The following from a kind reader of this site, Diane B Sun April 17, 2022 :
Just as a small follow up to the Forsythe story, in about 1892 John Forsythe moved his family from White Oaks to an area near Prescott Arizona. Looks like Dave Wells moved his family from White Oaks to Jerome AZ in about 1890 (I think it was 1888). He had 10 kids and they almost starved (see Elizabeth Scholey’s story in Family Search). They were the first of the Wells family to move there. There he continued mining and he and Susannah “Jane” had two more children; Samuel Wells Forsythe in 1894 and Melvin Frederick Forsythe in 1902. Susannah “Jane” died in 1904 at age 37, leaving John responsible for raising his remaining children by himself. Instead of remarrying as most men did back then, John soon arranged for his older daughters to be married off and his older sons to become independent and by 1907, John left his family behind and moved to Oregon to pan for gold. His youngest son, Melvin was 5 years old when John left Arizona, and was raised by his older married sisters, each taking a turn keeping him. John did not see his son again until 8 years later when Melvin was 13 years old. John never did strike it big, and in 1925 he died in San Diego Ca, while living with his daughter Rosa Forsythe Eshom and her husband Oscar. It’s a sad story of hard times, tragic loss and unfulfilled dreams. I’m glad to finally be able to know more about them.
John Forsythe married Sam Wells’ sister Jane (Jennie) Wells when he was 26 and she was 14. They were my great grandparents. John was friends with Sheriff Pat Garrett, who had killed Billy the Kid near White Oaks in 1881. New Mexico was still partly “wild west” but things were getting more civilized.
My mother remembered John’s brother, “Uncle Bob” Forsythe, who, as written below, was tried and acquitted in the 1890s for killing his brother in law. Mom had never heard the story until I was told about by distant cousin Iginio Fitzpatrick. In his later years Bob and his wife lived in Los Angeles and during WWII Mom and her husband Ed Slaughter would occasionally visit her uncle. She said he was always very nice to her. I guess he had settled with the one family member he didn’t like.
Sam Wells, junior, published an account in a Texas Pioneer magazine in the 1920s of his riding with the US Cavalry into Mexico against Indian raiders in the 1870s from Fort Clark. This event was later made into the highly fictionalized 1950 John Wayne film “Rio Grande.” Sam would have been about 15 and went along as a civilian scout.
GOLD MINING BOOMTOWN
by Roberta Key Haldane 2012
SAMUEL AND MARTHA FRANCES WELLS Not of the “White Oaks 400” and Proud of It
If ever there was an American story of the Old West on the verge of changing into the New West, it is that of the pioneering Wells family of White Oaks. Samuel “Sam” Wells was born in the midst of the Civil War on April 12, 1863, in Gainesville, Texas, north of Fort Worth and a scant seven miles from the border of Indian Territory. His parents hailed from Illinois. The family moved to southwest Texas sometime in the early 1870s. Martha Frances Forsythe, Sam’s future wife of Irish extraction, was born the eighth of thirteen children in 1868 or 1869 in Belfast, Ireland. Four of her siblings would eventually sail across the ocean and migrate cross-country to White Oaks.
John, the first of the Forsythes to arrive in the Oaks, came to the United States some time before 1880 as the family’s advance emissary; however, in his application for U.S. citizenship dated October 20, 1886, John swore that he had lived in the United States only for “at least five years.” He appears in the June 1880 census of White Oaks as a young man of twenty-three years along with a fourteen-year-old wife, Jane—who happened to be Sam Wells’s sister. According to the 1880 census, the Wells and Forsythe families lived in the same or adjoining households. The Wells household at that time consisted of seventeen-year-old Samuel, an older sister, and Sam’s fifty-year-old mother.
A Witness of Indian Raids and Terror in Texas
Sam grew up in wild country near the head of the Nueces River in Uvalde County, Texas. Uvalde County lies in southwest Texas roughly one hundred miles west of San Antonio. The Wells were one of some twenty families who had settled in that part of Texas. In those days, Comanche, Apache, and Kiowa Indians roamed the Southwest following the seasonal migrations of the buffalo that were at the center of their existence. The Native Americans resented any encroachment into their ancestral lands as well as the wholesale slaughter of their food sources and tried every means to prevent the newcomers from staying. They attacked isolated settlements of the whites seemingly at will.
Only a two-company post at Fort Clark, thirty miles southwest of the Wells place, afforded meager assistance in helping the settlers ward off Indian raids. Usually the Indians swooped onto the settlers’ farms by the light of the moon. They stole horses, shot the work oxen, and sometimes killed everyone they could find. Under cover of darkness, they would hide nearby, then try to slip up silently and set the houses afire. The Wells family kept some fifty “bear” dogs around the place to provide an early warning system in case of attack. The settlers had to be watchful every minute if they hoped to stay alive. Often they would hear of the massacre of one of their neighbors. If their own men or boys had to be a few miles from home, those left behind would be uneasy until the return of their loved ones. But the sheer beauty of the country that had drawn the settlers to Nueces country in the first place held them there.
In his memoirs, Sam recalled, “we could sit on the porch and see a herd of deer grazing on the hill most any time of the day. Often we would have to shoo the wild turkeys out of our cornfield. With a light wind we would have to keep our hats on to keep the pecans from falling on our heads. The wild turkeys would roost in the trees over our house. We could hear that panther scream in nearly any direction. Any one that never herd a panther scream cannot imagine the blood-curdling noise they can make. They—the best I can describe it is . . . say if a bear or a panther had a young girl down and was tearing her to pieces limb from limb. One could stand on the banks of the river running down near the house and count dozens of fish in all sizes, from 1 pound to 30 pounds.”
(Note – I have deleted a fairly grisly account that follows of an Indian raid on white settlers that happened near the Wells ranch. Graphic descriptions of torture and death.)
On to a New Home at White Oaks Spring
It is not known what prompted the Wellses to leave their Nueces home for White Oaks in New Mexico Territory, but Sam Wells arrived at the Oaks before June 1880 with his mother and two sisters.9 With households so near, it was inevitable that the Wells and Forsythe youngsters would notice each other. John Forsythe married Sam Wells’s sister Jane in 1880. Soon after arriving, Sam staked out a homestead in a choice valley two and a half miles southeast of town that included a Southwest commodity more precious than gold: water. White Oaks Spring, and its surrounding white oak trees, gave the town of White Oaks its name. That spring and the many nearby oak, juniper, cedar, and piñon trees made the Wells homestead a place of great beauty, enhanced by the nearby Patos and Carrizo Mountains.
In 1888 Sam further cemented the Forsythe-Wells connection by marrying Martha Frances Forsythe when he was twenty-five years old and she was twenty. Sam and his wife would have seven children.The Only Family Pond The first order of business for Sam on his homestead was to build a comfortable log house. Next came the planting of gardens and an orchard, which was irrigated by White Oaks Spring.
Because water in the area was scarce, Sam also sold the water from the spring to the miners. Sam dug a pond that was fifteen feet deep in the middle and kept it filled with spring water. The large carp with which he stocked the pond were difficult to catch, but when they swam to the edge where plants grew, Sam would shoot them. Because water from the spring was plentiful, Sam decided to build an icehouse, covering the floor with several inches of sawdust obtained from a local sawmill.
Every winter the family chopped ice in six-to-seven-inch-thick blocks from the pond, stored it in the icehouse, then sold it to the townspeople in summer. It was daughter Edith’s job to float the blocks of ice to a dock, where they were hefted by large tongs into the icehouse. Southern Baptists immersed their converts in that same pond. Twenty-five people were baptized one Sunday. All of them backslid and had to be baptized again when a new minister came to town. The icy cold water required a wash boiler constantly full of hot coffee to revive the baptized converts while they changed from wet clothes to dry in a small room of the icehouse.
When the gold at White Oaks played out, valuable tungsten was discovered. A New York company bought the mine and set up headquarters in the Hewitt Building. The wife of the mine owner told Martha Frances that because it was God who had given the Wellses water, she should let the people from New York have it for free. Martha Frances replied that since God had given the New Yorkers their tungsten, they should exchange some of it for the water.
Over the years, as the family grew, Sam would build a second log house and, finally, a large adobe house. Daily Life To help feed the family, Sam would hunt the plentiful wild turkey for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holidays. He would find a turkey roost and wait until dark to shoot. He also killed deer, and venison hung in the meat house year-round. Sam cut off strips of venison, salted them, and hung the strips on a line to make jerky. Daughter Edith kept a cowchip-stoked fire burning under the meat to cure it; beef was also jerked in this manner. In partnership with a man named George Treat who owned the local meat market, Sam bought, butchered, and delivered meat to the shop. The Wells also milked a few cows. Again, it fell to Edith to drive her horse and buggy to town to deliver milk and cream, ice, and vegetables to townspeople.
For a barter worth $500, Martha Frances acquired the first piano to arrive in White Oaks. Urbain Ozanne, proprietor of the Ozanne Hotel, had run up his meat bill and could not pay, so Martha Frances, who loved music and dancing, took his piano in exchange. Thereafter, the Wells house was filled with music.14 As young marrieds, Sam and Martha Frances regularly drove to Las Vegas for supplies in a light covered wagon. The round-trip, including a stay for reprovisioning, took more than a month. Once they also drove south to El Paso, Texas, in the wagon. Martha Frances had her own little saddle horse called Dunny.
As a pastime, she rode her horse with several other White Oaks women, always sidesaddle as befitted proper ladies. All the women wore long riding habits and big hats tied on by long veils or scarves. Besides horses, the family raised cattle. Their first herd of cattle carried the KV brand. After this herd was sold to the Bar W Ranch, the replacement herd was branded FAW. Because cash was chronically scarce, Sam sometimes worked in the coal mine a short distance from his house. He had a blind horse that he rode to work; the miners used that same horse to bring cars of coal to the surface from the mine. Like many others, Sam was deafened in a mine explosion, making communication with him quite difficult. And like most other men in White Oaks, he always prospected off and on for gold, iron, and other minerals.
According to the memoirs of daughter Edith, there were two “classes” of people in White Oaks: the first—bankers, grocery store owners and mercantilists, bookkeepers, lawyers, ranchers, mine owners, and sheepmen—called themselves the “400” and lived in large, lovely homes on the east side of town. The other class was made up of those like the Wells family, but Martha Frances never considered herself inferior, telling her children that true aristocrats could live on good terms with anyone. The Baptists and Congregationalists shared the same church for their services. Eventually, the Baptists met in a hall in the Hewitt building while the Congregationalists built a new church. The Wellses were Congregationalists, and Sam donated the first one hundred dollars to build their church.
The Later Years
The Wells children grew up and scattered. Daughter Lina Cherrille married William Coe, son of George Coe of Glencoe. Edith and Cherrille became schoolteachers like their mother. After high school, Edith attended Normal College in Las Vegas, New Mexico, before teaching at San Patricio, White Oaks, Glencoe, Capitán, and Encinoso. She married Clarence Palmer of Texas Park in 1915 and moved to Oklahoma. Cherrille also taught in the White Oaks Schoolhouse for a time. Sam made a brief foray into politics; he ran for Lincoln County Commissioner as a Republican. Along the way, Sam and Martha Frances divorced (nobody knows why, and divorce was unusual for those days) but eventually got back together and remarried.17 With the passage of the years, Martha Frances began traveling to California to spend the winters with one or another of her daughters; Sam stayed in White Oaks year-round. Martha Frances died in 1938 at daughter Cherrille’s house in Tularosa. Found by her daughter and granddaughter on the front-room couch, she had died peacefully while combing and arranging her long hair, which she always wore in a pompadour. Sam followed on December 13, 1941. Both are buried in Cedarvale Cemetery in White Oaks.
Robert Forsythe Murders George Fitzpatrick
On May 3, 1894, Martha Frances’s youngest brother, Robert, furnished the family some unwelcome notoriety by gunning down his brother-in-law George Fitzpatrick on a road outside White Oaks.18 Robert’s accomplice was Oliver Peaker. The exact motive for the killing is unclear but seems to have centered on Fitzpatrick’s wife, Elizabeth Forsythe (another of Martha Frances’s sisters), and on Fitzpatrick’s decision to move his new family to a ranch in Mexico owned by his brother.
The Forsythes hired for Robert the very able and well-known defense attorney Col. George Prichard. The case was prosecuted by district attorney George B. Barber. In keeping with the code of the times—that a man always took care of his own affairs—the jury found Robert not guilty on April 16, 1897. In a strange twist, the widow Elizabeth Fitzpatrick afterward married Oliver Peaker, codefendant in the murder of her husband. Oliver and Elizabeth eventually left White Oaks to live in England.
| Name: | John Forsythe | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Age: | 23 | |||||||||
| Birth Date: | Abt 1857 | |||||||||
| Birthplace: | Ireland | |||||||||
| Home in 1880: | White Oaks, Lincoln, New Mexico, USA | |||||||||
| Dwelling Number: | 8 | |||||||||
| Race: | White | |||||||||
| Gender: | Male | |||||||||
| Relation to Head of House: | Self (Head) | |||||||||
| Marital Status: | Married | |||||||||
| Spouse’s Name: | Jane Forsythe | |||||||||
| Father’s Birthplace: | Ireland | |||||||||
| Mother’s Birthplace: | Ireland | |||||||||
| Occupation: | Mining | |||||||||
|
||||||||||
John Robert Forsythe
| BIRTH | |
|---|---|
| DEATH | 1 Jan 1925 (aged 70)
Imperial Beach, San Diego County, California, USA
|
| BURIAL | Burial Details Unknown |
Newspaper Clippings
Lincoln County Marriage
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Lincoln County Ownership
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Results for your Search by Grantee: FORSYTHE JOHN For official copies of documents, please visit the County office. Type Grantee Rec Book Page # Filed Grantor Instrument Description Doc# WD FORSYTHE JOHN 1 D 304 2 18830416 WELLS SAMUEL 18821127 188310304 1 WELLS SUSANNA 188310304 Track Unit Block 13 Lot 5 Parcel PART WHITE OAKS O P 188310304 WD FORSYTHE JOHN 1 G 199 3 18851113 WELLS SAMUEL 18850908 188510199 1 WELLS SUSANNA 188510199 Section 32 Township 06S Range 13E PART 188510199 WD FORSYTHE JOHN 1 G 743 2 18860915 WELLS SAMUEL SR 18860913 188610743 1 WELLS SUSANNA 188610743 Section 32 Township 06S Range 13E SE/4 NW/4 188610743 PATENT FORSYTHE JOHN 1 DP 409 1 18930721 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 18920630 HOMESTEAD CERTIFICATE NO 68 189310409
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Family Members
Spouse
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Susannah Jane Wells Forsythe
1866–1904
Children
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Edith Ella Forsyth
unknown–1886
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Eliza Jane Forsythe Mayhew
1882–1962
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Rosa Susannah Forsythe Eshom
1885–1969
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Birdie Forsythe Miskimon
1887–1910
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David Isaac Forsythe
1890–1971
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Emma Winonna Forsythe Grigg
1892–1974
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Samuel Wells Forsythe
1895–1922
From a direct descendent below, 4-20-2022
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Hi Steve,
This is what I used as a reference to the date of the marriage between 14 year old Susannah Jane Wells and 26 year old John Robert Forsythe in 1880. According to this document, they were married in Uvalde County, Texas on March 8, 1880. It appears that John quickly moved his young bride and her mother, sister and brother to White Oaks that same year. John’s date of birth seems to be a bit fuzzy, but this is what I have in my Family Tree.
Best,
Diane B
1880 White Oaks census
John Forsythe b 1857 age 23
Married
Miner
Ireland
Jane b 1866 age 14 tx no kids