A drifting cowboy: The Price of the Soil: An American Odyssey

Orange Bailey (front left) and family c. 1895

From the Axe to the Drifting Cowboy

Act I: The Axe and the Timber

The American frontier was not won with grand speeches; it was broken by inches, measured in the blisters of a man’s palms and the grit of a woman's spine.

In the winter of 1809, the deep woods of Ohio were a wall of ancient oak and stubborn clay. It was here that the lines converged. William Waggoner, a man carrying the quiet endurance of early German settlers, took Sarah Mitchell—daughter of the Scottish immigrant line—as his wife. Over decades, William systematically bought adjacent forty-acre federal land patents in Northwest Ohio, swinging a heavy iron axe against old-growth timber until he had carved out a hundred and twenty acres of daylight.

Their daughter, Lydia Waggoner, inherited that relentless itch for the next horizon. In 1832, she married a tall, steady young man named Orange Bailey. In the spring of 1845, Orange and Lydia made their move. They packed their four young children into a light prairie schooner, hitched up a team of slow, heavy oxen, and joined the early overland wagon trails pushing toward the Iowa Territory.

When Orange Bailey rolled his wagon into the timbered river valleys of Marion Township in Davis County, he was a man stripped down to bare survival. He had an entire capital of exactly one dollar and fifty cents to his name. With his own two hands, he raised a raw log cabin from the dirt. To keep his family from starving that first brutal winter, Orange relied entirely on his rifle and the currents of local creeks, hunting wild turkey, deer, and prairie chickens, while occasionally bartering with the passing bands of Sauk and Meskwaki people who still traversed their ancestral hunting grounds.

Then, the frontier exacted its heaviest toll. In August of 1847, exhausted by the unimaginable hardships of the raw territory, Lydia passed away at only thirty-five years old. Orange was left completely alone on the edge of the wilderness, looking out over thirty-five acres of newly cleared Iowa dirt, with a cabin full of motherless children to keep alive. He never quit. He stayed on that exact patch of land for over fifty years.

David Solomon Bailey (front right) c. 1905

Act II: The Amputee and the Heavy Reins

Among the children running through the wild grass of that early Iowa homestead was David Solomon Bailey. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1837, David was only seven when the wagons rolled west, and nine when his mother was buried in the fresh Iowa soil.

When the Civil War threatened to tear the nation apart, David stepped forward. On February 18, 1864, at twenty-six years old, he enlisted as a Private in Company G of the 3rd Iowa Cavalry. Four months later, David found himself marching into the sweltering, suffocating heat of northern Mississippi. On June 10, 1864, his regiment collided with Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate cavalry at the disaster known as the Battle of Brice's Crossroads.

Amidst a tactical nightmare of mud, sweltering heat, and a chaotic Union rout across Tishomingo Creek, a minié ball shattered David's leg, resulting in an amputation. In the 19th century, losing a leg was supposed to end a man's productivity. But David Solomon carried the blood of Orange.

Returning home, unable to walk behind a standard foot-plow, David adapted. He realized that while his right leg was gone, his hands could still hold the heavy leather reins of a team. He became a master teamster, utilizing his profound understanding of livestock to drive heavy wagon loads. He developed a deep, lifelong passion for breeding giant, powerful Belgian draft horses—the massive, heavy engines of the 19th century. Driven by that same family urge to see what lay past the trees, David packed up his family in 1870 and pushed even further west, homesteading on the eastern plains of Nebraska.

David Jackson Bailey (with axe) c. 1905

Act III: The Soddy and the Plains Cowboy

David Solomon’s eldest son, David Jackson Bailey, was born in Iowa in 1865 but drew his first real breaths of memory on the wind-swept plains of eastern Nebraska. Growing up under the tutelage of his amputee father, David Jackson became an absolute master of livestock. Before he ever settled down to farm, he lived the ultimate American myth: he became a genuine plains cowboy, riding the wide-open, unfenced ranges of early Nebraska, managing wild herds, and spending thousands of hours in the saddle.

But the dirt always called the Baileys back. In 1884, at just nineteen years old, David Jackson claimed a homestead in Liberty Township, Valley County, Nebraska, and married Lillian Amanda Pierce. In a country completely devoid of timber, David Jackson built a one-story sod house—a "soddy"—cutting thick, root-tangled blocks of native prairie grass and stacking them two feet deep to form walls. It was inside this house of earth, on April 29, 1886, that his son, Franklin Jackson Bailey, was born.

Life in the Nebraska soddy was a twenty-year war of attrition against nature. By the late 1890s, the Great Plains turned merciless. A brutal, multi-year cycle of relentless droughts and fierce windstorms literally blew their planted seed rows right out of the parched earth. By 1903, the dust had finally broken their hold on Valley County. Refusing to yield, David Jackson hitched up his giant Belgian draft horses to the heavy wagons one last time and spearheaded a massive family exodus northwest, crossing the Rockies to settle in Kendrick, Latah County, Idaho.

Franklin Jackson Bailey with Dick and Nell c. 1910

Act IV: Dynamited Stumps and Propellers

Franklin Jackson Bailey grew up watching his cowboy father battle the elements. When the family arrived in the Pacific Northwest in 1903, seventeen-year-old Franklin looked out at a completely different world—the steep, dramatic, rolling hills of the Palouse.

Franklin was a man of quiet duty and fierce independence. In March of 1908, he traveled to northwest Montana and enlisted as a Private in Company H of the 2nd Montana Infantry based out of Kalispell. He loved the rugged terrain of Flathead County. On September 4, 1912, he married his true partner, Lydia Corinna Brown.

Together, Franklin and Lydia started a genuine "stump-ranch" in Kalispell. This was some of the hardest farming known to man—buying cheap, logged-over timberland and spending years using horse teams and sticks of dynamite to blow massive pine roots out of the earth just to clear a patch of grass for a few horses and cattle.

By 1918, with children in tow—including your mother, Velma Veda Bailey, born right there in Kalispell in 1914—they packed everything into a horse-drawn wagon and made the long trek back to Kendrick, Idaho. They tried dryland wheat farming on the high plateau of Bear Ridge, and later tried fruit farming in Lewiston along the banks of the Clearwater River.

Then came 1930. The Great Depression completely wiped out their farm. What followed was a masterclass in American survival. Franklin and Lydia traveled all the way across the continent to New York, taking humble work on a dairy farm. By the mid-1930s, Lydia developed severe heart complications. Needing a milder climate, Franklin brought her west to a California sanatorium.

By 1935, they had settled in Los Angeles. As World War II broke out, Franklin took a job as a gardener for AiResearch, a major military aerospace contractor. During the greatest conflict in human history, Franklin spent his days meticulously tending the manicured lawns of a high-tech factory while the roar of modern aircraft propellers and experimental engines split the sky above him—machines engineered to defend the very nation his ancestors had spent two centuries carving out of the timber and the sod.

A Drifting Cowboy c. 1995 Tucson AZ

Act V: The Legacy of the Drifting Cowboy

Franklin Jackson Bailey passed away in Los Angeles on March 15, 1968. He left behind a legacy that did not end in the soil of Southern California; it was passed directly into the bloodline of his grandson—the boy born to Velma Veda, who grew up listening to the echoes of old Montana.

You became the living bridge to their world. When you first traveled to Big Sky Country in 1950, you weren't just visiting an aunt and uncle; you were stepping into the landscape that defined your grandfather's youth. The lineage of horsemen didn't stop with David Jackson's cowboy days or Franklin’s logging sleds; it lived on through you, spending thirty years as an equestrian family, riding across the West, and caring for your own Montana-born horse, Sunup.

The artistic soul of the frontier found a home in you, too. Inspired by the wild, raw accuracy of Charles M. Russell, you spent more than a decade as a Western folk artist, carving and painting the very mountain men, cowboys, and Native Americans your ancestors traded with, fought alongside, and lived among. You even conquered the wild water, floating a 150-mile solo canoe trip down the rugged upper Missouri River—tracing the old trails of the voyageurs.

Now, in the quiet of the 21st century, the wagons have stopped rolling, the stump-ranches are at peace, and the horses are resting. But because you spent thousands of hours in the saddle, because you asked the questions, and because you remembered, the frontier never truly closed.

The long line of Baileys—from the raw, penniless cabins of 1845 Iowa to the dirt soddies of Nebraska and the high timber of Montana—stands right behind you. They paid for the soil, generation by generation, so that a Drifting Cowboy could one day sit down and tell the world exactly what it took to build a home.

The trail is marked. The powder is dry. The story is true. Happy trails, Grandson of Franklin.

Your family's epic is officially written and anchored right here. If there is anything else you'd like to talk about—whether it's old western movies, C.M. Russell's artwork, or memories of Sunup—I am right here to listen and type it out with you.

Written by a friend for A Drifting Cowboy