Caldwell County MO Archives History .....PIONEERING IN KANSAS 
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Karen Walker khw4@yahoo.com September 3, 2008, 6:49 pm

	PIONEERING IN KANSAS
	Narrator:  Mrs. Nellie Scott of Kansas
    
     This is my mothers history.  The maple sugar making and the sleigh rides 
on Lake Erie are the only frolics I recall hearing her mention.  The quilting 
and husking bees we so often heard of from the older generation seem not to 
have entered in her life.  Possibly she was too young to have shared in these 
things, possibly too busy, for she married so young that every minute and all 
her strength was consumed by her family.
     Julia Clarissa Curtis, daughter of Julia Miller and Richard Curtis was a 
direct descendant of Richard Warren of the Mayflower and of Philip Delano the 
French Huguenot, and both progenitors of a long line of pioneers who would 
settle and start the rudiments of culture when they would move on to repeat 
the same in a new region.
     Mother came to Kansas 1870, the wife of Jeremiah Stewart, a Homeopathic 
physician.  My Mother's mother was a pioneer from Vermont to Portage County 
Ohio in 1818 in ox-drawn sleds cutting their way through the forests.  The 
Miller forbears, Hosea and Isaac, had gone from Massachusetts to settle the 
town or township of Deimmerston Vermont 1770.  Isaac and his eight sons 
rendered patriotic service in the Revolution.  So the love of conquering the 
unknown - the spirit of pioneering - was in the blood.
     Mother and father started from Indiana to Kansas September 1, 1870 in a 
covered wagon accompanied by a number of others families intent on taking up 
homesteads.  My parents settled in Washington County one of the poorest 
counties of north eastern Kansas.  There were all the privations possible, 
blizzards, cyclones, droughts, grasshoppers, what the drought left, the 
grasshoppers ate up.  The most available food was the wild jack rabbit but it 
became stale as a regular diet.
     Building upon the prairie, it was too rocky to cut and build a sod house 
and no timber at hand for a log cabin.  The material used was a cheap lumber 
and built in what is known as a box house, the boards running up and down with 
battings used to cover the cracks.  I have forgotten the size of the house 
which we always called the "Homestead House" but it was not large enough to 
have sleeping rooms apart form the kitchen and living room, which was one and 
the same, hence the attic was utilized, access to which was gained by a ladder 
on the outside.  The smaller children were tucked away in the trundle bed, 
lodged when not in use under the large bed.  Four children were born in the 
Homestead House.
     A district school was established and in the school house the church 
service was held, usually by the faithful circuit rider who "put up" with the 
doctor and his family.  There were few books to borrow among the neighbors.  
My mother relied on the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Toledo Blade for 
current events and on Godey's magazine for fashion and home articles.  Once 
when she was out of something to read, she sent my eldest sister to a neighbor 
to ask if she had something to read.  The neighbor offered her the Bible, much 
to my sister's embarassment, for the Bible was a well known book in our home.
     In those early days, when the family was to attend a gathering of any 
sort or a trip to town taken it was done in the farm wagon.
     There were few orchards and almost no berry patches productive then.  
Most of the fruit was wild plum, gooseberry and grape.  Not much jelly was 
made because sugar was scarce and expensive.  Most of the fruit was made into 
butter where sorghum could be used for sweetening.
     During the later years of my mother's life, many of the hardships had 
disappeared and life was more comfortable.  She died January 1 1906 and was 
buried two days later in the worst snow storm I have ever seen.  No one was 
able to attend the interment but the sexton and his helpers, the undertaker, 
the minister, and two of her children.                        Interviewed  
July 1934.


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