2. THE FAMILY MATRIARCH

THE FAMILY MATRIARCH

Three generations:  Fern, Lela May, and Dodie.

Fern Miller was born in 1888 in Lawrence, Kansas.  Her mother, Elmira Lenora Miller, was a 'grass widow" which in those days described a woman whose husband was gone but still alive - somewhere.  Elmira was working as a domestic servant to earn enough to survive and to feed her two daughters, Fern and May.  Her husband had run off to the Alaska gold fields and promised to send for his family as soon as he struck it rich in Alaska.  

MILLER ABANDONS HIS FAMILY

He did come back briefly for a visit when Fern was 16 years old and brought Elmira a Victorian Loveknot ring made for him using gold he had found at his dig in Alaska.  He gave it to her with the promise that he would always love her, but his future was in Alaska, not back there in Kansas.  He tried to get her and his daughters to go back there with him, but Fern (Grandma) had a boyfriend, Ed Childers, she was trying to hook at that time, and May was determined to go to college and had been accepted at the University of Kansas for that Fall semester.

Grandma managed to convince Ed to marry her but she discovered that he expected her to act like a wife and learn how to cook and clean and do his laundry and make babies.  When she tried to make cornbread without cooking the corn first before adding it to the batter, that was the final straw.  The cornbread tasted like it was full of buckshot with all that uncooked corn.  Ed walked out, got a divorce, and dumped her on her rear.

GRANDMA STOPS BELIEVING IN 'TRUE LOVE'

Grandma managed to get a job as the new schoolteacher for the one-room rural schoolhouse because she had a diploma from high school.  But, you can imagine her dismay the first day of class when she discovered that some of her students were almost her age and stood a foot taller (She was only 5 feet tall).  When she tried to apply some discipline in the classroom, the 17-year-old boy she was chastising for spitting tobacco in the corner of the room, simply lifted her up by the elbows, took her to the door and told her to  'high-tail it outta here before you get hurt'.

Undaunted by her failure as a wife and a teacher, she made a decision that she later taught to me:  "You make your own opportunities in life.  Don't waste your time trying to be what others expect you to be.  Nothing is impossible if you set your mind to it."  So she approached the owner of a large store in St. Louis, the same one her grandparents had used many years ago outfitting their wagon train en route to Kansas when that store was just a frontier dry goods store.

HER CAREER AS A TRAVELING SALESWOMAN

She convinced the store owner that the lack of stores on the frontier was very frustrating to many of the farm families and that, if he would provide her with a horse and buggy, and some catalogs of merchandise, she would travel throughout Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska taking deposits for items to be ordered from the store and shipped to the homes of the purchasers.  She managed to sell everything from "pins and needles to player pianos", she told me.

One of her regular stops on her sales route was Dodge City, a railhead where ranchers brought their livestock to sell and ship to buyers using the new railroads.  She would always stay in the boarding house/hotel in Dodge where the ranchers would stay after delivering their herd.  

THE HUSSY AND THE COWBOY

It was there she met Alf Patton, a very tired cowhand who was suffering from pleurisy who was too ill to come to the dining room for his meals.  She volunteered to take his meals to him, and she spent hours with him being regaled by his stories about 'riding with Bat Masterson' and ranching in North Texas.  His family had owned a place outside Corsicana, Texas, called "Turkey Track Ranch". The brand on the cattle looked like a turkey track, of course.  After the Civil War, they lost the place to the carpet baggers after the Federal government raised the taxes on former 'friends of the Confederacy'. Ranching was the only thing he knew how to do, so he signed on to work on cattle drives from Texas to Dodge City.

If you haven't heard about the participation of Texans in the Civil War and the punishment doled out to them during the Reconstruction, please read this:  https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mzr01

He also told her how much he appreciated her visiting his room in the middle of the night to put a mustard plaster on his chest to help with his pleurisy.  After a few nights of mustard plasters and other inducements to help him get well, he proposed to her and took her back to Texas with him.  The fact that she was in her early 20's and he was in his 50's mattered not one whit to them although it was considered quite a scandal in Dodge City at the time.

With that, they rode off into the sunset, heading for Arlington, Texas, where he gave up cowboying and started working as a bill collector, while Fern worked part-time at the local high school as the cafeteria cook, and proceeded to have babies in short order.  Lela May was born in 1913 when Fern was 25, and George a few years later with Paul soon after.