Unexplained Deaths in Early Kansas

 In 2018, I made a post to this blog about the families of two Reeves' brothers who migrated into the Kansas Territory as soon as it was opened for settlement.  Gaston and Terrell Reeves were sons of William Reeves and Anne Terrell originally of the New River area of western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia.  William's father was George Reeves of Grayson County, Virginia who settled on the Peach Bottom Tract there in 1767 and served in a Revolutionary War unit from Montgomery County, Virginia. The known history of these Kansas settlers can be found in my initial post Settlers in Kansas Territory

At the time, I was puzzled by the deaths of both couples and most of their children within a decade after their arrival in Kansas.  They settled along the Verdigris River in southeastern Kansas and I wondered whether there had been attacks by Native Americans to the settlement or if some forces of nature such as tornados could have been responsible for so many deaths in these families. I searched most available sources but found nothing that might explain their deaths until several years ago when one of the descendants of Gaston Reeves joined  The Reeves Project and emailed to me all of the information he had been able to locate. 

1860 Census
Greenwood County, Kansas

My distant cousin Joe had finally discovered what appears to be the cause of their deaths when he came across a letter written in 1860 by Dr. Aaron Venard pleading for medical supplies.  When I discovered that the parents of these two families were missing in the 1860 census, I had found Gaston Reeves' children living in the home of Dr. Venard in Greenwood County.  In the letter that Joe found from Dr. Aaron Venard to Thaddeus Hyatt, he details the effects of scurvy on the pioneer settlement.  I have never considered scurvy a factor in anything other than long sea voyages, but apparently drought and the limited availability of adequate food sources to prevent illness had taken a toll on these settlements.

Dr. Venard's letter details the sicknesses of the prior winter and mentions that the primary problem was scurvy. Those who had come the previous year and made it through until Christmas, began to recover when the vegetables became available in January and February.

He explained that when vegetables did not exist, the scurvy was rampant.  He wrote that over the coming winter he expected the scurvy would ravish the settlers again.

Many more died over the coming 10 year period.  By 1873 practically all of the children of Gaston Reeves were deceased as well as the majority of Terrill Reeves' children.  Only Gaston's two youngest daughters are recorded as moving further toward the Pacific coast and lived into the next century.

The ancestors of my cousin Joe Hubbell, Elizabeth Easter Reeves and David F. Carter married in 1872 and migrated to California in 1875.  Many thanks to Joe for sharing all this trove of information about these families.