An Appreciation for a Colleague

I attended the Bridgewater State Univ. production of The Importance of Being Ernest on Thursday evening. It was the final BSU production directed by my long-time colleague and friend Dr. Suzanne Ramczyk. She follows me into retirement after a three-decade career in teaching theatre at BSU.

Oscar Wilde's "'Ernest" is delightful and a light-hearted tease on the social program of marriage and the absurdity of British class practice. It was well done and featured two alumni in older character roles.

I have been reflecting on our long run collaboration, and the shows Suzanne directed that I designed:

[left: Comedy of Errors]

Machinal (2011), Cabaret (2009), An Ideal Husband (2008), How I Learned to Drive (2008), Urinetown (2006), "Theatre on the Edge" (2005), The Secret Garden (2003), Antigone (2002), Hotel d'Amour (2000), The Scarlet Letter (1999), Jack the Ripper (1997), Marisol (1995), No Trifling with Love (1994), Life Chains (1992), Step on a Crack (1992), The King Stag (1991), Madwoman of Chaillot (1989), Comedy of Errors (1988), Lock Up Your Daughters (1987), The Threepenny Opera (1986), Company (1985). I may have overlooked one or two.

I designed many shows for other directors over the years, but working with Suzanne was always an artistically rewarding experience. She and I shared a passion for exploration, innovation, social commentary, and the highest artistic standards we could muster. We both were followers of the revolutionary theatrical experiments in the 1960s and 70s. She received her doctorate at the University of Oregon, and she once trained under theatre fundamentalist Jerzy Grotowski.

Dr. Ramczyk is perhaps the most prepared and grounded director of any of the dozen or so with whom I have worked. I was particularly engaged by her openness to and respect for my perspectives on the work. Often beginning with a simple image or phrase, we would find a touchstone and anchor for artistic explorations in the production. It is notable that she challenged me to be more exploratory, she trusted my responses and defended my choices.

Scores of students over the years have benefited from her zealous investment in performance studies, the training she provided in movement and voice, and her continuing support in their performing careers. A life in professional theatre and film is difficult, the work is irregular and usually at night on stage, and out of town for film. Yet many students have realized that dream by way of her mentoring.

Suzanne and her husband Ed Zeldin deserve a long and rewarding retreat. I suspect she will find a way to remain active in theatre. I wish them happiness and great health for a well-earned retirement.

Arthur L. Dirks

30 April 2017

Reading the Country

One of the more difficult things for some people, including myself, is coming to terms with the difference between political sentiments where one lives and those elsewhere in the country.

I live in New England, specifically in southeastern Massachusetts. It's a working class world for the most part, with deep immigrant and ethnic histories. Historically, this region was and remains the first stop off the boat for many populations. Some towns are populated more solidly by one group or another, as evidenced in the surnames of the time, giving rise to small traditions and a character of sentiment in the town.

Taunton, MA, town flag

Taunton does have a long and proud history. It flies the "Liberty and Union" flag, commemorating it's status as earliest to commit to revolution. For well over two centuries it was a significant regional manufacturing center, but none of that remains as the last silver plant closed. It is a struggling mix of retail and services, somewhat passed by as expressways built through adjacent, less built towns.

The city consistently votes Democrat, but also likes less doctrinaire Republicans. Many of us believe mixing parties is necessary to keep the governing bodies honest. We sometimes refer to "Republican lite" to characterize those office holders. They tend to embace fiscally conservative ideas but recognize that poverty usually is not a personal choice.

It's pretty hard sometimes to read the comment streams on news items and social media. If you consciously seek a balanced understanding of what people think elsewhere, the result is really disheartening. The vitriol, the terms used, the extremes espoused do not endear me to more conservative parts of the country. While I may dislike conservative opinion, I still hope we can have a conversation.

Nevertheless, I do share the view on the left that our current president is incompetent. That is not based on his politics, which are fractured and expedient. The man appears to have no principles beyond service to his own needs.

A Bull, A Fearless Girl, Art and Respect

Popular culture partisans have been trading somewhat predictable arguments about the retention of the statue of a Fearless Girl that faces  down the Wall Street bull in a small plaza in New York's financial district. The Charging Bull was created by Arthur Di Modica in the late 1980s, and was placed originally in front of the New York Stock Exchange, but it was moved to a tight little park or plaza nearby.

Early in March 2017 a "fearless girl" statue appeared in the plaza facing the bull. The girl statue by Kristen Visbal was commissioned by a Boston financial firm. It has been given a year's lease on the plaza. Di Modica says he'll sue. Female comment predictably wants to make the installation permanent.

It would be easy to pick sides in this. I think I'm in a male minority. I like the bull statue and experienced it by accident a decade or so ago. We were walking around the financial district on a sight-seeing Sunday, the only day you can get around down there leisurely. We turned the corner and suddenly confronted this enormous bull in charge mode. It was very powerful. I don't know if the location now is the same tiny, forever-shadowed plaza it dominated when we encountered it.

At first one catches a glimpse of part of it, and in walking further around corners, the whole enormous beast comes into view. It is dynamic, powerful, and awe-inducing. It weighs 7000 lbs.

What does it mean? It's placement as I saw it was so incongruous and unexpected, lurking and dominating. I interpreted it as a symbol of the dynamic power and dominance of markets, the focus of nearby firms. As such, I thought it was an intriguing and artful abstraction. But it wasn't so purposeful in its origins. Di Modica had to push for its installation, where it was, for a time, near the NYSE. The Times notes that it was self-commissioned by the artist. The financial district has little interest beyond its own functional activity, and largely comprises its own audience. Public relations through artwork is unimportant.

The "Fearless Girl" was installed in March 2017 facing the bull. The girl was commissioned by a Boston financial firm and stands just over 4' tall. It was not designed specifically for the installation, where she appears to be defiantly facing down the bull, and was intended to promote workplace gender diversity.

Social media have some pretty strident positions on the statue. The easy interpretation is a celebration of the power of women in the market. The comment streams turn themselves inside-out on issues of power, authority, and gender in general. Some feminists find the Fearless Girl statue "infantilizing," and focuses too much on the personal power of women and not on the structural forces of feminism. (While nothing escapes critique, that just sounds like a refusal of any accommodation.)

One thing is certain. Many women find the installation to be very powerful and want it to be permanent. Fair enough, but I'm with the bull's artist Di Modica, who is going to court to restrict the installation of Fearless Girl. Whatever his intention of meaning in the bull, and the meaning one acquires in contemplation, it is changed and shaped - and perhaps trivialized by the Fearless Girl. As for the Girl, its meaning, too, is shaped by the bull. It makes the defiant attitude specific and targeted, not a profound stance to the world, which I think should be more meaningful.

In museums, great works are juxtaposed to enhance and deepen their meaning and appreciation. Usually this is exhibition-based placement, and the works will be re-positioned over time. The placement of Fearless Girl speaks to the times we are in, but it does also overlay and narrow the meaning of both pieces, in my view. It should not be permanent.


Arthur L. Dirks

How the West Was Lost

 The west that was lost was a complicated place, with its own culture and politics until it was overwhelmed by the American expansion.


Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860.
Anne F. Hyde, 2011, Univ. of Nebraska Press. HarperCollins reprint.

 A year ago, I published a blog post on "Getting to the West" by various means. I was writing a family history book and need to understand about travel to the west and west coast. Anybody who is descended from the 19th Century national expansion has a stake in that history.


A (well-hinted) Christmas gift last year was Prof. Anne F. Hyde's thorough study Empires, Nations, and Families. It's a big book - over 500 pages of text, and academic in its citation and documentation of sources, so it took a while to rise in the reading stack. I was pleased to find the text is clear, well developed and well-arranged. It is never pedantic but it is direct and doesn't play the reader. The approach is academically sound and the language flows well and is readable. The story is very accessible, and the author does excellent work in maintaining temporal continuity. Dr. Hyde, now at the University of Oklahoma, was a professor of history at Colorado College at time of writing (pub. 2011). The book won a Bancroft prize and was considered for a Pulitzer.

Though I have lived elsewhere for decades, I grew up on the margin of midwest and west America. In mid-Twentieth Century western Kansas, the city ways, cares and crop lands of the east trailed off into the vast fields, sparely settled range lands and small market towns and struggling communities of the west. We learned in school about the native Americans, the Indians, as if they were pre-historic peoples. In the 1950s we visited their ruins on field trips and took photos of one or two dressed and posed for tourism and "education." A tourist attraction, usually preceded by the name "Old Fort ...." had photographs of Indians around during its active life, if it survived to the photographic era. It might employ an ancient Indian in a war bonnet to pose for tourist photographs during summer travel times. A percentage of the communities there had been established at military outposts, and "Old Fort ...." attractions appear in at many towns. Our well-plowed crop lands, fenced pastures and towns with grid streets alphabetically named after trees that didn't grow there, all clearly were intended to displace the character of the prairie lands. The "old settlers reunions" were about those who came when history began, mostly in the 1870s following Kansas statehood as a free state in 1861. Centennial celebrations were a big deal for a while. They celebrated the "beginning of civilization" in what was considered empty land.

A big thing for kids was to search "old Indian sites" for arrowheads, but there were few such local battlefields or Indian attacks. Local history museums displayed prominent older collections, and there always were a few folks who had collected (and traded) a dozen, and more "possibles."

All of this is prelude to my acknowledging how little we knew. The land was not empty. I have the impression that there has been some revision of that narrative in schools today. I'm sure it remains a difficult story to sell. We only knew it as our version of the Roman ruins. A world lost and only curios remain.

Hyde's excellent book begins with the fur trade - Hudson's Bay Company, the Sublettes, the Choteaus, the Bents, their outposts and and prominent trading families. She goes into considerable detail on their operations and their interaction with the native Americans. Of particular note and importance in the narrative and history were the practices of marital diplomacy. Traders were pragmatic and practical people operating at the edge of European-American civilization, and the finely tuned moralities of protestant Europe had little place in their lives when it came to creating families. They married native Americans, sometimes in multiple settlements, and established extended families, with many of their children becoming partners in their enterprises. These alliances brought them acceptance and support among native peoples throughout their trading region.

As the country expanded that life came under tremendous pressure, native Americans were forced into losing conflicts with European-Americans who asserted a supreme right to appropriate the lands. So very many efforts to compensate and accommodate were disastrous to the natives. Their rebellions were brutally suppressed as they were summarily disposessed and occasionally annihilated in the national expansion. In so many cases, the received story is considerably at odds with the events that took place, and in most cases the public motives were highly objectionable - even immoral by today's standards.

The traders and their extended families were the interchange and last link of common ground between expanding European civilization and survival of native American life. The book is a thoroughly readable and informative social and political history of the earliest American west. I'm hanging on to this for re-reads. I highly recommend it.

Arthur Dirks
23 October 2016

Ohio to Missouri Part 2

Ohio to Missouri Part 2

This entry is a follow-up on a previous post regarding the Woods family resettlement from southwestern Ohio to Platte Co., Missouri. 
_______ 
Our conjectural Jeremiah Woods married either Virginia Soward about 1821, or Virginia Lowers on 10 May 1821, possibly at Batavia or Milford, Ohio.[1] He was age 23 and Virginia Lowers was 16. There is no hint that he was widowed. No available source records his trade, but it is likely that Jeremiah was a carpenter, possibly a contractor. It was the trade he was known to have followed in Weston, one followed by descendants, and one always in demand during the national expansion. Jeremiah and Virginia remained in Ohio for a decade, until the late 1830s. In the 1820s a similarly named family lived in Milford on the northeast edge of Cincinnati today.[2] A Jeremiah Woods purchased land in nearby Dearborn County, Indiana, in 1837,[3] but there’s no certainty that it was the person considered here or indication that he moved there. Within the next two years our Jeremiah moved his family to Missouri.

Jeremiah and Virginia Woods had nine children, born 1822-1840. All but the last were born in Ohio, according to later census. There was a gap in Virginia’s two-year births between 1833 and 1837 that suggests a failed pregnancy or birth. The gap between the birth of Louisa born in 1837 in Ohio and Samuel in Missouri in 1840 marks the move west.

The prevalence of large families in this study is somewhat notable today. The values of the culture at large proscribed artificial birth control generally until the late 1950s, though it was forbidden mostly only to Roman Catholics. Note that before the twentieth century, a young wife typically gave birth on a cycle of about two years, as long as she was physically up to it, usually into her late forties. A large family was of notable value on a farm or other family enterprise.

Families of fewer than perhaps five children, however widely spaced, often were considered unfortunate until mid-twentieth century. Childhood death by disease or accident claimed many more children than in current times.[4] Americans also typically saw family size as a legacy of name, a measure of influence, and a labor force for the family enterprise. Over-population in newly settled areas was not a serious concern, and most cities encouraged population growth to serve economic interests. Statistically, households included at least four persons until 1940, or two children or parents per couple, averaged across the population. The number dropped below three in 1975, and just 2.57 persons per household in 2004, or one resident child or parent for every two couples of all ages. While not exactly comparable, the figure suggests a birthrate that risks stagnating economic growth without immigration....[5] 

Weston Missouri in 18960

Whether Jeremiah Woods moved his family by land or river, it was seven hundred land miles to Weston, Missouri, from southwest Ohio. They likely took little with them, but necessary family goods. With three teenaged sons, the move could be managed reasonably if they took only what they thought they would require. It would take a month or more by land, two to three weeks by river.

 It was common to move accompanied by a few extended family members, who also may have arrived sooner or later, but no other Woods, Soward or Lower families have been found yet in Platte Co. at the time they arrived. In fact, sources indicate that Jeremiah was the first permanent resident in town. There may have been another Ohio family, not yet identified, who migrated with them. What is certain here is that the Woods family was in Ohio in 1837 for the birth of Louisa. In 1840 they were in Platte County when Weston was incorporated.
Jeremiah Woods was in his forties when he signed the petition to establish Weston township in Platte Co. in 1840. Virginia, sometimes called Jane, died in 1841, shortly after the move to Missouri and the birth of 11. Samuel.[16] She was 37 years old, having married at age 17 and borne nine children.
The following year Jeremiah was a trustee for the town of Weston when it was incorporated in 1842. He was described as a wealthy business leader when he purchased a home in 1847. Jeremiah was elected Justice of the Peace successively throughout his life. He was a carpenter and joiner, businessman, merchant, a Masonic Lodge founder and Knights Templar member. Jeremiah was elected mayor of Weston in 1855 and lost election to Justice of County Court in 1858. He was “universally esteemed for good natural sense and stern justice.”[17] In 1860 he was living with his daughter 10. Louisa and her new husband Henry Roney, a lawyer and later a circuit clerk and judge. Jeremiah died in 1866 at age 69, and is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Weston.[18]

[1] (FamilySearch Clermont, Marriage records 1821-1834 vol 2 img 34 of 318) [2] The 1830 Census in Milford includes a Jeremiah Woods family whose ages are a difficult match. (1830 United States Federal Census 1830; Milford, Clermont, Ohio; series M19, roll 128, pg 266, FHL film 0337939) [3] (US Federal Land Sales Records , Doc. #: 5037 Serial #: OH1480__.005) [4] Overall comparison figures are difficult to find. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century six to nine mothers and 100 infants died per 1000 live births. The 2015 infant mortality rate in US is 7 deaths per 1000 population. UK rate is 5, Europe is 3-4. (www.cdc.gov) This does not include other childhood death. Note that two of six Mordie Woods’ children died. [5] (Pearson Education, Inc. , U.S. Households by Size, 1790–2006 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884238.html) [16] (Platte County Historical Society p. 47) [17] (Paxton p. 46) [18] (Paxton p. 422)

Early California Settlement

The early Woods family joined the national expansion even as it had barely settled in Ohio in Dayton. Perhaps the earliest in the family to lead the movement west was Jonas, son of Jeremiah and Virginia, as many did following their participation in the Mexican-American War. 

 Jonas Stansbury Woods

5. Jonas Stansbury Woods is notable as a pioneer as much as his father. He was born as third son of Virginia and Jeremiah on 1 Dec 1825 in Ohio. The middle name Stansbury has been a matter of some mystery. It is possible Stansbury was 2. Jeremiah or Virginia’s mother’s birth name, but it is somewhat unlikely. Jonas’ birth predates most known historical Stansbury names in America. In the 1700s there were Stansbury families in New Jersey and Maryland, and at least one in Kentucky about 1800. One Baltimore family of some note dates to the time period. Their connection to the Woods or Soward or Lowers family has not yet been shown.

5. Jonas Woods helped his father move from Ohio to Missouri in 1840 at age fifteen, married Emily Hawn in 1845 in Platte Co. Missouri. She was age 15, possibly born in New York in 1829, and he was 20. Her family is unknown here. Emily died at Sacramento at age 87 in September, 1916.[1] Censuses show her birthplace variously also as Germany and Ohio.

Within the year after marrying, Jonas enlisted at Fort Leavenworth in June, 1846. He became a second lieutenant and then a captain during the Mexican-American War in 1847 that acquired the southwestern states. Jonas led a Weston, Missouri, infantry company to defeat a superior force.[2]

The war lasted from early 1846 to late 1847 after the United States annexed west Texas and parts of neighboring states, claiming ground to the Rio Grande. American ground forces advanced into today’s northern Mexico, while other forces blockaded Pacific ports and captured Mexico City. Resulting treaties recognized the Rio Grande River as the border and Mexico ceded Texas, New Mexico and southern California in 1848.^[3] Jonas returned home and within a decade, gathered up his family and moved to the West.

Before the war, Mexico claimed all of present day Texas to the southern border of Oregon. In 1830 Mexican citizen John Sutter won approval from the Mexican state to establish a new settlement, an “empire of civilization,” at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers in California. Discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill in 1848 set off the gold stampede, destroying Sutter’s plans for his commune of Helvetia. Sacramento development began with trade at Sutter’s wharf at the join of the two rivers on the west side of modern day Sacramento.

Figure 14. Sacramento in 1850. (California State Library)

The rivers separate Sacramento from West Sacramento and Yolo Co. today. Flooding was a problem, requiring construction adaptations as the city developed. A cholera epidemic and conflicts with squatters characterized early years. In 1852 a fire burned over three-fourths of the city, followed by another in 1854. Sacramento was made the California State Capital in 1854. The San Francisco Valley Railroad was begun in 1855.[4] By 1860 Sacramento Co. held fifteen percent of the state’s population with 24,000 people, of which 14,000 were in Sacramento City. Total California population at that time was 380,000.[5]

Jonas and Emily Woods moved from Weston to Sacramento sometime in the 1850s, perhaps seeing opportunities as a builder following the 1852 fire. Their first child born there was in 1854. By 1860 Sacramento was the 67th largest urban place in the country. Jonas was living with Emily and five children in American, a township district with six hundred people on the north side of Sacramento along the American River. He was a brick mason.^[6] By 1870 Jonas’ five-year-younger brother Jeremiah Marion Woods was a deputy sheriff in Sacramento, and Jonas and Jeremiah were proprietors of Dexter Saloon and Stables on K Street.^[7]

One might muse that drinking and driving - horses - didn’t seem to be a problem at the time. Stables were as important in cities as parking lots today, and hired drivers likely needed a place to await a call. In Sacramento the saloon probably resembled an urban bar today where tradesmen, clerks and businessmen gather during the working day. In a city with over sixteen -thousand people by 1870, there must have been several stables and certainly more saloons.

5. Jonas Woods and Emily had six children. Rosella, born in Missouri in 1847 before the move to California, married Amos Mathews of Missouri in Sacramento in 1868, and they had a daughter Carrie. Alfred Stansbury Woods, born in Missouri in 1849, married Philomena Hess in 1874 in Sacramento and they had a daughter Emma. Anna Florence, born in Missouri in 1851, married William Cary in 1870 in Sacramento and they had four sons. Emeline W., born in 1854, married Joseph Augustus Martin in Sacramento in 1873 and they had a son. Mary Louise, born Christmas Eve, 1860, became a school teacher and lived with her parents until they died. She died in Sacramento in 1932.  Alice, born in May, 1862, possibly married William Sharkey. [8]

---

[1] (Old City Cemetery Committee, Inc. Woods, Emily, Vo. A, pg 19, lot 1378)

[2] (Paxton p. 84)

[3] (Mexican–American War)

[4] (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sacramento,_California)

[5] (Gibson)

[6] (1860 United States Federal Census , American, Sacramento, California; roll M653_63, img 163, FHL film 803063; pg 160-161; fam 1366, ln 38-40, 1-4 [Woods])

[7] (City Directory Sacramento CA, 1873; pp. 486-7, ln 24, ln 4,7,9,10 Woods)

[8] (Old City Cemetery Committee, Inc. Lot 1378 Rosa Mathews), (California Marriages 1850-1945 FHL film 1302107, Sacramento,, 3 May 1903, Hood William and Woods, Emma), (1910 United States Federal Census Franklin Twp, Sacramento, California, ED 92, roll 92, part 1, page 115B)

Living in a War-Torn America

The Westerfield Massacre.

The predations and complications of moving around and settling America during the Revolutionary War were immense but commerce and life continued throughout. This passage of the text I've been working through suggests those difficulties.
_____________

In 1780 the Revolutionary War was being fought. Charlestown, South Carolina, had fallen to the British in 1779. The French entered the war in 1780 on the side the revolution. American rebels defeated loyalist forces and natives who had been terrorizing settlers near Elmira in south-central New York, and retaliated by destroying over thirty native villages. The Battle of Charlestown in South Carolina was lost for the revolutionaries in January, while the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina was won in October. In 1780 Pennsylvania freed children of slaves.

Fig. 19. Low Dutch Station  marker. The station was one of six 

forts established on Beargrass Creek in 1780, now part of 

Louisviille.

As the Colonial wars intervened, the native conflict with settlers was co-opted first by the French and then by the English. The deadly attacks on colonists often came from natives who were guided, supported and rewarded by French handlers before 1765 through the French and Indian War. By 1770 or so, natives again were exploited as surrogate guerillas and raiders, this time by British handlers throughout the Revolutionary War. The natives themselves were from northern British or French-controlled areas beyond the treaty line and in Canada. Kentucky, in fact, was not residential territory for any organized native population in the late eighteenth century, though there were hunting ground claims.

The saga of a native attack on the Westervelt families travelling to safety is remarkable. The “Westerfield Massacre” occurred about twenty miles south of Louisville. On June 27, 1780, at 3:00 AM, a travelling party of settlers was trying to reach safer ground when they were attacked by natives, several were slaughtered, and two women were taken to French Canada and sold as servants/slaves. The group included several ancestral family members, including grandparents of Cornelius Westefield.

The British army was advancing into Kentucky by May, 1880, supported by Indian raids. The. English Captain Henry Bird and his 8^th Regiment of Foot moved down from Detroit with 150 white troops and a thousand natives spreading annihilation along their path.

12. Jacobus Westervelt purchased four hundred acres near Harrod’s Town, and by the summer in 1780 the Westerfields and other families were moving on to safer territory, ninety miles farther south and east. The caravan set out on June 26, 1780, and included forty-one settlers from ten families, led by Jacobus Westervelt. At 3:00 AM on June 27th they were attacked by natives in service to the British. Ten of the seventeen settlers who died were Westerfield family members.[1]

Testimony of survivors was taken in depositions and appears in court records and legislative hearing documents. Those accounts substantiate the horrifying summary by Hiram Stafford in his 1865 testimony to his knowledge of the attack seventy-five years earlier. Hiram was a grandson of James Westerfield, Sr., son of Leah Westerfield who escaped during the attack. His account pulls together the substance of the testimony of several witnesses whose depositions were taken at the time. The return of Mary from British Canada and some minor sequences of events vary slightly with contemporary accounts, but there appears to have been relatively little embellishment:

Fig. 20. Mural in the Missouri State Capitol marking the 1780 

native attacks on St. Louis, the same year as the British-sup-

ported native raid on the Westerfields in Kentucky.

//--

…My Grandfather, James Westerfield [James Westervelt, Sr.] was a large man weighing 333 pounds, himself and family left Berkeley County, Virginia, about 1780 and emigrated to Kentucky by way of Pittsburgh to Louisville intending to go to Harrod’s Station in now Mercer Co. Ky.[2] Him and company (of) about thirty persons started from Louisville to the station. (They) camped for the night on the waters of bargrass [Beargrass Creek] about twelve miles out and sometime in the night was attacked by a party of Indians while asleep, and but few escaped death.

The old man [James Westervelt, Sr.] and two of his daughters (were) among the number killed. The old lady [Maria Demarest Westervelt] saved three children [Catharine, Leah or another child, and Rebecca, a baby] by hiding in a sinkhole. One child (was) in her arms and two (were) under her clothes to keep them from crying. My Mother [Leah, then age 13] then single also escaped to a fort not far off…

Those that were prisoners was separated a little way from each other until they could find out which was capable to travel and those unfit to travel was tomahawked and scalped. One woman (was) sitting by and seeing all of her children one after another slain…they went to her to take her infant out of her arms, her fortitude gave way…(She) held on to the child screaming for its safety (and she ) was killed on the spot by the hatchet and scalped. (The indians) then took the infant by the heels and beat out its brains against a tree. They then took each of the others as they intended to take with them and ripped open the beds scattering the feathers gathered their plunder and left. After killing the old man [Jacobus Westervelt, Sr.] they seemed to think they had killed a giant, three buttoned themselves in his big coat and danced.

Deborah Westerfield and her cousin Polley (were) taken off prisoners to Detroit, then sold to the French as servants, (They) was badly treated…(and later) sold into another family. They remained (with them) until exchanged and finally got home…(two years later).

While (the girls were) in captivity…the old lady [Mrs. Westervelt] was taken (by Indians) on her return from a friend’s house (in Shelby County.) (She) had her horse shot (out from) under her and (was) taken not far from Ketcham’s Station in now Shelby Co. Ky. (She was) Taken a few miles off secreted for the night, until they could steal horses for their journey [They] came back before day with the horses, (and) gave (her) choice (of horses to ride). She took a favorite one which she knew well… (She) put on her saddle...mounted and off was taken to Detroit in great hope of meeting with her daughter and cousin, (Polley – Mary Westerfield) but to her disappointment they…(had been) released and (had) gone home around Easter. She remained there about one year and finally got back
--//
[1782-83].( H.R. Stafford, Carroll County, Mar 28th, 1865).^[3]

The Westerfields did settle in the Bardstown area, a few miles south of the massacre site, and in nearby Mercer County communities, about thirty miles southwest of Lexington. Several Westerfield family members later moved back and forth between Mercer County and Platte Co., Missouri, about six hundred miles apart by land, or about three weeks wagon or carriage travel, but perhaps ten days to two weeks by steamboat, before the 1870s when rail travel became popular.

Jacobus (1755) and Phoebe Westerfield had not joined the 1780 party to Kentucky, but had remained in northern Virginia near Winchester, before returning to York Co., Pennsylvania, and later moving to Kentucky. Cornelius Westerfield, the ancestor of interest, was born at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in February, 1782.[4]

---

[1] (West , indiv rec Westerfield, Cornelius)

[2] This route differs slightly from the one outlined here.

[3] (Draper Manuscripts, Boone Papers Series C, Vol. 24, pp145, 145-1, 145-2, 28 March 1865)

[4] (Belcher 30-37)
______________

Arthur Dirks
24 August 2015