CLARK / WARMOTH WAGON TRAIN WEST

Introductory Statement By: Ann Warmoth Harbeson

20 October 1999

There are several levels of "telling" here:

1. The oral history of the wagon train journey, told by Mildred Clark Swaggart and Julia Clark O'Hara, two Clark sisters who made the trip. This history was told in the year 1934 on the occasion of the 100^th birthday of their eldest sister, Nancy Jane. At the time of the telling, Mildred was 82 and Julia 80.

2. The original letter by Mary Frances Guthrie Clark to her sons. According to Mary Frances, she collected the stories from Mildred and Julia 13 years before creating the letter, working from notes she had jotted down at the time. By this calculation, the letter was written about 1947. However, in a parenthetical insert describing the fate of two china dogs, the year is identified as 1951.

3. The typed version produced by Marian Warmouth Belard Warmoth. According to a note by L. Arthur Warmoth, this version was produced around 1960.

4. The Microsoft Word file which appears here, produced by Brian Raffaelli and Ann Warmoth Harbeson, with this explanatory addendum.

On Errors: Every effort has been made to reproduce this document exactly as typed in the original copy from Marian Warmoth. There are typos and misspellings, all of which appeared in this original and which have been included in the interests of faithfulness to the original document.

One exception to this attempt at authenticity is the use of bold text when names appear. This exception has been made to assist family historians and others in locating individual names while purusing the text.

It should be noted that in the Clark birthdate table, two dates were incomplete because the photocopy handed down was cut-off on the right edge. The dates shown are our best guess given the sequence of the children the the pieces of the numbers which could actually be seen: Orville Scott Jr., and Julianna.

It is likely that the original letter was a handwritten document and we have no known copy of that letter. While the obvious typos can be assumed to have been the work of Marian Warmoth, it is not clear which spelling errors might have been hers and which in the handwritten letter.