THIS IS LARGELY Evelyn Elledge's own story. It is a story, primarily, of the Elledge family settlement on the great
western plains in the latter 1880s; it is also a story of a thrilling period in the history of American settlement,
when hardy settlers pushed into the late buffalo and Indian country and began peopling the last great West. Evelyn
(Mrs. Everett Eugene Boone of Hibbing, Minn.), who tells the story, is the youngest child of Harvey V. Elledge,
the Griggsville pioneer, who, following his marriage to Hannah Rogers in 1850, left Pike county and settled in
Appanoose county, Iowa.
Boone descendants are invariably proud of their ancestry, and Evelyn Elledge Boone is no exception. In the northern
pine woods where is Evelyn's home, there are closed seasons on big game. Mrs. Boone says that so far as she is
concerned, there is no closed season on ancestors. Once, however, as she relates, her pride in her Boone ancestry
went before a fall.
This is her story: "Our history teacher, to encourage outside reading, usually questioned us at the end of
the recitation period for further information on the subject than that found in our text book. Knowing this method
on his part, gloatingly I turned over this choice bit of information I would have to spring on my unsuspecting
teacher and classmates! I counted the days until our lesson assignment would cover the record of Boone in Kentucky,
and anticipated gleefully his queries. Came the day, came the hour, came the class, came the final questions, and
came my hand, wildly waving above all the rest! ‘Well, Evelyn, what do you know about Daniel Boone that has not
been brought out in class?' Eagerly I poured it forth, gulping in my excitement, ‘I'm his relation!' Youth, ‘tis
said, is cruel, and this class was no exception. I was laughing at long and loudly, and when the ‘tumult and shouting'
died away, I was reduced to sobs, and when I attempted to enlighten them my words were so incoherent I think even
the good old teacher had his doubts."
Harvey Elledge, soon after Evelyn's birth in 1881, left the farm where he had settled near Moulton, Iowa, and moved
to Orleans, also in Appanoose county, where he was postmaster for some years. At one time he was deputy sheriff
of Appanoose county. Says the daughter: "Father's assignments were only the toughest customers, for like the
Mounties of the Canadian police, he always got his man."
Evelyn's mother (Harvey's second wife, Mary Scott Jennings) was failing in health in Iowa and her doctor advised
a change of climate. Harvey had a relative, John Baldwin, a cousin of his sister's husband, in Nebraska with his
married daughter, Mrs. Frank Copeland. He had suffered from the same complaint as Mrs. Elledge, and induced by
his advice and the prospect of free land, Harvey took his wife and family to Nebraska, accompanied also by William
Riley and Charles R. Elledge and their families. In Nebraska they located out from Trenton in the Frenchman River
country. William and Charles made the trip overland, taking some of the household effects and stock. All lived
in sod houses that first winter.
The mother's health improved, and Harvey, deciding to stay on, built a small frame house with a sod lean-to and
great sod barns on the side of a canyon to house the stock. This canyon, where the Elledge family settled, had
once been the scene of a deadly combat between warring Pawnee and Sioux Indians. Many a warrior had bit the dust
and been buried there.
Writes Evelyn: "In our time there my brother Carl and I spent hours of delightful search among the mounds
thrown up by ants, for beads. They were to be found in colors of blue, red and white, and a few yellow and green.
Most of them were tiny, as those used in Indian embroidery. One day when he and I conceived the idea of digging
to the bottom of an ant hill to discover whether the beads were brought up from the bottom and left on top or whether
they were carried in from a-far, we made such an exciting find that it sent us flying home to mother, terribly
scared.
"We had selected a mound situated on a ledge that extended out a few feet from the canyon's side. The loam
was soft, light and sandy and we dug furiously like a couple of young puppies intent on unearthing a savory bone.
Then came a slight halt. Carl's hand came out of the hole with dirt mixed with coarse reddish hair, rather short;
then mine went rather shakily down to bring up a fist-full of the same mixture. We examined it thoughtfully, and
quickly, too. I brushed what clung to my little pinafore and began to assume a sitting posture, from which I jumped
into a run for home, Carl at my heels. We had found an Indian!
"Although not voicing our thoughts, we were agreed when we reached home we had found an Indian. The matter
had to rest until father came in from the fields, as mother was too busy to leave her work to return with us to
our gruesome find; secretly we thought she was scared, too! Eagerly we related each detail as father unharnessed,
watered and fed his team of work horses. I know he must have given mother a wink as he passed the house with us.
He was armed with a shovel. Imagine our disgust, as father spaded, to discover more and more hair and then the
perfectly cured and bleached bones of a horse! We returned home rather crestfallen, because we had steeled ourselves
to look an Indian skeleton in the face.
"When we were older and more versed in Indian warfare, we regretted, as did father, that we hadn't dug beneath
the remains of the horse. More than likely we would really have found an Indian skeleton, because the Pawnees,
if they had time, killed a dead chief's pony and buried it over him, so that he could ride it to the Happy Hunting
Ground."
(Note: At the same time that Evelyn Elledge and her brother, Carl Boone, were burrowing into the ant mounds on
the plains of Nebraska, another inquiring youth of the same age as Evelyn, 200 miles to the south, on the great
plains of southwestern Kansas, was likewise digging into similar ant mound to find where the ants were getting
their pretty beads, which of course they were bringing up from the burials of Indian braves. That inquiring youngster
was the writer of this history, whose father was then pre-empting government lands in the wild Cimarron country,
near the border of the old Cherokee Strip, known also as "No Man's Land," then a lawless region just
beginning to be settled. Those far-flung treeless plains were then deep-furrowed with the paths of the buffaloes,
leading to the great wallows, and scattered far and wide over the prairies lay the bleached carcasses of the mighty
herds that late had roamed there in countless numbers, grim reminders of a vanished life.)
Evelyn relates some thrilling episodes of the plains, wherein her brother, Carl Boone Elledge, and his pony Crockett
and dog Pompey figured. Once the family discovered a great fire only a few miles away, a curtain of flame coming
in their direction at a frightful pace. Carl, mounted on Crockett, sped westward to warn other settlers, after
assisting his father and sister Maude to harness the two teams with which to plow fireguards around the home. The
flames reached the canyon and some leaped across. Evelyn tells the story:
"In the meantime, father and Maude plowed deep furrows between the house and the lapping patches of flame;
as the flames mounted, Maude was forced to abandon her work and brought her horses up to the sheltered side of
the house. Father worked on until his horses refused to face their task and ran terrified to the house. Meantime,
mother, with my six or seven years of age help, manage to get the cows, calves, pigs and chickens corraled in the
sod shelters. Here, although the thick turf of grass which had grown over the roofs, burned, the creatures were
safe. Father and Maude's plowed fire-guard saved our house but we lived continually in fear."
Another time, Carl's pony, Crockett, frightened by a jack-rabbit that suddenly jumped up against his legs, bolted,
and Carl was thrown from the saddle, his foot catching in a stirrup and he was thus dragged over the frozen stubble
at his flying pony's heels for a long distance. Fortunately, his heavy-lined coat rolled and formed a sort of pad
under the back of his head as he was dragged, thus preventing death. He was unconscious when the pony stopped at
the house and the clothing had been torn from his back and hips and the flesh was torn and bleeding. Says his sister:
"Poor mother thought her dear little red-head would never be able to scamper about again, but her love and
wonderful care brought him through safely. I think we all sort of gave that old coat of Carl's the peg of honor
next to father's buffalo."
Another time, Carl, Crockett and Pompey killed a coyote out on the prairie, after the animal had put up a hard
fight. Carl was then 10. The coyote bested Pompey, but Crockett, the pony, striking out with a foot, struck the
fighting animal squarely on the head. While thus pinioned, Carl dismounted and with his pocket knife cut the coyote's
throat. Of this triumph, his sister writes: "Never did warrior return from field of conquest more puffed up
than did this scion of the Boones! The coyote hung a limp rag across the pommel of the saddle, his fine full-furred
tail almost touching the ground. Carl wanted to appear nonchalant, as though killing a coyote was an every-day
affair for 10-year-old youngsters, but the little boy in him gained mastery when father appeared in the doorway,
and he fairly screamed, ‘See what I killed with my knife!' It was a grand moment and we have relived the glory
of it in each re-telling to the present time."
To the Elledges, while living here, came that terrible scourge of the plains, drouth, desolating and absolute.
The crops had been planted and the spring rains gave promise of harvest. Then came the hot winds and the leafage
was parched dry and had to be cut at once before it would shatter and be blown away. Enough sustenance had not
been stored in these stalks and leaves to sustain the stock through the long hard winter that followed. Of this
terrible time, the daughter says:
"I have seen father shoot his stock as a mercy death against the slow sure one of starvation. That winter
saw dear, gay old dad sobered and sorrowful, because he was so kind he could not bear the sight of suffering. Wheat,
left over from the spring sowing, and ground in mother's coffee mill, was our main food, and the preserved meats
of animals killed before starvation had started disease. Hogs that were confined in pens would devour the weaker
ones, until father killed them and dragged them out from the house with the horses and buried them in deep ditches.
"Father, early the next spring, traded the homestead for a new stock and equipment and moved us some distance
away to our other tract of land on the border of Frenchman River. An earlier land-seeker had abandoned the claim
and left as the only sign of his having lived there, a well, and a large one-roomed sod house, with an upstairs
of frame, with a large loft for sleeping. Mother and we children loved this place; the sod walls were fully three
feet thick, plastered with mud and white-washed on the exterior; the window frames were set nearly flush with the
walls on the exterior and thus formed seats on the inside, where we piled our schoolbooks. A shelf high up above
our heads held the blooming house plants always cultivated. The floors were of pine but they scrubbed white under
mother's care, and I think no curtains will ever seem so beautiful as those she fashioned for the windows of that
house. She worked long after us children had been tucked away in bed in the loft, sewing on the machine father
had given her for her wedding present, one of the first Singers in Appanoose county, Iowa. No doubt the curtains
were made from some of the frilly dresses she had worn as the belle of the ‘singing school,' ‘candy pulls' and
‘spelling bees' around Orleans, Iowa. Whatever the material was, I know I shall never forget that thrill of gladness
and beauty they created for me when I returned home from a day at the sod school two and a half miles down the
river. Father at the window in a comfortable old spindle-back rocker, Pompey at his feet, mother fine and clean,
bending over golden crusted loaves of freshly baked bread, a braided home-made rug in front of the hearth, and
those heavenly fashioned curtains at the windows! I close my eyes and see them now and pray God to bless all home-making
mothers as He did bless that wonderful mother of mine."
Mrs. Boone thus continues her narrative of that plains settlement: "Another year of drouth ended our stay
in this lonely place. Early in the spring the winds came with such power and velocity that the sands were caught
up and formed clouds of such density that we could not see the barn from the house windows. The crops planted later
in this loose hot soil withered and died at the first hot blast. I remember well the day it struck our corn field.
About 11 o'clock the hot winds began to blow and by three in the afternoon our waving field of dark rich green
had become a crackling wave of yellowish tan. We watched it curl and parch in the biting heat; the sand became
so hot to our bare feet we had to go indoors. Next day we cut and shocked this late July or early August forced
harvest. The pumpkins that were planted in the hills of corn dotted the field with splashes of color, although
their leaves were seared and dead.
"Father traded this place for a stock of boots and shoes in Trenton, Nebraska. Mother used the room adjoining
the store for a dining room and opened a restaurant. Her good cooking attracted patronage, but Father's pride had
been wounded. He discovered that he had been tricked into an exchange that gave him a left-over stock of discarded
styles and shapes, some of which were sold at greatly reduced prices and others left to be carried back to Iowa
and used by the family and friends. Father's pride also would not allow him to let mother be the bread- winner,
although failing eyesight warned him that his days of earning power were nearing an end. Fearing this and wishing
to be near the older boys in Iowa, he and Carl returned to Moulton, leaving mother and us girls to carry on in
the restaurant alone until he could send for us. We joined them three months later and the entire family spent
the remainder of the winter with Jim (Harvey's adopted son), who had a lovely home near Orleans. In the spring
we moved to Moulton, where I was enrolled in the 8th grade."
Then came the great tragedy. The two older sons, Charles and Edward, financed an operation for the removal of cataracts
from their father's eyes. A noted surgeon, assisted by the local doctor, operated. The pioneer was led home with
bandages on his eyes. Came the day when they were to be removed. The younger children stayed home from school,
anxious that their father should see them all again. Says the daughter:
"He was seated so that he was facing a west window, and when the bandages were removed he though he could
see the outlines of the small window panes set in their frames against that warm gob of light from the afternoon
sun. I believe that the doctor knew the operation was unsuccessful then, but to let father gradually realize his
condition he put the strips of cloth back around father's head and bade him wait a few days before they would be
removed for good. I think, too, that mother and we children were aware of the true state of affairs although father
tried to pass it off with a bluster of courage and cheerfulness. He sang less those few weeks before the bandages
came off for the last time and he knew that he was stone blind.
"I believe now that he sang when his mind was on his troubles for the tunes were there but the words often
drifted off into a mere hum. This habit remained with him through the long years that followed, to his death. Old
Kentucky folk songs, singing school roundelays and church songs, he sang while death came for him.
"Our parents never paraded their religion on Sunday, they lived it every day. Both were members of the Christian
church in Iowa. Father had been raised in the Baptist faith in Illinois, his parents were of that faith, and Grandmother
Jennings was a Dunkard until the Christian faith reached Roanoke (Va.), then she adopted that faith, although her
two older sons and Aunt Elizabeth remained in the Dunkard. The two sons were the founders of that faith (Dunkard)
at Orleans. He (father) became a member of the Christian church in Orleans, where that was the only one organized
with the exception of the Dunkards. The Christian faith was strong in Virginia, from which a majority of Orleans'
populace had immigrated.
"Father was short, inclined to be stout, resembling his Griggsville kinsmen, Leonard Boone and David Lowery
Elledge, brown hair and laughing grey eyes; such a lovely, happy, optimistic disposition I have never seen equaled,
only in mother, who was his counterpart in these virtues, but she was more patient. Father would flare up in a
rage that would cause those who had aroused his ire to ‘seek tall timber,' but it ended as quickly as it came,
leaving no scars of vengeance or hatred.
"I think father sang more when he was blind than before, possibly to keep away self pity and loneliness in
those dark days. Because he had been so active and loved to read and see things. I know this exile into darkness
must have been almost unbearable at times, but he never complained. He was a great reader, and after he became
blind nothing pleased him more than to have someone read to him. Blindness seemed to intensify his memory and he
could have given us all this history we are now so eagerly searching out, even in minute detail.
"He loved his parents and the old town of Griggsville. He went back for visits twice in the years after he
left there, and that was an achievement considering the lack of easy mode of travel as we now have it.
"A brother-in-law, Thomas Rogers, once said to mother in father's presence, ‘When Harvey dies you'll have
to bury him back in Griggsville or he'll dig a tunnel through to his beloved Illinois.'"
Harvey Elledge, pioneer settler of 1834 at Griggsville, was blind for more than 15 years; he died in Cincinnati,
Iowa, August 28, 1908, aged 82 years, 2 months and 26 days. Excepting four years in Nebraska and two years in Davis
county, Iowa, he had resided continuously in Appanoose county, Iowa, after his removal from Pike county, Illinois,
in 1850. He is buried in the Pleasant Hill cemetery at Cincinnati.
Mrs. Elledge, the former Mary Scott Jennings, born at Roanoke, Virginia, November 24, 1842, died at the home of
her daughter, Mrs. Maude Gruzebeck, in Ironton, Minnesota, December 28, 1928, aged 86 years, 1 month and 4 days.
She is buried beside her husband at Cincinnati.