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.

29 Palms: Arrival

Getting off the bus at Camp Wilson in 29 Palms is like going to the kitchen and putting your head into the oven.  It’s that hot.  Immediately my nose shrank due to the lack of humidity.  This is the Mojave Desert where Patton practiced with his tanks before the war.  In many areas, supposedly off limits to everyone, is ordnance sticking out of the sand – some unexploded.  We had arrived from Ontario, California from Kansas City’s Hq. Co. 24th Marines for CAX78.  I remember going down Highway 62 into Yucca Valley aptly named and passing the exotic town of Joshua Tree.  I thought, “How bad could it be?” as we pulled in to the main base.  I’d been stationed at Ft. Hauchuca, Arizona for intelligence training two years before and that wasn’t so bad: There were patches of snow still in the mountains overlooking the desert in February.  There were no school dorms or barracks for us at 29 Palms.  Of course active duty types hate reservists so the Standard Operating Procedure is to immediately bus them to Camp Wilson which at that time was a tent city on the north side of the base.

I’ve recently heard on TV that the highest recorded temperature in the United States was 138 degrees in some desert.  In our tents one afternoon our corpsmen came out and measured the surface temperature (August) at 144 degrees.  It was so hot that a flock of Roadrunners that stumbled into our camp, lined up on the narrow shadow of a telephone pole.  The next photo is what it looks like during a sandstorm.  You hunker down and check the tent ropes.  Our floor was sand.  Nothing was pre-fab.  Cots were wooden because the metal ones always got too hot.  After a week someone hauled in a rubber water bladder for showers and it’s hard taking a shower in a wooden pallet.  Girls were being added to USMC combat units and they always showered first.  There was a lot of volunteering for shower tent guard duty all of a sudden.  Across from our tent was the Colonel’s big water bag hanging on a tripod.  One rebel among us soaked his cover in the sacred object before he starched it (the cover).  We bought our little ones at the Exchange.  They were canvas with a cork stopper and looked like a purse.

The last photo is dawn at 29 Palms shortly before another sand storm coming in from the East.  In the distance are the mountains above the valley where the exercise was going to take place.  Closer are the cement pads supporting water pipes for shaving and washing.   The little white shacks were used for another purpose.  I was always amazed at how long some Marines would stay in them to avoid a work detail (officers too).  The trick is to bring a big cigar.  Note the M-60 tank with its turret turned backwards moving north.  It was part of the positioning up the valleys for that particular battalion’s exercise the next day.  I really mean “all” the unit’s equipment including 155mm SP howitzers, jeeps, trucks, and even Bradleys that were new at the time.  Bradleys had little respect because they were lightly armored and were yet to be proven.  We had Israeli advisers.