General Notes

Cordelia Wadell and Clarissa Ashbaugh were cousins.
Served in the Union Army from 1861 to 1863. Upon his discharge, he moved to Montana, arriving at Alder Gulch on 1-14-1864. In 1865 he opened "Allen's Bar" in French Gulch, Montana. Travelled back and forth from Missouri to Montana and married his first wife in Pike County, Missouri in 1869. He later married his first wife's cousin after the death of his first wife. He worked placer claims near French Gulch and Rocker, Montana. He is buried, along with both of his wives, at Deer Lodge, Montana.

He is listed in the index to the "1899 Society of Montana Pioneers" with the following biogr aphical notes:
"W.N. ALLEN, born in Missouri in 1839. Place of departure for Montana, Utah.
Route traveled, via Bridger road; arrived at Bannack in March, 1864.
Occupation, miner. Residence, Anaconda."
The 1870 U.S. Census for deer Lodge County, Montana, page 66, shows William N. Allen wit h a real estate value of $3,000.00. Living with him at the time were William R. Allen (born 1 848-1849), a cousin, and his wife Elmira and child Eliza.

The Following copied from "The Chequemegon" by William R. Allen (son of this William N. Allen) The William Frederick Press, New York 1949

By The FALL of 1876 my father HAD ACCUMULATED sufficient money to enable him to again visit his old home in Missouri. The family consisted of my mother, two small brothers, one an infant and myself. We traveled to Salt Lake, 450 miles, by stagecoach, riding night and day. By that time the railroad had reached Utah, with the terminal at Corrine.

I have the vision before me now of the first railway train that came before my eyes, a passenger train of about three coaches--there were no pullman cars then. The old fashioned wood-burning engine with its inverted bell-shaped smokestack on the locomotive. In dreaming of a railroad
track I had pictured the wheels of the train running in grooves in the rail. It was a long time before I found out how that locomotive and the cars stayed on that rounded
top of the rail.

The trip from Corrine, Utah, to St. Joe, Missouri, took six days in a very filthy, crowded, day-coach immigrant train. Food had to be carried along, as there were no dining cars' or eating places on the way. Measles and other diseases broke out among the children; my infant brother died shortly after arriving in Missouri.

The winter soon passed, with two outstanding matters of interest remaining in my mind: the large number of colored people and the frozen apples, shriveled but still hanging on the trees.

In April we started the return trip to Montana, via the immigrant train route across the plains to Corrine, Utah. On arrival at Corrine, my father bought two teams, a covered wagon and a two-horse buggy, bedding, camp equipment and food to carry us on the trip. My father drove the wagon and my mother the buggy, camping when night overtook us. The roads at best were ruts and trails and the spring rains made some of these next to impassable and the trip was slow and tiresome. The fuel for campfires, which we carried in the wagon to keep it dry, consisted of buffalo chips and sagebrush stalks. At night the sagebrush smoke from the fire was pleasant to smell and the buffalo chips, when reduced to coals, formed a heat base that covered the Dutch oven. When the bread was baking, with bacon frying and coffee boiling, the aroma whetted appetites to a devouring degree.
The trip took about two weeks. When at Melrose, Montana, on the Big Hole River, about fifty miles from French Gulch, our destination, we stopped for the night at Robbins Stage Station. While the men were caring for the horses, a drunken Indian came into the room where my mother and we children were. It so frightened her that she was stricken with a heart attack and died within a few hours. This left my father alone, with two small boys. The body placed in the wagon and taken to Deer Lodge, 75 miles requiring two days of travel, where funeral services conducted by Reverend J. R. Russell, and where she buried.

I grew older and realized my father's position and must have been his feeling on that sad journey, I often at his courage to carry on. He placed on my tombstone the inscription, "Blessed are they that are pure in heart for they shall see God." As time went on, and I became better acquainted with my father's deep religious nature, I could better understand the Power that sustained him in those trying days.

The following summer was a hectic one for all of us. We boys spent most of our time at the homes of friendly neighbors and my father lived alone. He soon realized that a home must be provided. My mother had often spoken of a cousin (Clarissa Ashbaugh) as a fine woman and had expressed the wish that if anything happened to her this cousin could take care of us children.

In the winter of 1877, my father went back to Missouri, married this cousin and returned the following May, coming back to the one room log cabin in French Gulch. We children slept in a trundle bed that could be pushed under the big bed during the day. Our new mother cooked over the coals in the rock fireplace, took over the reins of the household, and was to us one of the finest and truest mothers that ever lived, and one, of the most devoted wives a man ever had. She survived my father a number of years and is buried in the Deer Lodge Cemetery on one side of my father, while my real mother rests on the other side. No two boys were ever blessed with finer parents.

The summer of 1877' started auspiciously for us, my father with a new wife and we boys with a new mother. Father bought a cow, a rare animal in those parts at that time. This gave us milk and butter, a great innovation for a camp. We shared some of it with the neighbors.

Later in the year, a lean-to kitchen was added to the one room cabin. It had one window-sash for light, the swinging on hinges made from leather straps cut from old boot tops. The fastener was a wooden bar sliding into a groove on the inside of the door. To lock it, a nail was slipped behind the bar and when closing from the outside the nail was so cleverly pushed in that it appeared only as a nail head in the wood. But those days bolts meant but little. Most of the time, cabins were left unlocked and anyone was at liberty to help themselves and sleep in the bed, if necessary, when the family was away. There was one rigid rule, however; that was, to wash the dishes and clean up the cabin. The remainder was hospitality of the real sort.

LDS FHL AF#161L-R9T.
SOURCES: "Family of Johann Heinrich Eschbach" Rev. John D. Ashbaugh webmaster@@zionweb.org, at AWTP (who has generously shared the above narrative at AWTP.  Much apreciation!)