MARCUS Paul presented a talk entitled “Ireland to the Wild West” at the June meeting of Crediton and District U3A.

Marcus told us about the lives of James and Agnes Wilson.

James was born in Ireland in 1846. He left, aged 17, to go to America. Here he decided to become a minister of the Presbyterian Church and studied in both America and Edinburgh. It was in Scotland that he met Agnes Hately, a talented musician.

They married in 1874 and emigrated to America. Agnes was a prolific letter writer, and it is through her letters to her family in Scotland (now held by Yale University) that Marcus was able to piece together James’s and Agnes’s story. At first, all went well. James took up a well-paid post as the minister in the small town of Cedarville in New Jersey.

Agnes’s letters are full of descriptions of setting up her first home and of the neighbours and the friends she made. She had two children: a girl and a boy.

In her letters, Agnes shared her experiences of giving birth and caring for young children in excruciating detail. James enjoyed his work and was popular with his congregation.

However, in 1878, he decided to take up his ministry in the newly-created state of Kansas. As well as acting as the founding minister for a new church in the “Wild West”, James also hoped to be a successful farmer. James and Agnes, like other young hopeful homesteaders, were told that the land in Kansas was fertile and unoccupied and that the climate was “healthy”.

They were sold a dream that prosperity would be easy to come by. Sadly, this idyll did not exist and James and Agnes, like so many others, found this out to their cost. Of course the land was occupied!

The First Nation peoples (mostly Cheyenne in this area) had lived there for centuries. Their nomadic way of life was a sustainable way of living in an area that was semi-desert. The Cheyenne were driven off the land with great brutality and European farming practices destroyed the delicate environmental balance, eventually turning the plains into a dustbowl by the early 20th century. There were also the cowboys who herded vast numbers of Longhorn cattle from Texas to the railway lines crossing the country east to west. These men spent much of their time living in poor conditions and when reaching the towns, behaved wildly. Alcohol abuse, prostitution and gambling were rife.

The cowboys also clashed with the homesteaders as the farm fences prevented the free movement of their large herds of cattle. James and Agnes experienced all these conflicts, but it was infectious disease that destroyed their dream. The whole family was stricken with a malarial type of fever. Agnes and the children recovered but James died. After six years in America, Agnes returned to Scotland to live with her sister. She remarried after some time and lived to the age of 83. Marcus gave us a brilliant talk and we had a wonderful insight into the difficulties of life in 19th century America.

Liz Ouldridge