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James Uriah Coleman
In a sense, James Uriah was a pioneer. He made the trek with the Coleman family from Illinois, where he was born, moving through Missouri, Kansas, Utah, and Nevada and then eventually to Sacramento, California, where he is buried. This is the story of our Coleman pioneer.
James Uriah's father, Jacob Coleman, was born in Miami Township, Hamilton County, Ohio. His mother, Barbara Frances Dale Coleman, was born in Kentucky and raised in Rush County, Indiana, which was where they met and married. They then went to live on a piece of land in Jasper County, Illinois, which he purchased in 1853. This was called Willow Hills Township.
Illinois Winds
In 1862 they bought more land in Jasper County. Jacob's brother, James Coleman, had come to live near him in 1859. By 1870 Jacob had moved his family northward and was living in Union Township, P.O. Casey, Cumberland County, Illinois. ( James later said they lived on the William Steers homestead in Clark County, 3 miles northwest of Casey.) But it was actually in Union Township that James Uriah was born, while his previous siblings had been born in Jasper, where several of them had died. (Purnell, at age 14, and Jacob William and Nancy Ann, each before they were 6)
Roy says, "In Illinois, before they moved to Missouri, he [James Uriah] said they lived kind of on the plains, and cyclones or tornadoes would come through there. He said they had a big cellar dug with a trap door on it and it had a cable on it and they'd pull it shut and they'd tie that cable down, wrap it around a deal there so the wind couldn't blow it. He said, 'Three or four times that's all that saved our lives.' He said they had an old house that was there on the ranch when they went there. And he said it just tore that house all to pieces until there was nothing left. And he said the furniture was scattered for two miles."
Clearing Land in Illinois
James Uriah remembered his family spending years clearing timber, rolling logs in huge piles for burning. They ended up with a nice farm and harvested good crops for several years. But then the rain kept coming earlier and lasting longer and increased to the point crops could not be grown.
In the fall of 1871, following 3 years of excessive rain, they decided to leave. Jacob's brother, James, decided to stay. (To this day he has descendants there in Jasper County.)
Discouraged and blue, the Jacob Coleman family loaded up on wagons and began moving westward. As heavy storms caught them, they rented a place to spend the winter at a farm belonging to Alice Appleby, in Polk County, Missouri. That winter, their last child, Perry Alonzo, was born. In the spring of 1872, they rented another farm in the same county and harvested a crop there. Then, in the spring of 1873, they moved on into Cowley County, Kansas, where they homesteaded 160 acres of land for 8 years.
Wild Boar Scare
Roy says this happened in Illinois or Missouri, but James Uriah was only 4 when they left Illinois, and they were only in Missouri for a year. Kansas had no formal school for them, so it might have been in Missouri they had this scare:
"He said they lived out of town and theysaid they didn't go to school the whole year round. They'd just go a few months, when they could afford to go. He said he and his sister was coming home from school and a wild boar chased them. And they run and climbed up a willow tree by a creek. And he said that pig tried to get them, and rooted the tree and kept them there for hours and hours. And his sister's skirt come down and that pig jumped and grabbed the skirt and tore the skirt and almost pulled her out of the willow tree. He said it was a big old wild boar hog. And he said they sat there until pretty near one o'clock in the morning. He said their folks come looking for them cause they hadn't come home from school. He said they wasn't supposed to go play down by the creek, but he said, kids go play, and play in the water, and what not. And he said she almost got eaten up because of it and he said, 'We never did play after school any more."
The sister above may have been
Martha Alice, if it happened in Missouri.
Windy Kansas
James Uriah was barely 5 years old when they got to Kansas. He wrote that they built a house out of "stable circles," (buffalo chips.) They began mowing and stacking wild hay, which grew abundantly there. Only having one mowing machine, it ran day and night." The hay rake also ran continuously. Then came the stacking. The work was not limited to boys; they all took turns at all the jobs. His sister, Elvira, was now the oldest, at 17. John was 15. Martha was 11. Mary Elizabeth was 3 and Perry Alonzo was 1.
James Uriah wrote that the "snow held off until mid winter." "Everyone was well and happy." Christmas came. There was no snow in Kansas that year, but Santa Claus came anyway. The next year there were 3 feet of snow by New Year's Day. They turned the equipment used for hauling hay into bobsleds.
In the spring of 1875, his father, Jacob, went into the livestock business. He went to Kansas City to buy some sheep, and later some calves. They found more success in animals than in growing crops in windy Kansas.
Unfortunately there was no school in that part of Kansas, which James Uriah said, "was a deterrent to our progress."
But they loved life in Kansas. There were wild turkeys and prairie chickens to hunt. His sister, Elvira met a neighbor, John Brock, and they were married by 1878. Another sister, Martha Alice, married William Sweet there in 1881.
Force to Leave Kansas Quickly
They could have remained there forever, had it not been for one occurrence. James Uriah's brother, John, had married a woman named Pamelia, by 1880, and they soon had a daughter, Emma. Then, his wife left him. This so devastated the Coleman family that they apparently concocted a plan to snatch the child and to escape to Washington territory. But word of their plan got out on the evening of the planned attempt and Pamelia and her father toldthem at the point of a gun that they should leave. The Coleman family ended up fleeing the area in 1881 (July 4?), leaving behind their two married daughters.
Traveling through Utah, the Jacob Coleman family met up with Jacob's brother Uriah, for whom James Uriah had been named, who told them the Oregon territory was too soggy for anything but horses, and convinced them tostay in Utah. They bought a home in Nephi City, Utah, which was where he lived.
Little Schooling in Utah
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