This is my fourth year working on this year-long 52 Ancestors in
52 Weeks prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. I will write each week in one of
my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails into the Past. I
have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.
I have no wealthy ancestors. Most just made enough of a
living to support their families. But one family might have felt great fortune at
the start of homesteading in Dakoka Territory.
The Gleeson family came to Dakota Territory in 1879 from
Carleton County in Ontario, Canada. The family consisted of John Gleeson and
his wife, Margaret Tierney, and ten children, ranging from the oldest at twenty
to the youngest at two. Was it the lure of homestead land that brought them?
In all, John, his sons, Martin and John J, and his daughter,
Ann, all initiated the homestead process acquiring 160 acres each. They ended
up purchasing their land in Sections 5, 9, and 10 before the five years was up.
They must have had hard times in the winter of 1880-81, when
the weather was so severe. The first blizzard came in October. There was so
much snow, that the trains stopped in the area. Food was hard to come by. In
the story Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder, she wrote of Alphonso
Wilder bringing in wheat to the families of De Smet. Surely the area around
Mitchell suffered the same fate. Families lived on turnips and wheat that was
ground with a coffee mill because there was no access to the mill. I imagine
the coffee mill would be in use all day to grind enough wheat to feed a family
of twelve.
Still, they stayed and survived, each improving their
property and building a house. They finally obtained patents for their property.
John and Margaret eventually sold their land and moved into Mitchell, where
they operated a hotel. Ann married John H. Sullivan, who had also obtained 160
acres. They, too, sold their land and moved to Montana. Martin and John J.
continued farming another twenty years or so.
Their wealth in land was obtained through hard work along
with the good fortune of inexpensive land in the United States west.
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| A portion of John Gleeson's affidavit, describing his property and life on the farm |
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