JUDITH RICE-JONES

 Judith Rice-Jones, the author of the following article, was a librarian and historian at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and is member of the Reed family.  This draft article was written in approximately 2000 and shared with our family in 2005, along with other historical material related to the Reed Family.

From Ravenna, Ohio to Wyoming, Nebraska:  Utopia Found and Lost

                                                         

  (D R A F T)

Introduction

For the past twelve years I have been a judge at our Regional History Day competition which was hosted for many years by my institution and is now hosted by Colorado College.  In addition I frequently work with local middle and high school teachers, librarians, and students in helping students select topics, identify primary and secondary material and help them locate sources of primary material.

I have the good fortune to have been given some primary material from 19^th century America which I have used to show the students how letters and diaries from ordinary citizens can reveal a wealth of information about their time and open up new avenues of research.

In addition, as the Social Sciences Librarian at my institution, I work with many of the Women’s studies faculty and have come to appreciate the side of life revealed through women’s writing.

Whose history will we tell?  The American Dream whether expressed as a concept (land of opportunity) or an ideal (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) is a democratic vision in which common folk are supposedly the chief beneficiaries.  Moreover few expression of these democratic aspirations were more characteristic of nineteenth century Americans than the ordinary pioneers act of pulling up stakes and heading west.    The process itself had an inner dimension that must be understood through the lives of individual pioneers.  What motivated them to start west?  Did they find what they hoped to find or something else?  How did the reality of the migration and the hardship affect their dreams?  The best answers to these questions rest not in what the nations leaders said the promise of American life was but in what the common folk found it to be.

In this paper, I hope to show how a relatively short diary from 1856 combined with a letter by the same author and her husband written in the spring of 1863 reveal a great deal about life in their communities, aspirations for the future and their country, commitment to civic concerns. Diaries like autobiographies offer the reader symbolic reflections of their own inner lives.  Both address the complex problems of personal identity using language that everyone can understand.  The blend of unique narrative voice and revealed social-historical patterns renders diaries and autobiographies especially useful as windows to their times.  History as diary or autobiography matters because we need personal links to the past that we can trace through family, local regional, national, and ethnic patterns.  These records take the shape that their culture provides and in turn shape possibilities for future generations.  

Diaries and autobiographies join historical identity and creative imagination. Diaries and letters allow us to hear the voices of settlers and to view rapid changes over time within and without the region.  One cannot but be impressed with how much of their lives depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships and family relationships.  In their writings we see the themes introduced by Turner on boundaries, borders crossroads.

Caroline Lorinda MacIntosh was born October 25, 1830 in Hiram, Ohio.  She was the sixth child of John MacIntosh (b December 20, 1791) and Jerusha Ferris (b August 3, 1799 in Wheeling VA) who had married in Catskill, NY in 1818.  John was the fifth and last son of Ebenezer MacIntosh, celebrated shoemaker and leader of the Boston Tea Party known as Captain General of Liberty Tree.  Ebenzer Macintosh and fled to New Hampshire after his involvement in Boston became widely known and there the last three sons were born.  Around 1799, Ebenezer and his three sons, Paschal, Moses, David, and John walked from North Haverhill to NE Ohio.  John, the youngest was bound out in the area around what is today Cleveland.  All four of the sons settled in towns in Portage County and both Moses and David were soldiers in the War of 1812 with David rising to the rank of General. The Connecticut Western Reserve Lands are found in 14 northeastern Ohio counties.  Connecticut claimed this land under an English Charter issued in 1662 by King Charles II.  Connecticut released its jurisdictional claim to this land by a deed of Cession to the United States on May 30, 1800 The Western Reserve, with the exception of the Fire Lands was sold bay the state of Connecticut to the CT Land Company in 1795.  When the early settlers came to Ohio, four fifths of the land was covered with dense forests.  Until roads could be cut, travel was chiefly along waterways as the Ohio River and its tributaries.  The threat of Indian attack had been reduced by diplomacy Jay’s Treaty 1794 and military victories, Fallen Timbers, Ohio 1794.  Land development companies CT Land Company organized and launched campaigns to promote homesteading in the area and liberalized govt. land policies (land Act of 1800 and the establishment of federal land offices in Ohio facilitated settlement.

The rush to capitalize on these conditions contributed to a dramatic rise in Ohio’s population from 45,365 in 1800 to 230,760 in 1810, and 581,434 in 1820.  Ohio became a state in 1803.  A few heavily traveled roads bore the bulk of the Ohio-bound traffic.  The future route of the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo was very popular with New Englanders.

Due to the difficulties of travel, most traveled in groups of families or neighbors.  These groups illustrate the important role that family ties played in westward migration.  Need for physical assistance on the trail was obvious but a more general impulse which Gerald McFarland terms a “collective family purpose” was also at work.

Violence as one of the prevailing white male responses to a frontier environment did not go unchallenged.  When frontiersmen aggressive attitudes carried over into white society and took the form of disorderly conduct—brawling, drunkenness, rape and even murder many pioneers found this unacceptable.  They worked to create a countervailing force through such institutions of social respectability and social control as churches, schools, and courts. Protracted religious revival meetings had an important place in the early history.

Caroline was at various times a teacher and a tailoress.  The portion of the diary presented here covers the period from the beginning of 1856 to June.  On April 2, 1856 she married Abner Clark Reed whose first wife had died the previous year.  Mr. Clark had a two-year-old son from his first marriage, Charles Clark Reed.   Clark was the fourth son of a hatter who had moved from Granby Connecticut with his eight children settling in Mantua, Ohio.

After a year of marriage, they traveled by train and steamship to Wyoming, Nebraska, a ferry stop on the Missouri River.  Travel was not without risk.  A contemporary account from Scientific America (1845 v. 1):

According to the St. Louis Union the total number of steamboats which have met with disasters on the Western Rivers during the past year is 109  Of this number 59 were totally lost.  By the various accidents 205 lives were lost.  No estimate is attempted of the loss of property.

Wyoming was laid out in 1855 by Jacob Damson who named it after his town in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania.  Bordering the Missouri and Weeping Water Creek, it was adjacent to a bluff where Lewis and Clark had camped in 1804.The following year, he established a weekly newspaper, the Wyoming Telescope.  The town was incorporated May 25, 1857.The paper continued for two years and was then replaced by the Wyoming Post which also continued for only a few years.  During the early years of its existence, the citizens imagined Wyoming was to be the leading town of the upper Missouri.  Before the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad, the Mormon emigrants for Salt Lake were brought from St. Louis by boat and Wyoming was the point of debarkation and where their land travel commenced.  Over 7,000 Mormons who arrived daily including many nationalities: Britons, Germans, Scandinavians, Swiss, Dutch, French passed through. They left Wyoming in 22 companies of from 200 to 600 people at a time. Brigham Young’s nephew Joseph Young was stationed in Wyoming as quartermaster.  Early mail routes and stage routes all made Wyoming one of their stops.  Every day of two a steamboat arrived at the pot of Wyoming.

J. Sterling Morton who lived in neighboring Nebraska City wrote: “The joyous fields of golden grain nodded an indisputable affirmation to the questions, Can Nebraska ever be settled up?  Can she ever sustain any considerable population? And gracefully beckoned the wealth emigrant to a home of healthfulness and abundance.”

In 1856 the settlement had a newspaper, two attorneys, two-wagon repair and manufacturing shops, a lumber mill, a couple of blacksmiths, a doctor, and a saloon which offered oysters for lunch.  In addition to the steamboats, the town also served as a stop on the forty-eight hour stage connecting St Joseph, MO and Omaha.  The crops were food for the first few years and when the financial panic of 57 came the pioneer had little to fear.  They continued to prosper.  Then came the clouds of war. Prices went sky high.

Wyoming had a social life as well.  A literary society called the Wyoming Lyceum was organized.  The Mormon storehouse was used as a church as was the schoolhouse.  After the Mormons ceased coming to Wyoming, the old storehouse was used as a community house and many lively dances were held there.

The 1860 census shows 109 inhabitants including the five members of the Abner Clark Reed family and also six members of the Grosjohn family from Switzerland.  Most of the residents are from Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois or Pennsylvania.  By the 1870 census the population had increased to 911 and by 1880 had declined to 801.

Wyoming was typical of the town-building mania.  Legislation providing for the reservation of town sites was enacted by Congress May 23, 1844.  It provided that three hundred and twenty acres could be held as a town site when it was occupied.  Such a plot was not subject to entry at the land office under the preemption act.  The owners of the town site were given the privilege of buying the plat at the minimum price. The major occupation of the few citizens of Kansas and Nebraska in the fifties and sixties was town building.    It was the habit of those promoting various town sites to have an agent at the river landings to meet the new emigrant and verbally advertise his town site.  It was a popular idea that great cities would grow up on the western side of the Missouri River and that cities such as St. Joseph, Sioux City and Council Bluffs would never amount to anything.

After a town was laid out, it was necessary to attract residents.  It was desirable, if possible, to secure a printing presses and hire someone to print a newspaper.  Having secured a mouthpiece it was much easier for the community to sing its own praises.  The company paid for a large number of papers to be sent back east.

Another method for booming the town was to build a hotel.  This both made a good impression on the readers of the paper and provided a place for the newcomers.  A third way to build a town was to give away lots.  Lots were given to churches, lodges, and other organizations for building purposes.  Lots were given to the first born, the first woman, etc.  Towns held huge celebrations and used the occasion to auction off lots.  Towns sprang up like magic.

The account about the MacWaters gang is confirmed in an interview with Mrs. Anna Grosjohn Fey, daughter of the original settlers who had come west for their health.  She describes William McWaters as the Dilinger of the 1850s and relates several stories of his misdeeds.  She also describes assaults on the post office by Southern sympathizers who saw it as an agency of the government they despised.  Both the MacWaters gang and Jesse James were seen at Wyoming.Wyoming ceased to be important when the railroad came through west of the town.  The completion of the Union Pacific led to a significant reduction in freighting business but the death noll was construction of the Burlington Railroad in 1870, which bypassed the town by twelve miles.

This family left a large extended family, friends in Ohio to seek a new life in the West.  They brought with them their commitment to their relatively young country and found, if not paradise, at least a bountiful and beautiful community on the banks of the Missouri River in what had to have been a very cosmopolitan town for its time.  Abner Clark Reed continued to buy land in the town, a total of nine separate purchases from 1860 to 1879 which would seem to indicate that the loss of the ferry traffic and the town’s definition as a crossroads did not dampen his enthusiasm for his chosen community.  A year after the death of his second wife, he married again and with his third wife had two more children.  In about 1880 he moved with his four children to Sterling where he was again postmaster and store keeper.  He died in Sterling in 1885.  One of his sons, Charles Clark Reed later represented Vesta, Nebraska in the state legislature.

In the diary of Lorinda’s we see the spirit of community in the visits given and received, in the spelling school and the singing school, the activities at the lodge and the center, at the revival meetings, the temperance society meetings.  The role of the Mormons—undoubtedly one the major colonizing groups in America is seen through the anti-Mormonism of Hiram where Joseph Smith was tarred and feathered and copies of the anti-Mormon, A Women’s Life Among the Mormons were available and read within a year of the original publication

We rejoin the Mormons in Wyoming, Nebraska where they are outfitted for the trek west.  The promise of the frontier seems to be met in the early success the Reeds find in Wyoming.  The land is rich and game and orchards provide plentiful food.  The war though fought seemingly far away is ever present due to the constant influx of people from both sides of the issue.  The ideals which the settlers brought west with them reinforce their determination to defend the union. 

Thus through these brief glimpses of life in the 19^th century, we see many of the important themes of the era—rise of social organizations, temperance groups. Anti-Mormon sentiment, the dream of a better life in the west, devotion to the young republic.  In following the story of these common folk, our spirits are uplifted by the struggles they endured and the sacrifices they made in the settling of the midwest.

Judith Rice-Jones, the author of this article, was a librarian and historian at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and is member of the Reed family.  This draft article was written in approximately 2000 and shared with our family in 2005, along with other historical material related to the Reed Family.