The Ggma Chronicles, part 3: Grandpa Steals a Wife and Makes a Bad Trade
Notes of another Family account from my maternal Grandmother, Alice Green-Kollenborn, about her maternal Grandparents
Grandpa Sylvester Myers, “Ves,” as my grandma Eunice called him, had a gypsy heart—even though he was Pennsylvania Dutch and Scots.
Born in Des Moines County, Iowa, on August 3, 1853, to Milton E. Myers and Mary McAndrews, his father died when Sylvester was about 11 years old.
His mother had died a few years earlier. His stepmother threw him and his older brother out when his father died. He got a job at the livery stable driving stage to Des Moines, Iowa. Gamblers, hucksters, and drummers were regular passengers and saw to it that he was well-fed and had a place to sleep.
“I slept in a basement where it was warm in winter and cool in summer. My roommate was a big grey tomcat,” Grandpa often told us kids.
“They often took me to saloons where they gambled and drank, but they always treated me good,” he said.
When Sylvester was about 15 years old, he got a job working on a farm for Milton Reeder, his future father-in-law and a school professor. Mr. Reeder had a gentle, flaxen-haired daughter named Eunice, three years Sylvester’s senior. She was to be married to a wealthy man who was building and furnishing a home for her. Just before her wedding day, Sylvester proposed to her.
She accepted the proposal, but her father Milton strongly objected to her choosing Sylvester, as he was only 17 and owned nothing. Her father also thought Eunice was marrying a man beneath her, as he had little material goods or formal education. But he had ambition, and love for Eunice.
In spite of the protest, Eunice and Sylvester were married on New Year’s Day, 1870.
“By the time I was 21, I had a baby on each knee,” he used to boast.
He was a devoted father to their seven children and always provided generously for them. Their children, Meril Milton, Emanuel, Harriet, Virginia Belle [my grandmother’s mother], and Florence Charlotte, were born in Worth County, Missouri.
Florence was a tiny baby when Sylvester, Eunice’s brother Seymour, and several other families decided to go to western Kansas to stake a claim there. Sylvester sold off his horses and other stock, taking only a team of oxen, two milk cows, and what supplies would fit into a covered wagon. They all left Grant City, Missouri, in the early spring of 1883, crossing the frozen Missouri River near St. Joseph just ahead of the spring thaw.
The families encountered many hardships on their trek. Baby Florence was ill and Grandma Eunice carried her on a pillow across the prairie. They kept going until they reached the farthest western prairie and came to a fork in the Solomon River and settled on the South fork about 15 miles north of Hill City, Kansas, in Graham County. Here, Sylvester and his brother-in-law, Seymour Reeder, staked out adjoining claims and helped each other build dugouts and soddies and break the land for cultivation.
Sylvester helped build the railroad and telegraph lines through western Kansas while the two boys, Meril and Emanuel, took care of the crops and chores at home.
One day when Sylvester was on his way to town for supplies, he met a couple of Indians that asked to trade him a beef for one of their ponies, which he agreed to do. Eunice, his wife, and small children, were home alone. The two Indians came riding across the prairie toward the house with big butcher knives in their hands. Eunice knew nothing of the trade. She became very frightened at seeing the Indians. She barred the door and hid the children in the closet, fearing they were going to be massacred. They tied one pony outside and hopped on the other, riding like the wind from the way they came.
When Sylvester got home from town, he found Eunice still in the house. Sylvester explained to Eunice that on his way home from town for supplies he had traded a beef for the Indian pony.
Early next morning, however, a young squaw, towing her buck by the ear, came galloping across the prairie to Sylvester and Eunice’s house. She demanded Sylvester give her pony back, snatched her pony, leaped on his back, and fled the way they had come, leaving Sylvester short one beef. From this experience, they learned not to deal with Indians.