CREEK ROAD GANG
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Imagining Eliza
Patricia Zita Krisch
copyright 2003
A few years ago I was discussing with my cousin, Rob, how long our parents had lived (mine to their mid-eighties and his mother, my aunt, to ninety-two). “You’re lucky. You have those hearty, pioneer genes,” he said. Rob was adopted and didn’t know his ancestry. At the time of our conversation, he was struggling with the effects of a brain tumor that would claim his life within the year.
I am a fourth generation Californian born and raised in Sacramento. Growing up in the forties and fifties I was always proud of my forebears who came west during the nineteenth century. But I was never able to see them actually as pioneers as none had come by covered wagon, the West’s equivalent of the Mayflower.
Children who grow up in Philadelphia are raised on stories about Ben Franklin. Children who grow up in Northern California’s Central Valley hear of John Sutter on whose land gold was discovered. The aftermath of that discovery ruined his fortune. The other founding story is of the Donner Party, that saga of poor planning, bad luck, and cannibalism. If I regretted not having an ancestor who came by covered wagon, at least I escaped the Donner Party legacy.
The founding relatives in my family came west by boat and by train. The family story on Mother’s maternal line was that they had come to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, before the American Revolution and then immigrated to Park City, Utah, in the eighteen-eighties. Park City at that time was a booming silver mining town. Mother’s grandfather, William Deason, worked in a supervisory position with the Ontario and Daly mining companies, the two largest in the town. He and his wife flourished there. They had a family cook and other household help.
Mother was born in Park City in 1907, but her parents moved their young family to Portland, Oregon, when she was just a year old. My grandmother occasionally took her daughters to Park City to visit her mother. Mother repeatedly described her grandmother as “a lady,” always formally dressed and focused on correct behavior. This lady of ease, Elizabeth (Eliza) Lockman Deason, surely couldn’t meet anyone’s criteria for a pioneer ancestor.
Recently, my husband, Bob, and I spent several days in Salt Lake City and then a few days in Park City, my first visit to either place. Touring the Mormon sites, I was struck by the central role that the covered wagon treks play in the founding stories. Once again, I was reminded of the importance of pioneers in our Western mythology.
I took advantage of the Mormon’s Family History Library and did some research on the Deasons. There I confirmed what Internet research had suggested: the founding male had come to Nova Scotia just after the revolution, not before. He was a loyalist given land by Britain after it lost the American colonies. Mother’s grandfather, the fourth generation descendant, was a coal miner, not a schoolteacher as Mother claimed, in Cape Breton before he immigrated to Utah.
While most of my heritage is Irish, the ethnic origin of the Deasons has always been a question. Were they English, Welsh, Scotch or even perhaps French? Realizing that Mother’s grandfather, William Deason, changed the spelling from Desson at the time of his immigration allowed me to establish, using resources at the Mormon library, that they probably originated in Scotland.
Energized by my research, Bob and I drove to Park City to spend a few days. Maybe I could find my great grandmother, Eliza’s, house, the one Mother talked of visiting as a child. I had no picture, actual or mental, of the house. My brother, Terry, remembered it from a brief visit as a child as being up a steep, steep hill. Mother had spoken only of the formal front parlor, giving me little to go on when looking for a house from the outside.
The local museum referred me upstairs to the Park City Historical Society where I found three helpful people. After I failed to locate Eliza on the l930 census printout, one of the women suggested I try searching the municipal water company’s records on microfilm at the local library. There on almost the last frame I found Mrs. William Deason listed from the mid nineteen-twenties. The address was 835 Norfolk Avenue. Bob and I raced over to see the house. As our rental car groaned up the hill, I realized the accuracy of Terry’s memory. We found the house, but it had undergone a major renovation and addition the year before. We took pictures and I returned to the Historical Society. From their files they produced a picture taken by the WPA in l940. Here was the house as it probably looked when my grandmother was growing up. It is where my mother lived her first year.
But, what about Eliza Deason? As a person she was still out of reach. At the library I found her obituary from 1933. The family facts, ones I had heard all my life, now jumped out at me. “Her husband came to Park City in l882 and in l883 Mrs. Deason and family followed--and her home has been in this community continuously since that time.”
Thirty-six year old Eliza had followed with John, aged seven, Bonaventure (Bonnie) aged five, Mary Teresa, aged two, and Anna, my grandmother, a year old baby. I assume they came by train from Sydney Mines on the eastern edge of Nova Scotia all the way to this mining town in the Wasatch Mountains at 7,000 feet elevation.
I traveled several times from the east coast to California with my daughter when she was a baby and then a toddler. Flying all day alone with a small child was always a tiring day. But it was only one day.
How many days or weeks did it take Eliza to travel with her four little children across a large part of the continent? Did a relative come with her or was she all by herself? Did John and Bonnie entertain themselves by swinging between the seat backs and fall and split a lip (as my sister once did)? Did they annoy other passengers by crawling under seats, snatching passengers’ hats, racing up the aisles yelling like banshees? Was Anna just learning to walk and wanting to toddle around the swaying train? Was Tessa, jealous of the baby on Eliza’s lap, fighting for a place there, too?
How many changes of train lines did Eliza have to maneuver with all of these children? In 1883 dining car service was not yet standard on trains. How many times did Eliza have to herd all four children off the train and feed them at a crowded, noisy station diner? Was money tight for this?
When Eliza arrived with her children she came to a boisterous, multi-ethnic boom town. Saloons and “soiled doves” provided the major recreation for the hard working miners. Drunken arguments were frequently settled with fists and sometimes with a pistol. In this environment Eliza raised her children to be observant Catholics and to appreciate literature, music, and painting. The girls were taught needlework. The decorum that so impressed and intimidated my mother was, I suspect, a bulwark against lawlessness in the small society in which they lived.
Eliza gave birth to three more children--two more girls and another son, the latter born when she was forty-two. In a town known for high infant and child death rates, all of her children survived.
John and Bonnie, the little boys she brought from Cape Breton, both trained at the Colorado School of Mines. John became a successful mining engineer, I believe, and Bonnie had his own, prosperous assay business in Salt Lake City. Tessa was sent to finishing school. Anna and a younger sister, Helen, attended college and became schoolteachers. Joanna, born in Park City, trained as a nurse. My grandmother always spoke of Bill, the baby, as the scamp who got accepted into Annapolis and then was kicked out for misbehavior. Only when I read his obituary when we were in Park City did I learn that he had gone on to have a successful career as a chemist.
For Eliza and her husband the move to Park City had provided financial ease and the ability to educate all seven children. William died in 1912 and Eliza lived on in their largish house for another twenty-one years, dying at age eighty-six after only one week’s illness.
During the three days we spent in Park City I pictured Eliza hiking up and down the steep hills of that mountain town--up hill to the Catholic Church where she was a devout member, downhill to shop on Main Street and then back up the hill that had left me gasping to return home. The clean, dry mountain air and all that bracing walking probably contributed to a healthy old age.
The newspaper’s obituary dwelt in generalities speaking of her charm and kindness, but one item brings her alive to me. “Six weeks ago in California, her son, John Deason, died suddenly--and this sad bereavement is believed to have hastened the devoted mother’s death.”
From now on when I reflect on Eliza, I will always imagine her trip across the continent with that band of little children in tow and of how she raised them and their younger siblings to be good citizens in that raucous mining town. I am proud to claim Eliza as my pioneer ancestor.
I am a fourth generation Californian born and raised in Sacramento. Growing up in the forties and fifties I was always proud of my forebears who came west during the nineteenth century. But I was never able to see them actually as pioneers as none had come by covered wagon, the West’s equivalent of the Mayflower.
Children who grow up in Philadelphia are raised on stories about Ben Franklin. Children who grow up in Northern California’s Central Valley hear of John Sutter on whose land gold was discovered. The aftermath of that discovery ruined his fortune. The other founding story is of the Donner Party, that saga of poor planning, bad luck, and cannibalism. If I regretted not having an ancestor who came by covered wagon, at least I escaped the Donner Party legacy.
The founding relatives in my family came west by boat and by train. The family story on Mother’s maternal line was that they had come to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, before the American Revolution and then immigrated to Park City, Utah, in the eighteen-eighties. Park City at that time was a booming silver mining town. Mother’s grandfather, William Deason, worked in a supervisory position with the Ontario and Daly mining companies, the two largest in the town. He and his wife flourished there. They had a family cook and other household help.
Mother was born in Park City in 1907, but her parents moved their young family to Portland, Oregon, when she was just a year old. My grandmother occasionally took her daughters to Park City to visit her mother. Mother repeatedly described her grandmother as “a lady,” always formally dressed and focused on correct behavior. This lady of ease, Elizabeth (Eliza) Lockman Deason, surely couldn’t meet anyone’s criteria for a pioneer ancestor.
Recently, my husband, Bob, and I spent several days in Salt Lake City and then a few days in Park City, my first visit to either place. Touring the Mormon sites, I was struck by the central role that the covered wagon treks play in the founding stories. Once again, I was reminded of the importance of pioneers in our Western mythology.
I took advantage of the Mormon’s Family History Library and did some research on the Deasons. There I confirmed what Internet research had suggested: the founding male had come to Nova Scotia just after the revolution, not before. He was a loyalist given land by Britain after it lost the American colonies. Mother’s grandfather, the fourth generation descendant, was a coal miner, not a schoolteacher as Mother claimed, in Cape Breton before he immigrated to Utah.
While most of my heritage is Irish, the ethnic origin of the Deasons has always been a question. Were they English, Welsh, Scotch or even perhaps French? Realizing that Mother’s grandfather, William Deason, changed the spelling from Desson at the time of his immigration allowed me to establish, using resources at the Mormon library, that they probably originated in Scotland.
Energized by my research, Bob and I drove to Park City to spend a few days. Maybe I could find my great grandmother, Eliza’s, house, the one Mother talked of visiting as a child. I had no picture, actual or mental, of the house. My brother, Terry, remembered it from a brief visit as a child as being up a steep, steep hill. Mother had spoken only of the formal front parlor, giving me little to go on when looking for a house from the outside.
The local museum referred me upstairs to the Park City Historical Society where I found three helpful people. After I failed to locate Eliza on the l930 census printout, one of the women suggested I try searching the municipal water company’s records on microfilm at the local library. There on almost the last frame I found Mrs. William Deason listed from the mid nineteen-twenties. The address was 835 Norfolk Avenue. Bob and I raced over to see the house. As our rental car groaned up the hill, I realized the accuracy of Terry’s memory. We found the house, but it had undergone a major renovation and addition the year before. We took pictures and I returned to the Historical Society. From their files they produced a picture taken by the WPA in l940. Here was the house as it probably looked when my grandmother was growing up. It is where my mother lived her first year.
But, what about Eliza Deason? As a person she was still out of reach. At the library I found her obituary from 1933. The family facts, ones I had heard all my life, now jumped out at me. “Her husband came to Park City in l882 and in l883 Mrs. Deason and family followed--and her home has been in this community continuously since that time.”
Thirty-six year old Eliza had followed with John, aged seven, Bonaventure (Bonnie) aged five, Mary Teresa, aged two, and Anna, my grandmother, a year old baby. I assume they came by train from Sydney Mines on the eastern edge of Nova Scotia all the way to this mining town in the Wasatch Mountains at 7,000 feet elevation.
I traveled several times from the east coast to California with my daughter when she was a baby and then a toddler. Flying all day alone with a small child was always a tiring day. But it was only one day.
How many days or weeks did it take Eliza to travel with her four little children across a large part of the continent? Did a relative come with her or was she all by herself? Did John and Bonnie entertain themselves by swinging between the seat backs and fall and split a lip (as my sister once did)? Did they annoy other passengers by crawling under seats, snatching passengers’ hats, racing up the aisles yelling like banshees? Was Anna just learning to walk and wanting to toddle around the swaying train? Was Tessa, jealous of the baby on Eliza’s lap, fighting for a place there, too?
How many changes of train lines did Eliza have to maneuver with all of these children? In 1883 dining car service was not yet standard on trains. How many times did Eliza have to herd all four children off the train and feed them at a crowded, noisy station diner? Was money tight for this?
When Eliza arrived with her children she came to a boisterous, multi-ethnic boom town. Saloons and “soiled doves” provided the major recreation for the hard working miners. Drunken arguments were frequently settled with fists and sometimes with a pistol. In this environment Eliza raised her children to be observant Catholics and to appreciate literature, music, and painting. The girls were taught needlework. The decorum that so impressed and intimidated my mother was, I suspect, a bulwark against lawlessness in the small society in which they lived.
Eliza gave birth to three more children--two more girls and another son, the latter born when she was forty-two. In a town known for high infant and child death rates, all of her children survived.
John and Bonnie, the little boys she brought from Cape Breton, both trained at the Colorado School of Mines. John became a successful mining engineer, I believe, and Bonnie had his own, prosperous assay business in Salt Lake City. Tessa was sent to finishing school. Anna and a younger sister, Helen, attended college and became schoolteachers. Joanna, born in Park City, trained as a nurse. My grandmother always spoke of Bill, the baby, as the scamp who got accepted into Annapolis and then was kicked out for misbehavior. Only when I read his obituary when we were in Park City did I learn that he had gone on to have a successful career as a chemist.
For Eliza and her husband the move to Park City had provided financial ease and the ability to educate all seven children. William died in 1912 and Eliza lived on in their largish house for another twenty-one years, dying at age eighty-six after only one week’s illness.
During the three days we spent in Park City I pictured Eliza hiking up and down the steep hills of that mountain town--up hill to the Catholic Church where she was a devout member, downhill to shop on Main Street and then back up the hill that had left me gasping to return home. The clean, dry mountain air and all that bracing walking probably contributed to a healthy old age.
The newspaper’s obituary dwelt in generalities speaking of her charm and kindness, but one item brings her alive to me. “Six weeks ago in California, her son, John Deason, died suddenly--and this sad bereavement is believed to have hastened the devoted mother’s death.”
From now on when I reflect on Eliza, I will always imagine her trip across the continent with that band of little children in tow and of how she raised them and their younger siblings to be good citizens in that raucous mining town. I am proud to claim Eliza as my pioneer ancestor.
* * *
Biographical Note:
Patricia (Patty) Zita Krisch grew up in Sacramento, California, and
lived for many years in Chicago and for more years in suburban
Philadelphia. She is currently completing a book, A House Alive with Words,
about a cohort of boys living in a residential A Better Chance program
to prepare for college. In an earlier time in her life she worked as a
demographer studying metropolitan population patterns and taught
college sociology classes. She has been a member of Virginia Newlin’s
autobiographical writing workshop class for thirteen years and wrote a
memoir about her mother, The Solace of Clothes. She also writes occasional autobiographical pieces of which this is one. Patty's story "Archaeology" appeared in our December 2009 issue, and her story " A Fairy God Aunt" appeared in our January 2010 issue.
