So in Kearney (pronounced Carney), Nebraska we found an old timer on the old Oregon and Mormon trails and the old Lincoln Highway and asked him to enlighten us.
He said that the early mountain men and explorers came by horseback and lived off the land.
But families such as ours who came later used other types of transportation. In the 1850's the Powells from England, the Olsons from Denmark and Sweden and the Andersons from Norway coming to the Salt Lake valley and the Wheelers, Wagners, and Spriggs coming from the southern and eastern USA and Germany to Denver first had to find a covered wagon...
add some oxen...
and make sure they knew where the barges were so they could ferry across the rivers.
However, the Bleaks coming from England and the Moffats from Scotland pushed and pulled handcarts across the plains--the Bleaks in the Martin handcart company that got stuck in the snows of Wyoming in 1856 and the Moffats in the Robinson company in 1860
The Bleaks settled in St. George, UT but Caroly's grandmother Artemesia Bleak lived for a time with Eliza R. Snow in Salt Lake and eventually met and married Edward Powell from Coalville. The Moffats settled in Meadowville, Utah (now a ghost town) near Aunt Gwen and Uncle Gene's Bear Lake cabin that we love to go to. They later moved to Salt Lake.
After 1869 everyone came by train. John McLean came from Scotland to help survey the first railroad to cross the USA and the branch lines throughout Utah. He met and married Janet Moffat and lived first in Meadowville before moving to Salt Lake.
The Lallatins came from Germany in the 1880's, traveled by train and settled first in Logan before ending in Soda Springs, Idaho, the home of the hourly geyser...
and the bubbly Hooper water that the pioneers on the Oregon Trail thought tasted like soda pop. There my grandfather Christopher Lallatin married Agnes McLean, who he met when she came from Salt Lake to help out a sister.
What did they eat on the way west? Other than the supplies they brought, they sometimes shot buffalo...
and ate it on the way.
How would mom look in this buffalo coat?
Even before the railroads came, there were places to stop for supplies. But you didn't want to be left behind when the wagon train left...
because if you were slow getting to your horse and someone else took it, you would have a mighty long way to walk!
Our Thompson line came to Massachusetts from Holland and England through three Mayflower families and has been in America since the 1620's. The Schnells came to Pennsylvania from Germany in the early 1700s. In the 1800's both families started west. The Thompsons came by train to Spokane, Washington from Minnesota in the 1880's. The Schnells came later when my grandfather Louis Thompson went back to study at the University of Wisconsin and met and married Lottie Schnell. The rest of her family followed the newlyweds to Spokane from Wisconsin in the early twentieth century. The Irish Buckleys also came by train from Iowa to the Spokane area in the early twentieth century.
As I pointed out in an earlier blog, the Thompsons played an important role in the early development of the Spokane valley.
Both the Thompsons and the Schnells are buried in Riverside Cemetery in Spokane.
Of course, you can't forget one more modern way that the ancestors moved around in the West. Whereas the Thompsons, Schnells, Lallatins, McLeans, Buckleys, Powells, and Bleaks tended to stay put for a generation or two when they got west, Caroly's grandparents Charles and Irene Wheeler kept moving from town to town and house to house--by automobile using Denver as a home base. I'm sure you remember the many automobile stories associated with grandma Wheeler, including her hitchhiking around the countryside with her children.
You better not forget the lighthouse on the Mississippi that the Wheelers sometimes tended in Hannibal, Missouri. That's where grandma Irene Wheeler met Mark Twain.
My grandmother was Irene Wheeler. I live in Oregon. My mother was Patricia Wheeler. We must be related somehow. My name is Wendy.
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