Re: Buffalo Wallows
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In reply to:
Re: Buffalo Wallows
Clifford Scott 1/14/08
Hi Clifford, well I can say one thing, your Scott's were a lot smarter then mine were as you can see below.
And you can see that when you are a little kid like my grandmother Orra was you don't remember the bad times only the good.
I don't have any info on your Scott's but if I run across any I will be sure to contact you.
Good hunting.
HOMESTEADING IN KANSAS
by Phyllis Delmont
" All you really nead to take along to Kansas is a lookin' glass and a rocking chair. Then you can set and rock and watch yourself starve to death"
[Kansas by Roscoe Fleming]
Ten years earlier and fifteen miles southeast of Willa Cather's setting for O Pioneers!, My great grandparents homesteaded in Kansas. Enoch and Piety (Haworth ) Scott left Indiana in 1868 with six children, stopping in Iowa with friends for a time and adding two more children to the family before moving on.
They arrived in Kansas in 1871. there first home was a dugout gouged from a hill. In 1872 a grasshopper invasion leveled anything green.
Piety wrote letters back home to her parents full of homesickness, describing the hard life on the prairie. They are presented as written and with Quaker dating.
Third month the 19th 1873
I don't know of any body that is able to help there selves the friends (Quakers) has been sending some help to friends here and they divide with us as they do with others but there has not bin enough. If we had not belonged to friends and a got help that way I don't know what would of become of us.
10th month 16th 1879
Well we have had rather bad luck this fall we lost to hogs the too was worth 25 dollars.
Third month 14th 1880
mother I drempt last knight of going in the old garden to gather green apples. O I would like to see thee and the rest of the folks. we have some corn not near enough to do us . we had good early potatoes but the late ones did no good the hot weather and the bugs spoilt them we had over 7 hundred cabbages set out and tended them good but worms and dry weather did not let them do much good. i don't know what will become of so many as there is that has nothing to go on.
In a small Quaker cemetery,that is still well cared for , Enoch and Piety buried five of the six children born on the prairie. These deaths were never mentioned in the letters. After they moved to the nearby town of Burr Oak in 1882, two more children were born and lived.