Hattie Pepper Minthorn

The picture above is of; Louella Pepper Wycoff Daugherty, daughter of Martha (my ggrandmother) and John's (Pepper) brother, Jacob; Emma Daugherty Bradley, daughter of Martha Pepper Daugherty; and Nell Pepper Lydon, John Pepper's daughter. These are all first cousins. The picture was taken Sept. of 1904.

Hattie Pepper Minthorn was the niece of my gggrandmother, Martha Pepper Daugherty. In the past I've included her "Reminiscences of Blizzard of 1888" in my Carrington/Daugherty Prairie Roots Newsletter. The writing was received from Helen McNeil in 1982 and taken from Wessington Times (SD), dated February 1, 1908. I have the entire article if readers are interested. I did think the first sentence was interesting; "Living as I do in a climate where roses bloom in January, the memory of my experience in the Dakota blizzard is almost like a dream."

I'd like to interject that my aunt Beulah Daugherty Goehring relayed to me the belief that her great grandfather, Peter DeLong, was lost in a blizzard in Bonilla, SD. The above blizzard could easily have been the same one. I have a copy of a book entitled, The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. The book does a good job of describing the events of that fateful snowstorm. I would strongly encourage the reading of this time period. "In three minutes, the front subtracted eighteen degrees from the air's temperature. Then evening gathered in and temperatures kept dropping in the northwest gale. By morning on Friday, Jan. 13, 1888, more than a hundred children lay dead on the Dakota-Nebraska prairie."

Basically, Harriet (Hattie) Pepper was the daughter of John Pepper and Mary Ellen Prettyman. She was born in 1861 and died in 1926. She married Fred Minthorn. They had three children; Helen, Harmon, & Walter. These three individuals have a relationship with Ketchikan, Alaska and Oregon. So perhaps Hattie was speaking about living in Oregon.

Hattie was the sister of Irvin St. Clair Pepper who I wrote about on Jan. 9th, 2009 posting. Hattie and Irvin were of a family of nine children. I believe that my grandfather, Fred Irvin Daugherty, was named after this Irvin. During this time period, the name was spelled "Peppers" rather than "Pepper".