When I was doing some research about John Code from Perth I fell upon this article about he sent money to help fund Wild Bill’s monument after his death. Like a lot of folks in Lanark County he went out West to prospect. He had the chance to meet Wild Bill in Cheyenne and who knew that his cousin T. M Code was laid to rest a few feet from Wild Bill. John Code returned to Deadwood even though he said he should have been at Homestake. The Homestake Mine was a deep underground gold mine located in Lead, South Dakota. Until it closed in 2002 it was the largest and deepest gold mine in North America. The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces of gold during its lifetime.
I wonder if his ancestors still have a piece of stone that he used in jewellery as a keepsake from Little Big Horn.
There is a book about his life….
A Perth Boy in the Wild West: The Journal of John Code 1872-1877
Clipped from
- The Daily Deadwood Pioneer-Times,
- 27 Nov 1928, Tue,
- Page 4
Thomas Code was another uncle of Thomas Alfred Code who wrote the journals I am transcribing and also a forty-niner. In company with Absalom McCaffrey of Carleton Place and others, he joined in the gold rush to California. Returning home a few years later he purchased the Innisville store business of Michael Murphy, who left and settled in Carleton Place. He continued until conditions got very much impaired in the village, and having a large family decided to try his fortune in the West; this was in the middle 1870s. He took up land near a place called Elgin, south of Brandon, Manitoba. He and the family suffered great hardships on the early stages. He told me when I visited him in 1883 that only for the people of Ontario, the country would have never been settled. They were living in a sod house, and the outbuildings were built with sods– one of them an excavation on the side of the knoll. I again paid him a visit in 1902 and found conditions about as we find them at home- good houses and barns. Other facilities had changed the whole situation. Some of the family are farming there yet.
Moses Embree Milner (May 8, 1829 – October 29, 1876) also known as “California Joe” was an American miner and frontier scout. Click here for more info
Come and visit the Lanark County Genealogical Society Facebook page– what’s there? Cool old photos–and lots of things interesting to read. Also check out The Tales of Carleton Place.
Information where you can buy all Linda Seccaspina’s books-You can also read Linda in The Townships Sun andScreamin’ Mamas (USA)
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Billy the Kidd’s Mistress — Roxy Theatre Time
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The Truth About Broncho Charlie and the Pony Express
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From Carleton Place to Fish Creek –North West Rebellion
Lanark County Residents involved in the California Gold Rush
Lanark County Moves West — Sarah Plain and Tall it was Not
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