The first house I bought all on my own was rather remarkably situated. Where the very residential street dead-ended abruptly in a dense stand of trees, a little gravel two-track led back to the house. One week after I moved in, I came home from work to find all the trees cut down as the city began to extend the city street down the hill. Sigh. So Doug and I bought 40 acres of former pasture and built a house in the middle of it. You couldn't see any other houses from ours -- or you couldn't until the Derecho came through. Sigh. If "vanting to be alone" is an inherited trait, I almost certainly got it from the Thomas family. I previously wrote about my great-grandfather, George, who was even younger than I realized, only about 3, when he moved with his family from Canada to Iowa in 1853. Then, because that apparently wasn't remote enough for his father, also named George Calder Thomas, the family went further west, to Colorado. George Sr. obviously had a strong preference for life "in the middle of nowhere" and passed that on to at least some of his sons.
In Colorado, eldest son Harvey joined the Union Army and served during the Civil War. Harvey may have enjoyed the wilderness, but it sounds as though it didn't like him. Harvey's daughter, Ina Thomas Walton, wrote this in her father's obituary:
He served in Company B. 2nd Colorado Cavalry, from 1861 to 1865. This section of the army was not sent to the more renowned battle areas of the east; instead they were detailed to the strenuous duty of defending frontier lines in Missouri, Kansas and Arkansas. This meant long, hard rides, fording streams, with no opportunity of drying their drenched clothing; frequent sleeping in the open, even in severe weather, at which time they kept close to their horses, seeking warmth from their bodies. Little wonder that Mr. Thomas emerged from this long term of service with an intestinal disorder against which he struggled the remainder of his life.
It was likely because of Harvey's health that his father took most of their family back to Iowa after the war, although I can also hear an echo of Harvey's mother, Mathilda, wishing for a floor that wasn't dirt and something at the windows to keep the flies out. As most of the family returned east in 1865, however, twenty-year-old Richard Higeson Thomas bid them goodbye and headed even further west. It seems likely he never saw any of his family again, although I feel certain from their parallel futures that he corresponded with his father and brothers. According to Richard's obituary, he served as a civilian scout and "forager" for General Custer as well as Custer's successor, General Miles, after the Civil War. This sounds so adventurous but if one imagines a boy who had grown up traveling on horseback for days on end, who grew up in western camps, watching cavalry and troops coming and going, doing what he could to keep food on the table, scouting and guiding was probably second-nature to him, the only marketable skills he had. In the 1870 census, twenty-five-year-old Richard was living near "Ten-mile Creek and Nelson Gulch," in Lewis and Clark County, just outside of Helena in what is now the state of Montana (then just a Territory). Gold and silver mining was the only thing happening in that area, so it's likely he tried his luck as a placer miner, shoveling dirt into sluices in an effort to capture gold on screens as the soil dissolved and washed away. The gold played out pretty quickly and silver mining required a much bigger operation to break apart the hard rock to find the seams of silver underground. Silver mining was extremely dangerous work, but it was also mostly underground and I don't think Richard would have liked that much.
Instead, he went to work for the U.S. Geological Survey department, helping to map the Territory. While surveying, he spotted a nice place to settle down and, in 1887, made a claim under the Free Homestead Act, designed to encourage settlement of the west. Anyone who"staked" up to 160 acres and then"proved it out" by living on it for five years was granted free title to that land. Richard chose the quicker option, living on his 80-acre stake near the town of Straw in Fergus County for 6 months and then paying $1.25 per acre ($100) to gain full ownership the land. During his "proving" six months, he built a 16' x 18' log and timber house with stone foundation and a stable, dug a well, and put up 480 rods (about 1.5 miles) of fencing. His claim says that he owned a table with four chairs, a cooking stove, a bedstead, two cupboards, and a washstand. He cultivated twelve acres and planted oats, barley and "vegetables," and had 6 horses and a plow. He told a bit of a fib on his application and said he was born in Pennsylvania rather than in Canada.
Over the ensuing years, the rules for claiming land were loosened in areas like Montana as people realized that significant irrigation was necessary for crop production levels anywhere near those that were common (once the prairie sod was broken and drained) in the less arid midwest; it took a lot more western land in order to feed a single family, let alone see a profit. Perhaps that's why Richard continued his employment with the USGS and focused on the Hydrology unit, which was renamed "The Reclamation Service" in 1902 and put in charge of managing water in the west. Can't you hear a man who'd grown up among the gradual settling of the western foothills plains saying, "look, folks, we have the most incredible land on God's green earth but we have a problem distributing water to it; the most important thing we can do now, for the land and the people, is to figure out how to use that resource effectively." Richard ended up selling his homestead and moving to Malta, Montana, to work for Reclamation. He died of pneumonia at age 65. Richard had fallen in love with the vast, uncharted land of the frontier west, and that was all the life he ever wanted, it seems.
He was a pleasant man to meet and his kind disposition and genial manners made for him friends wherever he went. The whereabouts of Mr. Thomas' relatives were not known and hence they were not at the funeral which was held at the M.E. Church Monday afternoon. Malta Lodge No. 57 A.F.A.M., of which the deceased was a member, attended in a body, and placed some beautiful floral pieces on the casket.
The Enterprise, Harlem, MT. 19 Jan 1911
Richard's father, George Calder Thomas, Sr., and the rest of the family returned to Iowa and settled near Des Moines. His mother, Mathilda Strowbridge Thomas, died
in 1873. Daughter Elizabeth married a man named "Blake" and moved east to Chicago; Harvey and George Jr. put down roots in Iowa. By 1874, however, George Sr. had had enough of "town life." He and his youngest son, John, along with John's wife, Maggie, went west again, to the very northwest corner of Kansas. They both made land claims in Rawlins County, where they took the "wait five years" route of proving their claims. By 1884, George had built a 24' x 24' sod and log house. He dug two wells, had 25 acres cultivated and 140 acres of pasture.
George Sr. died on May 8, 1889, at the age of 76. I have to wonder how many houses he had built over the years, how much prairie he had "broken," and whether he somewhat envied Richard's solitude in Montana. George died just a few months before he proved out his claim, but John successfully petitioned the courts for inheritance rights. Unlike Richard, John admitted that he was born in Canada, but pointed out that his father was born in Pennsylvania, making John automatically a U.S. citizen.
My family drifted apart from the other Thomas descendants but I've been able to re-connect with some of them while doing research, especially John Calder Thomas's descendants, who mostly have stayed in the western states, enjoying those Big Skies (as we Thomases do). The log cabin picture was provided to me by Gary Newport, John's great-grandson. Gary and Jana Newport were just lovely people whom I was lucky enough to meet in person when they stopped by our "middle-of-nowhere" house in Iowa to share genealogy information. Another of John's descendants, Rachel Hidy, had the same picture I did of George Sr. (Don't you LOVE that picture? Surely this is the male version of the "I cut my own hair with nail scissors" female archetype so beloved of modern detective fiction, no tying things back with a leather thong for George Sr.!), but Rachel's was very helpfully labelled. While I enjoy time to myself, I am so grateful to have met fellow researchers -- "family" who have become friends -- through a shared passion for genealogy.
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