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Whitman County
Washington
Genealogy and History



COOPER FAMILY
Biographies



Submitted by Don Rivara.

ENOCH S. COOPER
1805-1885

ESTHER COWAN
1803-1865


Enoch S. Cooper and Esther Cowan were the parents of John Shepherd Cooper [1838-1901]. We know this from the Cooper Bible in the possession of Donald Rivara and from the testimony of John’s daughter Rose Ella Cooper Goodrich [1875-1960].

Eldest of the sons of Isaiah Cooper and Elizabeth Montier Cooper, Enoch S. Cooper was born March 12, 1805, in Springville Township, Clark County, Indiana. He learned to read and write, as did his siblings, so he likely attended a school there. When he was twelve, the family moved to what would soon become Owen County, Indiana. His father was one of the founders of the county and the county seat, Spencer. At Spencer Isaiah established a ferry across the White River. Enoch grew up helping with the ferry and eventually became a partner with his father in the operation. As Isaiah devolved into alcoholism, he mortgaged his ferry to Enoch and Henry Matheny, a son-in-law, in 1826. This was probably some sort of chicanery on Isaiah's part because both Enoch and Henry were charged with larceny as a result. Isaiah's neighbors were at war with him; Enoch and Henry were probably innocent victims of the situation. There is no other evidence of any indiscretions on the part of these two, but with Isaiah it is another story.

Isaiah's alcoholism probably affected Enoch profoundly. He would name none of his children for their grandfather, but his firstborn would be named for Elizabeth, his mother. There is no evidence of Enoch's having been a drinker. His known behavior suggests that he was sensible, humane, and responsible, and respected by the family with one minor exception. William Henry Harrison was governor of Indiana during Enoch's childhood and probably remained a hero to him, because he named his first son William Henry, probably for Harrison and Enoch's younger brother William, with whom he remained close throughout his life.

In 1827 the Coopers moved to Pike County, Illinois, for a new start. Enoch was in his early twenties, a time when courting should have been a high preoccupation; but the population was sparse and neighbors far apart. Finally it was decided that Enoch and his foster sister, Esther Cowan, a year older than Enoch, would marry. He was twenty-four when the two married November 3, 1829, the first marriage in Derry Township. Marrying Esther, who was like a sibling, made for harmonious relationships within the family--nobody had to adjust to her. (In her memoirs, Into the Eye of the Setting Sun, Charlotte Kirkwood, niece of Enoch and Esther, misspelled the name as "Easter," which suggests that it was pronounced that way.)

Esther's parents, John Cowan (1768-1832) and Margaret Weir Cowan (ca.1776-ca.1813) had been friends of Isaiah and Elizabeth Cooper in Clark County; John and Isaiah had served in the same company during the War of 1812. When her mother died, Esther and possibly a sister were informally adopted out to the Coopers, frontier style.

When the Coopers left Clark County in 1817, John Cowan remained behind, eventually moving to Crawfordsville in Montgomery County. It is probable that father and daughter then lost contact with each other. He probably did not know that Esther had become a mother on July 21, 1832, less than a month before he died.

In Pike County, Illinois, while Esther was coming to term, events were occurring that would absent her husband at the time they became parents. Black Hawk, chief of the Sauk and Fox tribes, did not recognize treaties signed by other chiefs that prevented the Indians from inhabiting lands east of the Mississippi River. In the spring of 1832, to resist further white encroachment and to plant crops, Black Hawk led his people to the east side of the Mississippi.

Governor John Reynolds of Illinois, alarmed at the "invasion," called out the state militia and requested aid from the United States Army to expel the Indians. The men of Illinois answered the call to arms. On June 19, at New Salem in Pike County, Enoch and young Bill Cooper and their brother-in-law, Benjamin Shinn, married to their sister Charlotte, enlisted in Captain Ozias Hale's Company of Mounted Rangers, Fourth Regiment, Third Brigade, commanded by General Henry Atkinson. (Ozias Hale had been the minister who married Enoch to Esther in 1829.) Hale appointed Enoch first sergeant; Shinn, first corporal; and Bill Cooper, third corporal. At another New Salem, in Sangamon County, a young Abraham Lincoln was elected captain of his company. Daniel Matheny, to the north in Schuyler County, had also recently mustered in. The outnumbered Indians did not last long. During their retreat northward, bloody atrocities occurred on both sides. At the Bad Axe River, most of the surviving Indians were brutally slaughtered. Black Hawk was captured and sent to a prison in the East.

On August 16, Enoch's company was disbanded at Fort Dixon in northern Illinois, and he returned home to meet his new daughter. While he and Esther remained in Pike County, three more children were born: William Henry Cooper, April 3, 1834; Minerva Jane Cooper, October 18, 1835; and John Shepherd Cooper, April 12, 1838, but young William Henry died July 12, 1836 at the age of two.

In 1838 an economic depression was gripping the land, triggered by Andrew Jackson's assault on the Bank of the United States earlier. This may have been a factor in the relocating of Enoch and Esther to Platte County, Missouri, that year. His sisters Mary and Rachel Matheny had not lived near the rest of their siblings since the 1820's, but his sisters must have encouraged the Coopers to join them in the West.

In Missouri Enoch and Esther found the residents agitated. A polygamous religious sect called the "Mormons" outraged their intolerant neighbors, precipitating a highly-charged situation. On October 30, 1838, Governor Lilburn Boggs ordered that the Mormons "must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state." Mormon leader Joseph Smith, whose life had been spared by the courageous defiance of

a direct military order by Alexander Doniphan, led a midwinter exodus of his followers eastward across the Mississippi River to Illinois on the east bank, where a new colony would be formed.

In Missouri the Coopers had two more children: Rosannah Margaret Cooper, March 18, 1840; and James Patrick Cooper, April 7, 1842. It was during the winter of 1842-43 that the Mathenys became obsessed with Oregon. They had the means to buy wagons and six months' provisions for the journey. The Coopers did not. A famous painting depicts the departing for the West of more prosperous relatives, their wagons loaded, saying tearful goodbyes to their poorer kin. Such was likely the parting of the Mathenys from the Coopers. Probably about the time the Mathenys left for Oregon, Enoch and Esther headed east, back across the Mississippi to Pike County, Illinois, where the rest of the Coopers were still residing, but it seems Oregon never left their aspirations.

The Mormons had settled in Hancock County, Illinois, a little north of Pike County, where they had quickly built a thriving city, Nauvoo, on the banks of the Mississippi. But there was to be no peace for them. On June 27, 1844, the jailed Joseph Smith and his brother were murdered by a mob. A virtual state of civil war developed in the area.

On September 20 of that year, the Coopers' last child, Emeline Cooper, was born. About the same time, Enoch's mother, Elizabeth Montier Cooper, died. Soon thereafter old Isaiah and his sons made plans to move to cross the plains to Oregon in the 1846 season. It was probably money from the sale of Isaiah's farm that financed the crossing of the plains to Oregon of Isaiah and his four sons: Enoch, John, William, and Isaiah, Jr., and their families.

We know little about the Coopers' personal experiences during the journey to Oregon. A sister of Esther Cowan Cooper's disappeared enroute and was presumed kidnapped by Indians. That Esther had a sister close enough to her that they were travelling west together, suggests that Isaiah and Elizabeth Cooper may have taken in a second Cowan daughter. This story was told to me by my great grandmother, Rose Cooper Goodrich (1875-1960), a granddaughter of Enoch and Esther. We also know that Bill Cooper's wife gave birth to a daughter in the Grande Ronde Valley near present-day La Grande, Oregon, on September 1, 1846, in the privacy of their covered wagon. Isaiah Cooper, Jr.'s wife, Elizabeth, also gave birth to a child that year, perhaps on the trail.

The Coopers were on the trail at a dramatic time. When they had left Illinois, the political situation between Britain and the United States had been heated over rival claims to Oregon. War had been a strong possibility. While on the trail, emigrants headed for the Willamette Valley learned that a compromise had been reached. Their destination would be American soil, which caused much rejoicing. California-bound travelers learned news which caused some of them to change their destinations: war had broken out with Mexico. The situation in California was perhaps not safe to enter. Also adding tension to the trail that year was the Mormon situation. The Mormons' new leader, Brigham Young, was guiding his followers westward in search of an as-of-yet undetermined new Zion. Travelling a parallel route west was the Mormons' old nemesis, former Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs (incidentally, travelling with the family of Stephen Cooper, a son of the Missouri pioneer, Sarshall Cooper). Rumors spread along the trail that the Mormons intended to attack other vulnerable emigrants. Similar rumors were circulating in the Mormon camps. On the trail, too, that year was the ill-starred Donner party, heading for their tragic fate in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The Coopers left the Grande Ronde Valley with Bill Cooper's new daughter the first week of September and crossed the Blue Mountains over a trail hacked clear with axes three years earlier by their family and others of the 1843 immigration. The Coopers had apparently sent letters ahead to the Mathenys telling them of their planned crossing, because when they reached the Tygh Valley where they would arrive at the newly-opened Barlow Road's toll gate, two of Enoch's nephews, Isaiah Matheny and Daniel Matheny, Jr., were waiting for them. It was October 6 when the party arrived in the Willamette Valley; then they were led by Isaiah and Daniel to Matheny's Ferry (now the Wheatland Ferry) and Enoch's two sisters and their families. Except for Charlotte Shinn, now all of the children of Isaiah Cooper were in Oregon.

The Mathenys, now three years in Oregon, gave their tired and food-poor family sustenance until they could become established. There were several outbuildings on the Mathenys' former mission farm that served as temporary homes for the newcomers. Christmas of 1846 was probably a happy one for the new arrivals. But it was in January of that winter that the family was saddened by the death of Adam Matheny's young wife, Sarah Jane, who died after giving birth to her second child. It was the first family death in Oregon. Perhaps during the burial up on Rachel and Henry Matheny's land, someone reflected that this land would one day hold most of the mourners gathered there. After resting for a reasonable length of time, Enoch began his search for suitable land to claim. In February, Enoch, accompanied by William Logan and young Andrew Layson, made the forty-mile trip to Oregon City to register land. Layson, also an 1846 immigrant, would one day become Enoch's son-in-law. Enoch claimed 642.78 acres (5S3W, Sections3, 4, 10, & 16) on February 28, 1847, land adjoining on the south that of Henry and Elizabeth Hewitt, the daughter and son-in-law of Enoch’s sister Mary Cooper Matheny. It lies today on the northern border of Unionvale, Yamhill County, Oregon.

Returning from Oregon City, Enoch began to build a cabin for his family and clear the land for farming. It is unknown how much of this site was prairie and how much was forested, but the Hewitts, directly south of the site, had a large portion of their claim in natural prairie. The Cooper claim lay on the west bank of a slough that separated it from Grand Island, whose eastern boundary was the Willamette. The site was about fourteen miles north of Salem. What is now Wallace Road bisects the land.

Enoch did not head east to take part in the punishment of the Indians who participated in the Whitman Massacre in 1847; he was no longer a young man; and he was busy trying to establish a home and farm. Even when the news came of the discovery of gold in California, Enoch was not among the vanguard who went south in 1848. He, his father, his brothers John and Bill, and Henry Matheny and their families went south in June of 1849. They worked the gravel in what is now called Cooper Canyon, a mile or two west of the hamlet of Pilot Hill, El Dorado County, but they did not have as much success as those Oregonians who had gone down to California in 1848.

In 1849 the gold rush had begun in earnest. By fall thousands had crossed the plains or journeyed by ship to California. With them they brought the seeds of death. Illness spread in the camps. That fall "camp fever" (probably typhus) spread through the canyon where the Coopers were. Death took Isaiah Cooper, his son John M. Cooper, his son-in-law Henry Matheny, and Henry and Rachel's daughter Sarah Jane Matheny Layson. (Charlotte Kirkwood believed that others in the family died there of camp fever, but she couldn't remember who.) They were buried at Sutter's Mill, the only established cemetery at the time (now Coloma, CA). Notwithstanding these losses, many of the family remained at their diggings, including Enoch, well into 1850. In his absence, the Sheriff of Yamhill County, Oregon, sold some property of his. It was very probably Enoch Cooper who was referred to when the July 25, 1850 edition of the Oregon Spectator announced the arrival of Mr. Cooper from San Francisco on the Carolina. His brother Bill's arrival had been announced in the May 21 edition.

Upon returning from the mines, Enoch apparently established a ferry across the Yamhill River a few miles north of his home where the Territorial Road crossed the river. A mention of "Cooper's Ferry, near Dayton" appeared in the Oregon Spectator [27 March 1851, page 2, col.4] But this ferry does not seem to have been long lived. It was in this area that Enoch's brothers John and Isaiah Jr. had claimed land, but by 1851, John was dead and Isaiah had returned to Illinois. His brother Bill at that time lived several miles to the south; so Enoch was clearly the Cooper who operated the ferry. By that time, his thirteen-year-old son John would have been able to operate the ferry. In the November 11 issue of the Oregon Spectator that year, horses were reported stolen by a Mr. Cooper of the Willamette Valley. This may or may not have been Enoch or one of the family.

On April 6, 1852, Enoch and Esther's nineteen-year-old daughter Liz (Mary Elizabeth Cooper) married Andrew Layson. Andrew owned land across the slough from the Coopers on Grand Island. These were the Coopers' most prosperous years. They had a small amount of California gold in their pockets with which to develop their land and enjoy life. But a string of deaths, beginning with their daughter Emeline, June 16, 1855, again blighted their lives. The cholera epedemic of 1856 took Mary Cooper Matheny; Jane Cooper Staggs, the widow of John M. Cooper; and Bill Cooper's wife Mary Ann Cooper; as well as several babies. John's widow, Jane, had remarried to S.F. Staggs. Upon their mother's death, John and Jane's two surviving children, Anjanette Cooper, thirteen, and Robert Alexander "Eck" Cooper, nine, came to live with Enoch and Esther, as did Bill Cooper's baby son Isaiah. Staggs now controlled the two orphans' patrimony and would not relinquish it to them; so Enoch took Staggs to court in what turned out to be a protracted litigation. Enoch was named administrator of John's estate and Staggs had pay to the estate. During this turmoil, the Coopers' second daughter, Minerva Jane ("Jane") Cooper, married William Lumison and went to live on Grand Island near her sister Liz and Andrew Layson.

The 1860's were years of financial decline for Enoch and Esther, and from the East in 1861 came the rumblings of the fratricidal civil war taking place. That December the Willamette River overflowed its banks and swept away all low-lying farms. Grand Island was totally inundated. The Cooper home sat on higher ground and survived, but the family likely housed their two daughters' families, refugees from Grand Island.

His acquaintance with the courts as a litigant perhaps led to Enoch's selection as a juror. Records show that in the October term of 1860 he served as a juror, being paid for 6 days and 18 miles for the round trip to the courthouse. In May 1861 he again served for 5 days. In that session, his nephew, Henry Hewitt, also served, also being paid for 18 miles (Enoch and Hewitt lived on adjacent farms.) Records also show that In February of 1863, Enoch's brother-in-law Daniel Matheny, Daniel's son, Isaiah Matheny, and son-in-law Henry Hewitt foreclosed on 160 acres which had been given as security for a $562.66 note that Enoch and Esther had not been able to pay. Neither they nor their attorneys appeared in court. [Yamhill Circuit Court Journal, Vol. I, Oregon State Archives] Instead, the Coopers staved off the sheriff's sale by borrowing the money from Williams and Lippincott, a lending partnership to many of the farmers of Polk and Yamhill counties (and the forecloser on many).

1865 was another transition year, for the nation and for the Coopers. On January 16, Esther Cowan Cooper died in her early sixties and was buried on Rachel Matheny's land. Perhaps the loss of his mother stimulated John Shepherd Cooper, twenty-six, to marry seventeen-year-old Lucy Ann Willis on January 31. Shortly thereafter, John and his brother Jim decided to head east and fight for the Union. Somewhere along the Oregon Trail, they encountered immigrants heading west who communicated the news: the war was over and Lincoln was dead. Stunned and saddened, the brothers turned around and returned to Oregon, where John learned he was to become a father. He and Lucy Ann moved to Grand Island, where John farmed. Then, on May 13, Enoch's twenty-five-year-old daughter, Rosannah Cooper, died and joined her mother on the slope of the hill in the distance at what is now Hopewell, Oregon. Now Enoch's was an all-male household: Enoch, 60; his son James, 23, his nephew Alexander ("Eck"), 18, and his nephew Isaiah, 10. Personal property tax records of that year show that Enoch owned or produced 4 tons of hay, 50 pounds of tobacco, 40 bushels of apples, 4 hogs, 5 horses, 6 cattle, 8 bushels of potatoes, 4 sheep, 600 bushels of wheat, and 400 bushels of oats. He had 80 of his 640 acres under cultivation. His son James was taxed on 20 hogs, 6 horses, 4 cattle, and 7 sheep. His son John was taxed on 7 hogs, 2 horses, and 4 cattle.

Somehow Enoch and Esther Cooper had become even more deeply indebted, as apparently did many of their neighbors. Circuit Court dockets were filled with foreclosures by Williams and Lippincott. After Esther's death, the partners foreclosed on the Coopers for an indebtedness of $5,251.88, thus the north 320 acres, one half of the Coopers' square mile Donation Land Claim, was sold by the Sheriff of Yamhill County in 1869 to satisfy the indebtedness. It was decided somehow to sell only the half vested in the name of the deceased Esther Cooper; the remaining 320 acres was thereafter vested only in the name of Enoch. (Circuit Court Records)

Enoch's land did not lie precisely on the Willamette River, but rather on Lambert Slough, which looped off the Willamette a few miles north of Wheatland and rejoined it a few miles downstream to the north. The land between Lambert Slough and the Willamette formed a large low-lying island that was called Grand Island. Three of Enoch's children had settled on the island: Liz and Andrew Layson, Jane and Bill Lumison, and John and Lucy Ann Cooper. On the evening of June 15, 1871, Enoch's son John, with four of the children of his sister Jane Lumison, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, got into a boat that the family kept moored on Grand Island and proceeded to cross the slough to visit Enoch. The Lumisons' dog loyally was accompanying the children. Midway across the slough, the dog fell overboard and instinctively everyone moved to the rescue. The sudden shift of everyone's weight caused the boat to capsize. The smaller children were no match for the swirling water and were washed away. Under the darkening skies, John managed to reach the bank, and thirteen-year-old Emma Lumison was able to grasp a protruding branch and began screaming for help. The other three: four-year-old Rosannah Lumison, six-year-old Esther Lumison, and ten-year-old Frank Lumison, were gone. After searching the shadows vainly for the children, John and Emma returned to confront the Lumisons with the news that of the seven children they had given birth to, only Emma and the two-year-old Catherine were alive. (Two others had died earlier.) News of the tragedy spread through the Valley, and people came from far away to help search for the bodies. As the bodies were found, they were interred at Hopewell near the base of a madrone tree. Jane Lumison was probably still numbed by her loss when Nora Jane Lumison was born on June 27. Thereafter, the demands of a newborn baby probably helped Jane to focus less on her great calamity. Almost immediately the Lumisons sold their Grand Island property.

By the middle 1870's, the younger generations were looking for their life opportunities. The days of 640 acres of free land were gone, but 160 acres could be had under the Homestead Act. News came from the "Palouse Country" of Eastern Washington that wheat could be grown there. (It had been previously thought too cold for wheat.) Enoch's son Jim had been there since 1871 or 1872 and sent good reports. John became anxious to join his brother. So Enoch sold what had been his dream, the square mile of land on the Willamette, to accompany his remaining children in their quest for theirs. Illness, flooding, and the dangers the river posed for children were among the reasons for their wanting to leave. (At least four family children had drowned in the Willamette by then.) In 1874 Enoch sold his 320 acres. It was winter, December of 1874, when John's family and Enoch stacked a wagon with their possessions and loaded the wagon on a boat. After a couple of portages, the family arrived at the mouth of the Snake River, where they disembarked and headed to find Jim. It was bitterly cold and John's wife, Lucy Ann, was ready to deliver a child.

They spotted the smoke from from a chimney and found a cabin occupied by a bachelor. Seeing that Lucy Ann was in labor, the bachelor offered his cabin as a shelter from the bitter cold. It was so cold that whiskey froze in a jug left outside. It was January 4, 1875, that Rose Ella Cooper was delivered under a quilt in the cold, lonely cabin.

The Coopers found Jim and then land to homestead that lay between present-day St.John and Diamond, Washington, in Whitman County. The land there was treeless, unlike the Willamette Valley. But it was here that Enoch would spend the last ten years of his life.

In 1877 Whitman County went into a panic during the problems between Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and the United States Army. Settlers abandoned their farms and fled to the forts or to the larger communities. Enoch's family headed for Colfax, where they helped to build a barricade from which they could fend off an attack. Enoch's brother Bill Cooper and his family found shelter in Fort Walla Walla. It was rumored that Chief Moses of the Spokanes was headed south to join forces with Joseph against the whites. The adrenalin flowed as the residents peered into the horizon. They kept looking but saw nothing. As their adrenalin waned, news arrived that Joseph was headed east away from Washington and Chief Moses was headed nowhere. Everyone began to feel foolish and headed home. Most found their homes as they had left them. Some even found that friendly Indians had tended to their livestock for them in their absence. Some Indians, however, did use the opportunity to steal from the abandoned farms or to settle a grudge: the home and outbuildings of Bill Cooper's daughter Mariah Walling were burned to the ground. Most settlers, however, resumed their normal lives.

Enoch chose to live in a cabin by himself next to his children, helping out as he could. When his daughter, Jane Lumison, became ill with cancer, the old man helped care for her children. When she died, April 26, 1883, he had outlived four of his seven children. In the spring of 1884, partly to console herself over the death of her sixteen- year-old daughter Elizabeth from diabetes, Lucy Ann, John's wife, took advantage of the newly-opened railroad to visit her family in Missouri, whom she hadn't seen in seventeen years. Enoch watched John's children while he worked. It was during Lucy Ann's absence that Enoch's last Indian scare took place.

John's daughter Cloyd was 2 1/2 and was standing on the porch of John's home when two Nez Perce arrived. One was known by the family and was referred to among themselves as "Old One-Eye." It was the other Indian who picked up Cloyd from the porch, probably only intending to play with her; but it frightened the child and she began to scream. The Indian began to shake her and she screamed even louder. Enoch arrived and grabbed the Indian, who then put the child down, pulled his knife from its sheath, and put the knife to the old man's throat, backing him up against the house. Old One-Eye entreatied his companion to let the old man go. The other Indian finally relented and released Enoch. More than ninety years later, Cloyd recalled the event and remembered, after the scare, holding on to the skirt of her older sister Rose while Rose was setting the table for a meal and Cloyd was peering out the window to see if the Indians had left.

Lucy Ann returned from Missouri, so Enoch began to spend more time with the motherless Lumison children at their home. On February 22, 1885, Enoch was sitting in a rocking chair by the Lumison fireplace with one of the girls on his lap. As the girl was lighting his pipe, Enoch's head turned to one side and he was dead, three weeks before his eightieth birthday. The old man's body was loaded onto to a farm wagon and driven to a small cemetery on a knoll overlooking the canyon of the Palouse River on the opposite side (north) of the river from Diamond, Washington. The cemetery in 1992 lay among a sea of wheat, the only trees visible being those that dot the canyon of the Palouse. Wild roses, lupines, Queen Anne's lace, and shrubs covered most of the cemetery. Hardly any of the tombstones were visible. The carcass of a deer hung from the gate by the snout, apparently put there as a warning to other deer to keep them from grazing on the wheat. To reach the cemetery, just southwest of Colfax turn west from Highway 26. Go through the hamlet of Diamond. At the west end of Diamond, Shields Road, a gravel road, heads north. Turn right onto this road and cross the Palouse River. Go about half a mile past the bridge. Take the first road to the right, Gene Feenan Road, a dirt road that is in the middle of a wheat field. As you go down the dirt road, you will pass an abandoned house on the left. Continue until another dirt road comes in at the right. Turn right and cross the gully. On the other side of the gully, the road makes a "Y." Take the left fork of the "Y" uphill. It dead-ends at the cemetery. [The road once continued on past the cemetery and connected with another road.] In 1958 my great grandmother had told me about her grandfather's death and burial at this spot overlooking the Palouse River. Thirty-four years later I had found it; it was a very serene moment for me, totally isolated and quiet except for the chirping of some birds and the distant drone of an airplane.



CHILDREN OF ENOCH S. COOPER AND ESTHER COWAN

[1] MARY ELIZABETH COOPER LAYSON 1832-1904

There were many fresh corpses in Illinois when Mary Elizabeth "Liz" Cooper entered the world on July 21, 1832, in Pike County. Her father and uncles and many men who would one day be famous had taken part in the suppression of Black Hawk and his followers. In neighboring Indiana lay the grave of her Cowan grandmother in Clark County. Before another month was past, the grandfather, too, would meet his end in Clinton County. But Liz probably would never have become acquainted with him even if he had lived, because, after her grandmother's death, he had permitted Liz's mother, Esther Cowan, to be adopted by Isaiah and Elizabeth Montier Cooper, parents of Enoch Cooper, Esther's future husband. Isaiah and his Indian wife Elizabeth were the only grandparents Liz would know.

When Liz was about six years old, her parents loaded up their belongings, crossed the Mississippi River, and then traversed the state of Missouri to join her aunts and their families in "the Platte Purchase." For the next five years the Coopers lived in Platte County, MO, before returning to Illinois after seeing the Mathenys off to Oregon. Here they stayed another three years. Liz was fourteen in 1846 when the family crossed the plains to Oregon. Also crossing the plains that year was her future husband, Andrew Layson, who may have been in the wagon train with the Coopers, for two of Andrew's siblings were already in Oregon married to family members of Liz's. (Sarah Jane Layson to Adam Matheny, and Aaron Layson to Sarah Jane Matheny)

Arriving in Oregon, Liz had probably looked forward to reuniting with her cousin Mary Matheny, daughter of her Aunt Mary and Uncle Daniel, who was Liz's own age. Liz was probably somewhat surprised to discover upon her arrival in Oregon that her cousin was already married to a thirty-year-old man since the previous April and was expecting her first child in the spring. (Frontier girls in Oregon married unusually young--Liz was considered an "old maid" by the time she married at almost twenty.)

Liz was not so pretty as her cousin Mary. She apparently had buckteeth because her sister-in-law, Lucy Ann Cooper, used to admonish her daughter Cloyd, "Don't suck on your fingers or you will grow up to be as ugly as Aunt Liz." Liz's photographs show that she wasn't pretty, but was not really ugly--but then her teeth were not showing. Andrew Layson was twenty-seven and Liz, almost twenty when they married, April 6, 1852.

But Andrew had been busy. Arriving in Oregon in the same year as the Coopers, Andrew probably stayed with his brother Aaron or sister Sarah Jane, wife of Adam Matheny, upon his arrival. But Sarah Jane was dead within three months; so Andrew probably stayed on Rachel Matheny's land with his brother Aaron until he could select some land upon which to settle. But then Andrew became a soldier in the Cayuse War after the Whitman Massacre and then a Forty-niner in the gold rush to California. Perhaps he stayed on in the gold fields awhile. There is evidence that his brother Aaron was there in 1851; so Andrew probably was too. It is unknown how much wealth Andrew brought back with him from California, but apparently he felt he had enough to settle down.

The Laysons had ten children together: William Henry Layson, born December 1853, Yamhill County, living in Kennewick, WA, 1914; Horace H. Layson, born ca.1854, Yamhill County, living in Kettle Falls, WA, in 1914; Clara Layson, born ca. 1856, Yamhill County, married Silas J. Condit, April 18, 1878, Marion County, OR, died prior to 1914 in Marion County, OR; Eleanor "Ellen" Layson, born ca.1859, married William F. Brown, March 16, 1878, Marion County, OR, living in Peach, Lincoln County, WA, 1914; Samuel L. Layson, born September 6, 1860, Yamhill County, OR, married Martha Belle Miller, April 15, 1888, Marion County, OR, died January 30, 1926, Peach, Lincoln County, WA; Christina Ann Layson, born ca.1862, Yamhill County, OR, married John C. Dodge, March 16, 1889, living in Lancaster, WA, 1914, died February 6, 1949; Alice Layson, born ca.1864, died 1870's; Elizabeth "Bette" Layson, born ca.1865, married S.A. Henry, September 18, 1890, Salem, OR, living in Peach, WA, 1914; Esther "Jo" Corbin, born ca.1867, married Hyale Corbin, August 19, 1888, Marion County, OR, died December 17, 1921, Klamath Falls, OR; Martha Layson, died young.

Andrew and Liz settled on a land claim on Grand Island and were wiped out when the great floods of December 1861 inundated the island. From there they moved to Polk County briefly then across the river to Marion County, where they farmed in the West Stayton area from the early 1870's to the early 1890's. The Laysons were members of the Oregon Pioneer Association in 1877; records showed that they lived in Aumsville (in Marion County) at the time. In the 1880 U.S. Census, the Laysons lived in Lincoln Precinct, and Liz's cousin who had been reared by Liz's parents, Isaiah Matheny Cooper, 25, was listed as living with them. About 1890, they moved to Lincoln County, WA. They were there at least as early of Christmas of 1892 because on that date Liz and Andrew's son Horace signed the autograph book of his first cousin, Rose Cooper in Oakesdale, WA.

The Laysons settled near Peach, Lincoln County, WA, at this time and remained there for the rest of their lives. A portion of a letter from Liz to her her daughter Esther Corbin survives in the possession of a Corbin descendant:



...now I will tell you the prices Wheat 71 cts Oats $1 per Hundred Brand 90cts per Hundred Short $1 per hundred Shugar $7 per sackCoffe is various prices acording to quality. chickens $3 and a dozen Eggs 25 cts dozen potatoes 25cts a sack Cabage 2 cts a pound Squashes 2 cts a pound apples 75 cts a box I wish you and the children was heare So I could See you once in a while it is So loansom heare no neighbors only batchelars and they are worse than none there was one woman heare Monday

I had a letter from Ellen they was all (well?) but Frank she never mentioned Bill his mother is with Ellen Old Brown drove her off and none of the rest would keep her, it is nearly nite and I will close kiss Canna and Olive for me, Your Mother and Father

(Original in the possession of a Corbin descendant)



Liz was the oldest but the last surviving child of Enoch and Esther Cowan Cooper when she died on November 21, 1904, and was buried in the Peach Cemetery. During her life, Liz had maintained the correspondence with her children who lived away, but after her death, Andrew assumed the responsibility. This letter from Andrew to his daughter Esther Corbin has been passed down through her descendants:



March 11--1906

Peach Lin (Lincoln) county Wash

Dear Esther an Hile I will try to write you a few lines to let you know how we are geting along we are all well now and hope this will find you the same (?) W H L was here friday S S and family is all well I hav not heard from H H lately I hav not heard from any of you yet in regar to sineing a deed deed I hav a offer for the plas and want want to know if you will sine the Dead or not I thought maby you would think by bet writing for mee they was going to get the benefit of it it is not th case I intend to keep it in my one hands while I live I dont get but a small pay ment down and a mortgage to secure the balance the placce would hav to bee sold to devide it the land could not be divided So as to bee any acount to any of you and everything destroyed. the 4 children that are in reach here all will sine a deed and are ancies to set mee out of here I think this is apolig enouf for having Bet to write for mee

So good by for this time hoping to hear from you soon love to all

Andrew Layson



Andrew lived on to die on July 9, 1912, in Whitman County, WA, long outliving his two siblings who had also made the trip west to Oregon. He was about eighty-seven years old and was buried in the cemetery at Peach. The area around Peach was inundated by the waters of the Grand Coulee Dam in the 1940's, but the cemetery survives. A letter from the Laysons' daughter Bett tells of the event:



Peach Wash

Aug 21-12

Mrs Esther Corbin

My Dear Sister and family. I recieved your welcome letter last Sunday and was so glad to here from you agane. I had allmost made up my mind that you wasnt going to write any more.

We are all well but me and I am not bad off. only a little cough and throat trouble. I am alone now. Dick is out harvesting he went out the 14 of July. he was home all last week but went away agane Monday. he will be home in a day or 2 agane and then he will not be home any more untill after harvest. they expect to be gone about 35 days. Ollie is going with the same working that Dick is going with Ollie will sew sacks and jDick is roust-about. he gets $4.00 a day for himself and team.

Ellen is alone too.

William is up in Steavens Co helping Ollie put up hay. they will be home this week.

I have some sad news to write. would have let you know at once only we didnt know where you was. Our poor Father died on the 10 of July at 8:25 in the evening he went into spazms on the 8 at l ocloc'k and had 7 between that and 3 and then he was uncontious and lay in a stooper untill the end. he pased away very easy scarcely a treamer. he had not been in his right mind for about 3 or 4 months only for a little while at a time. he most allways seamed to know every thing for awhile after he would wake up in the morn'g but it wouldn't last long and then he would rave. he didnt ever know who I was for about 3 months. the last time I was there when he could talk he called me Pop (a nickname for his wife Liz) and he would cry if we told him I wasnt Pop. he has been so bad and we could not comfort him for so long that it seamed a relief to lay him to rest. he wanted to die and said so often that he wished it oas over

There was only Ellen, Sam, Chriss and I of his children at the funeral. Henry didnt get the message in time to get here and we didnt let Horace know, for he has been in 1 1/2 days drive from him all the time and never came so I wouldnt phone him.

Williams mother died on the 15 of July. she had cancer of the breast. she had been bedfast for a long time. Mary Neal was takeing care of her. Iguess she had a prety hard time for she had to work to get something to live on at the same time. You know that Ely died 2 years ago.

I went down to Somes (?) yesterday and picked 2 gal of blackberries for jell I will have 4 gal and a qt when I get them made up and that will be enough of one kind. I have nearly all my jars full. only 36 half gal left I will bill them with peaches, pears, and prunes. we will have the pears and peaches on our own place, our trees have only been set out 3 years and they are just loaded. we picked and sold 7 boxes of pears Sunday and will have that many more to sell.

Well I will quit for this time but if you will come up I will talk an arm of you good by and write soon Lots of love to all from Bett


[2] MINERVA JANE COOPER LUMISON 1835-1883

"Jane" Cooper was the third of the children of Enoch and Esther Cowan Cooper, but the sibling just older than she, died as a child. Her birth took place October 18, 1835, in Pike County, Illinois; and she was ten years old when the family departed for Oregon in 1846,

Jane's maturing years were spent in Yamhill County, Oregon, around her numerous uncles, aunts, and cousins. She was married to William "Bill" Lumison, who probably arrived in Oregon after a sojourn in the California gold fields. He first appears in Yamhill County in 1852, but he did not apply for a donation land claim. Perhaps he had close ties with one of the Wheatland area settlers and did not chose to remove from the area to claim some land. The couple were married April 11, 1856, when Jane was twenty and Bill, almost twenty-seven, the year of the cholera epedemic in the Willamette Valley.

Their first child, Mary Ellen Lumison, was born February 18, 1857, but died the following year on March 23, 1858. According to the Cooper Bible, written in her mother's hand, Margaret Emmeline "Emma" Lumison was born February 26, 1859. Next was John Franklin "Frank" Lumison, born November 13, 1860; then Peter Lumison, born May 2, 1863 and died October 22, 1863; Esther Elizabeth Lumison, born September 25, 1864; Rosannah Lumison, born September 6, 1866; and Clarissa Catherine "Kate" Lumison, born May 22, 1869.

The 1870 U.S.Census listed the Lumison family and their surviving son and four daughters, a growing family with year-old baby Kate, the youngest of the brood. The following year, on June 15, 1871, the tragedy occurred that took the lives of John , Esther, and Rosannah, when their boat overturned on their way to school. Only thirteen year old Emma and the youngest child, Kate, were left alive. At the time Jane was nine months pregnant and gave birth to Nora Jane Lumison, two weeks later, on June 27. Seemingly, Nora was not as bright as her siblings, perhaps due to her mother's terrible grief during the last stage of the pregnancy and during Nora's early months. The Eugene, Oregon State Journal, in its June 24, 1871 issue told of the Lumisons' tragedy:



On Thursday night the 15th inst., four children of Mr. William Lemason, with their uncle, undertook to cross a slough from an island to the mainland, four miles below Wheatland, when the boat filled with water and capsized. The uncle, whose name we did not learn, succeeded in saving one of the children, the other three, a boy aged about ten years, and two girls, aged respectively 5 and 8 years were drowned. Dr.H.V.V.Johnson of McMinnville states that they were on the way to visit their grandfather, Mr. Enoch Cooper, who lives near the scene of the disaster. The body of one of the children was found yesterday, and the friends and neighbors of the bereaved family were in search of the other two when the (mail) boat left Wheatland.





The Lumisons were to have two more children, James Paul "Pearl" Lumison, born December 27, 1874, and Lauretta Esther Lumison, born April 26, 1877. The Lumisons appear to have moved about the time Jane's father Enoch and other family members relocated to Washington. The 1880 U.S. Census shows that Pearl Lumison was born in Washingon Territory as was his younger sister Lauretta. Yamhill deed records show that the Lumisons sold 131 acres on January 2, 1872, right after the tragedy. It was probably then that they and Jane's younger brother Jim relocated to Whitman County, Washington.

The family was in Whitman County only eleven years when Jane died of cancer at the age of forty-seven, April 26, 1883, and was buried at the McConnell Cemetery just north of Diamond, Washington, on the north side of the Palouse River. Jane's older daughter Emma was already married by then, but Jane had Kate, 14, Nora, 11, Pearl, 8, and Lauretta, 6, still at home. Kate assumed the maternal role for her younger siblings and their Grandfather Cooper helped out as he could. Bill Lumison died about 1895 in Whitman County.

Emma married Charles Riley Burlingame (1852-1920), April 15, 1876, in Whitman County, Washington, had 12 children, and died May 29, 1932, nr. Stevenson, WA; Kate married (1) Amos Meade Burlingame in 1886 (2) William Rand (widower of her younger sister Lauretta), in 1926, died December 22, 1947, Renton, WA; Nora Married (1) Valentine Englehart (2)____Reed (3) Henry Parks, apparently adopted out most or all of her children after marrying a stepfather to the children, and died September 5, 1948, Colfax, WA; Pearl never married, making a career of working on wheat farms, died December 15, 1956, Spokane, WA; Lauretta married (1) Alfred D.Short in 1894

but was widowed shortly thereafter (2) William Rand (who 22 years after Lauretta's death married her older sister Kate), died May 12, 1904, Myers Falls, WA. Because the two older sons died as children and Pearl never married, the Lumison name died with Pearl.

MARGARET EMMALINE LUMISON 1859-1932

"Emma" Lumison was born on Grand Island, Yamhill County, Oregon, 26 February 1859, in the year that Oregon became a state. Although there had been older children than Emma, she was the first to survive infancy. When she was two the great flood of the Willamette River innundated Grand Island and the family was forced to live elsewhere, probably with Emma's grandparents across Landers Slough. In 1871 Emma nearly lost her life in the boating tragedy that took the lives of three of her younger siblings. Clinging to a protruding branch, she was rescued by her uncle, John S. Cooper, who had been in the boat at the time. This tragedy deeply affected the entire family and resulted in the sale of the homesite and the Lumisons' emigration to Washington Territory.

There Emma married Charles Riley Burlingame (6 June 1852-12 March 1920) on 15 April 1876, in Whitman County. The couple had twelve children together: John Franklin Burlingame, born 27 September 1878, married Nellie Viles 5 July 1902 in Spokane, WA, died 19 Oct 1924, in The Dalles, Wasco County, OR; Alice Jane Burlingame, born 31 May 1880, died 1880; Henrietta Burlingame, born 23 February 1882, Portland, OR, married Henry W. Gardner, April 1900, died 17 May 1947, Portland, OR; Minnie Myrtle Burlingame, born 10 November 1884, Multnomah County, OR, married William G. Viles and later Ernest Fields, no children, died 12 June 1968, Olympia, WA; Maud Grace Burlingame, born 12 January 1886, Whitman County, WA, died 1886, Whitman County; George Delbert Burlingame, born 26 March 1887, Whitman County, WA, never married, died 24 March 1929, Colfax, WA; Mary Catherine Burlingame, born 17 March 1889, Colfax, WA, married Robert Earl Cooper (a grandson of her great uncle, John M. Cooper), widowed, married C. Cleveland Collard, died 27 May 1969, Portland, OR; Henry Clyde Burlingame, born 28 January 1892, Whitman County, WA, died 1892; Ruth A. Burlingame, born 16 February 1893, Oakesdale, WA, married Edward D. Glass, 27 December 1911, Vancouver, WA, died 31 January 1981, Olympia, WA; Charles Raymond Burlingame, born 25 March 1895, died 1899, Myers Falls, WA; Martha Louise Burlingame, born 12 July 1897, Myers Falls, WA, married C.W. McLain, 3 July 1918, Vancouver, WA, died 9 July 1944, Whitman County, WA; Oscar Hibbard Burlingame, born 20 November 1899, Myers Falls, WA, married 26 August 1945 to Crystal Preston, Olympia, WA, died 8 January 1985, The Dalles, OR [He was the father of Gary Burlingame, one of the co-authors of this book]


James Patrick Cooper
1842-1903

Jim Cooper was born April 7, 1842, in Platte County, Missouri, the year before his family returned to Pike County, Illinois. He was four years old when his parents, Enoch and Esther Cowan Cooper crossed the plains to Oregon. For the next twenty-six years of his life, Jim was an Oregonian. He helped his father farm and accompanied his brother John when they were too late in their attempt to join the Union Army.

He was thirty years old in 1872 when he became one of the early settlers of Whitman County, Washington Territory. James was on a commission of three in the Colfax area in 1872 appointed to oversee the building of the first schoolhouse in the county. (History of Whitman County, WA.) His father and brother John had already arrived when Jim took a wife about 1875. Harriet "Hattie" Burlingame was fifteen years younger than the thirty-three year old Jim. His was the first of three marriages between the Cooper and Burlingame families. The next year Jim's niece, Emma Lumison, would marry Hattie's brother Charles R. Burlingame, and in 1886 another niece, Kate Lumison, would marry another of Hattie's brothers, Amos Meade Burlingame.

Jim and Hattie had five children: Henry Burlingame Cooper, born October 21, 1877, Colfax, WA, married Pearl R. Schell, October 9, 1903, divorced 1910's, died May 7, 1923, Stevenson, WA, five children; Esther Ann Cooper, twin to Henry, born October 21, 1877, Colfax, WA, died January 3, 1882, diptheria; Richard "Dick" Cooper, born June 13, 1882, Colfax, WA, not married, farmer, died February 16, 1946, Tumalo, OR; Ira Amos Cooper, born January 29, 1885, Colfax, WA, not married, farmer, died January 1, 1962, Bend, OR; Mary Asbarine Cooper, born August 3, 1891, Colfax, WA, married Frederick Miller, May 1909, Whitman County, WA, died April 14, 1958, Eagle, ID. Of all the descendants of Enoch S. and Esther Cowan Cooper, the only ones who still carry the name of Cooper are the descendants of Jim's son Henry B.Cooper.

Jim was apparently in declining health when, in February of 1903, he moved to Meyers Falls (now called Kettle Falls), Washington, to be with one of his children. After his death there, August 7, 1903, he was returned to Whitman County to be buried at the McConnell Cemetery near his father, sister, and baby Esther. The markers must have been wooden because no tombstones mark the graves, although cemetery records show there is a marker under the shrubbery and grass somewhere there that says simply Cooper. p;

Hattie soon thereafter married Grayson Hollifield (1856-1910), but before long she was widowed again. About 1912 she married a man named Jess Logsdon, but they divorced a few years later, and she resumed the name Cooper. She died of cancer in Chehalis, WA, March 18, 1924, and was buried in Stevenson, WA, where her son Henry had been buried a year earlier. Many descendants of Jim and Hattie live in the Boise, ID area.

The other children of Enoch and Esther Cowan Cooper did not marry and died young.
Submitted by Don Rivara


William Shepherd Cooper
1813-1888
by Don Rivara

Born December 12, 1813, in Clark County, Indiana, when the nation was at war for the second time with Great Britain, “Bill” Cooper was one of the younger children of Isaiah Cooper [1778-1849] and his Indian wife Elizabeth Montier Cooper [1779-c.1845]. His father was then serving in a company of mounted rangers that roamed over Indiana patrolling against Indian attack. At the time of William’s birth, his father had gone A.W. O. L. for two weeks. The boy was named William Shepherd Cooper; for whom he was named is unknown. His brother Enoch also was given the middle name of Shepherd. Shepherd is not a surname that we can trace in the family.

Before William had turned four, the family had moved to what would become Owen County, Indiana. Here his childhood was spent at first with the pride of being one of the first families of the county, then gradually becoming one of the pariahs due to Isaiah’s alcoholism. William was thirteen when the Coopers left Owen County in 1827, in a virtual state of war with the rest of the community.

Pike County, Illinois, where the Coopers moved in 1826, seems to have been a more peaceful place for the family. There were Indian problems and extreme weather situations, but the proximity to the Mississippi River allowed for ease of travel. Most frontiersmen did a lot of river travelling, so it is likely the Coopers did as well.

In 1832, eighteen-year-old Bill served in the Black Hawk War in a company with his brother Enoch Cooper and his brother-in-law Benjamin Shinn. After returning home from the expedition, he married Milly Crowder, November 25, 1832.

Nine months later Bill became a father at nineteen and probably a widower as well. Rachel Emillia Cooper was born August 31, 1833. Her mother is believed to have died in childbirth. Usually frontier men would have remarried in a matter of months in Bill’s situation with a motherless infant, but he waited seven years, perhaps testament to a deep attachment to Milly.

One June 28, 1840, his new bride was Mary Ann Crozier [aka Crosiar], daughter of James Crozier and Polly Cooper. There is a Crozier Creek in Derry Township in Pike County, probably named for Mary Ann’s family. Polly Cooper is believed to have been a kinswoman of her son-in-law. It appears as though she was the daughter of Thomas Cooper III [1771-after 1850], who lived in Schuyler County, Illinois, in 1850. It is also believed that she was an older sister of the Thomas Cooper IV [1817-1874] and Jacob Cooper [1816-1873] who settled near Wheatland, Yamhill County, Oregon, where the Coopers had earlier settled.

These were the children born to William Shepherd Cooper and Mary Ann Crozier Cooper:



About 1845 Bill’s mother, Elizabeth Montier Cooper, died in Pike County. The following year her husband Isaiah and the families of his four sons: Enoch, Bill, Isaiah Jr., and John M. Cooper crossed the plains to Yamhill County, Oregon, where Bill’s two sisters, Mary Cooper Matheny and Rachel Cooper Matheny had lived with their families since 1843. Mary Ann was pregnant at the time. Her ninth month would have been spent under the hot August sun, braving the sagebrush and alkali dust as the Oregon Trail followed the Snake River. In the Grande Ronde Valley of what is now eastern Oregon [near the present town of La Grande, OR], Jane Ann Cooper was born in the Coopers’ covered wagon. The Coopers used the newly-opened Barlow Road to cross the Cascade Mountains into the Willamette Valley.

The Matheny families had built extra log cabins on their land to house their expected kin. The family spent the winter on Daniel and Mary Matheny’s land by the ferry that they operated. Meanwhile Bill search for suitable land to claim.

At first the Coopers settled on low-lying land on the east side of the Willamette River in what was then called Champoeg County [now called Marion County] opposite the Mathenys, who lived on the west side. The Donation Land Claim was filed on Augusst 19, 1847, containing 640 acres [one square mile]. The land’s legal description began at the southwest corner of Isaiah Matheny’s land claim and extended south along the river. It was bounded on the north by Isaiah’s land and partly on the east by the land claim of Joseph and Mary Matheny Garrison. Bill had selected low-lying bottomland on what was called Mission Bottom. Today this land is bisected by Matheny Road as it approaches the Wheatland ferry. After a couple seasons of being flooded out, they decided to relocate. They chose a piece of land on high ground at the bottom of the hills just west of Wheatland on the Polk-Yamhill county line just inside Polk County. Today this land lies on the west side of the Hopewell Road abutting the Yamhill County line two or three miles south of the Yamhill County village called Hopewell.

Having become a young father, Bill became a young grandfather. His daughter Rachel had married Ruben Cave on June 18, 1850, and Rachel had her first child in 1851 while Bill was thirty-seven years old. She and Ruben had seven more children before his death in the early 1860’s. Rachel and Ruben settled immediately west of Bill and Mary Ann on adjacent land.

Like nearly all Oregon men, Bill went to the California gold fields, probably in June of 1849. The Cooper brothers, their father, and Rachel Matheny’s husband Henry were there. Their wives and children went along as well, atypical for the Forty-niners, but then most of them came from much further away than Oregon. Clarence Walling [1908-1989], a great grandson of Bill’s, said that Bill didn’t find a lot of gold. Clarence had an old newspaper clipping which stated that Mr. and Mrs. William S. Cooper were leaving San Francisco for Oregon on the ship Tarquina. Research has shown that this article appeared in the Oregon Spectator on 21 May 1850. An earlier announcement in the Spectator in the May 16 edition announced the arrival of merchandise in Portland consigned to William S. Cooper. These were probably goods purchased in San Francisco with his California gold. Bill and Mary Ann probably had an easier time in Oregon in the 1850’s with the money they had gained in California and the now-available things to buy in the Oregon Country. In the early years goods had been extremely scarce and exorbitantly expensive.

In 1855 Mary Ann gave birth to Isaiah Matheny Cooper, named for Bill’s nephew who had lived next to the Coopers on Mission Bottom. Isaiah Matheny had also left Mission Bottom and resettled on the west side of the Eola Hills due west of Bill and Mary Ann just over the hills. The farms of both abutted the Polk-Yamhill county line.

In 1856 a deadly cholera epidemic rampaged in the Wheatland area. Mary Cooper Matheny died as did almost every baby under two years of age. Little Isaiah was the only infant to survive the pestilence, but his mother did not. Mary Ann died that year probably of the cholera that had killed so many others of the family. Isaiah was sent to Enoch and Esther Cooper’s home during Mary Ann’s illness. After her death Enoch and Esther continued to rear the child. Bill was forty-three years old when Mary Ann died. He survived her by thirty-two years but never remarried. Bill was unlucky with his wives but not with his children—not one of the eight died during his seventy-four years of life.

As Bill’s younger children matured, they looked around for opportunities to obtain farms of their own as their father’s generation had. The Homestead Act of 1862 had provided that a family could claim 160 acres of government land if they would work it. Some Oregonians were heading to Southern Oregon and some even further to Northern California for suitable land to homestead. Bill and some of his grown children relocated to the Pit River Valley. Also moving to the general area in Northern California were Bill’s nephew Daniel Boone Matheny and his niece Mary Garrison Hall. Bill and his family were there about four years when the Modoc Indian War commenced. This was no doubt the reason they left their new lives and headed for a more peaceful location.

The Nez Perce Indians were known for their friendliness to whites, so some Oregonians were homesteading in Eastern Washington Territory, where it was said that wheat grew extremely well. Bill and his family, with misgivings at leaving their fledgling farms, headed to Whitman County, Washington. It was probably 1872 when they arrived. One of Enoch Cooper’s sons, James P. Cooper, was already there. Nearby were two of Mary Cooper Matheny’s sons. Jasper Matheny and two partners had purchased land at the falls of the Spokane River and had platted a new town called Spokane. Isaiah Cooper Matheny, for whom Bill had named his youngest son, was just over the nearby Idaho-Washington line where Moscow, Idaho, would soon spring up. More and more family members from the Willamette Valley began to arrive in Eastern Washington. In early 1875 Bill’s brother Enoch and the families of two more of his children settled on land nearby.

In 1877 when Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce went to war against the whites, it was rumored that Chief Moses of the Spokane Indians was headed south to join Joseph. The white settlers of Eastern Washington all headed to safety. Bill and his children “forted up” at Fort Walla Walla until it was deemed safe to return to their homes. All was as the family had left it except for the farm of Bill’s daughter and son-in-law Elisha and Maria Walling. In their absence Indians had burned their home and outbuildings and taken their livestock.

Bill had not sold his farm when he left Oregon. He simply abandoned it, probably leaving someone in the family to farm it. In 1875 the county sold the land to pay $11.25 in back taxes. Three of Bill’s children had remained in Oregon. Rachel Cooper Cave was too entrenched there with her second husband Bill Athey. Also, Bill’s sons Isaiah and Enoch were there. His sister Rachel, the last of his siblings in Oregon, had died in 1877.

A great grandson of Bill’s, Clarence Walling, was in possession of two telegrams. One, dated June 4, 1888, was sent to “W. S. Blake, care of Mr. Moore, Egypt, Lincoln County, WA” It was sent by Bill’s son, James C. Cooper. It said, “If you want to see your grandfather alive, come immediately as he wants to see you.” The other, dated June 5, 1888, is a reply from William Blake to his uncle James, “Can’t come immediately-Will be there about the eighth—W.F. Blake”

Bill died June 14, 1888, at the home of his daughter, Mariah Walling, at the age of seventy-four. He was laid out and embalmed by undertaker John S. Noble of Colfax, Washington Territory. He is believed to have been buried in the Colfax Cemetery as were the Wallings with whom he lived at the time of his death. Embalming was a service that probably Bill’s siblings had not experienced.

Clarence Walling was also in possession of Bill’s obituary from the newspaper in Colfax:
A PIONEER’S DEATH

William S. Cooper died at Wallings, about 10 miles northeast of Colfax on Thursday last, June 14the. Mr. Cooper was 75 years of age and enjoyed the distinction of having lived in several states, but having never moved into one. [None had yet achieved statehood when he arrived] He was born in 1813 in Clark County, Indiana. In 1827 he moved to Illinois, and in 1846 to the territory of Oregon. In 1849 he went to California and then returned to Oregon…[From here the article was torn off and incomplete.]


By the time of his death, train service to the East had reached Whitman County. The frontier was no more. He was the last of his generation in the Pacific Northwest. He son, James C. Cooper, served as executor of his estate. The appraisers were kinsmen John Dodge and James P. Cooper. His listed heirs were



None of William’s living descendants carry the Cooper name. Of his three sons, James did not marry. Enoch had two sons, neither of whom married, and Isaiah’s only son never married.


Submitted by Don Rivara


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