Charles Stallcup was born 6
January 1830 in Orange County, Indiana. He was the oldest
son of Samuel Stallcup and Jane Harned. Sometime around
1845 the Stallcup family moved from Indiana to Marion
County, Arkansas, where Samuel Stallcup became a tenant
farmer. Charles Stallcup married Winnie Wood, the daughter
of George Washington Wood and Nancy Coker, about 1852 in
Marion County. Winnie Wood was the sister of William
Edward Wood and Solomon R. Wood, who were victims of the
1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre in the Utah Territory. In
the spring of 1857, Charles Stallcup, along with his
brothers-in-law, the Wood brothers, James Larimore
(husband of Dicey Wood), Richard Wilson (husband of
Elizabeth Wood), and others, departed for the gold fields
in California. They left from George's Creek (located not far from
Yellville) in Sugarloaf Township in Marion County. George's Creek was named for
George Washington Wood, Charles Stallcup's father-in-law.
This
group was comprised primarily of young men
heading to the Western gold fields. Some of these men were
married, with young families, at that time. And like
Charles Stallcup, they left their families behind in
Arkansas to seek their fortune. Winnie (Wood) Stallcup was
pregnant, or had just given birth to, their third child in
1857, and like her sisters, Dicey (Wood) Larimore and
Elizabeth (Wood) Wilson, she did not accompany her husband
on the trip.
Unlike
the Wood brothers, Charles Stallcup, and some of the
others associated with this particular group, took a
different route, and were not involved in the Mountain
Meadows Massacre. (A fictional story, which only confused
the actual events, relates that Charles
Stallcup made a dramatic escape from the Massacre,
however, other men who made this journey with Stallcup,
were also living after the Massacre took place. Stallcup
and these men were never at Mountain Meadows.) By 1860,
Stallcup had returned from the gold fields, and was living with
his widowed mother, Jane (Harned) Stallcup in Blue
Township, in Jackson County, Missouri. Earlier researchers
mistakenly assumed, that because he was not enumerated
with his wife and children in 1860 Sugarloaf Township,
Marion County census, that he had died in the 1857 Mountain
Meadows Massacre. This erroneous assumption led to his
name being included on the list of the victims inscribed
on the 1990 Mountain Meadows Monument on Dan Sill Hill.
Other researchers have hypothesized that Charles Stallcup
fled West in 1857, leaving his wife and three children behind,
because of an 1854 incident involving his wife's cousin,
George Coker. Charles Stallcup accompanied George Coker to
Coker's brother-in-law, Jake Nave's, house to settle a
score. Jake Nave's wife Sally (Coker) Nave had recently
died. Coker rode his horse into Nave's house, probably
intending to kill him. Nave was quicker, and shot and
killed Coker. Jake Nave did go into hiding after he
murdered Coker, but Stallcup did not. The 1854 incident with George Coker and
Jake Nave was three years before the planned 1857 trip West. While life in Marion County could
be violent at times, and some residents tended to seek their own
form of justice for perceived wrongs, it still appears
that Charles Stallcup did not felt threatened enough to
immediately leave the area after the 1854 incident, or to
prevent him from later returning to Marion County after his
California trip was completed.
After
his trip West, Charles Stallcup returned to Marion County,
where he and his wife Winnie (Wood) apparently divorced.
After the divorce, Winnie (Wood) Stallcup married George
Autenriech and moved to Batesville, in Independence
County, Arkansas. Charles Stallcup then went to Jackson
County, Missouri, and around 1860 married his second wife,
Lucretia C. Matthews (or Mathis), with whom he would have seven
additional children. The family lived in Grayson County,
Texas, where their oldest son, William Jasper Stallcup was
born, in 1863. Charles Stallcup then enlisted for three
years in the Union Army's Company L of the Arkansas 4th
Cavalry Regiment on 01 June 1864, as a Private during the
Civil War. His military records indicate that he was a
farmer at the time of his enlistment in Little Rock,
Arkansas, and was 5' 6" tall, with grey eyes, light hair,
and a light complexion. During his service he spent some
time as a company cook, and also as a farrier.
After
the end of the Civil War, Charles Stallcup, and his
family, returned to Jackson County, Missouri, before
moving to Parker County, Texas, and then into the area of
the Chicksaw Nation Indian Territory that became Carter
County, Oklahoma, sometime before 1888, when he filed for an
invalid pension for his Civil War Service. Charles and
Lucretia Stallcup lived in Ardmore for almost twenty years, before
Charles died there on 19 February 1916. He was 86 years
old. He widow, Lucretia, died on 19 August 1922, at age
82, and they are both buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery, in
Ardmore, Oklahoma.
(From the upcoming book "1857: An
Arkansas Family Primer To The Mountain Meadows Massacre", by
Lynn-Marie Fancher and Alison C. Wallner. Copyright 2010.
Re-printed here with the permission of the authors.)
