Born under a wandering star - Stories from the Family Tree

My father's grandfather, Thomas Starnes, looks pretty relaxed in the rocker above, but he was actually quite a wanderer. Born in 1854 in Green Co., Tennessee, he stayed there only until he was 16, and then headed to Texas. That was just the beginning.

He landed in Johnson Co., Texas but by age 24 had courted and married 18-year-old Eudora Elliott in Palo Pinto County in February, 1879.  Their first child, Maude or "Sister" was born there in 1880; likewise my grandmother Beulah, in 1883.

The next child, Earl, was born in 1886 in Henrietta, Clay Co., Texas, a few miles east of Wichita Falls; the family lived there and in Bowie, Texas, 30 miles down the road for a few years, but by 1889 had made a giant leap to White Salmon, Washington!

Lewis and Clark gave the name White Salmon to the little Indian village on the banks of the Columbia River, just across from Hood River, Oregon and it wasn't long before a full-fledged town sprang up. There, Thomas worked as a nurseryman, raising and selling fruit trees for one of the town's leading citizens, A. H. Jewett. Evidently, the letters sent back to Texas really promoted the region, because a few years later Dora's father, Samuel Elliott, and sister Sally and husband Billy Brooks arrived in White Salmon.

Thomas and Billy went into the nursery business together, in competition with A. H., but evidently were poor businessmen and today the main street of White Salmon is named Jewett Avenue - not Starnes Avenue. Defeated, the family, with the two children born in White Salmon, Lester (1889) and Archie (1893), headed back to Texas. They were back in Johnson County when Virgil was born in 1896 but the 1900 Census found the entire family - except for yet-to-be-born Loren - in Sherman, Texas. You can only wonder why they were there.

The appeal of wide open spaces was strong for Thomas. By 1905 the family was back in Indian territory again, this time in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where the last child, Loren, was born. Sometime in this period they also lived briefly in New Mexico.

By 1910, Thomas, Dora, and some of the children were in Ontario, California. Thomas purchased some land and tried hard to be a farmer, but the call of the wild was too great. While Dora and Loren were in Texas in 1913 on a visit, Thomas sold out and he and Virgil - 17 years old at the time - took off for British Columbia Canada, expecting his wife to follow him. Dora had visited Canada previously; a manifest of Border Crossings from that period lists Thomas, Dora and Loren entering Canada from Sweet Grass Montana , but she preferred to live in California, close to where several of her children lived.

My grandmother said, "She would write to him like she was expecting him back any day and he would write her and tell her how to come to Canada; it went on that way for about two years, I think. They decided that there wasn't any use in that any longer."

Virgil describes the journey:

"We left Ontario, California, sometime in May 1913. Arrived in Edmonton, bought oxen, a wagon, and about half a ton of supplies and shipped it to Edson. There we loaded up and headed up the old Edson Trail, to the first place we had picked out on the map - Moberly Lake. 

After about two months of traveling through muskeg [bog land], up and down hills, and across rivers, so on and so forth, we arrived on Pouce Coupe Prairie. It would be late in July. After a couple of months of... travel over the old Edson Trail — building corduroy [roads] and pulling people out of mud holes, and getting pulled out in turn, mosquitoes and a few other things – the prairie looked like a wonderful place; we had no idea there was such open wonderful land in this remote country. 

So after a lot of consideration and scouting around we decided to give up going to Moberly Lake that year. Picked out a piece of land, well up on a knoll, and homesteaded. Put up a little bit of hay here, with the assistance of Mr. Timothy O'Callaghan, for our oxen, to carry us through that winter. 

Well, the funny part about it. After starting for Moberly Lake, I never got there until forty-two years later, and we drove in with a modern vehicle." 

Thomas must have at last found peace for his restless spirit; there's no evidence that he ever left the area again - not even to winter over in Dawson Creek, as so many of the prairie-dwellers did. He lived the remaining 29 years of his life in Pouce Coupe (French for "cut thumb" - ouch!) on that knoll, which is known today as Starnes Hill. He died in 1942 at the age of 87. Virgil also remained in British Columbia, marrying a Norwegian woman and spending the rest of his active years hunting and trapping - I previously told one of the family stories about him here. Dora, true to her word, remained in California until her death in 1948.