By James E. Kerns

My ancestors emigrated from the various countries of Europe.  They spoke English, Irish, Scotch, Dutch, German and French.  Their languages demonstrate their different backgrounds, but little more can be said which would show one family as being very diverse from another.

They had in common that they were all just common folk.  They were nearly all farmers, trying to eke out meager livings for their families under governments which cared little about the welfare of common people.  They had in common the fact that their governments and neighbors were actually hostile toward, and actively persecuted, them.  They were persecuted because they were dissenters.  Their religious views differed from their states’ religions and from the beliefs held by the majorities among whom they lived.  They were, therefore, hated, hunted, driven and plundered.

From England in 1635 came the Holts.  They were Puritans fleeing the persecutions heaped upon their sect for their divergent religious beliefs.  They settled in the Plymouth Colony, thus becoming some of the first European Americans.  The Holts were joined by the Barrows, Suttons, and others.

In the 1700’s from Germany came the Pfantzlers.  They were Lutheran.  In America they anglicized their name to Fansler.  They felt like the Children of Israel entering their Promised Land.  Upon entering a wild, uninhabited valley in Virginia, Dietrich Fansler exclaimed in German, “Behold the Land of Canaan.”  To this day that valley is known as the Canaan Valley.  Their promised land was not easy to tame nor was it always hospitable.  The snows were nine feet deep that first winter, and it wasn’t long until both Dietrich and his son, Henry, assumed the duty of serving in the Revolutionary War.

The Bauers, from Baden, Germany, changed their name from Bauer to Power to Powers in three generations as they adopted their new language and country, and as the country adopted them.  It was not an easy transition.  They traded familiar surroundings, faces and hardships for a new language, strange faces and new hardships in an untamed, often harsh land.  Valentine Power was captured by Indians in a skirmish in which his brother, Michael, was killed.  Valentine escaped from his captors and went on to become a respected justice of the peace.  He, too, had the “privilege” of serving as a Revolutionary War soldier.

The Cossarts were French Huegenots.  Leaving Europe was a necessity for them.  Thousands of their fellow believers and family members were killed for their radical Protestant beliefs.  A several-generation string of them became Baptist ministers in the freedom that they found in America.

The Johnsons came from England.  Arthur could neither read nor write.  He signed his will with a mark.  In America his son, Arthur, was sympathetic toward the cause of the revolutionaries.  Another son, John, was loyal to the crown.  The two men joined their respective armies.  They met at the Battle of Bunker Hill where Arthur took his own brother prisoner with the words, “John, give me your gun.”

The younger Arthur Johnson was married to Elizabeth Harrison.  While her husband served in the war, Elizabeth not only had his safety to worry about, but also the safety of her brother, Benjamin.  Benjamin was a wanted man.  He was a Signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Elizabeth was the mother of my 3^rd great grandfather, David Johnson.  David pioneered in Ohio, cutting a road through the woods for his wagon, and settling his family in an unbroken, neighborless wilderness.  Others came, including his cousin, William Henry Harrison.  William was the son of Benjamin, the Signer of the Declaration of Independence and governor of Virginia.  William lived for a time in David Johnson’s home.  When William was elected to the presidency, his Johnson cousins counseled him to give a short inaugural address.  He disregarded the counsel, however, gave the longest inaugural address of any president to date, did it in the rain, caught pneumonia, and died one month after taking office.

David Johnson became a respected community leader.  He was also an ardent Methodist.  The Sabbath was strictly observed in his home.  The livestock was placed each Saturday so that a minimum of work would be done in order to care for them on Sunday.  Saturday was also the day on which his sons had to black their boots since such chores could in no wise be performed on the Sabbath day.

Samuel Danner was Dutch.  Tradition says that he was orphaned as his family crossed the Atlantic on a cattle boat.  He was bound out as a servant at the age of 10, and ran away at the age of 15.  He became a self-taught doctor and minister.

The McCornacks were Presbyterians from Scotland.  They were relative latecomers to America, arriving in 1838.  They probably came seeking a better life.  They picked Elgin, Illinois as the place to settle so that they could have access to preachers from their own faith.  Andrew the elder lived to the age of 98.  He was a patriarch who carefully schooled his grandchildren in their catechisms.  His son, Andrew, however, felt the call of the West.  With the blessing of his parents, he loaded his wife and five small sons into a covered wagon and made the journey to Western Washington over the Oregon Trail in 1853.  The idea appealed to his wife’s brother and their parents, the Eakins, as well.  At the age of 70, they loaded up a wagon and came west following the brother.  That may seem unimaginable to us, but they each lived an additional 10 years after reaching Oregon.  They make my children 7^th generation Oregonians.

Andrew’s youngest son on the journey, one-year old Herbert, contracted polio.  The disease left him with one useless leg.  In order to keep up with his active brothers, he tied a buckskin string around the big toe of his afflicted limb.  By jerking the string he was able to bring that foot forward whenever it was its turn to move.  He didn’t know it at the time, but he was inventing physical therapy. He not only brought the leg back into working condition, but found his vocation in life by becoming a successful frontier doctor.  Herbert’s father and his own son, Elwin, both served in the Oregon legislature.

The Condons had once been wealthy landowners in Ireland.  The Condon Castle still stands.  It’s not a castle like those pictured in our popular fairy tales.  It’s a tall, round, stone, silo-type building, hollow in the middle with stairs on the inner wall giving access to open slits through which arrows could be shot at invading enemies without much danger of being hit by return fire.  Oliver Cromwell took their property and castle away, and left the Condon clan paupers.  John Condon was Protestant.  He married a Catholic girl which made the couple unpopular with both religions.  They sailed for America.

Their son, Thomas Condon, was 11 when he and his parents arrived in America.  He grew up in the wilds of what is now Central Park in New York City.  He studied for the ministry, and became a Congregational minister.  He and his bride, one of the aforementioned Holts, sailed around Cape Horn on a clipper ship, and served in several places in Oregon.  It was at The Dalles that his old interest in geology awakened.  Back in Ireland he had spent time with his grandfather who was a stone cutter in a rock quarry.  In The Dalles, freighters brought him fossils which they’d found near John Day.  He opened the John Day Fossil Beds, and came to be known as “The Pioneer Geologist of Oregon.”  He ended his career as a professor at the University of Oregon, from which his daughter, Ellen, graduated in the first graduating class.  Ellen became the wife of the boy with the buckskin string.

From my vantage point, it’s almost as if I’m looking down upon all of these families and their movements.  I see lines representing their travels leaving England and Scotland and Ireland and Germany and Holland and France.  The lines cross the Atlantic Ocean.  They go to Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Wyoming and Oregon.  In each of those states and others, two lines come together and join before proceeding on to the next destination.  The ultimate destination of all those lines is Haines, Oregon and an insignificant, common individual named James Elwin Kerns.

It didn’t just happen that way.  James Kerns is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  He just imagines that he’s looking down upon the journeys that brought these people together.  He’s not really doing so, but Someone else was—and is.  These people were all salt-of-the-earth, wonderful, God-fearing people who were doing the very best they could.  They took their limited means and limited knowledge, heeded an inner voice, and set off into the wilderness.  They blazed the way, established a nation with unique, unheard-of freedoms, and created a place where the Truth in its fullness could sprout, grow and flourish.  They were faithful to covenants made long before they began their mortal journeys.  They endured hard lives.  They did it so that James Kerns could be in a comfortable, free position with adequate time and technology to accomplish a crucial work for them which they could not do for themselves.  They desperately want their temple work to be done.  They were faithful and true to their covenants.  Will James, his cousins and descendants be faithful to theirs?