Westward to Kansas, the Amazing Land of Opportunity
I’m 12 years old. I’m old enough to join the cattle drive to Kansas. I can keep up with those older guys who are 23 or 24. I may not have all the skills they have yet, but I can help cook and I can wrangle the spare horses.
Okay, I wasn’t expecting it to be this hard. Even during the day, the coulees were just sometimes in front of you before you could even see where you were going. At night if there was a storm, the cattle would just start running and you’d hear that low rumbling noise along the ground. I’d have to jump on my horse and help the other guys round them up before they scattered all over. It was awful because you’re running your horse as fast as you can without being able to see anything. Even on a calm night, we would have to sing lullabies to settle the cattle down. The worst part of the cattle drive though was just being so tired. We never ever got enough sleep. Why, we would even sometimes rub tobacco in our eyes just to keep awake.
My grand-aunt, Winifred Watkins Walker, told me that her father, my great grandfather, John Calvin Watkins, shared the story with his children of him joining a cattle drive at the age of 12 as he headed west to Kansas. She didn’t tell me if she believed it. (A dry sense of humor seems to be a shared family trait; this was certainly true with my grandfather, my father, and my brother.) In the 1790s there were cattle drives from Tennessee to Virginia, but I could find no evidence of any cattle drives between West Virginia and Kansas. According to Wikipedia, between 1850 and 1910, “27 million cattle were driven from Texas to rail yards in Kansas for shipment to stockyards in Louisiana and points west.” By 1890, “the long trail drives increasingly became more difficult because the open range was divided up with barbed wire fences.” www.cowboysindians.com
My great grandfather, John Calvin Watkins, was born on May 24, 1869 in Taylor, West Virginia. His parents, Samuel and Susanna Watkins, had 10 children. According to the 1870 census the entire family lived in West Virginia at this time. Samuel died on September 4, 1874.
As mechanization and the industrial revolution took hold in West Virginia, farming was less profitable. The railroads began encouraging people from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and New York to head west to Kansas where crops were cheaper to raise and where they could be assured of a “temperate climate, excellent health, pure and abundant water.” 1876 advertising flyer for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad
After Samuel’s death and before 1880, two of John Calvin’s brothers migrated to Kansas. In 1881, it is likely that when John was 12, he, his mother, and several other siblings moved to Kansas to join his older brothers, Richard and William. The family probably arrived by train because the railroads often offered “free or reduced-rate transportation to Kansas.”
“Those who settled Kansas occasionally may have found conditions as agreeable as the railroads had advertised. But they also faced drought, harsh winters and summers, jackrabbit attacks, grasshopper infestations, dust storms, financial downturns, and dwindling populations. In the 1890s, the railroads stopped advertising Kansas.” https://www.kansas.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-story-of-kansas/article1053043.html
The Watkins family (including John Calvin and his mother Susanna) settled in Plum Grove, Kansas, a town which no longer exists.