Gen. Jefferson C. Davis. One of the most distinguished Indianans who made military life his profession was Gen. Jef­ferson C. Davis, who first volunteered his services to the profession of arms at the outbreak of the war with Mexico, and was a member of the regular army thereafter for thirty years.
    He was born in Clark County, Indiana, March 2, 1827. He was of an old Ken­tucky family. His grandparents, William and Charlotte Davis, died in Kentucky, the former in 1840, at the age of sixty-seven, and the latter on May 6, 1851. Wil­liam Davis, Jr., father of General Davis, was born July 29,1800, and died March 21, 1879. He married Mary Drummond, who was born June 24, 1801, and died Novem­ber 24, 1881. Their children were: Jef­ferson C; James W., born February 24, 1829, died October 12, 1906; John, born December 27, 1830, died May 6, 1859; Jo­seph, born November 14, 1832, died Au­gust 6, 1867; George, born November 21, 1834, died in March, 1901; William, born March 5, 1838, died November 25, 1910; Matilda Anne, born September 5, 1841, died July 19, 1890; Thomas Benton, born August 22, 1844, died in October, 1911. Joseph, George and William all also served in the Civil war, and Dr. Thomas Davis was contract surgeon in the regular army.
    Jefferson C. Davis spent his boyhood days near Charleston in Clark County, In­diana, on his father's farm. His military genius was inherited from a military an­cestry, some of his forefathers having fought in the Indian wars of Kentucky. "While a school boy in Clark County attend­ing a seminary he heard of the declaration of war with Mexico, and enlisted in Colo­nel Lane's Indiana Regiment. For gal­lant conduct at the battle of Buena Vista he was made second lieutenant of the First Artillery June 17, 1848. He became a first lieutenant in the regular army in 1852. In 1858 he was assigned to duty in the garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. About three years later he was with that garrison when Major Anderson consoli­dated the forces in Charleston Harbor at Fort Sumter, and General Davis was of­ficer of the guard when the first shot whis­tled over the fort April 12, 1861, this be­ing the first shot fired by the Confederates, the act that precipitated the long and costly Civil war. For this service he re­ceived a medal from the New York Cham­ber of Commerce, one of these medallions being presented to each of the defenders. In May, 1861, General Davis was pro­moted to a captaincy and was given leave of absence to raise the Twenty-second In­diana Volunteers. As colonel of the regi­ment he saw active service in the Missouri campaign, participating in the battles of Lexington, Boonville and Blackwater, and later at Pea Ridge, Arkansas. In Decem­ber, 1861, he was promoted to command of a brigade, and was under General Fremont and later under Generals Hunter and Pope. For services rendered at Milford, Missouri, December 18,1861, when he aided in capturing a superior fofrce of the enemy and a large quantity of military supplies, he was made brigadier general of volun­teers. At the battle of Pea Ridge he com­manded one of the four divisions of Gen­eral Curtis' army. He was also at the siege of Corinth, and was then assigned to the Army of the Tennessee. He led his old division of the Twentieth Army Corps into the fight at Stone River, and for his bravery was recommended by General Rosecrans for major general. In 1864 he commanded the Fourteenth Corps of Sherman's army in the Atlanta campaign, and in the march from Atlanta to the sea.   In 1865 a brevet major generalship was given him, and he was made colonel of the Twenty-third In­fantry in the regular army July 23, 1866.
    After the war he was employed as an army reorganize^ and was sent to the Pacific coast, and from 1868 to 1871 was commander of the military forces in the newly purchased Territory of Alaska. While in Alaska he resided with Price Maksutoff, who gave him valuable aid in understanding characteristics of that country. On several occasions General Davis was consulted by Governor Seward, who left everything to General Davis' judgment.
In 1873, after the murder of General Canby by the Modoc Indians in the lava beds of northern California, General Davis took command of the forces operating against them and in a remarkably short time compelled the Modocs to surrender. During the last years of his life he was in command of the Twenty-third Infantry and he died in Chicago while in line of duty November 30, 1879.
    General Davis married Miss Mariette Woodson Athon, of Indianapolis, daughter of Dr. James S. Athon. A niece, Ida Davis Pinley, resides at 2038 New Jersey Street, Indianapolis.
Source: Indiana and Indianans by Jacob Piatt Dunn

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Aunt Rachel Cooper Matheny
1803-1877

           

Rachel was the second child of Isaiah and Elizabeth Montier Cooper.  Born March 26, 1803 in Clark County, Indiana, a time when President Jefferson was negotiating the purchase of Louisiana, she lived for fourteen years in Springville Township  and passed the difficult times of the War of 1812 there.  Besides her several brothers and sisters, Rachel had as a companion a girl of her own age, Esther Cowan, whom the Coopers informally adopted about 1813.  The Cooper children all appear to have been well-educated by the standards of the time.  They probably attended a school in the Springville area or at nearby Charlestown.  Her mother was illiterate, but Isaiah could read and write.    

Rachel Cooper Matheny was quite a contrasting figure to her sister Mary, according to the images created in Into the Eye of the Setting Sun.  Whereas Mary was bold, tidy, prone to tears, disciplinary, and aspiring to be lady-like; her sister was wise, patient, close-mouthed, pipe-smoking, and understanding.

           

            She was fourteen when the Coopers moved to Owen County, Indiana, in 1817.  It was soon thereafter that the Matheny brothers,  Daniel and Henry, also moved up to Owen County from Hardin County, Kentucky.  Her sister Mary married Daniel in 1819, and Rachel, nineteen, married Henry, who was about Rachel's own age, three years later, July 4, 1822. Henry was afflicted with narcolepsy. At any time he might fall asleep, later awakening confused and disoriented. Perhaps due to this malady, Henry never quite became the commanding figure that Daniel became. 

            If Charlotte Matheny Kirkwood's daughter, Lenore Rogers, was correct in a letter she wrote to a relative, Daniel and Mary had been second cousins;  that would have made Rachel and Henry second cousins also. Whatever their status, the couple had only three children who lived to adulthood, although they may have had others who died young.  The three surviving children were Sarah Jane Matheny, born c.1825, Owen County, IN, married Aaron Layson (c.1820-1886), May 3, 1843, Platte County, MO, died autumn 1849, El Dorado County, CA, buried Coloma, CA; Isaiah Matheny c.1828-1853; and Louisiana Catherine Matheny, born March 8, 1829, Owen County, IN, married (1) James Cave 1844 (2) Joseph Kirkwood 1847, Yamhill County, OR, died January 6, 1908, Yamhill County, OR.  That Rachel and Henry had other children is evidenced by the early censuses.  The 1830 U.S. Census of Owen County, Indiana, listed three sons: 2 aged 0-5, 1 aged 5-10, and another male age 10-15 who was too old  to have been a son of Henry and Rachel.  The 1840 U.S. Census shows only a son aged 10-15 (Isaiah) and the two daughters: 1 aged 10-15 (Louisiana), and 1 aged 15-20 (Sarah Jane).

            Henry and Rachel did not leave Owen County, Indiana, when the rest of the family did, and there is no evidence that they ever lived in Schuyler County, IL, where Daniel and Mary lived.  Yet the siblings reunited in Platte County, MO, in the late 1830's.  Daniel and Mary were there in 1837; we don't know for sure what year Henry and Rachel first moved there, but Henry was already prominent enough by March of 1839 to be selected for the grand jury of Platte County.  The John S. Malott who also served on the grand jury was probably of the family mentioned in Into the Eye of the Setting Sun, as was James Beagle, probably the father of Charlotte Kirkwood's lifelong friend, Nancy Beagle.  Another member of the grand jury was Patrick Cooper, son of Missouri pioneer Sarshall Cooper, from Culpeper County, VA, perhaps a distant cousin?

            Henry and Rachel were members of the "Great Migration of 1843," like Daniel and Mary.  Charlotte Kirkwood mentions her aunt quite often in Into the Eye of the Setting Sun.  Rachel kept a diary during the epic journey.  It accidentally fell into a kettle of hot buffalo fat but was retrieved quickly by Rachel, but the outsides of the pages and the cover were damaged.  The diary, thereafter dubbed "Rachel Matheny's History of  Grease," was later destroyed when Rachel's home burned.

            Rachel's daughter Sarah Jane had married Aaron Layson unexpectedly while witnessing the elopement wedding of Aaron's sister, also named Sarah Jane, with Adam Matheny.  At first upset by the unplanned wedding, Rachel learned to have a very close relationship with this son-in-law, rearing his motherless children and housekeeping for him while he farmed her land.  But that was to be in the future,  During the 1843 migration, they were learning how to be kin.  When the Oregon company met to organize at the grove West of Fizhugh's Mill on May 18, 1843, Aaron Layson was called upon to act as chairman, quite an honor for the twenty-three- year- old newlywed.  Peter H. Burnett, later to become California's first governor was elected secretary. (James W. Nesmith diary, Oregon Historical Quarterly Vol. 7, p.329)  At the end of the Oregon trip, Henry and Rachel wintered at the Methodist Mission at The Dalles, not entering the Willamette Valley until spring (unlike Mary and Daniel Matheny, who crossed over Mt. Hood and wintered in the Tualatin Valley). 

            In the spring of 1844, Rachel and Henry settled at what is now Hopewell, Yamhill County, Oregon, against the Eola Hills.  When the first death occurred in the area, because their claim lay on high ground,  Rachel and Henry donated a portion of their land as the local cemetery, where Rachel herself would one day be buried.  At the Hopewell Cemetery there is a monument dedicated to Rachel.

            Henry apparently accompanied Rachel's brothers to the California gold fields in 1849, and most of the women went too, including Rachel and her daughter Sarah Jane Layson.  It was in what is now called Cooper Canyon a mile or two west of Pilot Hill, CA, where the Mathenys and Coopers worked the gravel.  It was there in the autumn that "camp fever" ravaged the canyon.  One by one Rachel saw her husband, her daughter, her brother John, and her father die there and be carried to the graveyard at Sutter's Mill (Coloma).  She couldn't have helped wishing the family had remained in Oregon on their land, but now she had too much to do to spend too much time reflecting.  There in the epidemic-plagued Mother Lode, she took over the care of Sarah Jane's motherless children, the youngest a newborn baby.

            With Henry alive, the Mathenys had qualified for 640 acres of Oregon land, but alone, she could only qualify for 320.  Her son-in-law Aaron Layson was now in the same situation; so he took over half of her land claim.  She cooked, cared for the children (Ann, born c1844; James Benjamin, born c1846; and Cena Abigale, born 1849), and took care of the house; he farmed the land.  Only twenty-nine when his wife died, Aaron never remarried until after Rachel's death many years later.

             The 1850 Census shows that Rachel was living alone with grandchildren Ann E., 6; James R.; 4, and Abby, 1; Aaron must have still been in the California gold country. But by 1860 Rachel was again living with Aaron and two unmarried grandchildren.  The 1865 personal property tax list shows that Rachel owned or produced that year 2 tons of hay, 40 bushels of apples, 2 hogs, 7 horses, 16 cattle, 10 bushels of potatoes, 100 pounds of butter, 70 bushels of wheat, and 100 bushels of oats.  She had twenty acres under cultivation.

            It appears that there was bad blood between the Laysons and the Kirkwoods. As early as January 1868, Joseph Kirkwood had foreclosed on a loan to his brother-in-law Aaron Layson.  In March of 1874, Aaron Layson is on record as having sued Joseph Kirkwood, but no resolution of the case is listed the Circuit Court Journal.  In 1876 Rachel sold her farm for $5,000 to her three Layson grandchildren. This sale may have provoked litigation. In March of 1877, Aaron Layson again sued Joseph Kirkwood.  Records also show that in June of 1877, Joseph Kirkwood filed a suit against M.E.Bailey, husband of Cena Layson Bailey, the daughter of Aaron and Sarah Jane Matheny Layson. At the height this lawsuit, Rachel Cooper Matheny died on June 25, 1877, at the age of seventy-four.  The friction among her family no doubt caused Rachel considerable stress.

            Rachel had been the last of her generation of the family left in the Willamette Valley.  Her brothers Enoch and Bill had moved to eastern Washington and her brother Isaiah to the Midwest; the rest were dead. She was buried in the cemetery on her own land, next to Mary and Daniel Matheny.  In 1932 a monument honoring Rachel as the donor of the cemetery at Hopewell was erected at the cemetery.  Her grandnephew, Dr.Jasper Hewitt, read her biography at the dedication.

            The following are brief biographies of Rachel and Henry's children:

 

            SARAH JANE MATHENY LAYSON

 c.1825-1849

 

            The older of the two daughters of Henry and Rachel Cooper Matheny, Sarah Jane was born in Owen County, Indiana, about 1825. [She was listed age 15-20 in the 1840 U.S. Census]  She spent her maturing years in Platte County, Missouri, where her family became close with that of David and Anna Maxwell Layson.  Sarah Jane, also the name of the Laysons' daughter about her own age, became her close friend.  Sarah Jane Matheny's cousin Adam Matheny was a close friend of Sarah Jane Layson's older brother Aaron Maxwell Layson.

            When the Mathenys made their plans to cross the plains to Oregon, the high excitement must have been infectious.  Not able to part with Sarah Jane Layson, Adam spoke to her father for permission to marry her.  The father was adamant:  his daughter would not be taken on such a risky venture perhaps to be killed by hostile Indians or die of starvation in the wilderness.  His refusal caused the young couple to elope with Sarah Jane Matheny and Aaron invited along as witnesses.  Caught up in the romance of the elopement and the adventure ahead, Aaron, twenty-two, and Sarah Jane Matheny, seventeen, decided to marry on the spur of the moment during the ceremony for the other couple.

            The wagons left Platte County and rendezvoused near Independence in a grove west of Fitzhugh's Mill.  There, on May 18, 1843, an organizational meeting was held.  Nominations were made for chairman, and it was probably Aaron's best friend (and now kinsman), Adam Matheny, who placed the twenty-three-year-old Aaron's name in nomination.  Surprisingly, the group elected Layson chairman and the renowned Peter H. Burnett secretary.  Under Layson's chairmanship, the meeting elected Burnett wagon master and authorized Daniel Matheny and another man to seek to hire John Gant as a guide.  Aaron Layson held no other office of note in his life, but at Independence, all eyes were upon him.  And so the Great Migration of 1843 began, in effect, a long, protracted honeymoon for the young couple, until the tedium of the trip dulled the adventure of it. ("Diary of the Emigration of 1843," by James W. Nesmith, Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. VII, p.229)

            Aaron and Sarah Jane settled next to her parents in Yamhill County and took up a donation land claim.  Together they had three children:  Anna E. Layson, born ca.1844, OR, married Wilson Gibson, died 1922, buried Hopewell;  James Benjamin Layson (aka Jim Ben), born 1845, Yamhill County, married Sarah C. _____, died 1920, Hopewell, Yamhill County, OR; and Cena Abigale, born  October 18,1849, El Dorado County, CA, married Rev. Mark E. Bailey, February 26, 1872, Wheatland, OR, died January 24, 1941, Vancouver, WA.  A Julie Jones genealogical note says that one child of Annie Layson Gibson committed suicide.

            The 1844 tax list shows that the Laysons had 25 horses and 90 cattle.                   Sarah Jane died of the camp fever in El Dorado County, CA, and was buried at Sutter's Mill (Coloma) just after the birth of Cena Abigale.

            Circuit Court records show that in January 1868 Joseph Kirkwood won a foreclosure suit by default against A.M. Layson et al; perhaps Joseph had come to Aaron's rescue in January of 1862 when Williams and Lippincott, apparently an area banking partnership, sued Layson and won the case by default.  Whatever the case, it appears that Aaron was not prosperous. 

            Aaron lived on many years, never remarrying until his children were grown and his mother-in-law had died.  The following January 20 of 1878, at the age of about fifty-eight, Aaron married Eliza Jane Athey, a maiden woman also in her fifties, a sister of William Athey, who was married to William S. Cooper's daughter Charlotte Cooper Cave.  In the 1880 Census, Aaron was listed as living in Marion County, Marion Precinct.  He died in 1886 and was buried at Hopewell. Jim Ben lived out his life in the Hopewell area.

 

ISAIAH MATHENY

c.1828-1853

            Isaiah Matheny was a son of Rachel and Henry Matheny heretofore only suspected of existing.  The censuses of Owen County, IN, in 1830 and Platte County, MO, in 1840, clearly show that Rachel and Henry had a son. The 1849 Oregon Territorial census shows two adult males in the Matheny home.

            There were two different Isaiah Mathenys. Mary and Daniel Matheny's son Isaiah Cooper Matheny (1826-1906) was the other Isaiah.  Both served in the Cayuse War after the Whitman Massacre.  Donation Land Claim records show two different claims under the name Isaiah Matheny. An Isaiah Matheny filed a land claim across the Willamette River from  Daniel and Mary Cooper Matheny. This was probably Isaiah C. Matheny, yet

Isaiah C. also had a land claim just south of Amity on the Polk-Yamhill county line.       

            In October of 1853, Rachel Matheny, Aaron Layson, and Joseph Kirkwood petitioned the Yamhill County Circuit Court to administer Isaiah's estate. Isaiah had not lived to patent his land claim under the Donation Land Law.  Isaiah may have been the brother-in-law of Joseph Kirkwood in the California gold fields [mentioned in Into the Eye of the Setting Sun] who was engaged in conversation with a stranger who turned out to be Joseph's father, James Kirwood.  If this was Isaiah, he directed James and his son John to the whereabouts of Joseph in Oregon. 

            Isaiah does not appear in the 1850 Yamhill County, Oregon census, but he was probably in the gold fields at the time. After his death, his land claim was taken up in 1852 by William Matheny, a cousin of Daniel and Henry Younger Matheny, who had just arrived in Oregon from Missouri.

 

LOUISA CATHERINE  MATHENY CAVE KIRKWOOD

[a.k.a. "Lucy Ann," a.k.a. "Louisiana"]

1829-1908

 

            The younger of the two daughters of Henry and Rachel Cooper Matheny, Louisa was born March 8, 1829, in Owen County, IN.  She was eight when the family moved to Missouri and fourteen when they crossed the plains to Oregon.

            At the age of fifteen, on December 6, 1844, Louisa married James Cave, Junior, of a poor family told about in Into the Eye of the Setting Sun.  The marriage was performed by James O'Neil, J.P. (who had sold Daniel and Mary Matheny his claim to the future site of Wheatland).  Cave died shortly after their marriage;  there do not appear to have been any children.  At eighteen she married her second husband, Joseph Kirkwood, on April 16, 1847, and by him had twelve children.

            Joseph was born April 16, 1820, the son of James Kirkwood, a Scottish immigrant.  Kirkwood and three sons headed west after the death of Mrs. Kirkwood in the East.  It was 1846 and neither Oregon nor California were certain to become American.  Along the trail, apparently there was some kind of trouble.  Joseph chose to head to Oregon, whereas his father and two brothers headed to California.

            In Oregon Joseph found his way to the area where the Mathenys had settled in Yamhill County.  On 16 April 1847, he and the young widow, Louisa Matheny Cave, were married.  The couple settled on land next to Louisa's family on the east slopes of the Eola Hills.

            It was in late 1849 that Joseph's father and brothers were talking to a man in the California gold fields (Aaron Layson or Isaiah Matheny).  When he heard that their last name was Kirkwood, he said, "My brother-in-law in Oregon is named Kirkwood, Joseph Kirkwood."  When the father and his son John heard of Joseph's location, they set out immediately for Oregon.  The other brother, probably the source of the trouble with Joseph, did not choose to join his father and brother on the trip to Oregon.  He remained in the gold fields and was never heard from again.

            The two Kirkwoods arrived at Matheny's Ferry at Wheatland and asked the way to Joseph and Louisa's home.  It had to have been a very pleasant reunion for Joseph, who by then had three children.  The father and brother, John, never left the area.  John married Charlotte Matheny soon afterward, and, like his brother, lived to an advanced age on his Yamhill County farm.

            Roland Crosiar of Polk County says that his father, Ruthford Crosiar, told him that "Old Joe Kirkwood" did not trust banks.  In his tack room he drilled the holes for the wooden pegs to hold harnesses; he drilled them extra deep so as to hide his gold coins behind the pegs.  Many people who knew him say that Joe Kirkwood was a very difficult man.

            Louisa, who went by "Lucy Ann" in her youth and "Louisiana" in her later years, died January 6, 1908, at the age of eighty-two at Hopewell.  Joseph died there February 12, 1912, at the age of ninety-one.  Both are buried at the Hopewell Cemetery.  Their children were (1) Henry Kirkwood, born February 25, 1848, married Catharine M. Groshong, died January 16, 1932, Donald, Marion County, OR; (2) Ellen Kirkwood,born February 25, 1848 (a twin),

 Hopewell, married James McDonald, July 28, 1879, died December 20, l917, McMinnville, OR; (3) Perilla Kirkwood, born December 29, 1849, Hopewell, married Virgil Smith, December 8, 1874, died August 20, 1896; (4) James K. Kirkwood, born 1851, Hopewell, not married, died September 28, 1935, Eugene, OR; (5) Joseph Kirkwood, Jr., born 1853, Hopewell, married Sarah Cooper Russell (his mother's first cousin, daughter of William S. Cooper), ca.1879, died ca.1930; (6) Daniel David Kirkwood, born July 28, 1855, Hopewell, married Elizabeth Blake (his second cousin, granddaughter of William S.Cooper), April 10, 1881, Colfax, WA, died June 26, 1911, Davenport, WA; (7) Homer C. Kirkwood, born May 31, 1857, Hopewell, married Hester M. Miller, September 29, 1885, Yamhill County, OR, died January 29, 1903, Hopewell; (8) Romietta Kirkwood, born June 30, 1859, Hopewell, married Charles E. Magers, September 7, 1895, Yamhill County, OR, died August 29, 1931, Salem, OR; (9) Thomas T. Kirkwood, born June 30, 1864, Hopewell, married Emma Sampson, December 26, 1888, died May 15, 1958, McMinnville, OR; (10) John Milton Kirkwood, born August 16, 1867, Hopewell, married ?, died May 6, 1961, Gladstone, OR; (11) Hester Lillie Kirkwood, born August 1870, Hopewell, married  first:  Francis M. Allison, 1892, second Amos Branson, died February 11, 1924, Polk County, OR; (12) Fred Kirkwood born March 1873, Hopewell, married Pearl Miller, February 1, 1902, Yamhill County, OR, died May 27, 1963, Salem, OR.
Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

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Isaiah was a heavy drinker, a brawler, a man of great energy and abilities--in short a typical headstrong frontiersman who, although interesting, would probably not be welcome in our parlors today. The son of Nathan and Elizabeth Oldham Cooper, he began his life at a time when our nation was undergoing its birth, 9 December 1778. Although his parents may have lived in the area between the Ohio River and its tributary, the Monongahela, before the Revolution (they were there in 1790), when that area became under heavy attack by the British-allied Indians during the Revolution, Nathan and Elizabeth would have moved the family to safer havens. We do know that Isaiah was born in Virginia (or that part of it that has since become West Virginia) because his living children listed that as his birthplace in the l880 U.S.Census. He was probably born in either today's Hampshire County, West Virginia or Clarke County, Virginia. Those were the Cooper and Oldham family locales.
    By l790, the Coopers were living in Washington County, Pennsylvania, southwest of Pittsburgh. There were other Coopers and Oldhams there who may have been kinsmen. Isaiah's father had served in Virginia's l774 frontier Indian War called Dunmore's War and had at least that early been acquainted with the Upper Ohio River Valley. Because Nathan received his pay out of Pittsburgh in that war, it is clear that he was living somewhere on the Pennsylvania-Virginia frontier at the time.
    About 1792 the Coopers moved to the new locus of the Cooper relatives, the Watauga River Valley of extreme eastern Tennessee (present-day Carter County). Isaiah's Cooper grandfather and his uncles and aunts had already been there for a few years. It appears as though Isaiah's grandfather turned over his 150 acre farm there to his son Nathan to farm. Our first documented source that Nathan was there, was in October of l793, when he served in the militia during some Indian troubles, and he was also on the 1793 tax list of Washington County. Isaiah would have been fourteen at the time. It was here in what was then Washington County, Tennessee (Carter County after l796) that Isaiah came into manhood amid a large group of Cooper kinsmen, most of whom had arrived there after a sojourn in North Carolina.
    About l797, a period of great flux began in the family. Job Cooper, Isaiah's grandfather, who was a veritable wanderlust, removed to Hardin County, Kentucky, about late 1798 or early 1799. Others moved to what are now Pulaski and Wayne counties, Kentucky. On 22 June l799, his Grandfather Oldham, probably living on land he owned on Middle Island Creek in Ohio County, Virginia (now Tyler County, West Virginia), purchased 400 acres on Middle Wheeling Creek in what is still Ohio County (WV), almost atop the present West Virginia-Pennsylvania border. In fact, although the Oldhams lived on the West Virginia side of the border, the closest town was West Alexander, Washington County, Pennsylvania. Prior to this, the Oldhams had lived in Western Pennsylvania.
    About the spring of 1799, Isaiah appears to have gone to live with his Oldham relatives (perhaps his entire family had moved there). It would have been here that the twenty-year-old Isaiah met the Indian girl, Elizabeth Montier. Isaiah was smitten. And it is not hard to conceive that a dispute probably arose between Isaiah and his family over Isaiah's intentions toward the Indian girl. This would explain why none of Isaiah's sons were named for his father, as was the custom. This would also explain why, in August of l799, Isaiah and the pregnant Elizabeth suddenly appeared in Hardin County, Kentucky (where Job Cooper, his grandfather, had settled). The two married 11 August l799 in adjacent Bullitt County, probably because they had been passing themselves off as husband and wife among the relatives in Kentucky. Two days later, back in Hardin County, Isaiah served as a witness to the marriage of Thomas Carr to Elizabeth Enlous.
    We know Elizabeth was Indian because there were no other Montier families listed anywhere in any of the states of that era. The family name had been spelled Montour by all the English and American diarists and officials up to that time, but John Montour had clearly pronounced it Montier, as did all family members for the census takers in the first U.S. Census in l790 and all censuses thereafter. The Montour/Montier family is clearly Indian in all the records. John Montier (c.1746-1830) was, in all probability, Elizabeth Montier Cooper's father. John had inherited his father's lands near Pittsburgh and had received bounty land in Ohio for his service during the Revolution. In the l820 U.S. Census, his sons were living just across the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia (then Virginia) near present-day Smithfield, Ohio. Issac Oldham's farm lay just east of Wheeling. It would be rather impossible to believe that the only Montier family in the United States, and, moreover, one that lived near the Coopers, was not Elizabeth's family.
    The following February, on the 23rd, Mary "Polly" Cooper was born, certainly there in Hardin County. The "Josiah" Cooper name copied from the l800 tax list there was most probably Isaiah. A cursive "J" and I" look much alike. All through our family's history, the name Josiah has been confused with Isaiah in transcriptions of cursive records.
    The Thomas Carrs were either close friends or kinsmen because when Isaiah and Elizabeth moved north across the Ohio River into Indiana, the Carrs did also. It was in 1801 or 1802 that the Coopers settled on "Clark's Grant," the territory given in payment to General George Rogers Clark and his small army for their Revolutionary War service. Voting records show they lived in Springville.
    Springville (aka "Tullytown") was a rising and prosperous little town about four miles north of the Ohio River, just west of the town of Charlestown (which still exists today). As early as l799 a Frenchman had kept a store there. By 7 April l801, Springville had grown enough to be selected as the county seat. In l801 there were two taverns, a store, a blacksmith's shop, a wheelwright's shop, a hatter's shop, etc. A short distance west of the town lived Jonathan Jennings, the first governor of Indiana.
    Springville lay on the old Indian trail from the falls of the Ohio (Louisville) to the Indian nations of the north, west, and east. The location of the still houses and trading posts in Springville made it a great rendezvous place for Indians, where they would trade their furs, venison, and bear meat to the traders for whiskey, usually being swindled as well. White settlers there were often alarmed by the drunkenness and insolence of the Indians, which broke out sometimes into murderous violence. Springville and its vicinity was the only purely American settlement off of the Ohio River in Indiana at the time, although there were some Americans in the old French settlements. But after the county seat was removed to Jeffersonville in l802, the town began to dwindle away. A few years later it was totally gone. Not a vestige remains today.
    Isaiah appears on voting records and estray records over the years. All but one of his and Elizabeth's remaining children were born in Clark County: Rachel, 26 March l803; Enoch S., 12 March l805; Margaret, 15 September l807; Charlotte, 2 February 1810; Jane, 8 October 1812; William Shepherd, 12 December 1813; Isaiah Cooper, Junior, 18 June 1817; and John Milton Cooper, 19 April 1820.
    In the years preceding the War of 1812, the British had been conspiring with the Indians of the frontier against the United States, causing hostilities between the Indians and the frontier settlers. In 1811 General William Henry Harrison defeated the Shawnees at Tippecanoe Creek in northern Indiana Territory. When the war was declared in 1812, the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh allied himself with Britain. The lives of the frontier settlers were in great peril.
    On May 29, 1813, Isaiah joined Captain James Biggers' Company of Mounted Rangers, supplying his own horse. It was the duty of the company to roam over Indiana scouting for signs of Indians and, if found, to report these findings to the commanding general. At times the company coalesced with the larger army for battles. From December 1 to December 22, 1813, Isaiah was A.W.O.L. Elizabeth was giving birth to William at the time. A.W.O.L.'s on the frontier were not handled with the severity of A.W.O.L.'s today. He was merely docked the pay and perhaps reprimanded.
    Serving in Isaiah's company were John Cowan and his sixteen-year-old son James.  Cowan, from nearby Charlestown, became a close friend. The Coopers' daughter Margaret may have been named for Mrs. Margaret (Weir) Cowan, John's wife. Mrs. Cowan died about this time (1813). Not having a mother for his children was a crisis for a frontiersman, who spent all of his time laboring in the fields and on the farm. It was customary for widowed men to informally adopt out babies and the younger children to family and friends. This was how Esther Cowan, the Cowans' ten-year-old daughter, entered the Cooper family. There may have been a second Cowan daughter adopted by the Coopers as well. Esther was the same age as Rachel Cooper, and the two were probably close friends. That plus the fact that Elizabeth seems to have been a warm, maternal figure, probably made it an easy transition for Esther.
    In the spring of l817, Isaiah left Clark County with some of his neighbors to prepare land on the White River for their families to settle on. The place was called "the Dunn Settlement" in what is now Washington Township, Owen County, Indiana, but the county didn't exist at that time. Land records show that on February 20, 1817, Isaiah claimed 149 acres in Section 29 Township 10 Range 3; on November 28, he claimed another 376.66 acres in Section 28. Elizabeth remained behind at least until late June. We know this because Isaiah, Junior, was born in Clark County on June 18. Elizabeth probably joined her husband after their log cabin was built. Gardens and corn crops were planted around the stumps of the cleared land around the cabins.
    That fall an early frost hit the corn crop. The settlers were forced to hang the frostbitten ears in the lofts of their cabins to dry, but the corn blackened as it dried. The only way to sell it was to pound it into meal. This they accomplished by creating a log mortar and pestle. The mortar was a hollowed-out stump filled with the corn, and the pestle was a log tied high on a springy sapling. The settlers would pull down on the pestle to crush the corn. The tree would spring it back up.
Growing corn for their livelihoods presented the frontiersmen with a problem. There weren't roads, and corn was too bulky and perishable to ship to the East profitably. So they took to fermenting it and transporting the compact, valuable whiskey on flatboats to the Eastern markets. Unfortunately their economic necessity to make whiskey spawned a myriad of alcoholics among its producers.
    A July 4, l876 article in the Owen County Journal, speaking of the earliest celebrations of Independence Day in that county, gives us a glimpse of Isaiah in action. The Fourth of July in 1818 was being celebrated on the farm of Daniel Beem where the town of Spencer is now located. Feats of strength and marksmanship were typical male endeavors at such events in those days. Fifteen or twenty men were taking part in an event which demanded that the participant jump and shoot at a mark. Isaiah had been bragging up the abilities of Daniel Matheny, not yet his son-in-law. A neighbor, John McNaught, was proclaiming the invincibility of Neely Beem. Probably adding to the rivalry was the corn liquor that was in abundance. The escalating contention resulted in Cooper and McNaught betting twenty dollars on the outcome of the shooting event, a very large amount of money in those days. Each man wrote a note for twenty dollars. Realizing that his neighbors had gotten in over their heads in the competition, a man named Richard Morris got hold of the notes and tore them up, incurring Isaiah's wrath. Apparently Isaiah began cursing Morris, who was about to throw down his shot pouch in preparation for a fight. Morris's friends seized him and took him away, terminating the bet and the trouble.
    Isaiah was one of the founders of Owen County in 1819. He became a county commissioner, was on the first grand jury, and put up part of the bond for the fledgling county government. On 12 February 1820, he donated 21 ½ acres for the first county seat but reserved the right to operate a ferry at the site. This was the birth of Spencer, Indiana. Isaiah's land donation was on the White River near the future courthouse. It was created into a park, which still bears his name: Cooper Park. (History of Owen County, pp.562-565; 664) (History of Clay and Owen Counties, Indiana, 1883, pp.687-688, pp.693-694) Among the members of the traverse jury were Joshua Matheny and William Wood Cooper. William Wood Cooper, Isaiah's cousin, and Isaiah were among those who built the first road in Owen County, which led from Spencer down the river to the line dividing townships 9 and 10. William's wife, Mary Matheny Cooper, was a sister to Joshua, Daniel, and & Henry Matheny, Isaiah's kinsmen who had left Hardin County, Kentucky, to join him in Indiana. In April of 1819, William was appointed constable of Washington Township, succeeded the following year by his brother-in-law Joshua Matheny. The Mathenys were second cousins to the Coopers; so the family played a very important role in the early years of Owen County.
    The last of the Cooper children, John Milton Cooper, was born in Owen County on 19 April 1820, the year the first Cooper grandchild, Adam Matheny, was born.
    On July 4, 1822, Isaiah's second child, Rachel, married Henry Younger Matheny, Daniel Matheny's brother, further cementing the kinship between the Cooper and Matheny families.
    On 7 August l824, Isaiah was commissioned to be a justice of the peace. It was his duty to dispense justice among his neighbors. His heavy drinking, however, did not lend itself to sound decision-making. He quickly created a swarm of enemies. The Owen County Archives has several bailbond records that Isaiah was prosecuted for slander, assault and battery, etc. His constituents pushed for impeachment proceedings. There were numerous charges, probably all stemming from Isaiah's alcohol use. The easiest charge upon which to convict him was "willful neglect of duty" as evidenced by his being too drunk ever to attend a meeting of the Board of Justices. He was removed from office, and a war-like atmosphere existed among the Cooper family and the rest of the community. Isaiah's impeachment records can be found in the Indiana House Journal 1825-26, pp.115-119; and the Indiana Senate Journal, pp.155-167. It was time for a new start for the Coopers.
    It was in l827 that the family settled in Derry Township in the center of Pike County, Illinois, which hugs the Mississippi River in the west central part of the state. [1888 obituary of William S. Cooper] Here the clan endured a legendary blizzard-cold snap as well as an Indian War in the early l830's. The Coopers were the third family to settle in Derry Township. The marriage of Enoch Cooper to his foster sister, Esther Cowan, was the first marriage in Derry Township. Neither Mary nor Rachel Matheny ever moved to Pike County.
    About l838, when all of Isaiah and Elizabeth's children were grown, the couple were acquainted with a German farmer named Johnson, whose wife had recently died, leaving him with a four-year-old daughter, Charlotte. Johnson soon acquired a new wife; thereafter Charlotte was treated like the proverbial stepchild, being beaten and deprived of food. Perhaps at Elizabeth's suggestion, the Coopers offered to rear the pathetic girl. The Johnsons consented, that being one less mouth to feed.
    In 1843 Isaiah and Elizabeth's two oldest daughters left Missouri for Oregon. Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth Montier Cooper died (c.1845) and was buried somewhere there in Derry Township. Isaiah's son John and his wife Jane moved to the Cooper farm to live with Isaiah and his foster daughter.
    The Coopers were probably already planning to cross the plains to Oregon in 1846 and had probably made arrangements to sell Isaiah's farm when one day the Johnsons paid a visit, asking to have the now-large Charlotte returned to them. Isaiah felt that Charlotte was being viewed by the Johnsons only as a workhorse to help with the chores and to tend her now-numerous half-brothers and sisters. He felt she would once more be abused. Charlotte and the Coopers had bonded as a family, and he did not want to give her up; so Isaiah asked the Johnsons if he could have one last day with Charlotte. The Johnsons consented to Isaiah's returning the girl the next day. But the old man had other plans.
    As soon as the Johnsons left, he quickly packed bags for himself and Charlotte and headed for Independence immediately. His sons and their families were to meet him and Charlotte in Independence and then cross the plains to Oregon.
    Twenty-two year old Francis Parkman, a Boston Brahmin, was on a post-graduate (of Harvard) adventure on the Oregon Trail in 1846 and was in Westport in the spring. He may well have been describing the Coopers in his The Oregon Trail (p.16) when he states
....While I was in town, a train of emigrant wagons from Illinois passed through, to join the camp on the prairie, and stopped on the principal street. A multitude of healthy children's faces was peeping out from under the covers of the wagons. Here and there a buxom damsel was seated on horseback, holding over her sunburnt face an old umbrella or a parasol, once gaudy enough, but now miserably faded. The men, very sober-looking countrymen, stood about their oxen; and as I passed I noticed three old fellows, who, with their whips in their hands, were zealously discussing the doctrine of regeneration...."

    We have the reminiscences of a person who traveled west with the Coopers, a Philander C. Davis. His notes were written October 16, 1916, when he was a very old man, close to ninety. His memory caused him to forget some of the people who crossed the plains with him. During the processing of writing, he would add names as he remembered them. It is probable that he forgot the names of Enoch and Isaiah Cooper, Jr. It is unlikely that these two sons of Isaiah's crossed the plains in 1846 in a different wagon train than their father and brothers. Mr. Davis's manuscript can be found in the Oregon Historical Society Library in Portland:

....I traveled with my Brother In law James Brown And MY sister his wife who was the eldest of my fathers family of ten, four daughters and six sons also my brother Leander Sylvanus 4 years my senior and my brother Albert Gallatin 2 years my senior also Nicholas Schrum and his good wife and three grown sons and a nephew whose christian name I have forgotten his surname was Wimberlie I believe also Wm Elliot and wife and 3 children I forgot to mention Mr Schrums three daughters, two full grown, one between girlhood and womanhood Jack Schrum youngest of family lived near Mitchell in 1894; There was also another notable family or two  Mr Wingfield who settled on the Molalla near where good old Harrison Wright lived and died. Also the Coopers Wm and John and their familie; They were brothers of the wives of Daniel and Henry Matheny who came to Oregon in 1843 Isaiah and Daniel Junior came out to meet the Coopers and met the train in Tygh Valley I have seen the hill often that we climbed out of Tyghe and could hardly believe that we had done the job with worn oxen but our loads were light having been nearly all been eaten on the long journey. There was one more family in our company, Mr. Ish and wife and one child also two or three single men. Mr. Williams was one of them. From the Blue mountains we traveled down the Umatilla river to some point and from there to Willow creek and from there to some point on the Columbia below Willow creek and from there camped on the river nearly every night until we reached Deschutes river being compelled to climb the bluff in the morning and descend in the evening in order to get water and grass for the stock A few years later there was a better route found and traveled further south back from the breaks and gorges next to the river. We did not see a bridge or ferry after we left the Missouri state line near the town of Independence on 10th of May 1846. We forded every stream that we crossed beginning with the Kansas called Kaw at that time. 2nd South Platte nearly two miles wide shallow but swift and boiling full of moving sand Woe to the team that did not keep moving at a good pace. 3rd the Laramie near Fort Laramie narrow clear but swift and deep. 4th North Platte wift clear and narrow. On the deep fords the wagons beds were raised on the bolsters by blocks to keep the force of water from striking them and forcing them down stream and wetting the loads. 5th Green River broad clear shallow and beautiful. 6th Portneuf near Fort Hall the most beautiful broad green lovely valley and stream that I saw on the long trip. 7th Snake River crossing and Three Islands so called there was three channels but two islands. They were deep swift and frightfully dangerous; 8th second crossing of the Snake at old Fort Boise three quarters of a mile wide deep but a gentle slow moving current. 9th the Deschutes. I think we crossed near where what was called the Miller bridge or below for I know I had fearful feelings of being swept into the Columbia not more than 2 or three hundred yards below. I drove a team across both crossings of Snake But cannot remember whether I drove at Deschutes or not. From Deschutes we went to where the town of Dufur is now remaining there two or three days resting the teams giving the women time to wash clothes, From there we went to Tygh [Valley] and from there to Barlows gate Before starting into and over the Cascade range I must mention some others of the Co whom I had forgotten old Grandfather Cooper [Isaiah Cooper] father of the Coopers and two before mentioned Mrs Matheneys The Matheneys having come over in 1843. Also Frank McClintic [McClintock] brother of Mrs. John Cooper there may have been one or more others whom I have forgotten. Isaiah Matheney Frank McClintic and I were detailed at the entrance of the mountain to go ahead with the loose cattle so as to hurry them through the laurel thickets and prevent their becoming poisoned thereby. We drove them to the home of Daniel Matheney Senior ten miles below Salem on west side of the Willamette forded the river just below his ferry his place was on west side of river opposite Jason Lees old first mission where his Indians died faster than he could convert them.....I will now return to the Barlow Gate on the east side of Cascades but what I know of the trains crossing is limited gotten from those who were with it in passing I was too busy keeping the cattle out of the dense thickets and especially one plump little yearling heifer belonging to Grand Father Cooper which had a habit of dropping out and hiding I did not have time to note the conformation of the country streams I remember Zig Zag and Huckleberry camp at foot of Mt Hood. Also Laurel Hill where Mr. Wingfield's family wagon ended over on top of the team and frightened Mrs Wingfield almost into fits I knew the wagon had driven it often on the way over front wheels too low for rear wheels.....

    The Oregon Spectator, a newspaper already operating in Oregon City, heralded the progress of the 1846 immigrants as they began to trickle in to town:

September 3, 1846-Immigrants Arrive at Oregon City; Bring News of Wagon Trains

September 17, 1846-Families Arrive at Oregon City Via Barlow Road [These were the first to use the newly-opened road.]

October 29, 1846-145 Wagons Arrive; 7 Enroute Via Barlow Road

Now most of the Cooper sons and daughters were with their father with the exception of Charlotte Shinn, who remained in Pike County, Illinois, and possibly Jane, about whom nothing is known.
    It appears from early census records as if Isaiah resumed living with his youngest son John. We know that John later operated a liquor store in California; his views toward alcohol were probably compatible with Isaiah's own. The religious Mathenys were probably not as accommodating. For the next two years, Isaiah was surrounded by his family in Oregon's pristine setting. But California's gold rush was to end all that.
    When gold was discovered, everyone left his young farm for a try at the yellow lucre, but Isaiah and his party were not among the vanguard, arriving in California in June of 1849. Later in the summer forty-niners from the East arrived, bringing disease with them. A miner's work was hard labor in cold streams; it was the streams that were worked at first. Fruits and vegetables were hard to come by, so the gold-seekers were easy prey for the flux and the fevers that had arrived. Disease hit the camp where the Coopers were entrenched. The diary of A.R.Burbank, later of Lafayette, Oregon, gives us a brief sketch of the camp:

September 21, 1849
'Johnsons' Crossed River here, 59 ft. wide, a gravel bed 100 yards, road forks. We taken right hand past shanty's, one hospital, several sick, doctor sick. Family in adobe with Liquor shop. Man is Cooper from Pike Co. Ill--to Oregon in l846 and here in June 1849. He don't like Oregon and California. Intends to return to Illinois.

    This canyon where the Coopers searched for gold has a creek that feeds into the North Branch of the American River a mile or two west of the El Dorado County hamlet of Pilot Hill. It is named for them: Cooper Canyon. It was here that "camp fever," probably typhoid, claimed the lives of Isaiah, his son John, his son-in-law Henry Matheny, Rachel's daughter Sarah Jane Layson, and perhaps others in the family. All died in the fall of l849.
    Those who died in Cooper Canyon were buried at what is now Coloma, California, but then was the site of Capt. John Sutter's sawmill. It had been there that the California gold was first discovered. Visitors will not discover any family tombstones there, probably because anyone who happened to be a stonecutter by trade was not in California to cut stones, but rather to look for gold. The site is now Gold Discovery State Park. There are a museum, a reconstruction of Sutter's mill, and mining exhibits.

    Elizabeth was the oldest daughter of the eight children of Mary Cooper and Daniel Matheny. She was born 26 March 1823 in Owen County, Indiana, and moved with her family to Illinois in 1827 and then, in 1837,  to Platte County, Missouri.  There the very pious "Lizabeth" met young Henry Hewitt, whose family had arrived in the area two years after the Mathenys. The young couple married 25 February 1841.   
     Henry had a brother, Adam Hewitt, who crossed the plains to Oregon in 1842 and   was one of the fabled men at Champoeg who voted for the Provisional Government.  (His name is on the monument at Champoeg.)  Henry had wanted to accompany his brother in 1842, but he wanted his in-laws, Daniel and Mary Matheny, to accompany him and Adam.  Daniel could not ready his family to leave so quickly, saying "Henry, if you will wait till next year, I will sell out and we will all go." [Fred Lockley column "In Earlier Days," 6 March 1918, Oregon Journal, based on an interview of Charlotte Matheny Kirkwood.]
      On this journey Henry Hewitt, drove one of Daniel and Mary Matheny's wagons.  Driving that wagon, Henry was the first to cross the Blue Mountains of Oregon and the second to reach the end of the Oregon Trail at The Dalles.  The Hewitts made a donation land claim just north of Elizabeth's parents.
        The winter of 1843-44 was spent in a one-room cabin on the Tualatin plains near present-day Hillsboro near Elizabeth's parents' family.  The Hewitts' cabin had been built for them by Henry's brother, Adam Hewitt, who had come to Oregon the previous year.  It was a dismal, rainy winter that had the family wondering why they had ever left Missouri.  It was here, on April 2, 1844, that the Hewitt's second child,  Daniel Matheny Hewitt, was born.             
    That fall the Hewitts settled on 640 acres, the site of present-day Unionvale, Yamhill County, Oregon, just north of Daniel and Mary Matheny's claim.  Joseph McLoughlin, halfbreed son of Dr. John McLoughlin of the Hudson Bay Company, had built a small one-room log house on the place and had planted from seed about one hundred apple trees  that were just beginning to bear fruit. The Hewitts gave McLoughlin a yoke of oxen and four hundred dollars for his squatter's rights, and they moved onto the property.  There were five or six fenced acres.  There were large fir and oak trees covering one fourth of the land, the balance being prairie.  Here Elizabeth reared her daughter and many sons with nightly readings from the scriptures by the fireside.
    Henry Hewitt joined his in-laws when they went to the California gold fields in 1848.  Apparently he followed the gold rushes, because he was gone during the winter of 1862 to gold fields, probably in Idaho.  Various family members participated in the Idaho gold rush, including Henry's brother-in-law, Joseph M. Garrison.  During this time his family wintered in Salem.  Another time, in 1874, the family wintered in Amity during Henry's absence while looking for gold, according to the memoirs of his son Jasper Hewitt.  The 1874 venture was probably to the Black Hills of South Dakota because the gold rush was occurring there and his brother-in-law, Jasper Matheny, is known to have been there that year.  In 1864 Henry was elected a commissioner of Yamhill County.[Lang's History of Willamette Valley, p.895] The 1865 personal propety tax list shows Henry and Elizabeth to have been quite prosperous.  That year they either owned or produced 30 tons of hay, no tobacco, 500 bushels of apples, 40 hogs, 10 horses, 28 cattle, 100 pounds of wool, 40 bushels of potatoes, 40 sheep, 3 bushels of corn, 200 pounds of butter, 1,200 bushels of wheat, 1,000 bushels of oats.  170 acres of their 640 were under cultivation.
    In the fall of 1875, leaving some of their sons to farm the Yamhill County land, the Hewitts purchased the Salem ferry from Elizabeth's brother, Jasper Matheny.  The purchase included eighty acres on the west bank of the Willamette River opposite Salem and four lots on the Salem side where State Street ends at the river. The family lived alternately on the east and west sides of the river, finally building a new home on the west side.  In 1883 the Hewitts sold the ferry and the Salem city lots to a Mr. Foster, receiving as payment $6,000 and 240 acres on Mt.Scott in Clackamas County near Portland.  This land was sold to Harvey W. Scott in 1888 for $15,000 in cash.  This land was where Lincoln Park Memorial Cemetery now lies and extended just over the top of the mountain.  In the fall of 1883, the  family moved back to their original farm after selling their 80 acres in Polk County (next to the Salem ferry) for $2,000.  The original price the Hewitts had paid for the ferry and the 80 acres had been $9,000;  so they had realized quite a profit ($14,000).
     It was in the autograph book of Ann Eliza's daughter, Mary Thornton, that Elizabeth wrote this autobiographical note on 24 September 1885:

     Mary--as I hardly know what to write in your album
     On this page I will give you a short sketch of my history.  I was born Mar. 26, 1823, in Owen County, Indiana, and in 1825 my Father and Mother (Daniel and Mary Matheny) moved to Edgar County, Illinois, and in 1830 we removed to Schuyler County of the same state, and in the year 1837 we moved to Platt County, Missouri, where we remained until 1843, and on the 8th day of May of the same year, I with my husband and our child started for Oregon, and on the 8th of Nov. of the same year we reached our destination and have lived in Oregon for forty-one years.
    During my short stay in Missouri, there is three events I will mention.  The first is my conversion when it pleased God for Christ's sake to forgive my sins and fill my soul so full of the love of God that I still thank and praise his Holy Name for such wonderful grace.
    The second is my marriage in 1841, and the third was the birth of your dear Mother who has left us to dwell in a world of light and glory.
    I am now sixty two years old,
    written by your grandmother
                Elizabeth Hewitt
                Sept. the 24th 1885
[copied from Elizabeth's granddaughter Mary Thornton's autograph book by Jasper L. Hewitt, January 2, 1927]
    Henry Hewitt was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican and reared his children to believe as he did.  He loyally read the Weekly Oregonian.  His grandchildren recalled Henry holding a coal oil lamp in one hand, the Oregonian in the other as he perused the newspaper the evening that it arrived.   
    Now aging and financially secure, the Hewitts did not leave their donation land claim again.  Both died in 1899, Henry on January 15 and Elizabeth on October 13.  Henry's funeral was at the Hopewell Church with Rev. C.E.Crandall, pastor of the Dayton Methodist Episcopal Church, presiding.  Rev.Crandall also conducted the funeral of Elizabeth at the Hewitt home ten months later. The Hewitts are buried at the Hopewell Cemetery. 
    A half century after the Hewitts' deaths, their children placed a monument on the west side of Wallace Road near Unionvale to mark their parents' donation land claim.  Since 1919 the Hewitt descendants have been reuniting.  This was the origin of the Hewitt-Matheny-Cooper Family Assocation that still meets annually the first Sunday in August at the Maud Williamson State Park  south of Dayton, Oregon.   
        The Hewitt children were Ann Eliza, born 19 December 1841, married John L. Thornton January 28, 1864, died 12 August 1883;  Daniel Matheny Hewitt, farmer, born 2 April 1844, married Henrietta Miller September 16, 1867, died May 15, 1915 Monmouth, Polk County, OR, buried there; Henry Harrison Hewitt, lawyer, born December 7, 1846, married Maggie Rowland March 6, 1872, died February 18, 1931, Albany, OR, buried there; Adam Wesley Hewitt, farmer, born April 2, 1849, married Cynthia Pitman 21 July 1872, died September 9, 1930, Portland, OR, buried at Hopewell; James Andrew Hewitt, farmer and preacher, born August 25, 1851, married Mary Jane Rose, March 3, 1873, died June 10, 1925, Yamhill County, OR; Isaiah Cooper Hewitt, farmer, born May 5, 1854, married Linnie Holland, 1879, died June 22, 1930, Salem, OR, buried at Hopewell; Matthew Cresswell Hewitt, carpenter, born January 17, 1857, married (1) Malvina Janz (2) Rosa Hamlin, 1889, died August 29, 1945, Roseville, CA, buried there; Jasper Lewis Hewitt, dentist, born November 5, 1859, married Ida Ellen Harris, February 7, 1885, died April 6, 1946, Portland, OR, buried at Hopewell; Horry Wilbur Hewitt, born March 30, 1865, jeweler in La Grande, OR, not married, died May 3, 1947, Salem, OR, buried at Hopewell; Lorin LeRoy Hewitt, born May 5, 1869, Wheatland, doctor in Estacada, OR, married (1) Lena Miller, 1892, (2) Mabelle Holmes, 1928, died January 18, 1950, Dayton, OR, buried at Hopewell.

Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

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    Ann Eliza was born 19 December 1841, in Platte County, Missouri, the first child of Henry and Elizabeth Matheny Hewitt, the only daughter of ten children, the only child born in Missouri, the only one to die under seventy years of age, and the only one of the Hewitt children to make the epic journey of 1843 across the plains to Oregon;  all the sons were born in Oregon. On January 28, 1864, she married John L. Thornton.  The Thorntons belonged to the United Brethren  Church and had six children before both parents died in the prime of life.  Ann Eliza was forty-one when she died 12 August  1883.  John  survived her by only three years, dying 17 May 1887.  Both are buried in the cemetery at Hopewell, Oregon. Ann Eliza's much younger brother, Jasper L. Hewitt, in his later years, wrote a memoir of his family.  He described his sister caringly:
Ann Eliza Hewitt, my only sister, was married when I was yet in my fourth year so can not remember but one event before her marriage of her home life.  One of our cousins a very large girl Elizabeth (Lizzie) Matheny who was much larger than brother Mathew backed him against the wall and bit his arm leaving the marks of her teeth as you would suppose  Mathew's howl raised Ann Eliza quick and as Mother was not at home that day the sight of the bitten arm caused Ann Eliza to throw Lizzie on the floor and administer a spanking that, with the seen [sic] just before it, made an impresssion [that is] yet is quite vivid in my memory
    As a little boy I loved to spend the day with my married sister whom I loved  for she was so good to me and as her family grew up, I spent many happy days in her home.  She had a good husband a thorough christian man member of the "United Brethern Church."
        they had a lovely family of children...
   
    Ann Eliza's children were as follows:  (1) Mary Elizabeth Thornton, born 23 October 1864, Yamihill County, OR, married 31 May 1885 to Charles Dayton Ott (1858-1936), had one child, Otto Thornton Ott (1886-1956), who has many living descendants; Mary died 18 May 1891 at the age of twenty-six.  Like her mother, Mary was the oldest child, the only surviving daughter among several siblings, and, like her mother, died an untimely death. (2) Edgar Henry Thornton, born 7 March 1866, married 21 April 1891 to Lea Emma "Libby" Ott, (sister to Charles D. Ott, who married Edgar's sister Mary),  one daughter, Florence Thornton Phelan (1895-?); Edgar practiced medicine in Portland, died from hydrophobia (rabies) on 21 June 1915, buried at Hopewell (3) Olive Thornton, born 30 June 1869, died 10 September 1869 (4) Linzy Matheny Thornton, born 11 December 1870, Yamhill County, OR, married 6 April 1901 to  Lily Pearl Hill (1872-1907) and in 1913 to Mayme Le May (1876-1958); he had no children, died 2 May 1936, buried Hopewell, OR (5) Olin Dow Thornton [again, the vestige of Lorenzo Dow's influence] born 20 April 1873, practiced dentistry, married 24 November 1897 to Mary Elizabeth "Lady"  Hill (1876-1936), died 27 February 1938, buried at Hopewell, no children (6) Ruth Thornton, born and died on September 7, 1875, buried at Hopewell (7) Carl Doan Thornton born 9 December 1876. married 22 August 1913 to Mrs. Mattie (Squire) Smith (1882-?), one son, Edgar Hewitt Thornton (1917-1989), died 9 May 1935, buried Hopewell. OR (8) Jasper Thornton, born 19 April 1879, died 1 May 1879, buried Hopewell, OR (9) Ladrue Leslie Thornton, born 1 November 1880, Married 22 September 1918 to Rada F. Antrim (1895-1962), died 20 June 1950, buried at Hopewell, children:  Leo Maze Thornton (1922-), John Antrim Thornton (1925-1925, and Myron Thornton (1926-1926).
Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

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    Named for his grandfather, Daniel was born April 12, 1844, the spring following his parents' trip across the plains.
He was the only Hewitt child born in the small log cabin on the Tualatin Plains near present-day Hillsboro, Oregon,  where the family spent their first year in Oregon.  Daniel was one of the earliest white births in Oregon.  There had been only a  handful of such births up to that time.  Most of the white men in Oregon prior to 1843 had married squaws and their children were halfbreeds.  There had been some white births among the missionaries but no others.  The cabin  where Daniel was born had been  built for the Hewitts before their arrival by Daniel's uncle, Adam Hewitt.  When  Daniel was yet a newborn, the Hewitts settled on their donation land claim near present-day Unionvale in Yamhill County. It was there Daniel grew to manhood and learned farming, to which he dedicated his life.
    On September 16, 1867, Daniel married Henrietta ("Etta") Miller, daughter of George and Tabatha Curren Miller, who had come to Oregon from Iowa in 1862.  Later Etta's brother Merritt Miller's children would marry into the Hewitt-Matheny family:
Lena Miller would marry Daniel's youngest brother, Lorin Hewitt; and Pearl Miller would marry Fred Kirkwood, Daniel's cousin.
In the fall of 1872 the Hewitts moved to Polk County, where Daniel owned a large farm on the Luckiamute River.  In the fall of 1906,
Daniel retired from farming and moved into the town of Monmouth.  There, on 15 May 1915, he suffered a stroke and died.
He was buried in a cemetery just south of Monmouth.  At that time his son Early E. was living in Monmouth, while his son Guy G. Hewitt was living on the farm on the Luckiamute.  Etta survived Daniel by nineteen years, dying 20 December 1934, in Monmouth.
       
    His brother Jasper had this to say about Daniel in his memoirs:

     I do not remember many events in Daniel's life at home as he married when I was yet in my seventh year.  I do remember how fine he looked dressed up and with  peg-heeled red tight-fitting boots that fit like a glove with his trousers inside.  These heels stood well under the boot so the track on the ground was as small as a child's foot.  These were hand-made and in the style for dashing young men and were made of calf (hide).  He also had a family failing--he was a wonderful athlete, could beat all from far and near at two hops and a jump running.
    On one occasion when we boys went swimming with Father in the (Willamette) river just back of the place, Adam took a bad cramp and was sinking in deep water when Daniel swam to him, grabbing him by the hair as he went down for the third time and succeeded in safely landing him to dry ground, a great hero in the eyes of this small boy.
    As a boy almost grown, I worked one harvest for Daniel and Etta on their 470 acre farm in Polk County, Oregon, on the Luckamute River eight miles from Monmouth.  I found as we ran a threshing machine thru the neighborhood that Daniel was beloved by all his neighbors.  They would say that his word was as good as any man's note.  He lived on this farm for many years, rearing his family of two sons and finally died in his home in Monmouth leaving his wife and two sons and three grandchildren.  His body was laid to rest in the burying ground just outside of Monmouth as you go to the Luckamute Country.  Daniel was a faithful member of the Evangelical Church.

    Early Ellsworth Hewitt, the older son of Daniel and Etta Hewitt,  did not choose to be a farmer.  Born July 16, 1868, he was named for two Civil War military leaders.  Because his Miller grandfather was strongly pro-South, he was named for Confederate cavalry leader Jubal Early, and because his Hewitt grandfather was adamantly pro-Union, his middle name became Ellsworth for the colonel who organized the first Union zouave regiment.  Early studied pharmacy and owned a drug store in Monmouth until 1925.  Then he moved to Eugene, where he continued this line of work.  Apparently Early married twice.  His first wife was Jennie Davis (1869-1921).  By Jennie he had a son, Lowell Dow Hewitt (1892-1982).  On 14 November 1895, Early married his second wife, Lula Winifred Waller (1869-1942).  From this marriage a daughter Eileen Edith Hewitt Travis was born.  Early died May 2, 1948, in Eugene, OR, at the age of seventy-nine.
    The younger son of Daniel and Etta Hewitt was Guy Glen Hewitt, born July 15, 1875, on the farm near Monmouth.  Guy followed his father's inclination toward farming.  On September 5, 1897, he married Cordelia H. Harmon (1880-1933), with whom he had one son, Derrel D. Hewitt (1910-1987).  After his father's death, the Monmouth farm was sold.   Guy then purchased a small
farm on Greenwood Road near Rickreall on Rickreall Creek.  There he built a house and lived out his life.  He was a dairyman, specializing in champion Jersey cows.  Guy died at his home May 24, 1936, three years after his wife Cordelia's death.  Until his death in 1987, their  son, Derrel Hewitt, lived in the house that Guy had built in 1920 on Greenwood Road.  When Derrel died in 1987, he willed the house and land to his grandson, Brian Hewitt, then in his early twenties.  Currently Brian operates a truck farm and nursery on the site and yet another generation is growing up in the house that Guy Hewitt built. 
Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

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    The third child and second son of Henry and Elizabeth Matheny Hewitt, Henry Harrison Hewitt was born December 7, 1846, the first of the ten Hewitt children to be born on the Hewitt Donation Land Claim.  He attended the school on his parents' land and in September of 1866 entered Willamette University. Before graduating, Henry worked two terms teaching, one in Marion County and one in Yamhill County.  Graduating from Willamette in 1870, he taught for another seven years:  a year as principal  at  the Baptist college in McMinnville,  two years as principal of the public schools of Amity, two years as principal at Scio, and one year as principal at Lafayette Academy in Yamhill County.  While teaching at Amity he was the Yamhill County Superintendent of Schools for a year (1872).  His last three years of teaching were spent at Albany Collegiate Institute, teaching Greek, Latin, and mathematics.  While teaching there, he studied law and was admitted to practice in December of 1877.
    On July 2, 1879, he opened a practice of his own in Albany with H. Bryant and later was associated with O.H. Irvine.  Later that year he was elected to the School Board in Albany.  In 1888 he was elected District Attorney for Linn, Marion, Yamhill, Polk, and Tillamook counties.  In 1894 he was elected circuit court judge and served until 1898.  From 1898 until his death, Henry was senior partner of Hewitt and Sox.  Like his father, he was an avid Republican and served on the  Republican State Central Committee.
    Henry married Maggie J. Rowland (1850-1899), the daughter of Jeremiah Rowland, March 6, 1872.  They had one daughter, Olga Lenore Hewitt (1874-1952).  After Maggie's death, Henry remarried September 20, 1905 to  Wallula Adelia Laughead of Salem, who had been his first wife's dressmaker; there were no children from this marriage.  He died in Albany, February 18, 1931, at the age of eighty-four; his wife and daughter survived him.  He was buried at the Masonic Cemetery in Albany.
    Of his brother Henry, Jasper Hewitt recalled  

As of my only sister and oldest brother, so of Henry.  I can not remember much of his life at home because he left for Willamette University at Salem in the fall of 1866 when I was but
seven years of age.  Henry spent four years in Willamette, graduating in 1870 and immediately began a ten-year period of teaching school, was married, and studied law, which he was to practice for fifty-odd years.  So, as is usual when a young person leaves home for college, the home life is about done.  Henry's wonderful life at home as a boy and his later years had a wonderful influence on my life.  I remember him as a young man, steady, studious, cheerful, and always with a good word for things worthwhile and condemnation for dishonesty and trickery.  After the death of Father and Mother, I often looked to Henry for advice.
    Henry was a swift runner and an athlete and was always ready for a coon hunt or any honest sport.
    My first day at school as a visitor was to the old schoolhouse at or near the northwest corner of the old farm, under a very large, spreading oak tree.  I was a very small
boy but all of my older brothers were there.  The teacher was a Mr. Turner.  I sat just across the aisle from Henry during the day.  I suppose I got restless and caused a disturbance.  Mr Turner, the teacher, threw a large piece of chalk the size of a hen's egg and struck the desk just alongside of me, frightening me nearly out of my wits.  Henry, always ready for justice to be maintained, said to me, "Jasper, throw it back at him!"   But this small boy was much too scared for that, as Turner was a very large man. 

    Henry's only child, Olga, died childless, her only child having died in infancy.  Born in Scio, OR, October 22, 1874, she attended  Albany College and later married Dr. Charles Joseph Bushnell, a social science  professor at Albany College, now Lewis and Clark College.   Her husband's career caused the couple to move a great deal.  He worked at Heidelberg College in Tiffin, OH; Trinity Union College in Waihachi, TX; Oklahoma Agriculture and Mechanical College in Stillwater, OK; Lawrence College in Appleton, TX; president of Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR, 1913-1917; professor of sociology at University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, from 1919.  Bushnell was head of the Sociology Department for many years and did slum clearance work in Toledo.  He founded Chi Beta Chi social fraternity there, and the Bushnell home was always filled with members of that fraternity.  At the time of Charles's death in 1950, Olga was teaching at Mount Vernon School in Toledo.  She died two years after her husband and was returned for burial next to her parents at the Albany Masonic Cemetery.  Henry H. Hewitt has no living descendants.

Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

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     Adam Hewitt was born April 2, 1849, at a time when his father and Grandfather Matheny were in the California gold fields shoveling gravel into a "long Tom" to enrich  the growing family.  He was the fourth child of Henry and Elizabeth Matheny Hewitt; he was born on the family farm at present-day Unionvale, Yamhill County, Oregon.  Like his brothers, he attended the school on the northwest corner of the farm, and then went into farming.  After his parents' deaths in 1899, Adam settled on the northern portion of his parents' donation land claim in what came to be called "Adam's Grove, " a grove of oak trees in which his home was set.  His brother James Andrew Hewitt farmed the southern portion.  The first Hewitt family reunions were held at the old Henry and Elizabeth Hewitt home, but then they began to be held in Adam's grove, although one or two were held at Andrew Hewitt's farm.
    Adam's brother Jasper had this to say about Adam:

     Many, many of my boyhood days revolve around my hero--Adam, just ten years my senior.  As the story of my Mother goes, Adam would pick this little baby up (Jasper), carry me about, put me on his head or shoulder, toss me about, and call me his "little squirrel."  So as I grew older, I would say "I is Addie's peril," trying to say squirrel.  Mother used to take this little baby and her washing, Adam and her other smaller boys and walk a quarter mile through the woods to a spring, pull down a vine maple, fasten a quilt to it, and tie me in it.
When the maple would raise me up, Adam would swing me and sing to me while Mother did the washing.  I did not think so much of this when Mother used to tell me of this, but now after she has been gone more than 32 years and I have children and grandchildren, it mellows my heart. 
    Adam was the hero of our family and the neighborhood.  What he could not do in our minds was not worthwhile.  He could run, jump, wrestle, work, ride wild horses, catch wild game, fight if imposed upon--though he wasn't quarrelsome, always of a happy disposition, an optomist of the optomists--and could do anything that was to be done.  At one time when the dogs had a fox in a hollow log, he had it scared out and , as it came, he threw himself with a big white hat in his hands onto the fox, holding it  tight to the ground  till it was fastened.  He took it home alive.  I loved to be with him, work with him, hunt with him--time will not permit me to tell of the many pleasant events that flit through my mind in regard to him.
    When Adam was an old man at one of our family reunions, he told us all to listen to his story how he was considered the wildest of the family when a young man, but how his life had been changed when he took Jesus Christ as his savior from sin, and the peace and joy that came into his life.  He exorted all to follow this example as it would be the happiest day their lives.
 
    Adam married one of the nine Pitman girls who had attended school on the Hewitt land along side the nine Hewitt boys.  Cynthia Jane Pitman (1855-1932) married Adam July 21, 1872, in Yamhill County.  Adam farmed in the Dayton area during his parents' lifetimes before buying out his  brothers' interests in the northern portion of the old family farm.  Adam and Cynthia had three children:  Myrtle Alvertice, 1875; Martha "Mabel," December 23, 1878; and, much later, a son, Otis W. Hewitt, January 19, 1892.
    Adam's granddaughters, Meda Becker Johnson and Marie Stoutenburg Solberg, in a 1995 interview, told of Adam shooting a skunk on his land and taking in the orphaned babies of the skunk.  As the skunks grew, he would not permit his grandchildren to go near them, because, the skunks would become alarmed and spray them.  Apparently they remained calm and did not threaten Adam because they were accustomed to him, but the granddaughters said that the shed where Adam kept the skunks smelled foul even if the skunks didn't
threaten their grandfather. The women also said that their grandfather had been very active as an unofficial veterinarian for neighbors.  He called himself a "horse doctor" and even carried a satchel for his doctoring instruments.  His wife Cynthia did not look kindly on the many requests for her husband's services.  Once, when he prepared to go on a house call on a Sunday, she complained, and he answered," When the ox was in the mire, you pulled him out."
    Adam also raised bees.  He would don his bee hat and gloves and tie his trousers around his ankles.  He raised wheat and other grains, including buckwheat, which he raised because he was fond of buckwheat honey.  Adam built two different houses on his share of the old family Donation Land Claim.  The "old house" was still there as late as 1914.  Marie Solberg thinks Adam built the new house about 1918;  he was very active well into old age.  When a doctor prescribed a medication for Adam, he threw the medicine away, not trusting much in doctors, although his brother Lorin was one.  For a coulple of years Adam lived in Portland, where he worked for the Albina Fuel Company, probably hauling fuel.
    Meda had in her possession, issued to Adam in 1922, a  "Life License for Pioneer; Civil or Indian War Veteran; or Veteran of the Spanish-American War Who is a Resident of the Oregon State Soldiers' Home...to hunt game birds and animals and to angle in conformity with the law."  It is an interesting artifact that displays the value Oregon has always given its pioneers.
    But even Jasper's hero grew old and the inevitable came--Adam died September 9, 1930, at the age of eighty-one, a little more than two months after his brother Isaiah and five months before his brother Henry.  He was buried at the family cemetery in Hopewell, Oregon.  Cynthia did not survive her husband by long; she moved to Portland after Adam's death to live with her daughter, Mabel Stoutenburg, and died there January 3, 1932.
    The oldest of the children of Adam and Cynthia was Myrtle Alvertice Hewitt.  Myrtle married Walter Herman Becker, an area man with aspirations of becoming a doctor.  Apparently she waited for him to complete his studies at Willamette University, Oregon State College, and the University of Oregon,  for they were married June 14, 1900, when she was twenty-five and he, twenty-six.  They were married in Dayton, but later moved to Idaho, where Walter practiced for a few years before returning to practice in Portland.  At the time of his death in 1944, Walter Becker was practicing in Vanport, Oregon, which was swept away in the 1948 flood.
They had three children:  Haldon Becker, July 21, 1901; Meda Zillah Becker (Mrs. Nathaniel D. Johnson), February 16, 1908; and Herman Hewitt Becker, February 24, 1910.  Meda Johnson was secretary for many years of the Hewitt-Matheny-Cooper Family Association, and until her death a week before her eighty-eighth birthday, she remained very active.  When her final illness came, she was preparing for a foreign cruise.
    When Walter Becker was fifteen years old in 1890, a great flood came to the Willamette Valley, the one that destroyed Champoeg for the last time and also left  Wheatland moribund, the town founded by Daniel and Mary Cooper Matheny.  Although Walter hadn't yet joined the family, his account of that flood in Wheatland is of interest to us:

  
        FLOOD OF 1890 AT WHEATLAND

    During the freshet of 1890, I was at home with my father in the village of Wheatland, which is situated on low ground on the west bank of and near the Willamette River about twelve miles below Salem.  The village has a store, post office, blacksmith shop, and warehouse.
    It was the misfortune of some farmers to have held their grain, which was stored in the warehouse, expecting to get a higher price for it in the spring of 1890 than had been offered in the fall of 1889.
    In the latter part of January, 1890, the water began to rise and by February first, lacked but little more than three feet of being on the lower floor of the warehouse.  By this time those having grain in the warehouse were very much alarmed and came down to move the same to the upper floor.  Up to this time no one else seemed to be uneasy, but Sunday, February second, the water was in nearly every house in town and the men began taking their families in small boats to the high ground where they lived in a church until the waters subsided.  The water had been so swift up to twelve o'clock Sunday night that it was not considered safe to bring the ferry boat up from where it was tied near the river channel.  However, at that time the water did not seem so swift and we began ferrying.  The first load consisted of five horses, a cow, and a calf; with these we landed safely and went back after a flock of sheep.  On landing the sheep, we started out on a third trip.  It was now so dark that we could not see where to go, and before reaching town, we first ran onto the top of a small ash tree that stood in a hollow, and by much hard pulling got loose from it.  The next bad luck we had was to strike a stump that held us fast.  With a great deal of difficulty we succeeded in freeing ourselves for the second time.  It was 5 a.m. when we got back to town, where we waited for dawn.  In the morning of February 3,  the water was in both stores; in one it was so deep that we brought the goods out of the store in a small boat, the other one being on higher ground we could wade in and carry the goods out to the door until about
11a.m., that being the last trip in which I assisted as there were a great many people there from the country who were willing to help.  At 11a.m. while we were at the store putting on the last load of goods, the warehouse went down the river and as it turned over, the sacks of wheat could be seen plunging out into the water in such a manner as to remind us of a flock of sheep.    At 12a.m. February 3, I started out into the country, where I stayed with a farmer until the water went down.
    The water raised until Wednesday, February 5, to the height of 12 feet above the ground where our house stood and about 10 feet where the store stood.  It fell rapidly, leaving Wheatland with no fences but with mud to the depth of about one inch in every house. [Manuscript in the possession of Meda Becker Johnson, Portland, OR]

    James Andrew Hewitt was always known to the family as "Andrew."  Born August 25, 1851, Andrew was one of three sons of Henry and Elizabeth Matheny Hewitt to choose farming as a career.
     Before settling entirely into farming, Andrew spent a term teaching at the schoolhouse where he had formerly been a student, the school on the Hewitt land.  His brother Jasper, Andrew's student during that term, recalled "my brother Andrew...licked me one day on the road home from school because I thought him just Andrew and told him so."   Jasper had other reminiscences of Andrew as well:

James Andrew Hewitt was a short, stocky boy as I first remember him.  At one time in his life he reached almost the 200 lb. mark, and he had small hands and feet.  He was not of the athletic disposition as most of the brothers, but was as steady as a clock, positive (as most Hewitts) yet ready to concede your rights.  Andrew was stern yet jovial and had a wonderful disposition if not imposed upon.  He truly was a patient ideal man and a loving brother.  Many memories revolve around him at our old home...He was studious and steady and would scrap to the last inch for what he thought right.  Andrew was your friend (if true to him) to the last.  He was a man of good language and thought, a tireless worker teaching school, on the farm, or wherever his lot cast him. 
    Andrew died on a part of the old homestead near Dayton, Yamhill County, Oregon,  after spending most of his life as a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, of which he was licensed as a local preacher.
    At the age of twenty-one, Andrew married Mary Jane Rose, fifteen, on March 3, 1873.  Their marriage was to endure for fifty-two years.  Mary Jane was a native of Scioto, Ohio, and had crossed the plains to Oregon in 1861 just as the Civil War was beginning.
She survived her husband by twenty-one years, dying October 6, 1946, at the age of eighty-nine.
    The Hewitts had seven children:  (1) Ella Belle Hewitt, born August 2, 1874, died August 7, 1889; (2) Olive Grace Hewitt, born August 27, 1879, married Clarence Rollie Smith (1875-1956), had three children [Erma Delta Smith Shelburne, 1902-1984; Elsie Velma Smith Warmington, 1904-1990; and Ilo Ildon Smith, 1897-1897], died July 28, 1949, buried at Hopewell, OR; (3) Leeta Inez Hewitt, born July 30, 1881, married Edward Morris Coats (1878-1958) on February 14, 1900, married fifty-eight years, died 1969,  had four children: [Elvin Lowell Coats, 1902-1983; Eldon Andrew Coats, 1910-     ; Eleeta Margaret Coats Hildebrand, 1915-     ; and Elois Edwina Coats Demaray, 1923-     ]; (4) Roy Reno Hewitt, born August 5, 1883, married Lena Mae Heise (c.1886-1962) on September 20, 1908, had one son [Ronald Roy Hewitt, 1911-1981], after Lena's death Roy married second Julia Stearnes and third Ada Thomas Tanner, died January 26, 1976, in Wooster, OH; (5) Sylva Leona Hewitt, born December 30, 1887, married first Henry Allen Kerr, July 24, 1908, eight children:  Margaret Kerr Farris 1908-1996, James Andrew Kerr 1912-?, Marjorie Kerr Bauer 1915-, William Henry Kerr 1917-. Mary Alice Kerr Murray McClain 1919-, Kerwin Delore Kerr 1921-, Jean Milton Kerr 1924-, and Conrad Lewis Kerr 1926-1995; Sylva married second James Darbison in 1962, married third to ____Tauber, 1966, died 14 April 1970, McMinnville, OR, buried at Hopewell ;   (6) Velma Hewitt, died age 6 mos., buried at Waitsburg, WA, at the cemetery in town;  (7) Elmer  Evert Hewitt, born March 16, 1893, married Helen Lenart, died March 10, 1970, Albany, OR, had  four children:  Velma Elizabeth Hewitt, born February 21, 1922, married James Pollard, who died c1957; Ella Jane Hewitt, born August 7, 1924, married and divorced Lee Cleveland, married Gene Shermon, who died in September 1970; Elma Helen Hewitt, born September 28, 1926, not married; Elinor Louise Hewitt, born October 4, 1928, married Gerald Denton in 1949 and divorced c1975.
    James Andrew died of "Bright's Disease and old age" at the age of seventy-three, June 10, 1925, on the farm where he was born, and was buried at the family cemetery at Hopewell, Oregon.  On the day Andrew died, Mary Jane had baked an apple pie and then
went out to milk the cow.  Andrew had been ill and not out of bed for a year.  When she came in, the pie was half eaten and Andrew sat dead in his rocking chair. [Julie Jones of McMinnville]
    Another anecdote from Julie Jones is that Andrew's favorite fruit was ground cherries, sometimes called husk tomatoes.  He liked them fresh and in winter kept a layer of them spread out under his bed to ensure a supply.

Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

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    Isaiah was born on his parents' donation land claim at the current site of Unionvale, Oregon.  In 1879 he was married to Linnie Idella Holland (1862-1929) and by her had seven children.  Like his brothers Adam and Andrew, Isaiah lived on his parents' land until
their deaths, but apparently Isaiah sold out his interest after their deaths and moved to Salem in 1902.  There Linnie died July 22, 1929.  Eleven months later while crossing the intersection of Court and Liberty Streets, Isaiah was struck by a car and died from the injuries a few days later.  Both he and Linnie are buried at Hopewell.
    The children of Isaiah and Linnie were Cyrus K. Hewitt, born August 1880, married Elva _____, died 1955; Ivan L. Hewitt, 1882-1889; Alta Hewitt, born April 1885, married William Branson, died 1969; Alma Hewitt, born June 1887, married William New, died1971; Leonard Hewitt, born July 1889, died 1962; Elton Hewitt, born August 1897, died1971; Anna Eliza Hewitt, born July 1899, married William Carver, died 1979.
    Isaiah's brother Jasper had the following to say about Isaiah in his memoirs:
Isaiah...was but about 5 years my senior so my many play days brought me near to his life.  He was one of the truest, kindest and most loving brothers anyone ever had; it was never his fault if he had an argument with anyone.  He was positive for only one thing and that was for the right, a great consciousness of right and wrong; he never forgot to make his word good.  Isaiah was a small man; about 150 lbs was his usual weight, height 5'7", he , as Andrew, never partook of any athletic sports of any kind, only feats of strength.  Isaiah would not pick a fight, but like most westerners of his tribe and date would defend himself against anyone twice his size when forced to do so.  He spent most of his life on the old farm, but left the last fifteen or twenty years of his life.  He was in Salem when he was run down and killed on the street by an automobile, June 22, 1931 when in his 77th year.  He was a faithful member of the Evangelical Church.

Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

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    Matthew was the seventh child of Henry and Elizabeth Matheny Hewitt.  He was born on the family's donation land claim.  He became a carpenter and moved to Roseville, California, in 1892, the only one of the Hewitt sons to stray so far.  There Matthew became a building contractor and was prosperous.  The annual Hewitt family reunion was when Matthew visited his Oregon family in his later years.  After the death of his brother Henry in 1931, Matthew was the senior family member at these gatherings.
    Matthew married his first wife, Malvina "Vina" Janz while in Oregon.  Their only child, Bertha Beatrice Hewitt was born in Oregon.  Vina died sometime in the 1880's.  Bertha later married Leland Stanford Tennant in California and had three children by him:
Leland S. Tennant (1908-?), James Hewitt Tennant (1911-?) and Robert Henry Tennant (1916-)
    Matthew and his second wife, Rosa Hamlin, were married fifty-six years when he died at Roseville at the age of eighty-eight.
Their four daughters were Laura Wanda Hewitt, born 1890, married William Whitney Kennedy; Etta Eliza Hewitt, born 1892, married Percy William Dornfeld; Margaret May Hewitt, born   1896, died as an infant; Beulah Marie Hewitt, born 1897, married Harry M. Preisser.
    His brother Jasper had this to say about Matthew:

Matthew Cresswell Hewitt...as man or boy was extremely positive, always good natured, jovial, a wonderful laugher, always ready with some funny story which he himself enjoyed.  In his arguments you might think him mad from the tone of his heavy, positive voice, but instead there was a soft, kind heart and a desire for you to come through with your part of the argument, for he enjoyed it.  Matthew was about five feet 7 1/2 inches tall, weighing about 175 lbs. when in Oregon and 160 in Cal.  He was very athletic, enjoying running jumping, wrestling, boxing, or any test of strength...He dearly loved to sing, but in this was not as good as in athletics.  In his prime, he was a master with a pen, drawing birds, animals, etc.  He was a carpenter, a skilled finisher. 
    He was a fine playmate, but when with the older set of cousins, Kirkwoods, Mathenys, Rings, etc. he would try to run away from we younger sets.  They could not beat, so would wait for all.  Matthew would sometimes hold me until the cousins would go ahead, then let loose and run; but he could not distance me enough for this to work.
    He was a faithful member of the Methodist Episcopal Church and at one time was licensed as a local preacher.  In his boyhood he would ride all the young cattle on the farm and also yoke them up and hitch them up to the running gears of a wagon and oh how much fun it was!  Matthew was the only one of the ten children to leave the state of Oregon, his native state, to live-save Adam, who lived a short time in Klickitat, Wash, and Andrew for a short time at Ritzville, Wash.  Matthew reared a large family in California where he worked as a skilled carpenter.

JASPER LEWIS HEWITT
 1859-1946

    Jasper was the only family member of his generation to attempt to record his memoirs and family events in the tradition of his aunt, Charlotte Matheny Kirkwood.  Born on the family land claim just before the Civil War broke out, he grew up with a strong Christian influence, to which he mostly credited his mother.  He enjoyed the many camp meetings attended by his family, the frontier version of attending church.  Frontier people would gather into large groups to listen to sermons, sing hymns, socialize around their campfires, etc.
These might last several days.  Jasper joined the Evangelical Church in Salem about 1877, but backslided.  In 1884 he saw the light at a camp meeting near the old home in Yamhill County and remained a practicing Christian thereafter.
    When Jasper was sixteen, the family moved to Salem (1875), where his parents bought his uncle Jasper Matheny's ferry and eighty acres of  land adjoining the ferry.  They built a house on the west side of the Willamette in Polk County.  In Salem Jasper attended the old East Salem Public School and Willamette University.  He also worked in the linseed oil mill, a grocery store, a book store, a spice store, and  his parents' ferry.  On March 9, 1884, he returned to live on his parents old donation land claim in Yamhill County, where they   had recently returned.  That winter he met Ida Ellen Harris and married her February 7, 1885.  It was on the old family home place that his first child, Inez Lenore Hewitt was born June 6, 1887.
    After his parents moved away from the farm to what is now Mt. Scott in eastern Portland, Jasper moved his family to Portland.  There he worked at various odd jobs then at the Wiley Bullen Co. music store at 211  1st Street.  After gaining this experience, he and his brother Horry went into partnership in a music store in McMinnville, which was not very successful.  In September of 1891, the brothers sold the business and Jasper returned to the old farm, on a 55 acre parcel designated as his future inheritance, the northwest corner.  There they stayed until the fall of 1896, when they moved to Portland, where Jasper studied dentistry and practiced until he retired.  Although he had a city home, apparently he kept his portion of the family farm and enjoyed the outdoors and the nature there.
    Jasper was a joiner.  For many years he was a trustee of the old Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church in Portland on East 9th and Pine Streets. He was also president of the Board of Trustees of the Methodist Deacons' Home.  He was active in the Sons of the American Revolution, the Y. M.C.A., the Shriners' Hospital, and the Oregon Pioneer Association, of which he was president for many years and was in the process of dismantling at the time of his death.  (Sons and Daughters of the Oregon Pioneers was to be the successor organization.)  He died of a heart attack at Laurelhurst Park on April 6, 1946, while playing a game of horseshoes at the age of eighty-six.  His wife Ida had preceded him in death on June 13, 1938.
    Their children were Inez Lenore, born June 6, 1887, married Earl Richard Abbett (1881-1967), no children, died June 6, 1980, Portland; Henry Harris Hewitt, born March 4, 1890, McMinnville, OR, married Martha Donna Hulett (1890-1976), died Portland, 1971; Ruth Elizabeth Hewitt, born June 30, 1903, Portland, married Charles Thomas Nunn, no children, died February 28, 1937.

Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

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    Horry Hewitt entered the world in a dramatic month.  His birth on March 30, 1865, was followed within two weeks by Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox and Lincoln's assassination.  Ninth of the children of Henry and Elizabeth Matheny Hewitt, he was born at the family land grant at Unionvale.  He was the only child never to marry.  Horry would have been ten when the family moved to Salem.
There he attended Salem schools and Willamette University.
    Horry lived in a world of his own.  Enthralled with nature, he was an expert on birds and spiders, of which he had a large collection.  He also had a large collection of eggs of various bird specious.  He often went to considerable personal risk to gather these.  Horry also loved great literature and was an avid reader.  He began his career in partnership with his brother Jasper as owner of a music store in McMinnville, but that venture ended on an unhappy note between the brothers.  Horry then learned optometry and the jeweler's trade, moving to  La Grande, Oregon, in the early 1890's.  After retiring in the late 1920's due to the loss of the sight in one eye, Horry returned to the Willamette Valley, making his home in the Salem area.  He died May 3, 1947, at the age of eighty-two and was buried at the Hopewell, OR, Cemetery.
    His brother Jasper had this to say about Horry in his memoirs:

    Horry ...was a stout, stocky-built man, 5'7" tall, weighing up to 190 lbs. at times.  He was a good boy, very much by himself.  When he was small, he played as other boys did and was good natured and full of fun, but as the years passed, he took to the woods and fields for his spare time.  There he collected specimens of bugs, birds, wild eggs, etc. These he kept until he had cases of fine specimens.  He was a great reader and of later years enjoyed a violin, banjo, or guitar during his leisure hours.  Mother did not enjoy Sunday's violin music but Horry would sit in his room upstairs and play so softly it could not be heard below.  He tried farming for awhile but it did not suit him any more than the girls did, for he never married.  Thirty odd years of his life were spent in the jewelry business in La Grande, Oregon, where he stayed till the loss of one eye caused him to sell out.  Horry was the only one of the ten children not to embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ, saying "Not for me."

Robert B. Hewitt said that his grandfather, Jasper,  did not think highly of Horry, considering him a "slacker" in the world of work as well as in the spiritual realm and family life.  He was also the only Hewitt brother who smoked.  He smoked a pipe as well as self-rolled cigarettes.  Some of the later generations, however, were fond of their elderly Uncle Horry.  Whatever one's opinion of Horry, all agreed that he was of a different mold than the other Hewitt brothers.

Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

---

    Youngest of the ten children of Henry and Elizabeth Matheny Hewitt, Lorin was born May 5, 1869, twenty-eight years after his oldest sibling, Ann Eliza.  Lorin had several nieces and nephews who were older than he was.  Lorin attended Linfield College in McMinnville and later Willamette University.  He received his license to practice medicine in 1907 and practiced in Independence, Oregon, for about ten years.  When World War I came, he moved to Portland to take over the practice of doctors Bodine and Cantrell, who presumably had gone to the front to provide medical services.  About 1940 Lorin "retired" to Dayton, Oregon, near  where he grew up, but the needs of the community and Lorin's skill and desire, had him soon making house calls and a practice soon resulted.  He died January 18, 1950, at the age of eighty, still a practicing doctor.
    Lorin had married Lena Miller in 1895.  Lena was the niece of Henrietta Miller Hewitt, wife of his oldest brother Daniel.  Lorin and Lena had three children:  Lois Elizabeth  Hewitt, born June 1898, married Donno McCandless Pomeroy 1917, one child:
(Kenneth Hewitt Pomeroy in 1918), died 1923; Lavelle Miller Hewitt, born 1901, married Constance Whitney (1907-after 1995), died August 31, 1973, Portland, OR, two children (Merritt Whitney Hewitt 1945- and Elizabeth Eleanor Hewitt, 1946- ); Owen Hewitt, 1902-1904.
    After Lena's death in 1926, Lorin married Mabelle Homes, who outlived him.  For many years Lorin's grandson Kenneth Pomeroy lived with him and Mabelle.
    Among Lorin's brother Jasper's comments about Lorin in his memoirs was this:  "Lorin and his dear wife Lena kept his father and Mother, Henry and Elizabeth Matheny Hewitt, and lived with them in the old home.  They will never be forgotten for their kindness
and thoughtfulness to these old saints."
    Lavelle Hewitt was somewhat aloof from his family in his adult years and drank heavily according to his widow Connie in a November 1995 interview.  She said Lavelle, who died from cirhosis of the liver, mistreated her and the children.  Lavelle and Connie had no grandchildren; so Lorin's only future descendants must come through the family of his grandson, Kenneth Pomeroy.
Contributed by Brenda Wiesner

---

 

    Our evidence for John Cowan's being Esther Cowan’s father is circumstantial.  His was the only Cowan family in Indiana during Esther's childhood. .  Records show that John Cowan lost his wife Margaret Weir about the time that Esther was ten years old. Isaiah and Elizabeth Cooper were given Esther to rear in Clark County, Indiana  It was common to give children to relatives or friends to rear after a frontiersman lost his wife.  Military records show that John Cowan and his son James Cowan served in the same company of roving rangers during the War of 1812 as did Isaiah Cooper, and so they were well acquainted with each other.  The county history of Pike County, Illinois, shows that Enoch Cooper married "Esther Cooper, adopted daughter of Isaiah Cooper,” in November of 1829. Rose Cooper Goodrich testified to her grandmother's maiden name being Cowan.  Genealogy records of John Cowan in a book co-written by his granddaughter, Laura Cowan Blaine, show a four-year gap between the births of children where Esther would fit in.  Esther Cowan named a daughter Rosanna Margaret Cooper, probably for her mother.  Isaiah and Elizabeth Cooper named a daughter Margaret Cooper in 1808, probably for their friend Margaret Weir Cowan.  Census records show that Esther was born in Tennessee, where John and Margaret  Cowan were living in 1803.
     John Cowan was born December 14, 1768, in what is now Rockbridge County, Virginia, the son of Samuel Cowan and Ann Walker.  Rockbridge County, which is nestled between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains at the southern end of the Valley of Virginia, was then on the frontier.  Rockbridge County was formed in 1778.  When John was born, the area where the Cowans lived was part of Augusta County.  The Cowans probably lived near other family members along Hays and Walker creeks near the present-day Augusta-Rockbridge county line.  There were many other Scotch-Irish families in the area, and kinsmen of the Cowans and Walkers: the Moores, Campbells, Weirs, Todds, Houstons, and Breckenridges.  Several famous persons emerged in this branch of our family: Sam Houston, the hero of Texas; Joseph Reddeford Walker, the mountain man for whom several geographical locations are named; Mary Ann Montgomery [Mrs. Nathan Bedford Forest] wife of the Civil War cavalry leader; and Jeb Stuart, also a Civil War cavalry leader.  The two presidents Bush are also descended from a Weir, probably of our family.
      In the late 1760’s many family members left the Valley of Virginia to go to what is now Orange County, North Carolina.  John’s parents moved there about 1767 as did his grandparents John Walker III [1705-1778] and Ann Houston Walker and many Cowan and Walker uncles and aunts. For some members of the family, North Carolina would remain their home, but for Samuel Cowan and his brothers and John and Ann Houston Walker and their children, North Carolina was merely a respite.
     In 1772 the Cowans and Walkers left North Carolina and settled in the Clinch River Valley in southwestern Virginia near Cumberland Gap, the historic pioneer pass through the Appalachian mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee. John Walker III and his wife Ann Houston settled on a 300 acre tract of land they named Broadmeadows at the “sink” of Sinking Creek. Nearby, Samuel and Ann Walker Cowan settled on both sides of McKinney’s Run [now called Cowan’s Creek]. This area along the Clinch River was called Castle’s Woods.  The area then designated as Castle’s Woods today lies in present-day Russell and Scott counties, Virginia.  Cowan Creek, where the Cowans lived, lies on the slopes of Copper Ridge in Scott County, but the town of Castlewood lies in present-day Russell County.  Samuel Cowan’s brother David Cowan had lived at Castle’s Woods since 1769 and had built a fort on  his land ten miles upriver from where his brother Samuel settled. 
     There were two forts in Castle’s Woods.  The one on David Cowan’s land was called Cowan’s Fort but in official correspondences it was referred to as Fort Russell because the commander of the militia there was Capt. William Russell.  This fort was also called Fort Preston, Bickley's Fort, or Blackmore's Fort. It was located behind the present-day Masonic Lodge Hall in Castlewood, Russell County, Virginia. The other fort,    Moore’s Fort, was the home and fort of two sisters and brothers-in-law of Samuel Cowan. It was a larger and more substantial fort.  The brothers-in-law were first cousins to Ann Walker Cowan, sons of her aunt, Jane Walker Moore.
     It was to these forts that area settlers would flee in times of Indian peril.  Moore’s Fort was the larger of the two.  It generally had about twenty families living there and about twenty or twenty-five militia soldiers stationed there. During Dunmore’s War in 1774, Capt. Russell and the settlers of Castle’s Woods worked together to expand the forts to make them large enough to accommodate the area’s families.  Houston’s Fort, on Big Moccasin Creek was the home and fort of William Houston, a brother of John’s grandmother.
     The Castle’s Woods settlers also worked together to support a teacher for their children, James Russell.  For a number of years he taught the children in the area and was John Cowan’s teacher.  When a militia officer accused Russell of being a deserter, he was able to clear  himself of the charges, but to save his good name, he joined up for service in Kentucky and left the community in 1778.
         The Scotch-Irish, persecuted for generations by the British, had no love for them and vice-versa.  The British encouraged these thorns in their side to settle on the frontier as a buffer from the Indians for the established English tidewater settlements. When the Revolution came, the Scotch-Irish, almost to a man, volunteered for the Patriot cause.
     The British were quick to make alliances with the Indians, and so it was that while the Declaration of Independence was being signed in Philadelphia, Indian tribes allied with the British were approaching Castle’s Woods, then the westernmost settlement on Virginia’s frontier.  Learning of some 300 Indians’ presence in the valley, John’s father, Samuel Cowan, went to spread the word to his wife’s uncle William Houston and those “forted up” at nearby Houston’s Station [a.k.a. Houston’s Fort] that the Indians were in the Clinch Valley. His journey would have taken him southeast over Copper Ridge into Copper Creek Valley and then over Moccasin Ridge into Big Moccasin Creek Valley to Houston’s Fort.
      Cowan spent the night at the fort and in the morning a rider had come to report that the residents at Fort Russell [a.k.a Cowan’s Fort] were being menaced by the Indians. Hearing that his own family was in danger at Fort Russell, Samuel left the safety of Houston’s Station despite warnings as to the danger.  He was determined to go to his endangered family.  Just outside the Houston’s Station palisade he was immediately shot and scalped by the Indians.  He was brought into the fort and died that evening.  His bloody horse, spooked by the shooting, had returned home to Fort Russell where Samuel’s family saw blood on the saddle of the riderless horse and knew that Samuel had met his end.  Young John’s mother fainted away upon seeing her husband’s blood-spattered horse.  The seven-year-old boy would have witnessed this event.
    In the spring of 1778 a coalition of northern and southern Indians again attacked Castle’s Woods. Ann Walker Cowan had just begun walking the two miles from Fort Russell to Moore’s Fort with her brother Samuel Walker and another man. The families were forted up due to the Indian danger. The three were crossing a field planted in rye not far from Fort Russell when they were attacked by Shawnee Indians.  The Indians shot and scalped Samuel Walker, and took Ann Cowan  and her daughter Jane Cowan captive.  A third man was only injured, and he managed to return to the fort and warn those inside.  This “third man” may have been ten year old John Cowan because we are told in the Maxwell History and Genealogy that John ran for his life with the Indians right behind him in pursuit.  He just made it inside the gate of the fort as an Indian raised his tomahawk to dispatch him.
         In a nearby field, eleven-year-old William Walker, John’s first cousin, just a year older than John, was riding a plow horse while an uncle plowed his field. Delaware Indians stormed out of the adjacent forest and shot the uncle in both arms.  He began running toward his cabin, but he was downed just as he approached his cabin. They quickly tomahawked and scalped him. William attempted to reach the cabin as well, but the Indians quickly overcame him and took him captive.  He was carried away to a spot that the Indians, who were from north of the Ohio River, planned to rendezvous with the Shawnees after the attack, before heading north. William Walker was a son of John’s uncle John Walker IV.  John was never to see his cousin again.
     John’s brother Jim [James Benjamin Cowan], who was about eight years old at the time, was captured by the Cherokees and taken away to their nation and adopted into their tribe.  He did not make his escape from the Cherokees until he was about fifteen.  [These ages are my estimates.  They do not agree with the stories told by Dr. James Benjamin Cowan of Tullahoma, TN, who was rather inventive in his telling of the family history]
      Ann Cowan was taken by the Shawnees back to their predetermined rendezvous with the Delawares.  When William Walker was brought in by the Delawares, he was surprised to see his aunt and cousin Jane there. Young Jane, who continued to cry loudly, was suddenly tomahawked by an Indian, probably because the crying girl was a threat to their being located. The Indians told the captives not to speak to one another.
    After crossing the Ohio River, Ann Walker Cowan was taken by her Shawnee captors to the west, and William Walker was taken by his Delaware captors to the east.  Looking backwards as they were led away, aunt and nephew sadly took one last look at each other.  They were never to see each other again.
     Ann arrived in the Shawnee Indian village where captives were made to run through Indians lined on two sides with sticks.  The captive had to run through the lines and get to the other end. The Indians would beat the captive with the sticks as he/she passed through. If he/she failed to reach the other end or displayed less than strong behavior through the ordeal, he/she would then be tortured and burned to death.  Mary must have passed through the ordeal satisfactorily because she was kept as a slave of a squaw for the next six or seven years.
     John’s grandfather, John Walker III, was greatly grieved at the loss of so many of his family: two of his children, a son-in-law, and three grandchildren. He died later that year. 
    Even with the protection of the forts, life on the frontier was precarious and brutal: Indians attacked Cowan's Fort again in 1779 and Abraham Cooper and his son were killed. [Not connected to our Coopers-- yet] Another son, Christopher, documented this event in his application for a Revolutionary War pension and declared that "two young women was taken prisoner and he was one of the party that pursued & retook them again."
    It was about 1783 that John Cowan moved to what was then Greene County, Tennessee.  It was soon after this move that the heirs of Samuel Cowan had their father’s land surveyed. On August 20, 1784, the Washington County, VA, Book #1 of the Record of Surveys and Entries, page 153, this survey, done more than a year earlier, is entered:
 
     Surveyed for John Cowan, heirs etc. 230 acres of land in Washington County, by virtue of a certificate [some kind of deed], lying on both sides of McKinney’s Run [Cowan Creek], a south branch of Clinch River, and beginning at the foot of Copper Creek Ridge at a poplar corner to William Cowan’s land he now lives on and with the lines thereof etc.  March 25, 1783. 
     We the Commissioners for the District of Washington and Montgomery Counties do certify that John Cowan, heir at law of Samuel Cowan deceased, is entitled to 284 acres of land by settlement in the year 1772, lying in Washington County on a branch known by the name of McKenney’s Run, and adjoining William Cowan.  As witness our hands the 8th day of August 1781.  Teste James Reid, C. C. Jos. Cabell, Harry Innes, M. Cabell, Commissioners

     On the same page in the Book of Surveys is an entry for John’s uncle David Cowan’s land.  This makes it likely that David Cowan had moved to Greene County, Tennessee, also.     Where the Cowans moved to was the part of Greene County that became part of Knox County in 1792 and in 1795 became Blount County.  Many of the Scotch-Irish were moving to this area: the Cowans, Walkers, Houstons, Gillespies, McClungs, Weirs, etc.
     On 18 November 1788, the following document was recorded in the new Russell County, Virginia, clearly a sale of the land Samuel Cowan had settled upon arriving in the Clinch Valley, the same land that had been surveyed in 1783:
THIS INDENTURE made the eighteenth day of November in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight between James McKinney, of the County of Russell, in the State of Virginia of the one part and John Cowan, of Green County and state of North Carolina [Tennessee was still officially part of North Carolina at this time.] , of the other part witnesseth that the said John Cowan for and in consideration of the sum of sixty-six pounds of current money of Virginia to him in hand paid by the said James McKinney doth grant, bargain and sell unto the said James McKinney and his heirs a certain tract or parcel of land in the County of Russell containing two hundred and thirty-five acres by survey bearing date the twenty-fifth day of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-three, lying and being in the County of Russell, on both sides of McKinney’s Run a south branch of Clinch River and bounded as followeth, to wit:  Beginning at the foot of Copper Creek Ridge at a poplar corner to William Cowan’s land and with a line thereof north fifty-one degrees west one hundred and fifty-three poles to a white oak and ash sapling on the east side of the ridge, North thirty degrees east one hundred and fifty-five poles to a black oak and a white oak at the foot of a rocky ridge thence, leaving said line, North forty-seven degrees East, one hundred and forty-nine poles crossing the branch to two white oaks at the foot of a ridge South thirty-two degrees east forty poles to a black and white oak of the side of a ridge south forty-three degrees west forty-five poles to three white oak saplings on the west side of a ridge south Twenty-five degrees east eighty poles to a beech near a branch south four degrees west one hundred poles crossing the branch to a white oak and ridge at the foot of Copper Creek ridge and along thereon south forty four degrees west one hundred and twenty-six poles to the BEGINNING, together with all its appurtenances to have and to hold the said tract or parcel of land with its appurtenances unto the said James McKinney and his heirs to the sole use and behoof of him the said James McKinney and his heirs forever and the said John Cowen for himself and his heirs doth covenant with the said James McKinney and his heirs that the said John Cowen and his heirs the said land with the appurtenances unto the said James McKinney and his heirs against all persons what so ever will forever warrant and defend.  In Witness whereof the said John Cowen hath hereunto subscribed his name and affix3ed his seal the day and year avove written. John Cowen. [seal] At a Court held for Russell County the 18th day of November 1788.  This indenture of Bargain and sale of land from John Cowen to James McKinney was acknowledged in court and ordered to be recorded.  Teste: Henry Dickenson, C. R. C. A copy, Teste: E. R. Combs, Clerk Circuit Court, Russell County, Va.

     [The next story was extracted from a version told by Dr. James Benjamin Cowan of Tullahoma, TN, a grandson of James Benjamin Cowan, as written by P. D. Cowan.  Dr. Cowan had so many errors in his story that I have had to retell the story as I believe it happened, based upon MY research.  Some details of the story may not be accurate, but it is believed that the essence is correct.][If you ever come across P. D. Cowan’s The Shadow of Chilhowee, don’t bother to read it.  It is not history, but fantasy.]
   John’s mother resurfaced in a rather dramatic way about 1785.  A half-breed French-Indian and his Indian wife arrived at the Shawnee village where Ann was captive.  She convinced them to help her escape.  They buried her under a pile of furs in their canoe and headed to a French trading post somewhere in Kentucky.   Arriving at the trading post and knowing that the Indians would follow after discovering Ann’s absence, the half-breed and the owner of the trading post hid Ann in a small cellar under the trading post floor and sent a rider to seek help among Ann’s people.
    The rider rode day and night to what is now Blount County, Tennessee, where Ann somehow had learned that her Scotch-Irish community had moved. The Blount County settlers were assembled outdoors at meeting [religious services] listening to a sermon.  He rode to a stump, which served as the podium, and called out, “Is there a man here named Russell, Major Russell? Or Colonel Walker or any man named Cowan?”
    Major Russell spoke up.  “I’m Major Russell.  What is it you want?”
    The rider spoke excitedly, “There is a woman at the French trading post making her escape.  Her name is Ann Cowan and the Indians are in pursuit to recapture her, and I am to come here and tell her friends to come quickly as possible to rescue her. Within an hour a well-provisioned army of one hundred men was on a forced march northward toward the trading post, among them Ann Cowan’s sons.
    It was dark when the small army reached the trading post. The Indians had been loitering around the trading post asking questions about their missing slave and probably buying whisky at the post. Hearing the approaching hoofbeats, the Indians fled as Major Russell and his men arrived.  And from the dark depths of the cellar, still in the dress of the Shawnees, Ann Cowan emerged and was reunited with her now-grown sons.
     In Deed Book 1, page 44 refers to John being in Greene County on the 10 of November, 1788.
     From the book American Militia in the Frontier Wars, 1790-1796, page 102, we learn that John Cowan served in Captain Hugh Beard’s Company of Guards at the treaty on the Holston River near the mouth of the French Broad River, May 28 to July 11, 1791.
On September 24, 1799, in Deed Book 1, page 298, a transaction was recorded between John Cowan of Knox County, Southwest Territory and James McKinney of Russell County.  It is probably a lease or a deed of sale.
   On June 23, 1796, John Cowan II, his uncle William Cowan, and Robert Wood were among the registered surveyors of the Powell Valley Tract in Southwest Virginia and Tennessee.  John was a newlywed at the time. [p.66 Calendar of the Tennessee and King’s Mountain Papers of the Draper Collection of Manuscript, Wisconsin Historical Society Publications, Madison, WS, 1929]
      John’s mother had retreated to Rockbridge County after her captivity among the Indians.  On May 9, 1796, John paid a $150 marriage bond there to marry Margaret Weir [c.1778-c.1811], daughter of James Weir of Rockbridge County. We know nothing else about the Scotch-Irish Weir family except that it moved in tandem with the Walkers, Cowans, Houstons, and Campbells.  Both George Bush and his son George W. Bush are descended from a Weir/Ware of Blount County, Tennessee.  Ware is an alternate spelling of the name Weir.  They are probably distant cousins of ours.  Blount County is where many of our Weir, Cowan, and Walker relatives relocated.  These men below are their ancestors:
     William Gault Wear, Blount Co., Tennessee 11 Dec. 1817-Eureka Springs, Ark. c. 1900, m. Cooper Co., Missouri, 2 Nov. 1837; son of James Hutchenson Weir.
James Hutchenson Weir, Va. 30 Sept. 1789-Cooper Co., Mo. Apr. 1832, Knoxville, Tenn. 27 Oct. 1812
     About 1800 many of the residents of Blount County were moving southwestward into the Sewannee Valley in what was to become Franklin County, Tennessee, which abuts the Alabama state line.  John’s brother Jim moved there and John moved there briefly, but we are not sure when.  There was another John Cowan there, a cousin of our John’s no doubt, so it is impossible to discern which of the records are our John Cowan.  The other John Cowan was elected as one of the first county commissioners of Franklin County in December of 1807.  The first court met at the home of Major William Russell, the man who had lived at Castle’s Woods with the Cowans in Virginia, and then in Blount County with them. Later in Franklin County  a town would spring up that would be named Cowan, Tennessee, named for a family member. 
     We know that John moved his family to Mercer County, Kentucky about 1804.  In Beckwith’s History of Montgomery County, Indiana, in John’s son’s biography, it states that John had lived in Tennessee for twenty years, so our dates are about correct here. It was in Mercer County that John and Margaret’s daughter Sally was born.  There were probably Cowan relatives already living in Mercer County.  Another John Cowan had taken the census of that county in 1777.  That John was likely a brother to the subject John Cowan’s father, Samuel Cowan.
     About 1807 the Cowans moved again, to what is now Charlestown, Clark County, Indiana.  John had purchased the land grant of one of George Rogers Clark’s soldiers there.  The grant contained 8 acres in the settlement and 100 acres outside for farming.
      Margaret Weir Cowan died about 1811, leaving John alone with their seven or more children.  It is believed that John turned over the care of Esther and an infant daughter to Isaiah and Elizabeth Montier Cooper at this time.  This was a common occurrence on the frontier.  The men had to work and had no one to care for an infant.  Why Esther also was let go may have been because Esther was attached to Rachel Cooper, who was her own age, or perhaps because she was very attached to the baby.  This can only be speculation, but it was a common occurrence.
     Margaret may have already been dead when John served under General William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Tippicanoe on 7 Novembber 1811, in Captain Charles Beggs’ Company of Light Dragoons of the Indiana Militia.  In this battle the Shawnees, fighting under the leadership of “The Prophet,” brother of Tecumseh, were defeated.  Shortly thereafter, the War of 1812 began and the Indians allied themselves with the British. 
     On 1 April 1813, at Charlestown, Clark County, IN, John joined Captain James Bigger’s company of  mounted rangers who roamed throughout Indiana to prevent Indian attack. The company was mostly made up of men from Clark County, but there were also about eleven men from Vallonia.  John’s fifteen year old son, James Weir Cowan, also enlisted in the company.  Isaiah Cooper, whose son Enoch would one day marry John’s daughter, Esther Cowan, was also a member.  Each ranger received a dollar a day and had to furnish his own horse, arms, provisions, and ammunition. John and James were privates.  Their company was in the regiment of Colonel William Russell, the man who had commanded Fort Russell at Castle’s Woods.  The soldiers were fighting against the famed Shawnee Indian Tecumseh and his allies.
     Captain Bigger’s company took part on June 11, 1813, in a deployment commanded by General Joseph Bartholemew.  They attacked the Delaware Indians’ upper towns on the west fork of the White River.  When the force reached the Indian towns, they found that they had mostly been destroyed already, probably by a company from White Water settlement.  They did find one band of Indians near Strawtown and surrounded them.  The Indians were boiling deer heads in a large copper kettle.  The Indians fled with but one casualty to the whites: David Hays was wounded.  David Maxwell [one day to be John Cowan’s brother-in-law] dressed Hays’ wounds.  The patient was then carried on a horse litter to the mouth of Flat Rock, now Columbus, Indiana, where two canoes were made.  With a guard, Hays was sent back to his family in Vallonia, but he died shortly afterward from his wounds at the fort.  The captured Indian horses and kettle were sold to the highest bidder in the expedition.
     John remained unmarried through most of the decade.  His daughter Mary Ann Cowan, about twelve when her mother died, probably assumed the household duties.  Mary Ann died in August of 1819, and this probably prompted John to remarry.  Four months later, on 30 December 1819 in Jefferson County, IN, he married Anna Maxwell, 37, a spinster woman who was the sister of David Maxwell, who had served with John Cowan and Isaiah Cooper in the same company during the War of 1812.  Their marriage was performed by Rev. John McClung, who was a minister in the Reformed or Newlight Church.
   Apparently John was feeling that it was a time for some changes in  his life.  Not only did he take a new wife, but, in 1820, soon after their marriage, he moved  his family to the newly-created capital of Indiana, the village of Indianapolis.  They lived there about two years; during that time a son, John Maxwell Cowan, was born on 6 December 1821. Because Anna was along in years, this was to be John and her only child.
  The following year, 1822, the Cowans moved to Montgomery County, Indiana.  There they purchased land 2 ½ miles southwest of the town of Crawfordsville on Oldfield’s Creek  John was fifty-four at the time.  The land would have needed clearing.  John had two grown sons at home, Jim, 23, and Walker, 20.  The three men would have worked together to make a cabin and farm out of the virgin land.  Original land patent entries of Montgomery County show that on 4 July 1822 John purchased or claimed 80 acres that were the east one half of the southeast one quarter of Township 18, Section 11, Range 5.  It was patent #135496.
  For the next ten years John and Anna lived on this land, but in 1832 John became ill. He was either visited at or taken to the home of his daughter Sarah “Sally” Cowan Maxwell in nearby Frankfort, in Clinton County.  Sally was married to Anna’s nephew Samuel Dunn Maxwell.  John’s sons probably took care of the farm in his absence.  It was in Sally’s home that John died on 17 August 1832, at the age of sixty-three.  He was buried in the Old Town Cemetery in Frankfurt.
          By then John’s daughter, Esther Cowan, had married Enoch Cooper and was living in Pike County, Illinois.  Only the previous month she had given birth to their first child, and Enoch was just returning from having served in the Black Hawk War.  Whether or not Esther had maintained contact with her natural father is lost to us.  She is not mentioned in  his will.
     James Montgomery was the executor of John’s will, which was filed for probate on 13 May 1833, in Montgomery County, IN.  It stated as follows:

     In the name of God, Amen.  I, John Cowan, of Montgomery county of the State of Indiana, considering the frailty of my body and the uncertainty of this mortal life, and being of sound mind to make this my last will and testament, in the manner & form following, that is to say, I give & bequeath to my beloved wife Anna all of my personal property to have the use of while she lives single: after my death I also give & bequeath to my two sons, James W. Cowan and John M. Cowan, my land with all the apurtenances [sic] thereon & belonging; situate in Montgomery county & state above written to belong to them and their heirs forever, and at the death of either of them, if he died having no issue, then his part to descend to the other, and also that my beloved wife Anny is to have her part support off the plantation while she does live single, after my death, and at ther death all my personal property to decend [sic] to my two sons above named, each to possess an equal part; I also give and bequeath to my son Samuel W. Cowan, ten dollars to be paid to him in twelve months after my death; I also give & bequeath to my daughter Sally Maxwell ten dollars to be paid to her in twelve months after my death.  I hereby appoint James Montgomery of Parke county, and state aforesaid executor of this my last will and testament.  In witness whereof I do here unto set my hand and seal this first day of November, in the year of our Lord 1828.  Signed, sealed, and delivered by the above named John Cowan to be  his last will and testament in the presence of us who have hereunto subscribed our names as witnesses in the presence of the testator.
Michael Montgomery                                                    John Cowan
James Montgomery

This was an inventory filed 10 July 1833 of the personal property of John Cowan:
1 sythe [sic] and findings---------------------------2.00
2 hoes-------------------------------------------------   .75
1 shovel-----------------------------------------------   .37 ½
1 log chain-------------------------------------------- 4.50
1 falling axe-------------------------------------------1.50
1 iron wedge------------------------------------------   .37 ½
   horse geers------------------------------------------8.50
1 set brest chains-------------------------------------1.00
4 augers----------------------------------------------- 2.25
1 pot rack--------------------------------------------- 1.00
1 man saddle------------------------------------------1.00
1 side saddle------------------------------------------2.00
1 cory [?] plow---------------------------------------3.50
1 double tree------------------------------------------  .75
1 shovel plow-----------------------------------------1.00
1 drawing knife & sundries-------------------------  .25
1 kettle & bales---------------------------------------3.00
10 kettle & hooks------------------------------------ 2.00
1 sythe & cradle--------------------------------------2.50
1 old tea kettle----------------------------------------  .25
1 waffle iron------------------------------------------1.25
1 little skillet & lid-----------------------------------  .50
1 ovin & hooks---------------------------------------  .75
1 ovin [sic] and lid [probably a Dutch oven]---- 2.00
1 smoothing iron-------------------------------------  .50
1 Bible-------------------------------------------------  .18
Some old tin ware------------------------------------  .37 ½
Shovel tongs and hand irons------------------------1.37 ½
1 set of hand irons------------------------------------1.00
9 chairs-------------------------------------------------2.50
1 cotton wheel-----------------------------------------1.00
1 check [?] reel----------------------------------------1.00
cupboard furnature [sic]------------------------------2.50
1 table--------------------------------------------------   .75
1 umbrella---------------------------------------------   .75
1 clock-------------------------------------------------15.00
1 old gray horse--------------------------------------- 1.00
1 Reep [?] Hook--------------------------------------   .37 ½
1 waggon [sic]---------------------------------------- 5.00
1 bed and furnature----------------------------------16.00
1 ash bedsted bed & bedding---------------------- 12.00
1 lot of books----------------------------------------  2.00
1  candle stand--------------------------------------   1.25
1 lot of hogs------------------------------------------  7.50
2 cows & calves-------------------------------------15.00
Total Amount-------------------------------------$141.68 ¾
One Note of hand on John Hughes                     50.00
And William Galloway for
Total------------------------------------------------$191.68 ¾

      John’s second wife Anna Maxwell Cowan had been born 11 December 1781, in Virginia, and died 9 January 1854, in Frankfort, Clinton County, Indiana.  She was also buried in the Old Town Cemetery in Frankfort.  Anna received a 160-acre land grant in the early 1850’s for her husband’s military services in the War of 1812.  She was the daughter of Bezaleel Maxwell II [1751-1829] and Margaret Anderson [1755-1834].  Her grandfather, Bezaleel Maxwell I had emigrated from Scotland to Philadelphia then to Albemarle County, VA.  Her father was born in Albemarle and died in Jefferson County, IN. Her brother John Maxwell was the father of her nephew Samuel Dunn Maxwell, who married Sally Cowan. Her brother Dr. David Hervey Maxwell, later of Bloomington, IN, was in the same military company as John Cowan and Isaiah Cooper in the War of 1812.
CHILDREN OF JOHN COWAN AND MARGARET WEIR

[1]   James Weir Cowan was born 30 June 1797.  He was married to Isabel Hunter [21 January 1810-?] on 2 August 1831.  He was living in Clinton County, Indiana, as late as 1851.  Two of his known children were Samuel Walker Cowan, born 25 Sept. 1833, Company B Seventy-Second Indian Volunteers, U.S. Army during Civil War from 9 Aug. 1862 to 24 July 1865, married Mary Richards Sept 1865, died 4 February 1900, buried in the Masonic Cemetery in Crawfordsville, IN; and Margaret Ann Cowan, born 6 October 1835, married Issac N. Reath 18 Feb. 1857, died 3 June 1904.  James obtained 160 acres of bounty land in the early 1850’s for his service in the War of 1812.  He was in the same company as his father and Isaiah Cooper when he was just fifteen years old.  He had a horse stolen, killed, or lost during the war on March 1, 1814.  [See Maxwell History and Genealogy for more descendants.]

[2]   Mary Ann Cowan was born 18 April 1799 and died in August of 1819. She is not known to have married.  She was no doubt the woman of the house after her mother’s death.  It was probably because Mary Ann died that John Cowan decided to marry a second time, to Anna Maxwell, which he did four months after Mary Ann’s death.

[3]   Samuel Walker Cowan [“Walker”] was born 2 December 1801.  He died 30 August 1834 in Vicksburg, Mississippi.  Nothing else is known about him at this time. His obituary, which gives the impression that he was not married, says:

     He was a vigilant and faithful public officer, an ardent friend to human nature; one who wept with, and soothed those who wept, and aided and lifted up those who were bowed down.  Those who were allied to him by ties of blood have felt the parting pang, and while they have loved to remember that he was an honor to the name which he bore, they also remembered the presence of the Diety; their murmurings have been repressed.  Oh! They know that God has taken one of his noblest works.  C.

[4]   Esther Cowan 1803-1865.  Because Esther is our direct ancestor, her biography is more lengthy and is placed elsewhere in this work.

[5]    Sarah “Sally” Tilford Cowan was born 30 October 1805, in Mercer County, Kentucky.  She married Samuel Dunn Maxwell [19 Feb. 1803 – 3 July 1873], the nephew of her stepmother Anna Maxwell Cowan [1782-1854].  He was the son of John Maxwell [1775—1824] and Sarah Dunn [1780-1817] and grandson of Bezaleel Maxwell [1751-1824] and Margaret Anderson [1755-1834].  They married on 15 December 1822.  Sally died 1 January 1856, in Pisgah, Kentucky.  John Cowan died in his daughter Sally’s home in Frankfurt, Clinton County, Indiana.  Samuel Maxwell was a lawyer and the justice of the peace in Frankfurt in 1851 and twice mayor of Indianapolis [1860-1864]. One of Sally’s children was Margaret Maxwell Allen.  Sally’s narrative about her family was written by Margaret:

     My grandfather Cowan [Samuel Cowan] was killed by the Indians, and his wife [Ann Walker Cowan] taken prisoner at the same time, and was with them six years before she was rescued.  Later, was taken the second time as was with them six months.  They lived at the Fort at this time.  The son [John Cowan] just escaped by fleetness of foot, and got inside the gate of the fort as the Indian’s tomahawk was uplifted to kill him.

     Sally had the following children:  Sarah Jane Maxwell, 11 Sept. 1823-21 Oct. 1823; John Cowan Maxwell born 21 Nov. 1824, married Julia Ann Firestone 11 March 1851, died 12 January 1888; Irwin Maxwell, born 29 Sept. 1826-died 26 Nov. 1826; Margaret Ann Maxwell, born 23 Oct. 1827, married Rev. Dr. Robert Welch Allen 6 April 1846, died 15 April 1905, Los Angeles, CA; James Maxwell, born 13 March 1831-died 9 March 1832; Sarah Maxwell, born 30 April 1834, died 10 Oct. 1834; Martha Ellen Maxwell, born 27 Sept. 1837,  married Lewis Jordan; Samuel Howard Maxwell, no information; Williamson Dunn Maxwell, born 11 May 1842-died 26 June 1873; David Maxwell, died 1845; Emma Turpin Maxwell, married first Elisha Brown, married second Mr. Lemist. [See Maxwell History and Genealogy for more descendants]

[6]     John Maxwell Cowan was the only child of the second marriage of John Cowan. His mother was Anna Maxwell.  He was born in the new town of Indianapolis on 6 December 1821, being the first white child born in that town. John was born when his father was fifty-three years old and his mother, forty.  He was his mother’s only child.  In 1822 the family moved to a farm near Crawfordsville, Montgomery County, Indiana.
     When young John was ten, his father died, and hard times fell on the boy and his mother. 
     He entered the preparatory school of Wabash College in 1836 and graduated in 1842 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.  Soon after his graduation he was appointed Deputy Clerk of Clinton County and moved to Frankfort, where his sister Sally and her husband Sam Maxwell lived.  There he studied law in his spare time and was soon able to attend the University of Indiana Law School at Bloomington.  Graduating after one year, he returned to Frankfort and began practicing law.
     On 13 November 1845 he married Harriet Doubleday Janney in Stockwell, Indiana, with whom he had four children.  Harriet was born 29 July 1826 and died 28 June 1905, in Springfield, MO.
     In politics, John was a strong Whig and later a strong Republican after the rise of that new party. Like most Scotch-Irish of the time, he was Presbyterian. He was also a member of the Society of Colonial Wars. He was of medium height, slender build, and erect carriage.
     In 1858 he was elected judge of the Eighth Judicial Circuit and reelected in 1864.  In 1870, after finishing his second term on the bench, he moved his family to Crawfordsville, where he had grown up, forming a law partnership with Thomas M. Patterson, who would later become a United States Senator in Colorado. He afterward went into law practice with M. D. White and his second son, James P. E. Cowan.  After three years he retired from practice and began working for the First National Bank of Crawfordsville as assistant cashier and legal advisor.  He was for a number of years a trustee of Wabash College. 
    In 1881 his wife became ill.  A friend of John’s had moved to the Ozark Mountains near Springfield, MO, and recommended the climate as highly healthful.  This influenced the Cowans to move to Springfield, Missouri, where he purchased a farm two miles south of town, where they farmed and raised stock.  In 1889 the Cowans sold the farm and moved into a new home they had built on South Jefferson Street in Springfield.  John was a pioneer in the development of Walnut Street as a business center. 
    John purchased the Springfield Republican, which his two sons, James Cowan and William Cowan, ran. 
     John lived to an advanced age, dying at the age of ninety-eight on 3 June 1920.  He was buried in Crawfordsville, IN.
    The oldest child of John Maxwell Cowan and Harriet Janney was Edward H. Cowan.  He was born 21 December 1846 and was still alive in 1915, living in Crawfordsville, IN. In the spring of 1864 he graduated from the Preparatory Department of Wabash College in Crawfordville, IN, and joined Company H of 135th Indiana Infantry and was discharged September 29, 1864.  He reentered Wabash College and received a Bachelor of Arts degree and a M.D. in 1873 from Miami Medical College in Cincinnati, OH. He started a medical practice in Crawfordsville at that time and remained there for the rest of his life.   He married Lucy L. Ayars on 13 Nov. 1877. They had two childen: John Ayars Cowan [1880-1891] and Elizabeth L. Cowan, born 21 June 1884, who was a home economics teacher at Crawfordsville High School in 1915. This line probably died out.
     The second child of John Maxwell Cowan was James Porter Ellis Cowan, born 1848.  He was a special pension examiner for the federal government in Washington, D.C.in 1915. On 30 January 1873 he married Louana Burnett. They had one child: Harriet Janney Cowan, born 12 Nov. 1873.  She married Lewis T. Gilliland and lived in Portland, OR, in 1915.  They had one child Maxwell Porter Gilliand born 15 August 1901.  James married a second time, to Lalula R. Bennett on 31 Dec. 1883, and had Janet L. Cowan on 7 July 1885; Mary Bennett Cowan on July 20, 1888, and Anna J. Cowan.  All three lived in Marietta, OH, while their father worked in Washington. In 1914 James and his family were living in Springfield, MO, where he was an editor of the Springfield Republican, of which his father was the owner.
    The third child of John Maxwell Cowan was his only daughter, Laura Ann Cowan, born 14 March 1851, in Frankfort, Clinton County, IN.  Laura graduated from Glendale Female Academy in Ohio.She married Allen Trimble Blaine [1846-1880] on 16 Feb. 1876, a Civil War veteran, and was widowed at age twenty-nine. Laura was living in Springfield, MO, as late as 1920.  She co-authored Maxwell History and Genealogy about 1915.  She never remarried. Her only child from her four-year marriage was Mary Maxwell Blaine, born 3 October 1877.  Mary graduated from Drury College with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1898.  She obtained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1900.  She married Rudyard S. Uzzell on 14 Feb. 1906.  As of 1914 she had two sons: William Cowan Uzzell, born 14 January 1910; and Rudyard S. Uzzell, Jr., born 26 June 1912.
   The youngest of the four children of John Maxwell Cowan was his son John William Cowan, born 6 October 1853 in Frankfort, Clinton County, Indiana.  John William never married.  He was living in Springfield in 1915, running the Springfield Republican with his brother James.   
[Sources:  History of Clinton County, IN, pp.197-198;  written in 1912, sent to me by the Clinton County Historical Society; U.S. Census Clinton County 1850 page 625; Beckwith’s History of Montgomery County Indiana pp. 160-161; Bowen’s History of Montgomery County, IN pp. 707-710; Beckwourth’s History of Montgomery County, IN, pp.160-161; The Cowans from County Down, by John K. Fleming, Derreth Printing Company, Raleigh, NC, 1971, pp.363-364; History of Greene County, MO, pp.992-995,1915; Death cert. of John M. Cowan, 1920; Maxwell History and Genealogy, by Florence Wilson Houston, Laura Cowan Blaine, and Ella Dunn Mellette, C. E. Pauley & Co., Indianapolis, IN, 1915; Baird’s History of Clark County, Indiana, pp.37-38; Will E. Parham Papers, McClung Collection, Knox County Library, 301 McGhee St., Knoxville, TN; Tennessee  Cousins, by Worth S. Ray; ]
[John Cowan and Margaret Weir > Esther Cowan > John Shepherd Cooper > Rose Ella Cooper > Lois Belle Hodgson > Mildred Doreen Serrano > Donald L. Rivara > Rainie A. Rivara > Salman and Rehan Saeed]
Contributed by Don Rivara

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William Shepherd Cooper 1813-1888

by Don Rivara

Born December 12, 1813, in Clark County, Indiana, when the nation was at war for the second time with Great Britain, “Bill” Cooper was one of the younger children of Isaiah Cooper [1778-1849] and his Indian wife Elizabeth Montier Cooper [1779-c.1845]. His father was then serving in a company of mounted rangers that roamed over Indiana patrolling against Indian attack. At the time of William’s birth, his father had gone A.W. O. L. for two weeks. The boy was named William Shepherd Cooper; for whom he was named is unknown. His brother Enoch also was given the middle name of Shepherd. Shepherd is not a surname that we can trace in the family.

Before William had turned four, the family had moved to what would become Owen County, Indiana. Here his childhood was spent at first with the pride of being one of the first families of the county, then gradually becoming one of the pariahs due to Isaiah’s alcoholism. William was thirteen when the Coopers left Owen County in 1827, in a virtual state of war with the rest of the community.

Pike County, Illinois, where the Coopers moved in 1826, seems to have been a more peaceful place for the family. There were Indian problems and extreme weather situations, but the proximity to the Mississippi River allowed for ease of travel. Most frontiersmen did a lot of river travelling, so it is likely the Coopers did as well.

In 1832, eighteen-year-old Bill served in the Black Hawk War in a company with his brother Enoch Cooper and his brother-in-law Benjamin Shinn. After returning home from the expedition, he married Milly Crowder, November 25, 1832.

Nine months later Bill became a father at nineteen and probably a widower as well. Rachel Emillia Cooper was born August 31, 1833. Her mother is believed to have died in childbirth. Usually frontier men would have remarried in a matter of months in Bill’s situation with a motherless infant, but he waited seven years, perhaps testament to a deep attachment to Milly.

One June 28, 1840, his new bride was Mary Ann Crozier [aka Crosiar], daughter of James Crozier and Polly Cooper. There is a Crozier Creek in Derry Township in Pike County, probably named for Mary Ann’s family. Polly Cooper is believed to have been a kinswoman of her son-in-law. It appears as though she was the daughter of Thomas Cooper III [1771-after 1850], who lived in Schuyler County, Illinois, in 1850. It is also believed that she was an older sister of the Thomas Cooper IV [1817-1874] and Jacob Cooper [1816-1873] who settled near Wheatland, Yamhill County, Oregon, where the Coopers had earlier settled.

These were the children born to William Shepherd Cooper and Mary Ann Crozier Cooper:

Charlotte Elizabeth Cooper 1842-June 23, 1911

Enoch Shepherd Cooper October 1, 1843-June 15, 1922

Jane Ann Cooper September 1, 1846-November 3, 1928

Sarah Margaret Cooper 1848-August 15, 1922

James C. Cooper 1851-January 2, 1919

Mariah [Maria] Cooper May 3, 1853-December 9, 1909

Isaiah Matheny Cooper August 11, 1855-July 1, 1928

About 1845 Bill’s mother, Elizabeth Montier Cooper, died in Pike County. The following year her husband Isaiah and the families of his four sons: Enoch, Bill, Isaiah Jr., and John M. Cooper crossed the plains to Yamhill County, Oregon, where Bill’s two sisters, Mary Cooper Matheny and Rachel Cooper Matheny had lived with their families since 1843. Mary Ann was pregnant at the time. Her ninth month would have been spent under the hot August sun, braving the sagebrush and alkali dust as the Oregon Trail followed the Snake River. In the Grande Ronde Valley of what is now eastern Oregon [near the present town of La Grande, OR], Jane Ann Cooper was born in the Coopers’ covered wagon. The Coopers used the newly-opened Barlow Road to cross the Cascade Mountains into the Willamette Valley.

The Matheny families had built extra log cabins on their land to house their expected kin. The family spent the winter on Daniel and Mary Matheny’s land by the ferry that they operated. Meanwhile Bill search for suitable land to claim.

At first the Coopers settled on low-lying land on the east side of the Willamette River in what was then called Champoeg County [now called Marion County] opposite the Mathenys, who lived on the west side. The Donation Land Claim was filed on Augusst 19, 1847, containing 640 acres [one square mile]. The land’s legal description began at the southwest corner of Isaiah Matheny’s land claim and extended south along the river. It was bounded on the north by Isaiah’s land and partly on the east by the land claim of Joseph and Mary Matheny Garrison. Bill had selected low-lying bottomland on what was called Mission Bottom. Today this land is bisected by Matheny Road as it approaches the Wheatland ferry. After a couple seasons of being flooded out, they decided to relocate. They chose a piece of land on high ground at the bottom of the hills just west of Wheatland on the Polk-Yamhill county line just inside Polk County. Today this land lies on the west side of the Hopewell Road abutting the Yamhill County line two or three miles south of the Yamhill County village called Hopewell.

Having become a young father, Bill became a young grandfather. His daughter Rachel had married Ruben Cave on June 18, 1850, and Rachel had her first child in 1851 while Bill was thirty-seven years old. She and Ruben had seven more children before his death in the early 1860’s. Rachel and Ruben settled immediately west of Bill and Mary Ann on adjacent land.

Like nearly all Oregon men, Bill went to the California gold fields, probably in June of 1849. The Cooper brothers, their father, and Rachel Matheny’s husband Henry were there. Their wives and children went along as well, atypical for the Forty-niners, but then most of them came ffrom much further away than Oregon. Clarence Walling [1908-1989], a great grandson of Bill’s, said that Bill didn’t find a lot of gold. Clarence had an old newspaper clipping which stated that Mr. and Mrs. William S. Cooper were leaving San Francisco for Oregon on the ship Tarquina. Research has shown that this article appeared in the Oregon Spectator on 21 May 1850. An earlier announcement in the Spectator in the May 16 edition announced the arrival of merchandise in Portland consigned to William S. Cooper. These were probably goods purchased in San Francisco with his California gold. Bill and Mary Ann probably had an easier time in Oregon in the 1850’s with the money they had gained in California and the now-available things to buy in the Oregon Country. In the early years goods had been extremely scarce and exorbitantly expensive.

In 1855 Mary Ann gave birth to Isaiah Matheny Cooper, named for Bill’s nephew who had lived next to the Coopers on Mission Bottom. Isaiah Matheny had also left Mission Bottom and resettled on the west side of the Eola Hills due west of Bill and Mary Ann just over the hills. The farms of both abutted the Polk-Yamhill county line.

In 1856 a deadly cholera epidemic rampaged in the Wheatland area. Mary Cooper Matheny died as did almost every baby under two years of age. Little Isaiah was the only infant to survive the pestilence, but his mother did not. Mary Ann died that year probably of the cholera that had killed so many others of the family. Isaiah was sent to Enoch and Esther Cooper’s home during Mary Ann’s illness. After her death Enoch and Esther continued to rear the child. Bill was forty-three years old when Mary Ann died. He survived her by thirty-two years but never remarried. Bill was unlucky with his wives but not with his children—not one of the eight died during his seventy-four years of life.

As Bill’s younger children matured, they looked around for opportunities to obtain farms of their own as their father’s generation had. The Homestead Act of 1862 had provided that a family could claim 160 acres of government land if they would work it. Some Oregonians were heading to Southern Oregon and some even further to Northern California for suitable land to homestead. Bill and some of his grown children relocated to the Pit River Valley. Also moving to the general area in Northern California were Bill’s nephew Daniel Boone Matheny and his niece Mary Garrison Hall. Bill and his family were there about four years when the Modoc Indian War commenced. This was no doubt the reason they left their new lives and headed for a more peaceful location.

The Nez Perce Indians were known for their friendliness to whites, so some Oregonians were homesteading in Eastern Washington Territory, where it was said that wheat grew extremely well. Bill and his family, with misgivings at leaving their fledgling farms, headed to Whitman County, Washington. It was probably 1872 when they arrived. One of Enoch Cooper’s sons, James P. Cooper, was already there. Nearby were two of Mary Cooper Matheny’s sons. Jasper Matheny and two partners had purchased land at the falls of the Spokane River and had platted a new town called Spokane. Isaiah Cooper Matheny, for whom Bill had named his youngest son, was just over the nearby Idaho-Washington line where Moscow, Idaho, would soon spring up. More and more family members from the Willamette Valley began to arrive in Eastern Washington. In early 1875 Bill’s brother Enoch and the families of two more of his children settled on land nearby.

In 1877 when Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce went to war against the whites, it was rumored that Chief Moses of the Spokane Indians was headed south to join Joseph. The white settlers of Eastern Washington all headed to safety. Bill and his children “forted up” at Fort Walla Walla until it was deemed safe to return to their homes. All was as the family had left it except for the farm of Bill’s daughter and son-in-law Elisha and Maria Walling. In their absence Indians had burned their home and outbuildings and taken their livestock.

Bill had not sold his farm when he left Oregon. He simply abandoned it, probably leaving someone in the family to farm it. In 1875 the county sold the land to pay $11.25 in back taxes. Three of Bill’s children had remained in Oregon. Rachel Cooper Cave was too entrenched there with her second husband Bill Athey. Also, Bill’s sons Isaiah and Enoch were there. His sister Rachel, the last of his siblings in Oregon, had died in 1877.

A great grandson of Bill’s, Clarence Walling, was in possession of two telegrams. One, dated June 4, 1888, was sent to “W. S. Blake, care of Mr. Moore, Egypt, Lincoln County, WA” It was sent by Bill’s son, James C. Cooper. It said, “If you want to see your grandfather alive, come immediately as he wants to see you.” The other, dated June 5, 1888, is a reply from William Blake to his uncle James, “Can’t come immediately-Will be there about the eighth—W.F. Blake”

Bill died June 14, 1888, at the home of his daughter, Mariah Walling, at the age of seventy-four. He was laid out and embalmed by undertaker John S. Noble of Colfax, Washington Territory. He is believed to have been buried in the Colfax Cemetery as were the Wallings with whom he lived at the time of his death. Embalming was a service that probably Bill’s siblings had not experienced.

Clarence Walling was also in possession of Bill’s obituary from the newspaper in Colfax:

A PIONEER’S DEATH

William S. Cooper died at Wallings, about 10 miles northeast of Colfax on Thursday last, June 14the. Mr. Cooper was 75 years of age and enjoyed the distinction of having lived in several states, but having never moved into one. [None had yet achieved statehood when he arrived] He was born in 1813 in Clark County, Indiana. In 1827 he moved to Illinois, and in 1846 to the territory of Oregon. In 1849 he went to California and then returned to Oregon…[From here the article was torn off and incomplete.]

By the time of his death, train service to the East had reached Whitman County. The frontier was no more. He was the last of his generation in the Pacific Northwest. He son, James C. Cooper, served as executor of his estate. The appraisers were kinsmen John Dodge and James P. Cooper. His listed heirs were

Rachel Athe [Athey], age about 54 years, of Polk County, Oregon

Charlotte Blake, aged about 45 years, of Lincoln County, W. T.

Enoch S. Cooper, aged about 44 years, of Yamhill County, Oregon

Jane Ann Andrews, aged about 40 years, of Whitman County, W. T.

Sarah Kirkwood, aged about 39 years, of Whitman County, W. T.

Isaiah Cooper, aged about 28 years, of Yamhill County, Oregon

Mariah Walling, age about 35 years, of Whitman County, W. T.

James C. Cooper, age about 37 years, of Lincoln county, W. T.

None of William’s living descendants carry the Cooper name. Of his three sons, James did not marry. Enoch had two sons, neither of whom married, and Isaiah’s only son never married.

Contributed by Don Rivara

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