Aaron Blair dropped a note a few month back to tell me that he and his wife both graduated from Lovewell High School in 1961 and enjoy reading about the old place, even though he’s pretty sure that not many people will know where Lovewell is. The Blairs made it through just under the wire, because I believe the High School closed in 1962. On the very same day I heard from Wilma Fuller, who went to school in Lovewell for only two years, but admits to being a history buff. I hope she enjoys reading about the turbulent past of the White Rock Valley and the colorful pioneers who settled there.
Anthony Boudreault from Carlsbad, a grandson of Theodore Granstedt III, wrote to thank me for posting about the history of the Granstedt family. Since he also pointed out that in one instance I had mistakenly placed the Granstedts in Lakeview, California, rather than Mountain View, I was forced to revisit several of my old posts about the Swedish family from Scandia, Kansas, to track down my error. I seldom double back to see what I’ve written (That probably explains the typos you’re likely to find) but in this case, reviewing the history of the family was fun.
What had originally drawn me to the subject of the Granstedts was the killing of young Malcolm Granstedt in 1869 during the final raid by a Sioux-Cheyenne coalition in Republic County, Kansas. The other young man who was looking after horses that day was apparently Malcolm’s brother August Granstedt, the father of Theodore.
After connecting Malcom with his kin and following their trail to California, I stumbled upon a wealth of information on one of Theodore’s daughters, the vivacious Greta (nee Irene) who seemed to be a human lightning rod. At least, her name had somehow become linked with various mishaps and disasters that occurred a century ago, although only the shooting of a classmate was even partly her fault. Greta certainly had nothing to do with the sinking of the San Juan, which claimed her mother’s life, or the disappearance of her former roommate Bessie Hyde and Bessie's husband Glen, when they tried to run the rapids in the Grand Canyon. It’s just that Greta, being somewhat famous in her own right, often shows up as a footnote in other people’s stories, and most news stories that rate in-depth coverage are bad news for somebody.
Just as I was moving on to other subjects, Lovewell/Stofer descendant Dale Ann Johnson provided a set of family photographs which depict the Stofer and Granstedt families assembling for mutual support, usually involving a funeral. More recently, while leafing through my copy of Rhoda Lovewell’s book of family history, I found a sheet of Greta’s headshots, an actor's tool for helping talent agencies cast her in bit parts in TV shows and films.
To this day I keep an eye out for Greta Granstedt, expecting her to pop up on channels devoted to classic TV shows from the 50’s and 60’s. In fact, this very morning I watched two Perry Mason episodes back-to-back just to catch sight of the actress towards the end of her career. It would be inflationary to call these “guest appearances” since they amounted to brief glimpses of Greta delivering two or three lines of dialogue or the key to an apartment.
I was also delighted to hear from Keith Jones earlier this year. Keith has assembled a trove of information about early settlers in Marshall County, including a few names which I made feeble attempts to research more than a decade ago: Tremblé, Shangreau, LaRoche and McCloskey.
Earlier historians usually described McCloskey as a “Scotchman,” although I’ve recemtly found a couple who labeled him "a Frenchman by birth,” probably owing to the company he kept. However, if he was the same James M. McCloskey who signed up at Marysville in 1862 to join the 130th Kansas Infantry at the age of 52, then, whatever his cultural pedigree, he freely admitted to being a native of Michigan. He may have been only 47 upon enlistment, however, because when giving his date of birth he tended to alternate between 1810 and 1815.
In the 1830’s McCloskey had embarked on a career with a trading company operating out of Independence, Missouri. By 1839 he and his Sioux bride Wanbli Wakan Monie-Waka journeyed into the Rocky Mountains as part of a sales team accompanying seven wagons loaded with merchandise to be traded for buffalo robes. While marrying into the Sioux Nation was not exactly a job requirement for white traders, it was suggested as a matter of “prudence and business economy." The teammates established a trading post called Fort Pratt a few miles above Fort Laramie.
In 1855, McCloskey, along with fellow trappers and traders Joseph LaRoche, Louis Tremblé, Julian Shangreau and their wives and children, set out together for the new territories created by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
McCloskey settled near the crossing of the Big Blue, where the only other white landowner was the man who operated the ferry, Frank Marshall. McCloskey’s new farm hugged the townsite Marshall had begun to lay out, a town which he would name “Marysville” to honor his wife. LaRoche, Tremblé and Shangreau picked out claims in the southern part of Marshall County along the valley of the Black Vermillion.
James McCloskey was an educated man who was sworn in as the first Marshall County Clerk shortly after his arrival. His chief motives for bringing his family out of the Rocky Mountains were to allow his five children “to learn the ways of white men” and acquire a good education. It was a decision with unexpectedly tragic consequences, according to one historical vignette published in The Leavenworth Times on the occasion of McCloskey's death in 1902.
His sons attended school at the old Iowa Indian mission in what is now Doniphan county. All of them met violent deaths. One was accidentally killed while attending school at the Doniphan county mission. Another, who was for many years a government interpreter at Fort Laramie, was killed by a man named Boyer, who was hanged for the crime. A third son, who had been an interpreter at Fort Halleck. was also killed. McCloskey's daughters attended school at Highland university, in Doniphan county, and one of them died there.
Unfortunately McCloskey was no longer around to give his own detailed version of events.
It appears that James McCloskey had installed his wife and two girls on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, before enlisting in the Army. Following his wife’s death in 1867 he hitched up a wagon and drove nearly 500 miles to pick up his youngest daughter, to enroll her at the St. Mary's Episcopal College for girls in Lawrence, Kansas, before returning to Marysville. It’s possible that he picked up both girls while he was at it, because the slightly older daughter still had a lot of life left in her.
Jennie (McCloskey) Whalen, two years older than her sister Julia, would die at Pine Ridge at the age of 48 in 1901, one year before the death of her father. Jennie was the wife of John Whalen and the mother of eight children, six girls and two boys.
In 1875 a Kansas census taker found James McCloskey still working his farm outside of Marysville, twenty years after his arrival in Marshall County, sharing his home for the moment with his younger daughter, twenty-year-old Julia, who listed her place of birth as “Rocky Mountain.” She had been born in the southeast section of a vast area that was known at that time as Oregon Territory, a section known today as Wyoming.
According to Julia’s obituary, after completing her schooling, following her mother’s wishes, “she returned to her people, the Oglala Sioux, and accepted a teaching position in the government service. She was first employed at Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where she was both teacher and field matron.”
Julia met Joseph Kocer at the Pine Ridge Reservation when he was traveling with an Episcopal Missionary to the Indians. After marrying, Joseph and Julia worked together at the agency for a while, had five children, operated a store, and bought a ranch. Julia died in 1937.
James McCloskey was a sticker for accuracy, which was hardly the strong suit among pioneer journalists. In newspaper interviews McCloskey was adamant that his group of fur traders did not arrive in Marshall County until the fall of 1855, and that, despite what some historians contended, it was not until 1856 that Julian Shangreau’s young sister-in-law met her grisly fate at the hands of Kaw raiders. He also volunteered the little-reported fact that Shangreau’s wife had been taken prisoner during the same raid, though she was ultimately rescued.
I especially wanted to get McCloskey’s story out of the way, because Keith Jones has spent years following the trail of McCloskey’s pals, especially Julian Shangreau, a man whose last name can be correctly spelled at least six different ways. Next time I’m going to give Keith the floor to tell his side of the story.