Addie Jane and Elias Russell

This wonderful old family photo shows Addie Jane and Elias Russell with their oldest child, Bertie Lee who was born April of 1902. That's their home in the background which Elias built himself and one they added rooms to as more and more children were born, final count four girls and eight boys. They lived in this house near Cass, Arkansas all their lives. Elias cut timber, served as a sheriff's deputy, and did blacksmithing to feed his family. He always had mules and he loved those mules. Addie cooked and cleaned, canned and sewed - I can only try to imagine how difficult it was to raise twelve children without running water or electricity. He lived to be 85, working outside on his last day, and she 88, spry and clearing thinking to the end. These are my husband's paternal grandparents, fine people who raised all twelve of their children to adulthood and instilled in them a strong work ethic, love of country, and faith in God.

Mystery Solved - Maybe, Probably, Yes!

A longstanding mystery has been solved by a very distant but dear cousin of ours, Barbara Rogers, an Arkansas native and cousin on the Smith side of our family. She has pulled together from various sources enough information to finally identify our own Elender Jane Keeling Buckhanan, born about 1837-1838 in Roane County, TN, to William Weldon Keeling and his wife Elizabeth Hyden Keeling. Elender married John Littleton Trout Buckhanan on April 3, 1856 in Madison County, AR and became the mother of five children including our Sarah Frances Buckhanan Smith before she (Elender) died while still a young woman sometime between 1866 and 1870.

Because she was listed on the 1860 federal census for Madison County, AR as E. J. Buckhanan and then never appeared on the 1870 federal census we've had a lot of trouble identifying her. Fortunately, there were Keeling family members living with E. J. and John L. T. Buckhanan in 1860 so we had a clue about her maiden name but the only E. J. we knew of was E. J. Perry who married Weldon Keeling in 1853 - close but no match.

The final pieces of the puzzle were in our own family records but it took our cousin Barbara Rogers working closely with Mary Simms to piece it all together and finally give our E. J. a full name and a family we can research. We still have not found her burial place or date, nor do we have a photograph of Elender, but with any luck (and the discovery of a missing family bible) we may learn more about the life and death of Elender.

We have many people to thank for the bits and pieces of the Keeling family and Buckhanan family histories which have led to the identification of our gr-gr-grandmother Elender Jane. For a more detailed accounting of this search and discovery please read Barbara's post on Genforum at http://genforum.genealogy.com/keeling/messages/1220.html And please, if you know anything more about this branch of our family send me an email.

Smith Clan Reunion Calendar 2012

Hi folks,

The Smith Clan Reunion Calendar for 2012 is now posted here. Click on the Calendar photo to go to the individual months.

Please Help Identify this School

This is an old school house near Turner Bend in Franklin County, Arkansas. Do any of you know its history? This wonderful photograph was sent to me by a woman who is interested in knowing more about the building, whether it was once a Cass school, when it was built, when it was last used as a school, and what its use is now. I'm hoping someone out there is familiar with this lovely old building with its stone foundation and fence. Write me at pamruss@frii.com if you can help.

Elias Russell in 1958 Article about Old Gold Mine.

Is There Gold Near Cass?

A long-ago search for hidden treasure in Franklin county was fruitless but gave rise to some questions still unanswered.
Only another prospector, with mining in his blood and money to invest in an abandoned mine, is all that is needed to start a new gold rush in the mountains near Cass.
Now a ghost town, Cass was a flourishing lumbering center when interest was aroused over a Spanish legend, near the turn of the century.


(Caption under Elias' photo reads: "Mr. Russell who protected Mexican Charley from the mob, was deputy sheriff 22 years. He once hauled nine men 17 miles in his wagon to jail and two others being sent to the penitentiary.)

According to the legend, Spaniards prospecting for gold during the Civil War feared bushwhackers and hid a large number of gold bars and a huge gold cross in a partitioned room underground, somewhere in the mountains. Strange markings high up on an overhanging ledge and a deposit of a peculiarly red earth underneath the ledge, were said to indicate the location.

Dr. Tobe Hill, then a practicing physician at Mulberry Station, now Mulberry, 30 miles south, became so interested in the legend that he quit his practice and devoted 20 years and a tidy fortune, searching for the gold.

Floyd Turner, 72, who was born and reared on 160 acres where the mining claim was staked, said his grandfather, George Turner, first owned the land. He went to war and never came back. Then his father George Washington Turner, bought the interests of the other heirs and sold the land to Dr. Hill for $750.

Dr. Hill visited mining centers in the West looking for someone who could read the strange markings and brought back a man, part Pueblo Indian and part Mexican, known as “Mexican Charley.” Charley said he could read the markings and locate the gold by a much worn blueprint he brought with him. He was placed in charge of the mining crew. When news about Mexican Charley and his blueprint spread, it became necessary to emply men with guns to keep the crowds of people back so he and the miners could work.

The country went wild with excitement when Mexican Charley announced he had located the cap rock, that it would be raised on a certain day and that everyone present could look down upon the gold. A hurried trip was made to Little Rock to arrange for delivery of the escheatage to the state and to obtain police protection in handling the gold.

When the day came to lift the cap rock, the cove was filled with an immense, expectant and excited throng that milled about for hours, waiting for Charley to appear. But Charley was not to be seen by them that day. Prewarned of the possible danger that might result from a deception, he remained in hiding. Before the day ended, it became necessary to give Charley official protection when the angry crowd began calling for him to mob him. He was given orders the following day to leave the country and never return.

Later, a man, Joseph Palmer, who said he could locate the gold by witching, came to the mine. To test Palmer’s powers, some coins were hidden, and he was asked to find them. His witching rod was a three-pronged peach tree switch. He slit each prong near the end and placed a silver coin in one slit, a gold coin in another and a copper coin in the third. He held the switch in his hand, with coins level, as he walked about the grounds. He finally found the coins but said the switch pulled harder toward the mine. He wanted to witch over the mine but was not permitted.

Dr. Hill paid big wages for laborers to work in the mine – as much as $5 a day in that time when wages were low – and kept six to 30 men working, eight hours every day, for many years. He died believing the buried treasure he had not found was still somewhere in the earth.

His Lonquil Mining Co., it was said, sold at least 232 shares of stock at prices ranging from $25 to $100 a share, to people in Ft. Smith and other towns in Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma. J. L. Henson and J. H. Johnson, both of Ft. Smith, were president and secretary of the company.

Following Dr. Hill’s death and the failure of the mining company, interest in the mine lulled for a time. But through the years an occasional prospector had drifted in and started operations again.

The last to own and operate the mine were G. W. Glaze and his wife, from Salt Lake City. He was a prospector and artist-sign painter. Both he and his wife mined for the gold. Mrs. Glaze died in their cabin near the mine, from a heart attack, about three years ago. Soon after her death, Mr. Glaze left as suddenly as he had appeared, apparently abandoning everything, and has not been heard from since.

Mrs. Sarah Arbuckle, a widow at Cass, who lived near the mine when her husband worked there has vivid recollections of the mining boom and events that took place. “I knew Marion Hammond, George Martin and John Morehead who dug for gold many years – until they died, also a man named Douglas who burned to death in a house near the mine, and Charley Austin who was accused of squandering some of the mining company’s money, pleaded insanity and still lives somewhere back in the mountain,” she said.

Mrs. Arbuckle owns a share of the mining stock. “But never got anything out of it,” she declared. Her idea about the whole thing is: “When interest in the legend ran high and they started mining ore was brought from Joplin, Mo, and hidden in the dirt. That fired the works.”

Elias Russell, still active at 85, has lived within three miles of the mine all his life. He hauled lumber from his sawmill to the mine and was deputy sheriff 22 years during the mining operation. It was Mr. Russell who protected Mexican Charley from the hands of the mob. “Interest in the mine was high here and everywhere then,” he said. “Women, as far away as Dallas, Tex. Sold their feather beds for money to buy the mining stock, and lots of people would buy it again if it got started again. I always thought the place was just an old Indian village site and what they found were Indian bones and trinkets.”

The mine is in a picturesque, timbered, rock-strewn cove, walled in by mountains. The cove is, roughly, a quarter of a mile long and 200 years wide, with overhanging ledges and perpendicular cliffs, 50 feet high in places, on either side. Sparkling Cove Creek cascades down a gulch between the mountains and flows into nearby Mulberry river.

Seven tunnels, on both the north and the south sides of the cove, large enough for the small donkey-drawn cars on which the dirt was hauled out over narrow gauge tracks, extend far back underground from the bases of the cliffs. Some of these tunnels are filled with muddy water, while others have become springs. One is 20 feet deep.

While the old mine is seldom talked about any more by anyone in the locality, certain questions lie dormant in the minds of many old-timers who witnessed or were a part of the prolonged search for the gold. The strange markings high up on the ledge, the witching rod that pulls toward the mine, (Mrs. Arbuckle said: “I saw it pulling”, Charley’s blueprint and the origin of the legend itself, have never been explained to their full satisfaction.

Many thanks to Robert Myers for providing this 1958 magazine article, written by Steele T. Kennedy.

Today is the Big Day!

Today our Smith Clan is gathered over in Moffat County, Colorado, north and west of Maybell at a location best known as Bear Valley. Between approx. 1915 and 1923 several families of our relatives from Oklahoma and Texas homesteaded in that high, barren ground of northwestern Colorado but after a series of tragic deaths and failure to thrive in that remote and arid land the family packed up their homemade covered wagon and with the older children driving the cattle horseback set out to cross the Continental Divide in late fall of 1923. They all made it through the snow and cold to settle in Purcell, Colorado, now a prairie ghost town and never much more than that.

The survivors and descendants of that rugged band of pioneers are visiting the old homesteads and erecting signs with names and dates of the ones who lived and died there so that in years to come the grandchildren and great grandchildren will find it easy to locate those tracts of land in that uninhabited valley where dinosaurs once roamed. Yes, this land is just east of Dinosaur National Monument and south of Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area and adjacent to that infamous Browns Park, Colorado where outlaws once holed up from the law.

But most tourists who visit those three famous sites will never know of Bear Valley, also known as Bare Valley, and rightly so. It's off the beaten trail, privately owned land with unpaved roads and no trees in sight. But it means a great deal to those of us whose grandparents and great-grandparents took their hopes and dreams up there only to come away beaten and heartbroken after leaving three of their own buried at the little cemetery in Craig.

My thoughts are with you today, my Smith Clan relatives who made the big trek to Bear Valley today. May the good weather hold, your tires stay aired, and the click, click, click of cameras echo through the valley.

Those Damned Smiths!

On the surface there doesn't seem to be much similarity between my husband and me and our backgrounds. He's a Colorado boy, son of a farmer with roots firmly anchored in one place, eastern Colorado. I, on the other hand, grew up in Illinois and moved from place to place throughout my childhood, rarely attending the same school two years in a row. But we do have one interesting thing in common - both of us had mothers whose maiden name was Smith.

We have never found that we have a common ancestor in the Smith lines, so it's not like we're cousins. His Smiths are from Oklahoma and Texas whereas mine are from Illinois and Kentucky. But we have discovered that both of our Smith families were the objects of scorn and put-down by their spouses.

Bob grew up hearing his father cast aspersions on his wife's family, criticizing their lifestyle of coffee drinking, card playing, and cigarette smoking. Despite his dad's attitude, Bob says his experiences with the Smith clan were always happy times and that they were fun people to be with, loved to tell jokes and laughed a lot.

My dad was also critical of his Smith in-laws, finding fault with each and every one of them. I really think Dad's hostility stemmed from his jealousy of my mother's love for her Smith family. Dad made fun of the Smiths and made them the butt of his jokes, trying to elevate his own status in the process, but I know he loved them dearly, as did each of us four kids.

So we have a little private joke between us, Bob and I, a way of acknowledging the similarity in what we heard around the dinner table as we were growing up - "those damned Smiths!" says it all.