Thanks to that wagon, pulled by oxen

Many families have an unofficially designated genealogist, that one person who doggedly slogs through the past, collecting the fragments of information that tell our histories.

In my family, it’s my cousin Sherry. I’m not sure how she became the keeper of our story, but she does it well and I am grateful.

It was thanks to Sherry — and an unnamed staff member at the Rice County Historical Society in Faribault, Minn., — that I found myself last week standing in a place I’d never even imagined: on rural Minnesota farmland owned by our great-grandparents nearly 170 years ago.

Until a few years ago, I’d never thought much about these distant relatives.

It was after my daughter had moved to Minnesota for college in 2014 that I came across a passage in a family document that noted our forebearers had spent some of their nomadic pioneer years in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

My first call was to Sherry, the family genealogist, to learn more.

At the time she said she didn’t have the name of a town or community, but she did know they had lived from about 1855 to 1866 in a place called Rice County.

Now Minnesota has 87 counties (which must be a challenge for Minnesota school children if they, like us New Mexicans, are expected to memorize all those names when they are seventh graders).

I called my daughter and relayed the news that we had relatives who had once lived in Rice County, Minn., and then I got goosebumps — real, true goosebumps — when my daughter said, “Mom … I’m in Rice County.”

That must have been five years ago. Last week I finally got to visit the building that houses many of the old Rice County records.

I went in with low expectations, and was positively floored when a half hour later, the young man helping me emerged with a plat map showing early landowners.

Lo and behold, there was my great-grandfather’s name.

Thanks to recognizable proximity to one of those 10,000 lakes and access provided by a nearby bladed county road, a short while later we were on land in southwest Rice County that may have once been plowed by my kin, and I had some time to think about these relatives who made my very existence possible.

My great-grandfather was born in 1831 and his bride in “about 1838,” both in Indiana, according to Sherry. They traveled from Indiana to Minnesota in August of 1855, setting off only 11 days after they exchanged vows, the story goes, and traveling in a wagon pulled by oxen.

The journey was around 600 miles long. Historians tell us that oxen are good for maybe 15 miles a day, meaning they would have been on the road for at least 40 days — and likely more.

Under the best of circumstances — and if they came straight through — they arrived as the Minnesota forests were painted with the glorious colors of autumn, but also as the fierce northern winter would soon be testing their very survival.

We offspring of pioneers can look back to a thousand ways our family lines could have been derailed, entirely precluding our own existence. In this case, 600 miles of travel by ox wagon would be high on the list, but higher still would be 10 winters in Minnesota.

The day I was there, it was chilly with clouds moving in — the first snowflakes of the season were falling by that evening.

I couldn’t help but wonder if they had ever had time to appreciate the stunning beauty of fall in hard woods country, or if they were too embroiled in a race to collect food and stash enough fuel to keep them warm for the winter … and not even comfortably warm, mind you, but warm enough to prevent hypothermic death.

Their first baby — a girl named Rosanna — was born about a year after they arrived, and died only a few days after her first birthday. They had five more children in Minnesota before they were “burned out” and left for Texas.

(Burned out in this case meant that fire had likely destroyed their home, but I can tell you that I also would be “burned out” by 10 years of shoveling snow in Minnesota….)

In wagons drawn once again by oxen, they headed for Texas — more than a thousand miles away — wintering in Missouri on the way. After they arrived in the Lone Star State, they had four more children, including my grandfather.

My great-grandfather died in Texas, but my great-grandmother lived long enough to come to New Mexico in 1915 with some of her children and grandchildren. She was buried in the Portales Cemetery in 1929.

I plan to visit her grave soon.

I want to tell her about her great-granddaughter, Sherry, who keeps the embers of our family history glowing.

And I want to tell her that on a fine autumn afternoon I stood on the land in Minnesota where she and my great-grandfather lived and grew crops and buried a baby … and somehow survived.

Betty Williamson has no desire to travel hundreds of miles in a wagon pulled by oxen, but appreciates that her relatives did. Reach her at:

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