Wallowa County, Oregon and Environs
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Moving On By Winona Johnson Holloway J; ~tnn,I ~M ;r= ·~ - ;}/-~ _?~ lq?7 Moving On by WinonaJohnson Holloway ©1989 Shadow Butte Press Live Oak, California All rights reserved included the right to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form Cover picture courtesy of Alice Mccully Printed by "The Printer" in Davis, California, U.S.A. I I dedicate this book to Merritt Louis Holloway, whose genes have mixed with mine to produce our own line of descendants, now in its fourth generation. Thank you Merritt for having such interesting ancestors. Thank you for our adventurous life together. II Our past is not a dead past. It is still alive in little pockets and trickles to surprise us in places still to be found. How lucky are those who have perceived it- a spark that shines within us dimly-to tell us who we are and why and how. We know better where we are going, if we know from whence we came. WJH III Grover and Zora Johnson and family, 1926 Front: Zora, Grace, Joe, Tom, Maybeth, Grover Rear: Winona, Dorofy, Ellen, Mildred IV Moving On Contents Chapter 1 Others came before me ............................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 The world is full of a number of things ................................................. 15 Chapter 3 That was the time that was, a time that will not come again ............... 39 Chapter 4 Of fun and foibles ................................................................................ 71 Chapter 5 As the twig is bent, the tree's inclined ................................................... 87 Chapter 6 Making do ............................................................................................ 103 Chapter 7 On my own .......................................................................................... 125 Chapter 8 In which we try it out there in the big world ............................................ 133 Chapter 9 Someone told us that if we kept at it, everything would come out O.K.......................................................... 139 Chapter 10 We fought hard on the home front, and some got battle fatigue .................................................................. 169 Chapter 11 There were other things in other places .............................................. 191 Acknowledgements and Sources .................................................................. 203 Appendix Map, and family tree .................................................................................... 206 v --------------------------Moving On Chapter 1 Others came before me Way back in the outreaches of northeastern Oregon lies a special spot rimmed by great mountains and deep canyons; a well kept secret from much of the world, and a spot many native Oregonians have heard of but never visited. It has come to pass that people raised here in Wallowa County are just a little different, in some ways provincial. They still gather to talk of people-to take account and remember who they are, and who they married and where their children are living at the present time. This is a family oriented country, and those who have left to live in other places always look back on it as home and the people they knew there as part of the family-as a united group, a special fraternity. Coming into this country from the confines of the Wallowa River canyon one is first greeted by a cozy cove where bare hills hold a little sprout of the larger valley in the hollow of their hands. Wooded hills show darker above the small valley which is passed quickly on a good straight road up to Wallowa town, a few short miles away. Summers are cool and refreshing. Here the Nez Perce Indians lived in a summer paradise away from the heat of the canyons. Grass grew high and for over 100 years their horses roamed the hills freely, symbols of wealth and freedom, and so they multiplied and were cherished. Game and fish were plenty. One band claimed it for their special land and called it home. White men came for the beaver and were welcomed. Some married Indian women-were not the Nez Perce women desired above all others for their industry, beauty and character? All was well, and remained so for decades more. More white men came along with their families and the country was shared in the summer by Indians and whites. The first white men did not set out to drive the Nez Perce from this country but they stayed all year and built homes and plowed the earth. There was disagreement on the use of the land. People who had never been in the valley and did not understand, made the rules and laws. The settlers stayed and the Indians had to go. As people multiplied there was not enough land, or products of the land, for all who would have liked to have stayed on in this place which was their home. So they left, most of each generation born to those who came in early-going to busier places to make a living for their own. But they come back steadily and often, most of them so intent upon reaching places farther up country that they hardly notice the little Lower Valley cove. 1 --------------------------MowngOn county and just learning about difficult childbirth. In his long career in the Wallowa County he acquired plenty of practice and much skill in obstetrics. Most of my generation in Wallowa received their first spank on the posterior from him, that being the accepted procedure to get a new baby to take his first breath. A hearty cry from the newborn let anxious listeners know all was well, at least with the baby. Several neighbor women were in attendance, among them a little hard- working, chirp of a woman, Sarah Jane Bramlet Knott, credited, at least down in Lower Valley, with the distinction of being the first white child born in the county. All attention was paid to my mother who was thought dead. An aunt said she stuck pins in her feet to see if she was alive, which was done in fear and anxiety, as a last resort. (Zora lived to bear four more children, the largest of all, my brother Thomas, also being a breech baby.) I smiled in the morning and was dressed. After a week or so I was even given a name, when my father found one that pleased him on a Watkins liniment bottle-Winona-which was the place in Minnesota where these products were manufactured. My mother had a strong will, as well as a strong constitution, which served her well in a long and rigorous life; she lived to be almost ninety-four years old. Several males in her direct line of ancestors also lived well into their nineties. Born the eldest of nine children to Josiah and Ellen Malone Burgett in Lucas County, Iowa in 1887, she was her mother's mainstay and helper from an early age, at a time when a telephone was the only modern convenience in their home. She attributed her permanently rounded shoulders to hard work; however, her father was "humped backed" in his later years and some of her descendants have an inclination to be so. My father's name was Thomas Grover, but he was usually called Grover or T.G, to distinguish him among the numerous Johnsons in Wallowa County. He was born at Humeston, Iowa, May 20, 1886. In 1903, when he was seventeen, he came west to live with his grandfather, Luther Samuel Johnson, in Wallowa County, Oregon for his health. Grover, or T.G., had acquired a chronic cough, and because three of his aunts had died of tuberculosis it was feared that he might have the disease. His time with Luther was to have a lasting influence upon Grover, who otherwise might have been called a self-made man. Like many other men of his time, his grandfather Luther had not thought his own early experiences out of the ordinary. The glimpses we have are intriguing enough that we wish we knew more. Luther was born in 1835 in Ohio, of English parentage in a family that "held eight or ten" chil- 3 Moving On-------------------------- dren. Like many young men of his generation, he spent some time in the California gold fields, and told my father that he and his partner had panned enough gold from the dirt floor of their cabin in Rough and Ready, California, to buy their winter groceries. This must have been in the early 1850's because he was only fourteen years old in 1849. However, his gold rush experiences could have been at that early age or much later than '49. Gold fever struck old and young, male and female. He married his first wife, Elizabeth Mosburgh, my great-grandmother, in 1854 when he was nineteen. Her parents were on their way west in a covered wagon. She had a club foot and my mother told me that Luther thought she was not treated very well. Her deformity may have been passed on in some degree to her descendants in the form of a pigeon-toed walk. At least my mother thought that is where they "got it". Thomas Kingsberry Johnson, my grandfather, was born to her in 1856 in Lucas County, Iowa. Two of his brothers died early, one in a house fire, and his mother passed away when T.K. was six. Seven months later his father married Lovisa Coal Horton, and they had five children. Luther again tried his luck in California. He and Lovisa were living at Grass Valley in 1884. However, he moved to Oregon shortly after that; he had been in Wallowa County for some time when Grover, my father, came to live with him. He lived first at Alder, which was a settlement on the slope before the nearby town of Enterprise was started. Here he gave some of his ground for the cemetery, as did the Beechers and Wades. Later he took up a claim on Diamond Prairie. There was an old graveyard already there under some trees on a little hill.