Home Reunion 2000 Lemon Tree Lemon Chart Broili History William's Trek
|
| Home |
| Reunion 2000 |
| Lemon Tree |
| Lemon Chart |
| Broili History |
| William's Trek |
William Lemon (1872-1941) wrote this story of his early life in 1939. Below are excerpts detailing the family's Midwestern beginnings and their trek across the nation when William was just a boy.
1872, May 1, is the date on which this writer began life's experiences in a little village known as Pana, somewhere in Illinois, in Madison County...My parents at that time were managing a farm near the little town on which broom corn was raised and in after years, relating incidents about the place, they called it "the broom corn farm."
It is not amis to write briefly at this time somewhat about my parents and particularly about their divergent characteristics. Father, Wickliffe Lemon, one of five sons of Mr. and Mrs. Lucien Lemon of Indianapolis, Indiana, had just come out of the Civil War. He had served the entire period of that war, a northern democrat in the Union army. ...Mother (Mary Sanders Lemon, right) was one of a large family recently migrated from Germany. 
She was about eight years of age when they made the trip to the United States, settling in Madison county, Ill. She was decidedly rural and agricultural in her inclination and desires and this accounted for our family having followed that career. I was the second child having a sister Emily about one year my senior. There were four others to come later. One, Charlotte, died in infancy in Kansas. The others, five, all grew to adult years. Additional to the three mentioned above there were Lucien, Orange and Florence.
..When I was four years of age our family moved to Kansas, which at that time was "out west" and land might be homesteaded. My father, a Civil War veteran was entitled to special homestead rights. ..(T)he coveted homestead was located in Harvey county, not far from the county seat, Newton. Our nearest neighbor was a family by name of Masters who had located a short time previously to our coming. They had young children, a couple of boys near my age, with whom I played. One of these was Ira, in later life an opponent of mine in a political contest in Idaho for nomination as candidate for Secretary of State.
The section of Kansas in which we were located was entirely prairies..Buffalow (sic) had formerly roamed these in great number and had left piles of "chips" which now, dried and hard, were a boon to homesteaders...My older sister and I, only tots, were given a daily task of going out with a sack to gather buffalo chips.
My grandmother's children were six sons and one daughter, Emily. Naturally, that daughter was the shining star in the life of her mother. She had married early during the war to a Colonel Eli Lilly and after about a year, having given birth to a son, she died. It was a crashing blow to grandma... My sister Emily seemed to partially fill the terrible void in grandma's life...
The death of my little sister, Charlotte... seemed to have been the beginning of troubles on the Kansas homestead.. our second year, the terrible grasshopper scourge hit the region. A generally good crop of corn, wheat and garden.. all ravished and stripped clean within less than a week. Those grasshoppers came as a vast cloud, darkening the sun as a cloud would. Words could not convey the raw fear, terrible anxiety that gripped the homesteaders.
My father disposed of his homestead.. returned to Illinois...where two incidents of prime importance to me have been remembered vividly. The first, I fell seriously in love with my teacher. ... the second ... was catching a fish. It was the beginning of a fisherman enthusiasm which I have never been able to elude.
While living on the Kansas homestead.. there came to our home my father's.. father, his oldest brother Byron and his youngest brother, Thomas, each at different times. .. My father's family broke up in Indianapolis during the war, lost the merchandising business, grandfather and grandmother separated.. grandmother living most of the time with us and her two youngest sons, Marshall and Thomas...They came to us on the Kansas homestead, heading for the far West, Nevada, where relatives of grandmother were living.. the Wines people. Her maiden name was Wines, originating in Pennsylvania...Some of the three nephews, Norman, Ira and Lenord, had come or been brought into Utah with the earliest Mormon immigrants and when grown had gone into Elko county, Nevada....
My grandfather, Lucien Lemon, was a wanderer who would show up semi occasionally, unannounced and after a brief stay would depart quietly and without any adieu... Mother grew to like him very much and had great sympathy for him in his broken life...
Father rented a larger place west of the Silver Creek bottom (in Illinois).. It was a veritible palace for us after all the squalid places in which we had lived...While there, Uncles Marshall, Tom and grandma were writing about the wonders of the far west and particularly Elko county, Nevada..of a particular little valley up in the mountains where father might locate with his family and build up a cattle business. Naturally, father "got the fever"...pulled out alone to "spy out the land" ... and get enough money together to transport us all on the "emigrant train" over the recently built Union Pacific to Wells, Nevada...
We were taken to St.Louis by relatives in a wagon... The (train) coach was a veritible melee of all sorts of people, and all cooking and living together on the train, each maining their own personal provisions, of course, and managing as best they could...
Travel to the great west had passed from covered wagon to the railroad. And tho that was as late as 1880, the rail traffic was none too safe and danger of Indian raids still persisted... mother was mortally afraid of (the Cheyenne) and feared some of us might be kidnapped...
Mother had worked for hours before arriving at Wells to get her trapsings together so that detraining would be hastened. It was cold and drizzling snow; the wagon was made as comfortable as possible.. We did not stop at the town but hustled off toward Ruby valley some sixty miles to where a warm log house awaited us and where Uncle Marsh and Grandma were...
My uncle Tom.. declared I should become a cowboy and proceed from that primary cattle undertaking to a cattleman with big ranches and stock on a thousand hills. Accordingly he fitted me out with the dandiest cowboy outfit a boy could dream of. First, there was "Biddy," a gentle little black mare.. a brand new boy saddle... with short tapadoros and black hair shaps...Mother was more distressed because of this gift that was sure to lead me to hellin damnation.
The most notable place in Ruby valley was the old "overland station." It was a large pretentious place and the only flour mill in that part of the state. The owner was Ira Wines, my grandma's nephew...That home was a veritible paradise to us...My grandma was Uncle Ira's real aunt, her brother being his father (who) died leaving his wife and three baby sons... Their widowed mother joined the Mormons and took those three little sons with her in the trek across the plains in the famous Mormon migration, following them in the famous troubles in Illinois and Missouri and finally to Salt Lake valley, where she became the polygyomous wife of Bishe Snow, one of the "big shots" of the Mormon movement...
About spring 1881, our family began to arrange a move to Secret Valley, about 40 miles to the north of where we were staying...Winters began early ... and continued late.. and they were severe winters. It seems I never had warm feet during the winters in that valley except when in bed...When I reached 16, I began to connive about a few dollars because I was learning to dance and it always took a dollar to get a ticket... We had a very poor log house on our place, lacking money for shake roof, a dirt roof was put on...Our whole setup of ranch buildings were miserable...
Everything connected with my work and environment pointed to a career as as buckaroo and later on as a rancher... 
As I progressed in adolescent years there was not a task to be done in the ranch in which I did not come to do or have a part in... we finally moved from there to the worst places imaginable until finally landing in Boise valley. I look back in these declining years, nearing the end of the trail, with horror and disgust at our having spent the ten years in that unpleasant valley, unpleasant because of our poverty and lack of wherewithal to fix up properly for living in such a place.