Wyoming Land Patents and the Spanish Flu
Charles Frederick Thompson, Sr
Since moving to Utah 18 months ago, I have wanted to visit the cemetery in Evanston, Wyoming. The delay was mostly the result of the fact that its a 2 hour drive away, and I would need to dedicate a Saturday to the trip. Saturdays can be easy for other activities to take priority. It took the dreariness of social distancing and COVID-19 to push the trip to Wyoming to the top of the list. There are interesting connections with the current pandemic and the trip to Wyoming. The Evanston City Cemetery is where my great-grandfather, Charles Frederick Thompson (known as “Fred”) was buried, dying a short time after he became ill with the Spanish Flu in 1918.
The Thompson family was living near Chester, Idaho for the first decade of the 1900’s when Fred's wife Sarah Marsh Thompson wanted to be closer to her family in Wyoming. Due to the difficulties of travel at the time, Sarah had only seen her parents and siblings a few times in more than 10 years since moving to Idaho. In the winter of 1915, Fred went to see about land in Wyoming. Because of the snow, he was unable to see the quality of the land, but he determined to homestead in the area near his extended family. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided 320 acres of land to anyone, provided they built a dwelling, and cultivated the land for five years.
Bureau of Land Management website for searching land patent records
I wanted to connect with these ancestors, so rather than enjoy a leisurely drive along I-80 from Salt Lake to the Evanston Cemetery, I decided to subject my family to a back-roads trip past my great-grandfather’s homestead. The Bureau of Land Management’s General Land Office has a wonderful website that allowed me to to search the location of Charles Frederick Thompson’s homestead, as well as the adjacent homestead of his father-in-law James William Marsh.
To see the land 100 years later was an education. My grandfather always referred to it as “dryland farming”, but I never realized just how dry it was. While creek beds ran through the property as we drove the area, they were dry, with no water to be seen. And I wondered what the family would have done for water for themselves and their livestock, let alone their gardens. Though the University of Wyoming Extension claims success in dryland farming with a modern-day rotation of wheat, corn and sunflower.
Near the 320 acre homestead of James Marsh near Yellow Creek in Southwestern Wyoming
After scaring my family for an hour with gravel roads and a lack of cell phone reception, we traveled the remaining distance to the Evanston City Cemetery. It took some time for us to find the headstones. I was not able to find a plot map of the Evanston City Cemetery online, nor at the cemetery itself. So despite having precise locations, we had to find the stones by using the “spread-out-and-search” method. And our youngest daughter won the prize of discovery with her sharp eyes and attention to detail.
Headstone of Charles Frederick Thompson and Sarah Amelia Marsh in the Evanston, Wyoming City Cemetery
As the Marshes and Thompsons lived in adjacent homesteads in life, they were also buried in nearby gravesites in the cemetery. James Marsh and his wife Charlotte Amelia Peck, and Charles Frederick Thompson and his wife Sarah Amelia Marsh are all buried near each other in the older public section of the city cemetery. The two men had died within a month of each other. The 64 year old father-in-law, James Marsh had been ill for months. Journals and letters indicated that he had developed tuberculosis, and during the whole of the summer of 1918, he wasn’t expected to live. Yet James outlived his son-in-law by a month. Charles Frederick Thompson was infected with the Spanish flu in October of 1918, and died within hours. According to his son, it was 23 hours, the Wyoming Times obituary reported it as 30. Regardless, the speed of the illness must have shocked the family, as 40 year old Fred left behind a wife and seven young children.
Near the homestead of Charles Frederick Thompson off Yellow Creek in Southwestern Wyoming
Both men never saw the land patents registered for the homesteads they worked. Sarah Marsh Thompson registered her family’s land patent in 1919, the year following her husband’s death. James Marsh’s land patent was registered to “The heirs of James Marsh” in 1921.
Headstone of James William Marsh and Charlotte Amelia Peck in the Evanston, WY City Cemetery
As 2020 mirrors some aspects of 1918 with its public health concerns, it has provided a wonderful opportunity to learn and connect with ancestors and the lives they lived. Much can be done online through wonderful resources, and can then be supplemented with an enjoyable “boots-on-the-ground” experience on the gravel backroads of Wyoming.