The Bloomer Women Who Walked to Wyoming Territory Part 2 by Zina Abbott

 

Last month, I shared a blog post about two early Wyoming Territory women which I learned about as part of my research for my recent book, Lauren, I came across an account of two women who made an impact on early Wyoming history. I saved their story for Women’s History Month, focusing on the mother, Alice Willing Bloomer. This month, I wish to finish with more details about the daughter, Mary Jane Bloomer Morey Stimpson Richardson. You may find the previous post by CLICKING HERE.

Mary Jane Bloomer’s three husbands were the following, the second two marriages taking place after her move onto the Wyoming Territory frontier:

Marriage to Charles Norman Morey 1857
Marriage to William G Stimpson 1869
Marriage to William Richardson 1880

At the end of the Civil War, Mary Jane Bloomer Morey, finding herself destitute after her husband suffered a disabling brain injury as a result of his war service, put him in a home for the insane and looked for a means to support herself and her family. Her mother, Alice Willing Bloomer, who was widowed because of the war, and Mary Jane’s three-year-old son, Frank Morey, traveled to Leavenworth, Kansas, where, for a time, they worked at the Dexter Hotel.

Mary Jane's mother, Alice, was suffering from consumption. At wars end, it was widely proclaimed that consumption could be cured by moving west to the high and dry climate. They walked with a hand cart to Grand Island Nebraska in the middle of February 1868.  The ladies then rode a train to the new town of Cheyenne near the end of the tracks.  They next rode the train to the Dale Creek Bridge construction site, then they walked about twenty miles to Fort Sanders, arriving on March 4^th. There, they stayed for a short time while the town of Laramie was platted out and started building.  As soon as the first hotel, the "Frontier", was completed, the ladies took over management of the eating establishment there.

In August 1868, railroad officials offered Mary Jane a job operating the services at Percy Station north of Elk Mountain. It was also the time when she married her second husband, William Stimpson, a merchant from England. They boarded the train to Cheyenne for the wedding. Percy Station was a loading point for ties from the Elk Mountain area. Mary Jane had Chinese employees in her kitchen, and she soon learned to speak Chinese and several Indian dialects. 

By 1873, business at the Percy Station had greatly decreased, so it closed. Mary Jane and William Stimpson purchased the old Overland Trail Stage Station at "The Crossings" on the Medicine Bow River, which thirty later became known the town of Elk Mountain. This location served as a way-point for early American settlers heading west along the Overland Trail and other routes.  There, Mary Jane operated a boarding house, toll bridge, supply store, and tavern. Local histories are full of stories about Indian fights, bandits trying to rob the store, and Mary Jane sitting on the bridge with a shotgun in order to "collect" the toll bridge charge from immigrants moving up the Overland Trail.

Relationship of Elk Mountain and Medicine Bow, both along Medicine Bow River -  courtesy of Google Maps

 

In 1874, a daughter the Stimpsons named Mary Alice was born. In 1876, four years after Mary Jane's mother’s death, William Stimpson also died. He had been growing progressively weaker, and it was suspected he had cancer. This forced the family to move to Carbon, where Mary Jane worked at a boarding house. The only record of his death is the listing in Mary Jane’s family Bible.

Not long after William Stimpson’s death, the Trabing Brothers, who already owned a store in Rock Creek along the Union Pacific Railroad line, which was located about twelve miles north of present day Rock River, decided to expand their mercantile empire by  purchasing the store at "The Crossings" from the widow, Mary Jane. More details about the Trabing Brothers businesses may be found in a post I wrote for another blog. Please CLICK HERE.

The summer after Custer's battle at Little Big Horn, the Bozeman trail re-opened. The Trabing Brothers decided to be the first to open a store in northern Wyoming and chose a site at Crazy Woman Creek.  August Trabing hired Mary Jane to be the store manager. 

 

Not Mary Jane, but, yes, women did drive ox teams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Jane drove two wagon loads of supplies with her fifteen-year-old son, Frank Morey-Stimpson, and five-year-old daughter, Mary Alice Stimpson, . Again, with no protection and traveling alone, Mary Jane headed to Fort Fetterman and on up the Bozeman Trail to the Trabing Trading Post Store on Crazy Woman Creek, arriving in good order while the store was still under construction in the fall of 1877.

While at Crazy Woman Creek, Mary Jane's daughter died of scarlet fever in 1878. She was probably buried somewhere near the old store site.

While working at the Trabing store at Crazy Woman Creek, Mary Jane was also robbed by a gang, which was later identified as the Big Nose George gang. This could have been around the same time as the attempted railroad derailment outside of Medicine Bow in August, 1878, which was thwarted by an observant section crew foreman.

Mary Jane also acted as the area doctor, housed Moreton Frewen, the Englishman who brought the first cattle to northern Wyoming, and dealt with freighters and stage coach drivers, including Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickock.

Mary Jane operated the store at Crazy Woman Creek for just over a year, before the Trabing Brothers moved the location to what would soon be the town of Buffalo.  In the 1880 census there are only five families in northern Wyoming who were not connected with the military. Among those five families was Mary Jane and her son, Frank Morey.

William Richardson, a coal miner in Carbon and a good friend of William Stimpson, received the news of Mary Jane’s daughter’s death. Richardson,was an immigrant coal miner from West Auckland, Durham, England. He rode north to Buffalo and brought Mary Jane back to Carbon. There they were married. Mary Jane then had three more children while she was between the ages of forty and forty-four: Thomas Darrow Richardson, Edward Richardson, and Willing Gay Richardson.

Eventually, the family moved back to Elk Mountain. Several incidences of Mary Jane’s life include fighting off three renegade Indians and killing one in hand-to-hand combat at the ranch, "engineering" the irrigation for the Medicine Bow River Valley, building a post office, and challenging a neighbor to a gunfight when he threatened the family.

A newspaper article states that "the first irrigation ditch was built out of the Medicine Bow River by (Mary Jane) Mrs. Richardson and is still known as the "Garden Ditch". She also owned a toll bridge, store, hotel and saloon at Medicine Bow Crossing Station, today known as the town of Elk Mountain."   We do not believe this date could be correct as she did not move to "the crossing" until after 1870. A more reliable date for the garden ditch at Elk Mountain would be 1878.  A quote from the same article, "From a reliable source it was learned that it was a fact that Buffalo Bill, for some reason or other was ejected from the hotel by Mrs Richardson."

Mary Jane Bloomer Morey Stimpson Richardson died at the age of sixty-nine on December 21, 1910 in Elk Mountain, Carbon County, Wyoming. Elk Mountain played a crucial role in supporting the coal mining and timber industries vital to the Union Pacific Railroad's success. Many families settled here, immigrating from Finland, Sweden, and other European countries, bringing with them a rich diversity of cultures and traditions. She was buried in Elk Mountain cemetery.

 

Lauren, Book 2 in the Rescue Me (Mail-order Brides) series, takes place several years after, some of these incidences. However, Mary Jane was still alive and active in that general region of Wyoming Territory during the timeframe of this book. The incident with Big Nose George robbery would have taken place at the same time as Lauren’s story. To read the book description and find the purchase options, please CLICK HERE.  

Mary Jane Bloomer Morey Stimpson Richardson was still in the region at the same time as my story, Ellie, from the Runaway Brides of the West series. To find the book description and purchase options, please CLICK HERE.

 

 

 

Sources:

http://genealogytrails.com/wyo/carbon/bio3.html

https://www.familysearch.org/service/records/storage/das-mem/patron/v2/TH-904-69401-62-33/dist.txt?ctx=ArtCtxPublic

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/142211768/mary-jane-richardson

https://www.wyomingcarboncounty.com/places-to-visit/elk-mountain

 

 

The Bloomer Women Who Walked to Wyoming Territory by Zina Abbott

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While researching Wyoming Territory history for my recent book, Lauren, I came across an account of two women who made an impact on early Wyoming history. I saved their story for Women’s History Month.

Mary Jane Bloomer was born in Mina, Chautauqua, New York in 1842. She was the daughter of Alice Willing-Bloomer. She was married three times.

She and her first husband, James Morey, moved to Galina, Illinois, prior to the American Civil War. One of her aunts lived there. She became a friend of the Grant family. When the Civil War came, James Morey served as an officer under U.S. Grant. For a short time, Mary Jane served as Grant’s personal secretary. During the war, her husband was shot in the head, but survived. His discharge papers stated he suffered a "brain hernia," which meant that his brains were hanging out of the hole in his head. He was admitted to an insane asylum in Washington D.C. where he later died. He was buried at Arlington Cemetery.
 
In 1867, with her husband totally disabled and unable to support her, Mary Jane abandoned him. She and her mother, who was also widowed during the Civil War, walked from New York to Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory, with an oxcart and Mary Jane's three-year-old son, Frank Morey, who was born in Ohio during the Civil War.
 
Both mother and daughter knew General Grant, General Rawlins, General Sheridan and other officers from the Civil War era. Since many also ended up being in charge of the Transcontinental Railroad construction, it is assumed they were offered work before leaving New York for Wyoming Territory. Still,  it was a heroic undertaking for two women to travel alone with a child that far into a frontier. Many white men there were rough and uncouth, and many hostile Native Americans, very unhappy that the stagecoach routes followed by the railroad crews disrupted their hunting grounds, would kill any white person they came across they considered an enemy.

The three arrived at Fort Laramie. The following spring, the two women worked on the railroad construction sites as cooks. They started from the newly formed town of Cheyenne west to Carbon, not far from present day Elk Mountain. (It is now gone, but, at the time, was a lively city due to its role of providing coal for the railroad.)

 In late 1868, Mary Jane married her second husband, William Stimpson, a merchant from England, in Cheyenne. They appeared on the 1870 census operating the Union Pacific Railroad Percy Station, Carbon County, Wyoming near Fort Halleck (north side of Elk Mountain) and Carbon. Her mother, Alice, was operating the nearby Dana Station.
 

Benton

In 1868 the next Station to the west near Fort Steel was called Benton. Benton was recorded in history as perhaps the worst of the worst "Hell on Wheels" towns along the Railroad Construction. There was no law enforcement of any kind in this short-lived town.  It was essentially three large brothels and several bars. It attracted every evil character known in the west with every kind of indecency you can imagine going on. Every weekend the town was filled with drunken railroad workers, miners, professional gamblers, swindlers, and cowboys engaging in hard drinking, gambling, open prostitution, fights, gun battles, murder etc. In only four months of existence, the graveyard at Benton interred over hundred dead, most of them due to shootings.

The residents of Percy Station, which included both Mary Jane Bloomer Stimpson and her mother, Alice Willing-Bloomer, got fed up with the murders and cleaning up after Benton Station. They literally gathered up a lynch mob of people mostly—from Percy and some friends from Carbon and Fort Halleck. Heavily armed, they traveled to Benton.

The operators of Benton found out that the mob was on the way so they quickly packed up and fled to the west down the tracks. Only one brothel operator stayed to protect his establishment. When the mob arrived the operator managed to shoot one of the lynch mob before he was killed. The mob then burned the entire town to the ground.

Freighters picking up supplies for railroad

In October of 1868, Alice Willing Bloomer traveled from Percy Station to Fort Halleck to pick up supplies. While on the trail, she witnessed a band of Indians attack a freight train of five men hauling ties to Percy Station. The men killed three of the men and two others managed to shoot their way into a ravine and escape toward Fort Halleck. The three dead freighters were the first three burials in the town of Carbon to the west.

Drawing of Fort Halleck north of Elk Mountain

The Indians drove the oxen into the lake and hamstrung them. They left the livestock in the water to bleed to death. They then took the mules and fled before soldiers arrived from Fort Halleck. This became known as the Bloody Lake Massacre. Bloody Lake, two-and-a-half acres, is now dried up most of the year. It is north of both Elk Mountain and the former Fort Halleck. This incident became known as the Bloody Lake Massacre.

The lake was given its name by John Sublette, a government scout turned construction worker turned rancher, was in the Percy area and would soon be responsible for the naming the lake. According to his obituary printed in December 1928, he was a participant in an “Indian uprising,” with a non-specified number of U.S. soldiers in October 1868. The soldiers didn’t fare too well, but Sublette survived. He named the lake because of the gore that discolored it that day.

Map courtesy of Google Maps

Alice Bloomer saved arrows from the site, which were passed down through the family. She became a primary source of information regarding what took place. The discrepancy between her description of freighters versus Mr. Sublette’s description of soldiers is probably due to the fact she viewed the scene from a distance. Frontier soldiers, unless they were part of a formal review, often did not wear regulation uniforms while performing other duties.

Alice died four years later on August 1, 1872. She was buried in a shallow grave surrounded by sandstone slabs. Her burial place is identified by descendants as “Turtle Rock” ridge, the location where she witnessed the battle between the Indians and the freighters. Based on her assumed line of travel and the locations of the former Fort Halleck and former Percy Station, I was unable to identify on the map a location the family identified as Turtle Rock. However, the family is working with the Bureau of Land Management to erect a historical marker at her gravesite.

There is more to Mary Jane Bloomer Morey Stimpson’s story—she was quite the entrepreneur—but I will save that for next month’s blog post.

 

Lauren, Book 2 in the Rescue Me (Mail-order Brides) series, takes place several years after these incidences. However, Mary Jane was still alive and active in that general region of Wyoming Territory during the timeframe of this book, which is available. To read the book description and find the purchase options, please CLICK HERE. 

  

 

Sources:

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2022/10/06/on-the-road-wyomings-bloody-lake-has-a-grim-history-and-likely-grim-fishing-too/

https://sites.rootsweb.com/~wylaratp/html/_ox_cart_trip.html

http://genealogytrails.com/wyo/carbon/bio3.html

https://www.familysearch.org/service/records/storage/das-mem/patron/v2/TH-904-69401-62-33/dist.txt?ctx=ArtCtxPublic

https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/territorial-empire-trabings-and-their-freight