Sturdy Stock

When news stories are filled with the evil that people do, it’s easy to get depressed. Add normal life struggles, and a person can get so downhearted to never want to crawl out of bed in the morning. When bad weighs heavy, I recollect family stories that remind me I come from sturdy stock, where wimping out wasn’t an ancestral option.

This particular line started as religious dissenters in England who survived rolling Atlantic waves in the hull of a dark ship that landed them near Plymouth, Massachusetts. After several generations as Americans, this group left New England to start a brick factory in Ontario, Canada. Along with changing nationalities, they switched religious preferences to Methodism.

As followers of Wesley, they migrated to Northwest Kansas in 1873. My 3x great grandfather finally answered the call to preach and found himself riding or walking waterways that drain this region. He knew the Sappa, Prairie Dog, Bow Creek, North and South Solomon, Republican and others like the back of his hand.

After his retirement, the Methodist Conference asked him to record the story he titled Forty Years on the Firing Line. The original copy was handwritten on Big Chief tablets. About 60 years after he recorded it, my mom transcribed and typed it into a legible document. Between his handwriting as well as inconsistent spelling and punctuation, she labored for months. Fortunately, she recalled she too descended from sturdy stock and persisted until she had a document that gave family members and historians a sense of early Kansas settlers’ lives.

When I read this, I wish he’d included more details. However, a much longer document might’ve deterred the editing and typing required to make it readable. He opens with, “So I have hurriedly written largely from memory, making many mistakes, leaving out much that might have proved interesting.  . . . I plead for pardon for all that I have failed in. I pray that our young men in the ministry of Jesus Christ—will not—complain nor murmur, but go where they are sent in Jesus name.”

That statement reminds me that around 150 years ago, Grandpa came to preach on the American frontier. Yes, the place I call home and consider modern and comfortable was a mysterious, unsettled land. Ill health had driven him from frigid Canada to Kansas. His father and 13 other family members joined this trek to homestead in Norton Co. He mentions they arrived on November 3, 1873 and were 128 miles from Lowell, Nebraska, their nearest trading center.

Thinking about Kansas Novembers I’ve weathered, his comment that “We were delighted with the country and especially with the climate,” surprised me. He continued with, “I believe it added years to the life of my parents and my wife who the doctor said would not live to get to Kansas and our boy 2 years and 3 months old, that weighed only 17 pounds whom the doctor said could not live is still alive and the largest man of the family.”

Over the next few months, I’ll share more of his experiences. His stories remind us western Kansans come from determined, capable gene pools. As descendants, we continue to make our communities fine places to live and raise families.