The Wind Blew Him West

This is a true story based on the life an times of my father, David M. Sutton's written memoirs. David was born in New Jersey in 1842 and started writing his memoirs in 1922 when he was eighty years old in New York. David spent his boyhood years in a farm near the village of Tonanwanda in upstate New York, indulged by a doting mother an d disciplined by a Quaker father. He might have been more credit to his upbringing had not the Civil War come at a critical time in his passionate youth. Jacob Sutton with his Quaker abhorrence of war, sent his son west at the beginning of the Civil War hoping to keep him out of it. Quakers lived quiet lives, keeping much to themselves. Their beliefs attacked slavery, capital punishment and other practices they considered evil. They believed in the eyes of god, all men are created equal. At the tender age of twenty, young David left for Omaha, Nebraska where he met wagon master Captain Leroy Crawford and crossed the plains in oxen driven covered wagons on the Oregon Trail in 1862. The Oregon Trail began on the banks of the Missouri River in independence Missouri (the jumping point) an ended on the banks of the Williamette River at Oregon City, Oregon. The Oregon Trail has been called "The Trail that won the West". Courageous pioneers pushed west 2,000 miles, which meant emigrants would spend at least six months on the trail.It took a tremendous amount of courage to even attempt the trek west. There would be much hardship and danger from elements and hostile Indians on the warpath. Many emigrants would later turn back. Others would die from cholera and other disease on the trail. Some left behind family, loved ones and friends that they might never see again. Years later, David's wanderings took him to the Rocky Mountains of Idaho and Montana, the high Sierras of California, the foothills of the Mother Lode country, the lawlessness of San Fransisco's Barbary Coast, the deserts of Nevada and the mysteries of Arizona. From then on his gold-seeking ventures and adventures, fortunes and misfortunes, make an incredible biography. He lived a variety of contradictory lives, east and west, a witness to the developing country and, in his way , its violent historian. The past lived in him together with a dream of the future when the nations should have outgrown the follies of its youth. David later went on to become an accomplished machinist, a wealthy and prosperous gold miner, engineer, builder of mills, gambler in stocks, gold,silver and games of chance. Prospector, miner, mill builder, gambler, lost man lulled to sleep by the dizzy brews of Arizona to long slumber, until the rumbles of World War roused him. It's after math challenged him. Many things combined to bring him to a realization of himself. There were two dominating influences in his life. One, his pride in being "Old American", the other his faith in the founders of this nation and the real Christianity of their aim. One of his typical phrases was "Jesus Christ and Thomas Jefferson" - and around these two he built his philosophy. his ninety there years were set against the background of the America, which he saw growing and changing from a lusty infant to a bewildered giant, powerful but still immature. in 1922 he returned to his home state, a quick-witted, brisk- moving man of eighty years, and began the chronicle of his long life. He had lost his fortune, his wife an family, most of his friends, but not his sense of humour, his vision or his ability to enthral his audience by his songs and adventurous tails.