Ionia County MI Archives Biographies.....REED, Pearl (Lyon); Mrs. Fred) October 14, 1887 - NA
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LaVonne Bennett lib@dogsbark.com February 16, 2007, 3:38 pm

Author: Pearl Reed

THE SEBEWA RECOLLECTOR, June 1978, Volume 13, Number 6; submitted with written 
permission of current Editor Grayden D. Slowins:

BIOGRAPHY:  HOMESTEADING IN NEBRASKA (continued) By Pearl (Lyon) REED – The 
other dog we had was just shortly before we came back to Michigan.  We never 
had any sheep.  Papa sort of made pets of all of his cows.  I never saw an ox 
team until after I came back to Michigan.  When I was teaching the Grubtown 
school, a man delivered a load of wood with an ox team.  It was a Mr. Pryor.

After Jessie began teaching school she bought an organ.  I think the Crabtrees 
had an organ but we did not have one at school.  There we used to sing a few 
songs but that was the extent of our music.  Jessie’s first teacher came from 
quite a musical family.  She learned the song TWENTY FROGGIES WENT TO SCHOOL.  
Mama did not approve of that kind of music; it was too much like nonsense.

Our threshing machine was one of these where you put eight horses on a sweep to 
get the power to run the separator.  After 1900 a man came in with a steam 
engine.  He wanted everybody to be on hand ready to start threshing at five 
o’clock in the morning.  He had to make money enough to pay for his machine.  
He was really a hustler.

It was the 22nd of April 1899 when Jessie and I went to school as usual.  Papa 
had left the cattle in the corral.  We had been watching the light of a prairie 
fire in the southeastern sky every night for a week.  After breakfast Papa went 
out to plow more furrows to make our fire guard wider.  Just before noon the 
head fire came through between our house and the Valley Grove schoolhouse.  The 
folks at home did not know for a few minutes whether the schoolhouse was burned 
or not.  And we, standing outside the schoolhouse watching, could not tell if 
our home was burned or not.

Then Papa went again to plow beside the head fire to keep the side fires from 
burning.  When he brought the horses back he called to Mama to get a pail of 
bread and butter ready to take to the men who were fighting on the line.  She 
had the milk pail half full when he came back.  The men were fighting the side 
fires with wet gunny sacks and shovels to throw sand on the fires.  At one time 
Papa and our neighbor, Mr. Crabtree, were fighting side by side and suddenly a 
blaze went through and neither of them knew if the other was safe or not.  
About a mile and a half farther north the head fire turned east by the extra 
wide fire guard.  When the fire was only two miles from Bassett all the town 
joined in the fire fighting and put it out.

The next day, April 23rd, I was very surprised to find when I came home from 
school that I had a new baby sister.  She had arrived at our house and we named 
her Eva Grace.  She died November 19, 1975.  The next day a bad sandstorm hit 
us and its fury was greatly enhanced by the ashes from the prairie fire.  Mama 
had put an extra tablecloth over our food in other sandstorms and that is what 
happened this time.

Clarissa was born August 12, 1894.  That was one of the years of the drought.  
Papa had planted some watermelons.  When Clarissa was a few days old, our 
neighbor, Mr. Johnson, brought us a large watermelon that he had raised on the 
field across the road from our house.  How those watermelons ever grew in that 
dry soil we never could tell.

The chatauqua was a wonderful thing, bringing nationally known speakers and 
music to our community.  It would have meant little to us had it not been for 
our Sunday School Superintendent, Jim Davenport, who found out that any Sunday 
School in a group could go past the gatekeeper free.  So our Valley Grove 
Sunday School planned to meet before we drove down the big hill so as to come 
in our wagons, one behind the other.  The Ben Morris family, Crabtrees and our 
family and maybe a few others enjoyed this for several years.  Of course we 
took our picnic dinner and stayed all day.  We were all riding in wagons at 
that time.  I remember a Mr. Sisson and Frances E. Willard who were on the 
program.  There was a phonograph with earphones.  Florence Crabtree paid the 
dime and let Jessie and me listen.  Mrs. Willard was a temperance leader.  The 
site of the chatauqua was in a spacious, well kept place with a pavilion and 
many cottages where people from all over the state came for a two week’s 
vacation.  It was on Long Pine Creek at the foot of a large canyon.  Some boys 
climbed nearly to the top of the canyon and fell from a high cliff.  I do not 
remember if the boy was hurt or not.  The chatauqua was a short distance from 
Long Pine.  There was a wonderful spring where we had good water to drink.

About 1900 things began to get better.  We had more rain and better crops.  The 
first time the Corbetts came they were dressed in their best.  Afterward they 
came in more common clothes.  Mr. Corbett bought two colts that Papa had.  The 
Corbetts lived in Ainsworth, Nebraska.  They were our cousins.

When times were better, Papa bought a steel windmill and a double buggy.   When 
Jessie was sixteen years old she began teaching school and bought a carpet for 
the living room, a sewing machine, an organ, a photograph album for Mama and an 
autograph album for me.

Jessie went northeast of Bassett to teach at Moriahville and she boarded at 
Spragues.  One week end when she came home, she was bringing a buckskin Indian 
pony with black mane and tail with a black stripe an inch wide down its back.  
It was named Pet.  I enjoyed riding the pony, too.  Florence Crabtree bought a 
bay, long legged bucking bronco.  The two girls, Jessie on her little Indian 
pony and Florence on her big bronco made quite a picture.  Papa told Jessie he 
did not like to have her ride to bronco for fear she might get hurt; but she 
did ride it once in a while.

Our wells were about 20 feet deep with very good water that never went dry.  
The well was boarded up to keep it from caving in.  We had a well at the house 
and a well at the barn.  One spring Papa offered Walter and me a penny apiece 
for milking cows.  We would help him milk cows so he could get out to the field 
earlier.  So we took over the milking night and morning.  When we finished 
milking we would go to the house and write down the number of cows we had 
milked.  Each of us would try hard to see who would get the last cow.  Mama 
would carry the full pails of milk to the house for us.  We shipped 25# kegs of 
butter to Omaha that summer.

One morning as the fourteen cows were leaving the corral I saw a rattle snake 
coming out of the tall grass under the fence into the corral.  I called Mama 
and she came with the hoe to kill it.  I ran back and forth between the snake 
and the fence, kicking sand at it, to keep it from getting back into the grass 
again.  Of course, I was bare footed at the time.  Another rattler was under 
the shanty doorstep.  I went out the other door to see what the chicken was 
looking at under the step and saw the snake.  Mama came and killed that one 
too.  Papa cut off the rattles so that I could keep them.  I kept them for a 
good many years but finally they got lost.

In 1903, just after I started for high school, Mildred was born on October 1.  
Jessie was teaching a school near home at that time and she took a week off 
from school to stay home to take care of Mama and the baby.  Mildred was just 
one year old when we returned to Michigan.

There never had been a graduating class in Bassett until the year of 1904 when 
we graduated from the ninth grade.  There were eleven in the class.  They 
decided to have commencement exercises.  Each graduate wrote up an essay to 
read and that was the program for the evening.  We had the stage decorated with 
gold and purple bunting and each girl carried a fan.  I still have mine.  My 
chum and I had our dresses made just alike.  Our mothers made our dresses.  I 
went back to Nebraska in 1964 to the sixtieth anniversary of that graduation.  
I had my picture taken with one other graduate.  There were some others in the 
town but they did not attend the banquet so they did not get in the picture.  
One girl that I visited was just not able to come.

Visitors to Nebraska would say they would not live there for anything.  To stay 
there for two or three nights was enough for them considering the likelihood of 
prairie fires.  The railroad engines threw out sparks.  A wide plowed and 
burned strip was kept along the tracks as a fire guard.

We saw one tornado that was headed right for our house about 1900.  It looked 
as if it were coming right for us but it lifted before it got to the Long Pine 
canyon.  After the tornado there was a hailstorm with stones about the size of 
hen’s eggs.  They pounded right through the wood shingle roofs.  It pounded out 
all the glass on two sides of the house and in all the buildings around there 
so everybody was waiting for the railroad to bring in class and shingles for 
repair.  Our barn was struck by lightning once.  There were eight fence posts 
around the pasture that were struck the same afternoon.  Papa came in from the 
field when the storm was coming and put the horses in the barn.  His thought 
was to not take the harnesses off the horses for there might something happen.  
When the barn was struck by lightning he took the horses clear to the far side 
of the garden and hitched them to a couple of fence posts.  He came back and 
got out a little calf and a few other things.  Papa rebuilt the barn.  Mr. 
Crabtree came to help put the rafters on.

The same summer the barn burned, the Crabtrees had gone to Elgin, Illinois to 
sell some horses and to let Florence go to High School in Elgin.  She had 
loaned Jessie her side saddle and it was in the barn.  Jessie and Florence were 
both very glad to think the saddle had burned so that they could get the kind 
of saddle they wanted.  The side saddle had stirrups on one side.  They each 
got a new saddle.

Our years of drought were really terrible.  There were three years in 
succession that we lost all our crops.  In some other years we would lose one 
or more crops.  We never went to the place where there was relief sent in but 
one time somebody was going to the relief store and Mama said if they had a 
sack of corn meal she would be awfully glad to have one.  They brought her a 
sack of corn meal and it happened to have a ball of butter in it and a name was 
on the sack.  Mama never wrote to the person because she thought she just 
couldn’t afford the postal card.  Our relatives in Rhode Island sent a box of 
drygoods and dresses and things and, of course, our relatives in Michigan sent 
things from time to time.  It really was a hard time.

Grandma Brooks came out to see us before we moved down to the homestead.  She 
came again in 1900.  She was the only relative who came to Nebraska to see us 
while we were there.  Mama and Papa came back to Michigan in 1892 when Walter 
was a baby to see Grandpa Lyon because he was not expected to live very long 
and later they came to Michigan with Grandma Brooks.  Walter, Clarissa, Jessie 
and I stayed in Nebraska.  The younger children could ride without tickets but 
we could not.

I went to a high school party and that night Mama told me she thought they had 
sold the farm.  It didn’t enter my mind again until I saw Papa coming up to the 
schoolhouse on Monday morning at first recess.  He came walking toward the 
schoolhouse.  I thought “Oh, they’ve sold the farm!”  And, sure enough, they 
had.  I picked up my books and went to my boarding house and went home.  That 
was in 1904.  We had 400 acres to sell at $10 an acre and we had some horses 
and cattle besides.  Papa figured he would have enough money to buy a farm in 
Michigan and he did have.

On this train ride back to Michigan Papa woke us up to see the Missouri River.  
When we got into Chicago we had a four hour wait.  We stayed, all of us, right 
together without anybody getting out to see the town at all while we waited 
those four hours for another train.  We brought our own food to eat on the 
train even though there was a dining car on the train.  We sort of enjoyed the 
train ride but we kept thinking about the folks we had left behind.

When we arrived at Mulliken, Rollin Brooks was there with a horse and buggy and 
Uncle William was there with a wagon.  The people of Mulliken always turned out 
with their lanterns to meet the train.  Everybody wondered where that large 
family went to.  We had gone up there in Sebewa to Uncle William Brooks’.  
After a while they found out it was our family coming from Nebraska.

Papa would not even consider a farm that was more than a half mile from a 
schoolhouse.  We found the Stockwell farm on Frost Road south of Frost’s 
Corners, fifty acres that had not been heavily farmed and of very good soil.  
Papa went right to work clearing up the fence rows and took the shrubbery and 
flowers out of the front yard and planted grass there to make a start for a 
lawn.  He rebuilt the barn and improved the house some after we got there.

Later he bought the big brick Triphagen house that was on Potter Street in 
Mulliken.  There were two brick houses and it was the large one that he 
bought.  He had an acre and a few rods besides.  The house is still there.  He 
wanted to locate his retirement home in Mulliken because Clarissa and Eva were 
in college in Ypsilanti and he thought it would be easier to get to Mulliken 
than Portland on the train.

The rail fences to me looked like something out of this world.  All the brush 
along the roads seemed just terrible.  I was used to an open prairie.  
Nevertheless, Michigan was beautiful.

Once I went back to visit in Nebraska in 1951 with my husband, Fred Reed, so 
that he could see the West and we went again in 1956 to Pearl and Oscar 
Peterson’s for their golden wedding.  It seemed to me that the country was 
ruined by the shelter belts.  They had planted shelter belts here and there 
along the roadsides and they were doing strip farming.  Instead of planting a 
big field they were following the contours in strips.  They were doing some 
irrigating and they seemed quite prosperous with lots of cattle.  They had had 
more rain.  Our farm sold for double what Papa got for it in only two years 
afterward.  The man who bought our farm looked at the garden and saw the 
popcorn that Walter had hoed and said that if it would raise as good corn as 
that, he thought he would buy it.  The popcorn helped to sell the 
farm.                                                                           
  End.






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