When we think of pioneers traveling cross country in covered wagons, the images of the westward migration of the 19th century normally come to mind. For poorer families, though, horses and wagons continued to be a mode of transportation on into the 20th century. In the case of my wife’s family, they migrated from Idaho to Canada, and then back to Idaho in the years just before World War I, by covered wagon both ways.
Thomas W. Lyons, my wife’s grandfather, was born in Cache County, Utah, in 1875, and later moved with his family to the St. Anthony area of Idaho to start a farm. Times were always hard, and with a large family Thomas Lyons worked at many different types of jobs to help his family establish themselves. In 1898, Thomas’ father died, and the primary responsibility for providing for his mother and four other siblings fell to him. That year, he also met Julina L. Smith whose father was also farming in the area. They married shortly after they met, traveling to Logan to get married in the temple there in December of 1898. The trip to and from the marriage was by horse drawn sleigh, the several week journey doubling as a honeymoon for the young couple.
Thomas worked at mining, farming, and as a butcher. They had two children born in those first few years, but the farming was not very productive. Julina’s brothers and father had recently moved to southern Alberta in Canada, near Lethbridge, to homestead farms, and their good reports convinced Thomas and Julina to uproot themselves and emigrate. Arriving in 1902, they settled first in Magrath, then two years later moved to Raymond, and then a year later relocated the family to the larger town of Taber, where they built a brick home for their growing family.
Some of the Lethbridge area farmers were benefiting from canals and irrigation ditches built by the new settlers, but Thomas, his brothers-in-law, and many other farmers were beyond the reach of the water, depending on rains to grow their grain crops. He again took other work as it came available to supplement farming. He worked as a carpenter for a mining company and other odd jobs that often took him away from home for weeks at a time.
For a few years, the family prospered, but in 1912, hoping to make more money by harvesting their neighbor’s grain, Thomas and a friend bought a threshing machine. The timing turned out be bad; a drought began in 1912 that lasted through the next two years. While the farmers closer to Lethbridge had the benefit of irrigation water, Thomas and his neighbors depended on rains that never came and harvested less grain than they planted as seed in the spring. Limited harvests also meant the threshing business never turned a profit. After two years of this, with the 1914 crops already dried and dead in the ground, the dry farmers of Alberta threw in the towel.
Thomas Lyons, his close friend George Eldredge, brother-in-law Einer Johnson, and several other families loaded their few belongings and many children in covered wagons to return to Idaho. (Thomas appears in this picture, fifth from the left in the back row, helping to hold a colt.) By now, Thomas and Julina had five surviving children, a son and four daughters, three of them born in Canada. Two more sons had died in infancy.
On June 11th, 1914, their wagon train left Taber and headed for the United States via Spokane, Washington. They had little money, limited food, and were often viewed with suspicion in the towns that they passed through. The men, though, took opportunities to work when they could, and took pride in always being able to pay for their food and supplies, either with cash or their labor.
In Moscow, Idaho, the arrival of a wagon train was enough of a novelty that the mayor closed the streets to accommodate the travelers and fed all the children ice cream cones. In Donnelly, Idaho, the men found work building a school house, then hauling 100,000 board feet of lumber from the sawmills to the train depot for loading. As a result of working their way south, the trip took over five months. Finally, flush with a little cash, the families loaded most of their wagons, livestock, and goods on a couple of freight cars, and traveled the final distance from north of Boise to Burley, Idaho in relative comfort.
Upon arriving in Burley the day after Thanksgiving, 1914, the railroad demanded extra cash to unload the goods and livestock, which the families could not pay. Thomas Lyons went to the Burley bank and asked the president of the bank for a loan to pay the railroad and buy enough lumber to build a small cabin. The bank wired Thomas’ banker in Alberta who responded that Thomas Lyons was good for whatever he needed, so Thomas got the loan, unloaded their livestock and goods, and built a cabin.
Life in Burley was still somewhat tenuous; Thomas and his oldest son, Ivan, took carpentry work wherever they could find it when they weren’t working in Idaho. Over the next thirty years, Thomas and several of his sons traveled to New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona to find carpentry work when there was not enough work in Burley and the surrounding area. Eventually, Thomas and Julina raised a family of eleven surviving children in Burley, including my wife’s father, Bryant, the last of four boys at the end of the family. Julina died in 1940 and Thomas died in 1957; both are buried in Burley where they raised their family.
As a footnote, three of the four oldest daughters, having been born in Canada, were Canadian citizens but rarely left Southern Idaho for most of their lives. As luck would have it, one of my wife’s aunts traveled to Mexico with her son and his family for a vacation in the 1980s only to be held at the border on their return because she was not a U.S. citizen, and, like two of her sisters, had never naturalized. Eventually reason prevailed, and the pioneer who had journeyed hundreds of miles by wagon train from Canada as a child was allowed to board a jet plane and fly back from Mexico to Idaho and her home.