John J & Patience
Smith Caswell
John J Memoirs with additions from John
Edwards Caswell – edited by Judy (Todhunter) Rosmus
John J. Caswell (he added
the initial) was the seventh and middle child in a family of thirteen
children. The older children were born
in Ireland, the younger in Ontario, but John was born aboard an immigrant ship
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, probably on 1 May 1848. The family initially
settled in Darlington Township.
John’s Boyhood Years
In John J. Caswell’s later years he filled a notebook with
reminiscences entitled “The Life and Adventures of A.B. as a Pioneer’s Son, as
a Boy Lumberman, River Driver, Railroader, Carpenter and Farmer”. Alas, the memoir ends with his learning
something of the carpenter’s trade at about age sixteen. The author’s statement that he wishes to help
the reader by placing him “in a position to meet his reverses and the battle of
life” calls to mind the vastly popular Horatio Alger books where the young
heroes triumph over many difficulties.
When John was
four the family moved from Darlington Township to Biddulph a place John did not
much love, saying that “the township of Biddulph has for many years been known
as a township of tyranny and murder”.
After a few
months in Biddulph, Andrew began construction on a log home. John recorded his
memory of that ‘bee’ – “as was the custom in those days the neighbours gathered
to help all newcomers, father was not neglected and neither was the whiskey,
for a bee as they were called could not exist successfully without their grog,
and of course the children where never slighted. So your writer had to have his share and as I
was then better able to make more fun than work I was there and then well
filled with the best they had, so you can imagine me as drunk as any sott you
ever seen.”
John seems to
have been a happy-go-lucky youngster. He
records his tossing wood chips in the air when he was supposed to be gathering
them. When his mother came after him he
fled, thinking he could outrun her.
Wrong! Off came his pants, and
his legs were soon covered with welts from Mother’s switch.
In the evening
John and some of his brothers were sent to find the cows in the forest and
bring them in. Too often he found it
more fun to play with the chipmunks.
John reached
school age, and like his older brothers was sent off barefoot to school with a
card in hand on which the alphabet was printed. The beginners were kept repeating them “until
we hated the very sight of our card for we supposed we could master those few
letters in a short while and then would be men and women as far as knowledge
was concerned, but to our regret and dismay we knew the cat of nine tales
better than we knew our letters. We were
finally promoted to our first reader and this little book had more in it than
one child in ten ever learned.”
Once in school,
there was no vacation for a child except when their father took him out to work
on the farm or help an overworked mother.
These were “rate schools” where the family paid a fee for each
child. Eventually the district’s parents
managed to vote in the free schools which were supported by taxation.
Near the school
was a fine hill for rolling snowballs; at the foot of the hill was a road. One day a pedestrian dodged a snowball, only
to be hit by a sled. Enraged, the man approached
the boys, who pummeled him with snowballs, but a tall fellow who turned out to
be his relative, came to his assistance.
John’s younger brother was attacked by the latter, which brought John
and his best friend into the fray. When
school closed at four o’clock, the teacher detained John, not for fighting but
for swearing. He could not remember
having done so, though a “dern it” might have passed his lips. The accusation hurt him more than a dozen
whippings; he was made to promise that he would swear no more. “John is sorry to say that he has not at all
times kept his word.”
Tom had been
attending the Fish Creek School, when his parents decided he was needed on the
farm. John was shifted from Granton to
be enrolled in Toms’ place. At Fish
Creek John had to demonstrate that he was about as good with his fists as Tom
had been. But his schooling was short
for the older boys were off earning a few pennies a week to help support the
many younger children, and John was needed at home.
Andrew “who was
a never tiring man was scarcely ever able to lend a helping hand to his loved
wife so the burden of the housework and garden fell to Mother, and as John
became very handy around the house he grew to appear to be one of the
necessities around home, in fact he got to be very familiar in the wash tub and
in the art of working the bread for his mother.”
Johns turn as
mother’s helper came to an end when he, too was judged old enough to “go out
for service”. A neighbour came to
enquire whether the Caswells had a boy who could help in the harvest. He would pay $1 a day when boys were
ordinarily getting but 25¢. It sounded
good.
A man had been
hired to cradle the wheat on a per-acre basis.
That fellow worked from dawn to dark, and so John must do likewise. Even in the morning, while waiting for
breakfast, John was set to leveling the ground around the barn, while the boss
took his ease. As the weather improved,
it was necessary to keep ahead by hauling in the wheat sheaves after dark. John was put up in the hay mow to move the
wheat back in the barn as fast as the boss could toss it up from the wagon.
In the fall
John was hired out to a neighbour, Mr. Radcliff, for a year, with the
stipulation that he should go to school for the “three winter months”. His yearly wage was to be $40. All during the fall he plowed in a field
still full of stumps. “It was a miracle
if you could cross a ten acre field without getting stuck in the roots two or
three times and then the job of pulling back a plow of a hundred pounds or more
in order to get her loosed for a new start.”
John’s final
schooling lasted but two months, for Radcliff wanted him to work on a new barn;
and for this he would get an additional $8.
As doors to one opportunity closed, another opened. This gave John the chance to work under a
carpenter and learn how to use the hammer, saw and chisel. The experience was of greater use later on
when he worked for the railway.
Here, too, he
gained a lifelong love of checkers, his employer having sawed a stump off flat
and drawn a checkerboard on the surface.
The two, with Radcliff’s brother-in-law,(1)
played at every odd moment all winter, often sitting up until midnight. They sketched checkerboards on almost any
flat surface and played on their Sunday strolls. Later John stopped playing on Sunday, feeling
that it was profaning the Sabbath.
John Sets out on his
Travels
Tom Caswell
worked in the pineries of central Michigan as a lumberjack from the time that
he was 16 (about 1859). John joined him
a few years later. After the farm work
at Granton (Biddulph Township) was finished, the brothers would travel about
200 miles almost due west to Greenville, Michigan. During the winter they would cut timber,
which would be floated downstream to the mills near the shores of Lake
Michigan.
We cannot fix a
date to the time that John set off for California. Albert said that John worked as a carpenter
in the car shops of the Central Pacific Railway in Sacramento. The Railway Archives has a record of his
brother William being shop foreman there, so this is quite likely.
A copy of his
calling card exists. It reads, “John J.
Caswell, Sacramento, Carpenter”. John’s
silver railroader’s watch also still exists.
It was made by the American Watch Company, Maltham, Mass. While he was helping build a bridge over the
Rio Grande around 1890, the watch slipped out of his pocket and fell on the mud
flats fifty feet below. He scrambled
down, and found it was still running!
John and Patience
Later John followed Tom to Iowa, where they both found
wives. It is said that Patience Ethel
Smith was sixteen when they first met.
In 1882 John has established himself in Winnipeg with the
Canadian Pacific Railway, and was then sent to Joplin, Missouri, “where there
was a large railway car shop”. The
railway had sent him there to learn the outfitting of passenger cars. Patience
Smith was teaching school in Joplin, Missouri about 15 miles east of her home
in Carthage. In 1882 when Patience was
twenty-one, they were married. Her son,
Albert, recorded the location of the wedding at her parent’s home at Marcus,
Iowa, about five miles from Cherokee.
Children of John J Caswell and Patience Ethel Smith:
-
Albert Edward Caswell, B: 24 May 1884 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, D: 18 Jun 1954 in Eugene, Oregon, M: Mary Constance Edwards,
03 Jul 1912 in San Jose, Los Angeles, California.
-
Oliver John Caswell, B: 24 Jul 1886 in Clark's Crossing, Saskatchewan, D: 18 Apr 1897 in Clark's Crossing, Sask.
- Annie Erella Caswell, B: 09 Oct 1888 in Clark's Crossing,
Saskatchewan, D: 09 Dec 1966 in San Jose, California, M: George Bigelow
Campbell, 07 Jul 1913 in San Jose, California.
-
Cora May Caswell, B: 22 Aug 1893 in Clark's Crossing, Sask., D: 08 Jan 1973 in Cupertino, Santa Clara,
California, M: Joseph Jay Kilpatrick, 20 Aug 1923 in San Jose, California.
The newlyweds packed up “bedding, a few dishes, and an organ
besides trunks full of clothes”
(2) and headed for Winnipeg and the CPR shops.
“The Canadian customs inspector ruled that the organ was a luxury and that
they must pay duty; however, he was persuaded to reduce the charge from $50 to
$17.50.
The Caswells had a half-dozen abodes in Winnipeg before some
of John’s fellows in the car shops pitched in and helped them raise a little
house on the commons. [On my mother’s side her great grandfather was foreman of
the car shops and her great uncles were working in the shops along with the
Caswell brothers.]
They could not have been there very long when George Grant,
agent for the Saskatoon Temperance Colony and son of the founder of Granton,
got them interested in getting land in the Colony. Brother Robert and Joseph agreed to go there
in the spring of 1883, and Joe, as a partner of Johns’ promised to take up land
for John and do the first year’s development work.
On May 24, 1884, a son was born. As it was the Queen’s birthday, he was named
Albert Edward for the Prince of Wales.
Three weeks later the family was en route to Moose Jaw, at
that time the end of the rails for the Canadian Pacific. John had to travel with the cattle car to
feed and water the animals, which consisted of “two cows, a team of ponies, and
three pigs”. In the emigrant car were
Patience, baby Albert, Grandmother Mary Jane, grandma’s seven canaries, and her
old dog. Where the hen and chickens travelled,
Patience did not say. Leaving much of
their household equipment and clothing in the emigrant shed at Moose Jaw, they
set out in the farm wagon for Saskatoon.
After nine rainy days they reached their goal on the east side of the
river, now the Nutana district. “There was one good house, a makeshift of a
store, a blacksmith’s bellows on a post and an old scow on the river.”
The Caswells were taken across the South Saskatchewan on the
old scow, and set out down the river some twenty miles to Clark’s Crossing and
their new homestead. While a house was
being built, the family lived in a tent.
The next spring the second Riel Rebellion broke out. John moved his family to Saskatoon, their
land being a little too close to the centre of the rebellion. However, Patience was one of the women who
baked bread for General Frederick D. Middleton’s troops. John and Joe bought up hay to supply the
horses, and John worked with Lord Melgund, later Governor-General of Canada, to
put the cavalry horses across the river.
The scow upset once, and the tinned goods, hams and bacon John salvaged
were a godsend.
Land Title Problems
When Joe and Rob took up land at Clark’s Crossing in the
summer of 1893, Joe, as a partner of Johns, was to file a claim for him and
begin the required development work.
That first summer although he ploughed a number of acres, Joe failed to
file the necessary homestead application.
John reached Clark’s Crossing with Patience and baby Albert,
on July 2nd, 1884. Two years after Albert’s birth, Oliver John
was born, followed by Annie in 1888 and Cora May in 1893. According to his daughter, Cora, the first
home was a sod house.
The land
surveyors in the summer of 1883 set stakes for two different surveys: river
lots—long and narrow as in Quebec, and rectangular lots with mile square
sections, as had been established twenty years earlier in the United States.
French Canadian
settlers, of which there were many, preferred the river front lots, not only
because they were accustomed to that in Quebec, but also because families were
not so isolated. John assumed that the
river lot survey would prevail, and acted accordingly. The decision went against the French
Canadians and this was a major factor in the Second riel Rebellion that broke
out at Duck Lake in the summer of 1885.
It also meant
that John would have to relocate his house and that his mother, who had located
on the adjoining parcel under the river lot survey lost her homestead claim as
her development was now on a “school lot”.
She had to go east for medical attention, and never got back to
establish her claim. John then claimed
the land on which the initial cultivation had been done in ’83 under Pre-emption
Law, which permitted early settlers to buy another quarter section at a
discount after some development work.
The Homestead
Inspector’s Report of 8 July 1892 gives the following description of the
place. The first part of the house constructed
was frame, 16’x16’ square. Two log additions
had been made, one 16’x16’, the other 8’x10’, totaling 592 square feet. There was a large sod stable, perhaps made of
sods from the original house. The log
granary was 14’x16’. Only the garden was
fenced. There was a well, and a stone
stable under construction. Forty-three
acres were in crops and nine acres in the process of breaking. Two acres around the house were planted with
trees. John had thirty head of cattle
and four horses.
John was upset and angry because Joe, who had applied for a
patent later than he, was recommended for one on his homestead. The Land Board had decided “last winter that
all parties must have resided upon their land for three years from the time of
making entry before making application for patent except where parties have
been on the land before it came to market”.
The land had not been on the market when he and his mother came, for it
had yet to be decided which survey to use.
On 3 Sept 1892, John tried again. This time someone, perhaps a solicitor wrote
the letter for him. It was written in a
clear, bold hand, the spelling vastly improved, and it was organized well.
John seems to
have gotten a patent on his homestead.
Now he was asking why he, as one of the original settlers, had been
denied pre-emption claim. In this case
the part of the quarter-section he wanted included land on which he had built
his original soddy.
Seven months
later, the homestead Inspector at Prince Albert wrote a letter in support of
John’s claim to the commissioner, Dominion lands, at Winnipeg. He called John “a first class settler in
every respect, and his farm is a credit to any country”.
Home in Clarks Crossing, Saskatchewan
John obtained a quarter-section several miles north of Saskatoon
on the bluff about the flood plain, adjacent to Rob’s home. There he built a comfortable brick home and a
large barn for his prize cattle.
J
John, Patience,Albert, Oliver & Annie
In 1903 Albert went off to Manitoba College. Things were looking up. The Canadian Pacific was seeking a site for
new railroad shops. The favoured
location was on John Caswell’s homestead.
The winter of 1905 was an unusually severe one, and John recalled the
mild climate of Santa Crus, California, with pleasure. After the railroad had dallied for months,
John sold out to his friend Allan Bowerman, for $40,000. Bowerman sold to the railway company for
$100,000 six months later. John’s house
became a Roman Catholic convent, an ironic fate for an Orangeman’s home.
In Saskatoon, John became the first chairman of an
improvement district, so far as we know his only adventure in politics. One writer referred to him as “the fastest
‘pen’ in West Saskatoon”. On one
occasion he resorted to bare fists, thereafter conducting his duels only in the
newspaper.
Home on Lincoln Ave. in San Jose
Once in California, Annie and Cora preferred San Jose to the
countrified Santa Cruz; perhaps they spent a foggy week there in July. John made the transition from a cattle and
wheat rancher to a prune rancher. His
comfortable bungalow with columns made of river boulders survived until the late
1970’s. Around 1910 he sold that home
and built another on the same road.
Still later he built a tan-stucco bungalow a few hundred yards south of
Camden Road - and there he died in October 1925.
Cora May commented that while they were comfortable enough,
her mother always had to be very economical.
Patience survived John by a dozen years, living in her own
house for a while, then renting it out and living with Annie or Cora until she
got some money ahead, when she would go back to her own house. One night she helped serve a dinner at the Westminster
Presbyterian Church, San Jose. The next
morning a great pain seized her and she phoned Annie to come quickly. In a few minutes she was gone.
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