Family’s Immigration West Includes Tales of Wanderlust

Our family’s immigration west begins in 1755, so the story handed down
in our family goes (and history books and a monument erected in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, to honor her confirm it), when my maternal grandmother seven
generations back was carried off by the Indians after they had killed her
father and brothers and burned her home.

Her name was Regina Hartman; the home the Indians ravaged was near the eastern
boundary of Pennsylvania.
Regina and her
sister were hurried off and made to travel fast day and night through woods and
over rocks, up and down hills. A third and smaller girl the Indians had taken
captive clung to Regina
as to a mother. Although Regina
was only 9, she had to carry the weary child a good part of the way. When they
finally came to a halt the sister was taken on, never to be heard from again. Regina worked hard for the
Indians during the nine years she was held captive and became as one of them.

After the battle of Bushy Run, her
mother sought the girl when the released prisoners were taken back to Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
She found a swarthy maiden who could talk only in the Indian tongue. Efforts at
recognition failed. Then the mother thought to sing a song she had taught Regina as a tiny tot. The
girl, with memories of her childhood revived, took up the refrain, sang it through,
then repeated Luther’s Catechism as she had learned it in her home, and rushed
into her mother’s arms.

Thirty years later, Regina’s daughter Maria
and her husband, John Adam Baker, loaded their three children and a few choice
possessions into a covered wagon. Leaving their Northampton
County home, in eastern Pennsylvania, they
started on the long and weary journey westward across the state, wending their
way over mountains where bears and other wild animals were often their only
company. The trail they took doubtless followed the one of the forced march the
Indians had taken Regina
over years before, so they were ever on the alert for treacherous natives. This
was about 1795, when travel for many between Philadelphia
and Pittsburgh
was on foot, which was the means of delivering messages. The State road had
been built at a cost of $20 a mile, so it is likely they did not do much more
than cut down the trees. Isn’t it interesting to compare that price with the
present rate per mile of road building?

Despite the hazards of travel, the
little family made the trip safely, coming at last to Westmoreland County,
where they bought land south of Greensburg, about 40 miles from Pittsburgh.
There they built a log cabin, settled down to grow up with the country,
propagated and prospered for at least 80 or 90 years before the wanderlust
again set in.

In the mid-70s, “Kansas
Fever” struck western Pennsylvania
like the plague. Inoculation was unknown those days, so the westward trek was
on! Many came by covered wagon. Not so my father, Edgar Clark Fowler.

As a young man of 20, in the fall
of 1877, he packed his traveling bag. Grandmother Fowler filled another
suitcase full of food for him, and he bought a one-way railroad ticket, via St. Louis and Kansas City,
for Ottawa, Kansas. There were a few Indians in Dad’s
story too, but they were mostly in the minds of fond relatives and friends who
gathered at the little railroad station to see him off. With tears in their
eyes they bade him a last farewell, so sure they were that he’d be tomahawked
way out there in Indian-ridden Kansas.

Trains were slow those days, but
there was still food in the big valise when the engine finally chugged into Ottawa. There, young Ed
Fowler built himself a wagon, bought a team of horses, and drove the Kaw River
road through Lecompton to Topeka.
He put up temporarily at the old Gordon House, the town’s deluxe hostelry when Kansas Avenue was a
mud road. He listened to talk around the hotel lobby for “grassroot
opinion” on likely locations, and for sport and recreation went hunting
and shot prairie chicken in the “wide open spaces” where the
beautiful Topeka High
School building now stands in downtown Topeka. (My own home is a mere block away.) A
few weeks later, his mind made up, he climbed into his wagon, headed the horses
north and drove to Jackson
County. There he bought a
farm east of Holton; sent back to Pennsylvania
for his father, mother, five younger sisters and two baby brothers.

The following spring of 1878, the
Henry B. Bair family (my mother’s maiden name), also Pennsylvanians, came to Kansas – by steamboat.
The long trip down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi
and Missouri Rivers
to Leavenworth, Kansas, which is as far as the river was
navigable, took three and a half weeks. The big Pennsylvania
farm wagon and the horses came out of the ship’s hold at Leavenworth,
and the Bairs were soon on their way overland to a Jackson County
farm five miles west of Holton.

The first person pretty 18-year-old
Tillie Bair saw as the family drove into town was someone she knew, young Ed
Fowler, who by fate or happy happenstance, had come to town that day to replenish
supplies. The two young people had met at the old Sewickley
Academy, now famous in fiction, where
they had gone to school back in Pennsylvania,
a few years before.

Ed paid his respects to Mr. and
Mrs. Bair who sat in the front seat, then walked around the wagon to where
Tillie sat holding her year-old baby brother. “Is this yours?” he
asked, pointing to the squirming youngster. Blushing to her hair roots, Tillie,
for all her embarrassment, somehow managed a denial. Her explanation must have
been satisfactory, for the acquaintance was resumed, and they started going
steady. But young folks were not too hasty in those days, and it was almost
three years later that they were married on Christmas Day 1881. It was exactly
17 years later, the “coldest Christmas ever recorded in Kansas,” that I was born their sixth
baby. I’ve been grateful ever since that they named me Louise instead of
“Merry Christmas.”

There have been three more generations
added to the family since that eventful day. Being so steeped in the Christmas
tradition, it seemed only natural that I should choose Christmas for my wedding
day. On December 25, 1927, I was married to Paul M. Roote, who didn’t object to
the day, and has never had any trouble remembering anniversaries.

Incidentally, Paul’s maternal
grandparents came to Kansas,
not in a covered wagon, but rode in “in style,” on the first Union
Pacific train to come into the state. The conductor is reported to have stopped
the train so that Granddad Fisk could get off to milk a cow so that their frail
6-month-old baby boy might have fresh milk.

These are mere fragments of
stories, so sketchy of detail, that I’ve heard my parents and grandparents
tell. How I wish … oh, how I wish … I had listened more intently! Yet each time
my car takes with ease the steep hills of the Kansas River
road, my mind goes back to that 20-year-old young man, who was to become my
father, as he drove its muddy ruts in his homemade wagon, and each time I
salute anew his undaunted courage. Or aboard a Super Constellation as it skims
through the skies, I think of the slow, pokey steamboat that took weeks to
bring my mother to Kansas,
while I cover the same miles in a few hours. With her rare sense of humor and
her enthusiasm for living, how Mother would have loved to fly! And my mind
races back over the two centuries since little Regina Hartman was captured by
the Indians. Supposing she, like her sister, had never been heard from again?
Just where and who would I be, or wouldn I be at all? In that case, there
wouldn’t have been even these few fragments of stories to set down on paper.

Louise Fowler Roote
Topeka, Kansas