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Saponitown was, indeed, instrumental in enabling Bev and I to become acquainted last year. Through the course of our lengthy e-mail correspondence, I have come to admire Bev’s sharp intellect, zeal for knowledge, grand sense of humor, and, perhaps most of all, her keen appreciation for her forebears — some of whom she and I share in common. I regard Bev as a very special friend. I am particularly eager to encourage Bev’s collaboration in future editions of the ongoing genealogical/historical saga of our Stephens family. I have no doubt that her contributions to the book regarding Dean and Martha (Stephens) Rogers, Hester (Rogers) Fitzgerald — all of whom she has written about at some length on this forum — and others will add substantively to our knowledge of these long-departed, but fondly-remembered family members.
Allow me to say, also, that the Saponitown Board is a terrific resource for people who wish to expand on their knowledge of their Native American ancestry. One need only read through a handful of threads here to realize the wealth of knowledge and expertise that is brought to bear on this topic by the members. Kudos to one and all.
Ed Fisher
Ed has devoted his entire life to genealogy research. His 1,000-plus-page book is a testament to his research capabilities. As he himself remarked, “I have saved century-old family photos from being discarded and traipsed around abandoned cemeteries looking for clues.”
Ed provided the photo of Dean Rogers which I posted on Saponitown. It is the only photo of him known to exist.
Genealogy research requires infinite patience and finely-tuned detective skills. Ed has demonstrated both in his monumental book, packed with data and photos of ancestors who otherwise would have been forgotten.
I look forward to contributing my research to future editions of our Stephens Family Genealogy. This is a fun project through which I have met cousins, namely Ed, I never even knew existed. How exciting to discover, through Ed’s book, the contributions of our Stephens ancestors to the growth of Portland, Oregon!
Hi Bev! You and the other members of Saponitown might benefit from Ancestry.com’s latest database addition, entitled “U. S. Federal Census Indian Schedules, 1885-1940.”
Only persons who maintained a formal affiliation with a tribe under Federal supervision are listed on these census rolls. Nevertheless, it is an excellent comprehensive resource, especially for those who are just beginning the process of learning about their Native American forebears. The schedules are fully indexed and searchable not only by head of household, but each family member, as well.
I believe newcomers to Ancestry are eligible for a trial-period, money back subscription. In my view, the thirty-dollar per month fee is money well spent for a serious, determined family history researcher.
Good luck!
“How exciting to discover…the contributions of our Stephens ancestors to the growth of Portland, Oregon!”
What is now Portland, Oregon, was a vast, nearly-unbroken wilderness of virgin hardwood timber when James B. Stephens erected his cooper’s shack there in a small clearing along the banks of the Willamette River formerly occupied by a French fur trader under contract to Hudson’s Bay Company. It is, therefore, a demonstrable fact that Jimmy and Elizabeth Stephens and their three children became Portland’s first “American” family. Not all published histories of Portland and Oregon have been honest in reflecting this truth.
Of some interest to Bev Stayart — a native daughter of Davenport, Iowa — is the fact that the Stephens family also played a crucial role in founding Burlington, Iowa, or “Flint Hills” as it was originally called. During the 1820’s and 1830’s Isaac Newton Stephens Sr. — a brother of Emmor Jefferson Stephens, Bev’s great-great-great grandfather — operated a pioneering ferry service across the Mississippi River between Illinois and what is now Burlington, Iowa. In 1832 Isaac’s son, Samuel Fulton Stephens (1803-1885) and son-in-law, John Blake Gray (1809-1876), established the little settlement’s first retail mercantile business, called Stephens & Gray’s Emporium. Gray later bought out Stephens. In recognition of the two men’s pivotal role in promoting settlement at Flint Hills, J. B. Gray was given the privilege of naming the new town when it incorporated. He chose “Burlington” to honor his own place of birth in Vermont.
Members of the Stephens and allied families became friends with Sha-O-Qua, Keokuk, and other noted Native tribal leaders in Iowa. Isaac Newton Stephens’ other sons-in-law, Harvey Sturdevant and William McIlvain, were instrumental in establishing trading posts at Agency City and Eddyville. Their contributions to these enterprises have been well documented in the historical record. Sturdevant, in particular, enjoyed good relations with the Native population in Iowa. According to family tradition, when he died suddently in 1848 while on an assignment for the government in Kansas Territory, a Plains Indian volunteered to assist Harvey’s youthful brother-in-law, James Fulton Stephens, transport the body back to Iowa for burial in Davenport, a city Harvey platted during its incorporation process, and where, a century later, Bev Stayart of this board was born and reared! Sturdevant Boulevard and Agnes Lane are still extant in Davenport, and represent latter-day remnants of the Stephens family’s influence in the early history of that city.
Ed Fisher
Million-year-old human tooth found in Spain (Update)
“Spanish researchers on Friday said they had unearthed a human tooth more than one million years old, which they estimated to be the oldest human fossil remain ever discovered in western Europe.
In 1994 at the nearby Gran Dolina site several Homo antecessor fossils were uncovered, suggesting human occupation of Europe around 800,000 years ago, whereas scientists had previously believed the continent had only been inhabited for around half a million years.”
From an estimate of half a million years to an estimate of 800,000 years to one million years! I quoted this article at http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=102339776
to show that our knowledge is just beginning to evolve. We are continuing to push the envelope on our discoveries!
Thank you, Ed, for pushing the envelope such that our origins are not “obscured by the mists of time!”
How many times, as a kid, did I climb the cliffs of Crapo Park in Burlington and not realize that my ancestors had done so as children 150 years ago?
How many times did I drive down Sturdevant Boulevard in Davenport, oblivious to its origins?
I would like to add some additional facts about Chief Keokuk, whose life-size statue, erected in 1913, proudly overlooks the Mississippi River in the city which bears his name. His actual name was Chief Kiyo’kaga (Watchful Fox). He belonged to the Sac (Sauk) branch of the Sac and Fox Nation. He was not a full-blooded Indian. His father, whose surname was LaMotte, was half French and half Indian. His mother was a full-blooded Indian.
Today, most anthropologists agree that the races are “very mixed.” In essence, we are ONE.
Judith Fitzgerald and Michael Oren Fitzgerald have studied American Indian oratory and writings since 1970. Their recent book (copyright 2005), “The Spirit of Indian Women,” states in the Preface:
“‘The Spirit of Indian Women’ provides a glimpse into the sacred world of the nomadic American Indian women of the nineteenth century . . . . This book is an elegy for the women of this irreplaceable world, who were the perfect complement to the great chiefs and warriors. Indian women are sometimes thought of as subservient to the men, in part because of the very difficult circumstances that were imposed upon women in the early reservation era. The words of these olden-day leaders correct these mis-impressions and demonstrate the essential feminine role in their ancestral lifeway, with an emphasis on their traditional spirituality.”
Every page of this book features actual photographs of Native American women and describes in great detail their incredible lives and accomplishments. The photos, some of which have never before been published, are breathtaking.
In stark contrast to traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs, this book quotes one source (Hoxie) as stating, in reference to the Plains tribe, the Crows:
“Crows did not believe that the creator made women after men or that women were derived from men. Instead all the versions of the tribal creation story that have been collected indicate that two genders were made at the same time and from the same materials.”
I have a relative who looks very Native American. Her mother has told me that people are always commenting to her that “she looks like an Indian.” Her mom said that this upsets her and “she refuses to admit it and doesn’t like these comments at all!”
I find this very sad. On a similar note, another relative has always referred to my great-grandmother Hester, never by her name, but only as “The Indian.” His references to her are always accompanied by obvious disdain, hostility, and derision.
This is also extremely sad. When I visited Iowa last summer to do genealogy research, most of the librarians who helped me were fascinated by my Native American ancestry and quite helpful with my research. However, I will never forget the reaction of one librarian. She had been devoting considerable time to working with me and providing sources of information. When I told her my ancestors were part Native American, she looked at me and uttered one word, “Shame!” Then she left the room and refused to help me any longer.
I have posted these incidents to show that prejudice and hatred are alive and well in the world today. We cannot close our eyes and pretend that these attitudes have been eliminated because we are living in the 21st century. Most people hide behind a facade of surface civility. It is only in unguarded instances such as I have described that their true feelings are revealed.
My great grandparents would not have anything to do with the Indian relatives, even so far as my ggrandmother not sitting in the same room with her mother-in-law (the woman whose picture I posted earlier). Tomorrow, I am going to the Mesquake powwow with two cousins who are members of the family I was never told I had. Neither are members of the tribe (both have posted here in the past), but at least one was permitted and encouraged to learn of his Indian heritage. They lived among the Fox when they first came to Iowa and then that family member continued to attend the powwow as he grew up.
Techteach
Hi Techteach,
Your story does not surprise me, primarily because I have witnessed the same thing in my family.
I am happy you are attending the Mesquake powwow, especially since you are going with two cousins you never knew you had. How wonderful that one was encouraged to explore his Indian heritage!
I sometimes feel that our ancestors have chosen us, and not vice versa, to celebrate their memory. They only choose those who truly honor them.
The inspiration for Hester (Rogers) Fitzgerald’s headstone was Abraham Symons, a Narragansett Indian who lived in Haddam, Connecticut, from 1790 until his death in 1812. I found the story of Abraham Symons in the archives of the “Hartford Courant.” According to a November 15, 2006 article, “Abraham Symons attended the Moors Indian Charity School, founded by Eleazer Wheelock, a Congregational minister who founded Dartmouth College in 1769.”
After his graduation, Abraham Symons helped Wheelock run this charity school. Symons married and had four children. After their deaths, Abraham Symons, his wife and four children “fell victim to poverty and prejudice” and were buried in unmarked graves.
In 1924, Reverend William C. Knowles, who had been caring for the family’s unmarked graves, wrote to Dartmouth College asking for a donation to maintain the graves. The result was that alumni of Dartmouth College erected a headstone for Abraham, and five smaller stones for his wife Prudence and their four children.
I used Abraham’s 1925 headstone as a template in designing my great-grandmother Hester’s stone. Hester was also buried in an unmarked grave. Her light gray granite headstone is now being hand carved abroad. My only addition to Abraham Symons’ original stone is a Blackfoot “proverb” which I feel is particularly fitting.
The five of us — Bev, my husband Greg, and our dogs Donnybrook, Ash, and ZigZag — will travel to Iowa in the spring for the setting of Hester’s stone. She will then have the memorial she deserves — she died in 1878 and will receive her headstone in the spring of 2008, 130 years after her death.
A number of my ancestors were drawn to living and working on the water. My gggrandparents Martha and Dean Rogers lived on the Mississippi River in Fort Madison, Iowa. In those days, prior to our high technology, mass communication era, it must have been very exciting to live directly on one of the world’s greatest waterways.
I found an article describing life in Fort Madison in the late 1800s. The article is titled “Grandmother Brown’s Hundred Years” and describes Mississippi riverfront life. Quoting from this piece,
“‘Fort Madison in 1870! What was it like?’ I asked Grandmother Brown.
‘In 1870,’ said Grandmother Brown, ‘it was a town of perhaps five thousand people, with about forty saloons and no plumbing. It was hot in summer down here between the river bluff and the river. Only two or three families had then thought of building up on the hill. But, after the farm, it all looked good to me.
It was several years before we had a home of our own again. For the first few weeks we lived on Front Street. The life on the river fascinated me. Steamboats carrying passengers and pushing raft boats plied up and down the stream. I was never tired of watching them. I would get up in the night when I heard a boat coming; I used to think it a beautiful sight to see one steaming up the river at night, all aglow with lights. Come to think of it, the very first electric lights I ever saw were on a river steamboat.'”
Another ancestor, James B. Stephens, spent much of his life on the river. He lived on the Mississippi River across from Fort Madison for eleven years, supplying wood to the steamboat river traffic. After he moved to Oregon, he started the first ferry service between East and West Portland, which he operated from 1846 until 1865. It provided both freight and passenger service, as a canoe was the only alternative mode of transport at that time. 1846 was the same year that James B. Stephens laid out the town of East Portland.
Was domestication of the dog by our earliest ancestors a precursor to crossing the Bering Land Bridge? Was the dog-human partnership extremely vital to this journey? The following, while admittedly a theory, is certainly plausible.
The eminent anthropologist Christy Turner and his Russian colleagues have theorized an answer to why North America was one of the last places on earth to be populated by humans. The Bering Land Bridge re-surfaced many times during the last 40,000 years, but the first immigrants from Siberia to North America arrived only 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. What is the explanation for this gap of approximately 25,000 years? Turner has suggested that giant hyenas, now extinct, may have prevented crossing this land bridge for many thousands of years.
Quoting Turner, “In all of the excavations that my Russian colleagues have been doing across Siberia, they can find almost no human remains. That’s very interesting because if you go anywhere else with an equally good climate, almost always you find a little bit of human bone here and there. Further south, at about the latitude of Mongolia, there are hundreds and hundreds of [human] archaelogical sites that go back 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, but just a few degrees north and the sites are no older than 12,000 years.”
Turned suspected that rampant hyena packs, each consisting of 40-50 animals, may have been sufficiently intimidating to keep these early humans far south of the region where hyenas roamed in large numbers. Some of the evidence stems from a remarkable cave occupied solely by hyenas for roughly 40,000 years. Turner, a dental anthropologist, examined bones found there and determined that the animals were dragged in by hyenas. Predators typically gnaw at a bone or rip it apart with slicing molars, but a hyena simply crushes it. Even a bear is incapable of this feat. And these hyenas were much larger than hyenas today. “Even a modern hyena has a jaw powerful enough to crush the leg of a rhinoceros,” says Turner. “Modern hyenas tend to be fearless in the presence of humans, and they have been known to drag a human hunter from a tent in Africa and crush his bones like toothpicks.”
However, one skull found in this particular cave mystified Turner. “We found a true dog skull,” he said. “We’ve dated it to about 14,000 years ago, and it’s a domesticated dog, much smaller than a wolf.”
“This dog skull is the oldest dog ever found in Siberia,” asserts Turner. “It was domesticated just before humans started their migration north, leading them eventually to the Americas. . . This coincidence is so remarkable. Once we get the dog, then we get people in the new world almost immediately.”
Turner feels that these early humans domesticated the dog to protect them and their hunting camps from hyenas. Dogs bark at anything that invades their territory, so their barking would have alerted the humans to approaching hyenas and helped keep them at bay. This human-dog partnership facilitated the move further north into land thick with hyenas and eventually led to the crossing of the Bering Land Bridge.
Turner is the first to admit that this is a hypothesis only, but the coincidences are tantalizing. Some reader comments to Turner’s hypothesis are: “Hyenas are amazingly diverse in the Pleistocene. . . All told there were about five or six genera of hyenas during that time. . . I see no reason that this hypothesis would not extend well beyond hyenas. There were plenty of frightening beasts roaming about . . . that dogs could have helped keep them at bay.”
For further information, see http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/2006/03/hunted-by-giant-hyenas.html
Only the strongest of our early ancestors made it across the Bering Land Bridge, as the trip was so harrowing and fraught with peril. Domestication of the dog may have been a pivotal factor in enabling early humans to expand their territory north, eventually reaching and crossing the Bering Land Bridge into North America. From my perspective, this argument is both viable and compelling.
Please note that my support of this particular hypothesis does not extend to some of Turner’s other theories, none of which I have studied in depth.
Bev Stayart wrote: but the first immigrants from Siberia to North America arrived only 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. What is the explanation for this gap of approximately 25,000 years?
One explanation is that the 12,000-14,000 assumption is wrong. I don’t know of any dog remains in the two dozen or so “pre-Clovis” sites of human occupation in both North and South America; maybe they exist, maybe not. But there are lots of more or less reputable anthropologists who don’t believe the Clovis people were the first people in the Americas; and some don’t believe they first moved into this hemisphere from the northwest, either.
Be that as it may, the theory and discussion about dogs and hyenas is interesting (if a little gruesome).
This “first Americans” topic is in continual flux, and many who are working in it are hot dogs, amateurs, etc. But not all hot dogs and amateurs are mistaken; and not all cherished notions of 19th century natural science are correct.
I’ll throw in a Wikipedia article with a bunch of useful links (and an interesting map). You don’t have to believe in Wikipedia to find it useful for the kind of topic-hopping that makes Saponitown such a fun place… for starters, scroll down to External Links and click on the NOVA program; on that page, in the Interactives, click on Before Clovis — etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadowcroft_Rockshelter
You are right that the “first people” topic is a highly debated, even contentious issue in American anthropology. It remains a great unanswered question of who they were and exactly when and where they originated.
I checked out the link you recommended and found it extremely interesting. There is a wealth of information online dealing with timelines, sites of origination (such as the Altai Mountains), routes of migration, DNA analysis — the subjects are endless! The most important thing is to keep an open mind. As you said, this topic is in continual flux.
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