If you sit back by a night fire and watch the smoke drift up toward the big dark, it’s easy to think an outfit just materializes out of thin air. But any old cowboy who’s ever pointed a herd north knows every trail-tested rider carries a long backtrail—a line of tracks stretching back through dust, timber, and high passes, laid down by folks who rode the country before ‘em.
My grandmother, Lydia Corinna Brown Bailey, was the living gateway to two of the grittiest, most enduring strains of blood that ever crossed this continent. On one side, she carried the grit of Pilgrim stock that waded ashore at Plymouth Rock when America was nothing but timber and howling wilderness. On the other, she bore the wild, free spirit of French-Canadian voyageurs whose paddles beat the lakes and rivers of New France long before the stars and stripes were ever stitched together.
This is the long trail of Lydia’s people—a fourteen-generation march that started on the salt deck of the Mayflower, crossed the timbered hills of New England, swung through the fire of the Revolution and the War of 1812, rode the iron and wagon ruts into Montana’s Big Sky, and didn’t rein in until the dust settled against the Pacific waves of Southern California.
THE FOURTEEN-GENERATION TRAIL
[1620] MAYFLOWER LANDING ── William White & Peregrine White
│ (Plymouth Colony & Rhode Island Shores)
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[1776] LIBERTY & FIRE ── Solomon Brown (Drummer Boy)
& Dr. Caleb Sweet
│ (Saratoga, New York & The Continental Line)
▼
[1812] SABERS & PADDLES ── Samuel R. Brown (Light Dragoon)
│ & Lucy Passino
(Granddaughter of La Prairie Voyageurs)
▼
[1890] BIG SKY FRONTIER ── John Galloway Brown
& Abraham Lincoln Brown
│ (Flathead Valley, Creston, Montana)
▼
[1912] HOMESTEADS & DUST ── Lydia Corinna Brown
& Franklin Jackson Bailey
│ (Dryland Claims, Idaho Wheat, & LA Sunset)
▼
[1942] PACIFIC TERMINUS ── Jerry Head-England ("Drifting Cowboy")
PART I: Coming to America and Early Settlement (Massachusetts to Rhode Island)
To find the first blazes on Lydia’s trail, you have to turn the backtrail all the way to November 1620, when a battered three-masted square-rigger named the Mayflower rode the cold Atlantic swells into Cape Cod Bay.
Among that grim, salt-crusted company were William White (GEN 1) and his wife, Susanna Jackson White. They were English Puritans who had traded the soft green pastures of home for a harsh wilderness where a man either stood tall or got buried in the leaf mold. Before the ship even dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, while riding at shelter in the lee of the Cape, Susanna brought a son into the world. They named him Peregrine White (GEN 2)—the first English child born to the Pilgrims in New England.
Old William White didn’t live to see the timber cleared; the first brutal winter took him in February 1621 along with half the colony. But young Peregrine grew up tough as a scrub oak. He married Sarah Bassett, took up land in Marshfield, and lived out a long, rugged life that stretched all the way into the next century, dying in 1704.
GENEALOGY: THE PILGRIM ANCHOR
William White (1587–1621) ── m. ── Susanna Jackson (1593–1680)
[Mayflower Passenger] [Mayflower Passenger] │
Peregrine White (1620–1704) ── m. ── Sarah Bassett (1630–1711)
[1st English Child Born in NE] │
Sylvanus White (1645–1688) ── m. ── Deborah Church (1656–1690) │
William White (1683–1780) ── m. ── Elizabeth Cadman (1685–1768) │
Sarah White (1709–1795) ── m. ── John Brown (1705–1773)
[GEN 5: The White-Brown Union, Little Compton, Rhode Island]
From Peregrine, the line swung down through Sylvanus White (GEN 3) and William White (GEN 4), who pushed south into Dartmouth, Massachusetts. They were stockman and timber-clearers, building stone fences and rough-cut cabins along the coastal inlets.
By the fifth generation, the bloodline hooked up with the Brown outfit when Sarah White (GEN 5) married John Brown of Little Compton, Rhode Island. Their son, John Brown Jr. (GEN 6), married Lydia Barker—the woman for whom our Lydia Corinna was named generations later. They were Rhode Island coastal folks, working the gray water and rocky soil, but the country was getting crowded, and a unrest was stirring across the Thirteen Colonies that would soon set the whole frontier ablaze.
PART II: Freedom From Tyranny & On to New York
When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, the Brown outfit didn't sit on the fence. Every man who could carry a musket or beat a drum turned out to face the Redcoats.
Our 4th great-grandfather, Solomon Brown (GEN 7), was just a skinny twelve-year-old kid in Rhode Island when the war flared up. He was too young to pack a heavy flintlock, so he slung a brass-hooped snare drum over his shoulder and stepped into Fish’s Regiment of Rhode Island Militia as a Drummer Boy. He beat the assembly and the march through the dust and smoke of the northern campaigns, helping keep the line steady when British lead was clipping the brush around 'em.
REVOLUTIONARY WAR & 1812 LINEAGE
Dr. Caleb G. Sweet (1732–1831) Solomon Brown (c.1765–1839) [Continental Army Surgeon] [Militia Drummer Boy, Age 12] │
│
Mary Sweet (c.1770–1846) ────────── m. ──────────┘
│
Samuel R. Brown (1798–1877) ── m. ── Maria Weeks (1810–1890)
[Light Dragoon, War of 1812] [D/o Simon Weeks, Rev. War Vet]
Solomon married Mary Sweet, a woman whose own heritage was steeped in Continental blood. Her father, Dr. Caleb G. Sweet, served as a surgeon in Washington's Continental Army, patching up torn men from Valley Forge to Yorktown, eventually becoming an original member of the prestigious Society of the Cincinnati.
After the Redcoats were whipped, Solomon and Mary joined the post-war western drift, trailing out of Rhode Island into Saratoga County, New York, clearing timber around Galway and Ballston Spa.
That military fire didn't cool down in the next generation. When the Crown came back for a second round in the War of 1812, Solomon’s son, Samuel R. Brown (GEN 8), volunteered for the cavalry. Samuel swung a saber in Lt. Colonel Ball’s Squadron of Light Dragoons, riding leather and iron along the northern border to keep British raiders from crossing the line.
Samuel married Maria Weeks, whose father, Simon Weeks, had also served in the Revolution. By the 1830s, Samuel and Maria had settled in Jefferson County, New York, right up near the St. Lawrence River—the very place where their New England Yankee line was about to cross paths with a wild, river-running French heritage.
PART III: The Union Preserved & Western Expansion
Up along the St. Lawrence, the Anglo-American frontier met the French-Canadian fur trade. It was here that John Galloway Brown (GEN 9) met a young woman named Lucy Pinsonneau (Passino).
Lucy wasn't built from Pilgrim timber; her people were the voyageurs of La Prairie de la Madeleine. Her grandfathers were men like Gabriel Pinsonneau and Jean-Baptiste Meunier dit Lagacé, legendary French-Canadian rivermen who had paddled 36-foot birchbark freight canoes from the St. Lawrence to the far reaches of Lake Superior and the Mississippi, singing trade songs as they drove their blades through the dark water.
THE VOYAUGER & FRONTIER MERGER
Gabriel Passino (1803–1877) Marie Emélie Meunier (1808–1883)
[Son of La Prairie Voyageurs] [Daughter of Fur Trade Stock]
│ │
└───────────────┬─────────────┘
John Galloway Brown ──── m. ─── Lucy Passino (1836–1917)
[Eyesight Kept Him │ [Granddaughter of Voyageurs]
from Civil War] │
▼
Abraham Lincoln Brown (1864–1948) ── m. ── Geneva "Neva" Plympton (1870–1939) [Born at War's End in NY] [D/o Charles H. Plympton, 97th Ohio Vol., Union Vet]
When the Civil War erupted in 1861, John Galloway Brown couldn't take up a rifle for the Union due to severe crossed eyes that ruined his marksmanship. But he caught a heavy case of Western fever instead. He took Lucy and their young family on a wild, decade-long migration path that read like a conductor's call on a westbound train: New York to Wisconsin, back to New York, out to Iowa, back to New York, and finally, in the 1880s, all the way to the end of the line in Creston, Flathead County, Montana.
Their son, Abraham Lincoln Brown (GEN 10)—born in November 1864 right as his presidential namesake was winning re-election—grew up riding this western drift. Out in Montana’s Big Sky country, Abe Brown married Geneva "Neva" Plympton.
Neva brought another deep layer of Union sacrifice into the family. Her father, Charles Henry Plympton, had enlisted at age sixteen in Company K of the 97th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He’d fought through the hellfires of Perryville, Missionary Ridge, and the bloody Atlanta Campaign before mustering out in 1865 to push west.
PART IV: Homesteading in Montana & Farming in Idaho
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Lydia Corrine Brown 1912, Kalispell, Montana On September 13, 1891, out in Clay County, Iowa—while Abe and Neva were temporarily trailing between New York and the northern Rockies—a baby girl was born. They named her Lydia Corinna Brown (GEN 11). THE MONTANA HOMESTEAD UNION David Solomon Bailey (1837–1915) [3rd Iowa Cavalry, Union Vet, Lost Leg at Brice's Crossroads] │ Franklin Jackson Bailey (1886–1968) ── m. ── Lydia Corinna Brown (1891–1971) [Nebraska Soddy-Born Homesteader] [Subject: Gateway Ancestor] │ Velma Veda Bailey (1914–2004) [GEN 12: Born in Kalispell, MT] Lydia grew up with the scent of pine, sage, and woodsmoke in the Flathead Valley of Montana. She was a true daughter of the frontier—handy with a team, sharp-minded, and built with the quiet grace and iron spine of her voyageur and Pilgrim grandmothers.  Lydia, Opel and Frank Bailey, on their Kalispell, Montana stump ranch, c 1913 Out in the Flathead country, Lydia met a dryland homesteader named Franklin Jackson Bailey. Frank was a tough-grained outfit himself, born in a Nebraska sod house in 1886. His own grandfather had been a Union cavalryman in the 3rd Iowa Cavalry who had his leg taken off by a Confederate shell at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads in 1864. Frank had come up to Flathead County in 1912 to file on a dryland homestead claim near Kalispell. In 1914, Lydia gave birth to their daughter, Velma Veda Bailey (GEN 12)—my mother, and the last child born on that northern frontier line.  Velma and Vernon Bailey, Kalispell, MT, c. 1918 PART V: The Great Depression, Illness, & Sunset on the Pacific By 1918, the northern plains turned brutal. Drought hit the Flathead, the wind stripped the topsoil, and their stump ranch collapsed into economic depression years before the rest of the country felt the squeeze. Frank Bailey hitched his team of heavy Belgian draft horses to a canvas-topped wagon, loaded Lydia, young Velma, and their meager gear, and headed back across the high passes. They made a grueling 300-mile trek through the timbered mountains down to Kendrick, Idaho, trying their hand at wheat farming. By the late 1920s, they pushed further down to the Lewiston Orchards. Then the Great Depression hit like a blizzard in November. The crops brought nothing, the banks locked their doors, and Frank was wiped clean out. THE FINAL TRANSCONTINENTAL MARCH [1912] Kalispell, Montana ── Stump Ranch Homestead Claim Filed │ [1918] Kendrick, Idaho ── 300-Mile Wagon Trek Across Mountains │ [1928] Lewiston, Idaho ── Wheat Farming & Apple Orchards │ [1935] Los Angeles, CA ── Dust Bowl Refuge & Pacific Sunset │ [1942] Santa Monica, CA ── Birth of Jerry Head-England ("Drifting Cowboy") With nothing left but their grit, Frank and Lydia made the final decision that completed a three-century transcontinental march. In the mid-1930s, they loaded up their old rig and headed south, trailing down through the dust of the Southwest all the way to Southern California, settling in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles. When I was born in 1942—the grandson they called the Drifting Cowboy (GEN 13)—the long backtrail that had started on the wooden deck of the Mayflower in 1620 had finally reached the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. Michael, below, makes generation 14.  Lydia and great-grandson Michael, Los Angeles 1968 Lydia Corinna Brown Bailey lived out her final sunset years in Granada Hills, California, passing away on Christmas Day in 1971. She didn't leave behind chestfuls of gold or sprawling ranches, but she left something far better: fourteen generations of unbroken courage, carrying the blood of Pilgrims, Patriots, Voyageurs, and Homesteaders clear across the face of America. Thank you Gemini AI for your wisdom and research assistance. -- Drifting Cowboy |
