"I was born in a woodchuck hole." --- The Appenheimer family on the Kansas frontier, 1887-1893

 

The Appenheimer Family on the Kansas Frontier , 1887-1893, by BJ Omanson.  (Monongahela Books, 2018).  Period illustrations, photographs, newspaper notices, advertisements, documents.  Thirty-odd pages.  $15.


Excerpts:

As our grandfather liked to tell us when we were small children, “I was born in a woodchuck hole” —an absurd assertion that we received with giggles or grins, depending on our age. Yet the truth of the matter was not far off: Alpheus Appenheimer was born on January 3, 1891, to Alpheus Wheeler and Olive Witcher Appenheimer, in a one-room sod dugout in Wichita county, Kansas, during a night in which the temperature reached minus 20. A heavy snow had blanketed the entire state to a depth of up to three feet, and, in the western counties where the wind never sleeps, it was whipped into drifts for days afterwards. Tiny Alpheus was only kept from freezing by being snuggled against his mother beneath a mound of quilts.

This homestead was not the first farm undertaken by the Appenheimer family, whose luck had not always been with them. Prior to their migration into western Kansas five years earlier, they had lost a farm in Pike County, Illinois, to an epidemic of hog cholera. Lacking the means to start over again in Pike County, they decided to stake a homestead claim in western Kansas where they could obtain 160 acres by making basic improvements and maintaining a residence on it for five years under the Homestead Act.

The Realities of Homesteading

Even with favorable conditions, homesteading on the Great Plains was fraught with difficulty. Though the land was free for the working under the Homestead Act, it was practically impossible to make a living from it for the first three years, and few homesteaders could avoid going into debt. Breaking sod in the dry western counties was grueling labor, even for experienced farmers. A deep well had to be dug, and dry wells were a common result. A sod house had to be built, which necessitated even more digging in the rock-hard earth.

Kansas weather

Climatic conditions were harsh on the Great Plains at the best of times, with temperature extremes unmatched in other parts of the country. In January 1888, for instance, the temperature in western Kansas plunged to minus 42. The following July it reached 117. Such extremes were made even worse by the winds which, especially in the western counties, were notorious for their frequency and velocity. Rather than blowing parallel to the ground, they tended to slice into the earth at an angle, picking up everything in their path—dirt, sand and pebbles the size of peas. Soil from one field would be stripped off and piled onto adjacent fields in drifts.

                    Leoti, Kansas, about the time the Appenheimers homesteaded near there.

Ancestral families

 Where Once They Stood: The Colonial and Early Republic Ancestors of Alpheus Appenheimer and America Swango, by BJ Omanson. (Monongahela Books, 2018). Illustrated with period drawings, 250 pp.  

Excerpt:

"The tracing of a modern person’s lineage back through the centuries to a single remote ancestor in a vanished time and place, is the essence of genealogy.  However painstaking the research, with continual cross-checking and cross-referencing—however thorough and dispassionate the examination of evidence from multiple sources, however ingenious the triangulation of disparate data, and however rational the reliance on DNA testing for verification—the pursuit of a genetic lineage is an endeavor not untinged by the stain of romanticism. Though they might disavow it emphatically and cling to the respectable trappings of the dedicated scholar, there lurks in the shadowy recesses of every genealogist’s soul a secret Galahad, a quester after the Grail, a seeker after a direct link to some storied, half-mythic ancestor who has captivated the imagination, whether prince, or knight, or notorious outlaw.

The emphasis, in other words, is all on the individual—on direct links to particular ancestors—on traceable lineages—on great grandfathers and great grandmothers, as opposed to great uncles, great aunts, or first cousins several times removed.  This emphasis on direct lineages is mirrored in the history and legal system of every nation, and one can hardly gainsay its importance, but it is nevertheless a distortion of a core human reality: that the most basic unit in human society is not the individual but the family.

If this assertion seems less obvious now than in earlier eras, it is only because so much of human culture—through forces originally set into motion by humankind, but now utterly beyond its control—is currently in the process of disintegration. The typical American family in our time is both fractured and fractious, a mere stump of the great spreading tree that it was in its prime.

We speak reverentially of American individualism as a central national tenet, embodied in the figures of the 18^th century longhunter or 19^th century mountainman, the lone restless wanderer with his powderhorn and longrifle, self-reliant, living off the land, who has broken finally and utterly with the feudal European system of master and vassal: the quintessence of the free and independent man.

And while such individuals did exist—perhaps in greater numbers on the Appalachian frontier than in any other place before or since—their role in the arduous transformation over decades of the wilderness into established settlements was peripheral at most. That prodigious under-taking, for good or ill, and the brutal struggle it entailed against the Shawnee, Cherokee and other indigenous tribes, was the work not of intrepid individuals but of grittily determined pioneer families whose other options—very often—had all but run out.

Not only was it families who turned the tomahawk claims into backwoods farmsteads, who hewed out the first wagon roads and laid out the earliest frontier towns—it was also families (not generals or governors or governments, but families) who, in many instances, raised the militias, built the forts, and patrolled the forests. Consider those self-reliant families in the Watauga valley on the far side of the Alleghenies: cut off from any hope of support against the Cherokee from the governments of either North Carolina or Virginia, they declared their independence, established their own government and petitioned Williamsburg for recognition.

Dependent on no one but themselves for sustenance from the wilderness and protection against the tribes, families on the frontier naturally turned to neighboring families for support. They joined forces against the dangers that threatened them from all sides, and, before long, sealed their bonds by marriage, until families in a given region became, in effect, one great extended family.

For us now, trying to comprehend the lives of our colonial ancestors, it is not enough simply to trace the lineages of direct forebears. They did not exist as isolated individuals, but as members of extended families and close-knit communities who, for generations, had depended on one another for survival.

For this reason, in presenting the story of Alpheus and America Appenheimer’s frontier ancestors, I have included not only fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, but brothers, sisters, cousins and even in-laws as well—for they too were family.  On the frontier, especially, families were closely bound. They emigrated into the wilderness together, endured hardships together, suffered Indian attacks and abductions together, and went to war together. Calamities were family affairs."