by Anne Edwards
Despite the responsibility of three children born in four years, Michael, working as a soapmaker, accrued enough money by 1856 to emigrate with his family and two older brothers, Nicholas and John, to Canada. The family probably left England from Liverpool, the main port for homebound Canadian lumber and cargo ships, their decks packed with immigrants taken on for the extra profits. Because their trip appears to have been well planned, the Reagan family must have saved money from the wages of the three men and their crossing might not have been as horrifying as for most of their fellow passengers, who would have been crowded aboard with little food in confining, filthy, rat-infested conditions. Those with some funds brought food for the voyage with them and often were able to buy slightly better space for their families. Such vessels as the one the Reagans would have had to take to cross the Atlantic were called coffin ships because of the thousands who died en route or shortly after landing.
The Reagans all survived the crossing with enough money left to continue on what must have been a prearranged journey. For they did not remain in Canada more than a few weeks before they boarded a wagon train to Fair Haven Township, Carroll County, Illinois. Once there, they took advantage of the American Homestead Act, which allowed a settler to choose undeveloped acreage without cost and work the land for four years, at which time the land and any dwelling on it became his. In the 1860 census of Fair Haven Township, Michael Reagan (misspelled as “Reigan”) was recorded as being a farmer with real estate valued at $1,120 and personal property valued at $150. Four children were recorded, a son, William, having been born in 1859. Michael, with his brothers to help him, had built a small home and cultivated sixteen acres, which were now his.
Michael’s elder son, John, who had been born in England, was Jack Reagan’s father. As a young man, John Reagan farmed his family’s land. He moved into nearby Fulton in 1873 to work on a grain elevator. In 1877 he claimed two sections (21 and 22) near his family’s homestead (his Uncle Nicholas had a claim on section 23). He had to clear the scrubby black oak and cultivate his parcel alone, not an easy task. Eventually, he acquired livestock and built a two-room frame house (probably with the help of male members of his family, the custom at that time), seeded corn and planted beans and squash. The black soil was rich, rain was plentiful, but the life was hard and Jenny Cusick, whom he had married in 1878, was frail. Despite this, she had three children: Catherine (Kate), born in 1879; William in 1881; and John Edward (Jack) in 1883. Jack Reagan’s earliest memories were of helping to chase the flocks of blackbirds and crows that came to scratch up the seed of the spring planting. He was still a boy when he went with his father to hunt the raccoons that foraged their fields at night. His happiest times were when his parents called upon their neighboring family—his great-uncle Nicholas and his wife, Maria, and his grandfather’s younger brother, Bill, and his troop of kids. Unable to make a go of his farm, John Reagan moved his family back to Fulton, where he again took a job on the grain elevator.
Jack Reagan was a child caught up in fantasy. His mother taught him to read and to memorize the catechism, but his contemporaries frequently referred to him as “a clown of a boy.” The Reagans, all practicing Catholics, had a love of music and dance. Family gatherings meant sprightly reels and jigs executed with great enthusiasm. Corn whiskey was consumed in large quantities by the Reagan men, whose thirst was prodigious. To be a hard drinker without becoming drunk was a test of character, a means of demonstrating a man’s self-control.
When Jack Reagan was six, his mother and father died within six days of each other, both of tuberculosis. The world he knew came to an abrupt end. His sister, Kate, and his brother, Bill, were taken in by his uncle Bill. If he had been a few years older and able to do more than boy’s chores on the farm, he might not have been packed off to the small town of Bennett, Iowa (population three hundred), where his Aunt Margaret and her husband, Orson G. Baldwin, owned a general store. Aunt Margaret had been a spinster until the age of thirty-eight, when she met and married Baldwin, then a bachelor of forty-nine. Neither of Jack’s foster parents had had much experience with children. Aunt Margaret was a milliner by trade, an Irish woman with Old World ways, religious and strict in her discipline. Though Baldwin was born in Vermont, his forebears were early Connecticut settlers and his great-grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War. Uncle Orson was a stolid Yankee, not given much to talk, inclined to keep his business quite to himself. In as small a town as was Bennett, his nephew-in-law’s background was never discussed. There were neighbors who did not know that the boy was related.* Nor was Baldwin a public-spirited man. In all the records kept during his residency in Bennett, not one mention is given of his involvement in town doings—political, economical or social.
Baldwin’s General Store, which Orson owned free and clear, was at the southwest corner of Third and Main streets. The family lived in rooms behind it. An outside iron stairway led to the second floor, which was rented to the Knights of Pythias. The town had been founded only in the fall of 1884, when the railroad decided to place a depot there to augment service between Cedar Rapids and Clinton. One year afterward, Bennett had a two-story railroad station, some stores and a hotel (“conducted by mine host Flater”).
Before coming to Bennett, the Baldwins lived in Davenport, Iowa, where Orson had been employed in merchandising. Their new hometown could hardly be called a metropolis, but they had come a long way from the open prairie of the previous year, and the Baldwins were confident enough in Bennett’s continuing growth to invest their life’s savings in its future. However, since two other general stores, also carrying groceries, hardware and clothes—Templeton’s and Buzzard’s—opened before him, Baldwin’s never was to fulfill its promise.
Margaret disliked the crudeness of Bennett. The predominantly German-Lutheran town not only had mud streets and no sidewalks, but it supported two saloons and a pool hall and did not have enough good Catholics to form a parish.* Baldwin’s also sold women’s clothes, and Margaret traveled to Chicago several times a year to bring back ladies’hats, dresses and suits. The addition of high-styled city goods did not help too much, and the Baldwins had to continue to struggle to keep themselves and their young charge afloat.
As Jack matured, disciplining him became a problem. Aunt Margaret was not one to dismiss such pranks as placing the post-office sign in front of the lumberyard or upsetting an outhouse. Jack, a poor student, quit school at age twelve after completing the sixth grade. He then helped his uncle and aunt full time in the store, but sports were his real love. Wrestling matches were very popular in Bennett, and he would save his fifteen cents’ admission to attend them from the fifty cents a week his uncle paid him. In 1897, Bennett’s teenage boys (fifteen or under) organized “a ball nine” (a baseball team) that they called the Junior Tigers, and Jack became an avid member and then manager, “challenging all comers.” Once they competed with Dixon (and lost).
Win or lose, playing baseball on Sundays created a great Jocal controversy. “Why can’t these games be arranged for some other day in the week except Sundays?” a reporter on Bennett Buzzings inquired. And another reporter suggested, “the ladies of the town should put a stop to our boys playing ball on Sunday,” adding a complaint about the players’ language. “Baseball is a hoodoo game and some of the expressions that were used on the ground [that past Sunday] were far from what a gentleman would use before ladies.”
Finally, by 1899, when Jack was sixteen, he returned to Fulton in Carroll County, Illinois (a distance of thirty-one miles), to live with his elderly grandmother Catherine* and his twenty-year-old sister, Kate, who had secured a job for him at J. W. Broadhead Dry Goods Store, where she was employed in the millinery department. His brother, William, also lived in Fulton, working on the grain elevator as his father once had. For the next two years, Jack visited Bennett often. His relationship with his uncle had greatly deteriorated, and he stayed at the Bennett Hotel (fifty cents a night), registering with exotic addresses such as Du
blin, Ireland, and Molasses Junction. Known as a “real joker,” he obviously thought this amusing. His last visit to Bennett was Christmas, 1901. The Baldwins had decided to sell their store and premises. They moved to Waterloo, Iowa, in the spring of 1902, and then to Prophetstown, Illinois.
J. W. Broadhead Dry Goods Store was located on Main Street in Fulton. Shoes became Jack Reagan’s specialty. He liked children, and particularly admired the graceful turn of a lady’s ankle. He talked about some day traveling west to pioneer, as Michael Reagan and his brothers once had. But he remained at Broadhead’s for eight years, gaining a reputation as a young man a bit too fond of alcohol, a fact that made the parents of most eligible Fulton women (who were entranced by Reagan’s beguiling manner and dark good looks) wary. The West began to beckon seductively, but lost out when small, perky, blue-eyed and auburn-haired Nelle Clyde Wilson, two years his junior and a strong-willed woman, came to work at Broad-head’s.
Nelle was the youngest child† of Thomas A. and Mary Anne Elsey Wilson, and she had been born and lived most of her life on a farm in an area known as North Clyde, about eleven miles east of Fulton, where her family had moved when she was in her teens. Nelle’s grandfather was John Wilson. According to family legend, John’s brother, William Ronald Wilson, had married Susan, the daughter of Sir Charles James Napier (1782-1853), a British general who had served with distinction in the Napoleonic wars. The story went that Napier had returned to England to find that the daughter he adored had married—against his will and without his permission—the Scotsman, considered by Napier to be far below her station, and he subsequently disowned her. The Wilson family had either embroidered the truth or been misled. Sir Charles Napier did have two daughters, Susan and Emily, both born illegitimately of his Greek mistress. Napier raised the girls and was, indeed, close to them. But both eventually married soldiers in his command and remained near their father until his death.
Whatever branch of the Napier family William’s bride, Susan, descended from, it appears she had been disowned by her parents upon her marriage and the discredited couple went to Wilson’s home in Renfrewshire, Scotland. They sailed for Canada in 1853 with William’s younger brother, John, arriving in Halifax and then moving on to Ontario, where both men joined the rebels fighting the control of the Church of England in the Patriot War. William was taken prisoner for his activities, but somehow managed to escape.
During the years 1815-32, thousands of immigrants had come to Ontario from Scotland and Ireland. Movements for reform arose when the new settlers found themselves denied political opportunity for religious reasons. The immigrants were either Catholic or Protestant and the powerful group that dominated the government was the Church of England, which was Anglo-Catholic. A journalist and insurgent leader, William Lyon MacKenzie, attempted in 1837 to seize Toronto, but the rebellion was put down. The Wilson brothers were part of MacKenzie’s group, but they eluded capture and escaped to the United States.
The two brothers, with other fellow rebels, found their way to Dent’s Grove, Clyde Township, Illinois, in September 1839. Soon after, Susan Napier Wilson died. (A handwritten account of the disinherited woman’s story and her grief at never having been reconciled with her family was preserved in the Wilson Bible [apparently kept by John] and memorized by Nelle,* who, being the romantic in her family, swore always to forgive and to comfort any “sinner” she knew, and vowed to marry for love.)
John Wilson married Jane Blue on November 28, 1841. Jane was the daughter of another of MacKenzie’s Patriots, Donald Blue, from Argyllshire, Scotland, and Catharine McFarlain, also from the Highlands. None of the former rebels was welcomed graciously to North Clyde, where they had staked claims which in turn they had been warned to abandon. They replied to the county committee that they were “in peaceable possession” and would hold their land “at all hazards.” They were allowed to remain.
The adventurous brother had been William. The promise of gold in California lured him there in 1852. Donald Blue and John Wilson followed, leaving their families for a period of three years. They returned empty-handed. William remained in California. However, that does not end Nelle’s forebears’ fascination with gold. A bizarre paper was filed in the Clerk’s Office of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois; a lengthy narrative written by Daniel Blue, son of Donald Blue, related the details of the horrific deaths of his two brothers, Alexander and Charles, and another man by starvation during an expedition to Pike’s Peak “among the Rocky Mountains,” where, rumors had it, gold abounded.* The brothers and two others left on their fatal journey on February 22, 1859. Daniel’s account claims that within three weeks they were lost, then beset by snowstorms, fierce cold, illness, starvation and finally the death of the others of the party, excepting Daniel. Recounting the events that followed the first death, Daniel wrote:
We were not strong enough to inter the corpse, neither had we pick or shovel with which to dig a grave… The dead body laid there for three days, we lying helpless on the ground near it, our craving for food increasing… until driven by desperation; wild with hunger, and feeling… that “self preservation is the first law of nature” we took our knives and commenced cutting the flesh from the legs and arms of our dead companion.
But, Daniel continued:
… the corpse began to mortify and to smell and we could eat no more of it.
Days passed into a week. Alexander died:
After he had been dead two days the uncontrollable… cravings of hunger impelled Charles and I to devour a part of our own brother’s corpse…
Daniel recorded that on April 18, 1859 (as nearly as he could figure), Charles died, and several days later he committed his final act of desecration, stumbled on, still lost, and finally collapsed.
An Arapaho Indian found him, nursed him back to life and then got him to the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Express Company and to a Mr. R. D. Williams who transported him to Denver City. A man named Alexander J. Pullman befriended him at this point, listened to his story and agreed to write to John Wilson (Daniel’s brother-in-law) recounting the grisly facts that had been told to him. Daniel Blue’s “testimony” reads like a wild tale. But the three brothers did leave for Pike’s Peak on the date stated, and only Daniel survived. The bodies of the others were never found. “The History of Clyde County,” 1885, records that “Charles and Alexander [Blue] died upon the plains, from starvation during the Pike’s Peak gold excitement in ‘59.” Daniel is listed as still being alive as of that date (1885).
Thomas Wilson, Nelle’s father, was born to John and Jane Blue Wilson in 1852, the same year John went off to search for gold in California. Being her youngest, Thomas remained closest to his mother’s heart. Jane was a woman of staunch faith. The Bible had been her constant companion. Converted when a child of ten years, she became established “in the teachings of the Christ life.” The plight of her two brothers who had died on their trek to Pike’s Peak, and the three years that she had been forced to manage alone, had made an exceptionally dour woman of her.
A son, Thomas Wilson, married an Englishwoman, Mary Anne Elsey, in 1879. Mary Anne had come to America at age sixteen, after her parents’ deaths, as a domestic in the employ of the Frank Cushing family in Coloma Township.* The youngest of seven children, Nelle Clyde Wilson was born July 24, 1883. Seven years later, to the surprise of all, the conservative Thomas took offfor Chicago and was not heard from for several years. His brother finally found him and brought him home when his mother was dying. Jane Blue Wilson’s obituary relates, “There was one deep-seated yearning in the mother’s heart to see once more for the last time the one son Thomas, gone so long, and the son came and mother and son looked into each other’s eyes and she was satisfied.”
The Wilson family, led by Jane as its matriarch until her death in 1894, found their chief pleasure in their religion. They strictly observed the Sabbath, regularly attended worship and had detailed knowledge of the Bible. Sundays, along with other paris
hioners, they would listen to a ninety-minute sermon and then reassemble after brief pleasantries for three more hours of sermon, readings, prayers and hymns. Except for medicinal, sacramental or ceremonial occasions, whiskey played no part in their lives.
Mary Anne Elsey Wilson died when Nelle was seventeen. Her father (now returned to the fold) disapproved of Jack Reagan. But that did not deter Nelle. They were married on November 8, 1904, in the parsonage of the Immaculate Conception Church in Fulton (the Catholic church attended somewhat sporadically by Jack). Nelle’s brother Alex gave the bride away.
Nelle always forgave Jack his weekend benders, usually shared with his brother, William. An Irishman, she explained to friends, liked to have “a couple of nips.” But she never approved of her brother-in-law, who now operated a cigar store and made his own cigars. William, unlike Jack, grew surly when he drank and had served six months in Whiteside County Jail at Morrison for drunk and disorderly conduct and inciting a brawl. Jack, Nelle felt, was reaching for something that he had not been able to find in Fulton or at Broadhead’s—a sense of his own worth. The ambition was there, but he lacked direction. He did not think in terms of money, perhaps because he had not known many rich people in his life. To have people look up to him was of greater importance. Nelle persuaded Jack to leave Fulton and William’s influence. In February 1906, the Tampico Tornado (“so named after several disasters which leveled the town”) reported that John Edward Reagan (“Mr. Reagan worked for eight years in Broadhead’s big store in Fulton and comes highly recommended”) had recently joined the staff at the H. C. Pitney General Store, twenty-six miles away in Tampico.*
