Memorial Day

Complex History.

White Americans enslaved Black ones. White Americans fought to free them. 

Union Army, 8th Regiment Conn. Volunteers

My farm is on land where Indians lived.

     "The regiment was mustered out on the 12th of December, 1865, after four years and two months of service. Its tattered colors in the Capitol at Hartford speak more eloquently of its service than pen can do here, and the brave men who helped to make and maintain its honorable record.

              History of the 8th Regiment of the Connecticut Volunteers 

Stephen Nealon is my great grandfather. He married his wife, Avarilla, when she was fifteen, and she had already birthed three of her ten children by 1883, when they came to southern Oregon and bought the family farm at the base of the Table Rocks. My great-grandfather arranged that his gravestone would mark his service as a soldier in the Union Army in the Civil War, Company H of the 8th regiment of the Connecticut Volunteers.

A history of the regiment reports a dozen engagements including the siege of Fort Macon, and battles at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and a last battle at Fort Harrison. Some 72 men were killed in action, another 42 died of wounds, 132 died of disease, and 610 survived the war. A monument was erected at Antietam for the regiment. 

He was a survivor, and possibly did particularly heroic things in the war. He was there for all of it, which was heroic enough. Within the family there is less information about his war years and more about his having married a very young Southern girl, and then burdened her--or was it blessed her?--with ten children. She died young--or was it young for that time?--at age 60. His mother-in-law moved in with them. Was this elder care in the era when expectations and necessity meant care for frail seniors was done in the family, or was she there to help her daughter with the child-rearing? Maybe both. There was a small farmhouse and room for eleven. 

My great grandmother, Stephen's wife, is the old-looking woman, right of center in a white apron, holding toddler John, and there were two more children to come. Her oldest children, boys Marian and Harry, on either end, were in their 20s.

Today having ten children seems like an extraordinary burden on a wife--an act of patriarchy or insensitivity or cruelty. And yet in that era of big farm families and limited access to contraception, possibly it is evidence of continuing acts of loving intimacy appreciated by them both, the younger wife with agency getting exactly the big family that represented high achievement. They were people of their times. I don't know her motivation, but I see the fruits of it: the farm divided into ten strips of land, one for each child.

Was Stephen Nealon an advocate for racial justice that would stand muster in today's world? He risked death to help end slavery--a strong credential. But there is no record at all on his attitudes toward slave compensation after the Civil War, about racial justice generally, about whether he would have welcomed Black neighbors and friends, and whether he supported inclusion and equity. He almost certainly would not be thought woke, were he alive today. The era of his adulthood was a period of open, public Jim Crow-type segregation and prejudice, in both the north and south, including southern Oregon. There were no black families in southern Oregon. The Medford Hotel refused Black guests, throughout the 1950s. 

The great-great-grandmother, Atlanta Law, lived in Georgia and may have been a Confederate sympathizer. It seems likely to me. The Union Army burned down her city. 

Great-Great Grandmother

There is good legal title to my farm land. Stephen Nealon purchased it from a man who received it under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, an act that distributed land to settlers in the Oregon Territory. The act was the predecessor to the Homestead Act. White male settlers could claim up to 640 acres of land after working and residing on it for 14 months. Indians could not. Indians were not "citizens."

The land was available because of the displacement of the local Indian tribes during the 1850s. The lands along the rivers in the Pacific Northwest were unusual because they allowed large permanent settlements of hunter-gatherer populations. Salmon were abundant and easily harvested. There was no need to travel with the game and the seasons. The fish came to them. My farm abuts the Rogue River, and arrowheads are visible on the pumice soil after a rain. It was Indian land. 

Indians were displaced after skirmishes, an Indian War, a treaty, then a second displacement and removal. By 1883 it was a White man's area, and my great grandfather paid $3,000 for the 180 acres. Stephen Nealon's hands are clean, I suppose, but there is a darker past in the origins before him. The United States occupied it sufficiently that the Spanish and Russians didn't contest the land. We signed a treaty with Britain for land south of the 49th parallel. The people with the best title were Indians, but the White settler mindset was that they didn't count except as inconvenience and impediment. The land was the U.S. government's to distribute by right of occupation and conquest. 

My father, home from WW2

A few years ago an Indian group, the Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Tribe, bought a large piece of property very near my farm, having paid money to the heirs of the businessman who then owned the ranch. Once again the descendants of Indians control native land at the base of the Table Rocks. The Cow Creek Band are not the descendants of the displaced people, but they are here now and claim the most valuable part of the privilege of ownership and occupation--a monopoly right on local gambling customers. They were the first to open a profitable casino in the area, in a spot on the I-5 freeway 70 miles to the north. Another tribe would like to site a casino locally but cannot get the permits. The Cow Creek Tribe has "dibs" the same way White settlers did, by occupation and conquest.

Today I visit the gravesites of my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and one great-great grandparent. I am the heir to benefits and miseries. They survived, and here I am. It is all unearned.