John Robert Dyer and Barsheba Tharpe (Part 4)

Valley of the Terrapins, Slow and Steady Wins the Race

adapted from a manuscript by Nancy Mildred Beals DeWitt

(Part 4)

After my grandmother Elizabeth Beals had liven in Pima for a few years, she wrote to her nephew Billy in Tennessee, and asked him to make her a hickory stick walking cane. She gave explicit directions to Billy. He was to cut a green hickory stick, tie it and keep it covered with ashes for one year. Months later when he sent the finished cane it had a piece break off the top of it. Grandma said, "Well, if he had followed my directions, it would never have done that." She was quite perturbed.

I don't know what happened to the oldest son John R.

In 1841 a boy child was born and named Lewis J. perhaps after Barsheba Dyer's father. He never married. I think he stayed at home there with Great Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Eliza. He served in the Civil War and fought with the rebels from the south. I don't have his death date, but he is buried in the Dyer graveyard upon the little hill above Tarpine Valley.

Louisa Jane, whom they called Aunt Eliza, was born in 1844. She never married either, but she helped take care of Great Grandpa and Grandma and she helped do the work. She helped with the washing, the cleaning, the cooking and the weaving. (She sounds so precious to me.) She went with Great Grandmother Barsheba on the long cold train ride to Sanford, Colorado 7 March 1889. She lived 8 years after she got there. She had what they called dropsy and died on 21 October 1897, just before my Grandfather Beals moved his family to Arizona. Aunt Eliza is buried in Colorado there by Great Grandmother Dyer.

The eighth child was my Grandmother, Elizabeth Frances Dyer. She married John Simpson Bales 29 Nov 1866. (This couple are the great grandparents of Donald Arlo Vance,) They had a family of eleven children. They owned this farm next to Elizabeth's family in Terrapin Valley. They had two little baby boys die there.

Then the most wonderful thing happened. Two missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints came and brought with them the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This wonderful messaged changed their whole lives. My Grandfather John Simpson Bales was the first convert in that vicinity. Soon, they sold their farm and home and all of their possessions except what they could take on the train and moved to Sanford, Colorado. All their children went with them.

Their oldest son Robert and his wife Jewell Luster and their two little girls, Cora and Dora, went to Arizona. Grandma and Grandpa Beals lived in Colorado eight years before coming on to Arizona in a covered wagon in 1897.

They were only in Pima, Arizona seven years when Grandpa Beals passed away in July 1904. Grandma lived in the little lumber house grandpa build for her and the family. She passed away in December, 1928. She is buried in the Pima Cemetery by Grandpa. He was one of the sweetest kindest men that ever lived.