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MEMOIRS OF MY GREAT-GREAT GRANDMOTHER,
ELEANOR HOWARD (THOMAS) BRITTAIN KNOWLTON
November 1834 – August 1908

Ellen symathizes with the south in the Civil War, but states her opposition to slavery. She aids several southerners going home to assist as the Civil War continues, but they are killed in Utah. Gold coins are sewn into buckskin jackets. A friend is wanted for shooting a Paiute indian, and she helps him flee to California. She challenges the governor of the Nevada Territory for berating all southerners, and later refuses his apology.

It is now the spring of 1863. The children and I are well and soon my brother Samuel Thomas will take the teams over the mountains. Mr. Brittain is going to San Francisco to have his leg treated again as it pains him all the time. He will stay at Dr. Toland’s for a while then he intends to go to Sacramento for awhile and superintend the loading of his wagons and start them off to Carson and Virginia Cities.

I will be alone again for some time but I will have Miss Melissa True stay with me and she and the two older girls will go to school. My youngest daughter will not be three years old until October 13th so I will have plenty of time to work in my garden which I love and the doctor says that garden work will help me a lot. I have a gardener do the heavy work. Gardening pays in Nevada. The men have made one trip over the mountains and will go back again in a few days. We have a three hundred acre ranch on Carson River stocked with work horses and cattle. We keep a man there always to care for the stock.

A few days after Mr. Brittain had left a friend of ours, Samuel Snow and another southerner, came to the house and asked me if I had a saddle horse or two to spare and when I asked him what he wanted with the horses he hesitated a moment and then said, “You are a southern woman and do doubt you are in sympathy with our friends there the same as we are. I have gotten a company of men to go back with me to help them out and I have not enough horses to take them there.”

I said, “Yes, all my dear relatives are there and I do sympathize with them though I do not believe in slavery. You go to our ranch and take any horse or as many as you want.” I then bade him goodbye and wished him luck as I knew that he would try to do what he could to help as all his relatives were in Tennessee. They got back as far as Utah near Salt Lake where they were robbed and killed, and that was the last I ever heard of him or his company.

Well, when Mr. Brittain got back and the hired man told him that his best saddle horse and some other horse had been taken and he said he would not mind so much about the rest but he did mind about his saddle horse and that he would find the man or men who took him and make it hot for him.

I asked him when he told me about it, “What would you do with a woman who was accessory to the crime?” I then told him all about Mr. Snow calling and what he had told me about helping out in the south and that I had given him permission to go to the farm and take what stock he needed. Mr. Brittain said that I had done right. This was not the last time that I helped out men who were going to the aid of their southern friends and relatives and some that I helped got through all right.

Mr. Samuel Mason and Mr. Chisholm came to my house and stayed a week or two getting ready to go back to Arkansas. Mason had sixteen or twenty thousand dollars which he and Chisholm sewed up in buckskin jackets. I helped them fix them. The twenty dollar pieces were sewed checked off in squares so that they would not touch and rattle. We sewed in my clothes closet with a dim light so as not to be seen doing the work. Mason and his brother brought cattle across the plains with us in 1857 and as they had always trusted me with their secrets.

One time when he had made a trip he brought me an old dirty white cotton sack and told me to take care of it. I told him I did not know what to do with it for I guessed there was money in it. He said, “Oh, throw it under your bed or in any old rubbish.” When Mr. Brittain came home he said that it was money in the sack and I would have to stay close to the house. I did not care to take charge of it and when after dinner Sam and Halk Mason and the rest of the men went to town and left me with the old sack I began to be very sorry that they trusted me with their secrets and valuables.

Then I consoled myself that no one knew that I had the sack and Mason and Chisholm were certainly the shabbiest looking cattle men that I ever saw. Mason was a cousin of my father’s and I told him if he ever happened to see father to tell him about my family. He said that he would and that he would tell him about me, too.

Halk Mason came to me one day after that and asked me if I could hide John Hale in my cellar that night or until he could get him off to California. I asked no questions but told him that I would do as he asked. John was like a brother to me. He had lived with us for a year and when he was not with us he was on the Walker River with Mason’s cattle. Our cellar always looked like a prison to me. It was made of blue stone cut in square locks and had small air windows and a door and a storage house over it. I began to wonder what John had done that he should be gotten to California and decided I’d better ask Mason.

Mason told me that while John was out with the cattle he ran into a lot of Piute Indians who were drinking and one of them asked John to drink with him. John refused and the Indian insisted, saying that if he did not drink he would kill him. John was on his horse and close to the river so in order to save his life he shot the Indian. He then rode back to camp and told what he had done and Mason said that he would have to get out of reach of the Piutes and the soldiers. The Paiutes would tell the soldiers and they would have to take him prisoner for having trouble with the Indians.

I felt then that I was doing right to hide John. He stayed that night in the cellar and some time in the early hours was taken out. I bid him goodbye and gave him a letter to my father although I really doubted if any letter would reach him I always gave anyone going south a letter for him. It was very hard to get news to my dear old father who was a major under General Price. John Hale did deliver the letter. He was that kind of a man. He was one of the men who helped me parch the coffee for the Vigilants the night they caught Lucky Bill Thornton and Edwards.

One time Governor Nye was running for office for the second time. His opponent was Blasedale, a hard man to beat. Nye was making speeches all over the country and when he was to speak in Carson City everybody turned out to hear him, women as well as men. I went to hear the great speech, too. The pavilion was crowded and as many more standing outside. I was sitting in front of the platform, Mrs. Pixley on one side and Mrs. Ormsby, wife of Major Ormsby, on the other side.

The Governor was in his glory berating the southerners, calling them all kinds of names. I thought surely some of the men will call him down. He went on to say that there was not a southern man in the war that was not worse than a horse thief. I could not stand that and got up to tell him what I thought. Mrs. Pixley said “Don’t say anything!” and Mrs. Ormsby tried to make me sit down, but I addressed the Governor.

I said, “Governor Nye, you know what you are saying is not so. My father is a Major in the southern war and I know that he would not stoop to do as mean a thing as I know you have done. You cannot deny what I am going to tell you. When the government sent you money to supply the poor starving Indians with food and get them blankets you gave them instead plug tobacco and hats to the men and hoop skirts to the poor squaws. I know this for a fact because they came to my house and tried to sell the tobacco, that it made them sick, and the squaws wanted to trade their hoops for something that would keep them warm. Captain Jim’s whole tribe marched through the town dressed in the garb that you had given them and carrying the tobacco and when anyone said anything to them they would say that Nye is no good.”

This talk of mine stopped the Governor’s speech for he could not deny the truth of it. Every southern man in the audience rose to his feet. The first man I recognized was Mr. Thomas Bedford from Kentucky. Later they all came to see me and said they would stand by me if any trouble came to me for what I had done. My husband was in California at the time, but when he came home, Nye came to him and told him that he owed me an apology but I did not accept it.

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