Covered Wagons, Feather Beds, and Granny Susan

Great Grandmother Susan Ann Tarlton Moore

I remember my mother brushing Granny Susan’s long white hair as she sat up in the old featherbed in her daughter’s home, the home of  my grandmother Bessie Moore Wilson, on Reece’s Creek in the Missouri Ozarks.  She was old, I thought.  And maybe a little scary because of it.  Mother finished, and Granny’s slight frame remained turned in our direction, Grandmother’s colorful patchwork quilts up to her waist.

I was less than 4 years old, Ken must have been around 8 that day when Granny Susan patted the featherbed for us to hop on and sit with her.  Now I was about 1/2 cowboy and 1/2 Indian at this time, so I paid rapt attention when she began to talk about covered wagons.  

Covered wagons automatically meant cowboys and Indians so she, as much as was possible, had me on every word. I doubt any other theme of her story would last a man near 80 and be as fresh as a new lily after a spring shower. This would most certainly have been in her last year of life.  And I would be fascinated about the recollection for most of my life about the story she was about to tell us. In my youth, I associated every covered wagon with cowboys on horses and whooping wild Indians on the warpath against them and their caravans of dusty white canvas.  So, fascinated and still for once, the story poured into an empty spot in my brain, in my very being, and remained there, never fading.  It led to a thirst for more understanding until I decided, near fifty years of age, to put all the pieces together--the story and arduous research-- and fill it.

As I began researching in earnest about age 48, I, originally of the belief she must have been talking about coming to Wayne County. Missouri in a covered wagon, until my research of U.S census records showed she was born in Wayne County!  Eventually I stumbled upon the 1876 State census for Missouri, and found her and her mother Mahala Ward Tarlton, her Uncle Francis Marion Ward, and her Ward grandparents Meshach and Elizabeth Ward enumerated in a county just inside the western border of Missouri.  I came upon a handed down memoir in the possession of my aunt Mary by Susan’s sister to find out that they had taken a covered wagon all the way into the western territories of Kansas and Oklahoma to visit relatives.  In a covered wagon! Elizabeth Tarlton De Ruse, Susan's older sister, would write in her memoirs that they traveled so far west they ran out of towns. This was Indian territory at the time, and they were surely halted and told to turn around and return home by the Army---there was Indian trouble.  Do you remember Custer's Last Stand?  June 25-26 1876.  So I was right about my impressions and fantasies that day on the featherbed after all.

 In a very substantial way, Granny was telling us about the wild, wild, west!  And that 1876 census showed us not their original entry into the county, but their retreat back to the friendly confines of old Wayne because General Armstrong Custer had bit off more than he could chew.

My great grandmother, Susan Ann Tarlton was born in 1863, the daughter of Alexander Tarlton and Mahala Ward.  As a toddler she witnessed her father, a Union sympathizer, murdered by Southern guerillas in her home in Wayne County in 1864.  My great-great grandfather was home from a stock buying trip, ill with pneumonia, sitting in a rocking chair when the men in gray burst into the home and murdered him in front of his wife and children. This story was told by Susan to her granddaughter, my mother, Iva Delores Wilson Ragan.  Records and old newspaper articles substantiated it. 

As a child Susan was swinging on her grandfather, my 3x great grandfather, Meshach Ward’s front gate when she fell, tragically rendering her virtually blind, only being able to make out dim shadows for the remainder of her life.  She remained unmarried until until age 36 when she became the third wife, the previous wives dying from childbirth, of Daniel Moore, A Union cavalry soldier in the Civil War and later in the Plains Wars curtailing Indian uprisings.  Daniel Moore was my great-grandfather and both he and Susan were cared for by my mother in her teen years, making so much of our family history available to future generations. They had three children, my grandmother Bessie, Anna, and Theodore Moore.

Since Granny Susan was blind, Daniel read the Bible to her almost every evening.  Both were devout in their Christian beliefs.  Daniel was a faithful and devoted husband, seeing to her every need.  Even the daily trips to the outhouse were an almost impossible task and adventure for Susan, so Daniel devised to place a wire from the back door to the “necessity place” and Susan could then negotiate her way with ease. See the attached photo capturing that very negotiation.

Susan lived a long, full, and interesting life in spite of being deprived of its light, colors, and tapestry.  She is the very definition of pioneer.  She was present for so much of our American heritage.  I wish she could have seen it. I do, too.

My brother Ken and I visit her grave in the old Rucker Cemetery in Wayne County often. Every time it takes me back to that featherbed and my brain swells once more with the imagery of cowboys and Indians and the old West.