I’ve been digging into my family’s genealogy again.
My Dad used to tell me that we Manning’s were related to “Uncle Dick” Wootton, a well-known frontiersman and mountain man of the Southwest. He provided me with a biography about Wootton that was published in 1890, I read it maybe 40 years ago, and didn’t follow up on it in any way. I loaned the book to one of my siblings and never saw it again.
Recently, as I’ve hiked and explored the mountains and trails of Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, I’ve come across some of the places that are prominent in the Wootton narrative like “The Old Spanish Trail”. My curiosity got the best of me and I purchased another copy of the biography and read it cover to cover.
Wootton was a member of the fraternity of mountain men who trapped for furs, traded with Indians, hunted buffalo, and served as expert guides for entrepreneurs and the military who came to the Southwest during the period from the late 1830’s through 1880. “Uncle Dick” counted among his friends Kit Carson, John Fremont, “Old Bill” Williams, Brigham Young, and Santa Fe Trail trading pioneers Charles Bent and Ceran St. Vrain.
During his life, Wootton herded 9,000 sheep from Santa Fe to California to feed Gold Rush miners, was the first man in the West to ranch-raise buffalo, built the first commercial building in Denver, and built a toll road through the Raton Pass in New Mexico which significantly enhanced the Santa Fe Trail for freight traffic and cattle drives. That Raton Pass tollway later evolved into a Santa Fe railroad route (including tunnel) and the current Interstate 25 connection between Colorado and New Mexico.
During his fifty years in the rugged Southwest, “Uncle Dick” fought many battles with hostile Indians, traded with and became friends with many other Indian tribes, fought hand-to-hand with grizzly bears and desperadoes, conducted massive wagon train expeditions, made and lost great amounts of money, and raised a large family. Of his twenty children (from four wives), ten of them were sired after his 56th birthday, and his youngest son was born when Wootton was 66 years of age.
Quite a life.
When I was young, my Dad told me that we Mannings were related to “Old Dick” via my father’s mother, whose maiden name was Enz. Her family (the Enz’s) were all “railroad men”; in fact, her brother Lester (my Dad’s uncle who we called “Les”) was, at that time, the Engineer of the Santa Fe “City of Las Vegas” train that regularly traversed the Los Angeles-Las Vegas route.
(My Dad also told me that the Enz side of the family was related in some way to the Carillo family of early California fame. In fact, he related to me a story of him, as a young boy, being taken to a “big mansion” down in South Los Angeles somewhere, where he was introduced to the “matriarch” of a very influential family. My guess has always been one of the Dominguez daughters (the heirs of the Rancho San Pedro Spanish land grant). For some reason the Enz clan was known to this Early California family…perhaps through marriage by way of Leo Carrillo, the famous actor of the 1950’s. The Carillo family and the Dominguez families go back to the original Spanish exploration of California by Gaspar Portola, Father Junipero Serra, etc. A Dominguez family member was in that Portola expedition and, as a reward, received the first Spanish Land Grant in California, a 75,000 acre behemoth that encompassed what is now the L.A. Harbor, Los Angeles International Airport, Palos Verdes, the West Bay, Hawthorne, Signal Hill, Domonguez Hills, Compton, and so forth. A Carrillo was the Governor of Alta California, another Carrillo was Alcalde (Mayor) of Los Angeles three times, and the Carillo’s were related by marriage to Pio Pico, twice the Governor of California when it belonged to Mexico. Somewhere in that cobweb of intertwiningEarly California families, supposedly, there is an Enz-Carrillo-Dominguez connection…at least that is what my Dad implied many years ago. Of course, what did he know!)
Anyway, when I re-read the “Old Dick” Wootton biography I got interested in this passed-down family story and did some follow-up research on the Internet. Lo and behold, I found another book (No Time to Quit) which incorporated the “Uncle Dick” first-hand account into a broader historical narrative of the Old Soutwest and was written by Wootton’s great-great-granddaughter, Janelle Wootton McQuitty. So, I bought that one and read it.
It is a very absorbing work, particularly if the reader is interested in the history of Manifest Destiny and the expansion of the United States westward in the 1800’s. Lots of facts, interesting first-hand tales, and explanation of how and why history unfolded the way it did. The book tells it the way it was, which is not the politically correct way that the story is now told in school and in the movies. It is a “warts and all” version that paints the Indians, generally, as testosterone-charged groups who were constantly stealing, warring with each other, and who broke treaties as often as the White Man did. The early American frontiersmen and traders who dealt with the Indians (like “Uncle Dick”) required a significant skill set to thrive, i.e. conduct business, establish boundaries and trust, and keep from getting killed and scalped. They were brave fellows, for sure.
Wootton, during his lifetime, interacted and traded with the Cheyenne, the Pawnee, the Kiowa, the Pawnee, the Utes, the Piutes, the Comanche, the Apache, the Pueblo, the Navajo, the Sioux, the Crow, and others. He was held in high regard by the Arapahoe Indians because he had rescued one of the tribe’s young maidens from certain death. According to Wooton, the most hostile and nasty Indians were the Comanche: he avoided them like the plague.
The author (great-great-grandaughter Janelle Wooton McQuitty) concluded her book with some mini-biographies of key historical figures that played a role in Uncle Dick’s life and a genealogy of the Wootton clan.
Wootton and Kit Carson were close friends who lived in the Rocky Mountain communities of Taos/Santa in New Mexico and Pueblo in Colorado. Their wives and families helped each other out when “Uncle Dick” or Kit were on scouting or trading expeditions.
One of the historical figures whom “Uncle Dick” interacted with was John C. Fremont, who has gone down in history as “The Great Pathfinder”. He conducted several expeditions in the mid-19th century which explored routes from the Midwest to the West Coast. On each trip, he engaged expert guides like “Old Bill” Williams, Kit Carson, and “Uncle Dick” Wooton. These guys already knew the viable routes: they’d been traversing them for decades. Fremont comes across as something of a know-it-all who regularly disregards the advice of the mountain men. On one occasion, he did this and almost lost his entire expedition to exposure when the group got bogged down in a Winter storm. He later, unfairly, blamed his failure on one of the guides, “Old Bill” Williams…which both Kit Carson and “Uncle Dick” knew to be a boldfaced lie.
Coincidentally, my best friend in high school was John “Pat” Freemon. His father was also named “John”, and I was informed that the Freemon family name was a modified form of the Fremont name and that, in fact, the Freemons were part of the Fremont lineage going back to The Great Pathfinder. Who was I to judge?
Also interesting was the Wootton genealogy as sketched out by the author.
It so happens that the second wife of “Uncle Dick” Wootton, a widow that he met on a wagon train, was named Mary Ann Manning. My wife’s legal name is Mary (Charlene) Manning. What a coincidence! Poor Mary Ann Wootton died giving birth to the couple’s third child.
Look as I might, I was unable to find a direct crossover from Wootton to Enz, thus frustrating my quest. I did, however, discover that “Uncle Dick” and Mary Ann Manning spawned three children, including William Michael “Bill” Wootton who was born in 1858. He and his wife Mary Elizabeth McDougall had several children, among which was a daughter, “Lillie Mae”, who was born in 1882. She later married and had children, although the author is unclear as to her married surname.
Interestingly, my grandmother’s maiden name was “Lylia Mae” Enz. It is possible that this is the connection that I’ve been searching for. Could “Lillie Mae” Wootton have married some guy with a last name of Enz and named their daughter after herself, with a minor modification in the spelling? Stranger things have happened: every female child in my wife’s family (all good Catholics) was given a first name of “Mary” or a middle name of “Marie” to honor the mother, whose first name was Mary… and the Virgin Mary, of course.
They did things different back in the day.
I’ve written a letter to Janelle Wootton McQuitty to see if she can shed any light on the genealogical “missing link”. Hopefully, she might also know something about the Californio “Carillo” legacy.
It’s worth a shot.