George Washington Cherry

The Central Plains were not settled by a haphazard onslaught of land hungry pioneers.  The real ones were smart enough to follow the paths of least resistance up the Missouri River and adjacent trails to Independence and Kansas City using St. Louis as the ultimate source of supply.  In turn Kansas City became the hub which fed the Oregon Trail and the 800 mile long Santa Fe Trail. Westport, the beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, received supplies from Kansas City a few miles away.

The relevance of George, my great grandfather, is that he was the first Cherry to break from the Cumberland region, head west across the Mississippi River with the Independence Wagon Train, and found the Missouri Cherrys.  After 1850, he went west to California and became a gold miner in Jacksonville, Oregon.  George was a freighter across the Plains from Ft. Leavenworth to all government posts including those of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.  On November 1, 1855, he enlisted in the Oregon Mounted Volunteers in D Co. commanded by Captain Miles F. Alcorn and led by Colonel Robert Williams of the 9th Regiment.  At the time of enlistment, he was 5 ft. 11 inches tall, had a light complexion, blue eyes, black hair, and weighed 125 pounds.  He was discharged on May 28th 1856.

Shortly after this, he became a “filibuster” under General Billy Walker in Nicaragua where two hundred army soldiers of fortune fought against 20,000 Nicaraguans for control of that Central American country.  They succeeded for about a year until disease and starvation drove them out.  In November, 1857 George enlisted in the Utah Volunteer Battalion for the Mormon-Indian expedition.  The two stories I heard in my youth about George and the Indians happened here.  He scalped an Indian and left him for dead.  At a trading post some years later that same Indian came up to him and said; “You scalped me!”  George was supposed to have used a hollow reed in the water to hide from the Indians.  On December 12, 1857, he was stationed at Camp Scott, Utah Territory and became Captain of C Co. just three months after the Mountain Meadows Massacre.  He was discharged September 14, 1858 after walking 1200 miles back to Ft.  Leavenworth.  Prior to Kansas and Missouri, George had lived “3 years in Differnt (sic)Places in Oregon and Caliaforne (sic) and Utah” (sic).  After that, he lived “11 years in Kansas and 33 years in Mo.”

He then returned to Kentucky and married Sarah Parrish on December 12, 1858 in Barren County.  They packed up and went to Linn Co. Kansas for seven years.  This was during the time after the Kansas Nebraska Bill of 1854 which admitted Kansas as a free state.  Settlers both slave and free, were encouraged to immigrant there to tip the balance in favor of their particular political persuasion.  “Bleeding Kansas” was not a good place to be.  The newlyweds had no sooner got to Kansas than the severe drought of 1859-1860 happened.  When my grandfather, Isaac Anderson Cherry was born to George and Sarah in Olathe, Kansas April 15, 1861, the War Between the States began.