A Pioneer Mother — She Never Weighed Over 107 Pounds
Hannah Catherine Morgan was born in Madison County, Indiana, in 1854, and spent the next fifty years crossing the American continent in stages — Kansas, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Washington — before following her sons north to the Alberta prairie around 1906.
When there was no more West, she came North
His Father's Farm
Cloyd Foster — my grandfather — was born on January 17, 1889, on his father’s farm near Ione. His birth was never registered, as registration was not required in that district at that time. Forty years later, Hannah would swear to the date before a notary public in Barrhead, Alberta, so that her son could prove his age to an insurance company. I have a distinct recollection, she wrote, in the careful legal language of the affidavit, of the date of my son’s birth which occured on his father’s farm near the hamlet of IONE in the State of Oregon. She signed it Mrs. H.C. Foster, Widow, of the Post Office of Picardville in the Province of Alberta. By then she had been a great many things and lived in a great many places, but what the document required was her memory, and her memory was precise.
(runs with His Father's Farm above)
A Distinct Recollection
The affidavit was sworn twice — first used in 1918 when Cloyd applied for a life insurance policy through the Mutual Life Assurance Company of Canada, then sworn formally before a notary public at the village of Barrhead on October 30, 1929. The Mutual Life certificate is stapled to the affidavit page, the two documents doing their work together across eleven years. Hannah is identified as a widow, resident at the Post Office of Picardville in the Province of Alberta. She states that the birth was never registered, as it was not required in that district at that time, and that there is therefore no official registration. She makes the statement, she says, for the purpose of enabling her son to prove the date of his birth whenever the same shall be necessary. She signed it Mrs. H.C. Foster. The company accepted it.
The Baker Cemetery
I visited the Baker Cemetery outside Ione in August of 2017. It sits in the open fields with no shade, the harvested wheat running to the fence on every side. A pipe-rail enclosure marks the Morgan plot. Thomas Hamilton Morgan’s marble obelisk stands at the centre — Born April 10, 1817, Died April 1899. Elisabeth beside him, the matching stone, Born February 6, 1822, Died February 11, 1896. Milton Morgan Sr. and his wife Dora Baker Morgan are nearby in low granite markers, book-shaped, Father and Mother. Their son Milton R. Morgan Jr. — the boy who was twenty-one and working as a teamster in Laramie in 1880 — became president of the Oregon Wheat Growers League in 1964 and travelled the world promoting Oregon wheat. He said he was raised to be a farmer. Just a regular farmer. Wild asters were growing in the dry ground near the Morgan plot when I was there. They were the only flowers in the frame. Hannah is not in that cemetery. She is in Manola.
(runs with The Baker Cemetery above)
(runs with The Baker Cemetery above)
Nine Wagons in a String
Somewhere between Ione and Seattle, Andrew went ahead by train. His son Thomas Ewell, writing to his own son from South Burnaby, British Columbia in March of 1964, set it down plainly: my father had a big heavy team of horses and a covered wagon which my mother drove from Oregon to Seattle Washington with all of us kids there was nine Covered wagons all in a string my father had gone on ahead to Seattle by train he met us there. Nine wagons in a string. All the children. Hannah at the reins. She never weighed over 107 pounds, Ewell wrote. Where she got her strength I never know. The family lived in Seattle for a time, then moved to North Bend, in the foothills of the Cascades. Andrew sold the team to the Snoqualmie Hop Ranch, three miles from town — twelve hundred acres in hops, employing five hundred to six hundred pickers at a dollar a box, two boxes a day to make wages. Hannah cooked. Hotels, short order, all kinds. Ewell said she was an expert on it. A woman who weighed 107 pounds, cooking for hundreds of workers in the Cascade foothills, having driven a wagon train from Oregon with all her children while her husband rode the train ahead. That is the record.
Kate, North Bend, 1900
The 1900 census finds the family in North Bend Precinct, King County, Washington. Hannah is listed as head of household. She is going by Kate. Andrew is on a nearby page, living with Duke. She is forty-six years old, and the census records six children born. Around her are Roscoe, Thomas Ewell, and William Cloyd — the sons still at home. Also in the household, listed as a boarder, is a seven-year-old girl named Evelyn, birthplace California, parents unknown. Hannah is boarding a child. The separation visible in this census is quiet and undramatic. Andrew is in the same precinct. They have not fled each other. But they are in different households, and Hannah is head of hers.
Alberta, 1911
The 1911 Canadian census finds two Foster households in the Alberta district. Winfred Duke Foster, head, with his wife Mabel and their daughter Annie. And Hannah Catherine Foster, head of her own household, with Oscar, Ewell, and Cloyd still at home. She crossed the border and made herself head. She is fifty-seven years old. She has been moving since Indiana.
Alberta 1916
The 1916 census finds Hannah at Manola, still head of her own household, with Winfred and Oscar beside her. Duke had brought his family north but the Alberta life was not for them, and they had gone back to Washington. Winfred would follow eventually. Oscar stayed, as he always did. Of the sons who had come north with their mother in 1906, it was Oscar who remained longest, close to her through the years it took to build something in that country, and close to her still when there was nothing left to build toward. After Hannah died in 1942 he relocated near Ewell in British Columbia. He had spent his life beside her. |
Letters from Andrew
The sons came north to Alberta around 1906. Hannah came with them. She settled near Lunnford, a mile or so from the hamlet of Manola, on the Alberta prairie. Andrew did not come. What passed between them in those years is not recorded. He was in Yakima by the 1920s, living near Duke, writing occasional letters to Cloyd at Lunnford. In April of 1926 he wrote to Cloyd from 1818 Roosevelt Avenue, Yakima. He had bought Duke a house. He wondered whether coming to Alberta would be the right thing to do, and left it unresolved. Then, near the end of the letter, he wrote: 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. She is worthy. He said it twice.
Alberta 1921
By 1921 the household has narrowed. The census finds Hannah at sixty-seven, with Oscar beside her. Cloyd has married Margaret Tarplee, who came from England at twelve and grew up just along the correction line on the same Alberta prairie and will one day keep the letters that make this research possible. Ewell has gone to British Columbia. Oscar, who had a club foot and never married, stayed. He is the son who stayed closest, the one Andrew had asked Cloyd to look after alongside their mother.
Alberta 1926
Oscar
Beyond the Sunset
The little girls in the community would watch for her walking the road into town from Lunnford and run out to walk beside her, making conversation. That was their excuse. What they really wanted to know was whether they had grown past her yet. She lived to eighty-eight. She outlasted Andrew, outlasted the generation that made the crossing, outlasted most of what she had known. When her sons buried her at Manola in 1942 they chose a stone with a covered wagon engraved on it, a team of oxen leaning into the traces, and beneath her name they put four words. A Pioneer Mother. They knew what she had done.
Mrs. Foster from Washington
In a community history poem written in the early 1930s, a woman named Mrs. Edna Oestrich set down in verse the story of the Manola district and the people who had come to settle it. She gave a stanza to most of them — the Wallaces, the Tharps, the Brocks, the Skaallens. When she came to Hannah, she wrote four lines: Mrs. Foster from Washington settled a mile or so away / And her two grandsons are found in Manola to this day / At present both are single, but in this time of strife / It would be a powerful comfort to have a loving wife. That was all. Mrs. Foster from Washington. A mile or so away. It was, for a long time, nearly everything I knew about her.
The Morgans
Hannah Catherine Morgan was born on January 2, 1854, in Madison County, Indiana, the daughter of Thomas Hamilton Morgan and Elisabeth Cassandra Noble, who had come from Kentucky and were passing through. The family did not stay in Indiana. They moved to Missouri, then to Kansas, and Thomas Hamilton Morgan kept moving his family — fifteen children over twenty-nine years — across the middle of a continent that was itself still deciding what it was going to be. Two photographs survive of Thomas and Elisabeth, taken at Theo Danner’s studio in Heppner, Oregon — the same sitting, the same day, the same prop table with its china vase of flowers. They are old in these photographs, or at least they look it. Thomas has a white beard and a cane. Elisabeth sits very straight in full black, her hand resting on a small book. They have the look of people who have come a long distance and know it.
Elisabeth
(This image runs with The Morgans section above — no separate narrative needed unless you prefer to break it out. If so, suggested text: Elisabeth Cassandra Noble was born February 6, 1822, in Kentucky. She married Thomas Hamilton Morgan and bore fifteen children over twenty-nine years. She died in Morrow County, Oregon, on February 11, 1896, and did not live to see her grandchildren grown.)
Her Sisters
Ewell Foster, writing to his son from South Burnaby in 1964, named his mother’s sisters from memory: Jane, Mary, Dora, Ella. He said plainly that he didn’t know where the family had been born or when they had left Missouri. What he knew was that they had come to eastern Oregon and that his grandfather had a farm there, not far from Andrew’s place. A photograph survives of three of the sisters together — Hannah on the left, Mary in the centre, Samantha Dora on the right. No studio mark, no date. They are women in their middle years, dressed in dark clothes, looking directly at the camera with the same composed attention. They look like women who know each other well. Hannah has a plaid collar — a small individual touch. All three carry themselves with the same quality of quiet strength.
Montgomery County, April 1874
By the early 1870s the Morgans were in Montgomery County, Kansas, in the southeastern corner of the state near the town of Coffeyville. It was there, on April 19, 1874, that Hannah Catherine Morgan married Andrew Jackson Foster in her father’s house. She was twenty years old. He was thirty-two, a Union veteran from East Tennessee who had come west after the war and kept moving. The Probate Judge of Montgomery County issued the licence on April 10th; a Minister of the Gospel named J.M. Hedges performed the ceremony nine days later at Thomas Morgan’s home. The licence was returned to the court within thirty days as required. Everything was done properly.
Laramie, 1880
By 1880 Hannah and Andrew were in Laramie, Wyoming Territory, in a working-class neighbourhood called Hodgeman’s Addition near the Union Pacific tracks, enumerated at number 485. Two doors away, at number 483, were Thomas and Elisabeth Morgan with three of their younger children still at home — Maria, Samantha, and a grown son named Milton, twenty-one years old, listed as a teamster. The families had moved together, or in tandem, which amounted to the same thing. Hannah was twenty-six. In the six years since her marriage she had borne four children: Winfred Duke, five; Vida, three; Oscar, one; and an infant male of three months whose name the census did not record. Whether that child survived the years ahead is not certain. A son named Thomas Ewell would later claim Bellvue, Idaho as his birthplace, and another gave Kansas sometimes and Idaho others, and the arithmetic of the family never quite resolves cleanly. What is certain is that Hannah was managing small children in a railroad town in Wyoming Territory while the family figured out the next leg of a journey that had no clear end yet. Whether Andrew followed Hannah’s family west, or whether the Morgans followed the Fosters, the census does not say. What it shows is a father-in-law and son-in-law two doors apart in a working-class neighbourhood on the edge of the frontier. That is not a coincidence.
The Road West
The Oregon Trail corridor ran west from Laramie through the same high desert the emigrants had been crossing for forty years — through the Snake River plain, over the Blue Mountains, down to the Umatilla River and across the Columbia Plateau to the Willamette Valley. You can still walk the ruts outside Baker City, two parallel tracks pressed into the sagebrush, perfectly preserved, going over a rise toward distant mountains. Emigrants who made it that far wrote about the dust — one woman called it extremely suffocating — and about the water rationed to day intervals across the plateau, Butter Creek to Well Spring to Willow Creek to the John Day River, and about the exhaustion that accumulated mile by mile until, as one traveller noted, they were almost inclined to think the road had no end. They also wrote about what they did not expect. My grandmother Margaret Foster, who came to Alberta from England as a girl and married one of Hannah’s sons, remembered being told that the great danger of the journey west was not the Indians — they just sat horseback and watched — but the snakes. That detail did not come from her own crossing. It came from someone who had made this one. Milton Morgan’s trade as a teamster, and Andrew’s long experience handling horses as an artillery driver in the war, meant the family had the skills for the road. Whether they travelled the last legs by wagon, or partly by rail from the Union Pacific junction at Laramie, is not known. By 1883 Andrew was filing a pension claim from Bellvue, Idaho, which places the family there with enough stability to deal with federal paperwork. By the late 1880s they were in Morrow County, Oregon, farming near the hamlet of Ione, in the country the Oregon Trail had run straight through. Thomas Hamilton Morgan and Elisabeth were there too, on land not far from Andrew’s place. The family had arrived, after a fashion.
(runs with The Road West above)
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