The pioneer spirit

Just over a century ago, my newlywed great-great grandparents set out for a chance at a better life. They packed their belongings into two wagons, one packed with calves that were "too small to travel" – that is, too small to walk the 200 miles from Sterling, Kansas to Jet, Oklahoma. They also carried 2 feather beds, rag rugs, canned fruit and chickens. A few cows walked with them.

My great-great grandparents – Dorsey "D.J." and Bertha Hutchins - arrived in Jet, Oklahoma on October 3, 1897. Four years earlier the Cherokee Strip had opened for the biggest land run in U.S. history, but many homesteaders abandoned their land or sold it to latecomers like my great-great grandparents. Dorsey and Bertha themselves stayed just over a year and a half before going back to Kansas.

I never knew my great-great-grandparents. Bertha died in 1960, 9 years before I was born, and D.J. in 1957. My mom remembers them and I've heard plenty of stories about them from my great-grandparents and great-aunt and uncles. D.J. was a joker, they say. He liked to play pranks on his kids. And Bertha was a friendly, generous woman, who's smiling in nearly every photo I've ever seen of her. And she was tough and uncomplaining, evidenced by the letters she wrote to her mother while they homesteaded on the Cherokee Strip. She writes how she and D.J. lived in their wagon until they finished building their sod house. The "soddie," as they called it, had a mud floor and a roof that leaked when it rained. According to Bertha's short autobiography, sometimes after a heavy rain they had to dry out everything they owned. This doesn't sound like a complaint in her writing, just a recounting of how things were. She writes of the days in Oklahoma with fondness:

"In a struggling young community such as that was, every one pitches in to help anyone who needs it just as the time when no one had enough to have a Christmas dinner, but by pooling our resources we neighbors managed a fairly decent dinner and a very good time on our first Christmas away from our old home. We had a home of our own even though it was not very good and we had health and were young and could work and plan so we managed to get along."

Bertha and D.J. eventually had the opportunity to buy land closer to home, near Sterling, Kansas. They moved there with an addition to the family, their oldest daughter, Nancy Esther. Bertha and D.J. had 7 more children, including my great-grandfather, Pete Hutchins.

Most people aren't lucky enough to know their great-grandparents, but Grandpa Pete was a big part of my life until he died in 1987, when I was a freshman in college, and Grandma Mary – his wife – was around for a few years after that.

My great-grandparents instilled me with a strong sense of family history and pride. Grandpa Pete was proud to be a sharecropper and a son of homesteaders. He was a rancher, cattleman and farmer who started out with a small piece of land in Lane County, Kansas and eventually owned several sections in western Kansas and eastern Colorado, and even partnered on a 640,000 acre ranch in Australia.

I grew up in my great-grandparents' house on our family farm. My mom grew up in the same house, and my parents still live there. My great-grandparents had moved into a house in town when my mom was a little girl, and my mom and her three sisters were raised in the farmhouse by my grandma June and – until their divorce – my grandpa Calvin.

I know I tend to idealize Grandma Mary and Grandpa Pete, and I'm not alone in this. They have a mythic quality among many of us in the family. They were kind and loving and full of stories about great adventures.

My mom took my brother and me to visit Grandma Mary and Grandpa Pete at least once a week when my grandparents were in town (they traveled often in their later years). We would sit with Grandma Mary on the sun porch or in the dining room and she would talk about bird-watching or show us her rosebushes and give us glasses of iced tea. Or we would sit with Grandpa Pete in his study, and he would show us the places he'd traveled to on the globe in his office. Every time they returned from a trip – usually to Australia – they'd show us photos of their adventures. They believed travel was an important experience, and Grandpa Pete said he'd never regretted a dime spent on travel. They traveled to Africa, Hong Kong, Russia, throughout Europe and South America, to places that Americans didn't frequent in the 60s, especially not 60-something grandparents. In Africa, Grandma Mary rode a zebra and caught a 178 pound Nile Perch. Grandpa Pete bought a small plane and flew around the Midwest on fishing trips. They lived a pretty exciting life for a couple of Kansas farmers.

Grandpa Pete often told me about the wonders of technology and how vastly things had changed since he was a boy. I often wonder what he would think of the internet and cell phones and GPS systems. Grandpa Pete was old enough to remember the first time he saw a car. The way he tells it, my great-great-grandpa D.J. came home with the family's first car when Grandpa Pete was a boy. D.J. got to a gate near the house and hollered "Whoa!" The car, Grandpa Pete recounts, did not whoa. It tore through the gate and required some repairs before it could be driven again.

Grandpa Pete knew technology would continue to grow and he expected it would make life easier for people. And he expected his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to move on to bigger and better things. He valued education and while he was alive, gave every great-grandchild $500 a semester for college. He helped other people's children through college too. He wanted us to make smart choices and have successful lives. But I don't know if he would have expected that none of us could make a living by farming anymore. It's not that he encouraged us to follow in the family business, because he didn't. But he did instill a love of the land and of our Kansas roots, and farming and livestock are the primary industries in the state. Our small town, Scott City, is a rural town, with just 4,000 people and another 1,000 in the entire county. The population is shrinking and I suspect will continue to do so. Farming is a dying way of life. There are fewer and fewer people growing up on the family farm, and fewer still staying in the towns to manage the farms. The young people move away, like I have. They leave behind farms and homes that have been in the family for generations. Often they leave their extended families, all the uncles and aunts and grandparents and cousins that I saw regularly. They lose their connection to the land and their roots.

In some ways it seems fitting. The early homesteaders were, after all, pioneers. They struck out for a better life, for a place to raise their families. And now their descendents are doing the same.