The Life and Times of Andrew J. Foster
Born in East Tennessee in 1842, raised on farming, and the promise of better opportunities just over the horizon, Andrew J. Foster experienced westward migration, wagon trains, the political unrest of Bleeding Kansas, civil war, personal tragedy and more western migration. Sometimes farming, sometimes mining, sometimes timber claiming. Plenty of hard times.
Grandson of John Foster, Strikes Out to the North West.
Andrew Jackson Foster — Soldier, Pioneer, 1842–1928
It started with a flag on a mantle.
I was visiting cousin Elton Foster — son of my grandfather’s brother — at his home near Vancouver, and I noticed something I recognized. A folded flag in the colours of Tennessee. Being the kind of person who notices such things, I asked about it.
Elton said I should have a look.
It was a discharge paper. Andrew Jackson Foster, private, 2nd Kansas Battery of Light Artillery, Union Army. Born in Tennessee.
I stood there holding it and felt the ground shift slightly under everything I thought I knew about my family. My grandfather Cloyd Foster had come to Alberta from Washington State with his mother Hannah and his brothers around 1906. Their father had not made the journey — there had been a falling out, the kind that doesn’t get explained to children and so doesn’t reach grandchildren either. My grandmother Margaret Tarplee Foster, who wrote a monthly column for the Edmonton Journal and told stories beautifully, told Tarplee stories. Of her husband’s people she said almost nothing. I had grown up assuming the silence contained nothing remarkable. Pioneer families were full of hard partings and things left unsaid.
This was what had been sitting quietly on a mantle near Vancouver. Not a man who simply came from Washington in 1906. A Union soldier. Born in Tennessee. A man who had fought in the border wars of Missouri and Kansas and ended up on the far Pacific coast, old and far from everything he’d started with.
I was not braced for what came next. But that is where it began.
Beginnings — Jasper County Missouri, 1850
The first documented evidence of Andrew J. Foster places him in Jasper County Missouri in October of 1850. He is eight years old, the seventh name down in his father Jarrett’s household — below Dorcas, below Lucinda and Sarah and Martha and Elizabeth, just above his baby brother Francis Marion, four years old and born in Arkansas. The 1850 census was the first to record every member of a household by name, and the Foster family list reads like a compressed biography of a family in motion: Jarrett and Dorcas born in South Carolina, the older girls born in Tennessee, Andrew born in Tennessee, Francis Marion born in Arkansas. South Carolina to Tennessee to Arkansas to Missouri — a continent crossed in birthplaces.
Later documents would confirm that Andrew was born in McMinn County Tennessee, just across the Hiwassee River from his father’s farm in Bradley County. The women of the family likely gathered at half-brother John’s place in McMinn County for the birth — the way women on the frontier arranged such things quietly and without leaving much of a record. Andrew would have been too young to carry any memory of it. By the time Francis Marion arrived, the family was already in Arkansas, pushing west. Andrew Andrew J. Foster grew up not in Tennessee but in the border country of southwest Missouri — close enough to Kansas, Arkansas and Indian Territory to feel their pull, but rooted for the better part of his boyhood on Center Creek, eight miles south of Carthage.
On the same census pages, the future is already assembling itself around him. Half-brother John Foster Junior — son of Jarrett by an unknown first wife, born in South Carolina — has his own household nearby, with wife Jane and children Zachary, Mary and Martha. And just there on the page, the Chester family. Andrew will one day marry into that family. His cousin Jeremiah Foster, son of uncle Frederick, had already married into the Keiths. The frontier had a way of arranging these things, drawing the familiar faces close and keeping them there.
Andrew revealed a bit of his early life in later pension examinations
Growing Up on Center Creek
Years later, in the spring of 1897, a Special Examiner of the Pension Office came out to Andrew’s place seven miles from North Bend, Washington, sat down with a fifty-four year old rancher, and asked him to account for his life. Andrew J. Foster, sworn and steady, obliged.
I was raised near Carthage, Jasper Co. Missouri, he said, and lived in that country until I moved to Bourbon Co. Kansas.
He had grown up eight miles south of Carthage on Center Creek, in a household that still included his parents Jarrett and Dorcas and his younger brother Francis Marion. Half-brothers John and Danis and half-sister Elizabeth were nearby — John and Elizabeth with households of their own close to Carthage, Danis still back in Tennessee where he had always stayed. Sister Sarah had gone to Texas. The family that had crossed half a continent together was beginning, as families do, to scatter — though the core of it, Jarrett and Dorcas and their two youngest boys, held together through all of it.
In the latter years in Missouri they had drifted eleven miles north and west of Carthage. The neighbours Andrew named for the examiner decades later — the Hosmer brothers, the Thakers, Miles Coffelt, old man Berry and his sons, the Smiths, the Dales, the Sykes — were the furniture of a boyhood on the southwest Missouri frontier, the kind of names a man carries in his memory long after the faces have blurred. Francis Marion, a year younger and Andrew’s constant companion through those years, remembered the same world from his own angle. They had swum together in the creeks, worked the same ground, grown up in each other’s pockets the way brothers do when there is no one else for miles.
The storm that broke that world came on gradually, then all at once. By 1860 the shadows of war were falling hard across southwest Missouri. The Fosters were Unionists — not unusual for East Tennessee stock, where loyalty ran deep in the hill country — but the world around them was far from agreed. Many of the families Frederick Foster’s children had married into across the region leaned Confederate. The war would set neighbour against neighbour and cousin against cousin. The Fosters had no confusion about which side they were on. But first they had to get out.
Andrew told it plainly. Father and mother were old and hated to leave the old home so we stayed too long. The bushwhackers robbed us of all stock but one three year old yoke of calves — so we had to stay ’til the Feds come a rush from Kansas. He patched up a wagon, hitched the steers, threw in what remained of their belongings, and drove his aging parents north to Marmaton City in Bourbon County Kansas. They rented a place belonging to one Parley Foster — no relation — and settled in as best they could. Uncle Johnny Prigmore, who had known Andrew since boyhood, lived close by. Francis Marion came with them — the last time the four of them, Jarrett and Dorcas and their two youngest boys, would live under the same roof.
It was the early spring of 1861. For now, they were safe.
A Unionist in a Divided Family
Why did Andrew J. Foster walk to Fort Scott in August of 1862 and enlist in the Union Army, when so many of his Missouri cousins were already fighting for the other side?
The political split in the Foster family is real and runs along a clear line. Jarrett’s branch — Unionist. Frederick’s children, who had married into Confederate-leaning households across the region — generally the other way. It is a divide that would have been felt in every direction across southwest Missouri, where the war was less a distant abstraction than a neighbour with a gun.
East Tennessee stock tended Union, and that is part of the answer. The hill country of Bradley and McMinn Counties, where the Fosters had put down roots in the late 1830s, was never Confederate territory in its sympathies. Men from those valleys served the Union in numbers that surprised the Confederacy and have surprised historians ever since. Jarrett Foster had absorbed that loyalty and carried it west.
But there may be a more particular thread worth following. Jarrett’s eldest son Danis G. Foster — who never came west to Missouri, staying always in Tennessee — served in the 8th Tennessee Infantry, Union. And Andrew Hooper, who had married daughter Mary Foster, served alongside him. The Hoopers were Union people, and the connection between the Foster and Hooper families ran deep. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether that contact — the presence of committed Union men close to the family across two generations — helped fix the compass for Jarrett and his sons when the time came to choose.
There is also a harder, more practical possibility. The summer of 1860 had brought a terrible drought across southwest Missouri. The family was already stretched — old Jarrett and Dorcas, two sons still at home, bushwhackers stripping what little remained. One mouth less to feed and a soldier’s pay arriving regularly was not nothing. Andrew was twenty years old. The army was hiring.
Perhaps it was all of these things at once — loyalty inherited, example set by older men he respected, and the plain arithmetic of survival on a failing frontier farm. Whatever the weight of each, the conclusion was the same. On the 19th of August 1862, Andrew J. Foster presented himself at Fort Scott and enlisted.
It Seemed Like More Than a Job
Andrew later remembered it plainly, writing to the Commissioner of Pensions:
In summer of 1860 I lived with my parents and younger brother in Jasper Co. Missouri. Father and mother were old and hated to leave the old home so we stayed too long. As you know, south Missouri was overrun with rebel army. The bushwhackers robbed us of all stock but one three year old yoke of calves so we had to stay ’til the Feds come a rush from Kansas. We threw what things we had in a wagon I had patched up, hitched steers and went to Marmaton City Kansas. In 1862, 19th day of August, I enlisted.
It seems to have been more than a job.
Fort Scott, August 19, 1862
Andrew J. Foster presented himself at Fort Scott, Kansas on the nineteenth of August 1862 and enlisted as a private in the 2nd Kansas Battery of Light Artillery. He was twenty years old. The examination, he recalled years later, was not elaborate. They drew the men up in a line. An officer walked along in front, looked them over, and they were accepted. Andrew was sound in body that day — he was clear about that, when it mattered legally. Whatever was coming, he was ready for it.
The neighbours from Marmaton City had come in at the same time. He remembered their names decades later — the Copes boys, Middleton, called Mid, Cunningham, who came in a few days after from his neighbourhood. The 2nd Kansas Battery was a local outfit, raised from the border country Andrew had spent the last year living in. These were men he knew. The frontier had a way of arranging these things.
He would not be home for three years.
The 2nd Kansas Battery of Light Artillery
The official record of Andrew J. Foster’s war service arrived in the mail in January of 1883 — a single page from the War Department’s Adjutant General’s Office in Washington, dry and precise in the way that government documents are. Private, Company 2d, Battery Regiment Kansas Light Artillery Volunteers. Enrolled August 19th 1862. On detached service with the Right Section September through December 1862. Present May and June 1863. On Left Section August 1863 through June 1865. Mustered out with Company August 11th 1865. The medical records of the Battery, the document noted, were not on file.
It is a spare accounting of three years of a young man’s life. The battles are not named. The marches are not described. The document tells you where Andrew was on the rolls and when he was present. It does not tell you what he saw.
For that you need cousin Elton.
Elton Foster was Andrew’s grandson through his son Ewell — and he remembered as a child sitting beside the old man’s footlocker on his grandfather’s knee. Andrew, old by then and far from the war, named the engagements he had been part of. Honey Springs, he said. Cabin Creek. And Newtonie. Other fracases too.
Honey Springs and Cabin Creek are well documented now — significant engagements in the Indian Territory that the 2nd Kansas Battery played a real part in, and they will have their own treatment in the story of that unit. Newtonie puzzled me for a time, known only through what Andrew had told Ewell, and Ewell had told Elton, and Elton had told me. It was Blair Tarr at the Kansas Historical Museum who solved it — corresponding to confirm that Andrew meant Newtonia, Missouri. Specifically the Second Battle of Newtonia, fought in October 1864. You can hear the accent playing in the spelling that passed down through three generations of telling.
After the major campaigns the 2nd Kansas Battery became the garrison battery at Fort Smith Arkansas, and Andrew likely spent much of the latter part of the war there — present on the rolls through the long months of 1864 and into 1865, soldiering in the way that most soldiers spend most of their time, which is to say waiting, drilling, and keeping the peace in occupied territory.
He was mustered out at Fort Leavenworth on the eleventh of August 1865. He had served his three years faithfully and come out the other side.
But before all of that — before Fort Smith, before Newtonia, before Honey Springs — something happened on a road in Arkansas in the fall of 1862 that Andrew J. Foster would spend the next thirty years trying to get the government to acknowledge.
The Horse at Maysville
Andrew told it himself, in a written statement he filed with the pension office — as near as he could remember, he said, which turned out to be very near indeed.
It was the fall of 1862. The 2nd Kansas Battery was returning to Fort Scott from Prairie Grove, passing through Arkansas on the march back. There was a horse belonging to the Battery — a mean animal, a saddle horse that Simon Washburn had been driving to the caisson on the off wheel. The horse kicked so badly that it was unsafe for the cannoneers to ride behind. Andrew proposed to the Captain that he would ride him. He exchanged with Washburn, put the horse under saddle, fitted him with a double-reined bridle and tied a knot in one rein, looping it short over the horn of the saddle so the horse could not get his head down to kick. Then he mounted him.
The horse held the whole team for a while. When he did start he plunged quite wickedly. While he was plunging he twisted, and threw Andrew onto the horn of the saddle. His left testicle was hurt and mashed some and made him sick and faint. But Andrew stuck to his horse and they finally got started and went on to Fort Scott. His testicle pained him all the time but he would not give up. They were about three days on the road.
Captain E.A. Smith, writing to the pension examiner from San Bernardino thirty-five years later, remembered it clearly enough. He was satisfied, he wrote, that Foster’s accident occurred at the time of their second visit to Maysville — on the return to Fort Scott, about the first of December 1862. They had been camped on the Indian Territory side of the line, having come recently from Bentonville Arkansas, and were on their way back. Foster was one of the drivers. Smith did not know he was hurt at the time, but later in the day Lieutenant Wilson came to him and said Foster had been badly hurt by the bucking of the horse that morning. Smith had kept a diary during part of that campaign, he noted, but it ended abruptly just before they camped at Maysville the second time and contained no mention of the accident. They had camped at Maysville two different times, about a mile apart.
Fellow soldier George Akers, deposed in Joplin Missouri in January of 1898, remembered the same horse and the same morning from the ground. Someone had said there wasn’t a man in the company who could ride him and Foster had mounted him. When the horse finally came to a stop someone caught his head and held him, and others helped Foster off. He went into the tent evidently hurt. Akers noticed his mouth was bleeding and asked Lieutenant Clark what was the matter. Clark said the horse had bursted the rim of Foster’s belly. They took him into the tent. Akers did not see Foster again until they returned to Fort Scott — two or three months later, he thought, around Christmas Eve.
On arrival at Fort Scott, Captain Smith let Andrew go home with his father for a week or ten days, perhaps two weeks. Old Doctor Elder, living on a creek eight or nine miles from the Foster place — Coolomine Creek, Andrew thought it was called — was sent for. He came and examined him and called his trouble a rupture. The testicle was swollen about three times its natural size. The doctor gave him some kind of a wash like a liniment, had his mother knit up an egg, made some sort of a preparation and bound it on the injured place, which helped reduce the swelling. Then Dr. Elder had Andrew’s mother knit for him a suspensory out of silk. Andrew put it on at home and carried it with him back to service, wearing it all through to discharge.
His brother Francis Marion, deposed in Carthage Missouri the same month as Akers, remembered Andrew coming home sick and being nursed by their mother and father. He was sick in bed part of the time and up part of the time, Francis recalled. He had heard Andrew say that he was ruptured. He never saw the injured parts and had no personal knowledge of the case. But he knew his brother, and he was certain of one thing — Andrew had no rupture before he enlisted. They had swum together since boys. He would have known.
Andrew returned to his Battery and served out his three years. He did not go to hospital. He stuck it out and did his duty. But the pain in his back and hip was with him ever since, he said — beginning with a gnawing pain in the lower part of his abdomen on the left side, working around to the back and hip. At times it had been so bad he was unable to do any hard work or indeed any work in wet weather. He had always supposed that pain was due to the injury to his testicle, and to the same injury that produced the rupture.
None of his disabilities, he was careful to note, were the result of intemperance or vicious habits. The only bad habit he had ever had was chewing tobacco. It may be called one. You can judge for yourself. He had known it from boyhood and his habits had always been moderate.
After the War — Closing Out Jasper County
The war had not been kind to Union families in southwest Missouri, and when it ended the unkindness did not stop. The old place near Preston had burned. They had rebuilt, tried to make it work for a few years, moved three miles up to the Big Muddy and lived there over a year. But the decision had already been made in their hearts. Jasper County was done.
On the fifth day of May 1869, Jarret Foster and Dorcas Foster his wife appeared before Notary Public Thomas S. Crane in Jasper County Missouri and signed over their forty acres to their son Andrew. The southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section thirty-six — forty acres more or less, for four hundred and fifty dollars, paid in hand. Jarret signed his name. Dorcas made her mark.
The notary, as the law required, took Dorcas aside and examined her separately from her husband — satisfying himself that she executed the deed freely, without compulsion or undue influence. She confirmed that she did. Whatever Dorcas Foster felt about leaving the land she had worked and the home she had kept across thirty years of westward striving, she relinquished her dower rights without recorded complaint.
The deed was filed for record two days later. The old home place now belonged to Andrew. It would be his to dispose of.
After the War — Closing Out Jasper County
Five months after Jarrett and Dorcas signed their forty acres over to Andrew, he sold it. On the twelfth of October 1869, Andrew J. Foster conveyed the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section thirty-six to one Charles M. Smith for five hundred dollars. Andrew signed his name. The deed was recorded that same day.
Four hundred and fifty dollars in. Five hundred dollars out. The fifty dollar difference was Andrew’s fee for making the journey back to Jasper County to conduct the business — because Jarrett and Dorcas did not make that trip. They were old now, and they had moved for the last time. The documents tell that story plainly enough without being asked.
The matter was closed. Missouri was behind them.
The Federal Census of 1870 found the Foster household reconstituted one last time. At the Montgomery City Post Office in Westralia Township, Montgomery County Kansas, the enumerator recorded Garrett Foster, 73, a farmer. D. Foster, 67, keeping house. A.J. Foster, 27, a farmer. Two boarders completed the picture — A. Price, fifteen, a domestic servant, and W.H. Evilsizer, nineteen, a sawmill worker. Even at seventy-three, on his last farm, in his final county, Jarrett Foster was running a working household.
Andrew was home. Missouri was behind them all. Kansas, at last, was going to hold.
In February of 1872 Andrew J. Foster, twenty-nine years old, took out a marriage licence in Montgomery County Kansas. The licence named his bride as Armanda Chester, aged twenty-two — though she would be known to the family as Armilda. The Chesters had lived near Fort Smith Arkansas, and it is possible the two families had known each other since the Foster migration west, when the road through Arkansas had been part of the journey. Half-brother John E. Foster would also marry into the Chester family, which suggests the connection ran deeper than coincidence.
The marriage was brief. Armilda died in childbirth. The baby, a girl, survived. They named her Sarah.
Two years after Armilda’s death, Andrew tried again. On the tenth of April 1874 a marriage licence was issued in Montgomery County Kansas for Andrew J. Foster of Coffeyville, aged thirty-two, and Hannah Catherine Morgan, aged twenty. Nine days later, on the nineteenth of April, the Reverend J.M. Hedges joined them in marriage at the home of Theo. Morgan — Hannah’s father’s place, in the same county where Andrew had buried his first wife and was raising his infant daughter Sarah.
The Morgans were neighbours in the way that mattered on the Kansas frontier — close enough to matter, trusted enough to marry into. Hannah Catherine Morgan was twenty years old and about to inherit a ready-made family, a grieving husband, and a life that would take her a very long way from Montgomery County.
Cherokee Township, 1875
The Kansas Census of 1875 finds the Foster sons firmly rooted in Cherokee Township near Coffeyville, and records Jarrett Foster for what would be the last time. He is seventy-nine years old, living alongside Francis Marion’s young household — Francis twenty-nine, his wife Emily Jane twenty-seven, and their son James B., seven years old and Missouri born. Dorcas is not there. She had passed since the 1870 census, leaving no grave marker that has yet been found. The frontier was not careful with its women.
Andrew, thirty-three, is on the same census pages with his new wife Hannah Catherine, twenty-one. There are no children in their household yet. But two year old Sarah — Andrew’s daughter by Armilda Chester, born at the cost of her mother’s life — appears in the household of Benjamin and Sarah Chester, her maternal grandparents, being raised among her mother’s people on the same road where her father farms. It is a quiet and telling arrangement, the kind that speaks of grief managed practically, of a young widower and a grieving family finding the best answer available to them.
Nearby, as ever, the Silas Morgan family — Hannah Catherine’s people, still close enough to be neighbours.
Laramie, Wyoming, 1880
The 1880 Federal Census finds the Andrew J. Foster family a long way from Montgomery County Kansas. They are in Laramie, Wyoming — in a part of town known to have housed migrants passing through rather than settlers putting down roots. They are on their way somewhere, not arriving.
Jarrett Foster had died in 1878, two years before this census was taken. He had come from Union County South Carolina and ended on the Kansas prairie, and what lay between those two points was a life of almost continuous motion — Carolina to Tennessee, Tennessee to Arkansas, Arkansas to Missouri, Missouri to Kansas, always toward the next horizon. His obituary had been placed by his neighbours, not his family. He was laid to rest somewhere in Montgomery County Kansas in ground that has not survived as a cemetery — almost certainly beside Dorcas, his life’s companion, though neither of them left a marked grave that anyone has since been able to find. The frontier was not careful with its people.
Andrew had buried his father and kept moving. It is hard not to read a kind of urgency into what came next. Hannah Catherine’s parents, the Morgans, were neighbours in the same migrant neighbourhood in Laramie — and it is likely their westward move that Andrew was joining, following his wife’s family toward whatever was next. He was thirty-eight years old. Missouri was twenty years behind him. There was nothing left to go back for.
The household the census records is a young one. A. Foster, 38, farmer. Anna C. — Hannah Catherine — 26, keeping home. Winfred Duke, five years old. Vida, three. Oscar C., one. And an infant son of three months, unnamed in the record, almost certainly Roscoe — who would later claim his birthplace as Kansas on some documents and Idaho on others, as though even he was uncertain which side of the journey he had arrived on.
They were moving west. The past was behind them.
This document from 1883 indicates Andrew received a report of his army service record. It seems likely this is related to an expected pension claim, or perhaps one was already underway.
The Pension Sage of Andrew J. Foster
Somewhere in the stacks of the National Archives in Washington sits a file folder thick with thirty years of effort. It is the pension file of Andrew J. Foster, Private, 2nd Kansas Battery of Light Artillery, and it tells a story that runs alongside everything else in this narrative — the moves west, the marriages, the children growing up and scattering — like a slow current beneath the surface of his life. Maybe I will visit again and bring more space to carry home more photocopies – this is only a small selection of what is there.
The earliest document in the file places him in Bellevue Idaho in 1887. The trail winds from there through Washington State and back again across decades. The documents are transcribed and deserve a read — they contain more of Andrew J. Foster’s own voice than almost anything else that survives. His life before the war, his service in it, and the hard time he had making ends meet afterward are all in there, told plainly and without self-pity by the man himself.
He fought for that pension the way he fought for everything — steadily, for a very long time, and with a persistence that only began to crack when he was very old and very tired and had simply run out of other options.
Ione, Oregon — A Farm That Leaves No Trace
Between the 1883 record placing Andrew in Bellevue Idaho and a fragment of the 1890 census finding him in Olney Washington, the documentary trail goes cold. There are no land records, no tax rolls, no census entries. For the better part of a decade Andrew J. Foster moves through the Pacific Northwest leaving almost nothing behind him.
Almost nothing. There is this.
In October of 1929, Hannah Catherine Foster — widow, of the Post Office of Picardville in the Province of Alberta — appeared before a notary public at the Village of Barrhead and swore an affidavit. She had a distinct recollection, she said, of the date of her son William Cloyd Foster’s birth. It had occurred on his father’s farm near the hamlet of Ione in the State of Oregon on the 17th day of January 1889. The birth had never been registered, as registration was not required in that district at that time.
It is the only record that places Andrew J. Foster in Ione. No farm, no deed, no neighbour’s account, no census entry has surfaced to confirm it. Hannah is the sole witness, swearing to a memory forty years old, in a province far from Oregon, on behalf of a son who needed his birth date established for insurance purposes.
And yet there is no particular reason to doubt her. She knew where her children were born. The question is where Andrew was while they were being born — whether he was present on that farm near Ione in any meaningful sense, or whether Hannah and the children were there and Andrew was somewhere else entirely, drifting through Idaho and Washington in the way the records suggest he was. We know the marriage was troubled. We know Andrew was in Washington long before the rest of the family joined him there. We know that when Hannah finally left for Canada she came without him.
A farm near Ione. His father’s farm, Hannah called it. It may be the most Andrew J. Foster ever put down roots in Oregon — and if so, the roots did not hold.
Years Later, Son Ewell Explains How The Family Got To Washington- In Letter To His Son Melvyn
Ewell Foster was Andrew’s son — one of the last two surviving children when he wrote this letter in March of 1964, from his home in South Burnaby British Columbia, to his son Melvyn in New Zealand. Melvyn Ewell Foster would go on to serve as Mayor of Lyttelton from 1977 to 1989 — but in 1964 he was simply a son asking his father about the family, and Ewell was writing back in the way that old men do, in one long unpunctuated breath, the way memory works when you stop editing it.
The way Ewell remembered it, Andrew had a place near the Morgan family farm in eastern Oregon. They were there a few years. Then his father went on ahead to Seattle by train. Hannah drove the wagon herself — a big heavy team of horses, a covered wagon, all the children, nine wagons in a string making their way from Oregon to Seattle Washington. Andrew met them there. They lived in Seattle for a while, then moved to North Bend, where Andrew sold the team to the Snoqualmie Hop Ranch three miles out of town. Hannah cooked — hotels, short order, all kinds. She never weighed over 107 pounds, Ewell wrote, and where she got her strength he never knew.
It is a warm picture. A family in motion, a father who goes on ahead and meets them at the destination, a mother of apparently inexhaustible capability driving nine wagons worth of children across the Pacific Northwest.
The records complicate it, gently but persistently. Andrew appears in Olney Washington and then Fall City Washington on his own, years before the family settled in North Bend. The 1890 census fragment finds him in Olney — alone, no family listed. The 1892 Washington census finds him in Fall City, in what appears to have been a work camp, no woman in the household. The family’s arrival in North Bend seems to have followed the death of Hannah’s parents, the Morgans, who had made the journey west with them. When the Morgans were gone Hannah brought the children to where Andrew was, or Andrew came back to where Hannah was, and for a time North Bend held them together.
Father went on ahead. It was true, as far as it went. It had apparently been true for some time.
The Years in Washington Before The Family Rejoined Him
The 1890 Federal Census was famously destroyed by fire, and what survives of it are fragments — among them a special schedule of Civil War veterans. It is in one of these fragments that Andrew J. Foster reappears, after years in which the documentary record loses sight of him almost entirely.
We know son Thomas Ewell was born in Bellevue Idaho. Son Roscoe claimed his birthplace as Boise Idaho in some documents and Kansas in others, as though even he was uncertain which side of the journey he had arrived on. But of Andrew himself — where he was, what he was doing, how he was living — the records are silent from 1883 until this page.
His address is given as Olney, Washington. Private, 2nd Battery Kansas. Enlisted August 19th 1862, discharged August 11th 1865. Two years, eleven months, twenty-four days. No disability listed. No remarks.
Olney does not feature in Ewell’s account of how the family came west. Nor has any record yet surfaced placing Andrew in Oregon at the time of son Cloyd’s birth near Ione — Hannah’s affidavit remains the only evidence of that farm. What the 1890 schedule shows is a man alone in a small Washington town, his service record intact in the enumerator’s columns, his family nowhere in the entry.
He was forty-eight years old. The family would find their way to North Bend eventually. But not yet, and not together.
Two years after the Olney entry, the 1892 Washington State Census finds Andrew J. Foster in Fall City, King County — closer now to the North Bend country that Ewell remembered, close enough that the broad shape of his account begins to hold. Fall City sits in the Snoqualmie Valley, a few miles downstream from North Bend. Andrew was in the neighbourhood, at least.
But the details are spare and they tell their own story. He is fifty years old. His birthplace is recorded as Tennessee. There is no female in the household. The men around him in the census are loggers, lumbermen, labourers — the working population of a camp or boarding house rather than a settled community of families. Andrew J. Foster, veteran of the 2nd Kansas Battery, former farmer of Missouri and Kansas and Kansas again, was living and working among transient men in the timber country of the Pacific Northwest.
Ewell’s account placed the family arriving together, his mother driving the wagon train from Oregon while his father went ahead by train. Perhaps that journey was still ahead of them. Perhaps Andrew was working, earning, waiting. Perhaps the distance between Fall City and wherever Hannah and the children were at that moment was one of those distances that is harder to measure in miles than in other things.
The record does not say. It only places him there, alone, in 1892.
1900 – the turn of the century
The Federal Census of June 1900 is the last that finds the Foster family entirely within the borders of the United States. Within a few years Hannah would take the younger boys north to Alberta, and the family would be divided by an international border as well as everything else that divided them.
The census finds them in the North Bend Precinct of King County Washington, and the picture it draws is both full and quietly fractured. Andrew J. Foster, fifty-eight years old, born Tennessee, occupation farmer, is listed as a lodger in the household of his son Duke and Duke’s young wife Anna, seventeen and barely a year married. He does not own his home. He is recorded as a widower — which he is not, Hannah being very much alive — though the distance between them by 1900 may have made the distinction feel academic to whoever answered the enumerator’s questions.
Two entries away, Kate Foster — Hannah Catherine, known as Kate — is listed as head of her own household, widowed, age forty-six, born Indiana. With her are Roscoe, twenty, a shingle weaver. Thomas Ewell, eighteen, also a shingle weaver. And young William Cloyd, eleven, at school. Two young boarders, sisters aged seven and two, born in California, complete the household. Hannah keeps her own house. Andrew is in his son’s. The enumerator recorded them separately and the record does not comment.
Vida — the only Foster daughter, the one Ewell would tell Melvyn about decades later, enclosing a snapshot — has made her own household nearby. She is twenty-two and married to Frank McElroy, twenty-eight, a gold miner. They have two young children, Leta and Walter.
Over in Snohomish County, Oscar Foster, twenty-one, is boarding in the city of Snohomish. He is a telegraph operator — the most modern of occupations for a boy born to a Kansas farmer on the move through Wyoming. The frontier arranged things, and then the children of the frontier arranged themselves differently still.
Andrew is farming — possibly working the timber homestead he had been granted the year before, up against the mountain country north of town, but living it seems in town. The shingle weavers around him tell the story of North Bend’s economy in 1900 — timber, mills, hard physical work. He was fifty-eight years old, recorded as a widower in his son’s house, his wife two entries away running her own household.
It was a quiet sort of fracture. The kind that doesn’t announce itself in documents.
The Irene D. Lindsey
On one of our visits to the King County Courthouse, Dale and I found several Proof of Labour records filed by Andrew J. Foster. They are brief documents — a man certifying to the County Auditor that he has done at least one hundred dollars worth of assessment work on his mining claim in the Snoqualmie Mining District, and that he has done so every year since he has owned it.
The claim had a name. He called it the Irene D. Lindsey. Whether that was a name he gave it or inherited with it, and whose name it was, we have not established.
The samples that survive are for 1907 and 1908, filed in January of 1908 and 1909 respectively — but the phrase every year since I have owned it reaches back further than the documents do. Andrew had been working this claim for years before these records were made. He was in his mid-sixties, living in North Bend, filing his annual paperwork at the courthouse with the same quiet persistence he brought to everything. The pension fight. The timber homestead. Now a mining claim in the Cascades.
Whether the mining had begun back in Idaho, in the years when the documentary record loses sight of him almost entirely, we can only speculate. The Bellevue of the 1880s was mining country. It would not be surprising. Andrew J. Foster seems to have tried most things the Pacific Northwest had to offer, and kept trying them long past the point where a younger or less stubborn man might have stopped.
Andrew's home in North Bend
Andrew J. Foster in front of what may be his house in North Bend, Washington. The photo is undated and comes from the album of Hannah Catherine Morgan Foster. The house stands on substantial stilts — consistent with Elton’s memory that his grandfather lived near the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River, where spring flooding was a fact of life. He is straight-backed in a good hat, standing at his gate, looking at something out of frame. Hannah kept this photograph. Whatever had passed between them, she kept it.
The State Soldiers Home, Orting — First Application, 1909
In the spring of 1909 Andrew J. Foster made his way to Orting, Washington, and presented himself at the State Soldiers Home. He was sixty-seven years old. He had no property. He had no real estate. He was receiving twelve dollars a month in pension — the result of that long fight with the Bureau of Pensions — and it was not enough. On the thirty-first of May he signed his application. He was unable to support himself, he wrote, for the following reasons: rupture and weak heart.
The surgeon examined him and rated his disability at seven-eighths. The character of his disability: rupture, disturbed mind, weak heart. His present condition: able to remain in quarters. He was admitted the same day his application was approved.
Hannah and the younger boys were by then in Alberta, taking up land under the Dominion Lands Act — a new country, a fresh start, the life she had decided to make without him. Andrew listed his nearest relative as Mrs. Vida McElroy of North Bend. Not Hannah. Vida — his daughter, Frank McElroy’s wife, the only Foster girl, the one Ewell would describe decades later with a snapshot enclosed.
He left the Soldiers Home at some point — the records show a notation for October 1917, suggesting he came and went — and by 1926 he was back, applying a second time. He was eighty-four now. Height five feet nine and three quarters inches. Complexion dark. Occupation farmer, as it had always been. Single, he wrote — widower, not married now. Seven children living, scattered from Yakima to Seattle to Canada. No property. No real estate. None.
The pension had grown, at least. Thirty dollars a month from February 1917, increased to forty dollars from June 1918. Seventy-two dollars by the time of the second application. The thirty year fight had yielded something in the end, though it had taken until he was in his seventies to feel it.
Tucked into the list of his seven living children was a name that stopped me cold: Mrs. Sarah Barnes, Ellensburg, Washington.
Sarah Barnes. Who was Sarah Barnes? It took years to place her, and the answer came eventually through the patient work of a hobbyist genealogist with a love of Union veterans who lived in Washington — whose name deserves to be here and will be added when I find it. Sarah was the daughter born to Armilda Chester in 1872 — the baby who survived when her mother did not, the little girl who had appeared in the 1875 Kansas census in the household of her maternal grandparents while Andrew grieved and rebuilt his life. She had found her way to Washington. She and her husband Edward had rejoined her father’s family, quietly, somewhere along the years. And there she was in the list, between Ewell in Seattle and Cloyd in Canada, as if she had always been there.
Elton had no explanation for her — she had simply never come up. A daughter from the first marriage, present in Andrew’s life in Washington. Was this part of what drove Hannah away? We cannot know. It may be the most innocent thing in the world. But the question asked itself, and once asked it does not entirely go away.
The second application contains a page that asks for the names and birthplaces of his parents.
Name of father: Jerad Foster. Birthplace of father: South Carolina. Maiden name of mother: Dorcas Mosely. Birthplace of mother: South Carolina.
That was the moment. That single typewritten page, sent away for and received in a package that arrived in the mail, was what started all of this. Elton had the discharge paper on his mantle. But this was the key that opened the door behind it — two names and a state, written down by an old man in Orting Washington who could not have known what he was leaving behind for the people who would come looking.
Andrew never forgot his mother’s name. Because he didn’t, neither do we.
A Seattle Lot, February 1909
Three months before Andrew presented himself at the Soldiers Home declaring no property and no means of support, he took out a mortgage. On the thirteenth of February 1909, George Watt and Isabella Watt conveyed to A.J. Foster a lot in the Calvin Hill Addition to the City of Seattle — Lot 12 in Block 38, Division Five — secured against a loan of four hundred dollars at two per cent per annum.
He was not alone in buying Seattle lots that winter. The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was coming — Seattle’s great coming-out party, scheduled to open that summer on the University of Washington grounds — and the city was in the grip of one of the most intense real estate booms in its history. Calvin Hill Addition sat right in the path of it. The Exposition was practically next door. Trolley lines were coming through. Interlaken Boulevard was being cut. A man with four hundred dollars and a sense of timing could see what was happening and place a modest bet on it.
What Andrew could not see — or could not hold on long enough to see — was what Calvin Hill Addition would become. Shortly after 1909 the Hagan brothers, acting for owner James M. Corner, replatted the entire tract, renamed it the Montlake Park Addition, graded and paved the roads, installed water, sewer, gas and electricity, and built out what is now one of the most sought-after neighbourhoods in Seattle. The views of the mountains and the lake that had drawn the developers’ eye are still there. The bungalows that went up on those lots in the 1910s are still standing.
Andrew’s Lot 12 in Block 38 is somewhere in Montlake today. He declared no property five months after buying it. Whatever happened — sold under pressure, lost to the mortgage, signed over to clear a debt — he did not ride the boom. The neighbourhood that grew up on his ground went on without him.
What he intended to do with it we still don’t know. The letters he later wrote to Cloyd refer to a house he bought for Duke, though the timing doesn’t quite fit. Whether this was that investment, or something else entirely, remains unresolved.
Andrew J. Foster had a way of keeping his affairs complicated. And an equally reliable way of being on the right side of an opportunity just a little too late, or a little too short of the means to see it through.
Letters to Cloyd, 1915–1927
Margaret Tarplee Foster — bookish, careful, a writer of columns for the Edmonton Journal — kept the letters her husband’s father sent. She kept them through moves and years and the long quiet of a family that did not talk much about Andrew J. Foster. That she kept them at all is a gift whose full dimensions are only now becoming clear.
The collection runs from 1915 to 1927. Andrew is at the Soldiers Home in Orting for much of it, though not always — he comes and goes, out to his place, down to Yakima where Duke has settled, and for a time to St. Cloud Florida, where he lived with Duke long enough for Duke to apply to the pension bureau for financial assistance in caring for him. From Florida he wrote that it was alright, but better to be near his loved ones. Which loved ones he meant is not entirely clear. He was with Duke, whom he loved without question. But Cloyd and Oscar were in Alberta, Ewell was moving between Canada and British Columbia and Seattle, and the boy whose picture he kept in a nice frame and wrote to even when the letters went unanswered for a year was a long way from St. Cloud. Perhaps he meant all of them at once. Perhaps he meant Hannah, whose name he invoked in the Yakima letter with a plainness that stops the reader cold — I want you and Oscar to look to the interest of your mother. She is worthy, although things is as they are between her and I. Whatever passed between them, he called her worthy. He never stopped.
The letters themselves are unlike anything else in the record. The pension depositions gave us Andrew the witness — precise, careful, legally aware. The letters give us Andrew the father, and the voice is something else entirely. Capital letters appear mid-sentence for emphasis. Periods are replaced with dashes. The spelling is phonetic and consistent and carries the cadence of a man who learned to read and write on the Missouri frontier and never unlearned the accent — deare, truely, Hellow, Cloyd. You can hear him.
He is alternately philosophical, practical, preachy and loving, often within a single page. He quotes scripture and dispenses advice and asks after the wellbeing of each child by name, reporting on all of them in the way of a man holding the threads of a scattered family together by post because post is all he has. By the 1920s the family had spread across two countries — Cloyd and Oscar in Alberta, Ewell moving between Canada and British Columbia and Seattle, Roscoe and Duke having tried Alberta before returning to the United States, Vida and Frank settled in Washington with Sarah nearby. Andrew tracked them all, relayed their news to each other, and mediated — gently but firmly — when the brothers fell out. Remember Cloyd that Duke is clear down and is not troubled over it, he writes in 1915, urging Cloyd not to drop his brother on account of his wife. Don’t drop your brother on account of his wife or even if she is foolish in many ways — council with him in a kind way and try and help him up. The patriarch, still at it, still trying to hold them together from a bed in Orting.
He admits needing money and asks for it without shame — Cloyd sends sixty dollars through the Canadian Bank of Commerce at Edmonton and Andrew thanks him with a warmth that makes the asking feel like the most natural thing in the world. He is practical about his circumstances without complaint. He reports on the house he bought Duke in Yakima — nine hundred dollars cash, a six hundred dollar mortgage — spending more on his son’s permanent home than he has ever managed to secure for himself. He still has hopes of getting it back someday, he writes. It may be like others forgiven.
And then the Soldiers Home, which he describes with a simplicity that is almost unbearable in its contentment. Room D, ground floor, south end of the hall. Three meals a day. A good bed. Room swept and mopped each day. Clean clothes and a bath every Thursday.
Which is the best thing I ever had.
After the rupture and the horse at Maysville and the thirty year pension fight and the timber claim squeezed out by corporate interests and the mining claim and the Montlake lot and the house in Yakima and the years in Florida and all the rest of it — this is what he called the best thing he ever had. Three meals and a clean room and a bath on Thursdays.
He read the Christian Science Monitor. He watched for news of Alberta in the papers and wrote in alarm when he saw reports of a hailstorm — fearing for Oscar and his mother. He confirmed his birthday for Cloyd’s records with the matter-of-fact precision of a man who has been asked to prove his existence to government offices so many times that the facts have become automatic — Yes Cloyd I was born in 1842, the 15th of February.
He closes his letters the same way every time, with small variations on a theme that never changes.
With love to all. As ever your father. A.J. Foster. Truly yours. A.J. Foster. Your father true. A.J. Foster.
In the last letter that survives, from March 1927, he looks around at the other men in the home and writes:
When I look at others here — I may say to you that I am best to my age and go through what I have and it does me good to do right and love my children. So I will ask God the Great Author of our Life to bless you all.
He died in December 1928. He was eighty-six years old. He had done right and loved his children and asked God to bless them all. There appears to be no bitterness. Which is, as you said, almost unbelievable — and yet there it is, in his own hand, in letters kept by a woman in Alberta who never met him.
The certificate of death of Andrew J. Foster as kept on file at the National Archives at Washington D.C.
Just as son Roscoe wrote to brother Cloyd, they applied for a military headstone and had a military funeral at the State Soldier’s Home Cemetery
Orting, 1994
The staff at the Soldiers’ Home, when I explained who I was looking for, pointed me toward the cemetery on the grounds. I found him in the long rows of men who had carried the Union cause through the border wars of Missouri and Kansas and come out the other side very old and very far from home.
The stone is plain white marble, the standard military issue, slightly tilted in the dry grass. His name arcs around the top in the carved style of the era. Andrew J. Foster. Below it, his unit. 2nd Kansas L.A.
That was all. That was enough.
I had come looking for a man I knew almost nothing about — a name on a discharge paper on a mantle in Vancouver, a flag in the colours of Tennessee, a gap in the family story that I had assumed contained nothing remarkable. I had found him in a pension file thick with thirty years of persistence, in census pages scattered across half a continent, in a deed signed in Jasper County Missouri in 1869, in a letter written by his brother that remembered a twin sister no record had ever named. I had found him in his own words, written to pension examiners and commissioners and to his son in Alberta — plain, determined, without bitterness, asking God to bless them all.
And now I had found him here, in the ground at Orting, in the company of his fellow soldiers, in a cemetery on the grounds of the place he had called the best thing he ever had.
It started with a flag I recognized and a paper I hadn’t expected. It ended here, in 1994, standing in dry grass in front of a tilted stone, reading a name I had spent years learning to find.
Andrew Jackson Foster. Born in East Tennessee, 1842. Died at Orting, Washington, 1928. Private, 2nd Kansas Light Artillery. Son of Jared Foster of South Carolina and Dorcas Moseley of South Carolina.
He never forgot his mother’s name. Because he didn’t, neither do we.
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