Our Tough and Smart Forebears

This probably belongs on Parents and Ancestors in the ongoing discussion there. However, it is too long for a comment, and I cannot add main posts there, so I will add it here.

After reading the fascinating posts concerning my maternal grandparents, I again saw the preponderance of strong women in the family heritage, and it helps even more to understand some of my aunts and uncles, cousins, and siblings.

I was particularly struck by reading the comment about the women being expected to get out in the fields and work at an early age, and the example of Clara dropping out of school at an early age to help manage the household. I suppose that is why families had so many children—cheap labor…

Anyway, as I read those stories, I thought of all the stories I have heard about how this nation was settled by families with that kind of strong work ethic; what today’s laws and mores would consider child abuse in many instances. I thought of the determination to survive and feed the family and build a life in often hard circumstances, with little or any of the conveniences we take for granted today.

For some reason, reflecting on all these stories made me think of a book I read years ago titled Stillwell and the American Experience in China. Written by the eminent historian Barbara Tuchman, it is one of the best historical books I have ever read. Tuchman lived many years in China and reported from there first hand during and after WWII. Stillwell was General Stillwell, who was the American liaison in post-WWII China before the takeover by the Communists under Mao.

She was writing during the Civil War, with the Communists advancing from the north. She relates an incident she witnessed when she was out on an expedition, and they came to the peak of a hill that overlooked a valley through which ran a train. The country was in ruin after years of Japanese occupation and the toll of war, so few trains were running.

As her party looked down on the valley, they saw a lone boxcar creeping along the track, surrounded by what appeared to be hundreds of tiny creatures that from the distance appeared as ants. On closer examination, it became clear that the tiny ant-like creatures were actually hundreds of Chinese peasants from the Communist side, pushing the boxcar along the tracks. When Tuchman realized what was going on, she wrote, “this is why I know their side will win.”

That may be an extreme example, but it reflects the kind of determination of the settlers in the 19th and 20th centuries in the western half of America that came in their wagons, with their families, and carved out homesteads and towns in the most difficult of circumstances, entire families working long hours in the fields or on the ranch to scratch out a living.

One of the most fascinating experiences I had as a teenager was when I was about 16 and I went to Oklahoma City and visited the Sellers, old friends of the family from when we lived there before and right after I was born. First names fail me now, but the older woman in the family spent some time telling me about how they came to Oklahoma. Her parents came during the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. She remembered living in a sod house dug out of the side of a hill. They were 12 miles from the closest neighbor and 40 miles from the nearest town. Once a month her father would hitch up the wagon and they would make the trek into town to buy supplies that could not be produced on the farm. It was like living history listening to her—I only wish I had been able to spend more time with her.

The point in all of this is that reading the stories of the hardships faced by my forebears, for me, integrates them into the overall life of the times in which they lived, and shows the determination and hard work that it took to establish civilized life in much of this country, especially the areas in which most of us live, and shows how our family had a small part in the process of building this nation as they sought only to survive and build a life for themselves. Even when they left the farm and moved to the city of Wichita, they remained industrious and hard-working, both the men and the women. We see in our own generation the entrepreneurial and take-charge spirit among the women that we read about from earlier generations, and understand that they came about it honestly.