We kicked off the month at our March 2 meeting with an interactive presentation led by John Juras. John told us the story of Zenas Leonard, his great-granduncle, who left Pennsylvania in the early 1800s to work in the fur trade. After working five years as a company clerk, he traveled from Missouri to points west – Idaho, California and Montana – before returning to Missouri again. Zenas rode a horse and never crossed a road or a fence.
He had many brushes with death. His first year in the Wyoming mountains, where he had gone to trap beaver, he and his party got trapped themselves – by snow. Desperate for food, they ate their own horses. Even so, their eyes lashed by piercing winds and their bodies weighed down by snow, they nearly died.
Over the course of his travels, Zenas Leonard was among the first white Americans to travel to the Pacific across the Southwest and to visit the awe-inspiring Yosemite Valley. In his narration, John recreated a world many of us know of from history books, but not from the personal account of an ancestor. He invited members to share their own family histories, and several members were happy to oblige.
Owen Robinson told us about his grandfather, who was a teacher in Livingston when the 1918 epidemic broke out. He stayed in the school, coming home 2-3 times a day to stoke the coals and get a meal, but otherwise remaining available to use his wheelbarrow to pick up the bodies felled by the Spanish flu.
Jesse Mahugh told us about his ancestors, Orville and Cressie Mahugh, who explored the Northwest some 100 years after the Corps of Discovery. They married in 1917 in Plentywood, where they farmed until 1923, when they moved to the greener pastures of Creston.
Cheryl Crawley told us about an influential water rights case her grandparents were involved in. They settled near the Pryor Mountains in 1898 and decided to dam a stream to irrigate their farm. Ranchers in Wyoming got pretty mad about the loss of water flowing their way and came to Montana to blow up the dam. This issue of water rights was ultimately settled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1911 opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. The opinion established the principle of “first in use” and favored the downstream cattlemen.
Chelle Feist told us that, watching “Band of Brothers,” she saw the spitting image of her grandfather in one of the characters. Bob Holter shared that his deceased wife’s great-grandfather, a doctor by trade, was a Confederate soldier captured by Union forces. He was ultimately released in order to care for the many wounded soldiers and ended up being one of the first licensed physicians in Montana.
It was an hour of fascinating glimpses into history from the lens of family history. Thank you, John!
