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Carney & Wehofer Family
Genealogy Pages
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m. 17 Mar 1814
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Married:
[Excerpt from the Life History of Stephen Maynard Stevens]
In the early winter of 1836, my parents moved from New York into Pennsylvania on the Cowaniska, a branch of the Tioga river, Here they engaged in the lumber business, rented a saw mill of the old sash saw, water power derived from the Cowaniska river, stocked the mill with logs, sawed them and rafted the lumber via of the Cowaniska, Tioga and Susquehanna rivers to Baltimore, making their last run of lumber in the Spring of 1839, which was the start to emigrate West. The family, together with their household effects being loaded upon the rafts of lumber, a small house being built upon one of the rafts for their reception. The family went down the Susquehanna on the raft as far as to Marietta, there the women and children stopped while the men took their lumber on to Baltimore and sold it.
When the men returned to Marietta, then the trip West really commenced. Boarding a canal boat, we proceeded up the Susquehanna as far as Hollidaysburgh from there by rail to Pittsburgh. Down the Ohio by Steamboat, up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Missouri, up the Missouri to Brunswick. Here we landed and bid a final adieu to the Steamboat. We found here a beautiful country, but Missouri was a Slave State and the folks would not settle in Slave territory after they saw the effects of Slavery on the white race; so we went to a saw mill on the banks of the Missouri river, sawed lumber suitable and built a keel-boat, got aboard of our own craft and started again in search of the promised land, going down the Missouri river to a place called Withington's landing, near Capogray. Here another landing was made, the family nearly all down with Ague.
My father took Steamboat passage to Keokuk, Iowa. Then on foot and alone in the late fall of the year he started Northwest, continued his Journey until his progress was arrested by the boundary line between the Whites and Indians, made selection of a place about one?half mile Northwest of what was since made the village of Talleyrand, known in after years as the Doty place. My father selected his claim and employed Conrad Temple to help him to build a log cabin. He went to work and soon had a cabin 16 x 16 feet and about ten feet high, the walls raised and the proverbial clapboard roof on it. Then my father con?tracted with Temple to complete the house which would be to put in one door and a cat and clay chimney, a puncheon floor and chink the crack with pieces of wood and then daub them over with clay mud for mortar. Closing this contract with Temple, the work to be pushed to completion, my father returned for his family.
On reaching his family, again he found most of them shaking with the Ague. My father immediately bought a good yoke of Oxen and a rude sled. I say rude sled. I wish it was in my power to give an adequate idea of that piece of mechanism, but words would fail me, so I must content with what I have already said. Loading what goods the oxen could haul on that sled, less the weight of the family, for that was to be their pulman palace for the rest of our journey, he then hired a man with a wagon and team of four horses to take the rest of immediate household goods about, Another load of miscellaneous articles were shipped by steamboat to Keokuk, Iowa, to be hauled out to our home later. With the outfit just described, we, started about the first of December with about Six inches of snow on the ground on the home stretch of some?thing over two hundred miles.
I will not pain anyone with a recital of the details of that long, cold, dreary journey, nor of the intense suffering of the sick ones. Suffice it to say that at about 4 o'clock p.m., December 26th, 1839, that journey ended with all the family still living. But what a sight greeted our eyes. Instead of finding a house fin?ished, ready for occupation, we found it just as father left it, just the walls and roof, the spaces between the logs without chinking, all open furnishing, even less protection from storm and wind than would be a pile of brush.
I then witnessed what people can do when driven by the law of self-preservation. It seemed to me that my father and brothers just flew. The things in the wagon were just piled out in the snow, the tools unpacked, some went to sawing out a door, some went to the timber nearby and commenced getting fuel and starting a huge fire. Others were cutting nooks in a bunch of hazlebrush in which the house and oxen could be screened to some extent from the piercing northwest wind. Throwing the bush cut down for a bed for the animals to lie down upon, as soon as the doorway was sawen out, the work of shoveling the snow out of the house was commenced. This was no small job, for the snow had drifted in the louse to the depth of about four feet. But this excess of snow was utilized outside to bank up out side of the walls to the height of about four or five feet, which formed quite a protection from the wind when we went to bed.
The puncheons, before mentioned, were dug out from under the snow and laid down in the house, forming a place on which the beds could be spread, but did not furnish any extra floor space, in fact, all had to crowd close together to find room for all to lie down. I spoke of puncheons. This might be a mystic word to a younger people of today, but was a familiar word to all settlers in a new country. Down to about 1850 they were no longer used, as saw mills were sufficiently numerous to supply the immediate necessities of the people. Well, a puncheon is simply a board or plank anywhere from 1-1/2 to 3 or 4 inches in thickness, split out of a log and one side hewn with a broad ax. They were usually from ten to sixteen inches wide and seldom more than eight or ten feet long, owing to the difficulty of splitting them thin enough, any wider or longer than that.
That first night was photographed on my mind to remain until memory itself shall perish. The stars shining with brightness known only to more northern latitude and clear frosty atmosphere crowded so close in bed that. it was difficult to turn over or change position, some of the men folks up all the time chopping wood and keeping fires, gangs of wolves within fifty yards of the house (if it could be properly called a house), howling and yelping, were surroundings so strange and novel as to keep open even the eyes of a tired child.
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