Part 2: Grandma Stolts' Family Chronicle – Sellecks Settle in America

The King's grandma's family chronicle continues on for many pages with one of the Selleck sons making his way from Canada to the United States. Grandma writes in Little House on the Prairie style of the joys and sorrows of life in the 1860's and 1870's as remembered by her paternal grandmother, Alice Eliza, the youngest of 13 children of that now-American Selleck son. Three of Alice's brothers had returned from the Civil War and rejoined their dad in the struggling family logging and sawmill operation.

“One night they awoke to the smell of fire. Crackling heat poured out of the sawmill. The horror of it stayed with Alice for years. All grabbed for their belongings. Fire is one enemy they couldn't fight. To save anything of value was all they could think of. 'Oh, Lord,' they called over and over. The destroyer took, in a few hours, what had taken the Sellecks years to get.

“They fell on their knees to the One who one day all men will kneel before. 'Lead us Lord. What shall we do? Where can we go?'"

Soon the family decided to head west across the prairie to find a place to homestead. Grandma vividly recounts Alice's descriptions of what they chose to pack, what the procession looked like, and daily life on the long, tedious journey. But it would always be framed in beauty and a child's eye view.

"Grandma said the stars seemed so close you could almost reach out and touch them. Flowers grew in patches, and once in a while they'd find sweet wild strawberries. A child could easily get lost in the sea of grass, and anyone would walk in circles if the sun and stars hadn't guided them all the way. Grandma Alice was twelve that year, and she and a brother a bit older enjoyed every minute of it all. It was high adventure for them. They even pretended they were on a ship like the Selleck ship of long ago."

I heard Grandma's (she encouraged everyone to call her Grandma) life on the prairie stories many times during the ten years she lived after The King and I were married. She loved and, in many ways, lived them, especially delighting in telling them to groups of children as she described in enthusiastic detail the building of a sod house (soddy), cooking in a three-legged pot, why girls wore sunbonnets, and on and on.

Her beloved Grandma Alice lived on through those stories. And always cheerful Grandma Stolts, who so loved her family and her Lord, lives on through her writings -- especially the prolific notes and comments in her Bible, which is pulled often from its prominent place on his desk to be read by The King.

Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation. Joel 1:3