Driving around Lewis County, I often wonder about the people behind the names of the roads I’m traveling, and thanks to my friend Maeve Mitchell, I’ve learned about the family behind the name of Tucker Road north of Toledo.
Maeve, who has researched her family’s genealogy for more than 50 years, wrote to me after reading both of my novels and my nonfiction book about Matilda Koontz Jackson, whose bachelor son Barton finally married at the age of 68. The woman he married, Jane E. Wilkens Riches, was Maeve’s great-great-grandmother. She died three years after they wed.
As for Tucker Road, John Tucker was born on Jan. 29, 1828, in Hampshire, England, and emigrated to the United States in 1851 on a 40-day voyage aboard the Goodwin. The following year, he crossed the plains to California, hoping to find gold near Humboldt. He mined for a decade — never earning more than $1.50 per day — then turned to farming in 1862. He was described in military paperwork during the Indian War of 1855-56 as 5-foot-10 with a light complexion, dark blue eyes and dark hair. He served a few days shy of a month while living in California.
“Farming in this part of California required irrigation, and he found it very difficult to agree with the terms his neighbors had set up for the distribution of the water,” Maeve’s cousin Carole Thomas Wiskirken wrote in a 1953 family heritage assignment after interviewing her grandfather who was John and Mary Tucker’s second-youngest son. “Being an Englishman and of a very stern mind and body, he decided that rather than quarrel or put up with this method of farming he would go where God would do the irrigating and he could farm in peace.”
Abandoning the farm near Susanville, California, he and his family headed north to Canada, where he could “get back under the British rule,” but his wife had different plans.
Mary Graves Hardesty, one of 13 children, was born on Feb. 28, 1839, in Missouri and, in 1861, traveled west with her brothers after their father died, to avoid fighting in the Civil War. Shortly after arriving in California, she met John Tucker. They married on Jan. 21, 1862, and in October of that year, she gave birth to a son, William John Tucker, at Susanville. (William became Maeve’s great-grandfather.)
In late 1863, John and Mary with their toddler William traveled north toward Canada with another family but lost a team of horses and their wagon while crossing the Cowlitz River at Toledo. The Tuckers rented a place on Cowlitz Prairie known as the Russell farm, and although they stayed there only three years, the road past their home and crossing the prairie toward Ethel became known as the John Tucker Road, and today simply as Tucker Road.
In 1865, they enjoyed Sunday dinners with John and Matilda Jackson at their home on nearby Highland Prairie (near present-day Mary’s Corner) as noted in the 1865 diary of the Jacksons’ daughter, Louisa. John Tucker may have enjoyed visiting with another native of England, John Jackson.
While John wanted to move farther north, Mary refused to ford another river. So in 1867-68, the family, which had grown to four by then with the birth of daughter Mary Elizabeth on Cowlitz Prairie in 1865, homesteaded on 160 fertile acres along a small stream that became known as Silver Creek “because the sand seemed to sparkle and give an appearance of silver,” Wiskirken wrote. Silver Creek, which was roadless at the time with only trails carved through the underbrush by horses and wagons, is about a dozen miles north and east of Cowlitz Prairie.
They built a log home with a rock fireplace for both heating and cooking. For two years, the cabin had no door, only a large canvas that failed to prevent small animals from creeping inside to steal food. John cleared the land, plowed and cultivated the fields, and accumulated more than a hundred head of cattle as well as pigs and chickens. He bought land from the railroad for two dollars an acre and expanded his farm to 600 acres.
For more than 25 years, John also operated a store and a post office, which was established in his Silver Creek home on March 15, 1875.
John’s wife served as a midwife to both settlers and Native American women.
“They all knew if they wanted Mary to be at the birth of a child, they should not be delivering when the rivers were high,” Maeve said.
Local Native Americans befriended the Tuckers, including the Ike and Costamas families who lived near the mouth of the Tilton River.
When new settlers arrived at Silver Creek, they cautioned John and Mary against allowing Native Americans to eat lunch with them.
“John and Mary responded that if they were good enough to work beside them in the fields, they were good enough to sit at their table with them,” Maeve said.
John took trips to Tumwater regularly for supplies to sell from the store. After a while, Jake Beusch built a store on the Cowlitz River at Salkum where two or three times a year boats brought supplies from Cowlitz Landing at Toledo. A round-trip fare to Portland on these boats cost about $1.50, Wiskirken wrote in her history.
The Tucker family grew to include Sarah, George Henry, Agnes, Albert, Alfred James and Frederick, but Sarah died at 19 of a severe appendicitis attack.
Once a year, Mary bought denim and calico, which she used to sew jeans, shirts and dresses for her children.
“Fred still complains about the ‘waists’ he had to wear, and he also complains about the pants that were never long enough after the first washing,” wrote Wiskirken, who grew up on part of the Tucker family homestead given to her grandfather, James. “His most prized possession was a piccadilly hat and a coat with tails; where it came from, he could not recall.”
Mary churned cream into butter and salted pork and sold both items in Tacoma for extra money for food and clothing. The boys with their father raised hogs and drove them to Chehalis where they sold for 1½ cents a pound. They also raised cattle and turkeys.
They didn’t build fences, so cattle roamed the woods and clearings on John’s 600-acre homestead. He carried a Yager rifle, short-barreled and large bored, while Mary wielded an axe when she needed a weapon.
“The story has been related of the time Mary was out with two dogs trying to find the cattle,” Wiskirken wrote. “She found the herd circled around a newborn calf, protecting it from a cougar that was waiting in a nearby tree. Mary picked up the calf and carried it on her back, the cougar following and screaming now and then until she reached the barn. The dogs helped keep the cougar away, but it is told that the cougars killed several dogs.”
Before the first schoolhouse was built in 1888, John Tucker hired a live-in tutor for his children. The Bill Beusch home served as Silver Creek’s first schoolhouse with a Mrs. Severns serving as an early teacher. Classes met only three or four months during the year, and older boys took turns attending while their brothers worked on the farm.
“It has been told that some of the boys who attended school carried guns as a means of self-preservation from both man and beast,” Wiskirken wrote.
Two of the Tucker sons, Albert and Henry, bought the Salkum store from Jake Beusch when he moved to Silver Creek. Others worked cutting cedar shingle bolts that they floated downriver to Kelso where they were split into shakes or shingles.
“This was dangerous work and took men who were very good with a peevy and with a heart that was young and daring,” Wiskirken wrote. “The shingle bolt drives were usually started in March when the water was high, to avoid jams.”
Despite the dangerous work, some men boasted of walking across the Cowlitz River on shingle bolts.
Other men logged with oxen and horses, floating fir logs down the Cowlitz.
James Tucker, who injured his leg falling from a wagon and spent five years recovering from the subsequent infection, learned to play the violin after trading a calf to Bill Beusch for the instrument, which had been obtained from the Kellogg sternwheeler plying the Cowlitz River. Fred, another brother, played the bass fiddle and zithers, while Otto Beusch played chords on the piano.
“These three furnished music and entertainment for many social gatherings for many years,” Thomas wrote. “The young people would go by horseback and buggy to dances and dance all Wiskirken and come home in the morning daylight.”
John later sold 90 acres along the Cowlitz River for $1,900 to Henry Mayfield, who laid out a town named for himself. A settler up Winston Creek called Ferry also had a store, school, and community hall. Other early settlers of Salkum and Silver Creek included the Plant, Doss, and Hendricks families.
By the time he was 70, John suffered from poor health, and on July 2, 1904, he was committed to an asylum at 76. Only a month later, on Aug. 14, 1904, he died of senility and exhaustion at Western Washington Hospital for the Insane in Tacoma and was buried at the Salkum Cemetery.
“He did his duty as a man and citizen, left a fair competence to those who had been dependent upon him, and after a long life of usefulness and labor finally laid down to rest, secure in the loving remembrance of numerous relatives and friends,” his obituary states.
After John’s death, Mary applied for a widow’s pension based on his service in the Indian Wars of 1855-56 while mining in California. He was a private in the 9th Company of the Oregon Military Mounted Volunteers, but although honorably discharged, he served only from Oct. 20, 1855, to Nov. 16, 1855 — a few days short of the 30 days required to qualify for the pension. The family kept his military uniform from the war in an attic for many years but then a fire destroyed the house.
The Tucker family descendants still have letters written to John by family members in England between May 1854 and July 1899. In one, John’s brother asked if he had heard of the murders at Whitechapel in 1888 and noted “They are calling him Jack the Ripper.” Maeve also has Mary Tucker’s reading glasses. Until the Covid pandemic, the family held a reunion each year in Rochester.
Maeve’s great-grandfather William, an expert blacksmith and farmer, married Georgianna “Anna” Katherine Ragan, daughter of George Ragan, who was known for chairs he made for settlers. William and Anna raised four sons — Henry, Alvie, Harold, and Edward. William married again to May White and had a daughter, Calla, who became a registered nurse in Chehalis.
It was through Alvie that Maeve found another connection with a character depicted in my second novel, “Shattered Peace: A Century of Silence.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
