|
1817-1895
Isaiah was born in Clark County, Indiana, the seventh of eight children of Isaiah Cooper, Senior [1778-1849] and Elizabeth Montier [1779-c.1845]. At the time of his birth, his father was in what was to become Owen County, Indiana, building a cabin, clearing land, and preparing for his family to move there. Soon after Isaiah Junior’s birth, the family made the move. So far no photographs have surfaced of Isaiah Junior, so we have only his description in his Civil War file to go on. We don’t know how much of his mother’s Indian blood appeared in him. [She had Algonquin, Iroquois, and Delaware ancestry.] His first ten years were spent in Owen County. These years coincided with Isaiah Senior’s drift into alcoholism, so they could not have been pleasant years. His father was impeached and removed as justice of the peace. It was in this atmosphere that the family moved to Pike County, Illinois, in 1827. They were among the first settlers in Derry Township. Here Isaiah Junior grew to manhood. In 1832 his two older brothers, Enoch and Williams S. Cooper, were gone to fight in the Black Hawk War. At fifteen Isaiah was too young to serve. In 1840 Isaiah became romantically interested in Elizabeth Sigsworth, a seventeen-year-old girl who had come from Yorkshire, England with her family. They married in Pike County on 4 December 1840, soon after her eighteenth birthday. Elizabeth Montier Cooper, Isaiah’s mother, died about 1845 and was buried there in Pike County. Soon afterward, in the spring of 1846, Isaiah Junior and his wife Elizabeth and their three children: John Milton Cooper [born 11 December 1841], Joseph Henry Cooper [born 5 September 1843], and Anna Elizabeth Cooper, born [February 1846] joined old Isaiah and the families of Isaiah Junior’s three brothers and crossed the plains to Yamhill County, Oregon, where their two eldest sisters, Mary Cooper Matheny and Rachel Cooper Matheny, had settled with their families in 1843. The Coopers arrived in October of 1846 and wintered with his sister Mary’s family at what was to become the town of Wheatland, founded by Mary’s brother Daniel the following year. The Mathenys had known that the Coopers were coming and had built them small log cabins to ease their transitions until they could find land on which to settle. The following spring, Isaiah, his father, and his younger brother John found land on the south side of the Yamhill River at its juncture with the Willamette River in Yamhill County. They filed claims in Oregon City, the only town at the time. His brothers Enoch and William settled closer to the Mathenys. Isaiah’s cabin was no doubt built in a festive “cabin raising” by family and friends. He would then have begun clearing the land to plant crops. He was probably given by the Mathenys seed potatoes, wheat, and other necessities to begin his farm. He had brought some livestock with him. At the end of the Coopers’ first year in Oregon, the Willamette Valley was convulsed with the Whitman Massacre and the subsequent Cayuse War, the war to avenge the Whitmans. Isaiah was a married man with a family to depend on him, so he did not volunteer for the small army that was raised, but many of the unmarried men in the family did take part in the action. Less than a year after the attack on the Whitmans, news came of the gold discovery in California. Although his father and brothers did not rush to the gold fields, Isaiah did went with his brother-in-law Daniel Matheny and his nephews. In an Indian attack on the trip south, Isaiah received an arrow that penetrated through his torso. His grandnephew, Jasper Hewitt, tells of this in his memoirs. Jasper said that Isaiah was speeding away with blood gushing from his wound onto his horse. It is presumed that Isaiah continued on with the Mathenys, for he surely couldn’t have returned to Oregon alone and wounded. He would have dug for gold at what was called “Matheny’s Diggings” on “Matheny Creek.” This camp evolved into the present-day town of El Dorado in El Dorado County, California. Matheny’s Creek has been renamed and is part of the headwaters of the Cosumnes River. The group of miners returned to Oregon in the summer of 1849. When they returned, the remaining Coopers and Henry Matheny, Rachel’s husband, caught gold fever. Isaiah returned to the gold fields with this group. They made camp at what is now called “Cooper Canyon” about two miles west of the small hamlet of Pilot Hill on the American River. That fall, an epidemic of “camp fever’ ravaged the camp. Many died, including Isaiah Sr. and his son John M. Cooper and Henry Matheny and his daughter. The bodies were buried at what is now Coloma, CA, with only wooden markers, which have long-since disappeared. In the spring of 1850 Isaiah decided to take his family and return to Pike County, Illinois. Contributed by Don Rivara
|
|
