I had visited Susan Stubblefield’s grave in Evergreen Cemetery numerous times, had heard about this early Valley settler’s memoirs for years and finally got around to reading them last month while working on the Aunt Blanche Brown articles. Blanche’s niece Linda Hulbert had lent me her copy of THE ROSE. That evening I sat down after dinner and began to read. The next day I was halfway through the book and had learned more about the American western migration experience in general and early settlement in isolated Anderson Valley in particular than I had ever read before in formal history, diaries, memoirs and newsprint. The information details were so dense I had to underline to keep up, but couldn’t in Linda’s loaned book, so the next day I went to the Anderson Valley Historical Society, the book’s publisher, and bought three copies.
To my left here at my office desk is my annotated copy of GRANDMA STUBBLEFIELD, 215 pages, virtually every page with an underline, note or question mark indicating a piece of history or biography new to me, the long-time amateur local historian. And the icing on this delicious reading treat is the romantic odyssey of THE ROSE itself. Grandma Stubblefield was born Susan Cody in a small village, Marcellus, New York, up the Hudson River Valley. Her father was a professional US Army infantry officer. The Cody family were French protestants, Huguenots, who migrated to the American colonies in the sixteen eighties during the Bourbon King’s purges of protestants and Jews. A first cousin and childhood friend of Susan’s was “Buffalo” Bill Cody, with whom she stayed in touch til the end of her life. The potted Rose her mother gave her at her first marriage Susan’s immigrant grandmother had brought to America from the Cody home in the Bordeaux region of France. “Keep this with you always and you will never be out of touch with your family.”
Cody father’s military life meant frequent moves to new posts including southern Indiana near Evansville on the Ohio River when she was eight years old. Here he purchased a hundred acres of river bottom land, which he cleared, built a cabin and farmed while still pursuing his military career. So right away Susan was learning all the skills necessary for successful frontier subsistence farming, horsemanship, livestock and poultry management, gardening and cooking, weaving and sewing, primitive medical care in lieu of professional doctors. The latter service she helped provide the soldiers in her father’s command, including combatting typhoid fever and smallpox. Susan’s formal education was conducted in a neighborhood log-built school.
Susan married in 1833 at age 22. Her Ohio River neighbor, William Sprinkles, had found unsettled land in central Indiana near the village of Harmony, had cleared a hundred acre parcel, built a log cabin home and brought Susan there to marry him. Susan brought with her to her new home the Stubblefield Rose.
Farmlife near Harmony was similar to what the early settlers in Anderson Valley created twenty years later: what I call semi-subsistence. Families grew or caught most of their food, and then sold or traded in nearby towns any surpluses from their livestock and grainfields. Unhappily not long after their marriage Susan’s husband drowned trying to save the life of their closest neighbors’ husband, a bizarre hunting accident in the local creek. Susan, however, with the assistance of other neighbors, continued to manage the farm and her local medical support work. One of her patients was another neighboring wife, whose typhoid migrated after months to pneumonia and the woman died. Two years later, in 1841, Susan married the husband, Benjamin Williams, and became mother to his five children. Three years later Susan and Benjamin sold their farms and moved to Randolph County, Missouri, about 100 miles northwest of St. Louis.
The Williams’s small farm couldn’t support their growing family, now seven children in number, so Benjamin became a livestock trader whose success took him for months further and further away from home. And again another water tragedy struck the family. As the California goldrush accelerated in the 1850s. Williams was travelling as far east as Cincinnati to purchase droves of cattle, mules, oxen, driving them to Independence on the Missouri River where the wagon trails west began, and selling them for profit to the emigrants heading for California and Oregon. While loading his stock onto a ferry across the Ohio, he slipped, fell into the river and drowned. Once again Susan was the sole operator of the family farm; and once again she began attending to the failing health of the Williams closest neighbor’s wife, Mrs. Cleveland Murray.
The Murrays were both close neighbors and close friends with the Williams. Murray was also a professional frontier wagon master, which meant using his knowledge of the continent’s terrain and the native American tribes to manage in virtual military command style the migratory wagon trains on their daily pilgrimage the 1800 mile journey across the plains, desert and mountains. Another article will describe intimately, thanks to Susan’s diary, exactly how that routine worked, hour by hour, day by day. It appears Murray knew the night before exactly how far the train could travel the next day, planned the trip hour by hour beginning before daylight, and would scout ahead to make sure the caravan ended up each evening where there was clean water for all, game to kill and feed for the livestock; and to prepare for what kind of encounter the voyagers might have with migratory Indians. Micro-management as the basis for survival on the frontier.
In 1853 Murray guided a wagon train bound for California and did not return until the following spring. While her husband was away Mrs. Murray died a lingering death, possibly typhoid and cholera, despite Susan’s best medical efforts. When Cleveland, a no-nonsense manager of his destiny, returned from California, “Murray convinced Susan they should marry, move to California and find a new home,” Susan recorded. The widow Williams, age 45, was now the mother of her own two children and step-mother to five other children, offspring of Williams and the new husband. Susan was a stoic Scot firmly given to a positive view of her ability to manage the pioneer family experience, no matter its vagaries. Remember, reader, that death in the family, husbands, wives, children and among neighboring friends was an inveterate part of rural culture pre educated medical profession and anti-biotics. One only has to read the gravestones in any American cemetery including ours around the Valley to appreciate the mortality rate back then.
In early 1856 Susan and her new husband sold their Missouri farms and began preparation for the summer-long trek to California. In a next article I am going to describe in depth their preparations for the journey, which will illustrate Susan’s rich reporting on this dramatic pioneer experience. Most accounts of the migration event are very brief, often far more romantic than the exhausting hot or freezing fifteen hour day shadowed by anxiety about adequate food or water along the trail, hostile Indian encounters, all the reality of wagon train daily life on plains, mountain and desert. Susan’s memoirs recount in hourly detail the family’s activities packing up all their worldly possessions, clothing, furniture, tools, hardware, livestock and fowl, food for the six month long journey, and all the necessities for building a new homelife out west, sometimes beginning in early winter.
As an example here’s a summary of the family’s departure from their Randolph County homes as recorded by Susan. Cleveland departed at dawn to register at the County courthouse the sale of their farms. Her memoir devotes a whole chapter to the daylong loading of the family’s possessions onto three wagons. In minute detail she describes the shape of the four tiered wagon boxes fitted between the wagon axles and the sequence in which they were loaded with provisions and worldly possessions, including the ham, bacon, chickens, furniture, bedding, tools and weapons, etc. Cleveland was to be the wagon master for the pending journey to California, so he had left for their Missouri River departure point to begin planning and organizing the whole party, some 25 or 30 families. So Susan and his older son, 21 year old Cleve supervised the loading and the five day trip from Randolph County to the river near Independence, where a ferry service took the wagons to the Nebraska side of the river. The last item Susan loaded was Grandma Cody’s pink rose, now in a pot sitting on the lead wagon’s driver’s seat.
My report will pause here and remind those of you interested in learning more about our frontier and the pioneering experience, to visit the Anderson Valley Historical Society, talk with the docents and purchase a copy of ‘The Grandma Stubblefield Rose.’
‘The Grandma Stubblefield Rose, The Life of Susan Stubblefield, 1811-95,’ Edna Beth Tuttle and Dennie Burke Willis, Anderson Valley Historical Society, 1982, $22.
Next week: The Wagon Train experience, six months on the road to California.
A great summary! I am a descendant of Susan and Cleveland and want to read your next installment.
Ken Murray