Ancestors

Mathew Flint Clarkson

Mathew Flint Clarkson was born in New York on 10 May 1849, though by the end of his life his exact age seemed to be unknown even to those around him, and his family later gave the year as 1850. He came from Bath, in Steuben County. Everyone called him Matt.

His father, Mathew Clarkson, was a Yorkshireman who had come to New York and settled in Steuben County, and his mother Mary was born in New York. In 1865 Matt was fifteen and living at Bath with his parents, his brothers James, Charles, Abram and George, and his sisters Mary and Lizzie. Charles and George were the brothers he later hunted buffalo with.

He came west to Kansas before he was twenty. In 1866 he was at Rome, a short-lived town in Ellis County. A year later he moved to Hays, the new town that grew up beside Fort Hays and quickly drew the life out of Rome. Rome's founders had planned to make it the metropolis of western Kansas. Then the railroad built a high grade west of its bridge over Big Creek, a plague of cholera killed nearly half the town, and Hays took what was left.

With his brothers George and Charles, Matt hunted buffalo for a living until 1876. Those were the years of the great hide hunt, when hunters nearly wiped out the southern buffalo herd for hides shipped east by rail. The brothers worked as a firm called the Clarkson Brothers. At one time they had between 10,000 and 11,000 buffalo hides stacked at a camp on Ladder Creek, southeast of old Fort Wallace in far western Kansas. Their average kill was 150 buffalo a day.

In those years buffalo hunters, soldiers, Indians, cowboys, bushwhackers and plainsmen all made Hays their headquarters. Matt remembered that there were few wells in town, because digging down to water was hard work. One summer the water in a well near a saloon began to smell very bad. People kept drinking it until the smell got so strong that they went down to look. At the bottom they found the body of a man. Nobody ever learned who he was or how he came to be there.

When the buffalo were gone, Matt settled on a farm on the Saline River in the northeast part of Ellis County. He married Palmyra Davis, whose family lived near Paradise in Russell County. Their son Reuben was born in 1882 and their daughter Bertha Kate on 20 March 1886 in Rooks County. Palmyra died young, in the 1890s, and was buried at Fairport. In 1907 Matt, then taking his mail at Finch, advertised for a navy blue coat he had lost on the road between the Saline River and Hays.

In his last years he lived with Mr. and Mrs. E. S. Richmond at Codell. He died there on Thursday night, 17 March 1932. Before he died he had told the story of his early days, "trusting some day it would be published", and the Plainview Times printed it in his obituary under the heading "A Pioneer Gone". His funeral was held at the Baptist church in Codell the next afternoon, conducted by the Rev. A. S. Gwinn, and his body was taken to Fairport and laid beside his wife's. His brother George was then living at Larned; Charles had died before him.

If Mathew Flint Clarkson is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Mathew Flint Clarkson (1849-1932)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/mathew-flint-clarkson-1849-1932-383d5c.