Highlighting Lewis County: Pioneer Women’s Lives Unrecorded

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Last week I escaped with a personal historian friend of nearly two decades to Newport, Oregon, where we holed up in a condo and worked. She wrote family recollections for a cousin; I tackled the nonfiction version of Matilda Koontz Jackson’s story.

Four years ago, I started delving into the records of the pioneer woman who was pregnant when she crossed the Oregon Trail in 1847 with her husband, Nicholas Koontz, and their four young sons. They watched Nicholas drown in the Snake River while trying to free an ox tangled in a ferry cable. She gave birth prematurely, but her tiny daughter died. In May 1848, she married John R. Jackson and traveled north to what today is Jackson’s Prairie, where a cabin built in 1850 became the region’s first U.S. courthouse.

Most public records pertain to Jackson and his life, although Matilda operated as a hostess to overnight guests at their hotel and visitors who stopped for meals. She fed prisoners, judges, juries, soldiers who later became generals, and even Washington Territory’s first governor, Isaac Stevens, and his family.

Fortunately, in 1939, at the request of N.B. Coffman and Charles Miles, authors of “Claquato Landmarks” published regularly in The Chehalis Advocate, Nettie (Koontz) Beiries of Chehalis shared recollections of her grandmother’s life.

“What this faithful, retiring, courageous and devoted wife and mother accomplished in her daily household duties staggers comprehension,” Coffman and Miles noted in introducing the sketch published in 1939.

Beiries, one of four daughters born to John and Charlotte (Simmons) Koontz, described her grandmother as “a dignified, serene gentlewoman, erect of form even to her last days.” She wore plain dresses of durable dark weatherproof wool in winter, black cotton in summer, with a small shoulder cape.

Matilda planted vegetable seeds saved from autumn harvests and used grease and hardwood lye from wood ash to make soap in a big iron kettle in the backyard. She dried wild blackberries, plums, apples, green beans and pumpkin and stored it on the cabin’s “buttery” shelves. She washed and dried wool fleeces, roasted green coffee beans, and churned cream into many pounds of butter. She poured melted tallow into molds threaded with double-twisted wicks to form tapering candles. After her boys butchered hogs, she made sausage and head cheese, and rendered lard in the backyard kettle.

In the evenings, surrounded by her family in the living room, Matilda carded wool into bats for quilts and comforters or spun it into yarn that she knitted into socks, stockings, scarves and mittens.

“Sometimes hymns would be sung and psalms read,” Beiries wrote. “Mrs. Jackson was deeply religious, always feeling the nearness of God.”

She prepared hearty meals of meat and potatoes over an open fireplace in the one-room log cabin until 1853, when Jackson purchased a small Franklin stove for her. She used long-handled tongs and a poker to stoke the flames and a turkey wing to brush the hearth.



Matilda served the food on “a long, sturdy dining table covered with a durable dark oilcloth with a white and gold pattern,” Beiries wrote. They often ate roasted or broiled mutton, she said, as “Mr. Jackson was especially fond of a dish he called broiled bones. Also, he liked mutton soup and wheat hominy.”

Matilda drew water in a bucket from a well, made salt-rising bread, and occasionally boiled English pudding although, Beiries said, “desserts were not the rule.”

The tiny cabin — considered spacious at that time — held a combined living room and kitchen with two small bedrooms downstairs and room for six beds upstairs, according to Beiries. Other buildings were constructed nearby.

“With the addition of the new buildings, the courtroom was only used upon rare occasions and finally only as a passage to the front door, two small bedrooms, and the stairway,” Beiries wrote.

If the walls of that cabin could talk, the stories it could share. Matilda gave birth there to three children — Mary, Louisa and Andrew Jackson — and saw two sons die of illnesses, Felix “Grundy” Koontz, 14, in 1855 and 10-year-old Andrew Jackson in 1861. She also received news at the cabin’s front door June 1, 1857, that her eldest, 18-year-old Henry Koontz, had slipped from his horse and drowned in the Cowlitz River. According to Karin Soderland, guest columnist in Betsy Hemenway’s Daily Chronicle column April 4, 1959, Matilda bid the men goodbye in a quiet voice and reached for the little hand of her toddler, Louisa “Lulie” Jackson.

“Come, Lulie, let us walk in the orchard,” she said, shuffling out to the apple, cherry and other fruit trees with Mount Rainier’s majestic snow-covered peak as a backdrop. Louisa remembered that was the first time she ever saw her mother cry.

Matilda found comfort in reading her Bible, kept on a stand near the chimney corner, Beiries wrote. “In the presence of overpowering grief or sorrow, she would possess herself in silence and composure and steal out into the quiet of the orchard.”

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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.