh: within a few years Matthias had grown very infirm and blind, seldom leaving his house, and had in great measure lost his memory. The objections were resolved through Matthias's own persistence. Not knowing whether any of his old comrades still lived, he sent his son to New Jersey, who found two of them. Lewis Covenhoven, aged eighty-one, a sergeant in the same company, and Joseph Van Cleaf, aged seventy-three, a private, both swore before a Monmouth County justice on 10 September 1833 that they had known Matthias in the service, had seen him frequently at their headquarters and on their marches along the coast, and that he had always performed his monthly tours of duty well as a good soldier. Covenhoven even recalled Matthias among the men sent to escort Congress. In a supplemental affidavit of 25 November 1833, Matthias openly acknowledged that age, sickness, and loss of memory prevented him from swearing to the precise length of each engagement, deferring to what his comrades had confirmed — a candor that only strengthened his case. The claim was approved. Certified by Secretary of War Lewis Cass on 18 January 1834, Matthias was granted a pension of one hundred dollars a year for life, payable semi-annually and effective from 4 March 1831. The record even preserves a small later episode of his poverty and vulnerability: a letter from one E. S. Stewart asking on the old man's behalf whether he was entitled to bounty land, and warning that a "professed pension agent" had written offering information for a fee of five dollars — the kind of speculation to which poor pensioners were frequently prey. Matthias's life traced the westward push of the post-Revolutionary frontier. He remained in Monmouth County through 1794, then moved north into New York — to Canajoharie by 1790, Charlestown in Montgomery County by 1800, Sullivan in Madison County by 1810, Cayuga County by 1820, and at last to Farmersville in Cattaraugus County by 1830, where he was numbered among the early settlers of that raw frontier country. The history of Cattaraugus County remembers him plainly: "Lane, Matthias, early settler, pensioner, died 1850 Farmersville." He died in 1850 in Freedom, Cattaraugus County, having lived ninety-one years, and was buried at Farmersville. His wife's name has not survived, but the children who did are partly known: a son Charles, born in 1798; a son William, born in 1799; a daughter Catherine, born in 1800; and a daughter, **Eleanor Jane**, born about 1796. It was through Eleanor Jane that the Lane and Strong lines were joined. **The Bridge to the Strongs** Eleanor Jane Lane married **Ezra Brewster Strong Sr.**, and it was Ezra — as "Ezra B. Strong," neighbor to Matthias in Farmersville — who stepped forward in the Cattaraugus County courtroom in 1833 to vouch for the old soldier's character. That signature is the quiet hinge of this chapter: the Strong descendant of Elder John, who had come over on the _Hopewell_, standing as witness for the Revolutionary veteran whose daughter he had married. With Elder John Strong's arrival in 1635, Matthias Lane's coastal service in the war for independence, and their two lines drawing together in the frontier town of Farmersville, the family's American beginnings are set — the fuller story of Ezra Brewster Strong Sr. and Eleanor Jane Lane belongs to the chapter that follows. ## Chapter 2 **Fields of Freedom** A Century In Cattaraugus Strong • Newman • Crandall • Easton For more than a century, a cluster of interrelated families — Strongs, Lanes, Newmans, Crandalls, and Powells among them — worked the land in and around the neighboring towns of Farmersville and Freedom in Cattaraugus County, New York. Their story begins in the hill country of New England and follows a Yankee migration westward, taking root along Clear Creek in the 1820s and 1830s and holding fast there through the Civil War and beyond, until at last one branch loaded a boxcar and set out for the far Northwest. This chapter follows those families to the eve of that departure, and no further. **The Land and Its Settlement** Farmersville and Freedom lie in the rolling upland country of southwestern New York — a landscape of broad-shouldered hills, wooded ridges, and narrow stream valleys, some sixty miles southwest of Rochester and forty-five miles east of Jamestown. The district was drained by Clear Creek, along whose valley the region's first road was laid out in October 1813, when the ground that would become Freedom and Farmersville was still part of the older town of Ischua and the county itself was raw frontier only recently opened to settlement. The valley floor offered the flattest, most workable route through otherwise broken terrain, and it was along that line that the country first opened to the settlers who followed. This was a country of hard winters and short, intense growing seasons, suited to the mixed subsistence-and-market farming typical of the western New York hills — grain, hay, oats, dairy cattle, orchards, and woodlots — rather than to any single cash crop. The soil rewarded labor but did not lavish wealth. The men and women who broke it were the kind who stayed put, married their neighbors, and filled the local burying grounds with a familiar rotation of surnames. The families who came here in the 1820s and 1830s arrived when the region was still being carved out of forest. Among the earliest was **Matthias Lane**, a Revolutionary War veteran and pensioner, who lived out his final years in Farmersville and died there in 1850. His presence marks how thin the interval still was between the founding generation of the young republic and the settlement of this frontier — men who had marched in 1777 were living to see their grandchildren break the first fields. **Connecticut to Vermont: The Strong Line** The Strong family's roots reach back to **Reuben Strong**, born 8 May 1733 in Colchester, Connecticut,— 2nd great-grandson of Elder John Strong —who married **Lydia Hutchinson** on 10 December 1761. He made his way north to Thetford, in Orange County, Vermont, where he died on 13 December 1775, in the earliest years of the Revolution. His son **Walter Strong**, born 19 September 1770 in that same town, married **Elsa Lucy** in 1790 and carried the family westward into New York State, living in Lima, Livingston County, when last recorded there after 1850. It was Walter's son, **Ezra Brewster Strong Sr.**, who established the family in Cattaraugus County. Born 25 March 1798 in Thetford, Ezra grew up in a hilly, hard-won landscape of small farms still within living memory of its frontier days. Like many young New Englanders of his generation, he did not remain in the state of his birth; the pull of cheaper, more open land drew him westward into New York, and by 1820 he had settled in Ontario County, part of the great tide of Yankee migration that peopled western New York in the decades after statehood. In 1818 Ezra married **Eleanor Jane Lane**, a daughter of **Matthias Lane**. Eleanor had come of age in the settled river country of central New York, born 10 February 1796 in the town of Charleston in Montgomery County, where the Mohawk Valley of her childhood had only recently passed from frontier to established farmland. Together she and Ezra built a large household through years of movement and settlement. From Ontario County in 1820 they moved to Parma, in Monroe County, by 1830, and on to Farmersville by 1832, where Ezra settled on a farm that later generations would remember as the place owned by Mrs. Bradford Jones. He was among the early settlers of that township, and the years ahead were defined by what one account plainly called "a manly struggle with poverty while rearing and educating a family." Eleven children were born to Ezra and Eleanor — among them Lucy Eleanore, Sally Merana, Mary Ann, William Nelson, Jacob Lane, **Ezra Brewster Jr**., Harriet, Walter Van Cleat, Joseph Gardner Haskins, Eleanor Josephine, and Reuben E. Raising so many children through the 1820s and 1830s demanded the full measure of a woman's endurance, in a household where domestic labor, farm work, and the constant care of the young left little idle time. Not all survived their parents; Harriet and Mary Ann both died before them. Their children scattered into lives of their own across the country. William, the oldest, became a wealthy farmer in Michigan; Sally was widowed by Henry Chaffee; Josephine married Danforth Shattuck; Lucy married into the Hellman family; and Joseph Strong served as a captain in the 28th Iowa Infantry, carrying the family name into the Civil War. Walter Strong took up farming at Machias, while Jacob Lane Strong — named for Eleanor's own father — settled in Freedom, married Phebe Phelps, and became a lifelong Baptist who served as a deacon of his church for over thirty years. It was said with quiet local pride that Jacob and his six sons all voted in the same election district, the sort of settled, multi-generational rootedness that defined the place. Eleanor spent her final years in the Cattaraugus County country she had helped settle, dying on 2 July 1855 in Freedom, at the age of fifty-nine, and was buried among the community her family had joined more than two decades before. Ezra outlived her by two decades. In his final years he followed the westward path once more, joining the family's presence in Michigan; he was living in Watertown, Clinton County, by 1870, and died there on 25 September 1875, at the age of seventy-seven. He was buried at Wacousta, far from the Vermont hills where his long and laboring life had begun. **Ezra Brewster Strong Jr. and Priscilla Crandall** Among Ezra and Eleanor's sons was **Ezra Brewster Strong Jr.**, born 15 May 1829 in Farmersville, the town that would remain the fixed point of his entire life. By the time the 1875 gazetteer of Cattaraugus County took his measure, he was known as a carpenter and a farmer, working a modest holding of two and a half acres along Road 5. The pairing was a common one in the hill country, where few men could live by a single trade alone; a skilled hand with saw and plane could frame barns and houses through much of the year while tending his own ground in season. In a town such as Farmersville a carpenter was a valued neighbor, his work visible in the very fabric of the community. Where many of his generation drifted westward with the frontier, Ezra Jr. remained remarkably tied to his native town, appearing there through census after census. He died before 1880 in Farmersville, the same town in which he had been born some five decades earlier. Ezra Jr. had married **Priscilla B. Crandall**, born 5 August 1822 in New York, a daughter of **Henry Sprague Crandall** and **Martha J. Guile**. Her childhood, too, unfolded in Cattaraugus County when it was still very much a frontier, and by 1840 she was a young woman on the threshold of her own family life. She and Ezra raised at least two children in Farmersville — a daughter, Elizabeth M. Strong, and a son, **Walter Ezra Strong** — living by the demands of the soil through more than thirty years of settled household life. The most striking turn in Priscilla's own story came late, when, widowed and past sixty, she left the New York countryside that had held her family for so long and made her way west with her son. But that journey belongs to the family's later chapter, and to the far Northwest. **The Newmans of Freedom** Into this same web of Clear Creek families married the Newmans, whose lives were bound to the town of Freedom and the small settlement of Sandusky through much of the nineteenth century. The eldest of them, **Daniel D. Newman**, was born 2 June 1817 in New York and became a man of standing in his community, serving as Commissioner of Highways for the town of Freedom. In that office he left a permanent mark on the landscape: in 1877 he oversaw the erection of the first iron bridge in the town, spanning Clear Creek at Sandusky. It was the beginning of a wave of such improvements — by the close of the century the town counted thirteen of these substantial structures, a quiet measure of how far the district had come from the single mud track of 1813. Daniel lived out his long life in his native county, dying 21 January 1891 at Eagle. His generation and the one that followed included several who spent their lives close to Freedom. Lucy Newman, born 13 November 1838, remained largely within Cattaraugus County, with a period spent in China Township in Wyoming County, and died 2 May 1909. **Franklin H. Newman**, born in 1839, lived in Freedom and Farmersville; his life was a short one, ending in May 1872 at Freedom in his early thirties. His daughter **Jeanette "Jennie" Lydia Newman** will marry into the Strong line. Chester C. Newman, born in June 1841 at Cattaraugus, was of all the family the most rooted in Freedom, where he passed nearly the whole of his very long life, keeping a grocery at Sandusky and earning his living as a village merchant; he lived to a great age, dying at Freedom on 4 February 1931, nearly ninety years old. Lillie Newman, born in 1855 at Freedom, made her home in the town. **An Era of War and Change** The decades in which these families flourished were among the most consequential in the nation's history. They settled during the Jacksonian era of westward expansion and internal improvement, and the generation that came of age here in the 1850s and 1860s grew up, as one family account put it, during the years of slavery, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln's presidency and assassination. Cattaraugus County sent its sons into the Union armies, and this family was no exception, Joseph Strong's captaincy in the 28th Iowa attesting to the reach of the war into these households. The technological revolutions of the age reached the region as well. The children born here in the 1820s and 1830s had grown up before the railroad; within their lifetimes rail lines threaded through western New York, and the community itself came to be known as **Farmersville Station** — a name that testifies to how thoroughly the railroad had reordered rural life, turning isolated farm towns into points on a network. **The Marriage of Walter Strong and Jennie Newman** It was that railroad, in the end, that would carry the family clear across the continent — but first two of these long-intertwined lines were joined. **Walter Ezra Strong** married **Jeanette "Jennie" Lydia Newman** at Farmersville Station. Jennie had been born there on 12 December 1859, into the same corner of Cattaraugus County that had held both their families for a generation and more. With their marriage the Strong and Newman lines, neighbors along Clear Creek since the days of iron bridges and Baptist deacons, were united in a single household. By the marriage of Walter and Jennie in the summer of 1875, the Strongs and Newmans had woven their two lines together within the same few square miles of Cattaraugus County soil that had held them for half a century — the farms above Clear Creek, the Baptist meeting house, and the small stores at Sandusky. Nine years later, a chartered boxcar would carry the couple and their kin out of that settled world and toward the far Northwest, but that departure belongs to the next chapter. ## Chapter 3 **A Boxcar and a Dream** The Strongs Move West Strong • Newman In the early spring of 1884, a chartered boxcar rolled westward out of New York bound for the Washington Territory. In its front compartment stood a kitchen range, a table and benches, two beds, a chest of drawers, and Jennie Strong's rocking chair; in its rear were a team of horses, two cows, some chickens, and a bred sow, together with hay, grain, and farming equipment. Riding along were **Walter Strong**, a carpenter who had made up his mind to leave the settled farm country of New York for a place he had only heard of, called Spokane Falls; his wife, **Jennie Newman**; their three small children; his aging mother; his wife's brother; and a family friend. It was a decision that would define the rest of their lives, and this chapter follows that boxcar and the family it carried across a continent. **Walter and Jennie in New York** Walter Strong was born on 6 February 1855 at Farmersville Station, in Cattaraugus County, New York — a rural community some sixty miles southwest of Rochester and roughly a hundred and fifty miles from New York City. He was the son of **Ezra Strong Jr.** and **Priscilla Crandall**, and he grew up during the turbulent middle decades of the nineteenth century, the years of slavery, the Civil War, and the presidency and assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He received such education as the public schools of the region afforded and learned the trade of a carpenter, a skill that would serve him well on a frontier where every homestead had to be built by hand. His wife was born Jeanette Newman — known through her life as Jennie — on 12 December 1859 in Freedom, in the same county, the daughter of **Franklin Newman** and **Hannah Easton**. The Newmans lived in Freedom at the time of the 1860 census, when Jennie was still an infant, and by 1870 the household had settled in Farmersville, where she spent the remainder of her girlhood. Cattaraugus County in those years was a landscape of family farms, dairy pastures, and small crossroads villages tucked among the hills of the state's southwestern corner, and a rural upbringing there meant a life bound to the seasons. On Saturday, 3 July 1875 — the day before the Fourth of July — Walter married Jennie at Farmersville Station. She was fifteen, a young age even by the standards of her day, though not an unheard-of one in rural communities where households formed early and hands were needed on the land. It would have been a summer wedding filled with good food and celebration on the eve of the national holiday. For nearly a decade the couple stayed rooted in Cattaraugus County, where Walter farmed and where their first three children — Franklin Dewitt, Grace Ruby, and Mattie Pearl — were born. **The Boxcar West** In the spring of 1884, Walter and Jennie resolved to begin a new life in the far Northwest. Chester Arthur was president, and the country beyond the Mississippi was still largely wild. The land they were bound for was covered with virgin pine forest, home to the Spokane Indians and abundant game; at the site of the future city there stood only the Spokane Falls Trading Post, where drinking water was hauled from the river in whiskey barrels. To carry themselves and their whole way of life westward, the Strongs chartered a boxcar on the railroad. The men slept in the back on the hay, while Jennie and the children — Grace, Mattie, and Dewitt — slept in the front. They did not travel alone. Walter's mother, Priscilla, herself born in New York in 1796 and by then a woman of advanced years, came west with them, as did Jennie's brother Carl Newman and a family friend named Jack Cook. The journey was long and tiring; they bought supplies where they could along the way, arriving in Spokane in late March as the last of the winter snow was leaving. Finding the March winds still cold, they lingered near Spokane Falls until spring, then on 21 April 1884 moved out to Wild Rose Prairie, a stretch of some fifteen square miles north of the city and about six miles south of Deer Park. At first they lived in a tent in the heart of the prairie, while Carl and Jack stayed behind in Spokane to find work, the family funds by then running very low. **Homestead on Wild Rose Prairie** Life on the prairie was one of long days of back-breaking labor for men and women alike. Salmon were pitchforked from the creeks and smoked for winter; deer, rabbit, pheasant, and bear were plentiful; wild hay was cut with scythe and wooden rake; and stumps were grubbed out by hand and burned to clear the land. Supplies were carried home on men's backs from Spokane until stores and post offices slowly appeared at Hazard, Deer Park, and beyond. The homestead did not come easily. Walter first filed on a tract in the heart of the prairie, next to the Hazard place where the tent stood, but another man later settled on part of it and filed as well, and the competing claims had to be settled in court at Seattle. When Walter's lawyer returned by train, he signaled from the slowing car as it passed through Spokane Falls that the case had been won — but Walter misunderstood the gesture and believed he had lost. It was likely during this uncertain period, around 1886, that the family briefly returned to Spokane Falls, where their son William was born. The same summer brought an Indian scare, when the settlers of the prairie — some fifteen large families — gathered at the fortified Fort Tarbert and Fort Griffith and lived together until soldiers arrived. The homestead deed was finally secured in 1889, and on that land the family remained for the rest of their lives. Their farm became known for years as the Edgewood Fruit Farm, where they raised cherries, plums, peaches, apples, and apricots, and sold butter and milk. Beyond farming Walter engaged in freighting, and he was counted among the industrious men of the community. His neighbor J. D. Walters, who homesteaded the adjoining property and raised strawberries, remained a close friend for life. Walter was an active worker in the fraternal lodges — a charter member of Modern Woodmen of America Lodge No. 7218 at Wayside and affiliated with the Knights of the Maccabees — while Jennie belonged to the Ladies of the Maccabees and was identified with the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Wild Rose. In an area with no doctor for many years, Jennie was often the one called upon to deliver babies; she kept instruments and was regarded as a midwife until the first physician settled at Chattaroy. **Walter's Death and Jennie's Later Years** After thirty-seven years on Wild Rose Prairie, Walter Strong died on Saturday evening, 22 October 1921, at six o'clock, following a three-week illness from internal carcinoma. He was sixty-seven years old. Funeral services were held at the Methodist Episcopal church on Wild Rose the following Monday afternoon, with the Reverend Dow DeLong in charge. The Modern Woodmen conducted the graveside rites, where more than forty cars bore relatives and friends to his resting place in Wild Rose Cemetery. He left twenty-one grandchildren residing in the immediate vicinity. Jennie survived him by more than a decade. She lived out her later years in the Riverside district of Stevens County, where the 1930 census still records her presence, a woman of seventy who had spent more than four decades in the Washington country she and Walter had chosen. Her granddaughter Thressa remembered being close with her Grandma Jenny. Jennie died on 1 May 1934 in Spokane, at the age of seventy-four, and was buried at Deer Park. **The Children of Walter and Jennie** The eldest son, Franklin Dewitt Strong, was born on 21 April 1876 at Farmersville Station and came west as a small boy in the family boxcar. On 2 August 1900 he married Myra Cornelia Eglin. Though he lived for a time in the Wild Rose and Riverside country of his childhood, in his later years he moved to the Cowlitz County region of western Washington; at his father's death he was living at Logging Camp 17, and it was at Kelso that he died on 26 May 1940. Grace Ruby Strong was born on 6 October 1880 at Farmersville Station and was old enough at four to be counted among the children who rode west and slept in the front of the boxcar. On 8 September 1916 she married Richard Martin Cline, becoming Mrs. R. M. Cline of Wild Rose. She lived much of her life around Wayside, near her parents' farm, and died on 25 October 1960 at Deer Park. Mattie Pearl Strong, born on 26 June 1882 at Farmersville Station, was the youngest of the three children born in New York and the third of those who made the westward journey as small children. On Christmas Day 1903 she married Arthur John Cline, and as Mrs. Arthur Cline she made her home in Williams Valley. She died on 13 April 1958 in Spokane. **William "Will" Henry Strong** was born on 4 February 1887 at Spokane Falls, during the family's uncertain interlude away from the prairie, and was raised on Wild Rose Prairie. On 9 September 1908 he married **Josephine Lillian Spence**. He lived a long life in the Wild Rose and Deer Park country, dying at Deer Park on 6 September 1967. His story, and that of his marriage, belongs to a later chapter. Ethel May Strong was the first of Walter and Jennie's children born on the Washington homestead, arriving on 9 September 1891 at Riverside in Stevens County. On 16 January 1909 she married John William Yandell and was afterward known as Mrs. J. W. Yandell of Deer Park. Her life carried her for a time to Potlatch in Idaho and to Omak in Okanogan County, but she returned to the Deer Park area, where she died on 21 March 1972. Guy Alfred Strong, born on 13 March 1896 at Riverside, was the child who lived at home at the time of his father's death, remaining close to the family land. On the last day of 1924 he married Thelma B. Lynch. He spent his life in the Stevens County country of Riverside and Williams Valley, dying on 20 September 1955 in Spokane. The youngest, Carl "Carlie" F. Strong, was born on 15 March 1899 at Riverside but did not survive childhood. He died on 8 April 1901, just past his second birthday. In those days coffins were homemade — the men building the box and the women lining it — and the little boy was among the earliest losses the family knew on the prairie they had come so far to claim. From a chartered boxcar and a tent on the open prairie, the Strongs built the Edgewood Fruit Farm and settled the Wild Rose, Riverside, and Deer Park country of eastern Washington, where Walter, Jennie, and most of their children lived out their lives within a few miles of one another.  ## Chapter 4 **The McKean Frontier** Cooper • Lanphere • Grow • Fitch Along the high, wooded plateau of northwestern Pennsylvania, where cold streams cut through rounded hills toward the Allegheny River, three families — the Coopers, the Lanpheres, and the Grows — took up land in the earliest days of McKean County's settlement. They arrived in the 1830s to a country still blanketed in old-growth pine and hemlock, and they made their homes not so much in towns as in the scattered clearings strung along the runs and creeks: Annin, Ceres, Bell's Run, King's Run, Myrtle, Turtle Point. For the better part of a century, from those first arrivals to descendants still living in Ceres as late as 1940, this corner of the county straddling the Pennsylvania–New York line was home. **The Country They Settled** When the first settlers came, the work of the axe was the work of settlement itself. A pioneer family did not buy a farm so much as make one, felling timber, burning brush, and coaxing crops from stumpy ground between the standing trees. The log houses built in the 1830s were the ordinary architecture of a frontier where sawn lumber and finished goods were luxuries hauled in over rough roads. Winters were long, the growing season short, and subsistence rather than surplus was the measure of a good year. The economy ran first on the forest. The men were both farmers and lumbermen, clearing land for crops while the felled timber itself became a source of income — the great pine and hemlock floated down the creeks in rafts and drives during the high water of spring, carried toward mills and markets downstream. A man might spend the winter cutting logs, the spring running them to water, and the summer tending fields and stock. Farming here was modest and mixed: hay, oats, potatoes, buckwheat, a few cattle and sheep, a woodlot, a garden. Prosperity, when it came, was the quiet kind — a frame house replacing a log one, a barn raised, a homestead purchased outright and passed to a son. Small commerce grew up alongside the farms; at one point a grocery was kept in a Cooper home, the sort of informal store that served a thin, dispersed population. The people of this district were overwhelmingly of old New England and New York stock, part of the great Yankee drift that had pushed from New England into western New York and then spilled south across the line. They were church folk of the Protestant mainstream — Baptist and Methodist Episcopal congregations anchored community life — and they held the small offices that ran a rural township. Membership in the Sons of Temperance signals a community that took its moral order seriously. It was also, for a frontier settlement, a place capable of quiet decency. When a Black couple, James Ward and his wife, settled and cleared land here around 1840, they were remembered as a worthy pair who received much kindness through long sickness, cared for by neighbors when illness came. The wider world eventually pressed in. The 1840s and 1850s were the years of consolidation, when raw clearings became working farms and the first generation grew old on the land they had broken. Then came the Civil War, which reached even into these remote valleys — the county sent its men to the front, some of them to the famous "Bucktails." The most dramatic change came after the war, when in the 1870s and 1880s McKean County became one of the great centers of the American oil boom, throwing up derricks across the hills and drawing thousands of speculators and laborers. The quiet farming districts of Ceres and Annin lay somewhat apart from the wildest of this frenzy, but no one in the county was untouched by it, and the same restlessness that had carried Yankee families west kept working on the next generation, sending sons and daughters to Dakota Territory even as the older folk remained in the hills. **The Coopers** The Cooper family reaches back into eighteenth-century New England. **Peter Cooper** was born around 1740 in North Providence, Rhode Island, and lived for a time in Killingly, Connecticut, before the line returned to its Rhode Island roots. It was there that **Samuel Cooper** was born on 16 September 1774. Samuel married **Mary "Polly" Russell**, and together they carried the family westward and then south into the timber country of Pennsylvania. Several of their sons came first — brothers Ira, Cyrus, and Russell reached the Ceres neighborhood as early as 1833, when the region was still raw forest awaiting the axe. By 1838 Samuel and Mary had settled in Annin township, followed by their sons Theron and Silas, who took up land along Annin Creek. Samuel lived out his years in Ceres, where he died on 12 October 1857 at the age of eighty-three. Among Samuel's sons was **Cyrus W. Cooper**, born in 1804 at Canandaigua in Ontario County, New York, and one of the first Coopers to establish himself in Ceres. If there was one constant in his Pennsylvania life, it was movement — not the wandering of a man without purpose, but the practical churn of a frontier settler who bought, cleared, and sold land as opportunity allowed. He sold his first holding to a man named Dedrick and bought land on King's Run, where he lived for a decade or more before removing to the village. There he built a home near where Dr. Place later lived, sold it, and at last relocated to Myrtle. The census years traced his residences within a single county — Ceres in 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880, Mapleton in 1876, Myrtle in 1879 — the outline of a man who spent his whole adult life within the bounds of one Pennsylvania county yet rarely long under one roof. In 1832 Cyrus married **Harriet "Fann" Fitch**, born in 1811 in New York. Harriet was remembered as a woman of quiet generosity, always frail and burdened with much care, yet capable of a striking charity. When James Ward lay dying, she took his ailing wife into her own home and nursed her through a serious sickness — the Wards' youngest child was born there — and she did this without any sense that she had done more than her duty. She died young, in November 1849, while the family lived at King's Run. Cyrus married a second time around 1850; that wife died at Myrtle in 1882. His two marriages produced several children — Omer, Artemus, Eveline, Juliaetta, Ruth Adalaide, and **Oscar** — of whom three survived to carry the family forward: Evaline, long a resident of Plainfield, New Jersey, as the wife of J. C. Dyer; Ruth Adelaide, who became the second wife of C. A. Warner of Ceres; and Oscar, who settled in South Dakota. Cyrus lived out his final years at Myrtle, a widower once more, and died on 29 April 1888 at Ceres, aged eighty-four, having outlived by more than half a century the wilderness he had helped to clear. **The Lanpheres** The family into which Cyrus's son Oscar would marry had followed the same westward path. It begins with **George W. Lanphere**, born on 4 September 1786 in New York, a native of New England along with his wife, **Hannah Haskins**. Tradition names his parents as Benjamin Lanphere and Elizabeth Dye, though that connection has never been proven. In 1835 George and Hannah left the settled districts and took up land in Ceres township, on the farm later owned by William Worden, where they cleared the ground and remained until their deaths. Five of their children grew to maturity — John, Lois, **Nimrod**, Esther, and Martha — and the daughters married into local families, Lois to John Chapman, Esther to Clark Wells, and Martha to Joseph Trumbull. George died on 2 October 1849 in Little Genesee, Allegany County, New York, and was buried in the Wells Cemetery there. His son **Nimrod Lanphere**, born 21 April 1817 in Almond, Allegany County, New York, was eighteen when he came with his parents to Ceres in 1835, and he spent nearly his entire life on the farm he cleared with his own hands. His was the settled life of a pioneering farmer who put down roots and stayed, watching a raw frontier township mature around him. On 2 June 1840 he married **Sally Grow**, daughter of **George W. Grow** and **Ruth Cornell** of Ceres township — a union of two families already rooted in the same corner of the county. Census after census, from 1850 through 1900, found him in Ceres, a rare constancy in an era of perpetual movement. His mail came through the post office at Myrtle, and the labor of turning forest into fields defined his daily world. Nimrod was counted among the leading citizens of his community, holding in turn the offices of supervisor, judge of election, assessor, and school director — the kind of practical public service that fell to men trusted by their neighbors. He was a member of the Seventh-Day Baptist Church and a Republican in politics. A second marriage is recorded in 1891, following the arc of a long life that had already spanned the settlement of the township. Nimrod died on 27 July 1903 in McKean County, aged eighty-six, and was buried in Bradford, having lived long enough to see the wilderness of his youth become a country of established farms and villages. **The War and Its Cost** The Civil War reached the Lanphere household through its two eldest sons, and both were tested in the field. George Washington Lanphere, born 27 January 1841 at Bell's Run, enlisted in the 58th Pennsylvania Infantry, Company F, on 2 February 1862 at Ceres. While on drill soon after, he slipped on the ice and injured a knee so badly that he was discharged for disability that April. Undaunted, he re-enlisted in September 1864 in the 85th New York Infantry and served until the close of the war, by then eligible to the rank of sergeant. In later years he moved steadily westward, living in New York, South Dakota, Nebraska, and finally Wisconsin, where he died on 13 July 1924 in Milton, Rock County, at the age of eighty-three. His brother Albert Leroy Lanphere, born 16 December 1842, went out with the Pennsylvania Bucktails — the 150th Pennsylvania Infantry, Company G, known as the "Third Bucktails," which fought alongside the 149th in Colonel Roy Stone's famous brigade. He enlisted on 18 August 1862 as a private and served two years, nine months, and seven days, rising to corporal before his discharge on 25 June 1865. His regiment's path ran through the hardest fighting of the war in the East: from guard duty in the defenses of Washington through Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and the long siege of Petersburg. Albert was wounded on the first day at Gettysburg — where one-third of the Union force consisted of Pennsylvania troops — and, considering the casualties of that battle, may have counted himself lucky to survive. He was wounded a second time in 1864 at Spotsylvania Court House, in the vicious rain-soaked fighting of that campaign where Grant, as one Confederate wrote, proved himself a man "who either does not know when he is whipped, or who cares not if he loses his whole Army." That both sons returned home from their wounds would have been no small mercy to their father. Unlike his brother, Albert remained close to the family's Pennsylvania roots, and he died on 2 August 1910 in Ceres, the township where he had been raised. Nimrod and Sally's other children carried the family through both continuity and sorrow. Hyalmer Lanphere, born 17 June 1845, lived his life in and around Ceres and Annin and died on 31 March 1886, not yet forty-one. Winfield B. Lanphere, born 28 January 1855, remained in Ceres throughout his life and died there in 1923. Not all of the children survived their early years: Benjamin V. Lanphere, born 19 April 1846, died the same day, and two daughters were lost within days of one another in the spring of 1862 — Alzina E., born 18 January 1849, on 25 March, and Alvira D., born 24 February 1852, on 29 March — marking a season of deep sorrow for the household. **Oscar and Rose, and the Move West** The Cooper and Lanphere lines joined in the next generation. **Oscar F. Thaddeus Cooper**, son of Cyrus and Harriet, was born on 1 September 1844 in Ceres, and **Rosalthea "Rose" Angelia Lanphere**, daughter of Nimrod and Sally, was born 15 April 1847 in the same borderland country — her origins sometimes remembered as being on the New York side of the line. On 18 March 1867, in McKean County, the two were married. Rose was not quite twenty, and the marriage would endure more than forty years. For the first decades of their life together the couple stayed in Ceres, where the 1870 and 1880 censuses still found them rooted in the Pennsylvania hill country. But like so many of their generation, they eventually turned toward the newly opening lands of the West. By 1880 they had reached Milton, Rock County, Wisconsin, and the following year North Freedom in Sauk County — a natural first stage in the westward movement of eastern families. They did not linger. By 1883 they had pushed on into Dakota Territory, drawn like tens of thousands of others by the promise of cheap and abundant land, and their residences through the 1880s trace their settlement in Brown County, in the northeastern corner of what would become South Dakota, recorded there in 1884, 1889, and 1891. By 1900 the family had established itself at Hecla, near the state's northern border — flat, treeless country swept by fierce winters, utterly unlike the wooded hills of McKean County. Raising eight children through such a migration demanded considerable resourcefulness from both parents, and the household they held together was the through-line connecting their eastern origins to their western future. Around 1910 the family crossed the state line northward into North Dakota, settling at Cayuga in Sargent County, where Oscar died on 27 February 1911 at the age of sixty-six. He was buried at Cayuga. Rose outlived him by more than a quarter-century, appearing in the later censuses at Ransom in Sargent County and at Fairmount in Richland County — a matriarch who remained close to family into old age. She died on 27 September 1937 in Henning, Otter Tail County, Minnesota, at the age of ninety, and was recorded buried at Kingston in Sargent County, North Dakota, returned to the prairie she had known through her long later life. In naming her son Frank Nimrod, she had carried her own father's name forward across all those miles. **The Children of Oscar and Rose** Oscar and Rose's eight children were born on either side of the family's move, so that the older ones were Pennsylvanians by birth while the younger were shaped by the Dakota prairie, and as they came of age they scattered across the northern plains and beyond. Nora Alice, born 6 August 1869 in Ceres, married Julius Stabnow on 21 July 1889 and died in Clitherall, Otter Tail County, Minnesota, on 21 October 1936. Eva Luella, born in 1872 in Ceres, lived across South Dakota and Minnesota, with long residences near Fergus Falls and Battle Lake, and died in 1951 in Cass County, North Dakota. Sadie Harriet, born 12 May 1877 in Ceres, married Edwin Ross on 30 May 1899; from the family's North Dakota base at Fairmount her path led at last to Oregon, and she died on 1 October 1948 in Roseburg, Douglas County. **Charles Calvin Cooper**, born 19 August 1879 at Bell Run near Shingle House, moved with the family to Hecla, where on 17 October 1900 he married Bertha Clausen and had a son, Edwin. After that marriage ended in divorce, he married **Anna Elizabeth Bartosh** on 25 November 1913, and the couple had five children. He lived in North Dakota until the late 1920s, then moved to Minnesota, settling at last in Bemidji, where he died on 21 April 1948. Frank Nimrod, born 2 November 1884 in Hecla, married Myrtle Martin on 27 June 1906 and moved at last to Southern California, dying on 19 December 1958 in Norwalk, Los Angeles County. Nettie Belle, born 29 May 1886 in Hecla, spent her life largely in the James River Valley of Dickey County, North Dakota, and died on 27 February 1958 in Breckenridge, Wilkin County, Minnesota. Omar Hartley, born 9 February 1889 in Hecla, made his home for many years in Fargo before moving west to California, where he died on 15 April 1978 in Paradise, Butte County — the longest-lived of his generation. Gladys Aurine, born 24 November 1891 in Hecla, married Sven Pearson on 5 June 1912, lived in the Dakotas and Minnesota, and died on 12 December 1972 in Wahpeton, Richland County, North Dakota. By the early twentieth century the great timber of McKean County had largely been cut over and the oil excitement had cooled, and Ceres settled back into the small farming community it had always been at heart, its founding names still on the census rolls and in the churchyards a hundred years after the first Coopers came up the creeks. The Lanphere men who fought at Gettysburg and Spotsylvania lay at rest in Ceres and Milton and Bradford, while the sons and daughters of Oscar and Rose were scattered from Bemidji to Fargo to Roseburg and Paradise — one branch of the family holding to the Pennsylvania hills, the other carried west with the frontier their parents had followed onto the Dakota prairie. ## Chapter 5 **The Bohemian Prairie** From Czech Villages to Iowa Farms Bartosh • Riha • Stará • Krejčová The people of this chapter came from a small cluster of villages in the Písek region of southern Bohemia — Údraž, Neznašov, Albrechtice nad Vltavou, Újezd, Bohanice, and the little quarter of Mala Strana — where for three generations the Bartoš, Stará, and related families were born, married, and buried. From that settled, church-centered countryside on the banks of the Vltava, they joined the great mid-century migration to America, carrying their Czech language and Catholic faith to the farming communities of Iowa and, in time, to the prairies of North Dakota. Their story is one of cottagers and hired hands who crossed an ocean and a continent to become, at last, owners of the land beneath their feet. **The Bohemian Homeland** The villages this family called home lay in the districts of Vltavotýn and the region of Budějovice, close by the old market town of Písek, whose name recalls the gold-bearing sand once panned from the riverbed. It was a gentle, ancient country of low hills, dark stands of spruce and pine, and medieval fishponds still worked in the nineteenth century, threaded by the Vltava on its way north toward Prague. The land was good enough for rye, barley, oats, potatoes, and flax, and for the pasturing of cattle and geese, but never so rich that a peasant household could grow careless. The villages themselves were tiny — a knot of houses gathered around a green, a chapel, and the surrounding strips of field — and homes were identified not by street but by house number. A person's parish record would faithfully note that a father was a cottager "in Albrechtice house number 31," or a farmer "from Albrechtice house 12." A house number was an inheritance, an identity, and a measure of standing all at once. That standing was finely graded, and the gradations governed everything. At the top stood the _sedlák_, the full farmer with substantial land; below him the _chalupník_, the cottager with a modest plot; then the _domkář_, whose little house and garden left him dependent on day labor; and at the bottom the _podruh_, the landless hind who lodged in another man's house and worked for wages and shelter, and the _pacholek_, the unmarried farm servant hired by the year. Within a single family one might find every rung of this ladder, and marriages often joined a farm servant to a cottager's daughter — two households rich in labor but poor in acres. Land could not be divided endlessly among children without impoverishing them all, and it was this quiet pressure, more than any single hardship, that would eventually set so many Bohemians in motion. The community was overwhelmingly Czech-speaking and Roman Catholic, its life anchored to the parish church, though the wider administration of the Habsburg realm was conducted in German. The priest recorded every birth, marriage, and death, and the midwife, or _baba_, was named in the baptismal register alongside the godparents. Parishes served scattered villages, so that the affairs of one settlement might be recorded across a boundary in a neighboring parish — as happened again and again in this thickly parceled countryside where villages, districts, and church jurisdictions did not always line up neatly. The decades this family belonged to spanned one of the great turning points in Central European life. The oldest of them were born in the years when the reforms of Emperor Joseph II were still recent memory — serfdom in its harshest form abolished in 1781, though the burden of _robota_, the compulsory labor owed to the lord, still lay across village life. The Napoleonic Wars reached even these quiet villages through conscription, requisitions, and the ruinous state bankruptcy of 1811, when the Austrian currency collapsed. The revolution of 1848 finally swept away the last feudal obligations, transforming a _domkář_ or _podruh_ from a lord's subject into a free man who owned his own labor; the children and grandchildren who married in the 1850s and 1860s were the first of their line to grow up in that freer, though still hard, world. By the 1860s, restlessness had found a direction, and word of cheap and abundant land in America reached even the smallest villages along the Vltava. **The First Generation: František Bartoš and the Stará Family** The earliest known member of the family was **František Bartoš**, born in 1791 in Albrechtice nad Vltavou, where he lived as a _chalupník_ — a small peasant cottager — in house number 31. His wife was **Veronika**, born about 1803, daughter of **Vít Bartuška**, a _sedlák_ of Albrechtice house number 12. Theirs was a match that reached across the ranks of the village, joining a cottager to a farmer's daughter. Their son **Jakub** was born there on 23 July 1834, into a settled, patient, half-feudal world standing on the near edge of the great upheavals of 1848. The family Jakub would marry into was rooted a little to the south, in the villages of Újezd and Údraž. **Matěj Stará**, born about 1784, lived as a _domkář_ — a cottager with barely more than a house and garden — in Újezd house number 29. His wife **Marie** was a daughter of **Josef Vávřina**, a _podruh_ of Bohanice. Their daughter, **Anna Kateřina Stará**, was born in 1828, into the long, watchful calm of the Metternich era, when the storms of war had passed but the deeper transformations were still to come. **Jakub Bartoš and Anna Kateřina Stará** As a young man, Jakub Bartoš worked as a _pacholek_ — a farm hand or horse groom — in Nezdašov, while living as a _podruh_ in the village of Újezd. On 20 February 1860, at the age of twenty-six, he married Anna Kateřina Stará, then thirty-two. Though Anna's home village of Údraž lay within the parish of Albrechtice nad Vltavou, the marriage was recorded a short distance south in the parish of Neznašov — one more instance of the way faith, kinship, and walking distances laced these villages together. Both were Catholic and single. By the time their children arrived, Jakub had risen to _domkář_ in Nezdašov, occupying house number 3. Their daughter Mary Bartoš was born on 4 May 1860 in Nezdašov, and their son **Frank Louis Bartosh** on 2 August 1864, both baptized in the parish of Neznašov. Frank was only seven months old when the family joined the outward flow of Czech emigrants in the winter and spring of 1864 and 1865, carried through New York and onward to Iowa. A third child, John, would be born in Iowa in May 1870, the first of the family's children on American soil. Jakub lived out his later years in Winneshiek County, Iowa, in the townships of Jackson and the village of Calmar, where he died on 19 November 1901. **Mathias Bartosh, Pioneer of Center Township** Of the same Bohemian stock, brother of Jakub, was Mathias (Matěj) Bartosh, born 31 January 1832 in Bohemia. As a young man in 1856 he served as a soldier in the war with Italy, one of the campaigns that drew the emperor's peasant sons far from their native villages. In 1858 he married Anna Stejskal, born in 1829, and in 1865 — the same years the family of Jakub Bartoš crossed — he brought his own family to America, first settling in Winneshiek County, Iowa. In 1874 Mathias moved west to Pocahontas County, taking up land in the northwest quarter of section 29 in Center Township, a claim he was the first to occupy and improve. Through steady labor he expanded the farm to 320 acres, holding it until 1895, when he retired to the town of Pocahontas. There he was remembered as one of the founders and a generous supporter of the Catholic church, and there he died on 24 March 1907. Mathias and Anna raised seven surviving children, whose marriages wove the family deep into the Bohemian settlements of Center Township. **The Riha Family** Into this transplanted community married another Bohemian family, the Rihas. **Albert Vojtech Riha** was born in Bohemia around 1833 and, like so many of his generation, crossed the Atlantic to Iowa, settling in the community of Utica in Chickasaw County, where he died on 24 August 1888. His wife was **Eva Evaline Krejčová**, and several of their children were born in Spillville, in Winneshiek County — a village so thoroughly Bohemian that its shops, churches, and daily speech remained Czech for generations. The children of Albert Riha reflected the restless movement of Czech immigrant families across the Midwest. **Mary Eva Riha**, born in Bohemia on 24 January 1868, immigrated while still young; she married **Frank Bartosh** in Iowa and eventually followed him to North Dakota, dying at Lisbon on 1 April 1943. James Reha, born in Iowa in August 1864, moved steadily northwest through Murray County, Minnesota, before settling at Lisbon, the same North Dakota town where his sister lived; he died there on 4 December 1943, only months after her. Elizabeth "Lizzie" Reha, born 14 November 1870 in Spillville, remained closest to home, marrying Joseph Sinek and living out her long life in Pocahontas and Chickasaw counties in Iowa, where she died on 26 August 1961 at the age of ninety. Anna Reha, born 14 May 1873 in Spillville, married James Joseph Vodraska and ranged the farthest — through Dickinson County, Iowa, Houston County, Minnesota, and back to Pocahontas County before her final move to Michigan, where she died at Lakeville, Oakland County, on 4 March 1928. **The Iowa Years** For more than half a century, from the close of the Civil War into the years between the World Wars, the Bartoš and Riha families lived out their American lives in the northeastern and north-central counties of Iowa. What drew them was Iowa's reputation across the Bohemian lands as a place where a landless cottager could become a landowner. In the villages of the Písek and Budějovice regions, a family's future had been fixed by tiny holdings passed down and subdivided until there was little left; in Iowa, the same labor bought outright ownership of farms that would have been unthinkable at home. They knew two very different Iowas. The northeastern corner — Winneshiek, Howard, and Chickasaw counties, with towns like Calmar, Spillville, Fort Atkinson, and Cresco — was rolling, well-watered country, cut by the Turkey and Upper Iowa rivers and settled early, already possessed of towns, mills, churches, and a growing Bohemian community when the family's first immigrants arrived in the mid-1860s. The country to the west, in Pocahontas County, was a different world: level, treeless prairie with deep black soil among the richest in the nation, but slow to be broken because it lay far from timber, water, and railroads. When the family began moving there in the 1870s and 1880s, families were often the first to occupy and improve a given section, breaking sod that had never been turned. The single force that transformed the prairie counties was the railroad; once the tracks arrived, land that had gone begging suddenly commanded real prices, and the early breakers of the first furrows — Mathias Bartosh among them — found their gamble rewarded. Through it all, the Catholic parish was the anchor of community life, where Czech was preached and marriages and baptisms recorded. These were tight, intermarrying communities in which the same surnames — Bartos, Reha, Riha, Sinek, Stejskal, Adamek, Vodraska — recur as neighbors, in-laws, and wedding witnesses. **Frank Louis Bartosh and Mary Eva Riha** The infant carried across the sea in his parents' arms grew up entirely within this transplanted world. By 1870 the household of Jakub Bartoš was at Calmar, and by 1880 at Utica in Chickasaw County, so that **Frank Louis Bartosh** came of age among the Czech-speaking farming settlements of northeastern Iowa. Census records later recalled his origins variously as Bohemia, New York, and even "at sea" — the confusion of a life that began in transit. On 7 June 1887, Frank married **Mary Eva Riha** at Fort Atkinson in Winneshiek County. Both were of Bohemian heritage, and together they raised a large family, with eight children born in Iowa. Their residences trace a household in steady motion: from Winneshiek County westward to Center, Grant City, and Pocahontas in Pocahontas County through the 1890s and early 1900s, and back east to Jackson Township in Winneshiek County by 1910 — a homecoming to the region of Frank's own upbringing before the largest move of all. In 1911 Frank made the final major move of his life, crossing into North Dakota and settling in Ransom County, first at Lisbon and by 1915 at Casey. This followed the well-worn path of Midwestern farm families pressing north and west toward newer, cheaper land — the same restless search that had first carried his parents out of Bohemia. Frank died on 14 July 1919 at Lisbon, at the age of fifty-four, and was buried there the same day. Mary Eva carried on, moving into the town of Lisbon by 1930, where she spent her final years amid relentless household labor across a lifetime that had begun a continent away. She died at Lisbon on 1 April 1943, at the age of seventy-five. **The Children of Frank and Mary Eva** The eight children of Frank Louis Bartosh and Mary Eva Riha carried the family across the northern plains and beyond. **Anna Elizabeth**, born 4 August 1888 in Center, Pocahontas County, married first Jesse Perry — with whom she had a son, William — and, after a divorce, married **Charles Calvin Cooper** on 25 November 1913, who adopted young William, thereafter known as Bill Cooper. Her life carried her from Iowa to Minnesota and finally to Spokane, Washington, where she died on 24 November 1964. Frank Albert, born 2 March 1890 in Pocahontas, lived across Iowa and North Dakota before settling at East Moline, Illinois; he married Mary Adamec on 23 June 1925 and reached the remarkable age of 102, dying at Moline on 25 November 1992. Joseph R., born 22 March 1892, made his home chiefly at Casey in Ransom County, married Florence Portz in 1914, and died at Enderlin, North Dakota, on 22 December 1968. James T., born 22 December 1894 in Center, married Anna Martinek in 1922 and lived in both Iowa and North Dakota. Mary Eva, born 18 May 1896, married Frank Zerr in 1915 and made her way to the Lisbon area, where she died on 9 November 1969. John Frank, born 29 April 1900, spent much of his life at Casey and Island Park in Ransom County and died at Lisbon on 2 October 1970. Stella A., born 28 October 1902, moved from Casey to Fargo and died at Lisbon on 3 March 1980. The youngest, William Lawrence, born 28 July 1907 in Winneshiek County, settled in Minnesota, married Loretta Rose Anderson in 1957, and died at Alexandria on 22 October 1995. **The Other Children of Jakub** Frank's sister Mary Bartoš, the eldest of Jakub's children and born in Bohemia in 1860, married Wenceslaus (Wenzel) Všetečka on 22 February 1876. She spent her life in Winneshiek County, in the townships of Sumner, Jackson, and Washington and near Fort Atkinson and Calmar, and died in Iowa on 12 January 1938. Their brother John Bartosh, born in Iowa in May 1870, lived throughout Winneshiek County in the townships of Jackson and Washington and near Calmar; he married Theresa (Tresi) Zack on 7 September 1895 and in later years moved to Minneapolis, where he died on 12 January 1934. Several others of the same stock are remembered by name alone — Jiří "George" Bartoš, Maria Magdalena Bartos Bartosh, and a further Frank Albert Bartosh among the Pocahontas line — their exact places within the family still to be worked out. Three generations after František Bartoš held his cottage at Albrechtice house number 31, his descendants were scattered across the farming country of Iowa, the prairie townships of Ransom County, North Dakota, and points as far afield as Illinois, Washington, and Minnesota — landowners and townsfolk in a country their emigrant forebears had reached as landless cottagers with an infant in arms. The villages along the Vltava had become a place remembered rather than lived in, while the parish registers of Winneshiek, Chickasaw, and Pocahontas counties, and the graves at Lisbon, marked where the family had come to rest. ## Chapter 6 **Württemberg Roots** Blacksmiths and Farmers of Bonfeld Daubel • Streib • Deck • Haueisen For more than a century and a half, the intertwined Daubel, Streib, Deck, and Haueisen families lived, married, and worked their trades in a cluster of small villages in the district of Heilbronn, in the kingdom of Württemberg. Blacksmiths, farmers, master butchers, and village officials, they baptized their children in the parish churches and appeared in the citizens' registers generation after generation — until the strict conscription of a newly unified Germany and the promise of a freer life drew one household of them across the Atlantic. This chapter follows those families from their Kraichgau homes to the threshold of emigration, and leaves the story of their arrival in America for the chapters that follow. **The Villages of the Kraichgau** The homeland of these families lay in the Kraichgau, the fertile belt of loess-covered hills that stretches between the Neckar valley and the Rhine plain. This was old, worked land — soft ridges and shallow valleys broken by orchards, vineyards, and open grain fields — and it rewarded the mixed farming that sustained its villages for centuries. A family here could be very nearly self-sufficient, growing its own bread grain, pressing its own fruit, keeping milk cows and poultry, and grinding its own flour. That same rhythm of self-reliance would one day cross the ocean with them. The villages themselves followed the classic Württemberg pattern: a compact core of half-timbered houses and barns clustered around a church and marketplace, with the fields radiating outward and worked by villagers who walked to them each day. Everyone knew everyone, the same surnames recurred across the generations, and marriages knit the leading farming and artisan households together again and again. Babstadt was the earliest anchor of the Daubel line, a village of perhaps a few hundred souls where the family held the standing of citizens and, in one generation, plied the trade of master butcher. To be a _Bürger_ there was to occupy a defined and respected rung — the right to own property, practice a trade, and take part in the community's common affairs. A few miles off lay Treschklingen, where the family's story briefly converged in a marriage recorded in November 1798, joining a master butcher and a village mayor's son from Babstadt to a bride whose origins reached toward Adersbach. Its "Ochsen" tavern anchored village sociability, and its recognized crafts and offices carried real weight in a place small enough that one could stand among its lanes and see the rooftops of the neighboring settlements. Nearby Daudenzell, in the Neckar-Odenwald district, gave the Streibs one of their earliest named generations. At the center of the whole story stood Bonfeld, to which both the Daubel and Streib lines gravitated and where the families' records grow densest through the nineteenth century. It was a thoroughly Protestant village, its Lutheran identity running deep, and in this era it belonged to a heartland of Pietist and revivalist religion. From 1825 until his death, Johann Georg Haueisen — kin to the Daubels through **Christiane Rosina Haueisen** — lived in Bonfeld as a well-known Protestant lay theologian and revival preacher of the Hahn community, and his grave lies in the village cemetery. Such earnestness gave villages like this a spiritual seriousness that shaped daily life and lent weight to notions of good standing — the very qualities officials would later certify when a family sought permission to leave. Life across these villages was materially modest and, for the young, precarious. Children were born often and buried often, sometimes within days of their birth; epidemics, poor sanitation, and the hazards of childbirth pressed on every household regardless of standing. Across the long span of these families' presence, the region passed from the patchwork of the old Holy Roman Empire — margraviates, bishoprics, and imperial knights — through the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and into the consolidated modern states of Baden and Württemberg. By the 1870s these villages lay under an orderly, paper-heavy bureaucracy that registered citizens, taxed emigrants, and certified reputations. Nothing about leaving would be informal. **The Daubel Line in Babstadt and Bonfeld** The Daubel line can be traced with certainty to **Johann Georg Deubel**, born in Babstadt on 25 July 1711 and dead there on that same date in 1779. In 1735 he married **Anna Margaretha Detterer**, and for a time he lived in nearby Obergimpern. His son, **Johan Georg Michäel Daubel**, born in Babstadt on 18 March 1738, rose to prominence as the village mayor and tavern landlord; he married **Maria Barbara Wilser** in 1764 and died in Babstadt in 1801, having spent his life at the center of the community's civic and social affairs. The family's standing carried into the next generation with **Johann Georg Michael Daubel**, born in the village on 24 September 1766, who made his living as a citizen and master butcher. In 1798, at Treschklingen, he married **Louise Margaret Melscheimer**; he died in Babstadt on 12 March 1821. It was his son, **Johann Christian Ludwig Daubel**, born in Babstadt on 6 February 1800, who moved the family's story to Bonfeld. On 19 July 1836 he married **Christiane Rosina Haueisen**, born in Ehrstädt on 10 June 1806 — for her, a second marriage, her first having been to a man named Haas. Johann Ludwig died in Bonfeld in 1869 and Christiane in 1886. Their household in Bonfeld would produce the generation that finally left Germany behind. **The Streib Line** The family that Ludwig would marry into carried a comparable weight of standing. The earliest Streib known by name, **Johan Christian Streib**, served as seigneurial steward in Bonfeld, an office that placed him in the administration of the local manor. The family's tradition of trust and responsibility continued with **Johann Georg Philipp Streib**, born in 1743 in Daudenzell, who became a village judge and farmer, combining the working of the land with a role in local justice; he married **Catharina Elisabetha Braun** in 1766 and died in December 1813 at the age of seventy. His descendant **Johann Christian Streib**, born in 1770, remained on the land as a citizen and farmer in Bonfeld, married **Eva Barbara Braun** in 1793, and died there in 1825. The line came to **George Michael Streib**, born in 1794 in Heilbronn, who married **Christiana Deck** in November 1829 and remained tied to Bonfeld until his death in September 1872, at the age of seventy-eight. His daughter, **Magdalene Christiane Streib**, born in Bonfeld on 10 July 1840, would join the two families together and carry the Streib name across the ocean. Her father's identity was a matter that the later emigration papers helped to settle, correcting an earlier understanding of her parentage. **Ludwig and Magdalene** The two lines were joined on 31 January 1867, when **Ludwig Daubel** married **Magdalene Christiane Streib** in the church at Bonfeld. Ludwig, son of Johann Daubel and Christiane Haueisen, had been born in Bonfeld on 9 October 1839. Like his forebears he was a craftsman — a blacksmith and mason both — following the trade essential to any farming community, where a smith shod horses, forged tools, and mended the ironwork on which agriculture depended. In 1860, at about twenty-one, he had performed his military duty with the royal artillery. Magdalene, twenty-six at her marriage and somewhat older than many brides of her day, was the daughter of George Streib and Christiana Deck. Together they raised six children, all born in Bonfeld: Heinrich (Henry) in 1867, Philipp in 1869, Johann Ludwig (Louie) in 1871, Karl (Charles) in 1873, and the twins Sophie Elisabeth and August in 1875. It was a full household, built entirely upon the small world of a single Württemberg village — until the family decided to leave it. **The Decision to Emigrate** The reason for departure, as remembered in the family, was the boys. The strict military conscription that came with the unification of Germany in 1871 weighed heavily on a household with a row of sons coming of age, and Ludwig and Magdalene wanted greater freedom and safety for their children — above all, to spare their sons the years of service that awaited them. The emigration was carried out formally and with care. In February 1881, Ludwig — described in the careful language of the bureaucracy as "the married man, Ludwig Däubel, smith from Bonfeld" — applied to the Royal Württemberg authorities for release from Württemberg citizenship for himself and his family, "for purposes of emigration to North America." The Bonfeld municipal council attested that Ludwig and his wife belonged by birth to the local parish, held Württemberg citizenship, possessed a very good reputation, and had never been penalized. It noted his fulfilled military service in the artillery and recorded that, beyond the necessary costs of travel, he held assets of roughly 3,000 marks — a substantial sum for a village smith. No hindrance stood in his way. The Royal District Government at Ludwigsburg issued his discharge that spring, and on 9 March 1881 the Mayor's Office in Bonfeld recorded that Ludwig Däubel had received his discharge certificate from the Württemberg State Union, noting that he had "no homeland certificate, also no other identification at hand." With that, the family's ties to the Württemberg state were severed, and a man set out with his papers cleared and his roots formally cut. The coming of the railroads made such a departure practical in a way it had never been before. Household goods and even farm machinery could be crated and shipped, and the Atlantic crossing that had once been the province of the desperate had become a deliberate choice for a solid, propertied family seeking a freer life. **Charles, the Boy Who Crossed** Among the six children who left Bonfeld in 1881 was **Charles Daubel**, born in the village on 14 January 1873 and a boy of eight at the time of the crossing. He would grow into a stern and hardy man, carrying on the smith's and farmer's trades of his father and grandfather in a new country, and his story — the farm at Chattaroy, the eleven children, the marriage to **Marie Anna Rudolph**, and the suspicion his German birth drew during the First World War — belongs to a later chapter. For now it is enough to note that he was one of the children for whose sake his parents had gathered up their household and left the only village they had ever known. In the winter of 1881, then, a Bonfeld blacksmith, his wife, and their six children stood at the hinge between two worlds — their discharge papers in hand, their trades and thrift packed for the journey, and generations of Daubels and Streibs behind them in the Kraichgau villages of Babstadt, Treschklingen, and Bonfeld. Ahead lay the crossing to North America, and the story of where they landed. ## Chapter 7 **German Spätzle Country**  Swabian Kin in Württemberg Rudolph• Stiebler • Raisch • Hahn The Rudolph and Raisch families both belonged to the same corner of the German southwest — the villages of the Esslingen, Reutlingen, and Böblingen districts of Württemberg, where forested hills, orchard slopes, and vineyard terraces framed a settled world of Lutheran farming communities. For generations neither family strayed far from the parishes of their birth. Then, within a single lifetime, the two lines were joined by marriage and scattered across an ocean. This chapter follows them through their Swabian homeland, through the union of Jacob Rudolph and Anna Maria Raisch, and outward to Philadelphia and beyond. **A Landscape of Villages** The places the two families knew were all of a piece: small Württemberg settlements south of Stuttgart, clustered around a parish church, measured in a few hundred souls, and bound together by a handful of recurring surnames. The Raisch line reached deepest into the wooded uplands. In Waldenbuch, at the edge of the Schönbuch forest, the family held its ground for more than a century and a half, alongside the **Kayßer** and **Weinhardt** lines whose records span from the early 1700s into the 1870s. Nearby Glashütte carried the same forest character, and it was between these two villages that the earliest known Raisch generations lived and died. To the south and east lay the villages tied to the **Rudolph** line and to the marriage that joined the families. Grötzingen, in the Esslingen district, was the Rudolph seat, a village of half-timbered farmhouses in the Swabian Alb foreland where the family's baptisms, weddings, and burials fill the parish register from 1711 to 1918 — more than two centuries in one place. Bempflingen, in the Reutlingen district on the broad valley of the Neckar, was a farming and orchard village where the **Hahn** and **Gaißer** lines lived and where the youngest Rudolph children were born. And Kleinbettlingen, in the Esslingen district, was the small village where the **Hahn** family buried its dead through the later 1700s, where the **Raisch** presence carried into the 1800s, and where — in a single church — Jacob Rudolph and Anna Maria Raisch would marry, and where Anna Maria would be born, wed, and buried within a span of twenty-four years. These villages shared everything that mattered: the same Lutheran faith, the church bell ordering the working day, the same rhythm of sowing and harvest and the autumn grape gathering, the same economy of small plots combined with a trade. They also shared the same pressures. Partible inheritance divided holdings among heirs until many were too small to feed a family; population growth outstripped the land; and hard years — the "year without a summer" in 1816, the failed harvests of the 1840s — struck communities with little cushion. By mid-century Swabia had become one of the great sources of German emigration, and the families in this chapter would in time follow that well-worn path westward. **The Raisch Line** The Raisch family can be traced back to **Johann Michael Raisch**, born in December 1733 in Waldenbuch, where he lived his whole life until his death on 3 April 1791. His descendant **Johann Georg Raisch**, born on 21 November 1764 in Glashütte, lived in Waldenbuch and elsewhere before returning to Glashütte, where he died on 9 October 1836 at the age of seventy-one. The next generation, **Christian Friedrich Raisch**, born on 23 December 1791 in Glashütte, moved between Degerloch near Stuttgart and Waldenbuch before returning again to his birthplace, where he died on 28 February 1862. His son, **Christian Friederich Raisch**, was born on 14 May 1818 in Waldenbuch and made his home there. Raised in the customs of Württemberg village life — its Protestant faith, its respect for craft and land — he married **Christiana Mary Hahn** on 15 February 1848 in Kleinbettlingen, in a year when waves of revolution swept the German states. Christiana had been born on 12 December 1825 in Bempflingen, the daughter of **Johann Georg Hahn** and **Maria Katharina Gaißer**, into a world of vineyards and close-knit farming villages. Together Christian and Christiana raised four daughters. The eldest, **Anna Maria**, was born on 28 October 1855 in Kleinbettlingen. The others carried the family into the wider world: Elizabeth Marie Margaretha, known as "Amelia," born in July 1858 in Reutlingen, married Emil Scholz and traveled the greatest distance of all, settling in Washington State — in Stevens County and in the communities of Elk, Chattaroy, and Milan in Spokane County — where she died in Milan on 9 January 1933; Catherine, born on 6 July 1863, married John Engelmann and made her home in Philadelphia, dying there on 21 May 1939; and Charlotte Fredricka, born on 6 July 1869, married Joseph Pfaff and likewise lived out her years in Philadelphia, dying on 16 July 1943. Christian lived beyond 1883, though the date and place of his death are not recorded. His wife Christiana outlived him by decades and made a remarkable late journey. In 1897, at the age of seventy-one, she crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia, arriving on 24 June — almost certainly to join family who had gone before her into the city's large German community. By 1900 the census recorded her there, and she died in Philadelphia on 21 March 1909 at the age of eighty-three, buried three days later in the city that had become her last home. Her life had stretched from a Württemberg village in the age of kingdoms to a great American city on the edge of the modern era. **The Rudolph Line** The Rudolph family was anchored even more firmly in a single place. **Johann Jacob Rudolph**, born in Grötzingen on 14 April 1711, spent his whole life there until his death on 28 November 1771. His son **Johann Jakob Rudolph**, born 3 February 1737, likewise lived and died in the village, dying on 26 September 1801. The next generation, **Christian Rudolph**, born 9 February 1784, ended his days in Grötzingen on 7 July 1848, and his descendant **Carl Christian Heinrich Rudolph**, born 8 April 1812, died in the village of his birth on 9 February 1872. For more than a century and a half the Rudolph name scarcely stirred from this one corner of Württemberg. It was **Jacob Rudolph**, son of Carl Rudolph and **Hedwig Stiebler**, who broke that long continuity. Born on 5 October 1853 in Grötzingen, Jacob married **Anna Maria Raisch** in 1877 in Kleinbettlingen — the union that joins the two families of this chapter and carries their story forward into the Daubel line. **The Marriage and Its Sorrow** The marriage of Jacob Rudolph and Anna Maria Raisch was rooted entirely in the Swabian world both knew, joining two families of the Esslingen countryside. For a few years the young couple shared the ordinary hopes of village life. Two children were born to them: a daughter, **Marie "Mary" Anna**, born on 9 August 1878 in Bempflingen, and a son, Christian, born about 1879. That future was cut short. Anna Maria died on 21 January 1880 in Kleinbettlingen, not yet twenty-five, and was buried a week later on 28 January in the same ground in which she had been christened and wed. Her granddaughter Rosie Daubel later preserved the shape of the family memory: a mother lost when her daughter was only three, a father who remarried, and a second wife who "didn't want his children." Widowed young and unable to raise the two alone, Jacob sent them to live with their maternal grandparents, Christian and Christiana Raisch — an echo of a pattern that would repeat itself. In 1881 Jacob emigrated to the United States, part of the great wave of German departure, and settled in Philadelphia, where the language, churches, and work were familiar. In 1883, in Philadelphia, he married again, to Anna Hofbauer, and with her raised a second family that included Carrie Anna, Albert, Michael John, Jacob John Jr., and other children. The census records of 1900 and 1910 find him established among the city's German-American families. By 1915 he had crossed the Delaware to Collingswood in Camden County, New Jersey, where the censuses of 1920 and 1930 record him, and where he died on 17 April 1933 at the age of seventy-nine, buried in Camden. Though an ocean and a new life separated him from his first children, he did not entirely lose track of them: a surviving letter from his American daughter Carrie to Mary's son Herman Daubel — his grandson — testifies to a thread of contact that reached across a generation and a continent. **The Children Carried West** The two children Anna Maria left behind grew up in the care of their Raisch grandparents. When Mary was fifteen and her brother fourteen, the family judged them old enough to make their own way, and in 1893 the pair were put aboard a ship bound for Philadelphia, into the care of their aunts on their mother's side — a Mrs. Engelman and a Mrs. Pfoff, married sisters of Anna Maria. In Philadelphia Mary went into domestic service, taught herself to read, write, and speak English — becoming quite fluent and a notably good speller — and for a time kept house for a doctor. All the while carrying the burden of supporting her brother, who suffered from an incurable illness that left him unable to work. That illness ended in tragedy. Christian Rudolph, afflicted from birth with a physical disability, took his own life in a Philadelphia park on 28 May 1896, at the age of seventeen. Unwilling to remain a burden to his sister, he ended his life, leaving Mary alone in a city she had known only three years. Mary’s own path turned westward through one of her aunts. Elizabeth "Raisch" Scholz had settled in Washington State near a family named Daubel, and on a visit to her aunt and uncle Marie met **Charles Daubel**. The two married in 1902, and Marie never returned to Philadelphia. Together they raised eleven children, and she made her home in the Spokane region — in Chattaroy and Elk — for the rest of her life, dying in Spokane county on 9 January 1939. Through her marriage, the intertwined Rudolph and Raisch lines passed into the Daubel family. Jacob's American daughter Carrie Anna Rudolph, born in Philadelphia on 26 November 1883 to his second wife, was thus Marie's half-sister. Known in later life as Carrie Roehm, she kept up the family's faint transcontinental thread, writing as "Aunt Carrie" to Mary's son Herman. She made her home in Haddonfield, New Jersey, living for more than thirty years at 2 Linden Avenue, active in the First Baptist Church, the Order of the Eastern Star, the American Legion Auxiliary, and the Haddon Fortnightly Women's Club, and a charter member of the Baptist Home auxiliary in Riverton. She died on 17 January 1979 at West Jersey Hospital in Camden, survived by three nephews. From two families rooted for centuries in the villages of the Esslingen, Reutlingen, and Böblingen districts, the line narrowed to a single marriage in Kleinbettlingen, an early grave, and two orphaned children — one buried young in a Philadelphia park, the other carried on to a farmstead and eleven children in the far Northwest, where the joined Rudolph and Raisch blood entered the Daubel line. ## Chapter 8 **Family Feuds and Timber** From Kansas to the Washington Woods Daubel The Daubel story in America opens on the Kansas prairie, where Ludwig Daubel and his wife, Magdalene Streib, first put down roots after crossing the Atlantic in 1881. What follows is the account of how that transplanted Württemberg family moved from a German farming settlement on the northern plains to the timbered country north of Spokane, and of the households — colorful, hardworking, and occasionally notorious — that grew up there. **A German Foothold on the Prairie** The family's first American home was Hanover, in Washington County, Kansas, near the Nebraska line, where a German settlement had already taken root around Hanover and Washington in the district known as Charleston. For roughly a decade, from about 1885 to 1895, this rolling tallgrass country along the Little Blue River was home to **Ludwig**, **Magdalene**, and their children — Philipp, **Karl (Charles)**, August, Sophie Elisabeth, Johann Ludwig (Louie), and Heinrich (Henry). Here a blacksmith and mason found steady demand: horses to shoe, plows and wagons to mend, ironwork and stonework for a growing farming community. And here, among German-speaking neighbors who worshipped in the same traditions and married their children among the same families, the Daubel children came of age. Kansas, however, was a way station rather than a destination. The 1880s and early 1890s were a time of restless movement across the American interior, and the decade closed under strain — falling crop prices, farm debt, and drought. For a household of grown and nearly grown sons, the pull of cheap railroad land and heavy timber in the Pacific Northwest proved decisive. **The Sons Go West** The move from Kansas came in stages, led by the sons. Henry and Phillip went first to Oregon. Phillip continued on to the west coast, settling in Thurston County around McLane and Olympia, while Henry, August, Louie, and Charles came to the Elk and Chattaroy country of Spokane County. In 1898 the young men bought land from the railroad for $2.50 an acre and, clearing heavy timber stump by stump, built three separate farms. In 1900 their parents followed, shipping their household goods and all their farm machinery west by train and homesteading on land adjoining their son Charles. This was a country still shading from wilderness into settlement. Cougars ranged close enough to the schoolhouses that children were sometimes kept indoors, the nearest doctor was far away, and neighbor women served as midwives. The forest that had to be cleared was itself the region's great resource: sawmills and logging camps such as the Spokane Lumber Company at Milan and Edwards and Bradford at Elk offered wage work, while the same families kept farms and raised stock. Milan, a short horse-drive away, served as the everyday trading point; anything beyond it meant a train ride into Spokane. It was a small, tightly knit, German-rooted community, its country schools — the Muhle School, the Deer Creek School — scattered miles apart, and its households bound together by the sharing of ice, labor, and threshing rounds. **Ludwig and Magdalene's Last Years** Ludwig and Magdalene lived out their days in this country north of Spokane, their Elk-area home no longer standing. Magdalene — born in Bönfeld on 10 July 1840, daughter of **Georg Streib**, whom Ludwig had married on 31 January 1867 — died on 11 July 1923, one day after her eighty-third birthday. Grandchildren remembered that a horse-drawn hearse came to the home at Chattaroy to carry her to the funeral home. Ludwig outlived her by a year and a half, dying on 28 December 1924 at Milan at the age of eighty-five. Both are buried in the Milan Cemetery. **The Daubel Brothers and Sister** Of their six children, most settled within reach of one another. Henry, the eldest, born in Bönfeld on 18 December 1867, was among the first west; he married Emily Romaine on 26 September 1903 and lived out his life at Elk, where he died on 12 November 1945. Phillip, born in the spring of 1869, went west first but alone, making his home in Thurston County and dying at Olympia on 18 October 1930. Louie — Johann Ludwig, born 27 May 1871 — farmed near Elk, married Sophie Peters on 9 March 1907, and outlived all his siblings, dying in Spokane on 15 September 1961 at the age of ninety. The twins August and Sophie Elisabeth were born together on 29 September 1875. August settled and farmed near Elk and died in Spokane on 22 September 1959; Sophie married Earnest Frederick Wagner on 12 January 1903, made her home at Milan, and died in Spokane on 16 November 1940. **The Family in the News** Life among the bachelor farmers of the Elk district was not always quiet, and for a stretch of years the Daubel name appeared in the Spokane papers with striking regularity. The brothers — Charles, Henry, August, Ludwig, and Phillip — made news in their several ways, from petty quarrels to a full-blown murder inquiry, and one former game warden, pressed to describe the neighborhood, allowed that "the town of Elk has real feuds like Kentucky" — with the single mercy that, unlike Kentucky, no one ever seemed to get killed. The most conspicuous of them was Henry, whose troubles began, fittingly, with a wedding that would not take. He and his bride were first married on 11 June 1903 by one R. H. Craig, an expounder of the Church of God who had lately taken up a homestead near Camden — only for the neighbors to observe afterward that Craig was no ordained minister and the union therefore no union at all. Duly worried, Craig looked into the matter, confirmed the bad news, and advised the couple to try again. And so that September the married-not-married pair came to Spokane behind a farm wagon loaded with live ducks — one hundred and two of them, brought along by the bride's thrifty brother, who saw no reason a second wedding trip shouldn't double as a day at market. The ducks were left standing in the street while Henry and his bride were properly married at last by Judge Stocker, at the cost of another five dollars, whereupon the whole party climbed back aboard the duck cart and rattled home. The marriage they had worked so hard to secure did not survive the winter. Henry was German; his wife, Amelia — recorded variously as Emelia, Matilda, Plusson, and Blusson — was French; and neither could speak the other's tongue, nor make themselves understood in English, so that their short life together "was made up mostly of signs." What passed between the signs was not happiness. Married in October, Henry was in the divorce court by January, alleging that his wife abused him, damaged the furniture, cooked badly enough to drive him to the restaurants, threatened to kill him, and had brought into his house four unruly children by a former marriage who had, the complaint sniffed, inherited "their mother's aversion to soap and water." She, for her part, said he had deserted her while she was carrying their child, leaving her alone through her confinement without food or care, and had disowned the baby outright — "the child was not his own and he did not care for it." By February she was hauling him back to court for unpaid alimony. The story darkened through 1904. In June the county commissioners, hearing that the mother was spending her days "drinking and carousing" while her children ran wild and filthy, sent the sheriff up to Elk to gather the four little ones and place them in a charitable home. That same month Henry was convicted of beating his wife before Justice McNamar of Milan, who felt the powers of a justice of the peace far too slender to punish the crime as it deserved — the most he could impose was thirty days and a hundred-dollar fine — and bound the case over to superior court. By July Henry was in a cell of his own, jailed for knifing a man named Thomas Lowe in a quarrel over the disputed property, having first been laid about the head and shoulders with a shovel. He came to the jail almost gratefully: his life, he said, had been threatened many times, and he produced a whitecap letter to prove it — five days' notice to pay a thousand dollars "or we will burn all the property you have," signed only "BY COM." Behind the prison walls, the paper noted, Daubel sighed with relief. The divorce itself, when it came, was pure vaudeville. Amelia gave her testimony through an interpreter while three babies howled in chorus across Judge Richardson's courtroom — her own infant, and two more belonging to a neighbor called as a witness — until the wind rattling the windows and the wailing of the children together nearly broke up the proceedings, and the judge was reduced to a broad, helpless smile as the lawyers strained to catch a word. The mother rolled and hoisted her hungry baby in the air until the spectators grew dizzy, and business was suspended until quiet returned. When it did, the divorce was granted to Amelia on her cross-complaint, with custody of her four-month-old, three hundred dollars, and a decree forbidding her ever to visit Henry's home again. The related assault charge was quietly dismissed the following year, the family troubles by then "settled and disposed of." If Henry hoped that ended his career in the newspapers, he was disappointed, for he had by now acquired the enemy who would follow him through the rest of it: his neighbor Peter Clancy. In 1907 the two men each pleaded guilty to assaulting the other in some altercation near Milan. By 1909 the feud had swollen into a tangle of accusations — that Henry had thrown a rock through the Clancy window and struck Mrs. Clancy in the abdomen, robbed the Clancy boy of a dollar and pitched him into a creek, and fired a six-shooter at Clancy himself — all of which Henry denied, insisting it was Clancy who had cracked him over the head with a rifle. A boulder "about the size of a man's skull" sat on the courtroom table as Exhibit No. 1 in the resulting twenty-thousand-dollar damage suit; the jury, out three hours, decided Henry had not thrown it. The quarrel reached its strange and sinister climax in 1922, when what began as another humdrum complaint — Clancy charging that Henry had loosed his cattle onto the Clancy crops — turned, in Justice Stocker's court, into something closer to a murder inquest. Witness after witness for the Daubels rose to link Clancy to a string of deaths and disappearances that had haunted the Elk district for years. One testified that Clancy, seen shortly after the lumberjack John Olsen was found dead near the Sunset highway, had remarked, "No, I haven't been down this way since I had to kill Olsen. I've been lying low since that." Others recalled a man named Katz, last seen leaving in Clancy's company to look at a cabin, whose torn coat and vest Clancy had later produced from a ravine with the guess that bears or wolves had got him — and whose paper Clancy had afterward tried to cash; and Ben Miller the fruit-tree peddler, said to have "gone to Alaska"; and Joe Rooky the barn boss, who went to Spokane and never came back; and "Dad" Turpening, found with his skull crushed on the railroad tracks near Milan. Signs reading "Clancy killed Olsen" had been nailed to trees along the road to Elk. Clancy, interviewed at his ranch, laughed the whole thing off as the invention of a fifteen-year feud with the Daubel brothers — those "bachelor farmers, lumberjacks and stockraisers" whose land he so disliked that he had built a road over the hills expressly to avoid passing it. The prosecutor took careful notes, promised an investigation, and the puzzled justice took the matter of the cows and the murders alike under advisement. The other brothers supplied their own headlines. Ludwig — "Louie" — endured a divorce in 1920 that the papers followed like a serial. His wife, Kate, a woman of sixty-four to his forty-eight and by her own admission on her fifth marriage, charged that he had kicked her against a fence and knocked her senseless, breaking her nose and her dental bridge, and that he blasphemed the Bible and mocked her for reading it. Ludwig answered that Kate spied on him from behind stumps, locked him out of his own kitchen, refused to cook, and had married him only because he was "the better fixed" of her suitors — and, more alarmingly, that she had bored a loophole in the wall of the farmhouse to take better aim when she shot at him, and kept a supply of strychnine that he suspected "was for me and not for the gophers." Kate allowed that she had indeed fired at her husband, but insisted the cartridges were blanks. Judge Oswald awarded the divorce to Ludwig, let Kate keep the Newport property she had brought to the marriage, and left him his ten-thousand-dollar farm. August, for his part, went to court in 1918 over a deer. Game wardens, alarmed that forty-five deer had been slain around Elk in a single year, caught August and one J. C. Dore tending a fresh carcass on — of all places — Peter Clancy's ranch, and hauled them before Justice Stocker. The two men swore the coyotes had done it; the justice decided otherwise and fined them fifty dollars apiece, a verdict they carried up to the superior court without success. It was at this trial, with Clancy testifying for the state and complaining that he was the victim of "pro-German animosity," that a former game warden offered his celebrated distinction: the feuds at Elk were as real as any in Kentucky, only nobody ever got killed. Charles kept to more ordinary misfortune, losing his threshing machine — along with Joe Vosahlo's barn and twelve tons of hay — to a smut explosion near Camden in 1921. And then there was Phillip, the brother who seems to have wandered in from a gentler story altogether. In June 1919 the country correspondent reported that "Philip Daubel drives a pair of prancing steeds and says he does not covet an auto." By September the bug had bitten: "Mr. Phillip Daubel was bitten by the auto bug. He now drives a car instead of his prancing steeds." His chief trouble was the road, or the want of one — he and two neighboring families were forever waiting for theirs to be opened, and when the work was abandoned for the winter Phillip reckoned the only way in or out was to lay greased stringers on the grade and let the settlers haul one another up by rope and windlass, and slide back down. After the knives and whitecap letters and boulders and blank cartridges of his kinsmen, Phillip and his prancing steeds make for a welcome and comic coda. **Charles and Mary** For all this turbulence, it is the household of **Charles** that forms the family's steadiest thread. Born **Karl** in Bönfeld on 14 January 1873, Charles was about eight when the family emigrated. He grew into a hardworking and famously stern man — the kind who, when one of his own sons fainted in the heat of harvest, would simply drag him into the shade until he came around and then carry on with the work. Charles met his future wife, **Marie "Mary" Anna Rudolph**, when she came out West to visit her aunt and uncle, Emil and Amelia Scholz, at Elk. Charles and Marie married in Spokane on 16 August 1902. They had eleven children — **Herman Carl**, Martha Elizabeth, Sophie Marie, Freda Mary, Elizabeth Pauline "Elsie," Marie Emma, Carl August, John, Ernest Ludwig, Albert Emil, and Rose "Rosie" Eleanor — all born at home on the farm in Chattaroy. With no doctor near, their neighbor Mrs. Freeman Staley, together with Nora Scholz, served as midwife for every one of the births. On the Chattaroy farm the family lived with remarkable self-sufficiency. Charles combined blacksmithing with farming; they raised apples, grapes, and other fruits along with grain that they ground into their own flour and cornmeal, and they kept their own meat, poultry, milk, and vegetables. Charles ran a threshing machine around the neighborhood to thresh his neighbors' grain, and the family operated a small sawmill to cut the lumber for the buildings on the Daubel farms. In winter they went to the Elk mill pond to saw blocks of ice, packing them in sawdust in an icehouse to keep food cool and make ice cream — ice they shared freely with neighbors, as their neighbor had shared her skill at the bedside. The First World War placed the family in an uneasy position. Having left Germany precisely to escape the military, Charles now found his German birth a liability. In 1918 a Chattaroy neighbor, W. R. Dwyer, reported him to the U.S. Marshal at Spokane, noting that Charles had been born in Germany, was not naturalized, and was not registered as an alien enemy, and branding him, in blunt wartime language, "a Hun pure and simple." The report entered the federal files, but it left no visible break in the pattern of his settled life. Marie died in Spokane on 9 January 1939, at the age of sixty, and Charles on 31 August 1950, at seventy-seven; both were buried at Milan, the corner of Washington that had been home since Marie's visit first brought her west. **The Eleven Children** The children of Charles and Marie came into the world across nearly two decades, most of them at Milan, and their lives carried them across Washington, into Idaho, and as far as Alberta, though the family's center of gravity remained the country around Chattaroy. **Herman Carl**, the eldest, was born at Milan on 18 May 1903. He would later marry **Thressa Lillian Strong**, but that is a story for another chapter. Martha Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, was born at Milan on 24 November 1904, married Edward Clayton Miller on 24 October 1924, and moved north to Alberta, living around Olds, Westward Ho, and Red Deer until her death at Olds on 2 May 1994. Sophie Marie, born at Milan on Christmas Eve 1905, married Stephen William McCurry on 15 November 1939 and settled in Mount Vernon, on the Washington coast, where she died on 10 August 1993. Freda Mary, born 2 August 1907, married John Arnst on 16 October 1925 and lived in the wheat country of Ritzville, dying there on 22 May 1990. Elizabeth Pauline "Elsie," born 22 June 1910, married Patrick J. Reddie on 23 June 1935 and lived widely — Odessa, Ritzville, Chattaroy, and even Lincoln, Iowa — before dying in Spokane on 21 September 1993. Marie Emma, born 10 January 1912, married Roy Douglas Newman on 14 January 1932 and lived longest at Deer Park, where she died on 30 April 2005 at ninety-three. Carl August, born 1 May 1913, married Juanita Hazel McGowan on 27 January 1942, divided his life between Chattaroy and Spokane, and died in Spokane on 4 June 1976. John, born 24 November 1914, married Ada Ellen McKernan on 26 September 1946, stayed close to the home ground at Chattaroy, and died on 20 May 2001. Ernest Ludwig, born in Spokane on 18 May 1917, married Ina May McGowan on his own birthday, 18 May 1946, lived many years at Chattaroy before settling at Deer Park, and died there on 30 January 2004. Albert Emil, born in 1920, married Viola Alice Bronkhorst on the last day of 1948, made his home at Chattaroy, and died in Spokane on 29 March 2014 — the last of his generation. Rose "Rosie" Eleanor, the youngest, born 24 March 1922, married Alois "Louie" Karg on 22 December 1942, lived between Chattaroy and Spokane, and died in Spokane on 5 January 2012. It is chiefly through Rosie that Marie's own words survive, a daughter recording the fragments her mother had spoken of a childhood ended by a mother's death, a father's departure, and a one-way passage across the sea. **Letters from the War** Of all the eleven children, it is Ernest whose voice carries this chapter to its close. During the Second World War he served as a sergeant with the 318th Fighter Squadron of the 325th Fighter Group — the "Checkertail Clan" — which fought across North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Italy, escorting bombers and striking rail lines, bridges, and fuel supplies. From those distant airfields Ernest wrote home to his sister-in-law Thressa, Herman's wife, at Chattaroy. Two of his letters survive. From North Africa, on 21 November 1943: _Dear Sis and All, Well here I am again and still doing O.K. How is your family and suppose Herman is still working, tell him that I will trade him jobs anytime he feels like it. I have got all of this life that I really want. I had a letter from John yesterday and he sure is lucky to be able to stay in the states. This Christmas will make the third Christmas I spent away from home. Did Herman and Albert get their buck this year, I suppose I would get the buck-fever if I tried deer hunting again. I have some pictures and as soon as I get more prints made I will send you one. I have an a** on me now like some old women. We have a setup in our tent now so we can develop our own pictures. I must close so I hope you and the rest a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Your Bro, Love Ernest._ And from Italy, on 17 January 1944: _Dear Sis and All, Well here I am in Italy and still nothing to write about or they won't let us write about anything around here. How is everybody at home. We been having nice weather here lately. There are lots of women here in Italy, but our orders are to stay away from them but that is hard to do. There are women and kids around every day selling oranges and nuts, boy I never ate so many nuts in all my life as I have over here, they are just crazy for cigarettes over here. I got a Christmas card from the Golden Chain Club of Chattaroy. Boy I sure would like to see your family again, I bet they sure changed since I seen them, but as long as they are as good as their Uncle Ernest it will be alright. Well Thressa I must close so hope this finds everybody is O.K. As Ever, Love Ernest._ From the discharge papers issued at Bönfeld in 1881 to a soldier's longing for a Chattaroy Christmas sixty years later, the Daubels had carried a single line from a Württemberg village to the Kansas prairie and on to the timbered farms north of Spokane, where Ludwig and Magdalene, Charles and Mary, and most of their children remain buried at Milan, within a few miles of the land the brothers cleared for two dollars and fifty cents an acre. ## Chapter 9 **Dresden to Santa Fe** A Baker in the Adobe Oven Helbig • Bergman • Metzelt • Erbse Our story now changes back to another branch of the family. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Saxony was one of the cultural jewels of German-speaking Europe, and its capital, Dresden, was the finest ornament of all. Strung along both banks of the Elbe in a broad river valley cradled by low hills and vineyard slopes, the city wore a baroque skyline that travelers called "Florence on the Elbe"—the domed Frauenkirche, the Zwinger palace, the Hofkirche, and the old stone bridge that had carried traffic across the river since the Middle Ages. It was a royal residence city, the seat of the Saxon monarchy and its court, and it held that curious arrangement of a largely Lutheran citizenry living under a Catholic crown, with the kings' grand court church rising amid a Protestant populace. It was here, in this beautiful old capital, that the American story of the Helbig family began. **The Family in Dresden** **Robert "Traugott Wilhelm" Helbig** was born in Dresden on 23 May 1852, the son of **Johann Friedrich Traugott Helbig** and **Caroline Louise Adelheid Bergman**. His people reached back into Saxony for at least a generation more: his father had been born about 1825, and an earlier **Johann Fredriech Traugott Helbig**, born about 1797, died in Dresden on 7 September 1880. Robert came of age in a Saxony being drawn, through the 1860s and 1870s, into a unified Germany under Prussian leadership—an era of upheaval and opportunity that would end, for many Saxons, in emigration. Dresden in these years ran on many things at once: it was a court and government town, but its outer districts were filling with workshops and factories, and between the palaces and the machinery lay the ordinary working life of a large city—markets, breweries, building trades, and the food trades that fed a rising population of well over two hundred thousand. Among these trades was baking, and it was as a baker that Robert was trained, a skilled craft learned under the guild traditions of the German trades and, as it turned out, portable enough to carry across an ocean. On 23 February 1877, in Dresden, Robert married **Pauline "Friederike Bertha Auguste" Metzelt**, known as Pauline, who had been born in the same city on 8 November 1853, the daughter of **Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Metzelt** and **Friederika Louisa Schulz Erbse**. Like Robert, she had grown up amid the trappings of an old royal capital, and the couple established their first household in the streets where both had been raised. Records place them in Dresden in October 1877 and again in June 1880, and there their first two daughters were born: Johanne Ernestine on 27 October 1877, and Margarethe Elisabeth on 25 June 1880. The family's roots in Dresden were deep, but the same forces transforming the city into a modern industrial capital were uprooting ordinary families across Germany. Emigration to America surged through the 1870s and 1880s, and around 1880 or 1881 the Helbigs joined that great westward tide. When they crossed the ocean, they exchanged the baroque towers along the Elbe for a life in the American Southwest that could hardly have been imagined from the streets of their Saxon youth. **An Unlikely Landing at Santa Fe** Robert's trade was recorded plainly on the ship manifest: _baker_. It was that skill that gave him his first footing in America, and it carried him to an improbable place. He settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and found work at the Indian School in nearby Albuquerque, serving as an industrial teacher during the fall term of 1882. The school opened that October with eighty-six Pueblo and Navajo pupils, housed in rough wooden structures the boys had reinforced with adobe walls to feel at home. When the term began, the storeroom off the kitchen was filled with "light, fine bread, baked in an adobe oven at the school, by Robert Helbig," while a Mrs. Helbig worked beside him as the school's cook. It was an unlikely place for a Dresden-born baker to find himself—part of a small corps of instructors keeping the school running on funds so thin that much of it, the school book frankly admitted, "having to be made up by the generosity of the people." Whatever became of Pauline and the two little girls born in Germany remains one of the unresolved sorrows of the record. By the time of the 1900 census Pauline had died, somewhere in New Mexico before the century closed, her exact date and place of burial unrecorded. She was not yet fifty. Both daughters born in Dresden had also vanished from the record without a trace; family memory holds that two of Pauline's daughters died after the family reached the United States, one account placing their deaths in Kansas, though no record of these losses has been found. Robert's later marriage record described him simply as "widowed from Paulina Metzel." **A Turbulent Santa Fe Life** Robert's years in Santa Fe unfolded in vivid, sometimes turbulent episodes preserved in the local press. He kept an orchard and a garden in the upper part of town, and worked for a time as a dairyman. In July 1889 he hauled a man named Antonio Borrego before 'Squire Padilla's court after finding him "having a 4th of July picnic" in his cherry trees; ordered away, Borrego struck Robert with a stone and "skinned up his face considerably." In 1891 he captured a large snake in his orchard and had it "bottled up on exhibition" at Ireland's drug store, where townsfolk argued over whether it was truly a rattler. His greenhouse burned to the ground one night in March 1900, and that August a "vicious bull" assaulted him and broke his left arm in two places, nearly costing him his life. In New Mexico the family had also grown. **Gertrude Marie Helbig** was born on 29 August 1883 in Santa Fe, followed by Albert Fred on 13 February 1885, Barbara in 1888, Marie Mary Hedwig on 21 September 1890, and Frances Kathryn on 10 January 1896—all born in Santa Fe. But the family's turbulence turned to grief in the summer of 1898. On the evening of 17 August, ten-year-old Barbara, "bright and amiable," was suddenly seized with violent cramps and convulsions at the family's home on eastern Manhattan street. Despite the best efforts of her parents and friends, she died in agony near midnight. An autopsy, performed at her father's own request, concluded she had somehow taken strychnine from a bottle of poison kept in the house. She was buried in Rosario cemetery. On his forty-ninth birthday, 23 May 1901, at six o'clock in the morning at the Santa Fe cathedral, Robert married Emma Braun, a widow from Philadelphia previously married to Charley Rights and identified in the records as a Lutheran. The Vicar General Fourchégu, who performed the ceremony, required of her the customary promise: that any children of the new marriage be baptized and raised Catholic, and that Robert's existing children be permitted to practice their Catholic faith freely. Gertie W. Helbig stood among the witnesses. That evening a reception and dance were held at the Helbig residence on Manhattan avenue, doubling as a celebration of Robert's birthday. Family rumor, gently preserved, held that his second wife "was mean." The Helbig home in these years was a place where others found shelter as well; in June 1902 a "health seeker," Mrs. Cora M. Fisch, died there, where she had been living with her husband and son. **Northward to the Minnesota Woods** The family's move north followed the marriage of Robert's daughter **Gertrude Marie Helbig**. On 2 April 1902, after two banns were published, Gertrude married **John Petri**—recorded as John Pitry, the surname more properly Petri—of Buena Vista, Minnesota, at the Santa Fe cathedral, with her brother Fred standing as witness. Gertrude afterward moved north to Beltrami County in Minnesota. Her own story, with its sorrows and remarkable length of days, belongs to a later chapter. Robert followed his daughter to Minnesota, and by 1905 he was living in Liberty Township, Beltrami County. His misfortunes did not end with the move. That November, working as a woodsman at the Olson camp near Dawson City, he was struck in the back of the neck by a butcher knife hurled by a fellow lumberjack who, without provocation, emerged from the kitchen as Robert gathered dishes in the dining room. The wound was ugly but not fatal; the assailant fled and was captured after a chase in which several shots were fired, and Robert was treated at St. Anthony's hospital. For all these hardships, Robert became a valued and well-loved fixture of his rural community—"always doing work of some kind," as one account put it, "much of it for his neighbors." He helped build the roads of Liberty Township, laying the corduroy on the Long Lake road that was still there when the road was later reworked. He was among the neighbors who helped move a house for George Elliot, rolling it over logs and across a stream with the aid of a stump puller; as the house crossed the creek, "old Mr. Helbig fell in," was hauled out by his shirt collar, and, undeterred, "kept on helping wherever he could." He kept a garden and planted flowers around his house on the south shore of Long Lake, favoring _Sweet William_, which bloomed year after year long after the house was gone. He lived at times in his son Fred's house there; when it burned, he rebuilt it. At a community gathering in April 1918 he entertained the neighbors by singing "America" and "Silent Night" in both German and English. That same October his home was destroyed by fire and Robert himself was seriously burned, rushed to Dr. Neal, who dressed his wounds and saw him through to recovery. His granddaughters visited him in the country and boated on Long Lake with a neighbor girl, Edith Hayes. Once, returning home late through the woods around the west end of Long Lake after visiting his daughter Frances Sundh, he lost his way in the cold and dark until someone heard him calling and brought him safely home. As Robert grew frail and could no longer live alone, his daughters took him into their homes in turn. In his final year he was bedridden, needing the bandages on his legs regularly changed, and a granddaughter, then thirteen—remembered as Clara—stayed home from school for a year to nurse him. She was bringing him soup for his lunch when she entered his room and found him dead. Robert Helbig died on 17 December 1937 in Liberty, at the age of eighty-seven, while living with his daughter Maria Klasen. Herman Klasen reported his death to the clerk of Liberty Township, and Robert was buried in Bemidji. **The Children in Minnesota** Robert's surviving children built their lives across northern Minnesota and beyond. Albert Fred Helbig—the Fred who witnessed Gertrude's wedding and whose Long Lake house sheltered his father—was born 13 February 1885 in New Mexico and made his life largely in Bemidji, where he died on 6 December 1962. Marie “Mary” Hedwig Helbig, born 21 September 1890 in Santa Fe, lived in Liberty and elsewhere in Minnesota, with time spent in Hutchinson, Kansas, and died on 4 August 1953 in Long Prairie, Todd County. Frances Kathryn Helbig, born 10 January 1896 in Santa Fe, was the daughter Robert knew as Frances Sundh, whose home he was returning from the night he became lost in the woods; she lived in Liberty and later in Bear, Adams County, Idaho, and died on 26 June 1963 in Bemidji. From a baker's household in baroque Dresden, the Helbigs had crossed to an adobe oven in the New Mexico desert and come to rest at last in the pine woods and lakeshores of Beltrami County, where Robert's _Sweet William_ went on blooming for years in the spot his house had stood. ## Chapter 10 **Walking the Trail to Bemidji** From Luxembourg to Minnesota Petrie • Riel • Mattheus The Petri family's American story begins in the borderlands of Germany and Luxembourg, in a corner of Europe where the surname itself would not sit still — Petri, Petry, Pitry, and eventually Petrie, as one clerk after another set down what he heard. From that shifting old-country ground the family carried its name across the Atlantic and westward across a continent, from a mining town in the Grand Duchy to the German Catholic farm country of central Minnesota and, finally, to the pine and lake country of the north. This chapter follows that passage and the immigrant generation who made it, leaving the fuller account of John Petri's own life and marriage for later. **Rumelange, the Iron Town Left Behind** In the summer of 1875, **John Petri** was born in Rumelange, a town tucked into the far south of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, in the canton of Esch-sur-Alzette. It was not a sleepy old village but a place caught in the middle of a dramatic transformation. Rumelange sits at the southernmost edge of Luxembourg, hard against the French border, in the iron-ore basin known as the _Minett_, named for the reddish, phosphorus-rich rock called _minette_ that lay in seams beneath the wooded ridges. For centuries the land had supported a modest rural population who farmed thin soils. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the ground beneath their feet turned out to be one of the richest concentrations of iron ore in western Europe. By the time John was born, the mines were remaking the town. New steelmaking methods, developed in these very years, could finally exploit the high-phosphorus ore that had once been considered nearly worthless, and the whole southern basin became an industrial engine almost overnight. Galleries and open workings cut into the hillsides, narrow-gauge rail lines threaded the valleys, and the population swelled with men drawn to the paydirt — Luxembourgers from the countryside alongside Germans, Italians, and others who came to swing picks and haul ore. Rumelange's rhythms were set by the shift whistle rather than the seasons, and its social life was shaped by the hazards and camaraderie of dangerous underground labor. Through it all the town remained overwhelmingly Catholic, its parish church the center of community life and its register the spine of ordinary existence, marking each family's births, marriages, and deaths. This was a formative era for Luxembourg itself. The Grand Duchy had only recently secured its neutrality and independence, confirmed by the Treaty of London in 1867, and was still finding its footing between far larger neighbors. Because the minette basin straddled the French, German, and Luxembourgish frontiers, the fortunes of Rumelange were tied to markets and politics well beyond its own valley — the German customs union that determined where its iron could be sold, the unification of Germany in 1871, and the lingering tensions of the Franco-Prussian War. For all the wealth in the ground, the boom did not guarantee a good life to the families who dug it out. Wages were modest, work was perilous, and a growing population meant real competition for jobs and living space. Across Luxembourg in these decades, tens of thousands chose to emigrate rather than stay, and the United States — with its promise of cheap land and open homesteads — was among the most common destinations. That was the current that carried the Petri family out of Rumelange in 1891, trading the iron hills of southern Luxembourg for the forests of the American Upper Midwest. **Mathias Petri and Katherine Riel, the Immigrants** The Petri story in America begins with **Mathias Petri**, born 13 February 1846 in the German lands near the Luxembourg frontier — quite possibly the Mathias Petry whose birth was recorded in Saarland a day earlier than the date carved on his gravestone, a small discrepancy not uncommon in households where birthdates were just family memories. It was a place of modest means, where a young man of working stock knew the rhythms of field and forge; when he crossed the ocean, he did so as a laborer. Around 1875 he married **Katherine Riel**, born in Germany on 6 October 1848, the daughter of **Phil Riel** and **Christen Mattheus**. The Germany of her childhood was not yet a unified nation but a patchwork of kingdoms and principalities, and the middle decades of the century saw wave after wave of its people depart for the United States. Katherine and Mathias made the great decision together, remembered in the history of Liberty Township as emigrating "as a young couple." Mathias was the first of the line to leave the old country. In the spring of 1891 he gathered his family and four pieces of luggage and boarded the _Westernland_, a Red Star Line ship running from Antwerp to New York. The passenger manifest listed him among seven travelers, all laborers, bound from Germany toward Albany, New York. They arrived on 1 April 1891, processed through the _Barge Office_ at the tip of Manhattan — the immigrant depot that served the port in the years before Ellis Island opened its doors. Their eventual home lay far to the west. **A Foothold at Avon** The Petris first settled in Avon, a small town in Stearns County, Minnesota, south of St. Cloud in the rolling, lake-strewn country of the central part of the state. Here they appear in the Minnesota state census of 1895 — Mathias and Katherine with their sons John, Champy, Victor, and Edward. Stearns County in this era was one of the most thoroughly German settlements in all of Minnesota, and Avon shared fully in that character. The great migration that filled these townships had drawn Catholic families from the German states, from Luxembourg, and from the Rhineland and Saarland borderlands — precisely the region from which the Petris themselves had come. German was the language of the home, the store counter, and often the church, and for an immigrant couple who had arrived with little more than they could carry, Avon offered something precious: a community where their language was spoken, their faith practiced, and their customs shared. The town owed its growth to the railroad. The Great Northern line running west from St. Cloud toward the Dakota country passed through Avon, and like countless small communities across the upper Midwest, the village existed largely because the rails did — a depot, a grain elevator, a general store, a church, and a clustering of frame houses along the tracks, a shipping point for the surrounding farm families. The economy ran on agriculture, and men of families like the Petris took up the work of farmers and laborers as the county shifted steadily from wheat toward dairying and diversified crops. The mid-1890s were hard years across rural America. The Panic of 1893 had thrown the nation into a severe depression, collapsing banks, crippling railroads, and driving down the prices farmers received. Yet central Minnesota, with its diversifying farms, weathered the depression somewhat better than the single-crop wheat regions of the plains, and a German Catholic community built on thrift and mutual aid had reserves of resilience that carried it through lean years. For the Petris, though, Avon was never a final destination. It was a foothold, a place to gain footing before moving on to newer country as the frontier of settlement crept north toward the pine lands. **North to Liberty Township** In the late 1800s **Mathias** and his eldest son, **John**, struck out for the newly opening lands of Beltrami County, walking the trail from Park Rapids to Bemidji through the timber and lake country of the northern frontier. Both took up homesteads: Mathias and Katherine claimed land in Section 6 of Liberty Township, while John took ground near Long Lake. Liberty Township sits in the north-central reach of Minnesota, in the transition zone where the great pineries give way to lake country and cutover farmland — a landscape of low glacial hills, boggy lowlands, tamarack swamp, and countless small lakes, Long Lake among them. When the first homesteaders arrived, they entered a country still largely covered in standing white pine. Roads, where they existed at all, were rough affairs; much of the low ground had to be crossed on corduroy — logs laid crosswise over swamp and muskeg — and men of this family helped lay that corduroy by hand on the Long Lake road. This was not a settled countryside but a place being wrestled into shape one clearing at a time. The economy ran on two inseparable things: logging and homestead farming. A man cut timber in the winter, when frozen ground and snow made it possible to haul logs, and farmed the cleared land in the summer, combining it with trapping, hunting, and fishing to make a living stretch. Logging camps operated throughout the region, feeding woodsmen who lived rough in the bunkhouses, and falling timber was lethal work — a dropped tree could end a life in an instant. The township was never a town in the ordinary sense but a scattering of farmsteads knit together by shared labor, one-room schools like the Long Lake School, and gathering halls such as the Deer Lake Community Club. The population was heavily immigrant and largely Northern European, carrying surnames from Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Scandinavia; Catholic and Lutheran families lived side by side and helped each other move houses and search the woods for the lost. Nearby Bemidji, the county seat, gave the township a market town, a hospital, and the place where records were filed and the dead were buried. The censuses trace the family's steadiness in this country — at Beltrami in 1900, in Liberty Township in 1905, again in 1910, and once more in 1920 — the rootedness of a family that had at last found the ground on which it meant to stay. In 1921 Mathias suffered a stroke that confined him to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. For a man who had crossed an ocean, walked the wilderness trail from Park Rapids to Bemidji, and broken new ground with his own hands, these final years brought a hard stillness. He died on 31 August 1925, at the age of seventy-nine, and was buried at Bemidji. Katherine outlived him, settling by 1930 into the town of Bemidji itself, where she spent her final years. She died in Beltrami County on 12 June 1932, in her eighty-fourth year, and was buried beside Mathias in the county she had helped to settle. From a birthplace in the German states to a grave in the northern reaches of Minnesota, her life had traced the long westward journey of her generation. **The Four Sons** Mathias and Katherine raised four sons, and the branches of the family spread outward from the homestead. **John Petri**, the eldest, was born 24 August 1875 in Rumelange — his birth certificate finally located in Europe after a long search. He came to America with his family in 1891 and grew into a man of some standing in Liberty Township. His life and marriage belong to a later chapter; here it is enough to note that he was the one from whom later generations of the family descend. Edward Petri, the second son, was born about 1879 in Germany. He appears in the Minnesota state census of 1895 and lived for a time at Avon, but after that the trail goes cold. He died sometime after 1910, and the later course of his life remains uncertain — one open question being whether he may have gone by the name Edward Dubois. Champy Peter Petri, the third son, was born 20 May 1888 in Belgium. A farmer by trade, he married three times over the course of his life. On 3 September 1914 he married Sarah Marie Malterud, a Minnesotan, and the couple settled in Section 10 of Liberty Township, where they had two children, John William, born in 1915, and Catherine Mary, born in 1920. Champy's path later crossed once more with his late brother's family: on 10 May 1946 he married Gertrude Marie Helbig, John's widow and, by then, twice widowed. The couple moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for a few years before returning to Liberty Township, where Champy died 4 November 1962. Victor M Petri, the fourth son, was born 16 July 1890 in Germany. Of the four brothers, he was the one who left Minnesota for the north: he married Clara B Roen on 16 November 1916 and eventually settled across the border in the Rainy River District of Ontario, where he died in 1964, at Chapple. From Mathias and Katherine, the first of the line to cross the Atlantic, the family had by the close of this generation spread from the iron hills of Luxembourg to a homestead in Section 6 of Liberty Township, with sons rooted at Long Lake, drawn north into Ontario, and — in Edward's case — lost from the record altogether. The pine trail from Park Rapids to Bemidji had become the family's American ground, and it was there, near Long Lake, that John Petri's own household would take shape. ## Chapter 11 **Mail Order Marriage** Petrie • Helbig The Petrie and Helbig families came together across a distance that would have seemed impossible a generation earlier — a marriage arranged by mail that carried a young woman from the adobe streets of the New Mexico Territory to the pine forests of northern Minnesota. Their story turns on two very different places, Santa Fe and Bemidji, and on the short, consequential life of the man who linked them. **From Luxembourg to the Long Lake Homestead** **John Petri** was born on 24 August 1875 in Rumelange, in the canton of Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, the son of **Mathias Petri** and **Katherine Riel**. Rumelange lay in the industrial south of the Grand Duchy, a country of iron and mines. In later years his own family sometimes remembered him as German-born — an understandable confusion given the shifting borders of the region — but his birth certificate, long sought and finally located in Europe, fixed Rumelange as his true birthplace. In 1891, when John was about fifteen or sixteen, he crossed the Atlantic with his family. For a young man of that age the passage meant leaving behind the only home he had known for a new country and a new language. The Petris did not linger in the eastern ports but pressed on toward the northern woods of Minnesota, where cheap land and the promise of a homestead awaited those willing to labor for it. Father and son came together to the country around Bemidji, in Beltrami County, and both took up homesteads in the late 1800s. They walked the trail from Park Rapids to Bemidji — a journey of many miles through forested country that speaks plainly to the isolation of the region and the endurance required to settle it. Mathias and his wife homesteaded in Section 6 of Liberty Township, while John claimed his own land beside Long Lake. By 1900 he was established in Beltrami County, and he would remain rooted in Liberty Township for the rest of his life, appearing in the local record there in 1905 and again in 1910. This was frontier country in the fullest sense: dense timber, few roads, and settlers who supported themselves by whatever the land and forest would yield. John farmed and logged to make his living, combining the slow work of clearing and cultivating a homestead with the seasonal labor of the logging camps that defined the northern Minnesota economy of the day. But he was more than a settler. He served as Justice of the Peace and as United States Postmaster — offices that placed him at the center of a township still forming its institutions. In a frontier settlement, the man who kept the peace and handled the mail held a position of real trust, and that a Luxembourg-born immigrant who had arrived as a teenager could hold such roles testifies to how fully he had made himself part of the community he helped to build. **The Helbigs in Santa Fe** While John was clearing land in the north woods, the woman he would marry was growing up more than a thousand miles to the southwest, in a world about as different from Minnesota as any in the country. **Robert Helbig**, a Dresden-born baker who reached America in 1881, had settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and built a life on the eastern edge of the old territorial capital. There, on 29 August 1883, in the southern reaches of that ancient town, his daughter **Gertrude Marie Helbig** was born, the child of Robert and **Pauline Metzelt**, whose full German names hint at roots far from the sun-baked adobe streets of the New Mexico Territory. Santa Fe in the 1880s and 1890s sat at the meeting of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the high desert plateau, some seven thousand feet above sea level. It was one of the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded settlements on the continent, established by the Spanish crown in 1610, and it carried nearly three centuries of layered history in its adobe walls — the Palace of the Governors on the plaza, the low flat-roofed houses of sun-dried brick, and the rising stone of the Cathedral of St. Francis. Through these years its population hovered around six or seven thousand souls, predominantly Hispano and Roman Catholic, with Pueblo communities nearby whose presence predated the Spanish entirely. Into that old and settled world came a thin stream of Anglo and European newcomers — merchants, tradesmen, and health seekers — and the German baker and his family were part of that current, tending orchards and keeping a dairy. New Mexico was not yet a state but a federal territory, and would not become one until 1912, a decade after the Helbigs had scattered. Gertrude grew up bilingual in spirit if not always in tongue, moving between the Catholic rhythms recorded in the parish books and the domestic world of a German household. The family carried the marks of immigration plainly: the clerks who kept the registers wrote by ear, and the surname appears variously as Helbig, Helbeig, and even Elbeigh. Her mother, Pauline, had died by the time of Gertrude's own marriage, and her father, Robert, remarried in 1901, taking as his second wife Emma Braun, a widow from Philadelphia. Gertrude, then seventeen or eighteen, stood as a witness to that union — a young woman watching her widowed father begin again. **A Marriage Arranged Across a Continent** On 3 April 1902, at Santa Fe, **John Petri** and **Gertrude Helbig** were married in the Cathedral of St. Francis. The parish record preserves the moment with its own particular spellings: "John Pitry," a single man, legitimate son of **Matthew Pitry** and **Catherine Riel** of Buena Vista, Minnesota, joined to "**Gertrude Helbeig**," legitimate daughter of **Robert Helbeig** and the late **Pauline Metzel**. Two banns had been published; the Very Reverend Anthony Fourchégu, Vicar General and Rector, performed the ceremony, with Fred Helbig and Louisa Wheeler standing as witnesses. John was twenty-seven, Gertrude nineteen. The circumstances of the match were unusual, and Gertrude spoke of it plainly in later years: she was, as she told it, a “mail-order bride.” She had been living in Santa Fe while John was settled in Minnesota, and their marriage appears to have been arranged across that great distance before the two ever built a life together. It was not an uncommon arrangement in an era when men who had settled the northern frontier sought wives through correspondence rather than local courtship. Whatever brought them together, the marriage carried Gertrude from the arid mesas of New Mexico to the cold pine forests of Beltrami County, and it endured. By 1905 she was living in Liberty Township, and there she would remain rooted for decades, appearing in the censuses of 1910, 1920, and 1930. On the Long Lake homestead she and John raised five children — Mathias, known as Matt; **Robert**; Alfred, called Fred; John Jr.; and Marie — all of whom attended the Long Lake School. **The Falling Tree** On 9 April 1913, John Petri was killed by a falling tree while logging. He was thirty-eight years old. The forest that had sustained his family took his life in a single moment, in an accident all too common among the men who worked the northern timber. He was buried in Bemidji. His children were still young. John Jr. was only two, and **Robert** was but nine when his father died. Gertrude — small in stature and now widowed with young children — was left to manage in a hard place. She remained on the Long Lake farm and in time married Jack Erickson, also recorded as John Erickson, whose land adjoined her own, so that the two places were farmed together. That union, entered into in 1928 in Beltrami County, ended in divorce. Then, in 1946, Gertrude married Champy Petri, her first husband's own brother. The wedding was shadowed by a grim coincidence: two days after she wed Champy, her former husband Erickson took his own life. For a time Gertrude and Champy lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and by 1950 she was recorded at Wauwatosa in Milwaukee County — a suburban setting far removed from the isolation of Beltrami County. But her life had been anchored in the north, and it was to the north she returned. In 1940 she had still been in Liberty Township, holding to the country John had walked into as a young immigrant, and her final years brought her back to that region for good. Gertrude Helbig died on 25 August 1982 at Bemidji, four days short of her ninety-ninth birthday. She had lived nearly a century, from the territorial days of the New Mexico frontier to the modern age, outliving two husbands and the divorce of a third marriage. She was buried at Bemidji, in the county that had been her home through the longest and most consequential years of her life. John Petri lived barely thirty-eight years, but the homestead beside Long Lake outlasted him: Gertrude raised their five children there and farmed the adjoining ground for decades, and the Petrie name took hold in Liberty Township — a Luxembourg-born logger and a Santa Fe baker's daughter, joined across a continent, whose family remained rooted in the Minnesota north woods long after both were gone. ## Chapter 12 **Prairie Crossroads** Dakotas and the Merging Lines Cooper • Lanphere • Bartosh • Riha North Dakota and South Dakota formed the ground on which several of this family's separate lines first came together. Across roughly six decades — from the territorial years of the 1880s through the middle of the twentieth century — the Cooper, Bartosh, Lanphere, Spence, and Strong families touched the Dakotas plains, drawn by the same forces that pulled hundreds of thousands of others: cheap land, open country, and the promise of a fresh start. Farmers, teamsters, laborers, and townspeople, they took their places among one of the most ethnically diverse rural populations in America, and on that prairie their marriages began knitting the separate threads into one. **The Northern Plains** The land itself set the terms of every life lived upon it. North Dakota was a country defined by its flatness and its enormous sky. Its eastern edge lay in the valley of the Red River of the North — a lakebed left behind by the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz, so level and so fertile that it drew wheat growers from across the world. Moving west, the land rose into the rolling drift prairie, cut by the broad, shallow valley of the James River, and further still into the rugged country toward the Missouri and the badlands beyond. The southeastern counties where most of these families settled — Ransom, Sargent, Dickey, Richland, and Cass — sat in this eastern and central belt, prime farming country where the soil was deep and the growing season, though short, was generous enough for small grains. South Dakota offered a parallel landscape. The northeastern corner, where most of these lives unfolded, was a country of low, rolling glacial plain — broad horizons, shallow lakes and sloughs left behind by the ice, and soil that rewarded the plow. Towns like Hecla, Britton, and Pierpont were laid out along the reach of the railroads, each a cluster of grain elevators, a main street, a church or two, and a scatter of farmsteads spreading outward into section-line country. The far western edge of the state was another world entirely: Spearfish, tucked against the Black Hills in Lawrence County, belonged to the mining and timber country of the western uplands, shaped by the gold rush that had brought Americans flooding into the Hills in the late 1870s. It was demanding country in either Dakota. Winters were long, brutally cold, and often deadly, with blizzards that could bury a homestead and isolate a family for days. Summers were hot and dry, punctuated by violent thunderstorms and, in bad years, hail that could flatten a crop in minutes. Trees were scarce away from the rivers, and those who stayed learned to respect the land. **Settling the Territory** When the earliest of these families were in Bismarck and McLean County in the mid-1880s, North Dakota was not yet a state. Dakota Territory was still being organized, its towns young and its institutions improvised. Bismarck, on the Missouri River, was a rough frontier capital — a railroad and river town that served as a supply point and jumping-off place for the country to the west. The Northern Pacific Railway had pushed through in the 1870s and 1880s, and the rails were the lifeline that made settlement possible, carrying homesteaders in and hauling grain and cattle out. The Spences, among the earliest of these families, lived around Bismarck and McLean County in these years, at the small center of a very large and empty land, where statehood — which came in 1889 — was a matter of active anticipation rather than settled fact. The Northern Plains had been the homeland of the Dakota, Lakota, and other nations, and the homestead boom pushed hard against that older world. Ordinary settlers and Native families still crossed paths in ways that could be neighborly as often as they were fraught, sharing the same difficult country in the same difficult seasons. The decades on either side of 1900 were the great settlement boom. The Homestead Act offered 160 acres to anyone willing to file a claim, live on it, and improve it, and the railroads aggressively advertised the region across the United States and Europe. Germans — including Germans from Russia — and Norwegians formed the largest groups, but Swedes, Bohemians and other Czechs, and native-born Americans moving up from older settled regions all took their place on the prairie. The families in this book reflect that mix precisely: Bohemian immigrants who came out of the Czech villages of central Europe by way of earlier settlement in Iowa, arriving in Ransom County around 1910; Swedish immigrants who had crossed the Atlantic in the great migrations of the 1870s and later; and old-stock American families with roots reaching back into New York and Pennsylvania, who worked their way west through the Dakotas. Catholic and Lutheran churches anchored these communities, and small towns along the rail lines — Lisbon, Enderlin, Ellendale, Oakes, Fairmount — became the centers where scattered farm families gathered to trade, worship, and marry. The economy of this country ran, above all, on grain. Spring wheat was king, with oats, barley, corn, and flax alongside, and the rhythm of life followed the crop: planting, the anxious watch through the growing months, and the hard labor of harvest and threshing in late summer and fall. The elevators along the tracks set the pulse of every town, and a family's fortune rose and fell with yields and grain prices set in distant markets. Fargo, on the Red River across from Moorhead, Minnesota, was the exception — the largest city in North Dakota and its commercial gateway, where the branch lines and main lines converged. **The Cooper Family on the Plains** Into this world came **Oscar F. Thaddeus Cooper** and his wife, **Rosalthea "Rose" Angelia Lanphere**, who had come west out of Pennsylvania and New York. They arrived in Brown County, South Dakota, before 1884, part of the great tide of settlers pouring onto Dakota land during the feverish decade when railroad promotion, cheap homestead land, and a run of unusually wet years drew tens of thousands northward. Brown County had barely been organized when the family put down roots near the small town of Hecla, its streets still raw and its future entirely unproven. Around Hecla they raised children who were born, married, and buried on that same ground across the decades that followed. The optimism of the 1880s gave way to harder truths in the 1890s, when drought and the financial panic of 1893 broke many who had come out in the wet years, but the Coopers held on, and their line reached across Brown, Marshall, and Day counties in the northeast and as far as Spearfish in the far west. It was the Coopers' son, **Charles Calvin Cooper**, whose life traced the family's steady movement westward and northward across the upper plains. Charles was born on 19 August 1879 at Bell Run, in McKean County, Pennsylvania — a corner of the state near Shingle House, in the wooded highlands where the Allegheny country met the New York border. By 1880 the family was recorded at Ceres, in the same county, and his earliest years were spent among the hemlock and hardwood hills of northern Pennsylvania, then dominated by lumbering and the small farming that filled the cleared land between the mills. Like many families of that era, the Coopers did not stay put; somewhere in Charles's youth the household turned toward the newly opened lands of the Dakotas. By 1896 his connection to South Dakota is already noted, and by 1900 he was living at Hecla, in Brown County, in the far northeast of the state near the North Dakota line. At Hecla, on 17 October 1900, Charles married Bertha Clausen. The couple had a son, Edwin Theodore Cooper. The marriage did not endure, and in time Charles and Bertha divorced — a difficult and comparatively uncommon step in that period, though the plains offered a certain anonymity to those who chose to begin again. **The Bartosh Line and the Merging of Traditions** Charles did begin again, and his second marriage joined the Cooper line to a family whose name carried the imprint of Bohemia. **Anna Elizabeth Bartosh** was born on a farm in Center Township, Pocahontas County, Iowa, in the summer of 1888. Her father, **Frank Louis Bartosh**, and her mother, **Mary Eva Riha**, belonged to the wave of Czech settlers who put down roots in the black-soil prairie of northwestern Iowa in the closing decades of the nineteenth century — a landscape of open fields and small townships, of tight-knit ethnic communities where the old language still moved through kitchens and church halls. The Bartosh and Riha families would carry that heritage onward into Ransom County, North Dakota, settling in and around Casey, Lisbon, and Enderlin. Anna spent the whole of her childhood in Pocahontas County, and successive census years trace her family's small movements within it — living in Center in 1895, in Grant City by 1900, and in Sherman Township by 1905. These were the ordinary shifts of a farming family, following land and opportunity within a familiar radius. As a girl she knew the rhythm of the agricultural year, the chores of a rural household, and the closeness of a community bound by shared Bohemian heritage. By 1910 the family had moved eastward across the state to Jackson Township in Winneshiek County, another region long favored by Czech immigrants. Anna married for the first time in December 1909, in Winneshiek County, when she was twenty-one. Her husband was Jesse Perry, and from that union came a son, William. That marriage, too, ended in divorce, and William — though born a Perry — would grow up under another name entirely. That other name came from **Charles Calvin Cooper**, whom Anna married on 25 November 1913 in Fargo, in Cass County, North Dakota. In that union the Cooper and Bartosh lines were joined — an old-stock American family with Pennsylvania and New York roots married to a Bohemian immigrant family out of the Iowa prairie, exactly the kind of crossing of immigrant traditions that the Dakotas made possible. Charles adopted young William, who was thereafter known as Bill Cooper — a quiet act that folded the boy fully into the new family. Together Charles and Anna had several more children: **Gladys May**, Eva Rose, George Thomas, and Sadie Harriet, a full and blended household raised across the moves that carried the family from Dakota to Minnesota. The threads of Charles's two marriages were not entirely severed by the years; his daughter Gladys, from the second family, is remembered to have crossed paths with her half-brother Edwin later in life, a small reunion that quietly bridged the two chapters of her father's story. **Following the Land** The middle decades of the couple's life were marked by steady movement across the upper plains. Charles and Anna were at Lisbon, in Ransom County, in 1914 and 1915. By 1920 the census found them at Eagle, in Richland County, in the southeastern corner of North Dakota — flat, open wheat country where the rhythm of life turned on planting, harvest, and the fortunes of the grain markets, and where their residence anchored them for years to a landscape of section-line roads and prairie townships. This restless movement reflected the circumstances of a working family on the northern frontier of American agriculture, following land, labor, and prospects from one small town to the next. The families gathered here lived through the region's sharpest swings. The years around the First World War brought high wheat prices and prosperity, but also strain — the 1918 influenza pandemic reached even isolated prairie towns, and the war pressed hard on German-speaking communities whose loyalty was sometimes questioned. The early 1920s opened with an agricultural depression that struck the wheat country years before the rest of the nation felt the Crash, as grain prices collapsed and farm debt mounted. The 1930s were the cruelest chapter, when drought settled over the Northern Plains, turning the dry years into the Dust Bowl and stripping the topsoil off exhausted fields. Grasshopper plagues, dust storms, and failed crops combined with Depression prices to drive countless families off the land, and North Dakota lost population as people gave up and moved on — many toward the milder country of the Pacific Northwest. The Coopers made exactly that journey. In the early 1920s Charles moved his family away from the Dakota plains and into the pine and lake country of northern Minnesota. By 1930 the household was recorded at Maple Ridge, in Beltrami County, and by 1940 it had settled in Bemidji itself, the county seat and the region's principal town. Bemidji, set on the shore of its namesake lake near the headwaters of the Mississippi, had grown up around the timber trade and offered a different country than the open Dakota wheatlands — a place of forest, water, and the small-city life of a north-woods county town. The family can be traced there through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, the longest stretch they spent anchored in any one region after years of frequent relocation. **Later Years** Charles lived out his remaining years in Bemidji, the last of the many places he had called home across a life that spanned Pennsylvania, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota. He died on 21 April 1948, at the age of sixty-eight, and was buried at Bemidji, in Beltrami County, in the northern town that had become, after so much movement, the settled ground of his final decades. Anna outlived him by sixteen years and made one final, considerable move, this time far to the west. By 1950 she was living in Spokane, Washington, at 2214 College Avenue, a full step removed from the prairie and lake country where she had spent nearly all her life, in the company of family that had grown to include grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A single remembered exchange survives from those years, small but telling. As an infant in the family — the author of this book — lay asleep, a neighbor remarked that the baby was "so young his eyes haven't opened yet," and Anna — by then Great Grandma Cooper — answered simply, "He's sleeping, silly." It is a fragment of ordinary domestic life, but it preserves something of her plainspoken, matter-of-fact presence in the household. Anna Bartosh died in Spokane on 24 November 1964, at the age of seventy-six, and was buried there, on the far side of a journey that had carried her from a Bohemian farming community in Iowa across three states and the better part of a continent. With the marriage of Charles Cooper and Anna Bartosh at Fargo in 1913, the Pennsylvania-and-New-York Cooper line and the Bohemian Bartosh and Riha line were bound together on the Dakota prairie, and the household they raised carried both traditions off the drought-stricken plains — Charles to a grave at Bemidji in the Minnesota pinewoods, Anna to one in Spokane, far to the west of the wheat country where their family had first come together. ## Chapter 13 **A House On a Truck** Petrie • Cooper The children of Charles Calvin Cooper and Anna Elizabeth Bartosh came into the world across a broad sweep of the northern plains and upper Midwest — from the Dakotas to Iowa to the lake country of northern Minnesota. Their lives, spanning the twentieth century, carried them steadily westward, and by the end most had settled in and around Spokane, Washington. Some died as small children; others lived into their eighties and nineties. Together their stories trace a family in motion, following work and one another across the map. This chapter follows that migration to its western terminus, where the Cooper line converged with the Petrie family through the marriage of Gladys May Cooper and Robert Petrie. **The Cooper Children** Edwin Theodore Cooper — from Charle’s first marriage — was born on 28 July 1904 in Ellendale, Dickey County, North Dakota. He married Helen Kathleen Cox on 3 November 1924 and lived across the state of Washington — in Colfax, Winthrop, Tucannon, Pomeroy, and finally Yakima, where he died on 10 September 1977. William Perry Cooper — adopted son from Anna’s first marriage — born on 16 March 1911 in Cresco, Howard County, Iowa, married Marcella Marjorie Kolkema on 6 December 1931. His life followed the same westward path, with residences in Lisbon, North Dakota; Saco, Montana; and eventually the Spokane area. He settled in Mead, in Spokane County, where he died on 19 November 1993. Eva Rose Rosecello Cooper was born on 13 December 1916 in Christine, Richland County, North Dakota. She married William “Bill” Merrill Albert on 18 May 1938 and made her way west through residences ranging from Eagle, North Dakota, and Maple Ridge, Minnesota, to Nine Mile Falls and Spokane. She died in Spokane on 26 May 2005, the last of her generation. George Thomas Cooper, born 1 August 1919 in Christine, Richland County, North Dakota, died as a small child on 21 December 1922 in Beltrami County, Minnesota. His name would be given again to a brother born a few years later. Sadie Harriet Cooper was born on 27 November 1922 in Buzzle, Beltrami County, Minnesota. She married Ralph Paul (Goodell) Robinson on 25 February 1939, and her later life was spent in Montana's Flathead country — in Kalispell, Columbia Falls, and Whitefish — where she died on 30 December 1999. The second son to bear the name George Thomas Cooper was born on 27 August 1925 in Pinewood, Buzzle, Beltrami County, Minnesota, three years after the death of the first. He married Gwen E. Aiken on 30 December 1958 and lived variously in Bemidji, Minnesota, in Stevens County, Washington, and in Spokane, where he died on 11 November 1975. **Gladys May Cooper** **Gladys May Cooper** was born on 8 September 1914 in Lisbon, in Ransom County, North Dakota. The North Dakota of her childhood was a land of open prairie and homestead farms, where families lived by the rhythm of planting and harvest and where the winters were long and hard. She spent her earliest years there; by 1920 the family was living in Eagle, in Richland County, still within the wheat country of the eastern part of the state. By her middle childhood the family had crossed into Minnesota. In 1926 she was recorded at Bemidji, in Beltrami County, and by 1930 the household had settled in nearby Maple Ridge — the north woods of Minnesota, lake country and timber country, a region whose economy leaned on logging and small farms carved out of the forest. It was in this setting that the shape of her adult life would begin to take form. She learned early what it meant to feed a crew of hungry loggers. On the strength of a marriage begun at a country dance, Gladys found herself cooking in a logging camp, ladling out meals for men who worked the timber — before life carried her westward to a long career in the operating rooms of Spokane. **Robert Petrie** Robert Petrie — known to family as Bob — was born on 16 November 1904 in Wilton, Beltrami County, Minnesota, and raised in nearby Liberty Township. He was one of five children of **John Petrie, Sr.** and **Gertrude Marie Helbig** — one of four sons, alongside brothers Mathias, Alfred, and John Jr., with a single sister, Marie. The family lived in and around Liberty and Turtle Lake townships through the census years of 1910, 1920, and 1930, in the pine and lake country of northern Minnesota where logging shaped much of daily life. At some point the family name had been written as Petri; the story handed down is that Robert added the "e" to make it sound “less Polish,” a small but telling gesture around the time of the family's westward move. As a young man he worked in a logging camp, hard and seasonal labor typical of the region, and he later took up trucking and carpentry as well. Robert met Gladys at a dance, and the two were married on 4 October 1932 at Bemidji. He was twenty-eight, she was eighteen. They held their wedding dance at the Deer Lake Community Club, and Bob later recalled with some pride that it drew the largest crowd the hall had seen to that date. Over the next five years the couple welcomed three sons — Milton Ronald, **Vern Robert**, and Dale Richard — all born before the family's great move west. The early years of the marriage were tied to the timber. Gladys and Robert ran a logging camp, and it was Gladys who served as camp cook, preparing meals for the loggers who depended on hearty food to sustain their labor. It was demanding, physical work, carried out in rough conditions, and it placed her at the very center of a working community's daily life. **The Journey West - A House On a Truck** By the mid-1930s many people were leaving Minnesota for the West, and two of Robert's brothers, Alfred and Mathias, were among them. Their encouragement, along with that of friends already settled, finally drew Robert and Gladys to follow in 1937. Robert acquired a small house — roughly eight by ten or twelve feet — from Oscar Richmond and mounted it on the back of his truck. Into it the family packed their possessions and cleared space to sleep, tying a stove and a washing machine to the back. With their three young children — the oldest about four, the youngest still a baby — they set out over rough gravel roads on a slow journey, camping at night along the way. Somewhere in a river valley in the mountains of Montana they stopped to camp for a while. Deciding it was time to wash clothes, they lifted the wood stove and gas-operated washer down from the truck, heated river water in a boiler, and hung the wash on limbs and bushes and spread it on the grass to dry in the bright sun. Family memory holds that Bob had been heading for Denver, but a snowstorm forced the decision to turn toward Spokane instead. Along the way they lived for a short while in Conrad, Montana, where Bob worked before pressing on, and stopped with friends in western Montana. For a time they also owned and operated a store in Wallace, Idaho, in the silver-mining country of the Idaho panhandle. Because they moved about so much in those years, they do not appear in the 1940 census. At last they came to Spokane, where Bob's brothers lived — the city set in the eastern part of Washington where the timber and mining country of the Inland Northwest met the farm lands of the Palouse, a natural destination for a couple whose roots were in the northern forests. **A Life in Spokane** In Spokane, Bob found work at several jobs before settling into construction, where he rose to foreman and did quite well. Gladys built a working life far from the logging camps of her early marriage, becoming an operating room nurse — a role that demanded steadiness, precision, and stamina. The transition from camp cook to surgical nurse speaks to a woman who was capable and adaptable in whatever setting she found herself. From that point forward, Spokane was home, and her residence there ran in an unbroken thread across the decades. Even so, the ties to Minnesota were not cut. Bob and Gladys often traveled back to Bemidji to visit family. One such visit passed into family memory: when they stopped to see Robert's brother John, he offered Gladys a horse blanket for the night. Unimpressed by the hospitality, she declared that if that was all he was going to give her, it would be the last time they came to visit. The couple enjoyed betting on horse races, bought two lots in New Mexico, and made trips to California to see relatives, always returning with a big sack of walnuts. They remained a remarkably lively pair into old age. In 1996, when Bob was ninety-one and Gladys in her eighties, they drove to Albuquerque on business and then on to Minnesota, Gladys doing most of the driving while Bob would take the wheel for fifty miles at a stretch to give her a rest. They visited family and many friends and were remembered by their Minnesota relatives as lively, healthy, and a pleasure to visit. They had planned to make the trip again in the fall of 1997, but Bob suffered a stroke, and the journey was called off. Gladys died in Spokane on 24 April 2002, at the age of eighty-seven, and was buried there. Robert followed her later that same year, on 14 December 2002, at the age of ninety-eight, and was buried in Spokane as well. **The Next Generation** Three sons carried forward the name Bob had shaped for himself. Milton Ronald Petrie, the eldest, was born on the last day of 1933 in Bemidji, Minnesota, and was a small child when the family made its slow journey west in the house on the truck. Milton did not do well in school and had been held back, which left him older than his classmates and open to teasing. He made his home in the Spokane area, living for years in Chattaroy, where he died on 20 September 1994. **Vern Robert Petrie** was born on 16 May 1936 in Bemidji, the middle son. He was still very young when the family moved west, riding through Conrad and a stint in Wallace before the family settled in Spokane, and he later graduated from Rogers High School. His fuller story — his marriage and the life he built out near Mt. Spokane — belongs to a chapter of its own. Dale Richard Petrie, the youngest of the three brothers, was born on 4 December 1937 in Bemidji — a baby during the family's westward journey. He grew up in the Spokane area and attended West Valley. Dale had once dated **Charlotte Anne Daubel**, though she would go on to marry his brother Vern; in 1961 Dale married Patricia Gwendolyn Evans and made his home in Spokane. With Gladys and Robert settled at last in Spokane and their three sons raised in the surrounding valleys, the Cooper and Petrie lines had traveled the full distance from the North Dakota prairie and the Minnesota timber to the hills of the Inland Northwest — the place where, for this branch of the family, the westward migration came to rest. ## Chapter 14 **Following the Sun** From Yorkshire to the Pacific Spence • Swallow • Anderson Our story now changes to a different branch of the family. Back to England, back to the line that will merge with the Strong line. Over roughly two and a half centuries, the Spence family traveled from the parish country of West Yorkshire to the far edge of the Pacific Northwest, carried westward by the same restless currents that moved so many working families of the age. Their story begins in an old English market town, threads through the farming prairies of the Midwest, and unfolds across the mining camps, railheads, and ranch valleys of the American West — a journey that, in its final generation, tied the Spence line to the Strongs through the marriage of Josephine Lillian Spence. **Yorkshire Beginnings** The family's earliest known roots lie in the parish country of Yorkshire, with **Richard Spence**, born at Warmfield in 1718, standing at the head of the line as it can now be followed. From him it passed through **Robert Spence**, born about 1756, who married **Sarah Taylor** at Pontefract in 1776, and then to **Edward Spence**, born about 1777 at Knottingley, who married **Mary Milner** in 1798. For roughly a century — from the late 1700s into the middle years of the nineteenth century — the intertwined Spence and Swallow families made their home in and around Pontefract, in the West Riding. Marriages were solemnized here in the 1770s and 1780s, children were born and christened through the 1830s and 1840s, and the census enumerators of 1841 and 1851 still found the family rooted in the town before many of them turned their faces westward. Pontefract sat on a low ridge in the fertile lowlands south and east of Leeds, in a district whose flat, well-drained soils gave way to some of the richest market-gardening ground in the north of England. Its name — from the Latin for "broken bridge" — hints at its long antiquity, and by the era this family knew it the town was already old, layered with centuries of history. Its ruined castle, slighted after the English Civil War of the previous century, still loomed as a grassy, tumbled monument, a reminder that this had once been one of the great strongholds of the north, the place where Richard II met his end. But by the late eighteenth century Pontefract was a market town of only a few thousand souls, comparatively genteel and agricultural in feeling — a place of tradesmen, market gardeners, maltsters, and small manufacturers rather than a smoke-blackened mill town. The land around Pontefract was famous above all for liquorice, whose long roots suited the deep, sandy loam. From it came the town's best-known product, the small round sweets known as Pontefract cakes, stamped with the image of the castle. Alongside liquorice the town supported malting and brewing, tanning, and the ordinary trades of a market center, while beneath the surface ran the coal of the great Yorkshire coalfield, which through the first half of the nineteenth century drew laboring families in and gave the countryside a harder, more industrial edge. Men accustomed to the handling of teams and wagons were a familiar part of the working population — the kind of practical, mobile trades that later served emigrants well on the overland trails of the American West. Life turned on the parish and its registers, and the century the family spent here was one of enormous upheaval: the wars against France, the hunger and unrest that followed the peace of 1815, the Corn Laws and depressions of the 1820s and 1830s, and the Reform agitation and Chartism that stirred the West Riding. By the 1840s — the decade in which the youngest Spence children were being born — Britain was in the grip of the Hungry Forties, a stretch of poor harvests and deep uncertainty. It was precisely in these years that families like this one decided to leave. **John Mathew Spence and Margaret Swallow** The bridge between the old country and the new was **John Mathew Spence**, born in 1805 at Knottingley, a small town on the River Aire known for its glassworks, limekilns, and river trade. He was the son of **Edward Spence** and **Mary Milner**, and a boy growing up there in the years around the close of the Napoleonic Wars would have known the rhythms of a busy inland port and the hard labor that supported it. His wife, **Margaret Swallow**, began her own life in Pontefract, born on 13 March 1805 to **Christopher Swallow** and **Elizabeth Fetherston**. The two married at Pontefract on 28 July 1830, and the town remained the center of their life in England for more than two decades. Together they raised a large family of eight — Matthew, Thomas, **John W**., James C. "Doc," William E., Joseph, Dorothy, and Edward — and the census enumerations of 1841 and 1851 found them settled in the town, a rootedness that suggests John had found reliable work and a place in the community. That world changed suddenly in 1852. The Spences arrived at New York on 19 May of that year, part of the great tide of English emigration flowing toward the American interior. The family did not remain at the port but pressed inland, and by 1860 they had settled at Prairie City in White County, Indiana — prairie farming country in the young state's northwest, where deep soils and open land offered an independence rarely available to a working man in Pontefract. The pull of the West did not release its hold. At some point after 1860 John moved on to California, an arduous journey for a man already past fifty, making his home in the fertile Sacramento Valley of Butte County. He died there on 25 September 1867 at Gridley, at the age of sixty-two, and was buried in the farming country of the Far West. Margaret's later years traced the same restless mobility: she appears at Kimshew in Butte County in 1870, in Humboldt, Nevada, in 1875, and at Tehama in 1880 before her death at Gridley on 27 December 1889, at the age of eighty-four. She was buried there, a long way from the Yorkshire town where her story began. **Prairie City: A Way-Station on the Indiana Prairie** For a brief interval the whole family gathered on the northwestern Indiana prairie. In 1860 John and Margaret, together with Matthew, Thomas, Edward, John, and Dorothy, were counted among the residents of Prairie City in White County — English-born newcomers, one household among the scattered farm families then filling in this corner of the state. White County lay in flat, fertile country shaped less by hills than by horizon. The name Prairie City was no accident: much of the surrounding township was open tallgrass prairie, an expanse of deep-rooted grasses that had daunted the earliest settlers and resisted the light plows of the pioneer era. Only heavier steel plows and systematic drainage would reveal the black soil to be among the richest farmland in the nation, and in 1860 that transformation was underway but far from complete. Life ran on farming, plain and simple — corn and wheat, hogs and cattle — with households largely self-provisioning and cash often scarce. The railroads pushing westward across Indiana in the 1850s gave prairie communities a restless, provisional quality, and men accustomed to the road were essential to a frontier economy that depended on wagons where rails did not yet reach. The year 1860 was one of gathering crisis, and within a year the young men of White County would be marching off to war. But for the Spences, Prairie City was a way-station rather than a destination; the same restlessness that had carried them from Yorkshire would soon carry the family onward toward the mining country of Nevada and the Pacific coast. **The Immigrant Generation** The sons and daughters of John Mathew Spence and Margaret Swallow, all born in Pontefract, came of age scattered across the frontier states, following mining country, ranch land, and the westward roads of Ohio, Indiana, Nevada, and California. The eldest, Matthew, born in 1831, moved through Indiana, Ohio, the Humboldt mining districts of Nevada, and the counties of Sutter and Butte in California, dying at Gridley in 1890. Thomas, born in 1833, followed much the same trail — from Yorkshire to Indiana and Ohio, then into Nevada's Humboldt country and on to the ranching and mining districts of northern California and the Klamath Lake region of Oregon — and lived to the age of eighty-five, dying at Orland in Glenn County, California, in 1918. James C. "Doc" Spence, born in 1838, settled in the mining country of Josephine County, Oregon — Althouse, Waldo, and Kerby — married Susan A. Higgins in 1874, and lived at Kerby until his death in 1924, also at eighty-five. William E. Spence, born in Yorkshire in 1840, came to America as a child and crossed the plains with his parents, traveling from Ohio to California. About 1868 he married Amelia Ann Taylor at Gridley, and much of the family's life was spent partly in Oregon, where they held a large stock ranch in Klamath county. He was remembered at his death as one of Orland's most respected citizens, an honored member of the I.O.O.F. lodge for forty years. Having been in failing health for some time, he died peacefully on 13 November 1911, at the age of seventy-one years, seven months, and thirteen days, his funeral conducted by the Odd Fellows. Five children survived him: Mrs. Alice M. Southwick of San Diego, Mrs. Irene Alexander of Dorris, Mrs. G. W. Harriger, W. E. Spence, and A. C. Spence of Orland. Two of the younger children did not share in the family's long American story. Joseph, born in 1841, died before 1860. Dorothy, born in 1845, and Edward, born in 1849, both spent time at Prairie City on the family's westward path; Dorothy died before 1893 and Edward in 1899. **John W. Spence, the Family's Great Wanderer** Of all the immigrant generation, it was **John W. Spence** who most fully embodied the family's restlessness. Born on 18 December 1835 at Pontefract, he was still in the town as a boy in 1841 and as a young man in 1851. By 1853 he had crossed the Atlantic and reached Defiance, Ohio — a striking leap for a young man barely out of boyhood, and one that set the tone for a life of movement. By 1860 he had pushed inland to Prairie City in Indiana, and from there his path led into the far West. He made his living as a teamster, and by 1870 he was in Humboldt County, Nevada, in the heart of the Great Basin mining frontier — country where hauling freight and moving settlers was demanding, dangerous, and essential work. He guided families and their possessions westward over long overland routes, often gone from home for months at a time. One remembered episode captures both the hardship of that life and the standing he held on the frontier: while John was away on one of these long journeys, his family in Elk, Washington fell into want and went hungry, and local Indians, learning of their distress, brought them food, saying they could not let the family of John Spence go without. It speaks to the good relationship he kept with the native people among whom he lived and traveled. **Sophia Margaret Anderson** The woman John married had come to America by an entirely different road. **Sophia Margaret Anderson** was born in Stockholm on 16 December 1855, the daughter of **Martha Jansdotter**, in a busy port city where opportunity for a young woman of ordinary means was narrow. In 1873, at eighteen, she stepped ashore in America as a single girl — one among a great wave of Swedish housemaids who crossed in those years to take up domestic service. She was not entirely alone in the venture: her brother Peter had made the same journey earlier, arriving in 1864, and the presence of family already established would have eased her path. Not long after her arrival, Sophia's life turned toward the American West. She and John W. Spence married on 5 July 1875 at Toana, in Elko County, Nevada — she was twenty and he was forty. Toana was a small station town on the high desert, owing its existence to the Central Pacific Railroad, which had studded the sagebrush with water stops and freighting points where goods came off the rails to be hauled by wagon into the surrounding mining districts. It was exactly the kind of place a teamster's trade made necessary and a young couple's fortunes might touch only briefly — a fitting crossroads for two restless, working newcomers, an English-born teamster and a recently arrived Swedish immigrant. **A Household Perpetually on the Move** Together John and Sophia raised a remarkable family of twelve children, whose birthplaces mark the steady movement westward. Through the 1870s and into the 1880s the family was rooted for a time in Elko County, Nevada, where they married and where several children were born — Bertha May, John William, Thomas Edward, Mary Amelia "Nell," and the infant Margaret, who did not survive her birth year. Elko itself, laid out in 1868 as the Central Pacific pushed eastward, was a raw young high-desert town on the Humboldt River plain, a shipping and supply point for ranches and mining camps, strikingly cosmopolitan for its size. A household like the Spences' — an Englishman married to a young Swedish immigrant — was entirely of a piece with this mingled frontier population, and winters were hard, medical help scarce, and infant death a familiar sorrow. The family appears repeatedly at Carson City in the later 1870s and early 1880s and at Elko in 1880. Then the pattern of movement resumed. By 1885 and 1886 they had gone north to Dakota Territory, appearing in McLean County — where Sophia's brother Peter lived nearby — and at Bismarck in Burleigh County, where they remained through 1888. During those Dakota years Sophia is said to have worked in Bismarck in the household of a prominent man, perhaps Gilbert A. Pierce, then governor of the territory, again putting her skills as a domestic to use. From there the trail turned west and south again. By 1889 and 1890 the family was at Gridley in Butte County, California — the same Sacramento Valley town where John's parents had come to rest. Gridley lay in the broad, flat floor of the valley, where the Feather River watered some of the richest bottomland in California, and it had grown from a farming and railroad economy into an established agricultural town. It was there, on the last day of 1889, that twins James Joseph and **Josephine Lillian Spence** were born. In December 1892 the family was at Klamath Falls, Oregon, remaining through 1894, and the final chapter of their wandering brought them into Washington State — to Yakima County, where Sophia and the children had settled at Fruitvale by 1900, and later to Denison in Spokane County, where the family appears in 1910. Sophia did not live to see the family fully settled. She died on 17 December 1905 at Milan, in Spokane County, one day after her fiftieth birthday, and was buried there. John lived out his final years in Washington, dying on 29 August 1916 at Pateros, in Okanogan County, at the age of eighty. He was buried at Dyer, in Douglas County — a long life bracketed by two very different worlds, from an old Yorkshire market town beneath a ruined castle to the young orchard country of the Pacific Northwest. **The Children of John W. and Sophia Spence** The twelve children of this marriage spread across the mining and ranching country of Nevada, the northern plains, and the Pacific Northwest, their own lives tracing the settling of the interior West. Bertha May, the eldest, was born at Elko in 1876, married John Staton in 1895, and died at Los Angeles in 1931 after years in Washington's Grays Harbor and Yakima country. John William, born at Elko in 1878, made his life largely in and around Ontario in Malheur County, Oregon, dying there in 1950. Thomas Edward, born at Elko in 1879, lived only three years. Mary Amelia "Nell," born at Elko in 1881, married Marcus Housden in 1904 and lived across Douglas and Okanogan counties in Washington before her death at Brewster in 1965. Margaret, born at Elko in 1884, died the same year. Alice Beatrice, born at Bismarck in 1885, married Thomas Lynch in 1902 and moved between Mountain Home, Idaho, and Sherman in Ferry County, Washington, dying at Mountain Home in 1921 at the age of thirty-six. Fredrick Reif Verner, born at Bismarck in 1888, married Edna Byng in 1912 and made his home chiefly in the Emmett country of Gem County, Idaho, where he died in 1961. The twins born at Gridley on 27 December 1889 carried the line into the next century. James Joseph married Alta Weger in 1910 and settled around Mountain Home, Idaho, and Denison in Spokane County, Washington, dying at Blackfoot, Idaho, in 1967. His twin sister, Josephine Lillian, married **William "Will" Henry Strong** in 1908 and settled north of Spokane, in the Williams Valley and Riverside country of Stevens County, living to 1972 and dying at Deer Park — the marriage that joins this line to the Strongs. Three more sons followed. Richard Lyle, born at Klamath Falls in 1892, married Beatrice Shultz in 1922 and ranged widely across Washington before his death at Bremerton in 1963. Marcus De Lafayette, born at Klamath Falls in 1894, married Addie Ervin in 1915 and lived across Okanogan County and the Yakima valley, dying at Medical Lake in 1967. The youngest, Raymond Adren, was born at Yakima in 1899, married Lucille French in 1929, and centered his life on Spokane. He died there in 1975, the last of his generation. From Richard Spence of Warmfield to Raymond Adren Spence of Spokane, the family had crossed an ocean and a continent in the span of a few generations, exchanging the liquorice gardens and castle ruins of Pontefract for the sagebrush railheads of Nevada, the wheat fields of the Sacramento Valley, and the orchard country of the Pacific Northwest. It was there, in Josephine Spence's 1908 marriage to William Strong, that the wandering Spence line came to rest and joined the Strong family whose story will be picked up in a later chapter. ## Chapter 15 **Wild Rose Prairie** Strong • Spence Long before the orchards and schoolhouses of Wild Rose Prairie had settled into their familiar shapes, two families were moving toward the country north of Spokane where their children would meet and marry. The Strongs had come west in 1884, and the Spences followed the promise of farmland from California northward into Washington. Their story converges on the rolling grasslands of Wild Rose Prairie and the neighboring valleys of Stevens County, where William Henry Strong and Josephine Lillian Spence built a household and raised a large family in the first half of the twentieth century. **Two Families Drawn West** The Strong family had made their home on Wild Rose Prairie, some twenty miles north of Spokane, since **Walter Ezra Strong** and his wife, **Jeanette "Jennie" Lydia Newman**, came west in 1884. It was here, on that open prairie country still counted as frontier, that their son grew to manhood, and here that Walter remained until his death in 1921, remembered as one of the district's real pioneer settlers. **William "Will" Henry Strong** was born in Spokane on 4 February 1887, when Washington was not yet a state. His childhood unfolded on Wild Rose Prairie, and by 1892 the family's circumstances had carried them north into Stevens County; the census of 1900 found the household at Clayton, a small settlement in that same county. Growing up in these years, William learned early the practical skills of country living — handling teams and machinery, managing crops and livestock, and turning his hand to whatever the season required — in a region still filling in with railroads, timber, and farming. The bride he would eventually marry came from farther afield. **Josephine “Josie” Lillian Spence** was born on 27 December 1889 in Gridley, a small farming town in Butte County, California, and she did not enter the world alone: she was a twin, sharing that December day with her brother, James Joseph Spence. She was the daughter of **John W. Spence** and **Sophia Margaret Anderson**, and her earliest years were shaped by the fields and orchards of California's Sacramento Valley. By 1900 the Spence family had left California for the Pacific Northwest, settling in Fruitvale in Yakima County, Washington — a migration typical of families of the era, following opportunity across state lines toward newly opened agricultural districts. The move placed Josephine, still a girl, in the orchard country of central Washington and drew her family, in time, toward the country around Spokane. **Marriage on Wild Rose Prairie** On 9 September 1908, in Spokane, William Strong married Josephine Spence. He was twenty-one, she was not quite nineteen. The couple began their married life around that same year at Wild Rose Prairie — the very country in which William had grown up — before the shifting residences of the decades that followed. By 1910 they had established a household at Denison, in Spokane County. Theirs proved a lasting and fruitful union. Nine children are recorded to William and Josephine: Margaret, Kenneth William, **Thressa Lillian**, Lyle Alfred, a baby girl who did not survive, Walter Eugene, Milton Lorraine, Ronald Neile, and Juanita Ilene. Raising so many children on rural land in eastern Washington filled Josephine's days with the unrelenting labor of the farm wife — cooking, preserving, sewing, tending gardens and animals, and nursing children through the illnesses and accidents of country life. The pattern of the family's residences traces a life lived within a compact stretch of eastern Washington, moving between neighboring valleys rather than pulling up stakes for distant territory. The censuses of 1920 and 1930 found them at Riverside, in Stevens County; by the spring of 1940 they were living in Williams Valley, and they remained in Stevens County into 1950. Through decades of national upheaval — the First World War, the prosperity and hardship of the 1920s and 1930s, the drought and depression that tested farm families across the region, and a second world war — their world stayed anchored to the working farm country north of Spokane. William lived to the age of eighty, spending his final years at Deer Park in the northern reaches of Spokane County, where he died on 6 September 1967 — in the same corner of Washington where he had been born and raised. Josephine outlived him by five years, dying at Deer Park on 7 August 1972 at the age of eighty-two, and she was laid to rest in Spokane, close to the land where she had raised her children and made her home. **The Children** The younger generation of the Strong family came into the world in and around Deer Park and Riverside in the early decades of the twentieth century, and like many large families of that time and place, it knew both the joy of children and the sorrow of losing them young. Two of the Strong children did not live to grow up. Margaret was born in June 1909 and died in February 1910, before she reached her first birthday. More than a decade later, a daughter came and went on the same day — Baby Girl Strong, born and died on 14 March 1922. These brief lives are part of the family's story, though the years denied them any story of their own. The surviving children carried the Strong name forward and settled, for the most part, within the familiar borderlands of Spokane and Stevens counties. Kenneth William Strong, born at Deer Park in 1911, married Helen Olive Yingst on 26 May 1936 and lived much of his life in and around Spokane, with a period at Riverside, before his death at Spokane in 1980. Lyle Alfred Strong, born at Deer Park in 1919, married Ethelene Caroline Durheim on 22 September 1939; his life carried him through Deer Park, Spokane, Williams Valley, and Riverside before he returned to Deer Park, where he died in 2003 at the age of eighty-four. Walter Eugene Strong, born at Riverside in Stevens County in 1924, moved among Deer Park, Spokane, Williams Valley, and Wayside over the course of his life and died at Spokane in 1991. Milton Lorraine Strong, born at Riverside in 1927, married Betty Mae Sampson on 23 July 1950 — the day of his own twenty-third birthday — and lived chiefly around Deer Park, where he died in 2010. Ronald Neile Strong, born at Deer Park in 1930, married Elizabeth Jeanne Reidt on 30 July 1955; his was a short life, ending in 1963 in Benewah County, Idaho, at the age of thirty-three. The youngest, Juanita Ilene Strong, was born at Deer Park in 1932 and lived at Deer Park, Williams Valley, and elsewhere in Stevens County; she married John J. Funk on 23 April 1966 and died at Spokane in 2017, the last of her generation, at the age of eighty-four. Among the daughters was **Thressa Lillian Strong**, born at Deer Park in 1915, who grew up in Washington and attended Deer Park High School. She would marry Herman Carl Daubel in 1937, but that marriage — and the family and communities it joined the Strongs to — belongs to a later chapter. Rooted for nearly four decades on Wild Rose Prairie and in the neighboring valleys of Stevens County, the Strongs and Spences had by mid-century become a settled farming family whose children were beginning to marry outward — carrying their lines, through daughters like Thressa, into the other families whose stories this book brings together. ## Chapter 16 **Merging of Lines at Elk** Herman and Thressa Daubel • Strong The northern reaches of Spokane County — the small farming communities of Milan, Elk, Deer Park, and Chattaroy, set among pine-covered hills and the Wild Rose Prairie country — form the ground on which two family lines came together in the marriage of Herman Carl Daubel and Thressa Lillian Strong. Both were born and raised within a few miles of each other in eastern Washington, and both spent nearly the whole of their lives there. Their union brought together the Daubel family, who had cleared their farms out of heavy timber at the turn of the century, and the Strong family of the Deer Park and Riverside country. **The Daubel Family at Milan** The Daubel family traced its roots to Bonfeld in Württemberg, Germany, and came to America in search of its freedoms. In 1898 **Charles Daubel** arrived in the Milan area of Spokane County together with his family, coming by way of Hannover, Kansas. Charles married **Maria "Mary" Anna Rudolph** and raised eleven children — six girls and five boys — on that hard-won land. There was no doctor near at hand, and a neighbor, Mrs. Staley, served as midwife for every one of the births. It was a mark of family pride that all eleven brothers and sisters were still living in 1971. **Herman Carl Daubel** The eldest of Charles and Mary’s eleven children was **Herman Carl Daubel**, born 18 May 1903 in Milan. He grew up in a raw, forested world he recalled vividly in later years. Shopping meant driving a horse into Milan, and whatever could not be found there required a train ride into Spokane. His first schooling took place at the Muhle School, which stood across the road from the Henry Hoener place; on some days there was no recess at all, because cougars came close enough to make it unsafe to let the children outside. He later attended the Deer Creek School, walking three miles each way. When the younger Daubel children finished their education at Milan, it was Herman who drove the team that gathered up the neighborhood children and carried them along — earning fifteen dollars a month for the task, and running, as he liked to say, the area's first school bus. Work came early and stayed with him. He hired out first for the Spokane Lumber Company at Milan, then for Edwards and Bradford at Elk, and continued in the woods until 1930, when he left the area for a few years to work on a farm on the coast. During this time he spent a stretch in Olympia, in Thurston County, working for his uncle Philip; when Philip died, Herman moved back home to the Chattaroy country that had shaped him. A quiet man by all accounts, he had by then run the full course of the region's livelihoods as farmer and logger. **Thressa Lillian Strong** **Thressa Lillian Strong** was born 10 August 1915 in Deer Park, in Spokane County, the daughter of **William “Will” Strong** and **Josephine Lillian Spence** — her middle name a quiet echo of her mother's. By 1920, and again in 1930, her family was living in Riverside, in Stevens County, a rural community of small farms, timber, and hard work. Thressa attended Deer Park High School, coming of age in the years when the Great Depression fell hard on the farming families of the inland Northwest. It was through her father that she met the man she would marry. Herman was working for Will Strong when the two became acquainted; he was somewhat older than she, and their courtship grew out of the everyday world of farm labor and family life. **Marriage and Family** Herman came home to marry Thressa on 6 November 1937 in Spokane, she being twenty-two years old and he thirty-four. He worked in the woods for a while and farmed, and while still farming took up work at the Aluminum Plant of America at Mead as a heavy-duty man. When operations passed to Kaiser Aluminum, he stayed on there for fifteen years — a life that bridged two eras, from the hand-cleared homestead of his boyhood to the industrial wage work of the mid-century Northwest. The family's life in the Elk years was shaped by sudden decisions. For a time they lived with Uncle Louie, until one day Herman spoke with him, came back out, and announced simply that they were moving, and the family relocated into Ludwig's home. In 1940 Herman and Thressa were living near Elk; by 1950 they had settled in Chattaroy, and it was Chattaroy that anchored the family for decades to come. Their marriage was blessed with three girls and three boys. The eldest was Verla Doreen Daubel, born 16 May 1938 in Spokane, who married Donald Dean Hayes on 23 June 1956 and lived for a time in Plummer, Idaho, just across the state line. **Charlotte Anne Daubel** was born 28 November 1939 in Elk — then a bustling town served by a railroad — where she attended school before going on to Riverside High School; on 6 July 1957 she married **Vern Robert Petrie**, and their story belongs to the chapter that follows. Harold Herman Daubel, known as Bud, was born 2 December 1940 in Deer Park, married Karen L. Roberts on 14 September 1968, and lived his life in Chattaroy, where he died on 11 February 2024 in Spokane. Dorothy Gay Daubel was born 17 June 1942 in Deer Park, married Bruce H. King on 17 September 1960, and made her home in Chattaroy. Larry Dale Daubel was born 26 October 1945 in Spokane, married Marlene K. Malek on 20 May 1972, and divided his years between Deer Park and Chattaroy. The youngest, Delbert Earl Daubel, was born 23 August 1952 in Spokane, married Susan Dawn Kluver on 15 April 1978, lived in Chattaroy, and died on 21 February 2020 in Spokane. **Later Years** By 1971, when Herman was profiled in a local Senior Citizen Spotlight, the household had grown into a wide family circle of six children and thirteen grandchildren, and that Christmas all of them came home. His pleasures in retirement were plain and companionable — he and Thressa attended the Deer Park Auction Sale and went fishing, and he kept his hand in the land by raising a few calves and pigs. The boy who had once driven a horse into Milan for the family shopping had, by the end of his working life, put in fifteen years at an aluminum plant, a quiet measure of how thoroughly the world of his childhood had given way. Herman died of a heart attack on 12 January 1977 in Chattaroy, in the same corner of Spokane County where he had been born nearly seventy-four years earlier, and was buried in Spokane. Thressa outlived him by a quarter of a century, dying on 17 April 2002 in Mead, and was likewise buried in Spokane. Across three generations the family had stayed rooted in the northern reaches of Spokane County — in Milan, Elk, Deer Park, and above all Chattaroy — never straying far from the land the Daubel brothers had cleared from heavy timber at the turn of the century. From this settled country the next thread of the story leads outward, through **Charlotte's** marriage to **Vern Robert Petrie**. ## Chapter 17 **One Family at Last** Vern and Charlotte Petrie • Daubel When Vern Robert Petrie married Charlotte Anne Daubel in Spokane on 6 July 1957, two family lines that had traveled long and separate roads into the Inland Northwest came together at last. Everything recorded in the pages before this — the migrations, the small towns, the working lives, the households reorganized on short notice — converges in the household these two built at the northern edge of Spokane. This chapter belongs to them and to the family they made. **Two Roads into Spokane County** **Vern Robert Petrie** was born on 16 May 1936 in Bemidji, Beltrami County, Minnesota, the son of **Robert Petrie** and **Gladys Cooper**. The Bemidji country of the 1930s was a region of lakes and northern forest, and the decade of Vern's birth was one of hardship across rural America. Like many families of that era, the Petries went looking for a better foothold. Around 1939 they set out from Minnesota in a "house on a truck" that became a family legend, making their way west, living for a time in Conrad, Montana, and spending a stretch around 1942 in Wallace, Idaho, a mining town in the Silver Valley, before at last settling in Spokane. Spokane became the anchor of Vern's life. Though the family lived in the Lewis and Clark district, he attended Rogers High School, from which he graduated. His brother Dale went to West Valley, and another brother, Milton, did not finish high school — small details that sketch the ordinary texture of a working-class family finding its way in postwar Spokane, a family that also kept a dog named Jack. While Vern's people arrived in Washington by way of Minnesota and the mining towns of the mountains, **Charlotte Anne Daubel** was already a child of the country north of Spokane. She was born on 28 November 1939 in the small railroad town of Elk, in Spokane County, the daughter of **Herman Daubel** and **Thressa Strong**. Elk in those years had real momentum, a bustling community shaped by the rail line that carried timber, freight, and people across the surrounding farmland and forest. By 1940 the household was recorded there, in the town of her birth, and the pattern of her childhood carried the family through a series of homes in the country north of Spokane. Charlotte's people had roots in Chattaroy, a small community in Spokane County, and records place her there through much of that decade — in 1950, and again across 1953, 1954, and 1955 — during the years she was coming of age. She attended school in Elk in her younger years and went on to Riverside High School, the regional school that served the scattered farming settlements of the northern county. For a young woman growing up in Chattaroy in the 1950s, the world was measured in familiar distances: the town, the school, and the city of Spokane not far to the south. **A Marriage That Began by Accident** Vern's marriage began almost by chance. His brother Dale had been dating Charlotte, but when Dale fell ill and did not feel like going to a dance, Vern took her instead. The courtship was not without incident — on one of their early dates Vern got into a fight with another man, pinning him down before letting him back up only to get cold-cocked, a flash of the physical temperament that would serve him through a lifetime of hard labor. Whatever the rocky beginnings, it held. Vern and Charlotte were married on 6 July 1957 in Spokane, Charlotte then seventeen years old. A record of a residence in Spokane in mid-June of that year, shortly before the wedding, suggests their lives were already turning toward the city as they prepared to begin a household of their own. Together they raised four sons: Steven Robert, Gregory Ross, **Darren Robert**, and Alan Richard Petrie. Charlotte was living in Spokane in 1958 and 1960, and the work of raising four boys filled her days through the 1960s and beyond. By that decade the family had settled in Mead, a community just north of Spokane, where they would remain for many decades and where Vern would spend his later years. **A Working Man and His Land** Vern was a working man in the fullest sense, moving through a series of jobs that mapped the industrial and transportation economy of mid-century Spokane. He worked at United Buckingham, Ringsby United, Silverwheel, and Goodyear, and at a rendering company; he pumped gas; and he served in the National Guard. He also took a job at Vermiculite that would prove fateful, for the vermiculite trade of that period exposed workers to asbestos, and that exposure would in the end destroy his lungs. But it was on his own land that Vern's daily life found its fullest expression. In 1967 he bought eighty acres out near Mount Spokane, and there he built a rural life that clearly gave him deep satisfaction. He grew alfalfa on fifteen cultivated acres and raised cows, horses, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits. He butchered his own cattle, hanging and skinning them in the barn — labor remembered vividly by his family, down to the smell of an accidentally cut cow stomach. He loved to cut wood. He hunted deer, and once shot a bear whose rug adorned the home for years before moths finally claimed it. The outdoors ran through the whole of the family's life. They bought a boat and fished for trout and walleye at lake after lake — Liberty, Davis, Lake Roosevelt, Sacheen. At Sullivan Lake they panned for gold in LeClair Creek and picked huckleberries by the gallon. Family vacations carried the same spirit of the open road that had first brought the Petries west: a trip to Disneyland in 1977; a journey to the Oregon coast, riding on boards laid across the bed of the truck beneath a canopy — shades of a house on a truck decades earlier — with an intercom rigged between the cab and the back. The trip included a memorable flat tire in Pasco, and visits to Kalaloch Beach, Agate Beach, and Hurricane Ridge. Another vacation carried them south to California and the Redwood forest, with stops at Crater Lake and the lava fields along the way. **Later Years in Mead** Vern lived out his years near Mt. Spokane within reach of the country and the town that had shaped so much of his life. The asbestos he had breathed in during his working years remained with him, and in the end it was his lungs that failed. Vern Petrie died on 26 March 2014 in Mead, Washington, at the age of seventy-seven, and was buried in Spokane — the city that had been the fixed point of his life ever since a boy arrived there in a house riding on the back of a truck. Charlotte's own arc followed the same ground toward the same place: a woman born in a small railroad town, raised across the farming settlements of northern Spokane County, married young, and settled at last in Mead, where she made a home and raised her four sons through the busy decades of family life and where she still lives today. In Mead, then, the long westward journey of the Petries and the rooted country lives of the Daubels finally settled into a single household — eighty acres near Mount Spokane, a boat, a barn, four boys, and the lakes and mountains of the Inland Northwest — the one family in which all the threads of this book at last come together.