WESTWARD HO, THE WINSTONS GO, TEMPORARILY
I wonder if Albert Tweed had heard Horace Greeley’s admonition to “Go west young man, go west” when he decided to load his wife, two daughters and son Douglas, my wife Janet’s paternal grandfather, on a covered wagon and go to California in the 1870s. They got there, probably looking for gold, and when I suppose there was little to be found, they boarded a ship and sailed to Charleston, SC and made their way back up to Marshall, NC, 25 miles NE of Asheville, hard up against Tennessee. Albert may have gained his adventurous spirit and passion for travel when he joined his father Neely and his brothers in going north and fighting for the Union Army, after Neely, the Lincoln sympathizing Republican clerk of court, had shot and killed Ranson Merrill, the Democratic sheriff of Madison Co in April, 1861, as revenge for the sheriff shooting his son. Merrill, brandishing his pistol with his fellow Democratic Confederates to celebrate their slim victory over the Republicans in an election to decide, along with the 99 other counties in NC, whether to join the Confederacy, most likely drinking moonshine and shouting “bring on those Yankees”, as in a similar fictional scene from Gone With The Wind when it was announced that the Confederacy had declared war on the United States, apparently by accident, winged Neely’s youngest son, Elijah, who was milling around the crowd in front of the courthouse on the main street of Marshall, with just a flesh wound. A year or so after Albert and family returned to Marshall from California, he told his wife they were going to California again. She, obviously an intelligent woman, refused, protesting that they had almost died on their last trip, having to trade their blankets to the Indigenous Americans for food. So, she took her two daughters to Knoxville and worked in a hotel to make ends meet, but Albert and son Douglas went west again, getting as far as Kansas, where they stayed for several years before returning to Madison Co.
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