By the middle of the 1840s, hundreds of steamers were landing every year at the major river ports; it became fashionable to take evening cruises on the most sumptuous of them, known as packets. Large side-wheelers lit up the murky night, crowded with dancers and music played by brass bands. They bore names such as Clara, Alert, Pocahontas No. 1, Cumberland Valley, Oceana, and Elk.
Indians often took passage, such as when a party of Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, and Snake boarded the fireboat Clara in Westport, later known as Kansas City, so that they might walk on the waters to their audience with President Fillmore. A spring menu of the Clara offered calf-head soup, roast beef with gravy sauce, roast mutton with chili sauce; roast chicken and pork were both available with a ketchup sauce. Boiled ham, corned beef, mutton, tongue, and codfish were also offered, the last “ala Rain Egg Sauce.” Gooseberry pie, rhubarb pie, sago pudding, and blancmange were all available for dessert, as well as selections of Madeira, sherry, port, claret, and malt liquors (quarts of London porter, “do do pints,” and Tennent’s Scotch Ale). Champagne was available in Heidsieck quarts, “Do pints,” “Irroy Cabinet Wine,” and “Do do do pints.” A note at the bottom of the menu warned that “Gentlemen ordering Wine from the Bar without designating the kind or price, will be furnished with Madeira at two dollars per bottle.”
Many steamboats sank. The Iowa sank after it hit a snag. The Otoe suffered various mishaps, sank and was raised, and sank again; then, in 1837, its boiler blew up in St. Louis while parked at the levee; ten people died; four months later it sank forever at Euphrasie Bend. Steamboat races were held at Jefferson City in 1838; the Edna blew up in 1840, killing fifty-five German immigrants.
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Esther Wilson was born an Adamson, and other Adamsons traveled with her and William. The Wilsons and the Adamsons had come together, in that generation, in northeastern Tennessee, among a circle of Quakers who met in silence at a place called Lost Creek, in Jefferson County, not far northeast from what is now Knoxville. William’s Wilsons came from Grainger County and before that were in North Carolina, and so too did the Adamsons come out of North Carolina and like the Wilsons were previously in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and western New Jersey, along with the Rouths and other families in our lineage. Patricia believes that William and Esther were married at the Lost Creek church, though records from that period are spotty and their names do not appear on the rolls. We know Esther’s father was a member of the local Meeting, but I find no evidence that the Wilsons were members of the Society of Friends, and it could be that in that first union of Wilson and Adamson, two great immigrant streams from the British Isles, the Quakers and the Scots-Irish, come together.
Another Adamson genealogist compiled a volume titled Lost Creek Memories, which records the names and dates of dozens of branching lineages. I found a copy in the New York Public Library. A curious code accompanies the lists. Entries include notations such as “con,” “dis,” “ltm,” “mbr,” “mcd,” and “mou,” which signify, in order, “condemned,” “disowned,” “leave to marry,” “member,” “married contrary to discipline,” and “married outside of unity.” Marriage regulations were strict among the Society of Friends, as were social restrictions. In those days many sons were disowned for pursuing the wrong vocation or the wrong wench. A son or daughter who married a Methodist or a Baptist had turned away from the way of truth and was lost to the community, cast out of the Meeting.
The Wilsons might have been Quakers or Quaker sympathizers or the descendants of English borderers or Lowland Scots or Ulster Orangemen. Whatever their lineage, they married into the Adamsons, who were undoubtedly Quakers, at least until then. When the Adamsons and Wilsons left Tennessee for Missouri, they seem also to have abandoned the Friends, though their austere folkways and fierce moralism left an imprint that can still be felt in their descendants.
Lost Creek Quaker Church, New Market, Tennessee
Patricia and Grant gave me a tour of the ancestral Wilson properties in Missouri. I piloted their car while Patricia navigated and Grant, in the backseat, made jokes about heaven. We drove out of Prairie Village, north through Kansas City across the river into Missouri and east on Missouri Highway 210 through empty plowed fields patchworking the broad fertile floodplain of the Missouri River. We stopped briefly in a hamlet called Orrick, where I admired the tiny brick city hall, an array of hulking grain elevators, and the picturesque remnants of the RRICK FARM SERVICE, whose sign had gone to rust and lost its initial O. We drove on, passing a floral cross memorializing someone named Bubba who met his end on that road, to Bluffton, Missouri, which no longer exists, outside Camden, and read the historical marker, found next to some corrugated-aluminum sheds and two squat grain storage buildings. The marker said that the town was founded in 1816 by families from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee and that Meaders Vanderpool founded the county’s first school in 1819, the same year the first steamboat ascended the Missouri River. A train sat idle on a sidetrack, loaded with farm equipment. The river meandered several miles to our south, across a barren field. I didn’t see any bluffs.
Patricia, who wasn’t at all shy, rolled down her window as we wandered around the town of Richmond and asked a scruffy young man who was wearing a dirty wifebeater and torn jeans, his belly poking out from under his shirt as he walked, where we could get a good sandwich. He directed us to his favorite diner, which to my relief was closed, because from the outside it didn’t look very appealing. We had passed another place up the road, and its lot was full of cars, so we stopped there. We were hunting for a small farm that William and Esther Wilson had owned in the 1830s, and Patricia was worried about finding her landmark, a small white church on a hill. She asked the chubby blond waitress, who knew it immediately. Patricia was skeptical, because you can’t see the church from the road, but the waitress said, “Yes, that’s exactly right.” She and her friends used to drive up that steep hill to the little church when she was in high school. They would hang out in the boneyard on Halloween.
She remembered the road being pretty bad, and I imagined the sorts of things I would have done on a lonely hill, late at night, in a graveyard, when I was that age. The menu would have included alcohol and much more. The waitress directed us toward Excelsior Springs and said the turnoff for the church would be about five miles up the road. Her directions were perfect. The sign said, TODD’S CHAPEL. We parked near the quaint white clapboard chapel and admired its simplicity: a sharply peaked roof and even sets of lancet windows, four on each long side and one by the front door.
I hiked down a rutted double-track road that plunged off the back of Todd’s Hill, climbed over a fence, and stood in a field that William Wilson owned until about 1830. It was a stock field, well trod and fertilized by cattle, stretching over a modest bulge at the base of the much steeper hill, surrounded by scrubby trees at the fence line. Dry straw-colored grass crunched beneath my feet. Beyond the trees lay almost identical fields and then another hill. Possibly William and Esther and young Perry had lived on this property, after clearing it by hand and burning the timber to make charcoal or lye, and attended the nearby church, which to judge from the dates on the grave markers was standing even then. Patricia told me that somebody’s Wilson sister was buried there, but I didn’t find the grave. Probably they were too far from the river to have sold the timber to the riverboats. I lingered in the old field for a time, listening to the ugly sound of a lonely bird, and tried to feel the weight of nearly two centuries of history on that land. All I could imagine was the weight of 182 years’ worth of cow shit.
Site of William Wilson’s farm, near Todd’s Hill, outside Richmond, Missouri
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In 1836, under pressure from white settlers, the Ioway Indians, along with the Sac and the Fox, agreed to sell their lands, which lay west of the Platte River and east of the Missouri, opening more than three thousand square miles to development. The Platte Purchase signaled the unraveling of the Missouri Compromise. The Wilsons and
the Adamsons were attracted by the new prospects and moved west, settling first in the area of New Market, named for their old Tennessee home, in what became Platte County, then in Weston, which was then one of the busiest ports on a busy river. Following Patricia’s directions, I drove through charming hills splattered with farms, some with showy white fences fashioned of split rails intended, perhaps, to evoke Kentucky horse country. Other nearby residents decorated their properties with cast-off farm machinery and less than picturesque household appliances. We pulled off on a dirt road and peered at a parcel that once belonged to Simon Wilson, Perry’s uncle. I got out and took a photograph of a bare stubbly field in gray light, bounded by tree-grown fence lines serving as windbreaks. In the distance I could see the peaks of an industrial facility of some kind. Returning to the macadam and turning north, I soon discovered that a strip mine and processing plant had sprouted atop the Wilson farm.
One fine April day a few months later I returned to New Market. The fields had sprouted up green with new growth, and leafy trees obscured the views between them, but there was no hiding that strip mine. A large yellow apparatus, a conveyor belt it seemed, stretched across the highway to transport material from the plant to great uniform piles on the west side of the road. I could hear the grinding of machinery crushing its material. I was alone this time, so nothing prevented me from pulling in to the plant’s parking lot and taking photographs. Apparently, some workers grew alarmed at my curiosity and alerted their superiors. Out strode a striking fellow named Michael Puffinbarger. He was a quality-control engineer, and he told me all about his plant. Puffinbarger and his colleagues were mining the Weston shale and crushing the ore down to what he called a four-inch top size. Then they put it all in a big rotary kiln, 175 feet long by 11 feet in diameter, and fired that crushed gray Weston shale at twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour. What came out at the end was Haydite, an expanded shale used as a lightweight substitute for limestone in making concrete and asphalt. Haydite was named for Stephen J. Hayde, who developed the process in the early 1900s in Kansas City, and this plant was built on the former Wilson farm more than sixty years ago.
I stood listening politely, genuinely interested in what the friendly Mr. Puffinbarger was telling me about his product, but really I couldn’t get over his appearance. His hair and scalp were caked with a dark black material. I couldn’t tell whether it was dust from the plant or if he had smeared shoe polish or some really old Just for Men black dye all over his hair. The stuff was plastered all over his scalp, and his hair was inky black. He was a large man, wearing a bright red T-shirt and blue jeans, with a ruddy face, a healthy beer belly, and a small tobacco stain near the corner of his mouth. I left New Market feeling rather well informed about the usefulness of Haydite and proud to know that the substrate of an ancestral homestead was saving taxpayers money and keeping motorists safe throughout Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska.
I spent a few days exploring northwest Missouri. Rolling hills and pretty old fields alternated with gigantic mown lawns surrounded by wrought-iron steel pickets and rock pillars. Bored cattle stood idly swishing their tails at flies in muddy old stock ponds of captured rainwater. Drowning traps for careless schoolchildren. A hobby farm with longhorn cattle flew the rattlesnake “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on a low hill. The country looked productive and fertile, though little real agricultural production was in evidence. I lingered at Weston Bend State Park and learned about the region’s bygone tobacco industry as dozens of carpenter bees burrowed into the weathered boards of a grand old barn.
Simon Wilson’s former farm, New Market, Missouri
On one of our drives Patricia and Grant took me to Liberty, where they lived during the 1970s and raised their children. We drove up a tall hill to see their beautiful old house, which now shared its yard with a monstrous rusty hulk of a water tower more than three times its height. A Hallmark cards shipping facility had come to town, and the city decided that the Clothiers’ yard was the perfect place for a new tower, which for some mysterious reason was required by the new plant. The Clothiers fought the condemnation all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court. When they lost their case, Patricia took out an ad in the paper putting the house up for sale, and it was bought by the attorney who had represented the opposing party in their lawsuit. He apparently didn’t mind sharing his yard with a gigantic steel spider just thirty-nine feet away.
In the evening I sat with Patricia and Grant and watched Fox News. Grant asked me with a sly grin if I thought it was true that Obama hated America: “You don’t think he’s a dedicated Marxist?” We talked about the Wilsons and Perry’s trips to California, and Patricia said that she thought he might have gone around the cape on one of his trips. They discovered gold in 1848, she said, and he got married in 1854, so you’ve got six years in there. Grant said he saw a program on television the other night, Nova or something; it showed huge mountains with glaciers, and fifty-foot waves off Tierra del Fuego. They don’t have any big land predators down there, he said, but in the ocean they have orca whales.
I said I thought you’d have to be crazy to go down there in a ship when you could cross the isthmus. “They’ve got no predators,” Grant said, chuckling in his deep gravelly voice, “in heaven.”
When we sat down for dinner, Grant gave one of his wonderful blessings. “Father, we thank you for the night of rest. We’re grateful for the privilege of this day. And we’re so thankful for the fellowship with Roger. We pray, Father, you’ll be with him as he travels. And with his family. We thank you now for this food, and we pray for the one who’s prepared it, for her health and well-being. We ask, Father, that you watch over and keep our loved ones. We pray that you will be with your people everywhere. Help us to choose wisely those who would lead us, and we pray for the well-being of those who defend us. Guide us today and keep us, we pray. In Christ’s name, Amen.”
At dinner we talked about the civil unrest of the 1840s. It wasn’t yet the period we call Bleeding Kansas, but there was plenty of bloodshed. The Kansas-Missouri border country, even before the arrival of Old John Brown, was a rough territory in those days, with pro-slavery border ruffians marauding through the countryside and civil unrest over the Mormon question. In Liberty, I came across a stately antebellum residence, recently pressed into service as a frat house, that once belonged to Alexander William Doniphan, a hero of the Mexican War. During the 1838 Mormon War, the occasion of the famous extermination order of Missouri’s governor, Lilburn Boggs, Doniphan refused to execute the prophet Joseph Smith after a court-martial found him guilty of treason. Smith was locked up for five months in the Liberty Jail, which has now been reconstructed inside a museum by the Latter-day Saints, before escaping to Illinois, where he was eventually murdered.
In the historic town of Weston, where William Wilson was slain by a mob in 1841, the former port long since abandoned by the fickle Missouri, I stood where the docks would have been, next to a railroad track at the edge of the quaint downtown, gazing out into the alluvial plain, trying to guess how many miles away the river flowed. I wondered about the mob that had taken poor William’s life. Perhaps he was mistaken for a Mormon.
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In 1849, my great-great-great-grandfather Perry Wilson made his first trip to California. He was the child of Quakers who had fallen away from the Truth; raised on a farm in a frontier society, he was surrounded by a clan of relatives who were ambitious and responsible members of their communities. His uncle Jacob Adamson was among the founders of New Market and was elected justice of the peace in Green township on June 22, 1839, and we find Larkin Adamson’s name listed among the first citizens of Weston. Yet the call of the West had brought his clan to Missouri from Tennessee, and before that from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. No one can ever know exactly what brought his ancestors to the colonies. They were restless people, and soon even Larkin and Jacob would pull stakes and move on.
Perry’s family never settled for long, thoug
h it’s likely he knew John Strode Brasfield, born in Clark County, Kentucky, in 1825, who came with his family to Platte in 1838 and settled in the Great Bear Rough along Todd’s Creek, not far from Todd’s Hill and the Wilsons’ farm. Perry and John were five years apart, and their lives followed similar paths. As a child Brasfield caught four bear cubs and walked three miles to attend school. He raised a sow and a litter of pigs and sold them at a profit of two dollars. He purchased a fiddle. Later he borrowed money from his family’s old slave Aleck and bought four calves, which he broke and used as oxen. In 1842, John signed on as a cook and hunter for a party of traders and went to Santa Fe. He encountered Comanches and was nearly captured and made it home with a mule and fifty-five dollars in his pocket.
Then came the news from Sutter’s Mill, and in the spring of 1849 John and his brother William and three friends set off to California to make their fortunes. They almost perished in the Humboldt Desert, and one of his companions went mad with thirst, but they made it through and spent the winter in Hangtown, a mining camp near Coloma that was known for its lynchings. Food was dear in the goldfields, and men grew as rich trading in groceries as they did from digging, with far less effort. Potatoes went for a dollar a pound and eggs for that much apiece. A dozen eggs brought the same as the twelve hundred pounds of young pork John had raised in Missouri. After clearing fifteen hundred dollars in the mines, John engaged in the mercantile trade and made a great profit in San Francisco. His brother William died, perhaps of cholera, and John went home to Platte, discouraged.
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