A couple of years ago, we retired and moved from Iowa to Arizona. It gets really hot there, though, so during the warmer six or seven months of the year, we travel in our motorhome. Slowly. Driving something that big is tiring, and we like to make sure we have some time to see all the sights, so we usually only go about 200 miles a day, and some days we stay put. Family and friends can never believe how little forward progress we've made in a week -- I know they're thinking "I could have driven that in a day!"
There are other conveyances that are slower, of course. The six-week ocean voyage many of our European ancestors made to North America comes to mind. But even those ships achieved 75-100 nautical miles a day. You know what was slower? Horse-drawn wagons.
I'm sure my ancestors used wagons to bring household goods to the Midwest, but I haven't found any who were among the more than 420,000 who made the 2000 mile trek to the west coast in a wagon train. However, I do have an ancestor who supplied them with wagons.
George Milton Alison was born in 1832 somewhere along the line between Illinois and Indiana. His mother, Rebecca, had married at 17 and had two daughters with her first husband before divorcing him for abandonment. The year after George was born, Rebecca signed a contract to indenture the younger of the girls, 5-year-old Sarah Jane. Nothing is heard or seen of George's father or the elder daughter and I suspect they had both died. Although I've not found papers, it's likely Rebecca signed a similar contract for George sometime in the next few years. Almost a decade later, she had another son, James, with her first, wayward husband, then married a man from Vermont and had a third son, Henry, before she and her third husband both died. George was 20, James was 9, and newly-orphaned Henry was 2 years old. We don't know who raised George, but it seems likely they also took in James and Henry, or at least were close neighbors to whomever did, as the three half-brothers remained connected throughout their lives, with frequent newspaper and occasional diary mentions of their visits to one another. Sarah Jane had moved with the family that raised her to Missouri where she met and married Hiram Pitt Bennett, who eventually served as a congressional delegate and Secretary of State for Colorado.
When George was 21, he married 18-year-old Margaret Umphenour in Pontiac, Illinois. Margaret's family had deep Pennsylvania Dutch roots, and had moved from Ohio to Pontiac when she was a little girl. Margaret was the fifth of ten children and her brothers, in particular, seemed to welcome George into the family.
In 1860, George, along with most of Margaret's siblings, were farming. George and Margaret had two boys, Elisha and Jacob, and George's much-younger half-brother Henry was living with them, as well. Two of Margaret's brothers, Isaac and Samuel, apprenticed at blacksmithing and then opened their own shop in Pontiac. Their timing couldn't have been better; between agricultural expansion and the westward pioneer migration, wagons were, er, rolling off the shelves. They drafted brother-in-law George to help with the carpentry. By 1870, George was a wagon-maker and he and Margaret had welcomed two more boys, Isaac and Ralph, and a daughter, Mary Rilla. They moved a bit west, to McLean County. The history of Weston, Illinois, notes that the community was founded with a general store, churches, a school and "G.M. Allison, a wagon maker."
Tragedy took the oldest boy, Elisha, in 1874, in a gruesome hunting accident. I have to wonder if that's when George starting seriously contemplating following his wagons west. Mary Rilla married Henry Frantz in 1884 and Frantz went with his father-in-law on several exploratory trips, looking for new business opportunities. George decided that Wichita, Kansas, had need of carpenters, and so he and Margaret moved there in 1887. And, in 1890, they, along with their sons, followed those wagons all the way to Oregon, although they made most of the trip the much easier way, via the railroad.
Margaret died about 1899 and George in 1912. He was living in Portland with his son, Jacob, and family, but was still listed as "Carpenter" in the city directory at 80 years old. They are buried in a tiny pioneer cemetery well south of the metro area.
As we travel (slowly) across the country, we've come across many artefacts of the wagon trains -- the landmark features that they used to find their way, even ruts from the iron wheels that still scar the plains all these years later. About the only thing the motorhome has in common with a wooden wagon is having four wheels. It's been interesting to follow the wagon trail west, though, much as George did when he was about the same age that we are now.
"Slow" also describes my progress in untangling George's genealogy. The heavy lifting has been done by others who have been generously willing to share, but we still don't have anything except a name for his father. But even if I never figure it out, George has left me a terrific legacy -- delightful and interesting people (relatives!) I never would have otherwise met. As someone who obviously cherished family, I think he would have appreciate that.
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