Obituary: George William James

Great Hanging of Gainesville, Texas

Oswald J. Hitz [1] married Sarah J. Harper in December of 1883. While researching Sarah Harper an interesting incident was discovered that involved her father, Manadier D. Harper. The event is known as the Great Hanging of 1862 at Gainesville, Texas. Rising tensions in Cooke county, Texas were the result of increased migration to the area following an expansion of the Butterfield Overland Mail route, a semi-weekly mail and passenger stage service that traveled from St. Louis, through northern Texas, terminating in San Francisco. The new migrants to the area did not own slaves which caused the numbers of slave owners to dwindle. By 1862 only 10% of the population of Cooke county owned slaves. Cooke and surrounding counties voted against secession which focused the fears of the slave holders in the county on the residents of the county that did not own slaves. A rumor circulated that 1,700 men had joined a Union League and were going to at...

In search of the Goodman homestead

July 26, 2020 Dennis and I took a trip up to Woodland township, Sauk county to see if we could find the old Goodman homestead and then to visit Goodman graves at St. Patrick’s cemetery outside Hillsboro. Using a combination of 1859 and 1906 plat maps, a modern highway map of Wisconsin, two pictures of the homestead, one from about 1901, the other from 1992, and relying on my memory of a visit many years ago, we were able to locate the homestead. It had changed greatly since I had seen it last. The barn that had stood to the left of the house was gone and there was a new pole barn standing to the right of the house. The house looked dilapidated, but it did look like it was being worked on. There was a new roof and a portion of the exterior was covered in sheathing. There was a lot of vegetation standing in front of it which made it difficult to see the entire building. When I had seen the house previously there was a pretty pond that stood...

Wolves in Wisconsin

I ran across this picture while I was working on the biography of George Herbert Anderson. George was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1897 but came to live with his grandmother, Christina Olson Long, in Stockholm township, Pepin county, Wisconsin after the death of his mother in 1901. He lived most of his life in the Stockholm area until later in life when he moved to Minneapolis. He is pictured here holding a dead wolf. The wolf population of Wisconsin prior to European settlement was estimated to be from 3,000 to 8,000. No one really knows for sure. What we do know is that as fur trappers and farmers began to move in to the area in the 1830's, the animals that the wolves preyed on began to disappear. Typically the wolves prey included bison, elk, and white-tailed deer in the south and moose, deer, caribou, and beaver in the north. Hungry wolves began to feed on easy-to-capture livestock. This was unpopular with farmers as one would expect...

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