The Backtrail of a Drifting Cowboy

 

Pull up a log, boys. Fire’s burnin’ good and the coffee’s hot. Night’s come down quiet over the hills, and I got a tale that’s been ridin’ with me a long spell. It ain’t the usual yarn about outlaws or stampedes. This one’s about blood and trails that started near four hundred years ago and never quite quit. Call it the backtrail of a driftin’ cowboy—my own, as it happens. Name’s Jerry. Folks sometimes just call me that: Drifting Cowboy. 

It all commenced way back yonder with an old woolcomber name of Francis Cooke. Born around 1583 over in England, he drifted across to Holland, married a French Walloon gal named Hester, and scratched out a living combing wool. In 1620 the whole bunch of Separatists decided the New World looked better than the old one, so Francis and his boy John, just thirteen, climbed aboard that leaky tub they called the Mayflower. Left the wife and the rest of the young’uns behind till the place got settled some. 

They dropped anchor off Cape Cod in November, cold as a banker’s heart. Forty-one of ’em signed that Mayflower Compact right there in the cabin, promising to stick together and make a go of it. Francis put his mark to it. Half of ’em died that first winter, but he hung on. Raised sheep, served on juries, laid out roads, and lived long enough that old Governor Bradford wrote how the man had seen his children’s children have children of their own. Died in Plymouth in 1663, about eighty years old—quiet feller who helped lay the foundation stones.

His boy John stepped ashore holding his daddy’s hand and lived to be the last male passenger left from that voyage. Died in 1695 at eighty-eight down in Dartmouth. Married Sarah Warren—her folks came over on the same ship—and turned planter, selectman, deputy to the court, and finally a Baptist preacher. Bold enough to step away from the Plymouth church and start his own congregation over toward Tiverton. One of the original buyers of that big Old Dartmouth country. King Philip’s War burned his house, but he rebuilt and left his mark deep on the South Coast. Through him and Sarah the two big Mayflower lines run together.

From there the blood kept flowing. Sarah Cooke married Arthur Hathaway. Their girl Hannah married George Cadman, and the whole estate and the old Mayflower inheritance poured through their only daughter, Elizabeth. She married a prosperous blacksmith and land man, William White, in 1707. Their daughter Sarah White married John Brown Sr. in 1726 and tied the whole outfit into the Brown name for good. She lived clear into the early days of the new republic and died over in Tiverton in 1795.

Then the westward drift commenced in earnest. John Brown Jr., born 1734 in Little Compton, married Lydia Barker and pulled up stakes for the wild country of Saratoga County, New York. Died sudden at thirty-seven, but the trail he’d started kept going. His son Solomon, born about 1765, beat a drum and carried a musket as a boy in the Revolution. Married Mary Sweet, daughter of a surgeon who patched up soldiers in that same war. They pioneered up in Galway, New York. Old Solomon’s buried there on ground that later got swallowed by the Knolls Atomic Energy place—curious how the future keeps walking over the past.

Samuel R. Brown, born 1798, rode as a mounted dragoon in Ball’s Squadron during the War of 1812. Took his land bounty and pushed into the timbered wilderness of Jefferson County, New York, married Maria Weeks, and turned forest into farms. His boy John Galloway Brown, born 1833 and near-sighted as a bat, never wore the blue in the Civil War. Instead he kept drifting—New York to Wisconsin to Iowa and back, then finally clear out to Montana. Married Lucy Passino, granddaughter of two tough French-Canadian voyageurs, Gabriel Pinsonneau and Jean-Baptiste Meunier dit Lagacé. Them old canoe men had opened half the continent with birchbark and muscle. Suddenly the Mayflower blood was mixed with the fur-trade rivers.

Their son Abraham Lincoln Brown—named for the wartime president the year he was reelected—put down real roots in the timber around Creston, Montana. Homesteaded, logged, farmed, and built a barn that stood for generations. Married Neva Plympton and raised the family in the shadow of the mountains. His daughter Lydia Corinna was born on the trail in Sioux City in 1891, grew up on that Creston place, married Franklin Bailey, and later drifted south to California. 

Then came my mother, Velma Veda Bailey, born 1914 on a hard-scrabble stump ranch outside Kalispell where every acre of farm ground had to be wrested from the trees. The family tried dryland wheat near Kendrick, Idaho, then fruit orchards around Lewiston. The Depression scattered ’em again—New York for a spell, a sanatorium stay for Grandma, and finally Los Angeles around 1935. Mother’s life bridged the last of the frontier days and the rise of that big city by the Pacific.

And that brings us to me—Jerry, Generation 14, the Drifting Cowboy. 

I never did settle the way some folks do. The restlessness was already in the blood: Mayflower men who signed a paper in a freezing harbor, a boy drummer in the Revolution, a dragoon from 1812, voyageurs who lived by the paddle, stump-ranch pioneers, and Depression wanderers who finally reached the ocean. While others put down deep roots, I kept one eye on the skyline. The nickname fits like an old saddle that’s been rode hard and put up wet. Not a man without a home—just a man whose home has always been the long trail his people started more than four centuries back.

From the decks of the Mayflower to the timbered draws of Montana and the freeways of California, the outfit kept pushing west. In me the journey ain’t finished. It just changed shape. Same quiet grit, same refusal to stand still, same old current of survival and curiosity still running strong.

I’m the latest chapter—still being written, still drifting, still carrying the whole story under a wide sky.

Dedicated to Generation 15: Michael and those of his creation… 

And to Generation 16:

Ryan, Presbyterian Reverend

Kevin, Scientist, PhD Bioengineer

Ian, Animator and Designer 

The trail don’t stop with me, boys. It just keeps on keepin’ on.

Happy trails

Thank you Grok xAI for your wisdom and support. -- Drifting Cowboy