First off, let me reiterate that I’m not an official Mayflower descendant until the General Society of Mayflower Descendants says I am. And, given the fact that I haven’t actually filed the paperwork, it doesn’t seem likely to happen before Thursday. However, I am as confident as ever that it’s only a matter of time. My. Time.

So here’s the bullet-point version of how we Leonards became a national treasure… (And many thanks to our good friend and fellow researcher Allan for providing me a nice, fat package of Pilgrimage this week.)

* 1609 – English dissenters moved to Amsterdam, Holland, and formed a new Congregation. A few months later, they moved to Leyden. Our Solomon Leonard and his father, Samuel, would join them a few years later.
* 1620 – An agent in London, Robert Cushman, acting for the Dissenter Congregation at Leyden, organized a migration to the New World. The name “Pilgrim” was reportedly coined by William Bradford some time later.
* September 6th, 1620 – The Mayflower set sail for America with one-hundred-two people on board. One of them, the oldest passenger aboard, was James Chilton. His daughter, 13-year-old Mary, was the youngest.
* Dec 21st, 1620 – The Mayflower dropped anchor, after wandering the coast a bit, at Plymouth Rock, in the future state of Massachusetts. Contrary to popular myth and famous paintings, Mary Chilton was not the first passenger to set foot in the New World.
* 1629 – Isabella Chilton-Chandler, Mary’s sister, who did not hyphenate her name at the time, arrived in America with her husband, Roger Chandler, and family. Our Solomon Leonard arrived at about the same time and may have even been on the same boat.
* 1629-30 – Solomon Leonard starts his five-to-seven year indenture to the Plymouth Company for his passage and future property.
* 1640 – Fully vested and now an official landowner, Solomon marries Isabella Chilton-Chandler’s daughter Sarah Chandler, officially making him a Mayflower descendant. The rest, as they say, is us.

Notice anything missing? Like the first Thanksgiving? Yeah, well, that’s a little hard to pin down. First off, it wouldn’t have happened until the year after the Mayflower landed… and by then nearly half of the passengers had died. Including James Chilton. And his wife. Daughter Mary was left an orphan and most likely raised by Miles Standish or John Alden. Now what kind of Thanksgiving story is that?

My sincerest apologies for leaving out so many details (and playing fast-and-lose with the rest), but I feel I’ve wasted enough of your time for today and all this writing has made me hungery, so… Pass the gravy… Pilgrim.

No, I mean an honest-to-goodness, pass it around the coffee clatch letter from home? I’m ashamed to admit it’s been years. But a recently discovered letter, mailed in 1889, just might inspire me to write a few of my own. To wit…

My g-g-grandfather Uncle Dan Leonard, wrote an eight page letter to his aunt in 1889. Eight pages! To an aunt! That letter turned up in his brother’s Bible, so we know it was passed around the family long after it was sent. His brother Isaac saw fit to immortalize it in a book he knew would be kept. Perhaps best of all, it was mailed from Leonard, Iowa, a post office named for Uncle Dan and housed in a neighbor’s home just two miles to the south.

The salutation reads simply, “Dear Aunt.” Uncle Dan had three aunts, but the presumption is that he was writing to his Aunt Luzanna, who stayed in Pennsylvania with her aging mother when most of the family moved west to Ohio. He regrets that enough time has passed that it’s unlikely his aunt will ever get to visit him in his new Iowa home. So he sent pictures and rather verbose description of the property. (The pictures, apparently, have been misplaced.)

None of that would have been particularly remarkable, if not for the fact that the house he described in 1889 is still standing and occupied 120 years later. Uncle Dan commissioned a painting of the place ten years after he sent the letter. Side-by-side comparisons show how little it has actually changed.

As an extra-special treat to my family, Uncle Dan described the HUGE stone slab at the base of the front porch.

“If you look closely, you will see Mrs. Dan Leonard standing on a rock (sitting to the front and right of it in the painting) 9 inches thick, 8′ long and about 4′ wide, the largest stone in South Western Iowa and on said rock is inscribed as follows: Daniel and Jane Leonard 1856 (the year Dan and Jane settled in that very spot).”

That rock appears to be granite, and it’s still in place. It’s been a source of great curiosity in my family. My parents and I often wondered if there might be a time capsule of some sort underneath. We’ve offered, more than once, to pay the current owner for the stone and whatever may lie underneath, but to date, no deal. Below is a little closer look.

The letter goes on to describe a picture of the original log cabin that “was the finest residence for twelve years on a stretch of land 16 miles long and eight miles wide.” That picture was also a commissioned painting, drawn from the pioneer couple’s own memories.

This post is getting a tad long, so I’ll save more on that painting for next week. That, and Uncle Dan’s description of the poor souls passing along the trail in front of his house, dragging their meager possessions back from failed settlement attempts to the south and west in Kansas.

Your assignment, between now and next week… Go write a letter!

Sponsored by The Bradford House and none other than Jim Beam himself, the event will honor an early staple of the Western Pennsylvania economy… Whiskey. (Okay, okay, so Jim Beam has been dead a while, but a direct descendant, Frederic Booker Noe III, will be there in his stead.)

And now the disclaimer… this is a fund-raising event (which translates as “tickets are not cheap”). A c-note and a quarter gets you a whiskey tasting experience (not to be confused with a wine tasting experience), Rebellion-era cuisine (sit-down dinner), and whiskey stories (not to be confused with drunken dialogs) from Mr. Noe. Oh, and your very own special-label bottle of Knob Creek Whiskey. There are discounts for groups of four or more people and by all means, report back to us if you go!

For ticket information and an order form, please click here (a .pdf file will open). For more information, contact Tripp Kline, president of the Board of the Bradford House, at 412-916-0187 or, by email, at trippkline@yahoo.com.

On a slightly related note, I recently finished reading Leland Baldwin’s Whiskey Rebels: The Story of a Frontier Uprising. Now, I’m sure you native Pennsylvanians know all about the cost of stills and such (grin), but I had no idea that at the time of the Rebellion, stills cost as much as a 200 acre farm! Nor did I know the cost was usually shared among neighbors.

I read somewhere that many of the so-called “rebels” who signed various petitions were often the victims of forgery. But I had no idea how many were afraid “Tom the Tinker” would burn their homes and barns if they didn’t support the Rebellion. So how ’bout you? Read any good books lately?

And finally, on a completely unrelated note… I suffered a hard drive crash a couple of weeks ago. The good news is… nothing on this site was affected and most of my personal research was backed up. The bad news is… I lost two years worth of e-mail (backup file was corrupted).

So, if we’ve corresponded at length during that time, there’s a very good chance I’ve lost your e-mail address. Feel free to send it again.

Oh, and the title of this post? No offense intended toward women, it’s just the title of one of my favorite blues tunes by John Lee Hooker. How’s that for a non-sequitur?

I wasn’t even sure where Bonanza’s Ponderosa Ranch was located, but based on the landscape, I was pretty sure it wasn’t in southern Iowa. Imagine my delight, decades later, when I discovered Joe Leonard, who actually met, maybe even worked with General Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Wild Bill Hickok!

Joseph Leonard (b. 20 Dec. 1837) was the sixth of nine children born to William and Mary (Van Ort) Leonard of Washington County, Pennsylvania. Shortly after his parents and most of his siblings decided to “go West” to Ohio in 1855, Joe decided to go WAY West to a place known only as “Indian Territory.” And there he disappeared for close to fifty years.

When Joseph’s father died in 1881, he left a tiny piece of Ohio to Joe, provided he “appear or make his wishes known within three years.” Joseph never did, and the property was divided among his siblings. Near the end of his own life, Joseph did reconnect with his siblings and his remarkable story began to unfold. Part of it came from a letter he left behind.

Joe had taken the riverboat Jacob Strader from Cincinnati, Ohio, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1858. From there, he took the Polar Star (once described by Mark Twain) up the Missouri River to Kansas Territory. Landing in Fort Leavenworth, Jospeh joined the Army Quartermaster Corps.

For the next several years, Joseph spent his time supplying horses to various forts in Indian Territory, later known as New Mexico and Oklahoma. That’s where he met the two Bills. Buffalo Bill Cody was in a similar line of work, supplying buffalo robes to the Army. And Wild Bill Hickok was, well, being wild… first as a professional gambler in Kansas City and later as a frontier sheriff in Kansas Territory.

In 1868, Joseph was shuttling horses between Forts Harker and Hayes when a young George Armstrong Custer came through looking for recruits among the hardy plainsmen he found there. Fortunately for Joe, he had the good sense to decline Custer’s Last Offer.

At some point in his travels, Joseph met and married Na-nia, a Caddo Indian also known as “Minnie.” He became a member of the tribe and lived among them for the next several decades. That fact alone probably explains why Joseph never claimed his Ohio inheritance.

Na-nia was quite likely the sister of Caddo chief Sho-E-Tat, also known as George Washington and Little Boy. Na-nia and Joseph had two children… a boy who died in infancy and a girl named Margaret, who was raised by Catholic nuns after Na-nia died in childbirth.

From that point forward, Joseph served as the official translator, guide, and scout for the Caddo tribe. He ushered tribal leaders to Washington D.C. at least twice to negotiate with government officials. Joseph eventually earned himself a reputation in Washington as “a notorious mischief maker” and was once arrested by the infamous US Marshal Jack Stilwell.

Joseph died in 1925, but not before reuniting one last time with his older brother William, who had spent the majority of his life in nearby Kansas. The two were photographed together with an unknown infant girl, possibly a great granddaughter, in the early 1920s. Joseph is said to buried in a Catholic cemetery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but his grave has yet to be found.

Joseph’s only descendants came through daughter Margaret and her Cherokee husband, John Downing. Their eight children were named James, John, Earl, Pearl, Renna, Thelma, Edwin, and Ernest. To date, none of those descendants have been located.

Julius Sterns' painting

Considering the boy a potential prize, either as a slave or potential brave, they snatched him away without witnesses. Thus began the adventure of Samuel Leonard, grandson of Solomon Leonard and Sarah Chandler. (Son of Samuel Leonard, thus the frequent use of “Leonardson.”)

Samuel spent a year-and-a-half with the Indians and was described as “a domesticated captive” in The Border Wars of New England by Samuel Adams Drake. Samuel had been with the tribe long enough to learn their language, customs, and way of life. The Indians treated him, says Drake, “as one of themselves.”

When, on March 15, 1697, Samuel’s new “family” decided to raid the town of Haverhill, Mass., the then 14-year-old Samuel was left, along with the squaws and younger males, to guard the camp. I’m leaving out a ton of detail for the sake of brevity, but the end result of the raid was this… twenty-seven dead, six houses burned, thirteen captives taken. Among them, Hannah Duston/Dustin and her “nanny” Mary Neff.

The large band broke into smaller groups as they made their retreat, with Samuel and the two women traveling with a group of two men, three women and seven children. Marching northward through snow-covered fields, the two women began to see Samuel as their only hope of escape.

They asked Samuel to ask his master where he would strike a man to kill him. The master answered at length, including a description of how to scalp a man. The stage was set.

The next morning, shortly after midnight, Mrs. Duston/Dustin woke Samuel and Mrs. Neff and together, the three of them used tomahawks to slaughter ten of the twelve sleeping Indians. One woman and a boy escaped into the woods. Again, I spare you the details of the scalpings.

Samuel and the two women found their way to the river, scuttled all but one of the canoes and used that canoe to float downriver to Haverhill and safety.

Mrs. Dustin/Duston and Mrs. Neff, being the older of the trio, told their story at great length, displaying purloined scalps as evidence. Samuel, being younger and having lived with the Indians, held his tongue. As a result, or perhaps because the newspaper-reading public loved a good yarn… the whole episode became “The Kidnapping of Hannah Duston” in story and song.

Hannah Duston became the first American woman to have a statue erected in her honor… in a park that bares her name… on the island where escape was made. And the ultimate slight? The painting above and to the left? Pictures two women and a girl as the heroes.

And now you know. There’s a ton of additional reading, if you’re interested, I can add links in the comments.

Cheers!
Rick