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CHARLES STALLCUP
*Not a victim of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre*
 


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.)


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